Recent content by Rudy

Well, that's very kind of you to say. Thanks. :)

You would say, then, that if we simply stopped punishing people for, say, stealing, murdering, raping, etc., they would oblige us by ceasing those activities? What an incredibly fatuous thing to suggest. Laws, and criminalization, arose in the first place strictly because some people will...

"Rape" is such a harsh word. Why not use, "surprise sex"?

Seriously; have you done illegal drugs? Marijuana makes you evil, now? Who wrote this; a 15 year old Mormon girl? It's more a "How Not Lawful Good are you?" to make a nerd reference.

Pure Nerd 87 % Nerd, 26% Geek, 26% Dork Huh. Didn't expect my results to be quite so polarized.

:m133: I repudiate any test that says that I'm more evil for not believing in God. Grrr...

It's all about patience. I had a bit of trouble with this, but not too much. At first, when I would offer to do things for her, she would take it as some kind of insinuation that she wasn't capable of doing it herself, and I often had to explain that this was not the case. Now my INTJ is much...

Ugh! This one is irritating, for two reasons. One, there were a number of secularists working on the Civil Rights movement long before people like King came onto the scene. A. Philip Randolph comes to mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Philip_Randolph People like this, and the...

Oh, mainly things like "if only people would love each other more," and nonsense like that. I don't really know anyone willing to advocate a purely socialistic system. Even in grad school for Econ (I'm a Ph.D. candidate at U.Penn right now,) there's not a single professor or student, no matter...

Because I've seen many failed theoretical attempts, and no successful ones. I'm perfectly happy to listen to your ideas on the issue, though.

If you can come up with ways to provide individual incentives to work and innovate, without changing what makes it socialism, I don't see why not in theory. I just don't believe that you can come up with such incentives that would actually work.

Yeah, pretty much. The lack of incentives for individuals is sufficient to implicate pure socialism as a failure. It's mostly "cons" when you're living in a world with other societies, in which case stagnation means you will be overtaken in development, and then will exist at the whim of the...

Actually, they don't look quite parallel to me. It looks like they will meet, just way off to the right.

Yes, that is the solution Wyote was referring to when he said it was solvable in 4 lines if they are points. If they're two dimensional dots, though, it can be done as shown by Van Hase with 3 lines.

Hmm... it's because, in terms of mathematics, "line" means "straight line." Anything else is a "curve". Still, in general English, you're correct. ;)