Sisyphus

Everyone does decide their own moral code, already. Some people just decide to wholly and unquestioningly copy another's.

"Tap into" = travel in that direction? Why 11th? Anyway, the many-worlds interpretation is not about different universes separated by space in some orthogonal direction.

Obviously life experience is going to inform one's interpretation of the law. That's inevitable and necessary, and is fact the judge's job. (If no interpretation were necessary, we wouldn't need judges in the first place.) That's different than allowing personal belief to supercede law.

Exactly. You don't go to space in order to leave Earth. It's not like emmigrating to a different country. If there's a moon colony, it will exist for the purpose of there being a moon colony.

I'm not worried about it. The only way in which religion should factor into the choice is if there's evidence those religious beliefs are invoked in making rulings, in which case they shouldn't be nominated in the first place. Any halfway decent lawyer understands separation of personal beliefs, and I don't think Papal influence has been a significant problem so far.

I do think it's entirely plausible and maybe even likely that the main group of colonists of extraterrestrial environments will not be traditional humans. And I also think it's pretty much inevitable that the first artificial persons will face tremendous resistance to being accepted as persons by a majority of the population. However, I doubt that one would be a cause of the other.

Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. However, it is also not itself a crime, nor is apathy. Nor, for that matter, is breaking an oath.

I only know 3, 16, and 19 offhand.

Don't LCDs actually use more power to show dark colors?

You don't think anyone is infilftrating G8 protests?

I don't know about you, but I'm not an illiterate serf. Are we talking about technology, or are we talking about social norms? And the point is disingenuous, anyway, for anyone who chooses to live with said technology. If it holds no promise, then why not go back to nature? Why not stop "playing god" by wearing clothes and harnessing combustion to remove the consequences of living in winter? Or is that before the arbitrary point where additional change is playing god? What are we trying to rationalize, again? Oh? And what liberal societies might those be, and how widespread were they? I can't even think of any that didn't have slaves. (Good thing so many people have been willing to "play god" since then, eh?)

Though human behavior has changed. Different societies have very different norms. Ok. I believe that. If you want, I'll add the qualification that we don't do that in liberal societies.

Really, it all boils down to whence, whither, and wherefore.

Compared to what?

If there is continuity, then it's the same person. And it isn't, in the same way that I am not the same person I was ten years ago, but I have to think of myself as the same in order to function and I have to be treated as the same in order for society to function. The idea of sameness is itself a convenient construct more than an objective reality. A person created "from scratch" would be no more or less deserving of rights than "natural" humans, though how we deal with such beings as a society would necessarily have to be different. I would say its creator has a responsibility towards it similar to a parent towards a child.

The propositions that 1) some circumstances are more desirable than others 2) historical progress is illusory/worthless are contradictory, and I don't think this essay satisfactorily reconciles them.

It definitely doesn't mean "not yet understood" in common usage. Nobody says quantum gravity is "supernatural," unless they mean that little pixies are doing it. I propose the definition: in exception to deterministic or statistically deterministic physical laws. That might not be quite the same as common usage, but it's not unrelated, and I think that could at least be a coherent definition, even if there are no such things in the universe.

Also, a merely neutral budget is not going to be good enough, since then we're stuck with the debt we have. We'd need a surplus - actually many years of substantial surplusses - to pay off the national debt. But just try running a surplus without losing elections to either people who promise to spend it, or to give out tax refunds, or both.

In this past week's Economist poll about the budget deficit, 62% of Americans favored cutting spending to combat the deficit, while only 5% favored raising taxes. Alright in theory, but cut spending where, exactly? The only thing that more than about a quarter of Americans can agree on cutting is foreign aid, at 71%. (Americans, on average, estimate that 24% of the budget goes to foreign aid. It is actually less than 1%.) Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that most of us want to abstractly "cut spending" without actually cutting any spending - we could all just have different opinions of what should be cut. But this still present a problem, since everything still has majority support. So, you can't raise taxes without angering 95%. And you can't cut spending in anything significant without angering at least 75%. So... Incidentally, we're seeing the effects of this kind of thinking with the very unpopular Governor David Patterson of New York, who is currently being attacked both for cutting budgets and for high taxes. Sigh.

I agree that "celebrate" is definitely the wrong word. Wars in general are not things to be celebrated (though the outcomes can be), and that particular war represented probably the darkest period of American history. That said, I do think that celebrating Union troops as fallen heroes and Confederates as defeated villains is unfair. It was hardly black and white. It was blue and grey. (And that said, I also find the Confederate apologist revisionism kind of disgusting.)

Out of all the various distances in the solar system, there are indeed a few that are in ratios of 1 to 100-120 or so. If the implication is that 1:108 ratios are all over the place, then I have to say "fiction."

Inasmuch as it's co-opted by Beck and Palin, the signal to noise ratio has dropped to incoherent levels. I don't think the movement as a whole currently has anything useful to say.

Romney: 438 Paul: 437 Palin: 330 Gingrich: 321 This early, it doesn't really mean anything. I've only seen a couple articles, but it does seem like Ron Paul is really being de-emphasized, which is interesting, since he essentially tied for first. For the Paul-ites out there, though, I wouldn't get ahead of myself. Ron Paul is the sort of candidate the GOP establishment likes to think they would vote for, in the abstract, in the same way that they like to call themselves "libertarian." They won't, though. Right now, Romney is the establishment candidate, and as always, the nomination is largely in the hands of people with things to lose.

There wouldn't be fire on the sun. Fire is a chemical reaction of fuel combining with an oxidizer into new molecules. However, the sun is all plasma - no molecules at all. It's too hot for fire. Hydrogen and oxygen alone are not flammable. Things are very readily flammable in the presence of pure oxygen, and pure hydrogen is a very ready fuel, however you still need both fuel and oxidizer. Oxygen itself is not the only possible oxidizer, however. It's just by far the most abundant in our atmosphere. I don't think you could ever have a fire in an atmosphere that was just like ours minus the oxygen.

I agree. It's not that I don't have concern for the people risking their lives, but it is a necessary part of the job. Sure, not worrying about ROE would be safer. Carpet bombing would be even safer. But that isn't why they're there.