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... [Watson] is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address.

These thoughts were a continuation of an important theme in his new book Avoid Boring People:

... there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Full citation here

Yeah that would be something. Rock and roll and physics are certainly not mutually exclusive. So for example Feynman sure pounded a mean bongo. And Brian Cox actually was a professional musician.

Would that be Brian May?

Both.

From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_%28physicist%29: "In the 1980s he was keyboard player with the rock band Dare [ref: http://women.timesonline.co.uk... newspaper= The Times 24 February 2008]

Apparently something about naming English blokes "Brian".

Precisely how they did it is yet to be revealed by a truly independent investigation with full subpoena power. This timeline leaves no doubt that the official story is a crock of lies, and indicates a number of people who should be taken in for questioning. For a longer exposition including proof of controlled demolitions, details of disinformation tactics, and information on moving companies, a "factoring company" that specializes in "unconventional transactions worldwide" and deals with the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI, and possible links to organized crime, see here.

Pre-9/11 Timeline

1946: July 22. Menachem Begin's Irgun Jewish terrorists dress as Arabs and bomb the King David Hotel, killing 92 people. The Irgun also plot to assassinate British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin; fortunately, this conspiracy is foiled by MI6.

1948: May 14. David Ben-Gurion declares the independence of the new Zionist State of Israel, born from deception and from the blood of victims of Jewish terrorism hours before the British Mandate is due to expire. It takes effect at midnight, Tel Aviv time. May 15. Eleven minutes after midnight, U.S. President Harry Truman officially recognises the proclaimed Jewish state in Palestine.

1954: July. An Israeli spy ring is arrested in Egypt. These Israeli secret service agents have been assigned to attack U.S. and British interests in Egypt. "Operation Susannah" is a typical example of false-flag terrorism in which the perpetrators pin the blame on another party - in this case, Egypt and "the Arabs" - for political gain. The operation is unsuccessful, the Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon is forced to resign as a result of the scandal, and the incident becomes known as the Lavon Affair.

1967: June 8. Israel carries out a sustained air and naval attack on the USS Liberty for over an hour, employing torpedoes, machine guns and napalm rockets, even to the extent of machine-gunning lifeboats launched to save the most seriously wounded. 34 men are killed and more than 170 wounded.

1983: Christopher Bollyn marries

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity | The Economist

Why abolish software patents - software patents wiki (en.swpat.org)

When Patents Attack! | This American Life

Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture | Video on TED.com

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? Times Labs Blog

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation - Boing Boing

US patent trolling costs $29b: study - Strategy - Business - News - iTnews.com.au

Patents | Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/

Zynga might be too close, but the vast majority of games actually copy each other so much that they create a GENDRE for god's sake. And that has been alwways a good thing for gaming in particular. The truth is that yes, there are indeed assholes, there will always be, but they seem to be on both sides and the question remains to where do they cause the less damage.

As far as being non-creative, I'm not sure who you mean. Personally, I develop new software for a living and I was curiously enough working on my novel when I got your reply.

Like any geek we can but hope that one day something like this will be more than smoke and mirrors.

It reminds me of this case http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article2748936.ece

Huh - I missed all your comments about "he could have surrendered." That's actually wrong. He was already targeted for assassination. Check this out. It could happen to ANY American. There needs to be some principle to protect citizens from government tyranny. Just say "well this agency or that official said he was killing people" really doesn't do it.

Hopefully it will turn out like this:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article515384.ece

WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.
What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

âoeWe bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,â one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. âoeIâ(TM)ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.â

Another said: âoeI took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.â Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: âoeSod off, Swampy.â

I had plenty of experience with anti-CIA recruitment protesters in college, and the charming anti-Republican protesters last year in St Paul. I really couldn't imagine possibly feeling sorry for them. They're repellent self-righteous zealots who are utterly obnoxious regardless of their cause, or even whether they're right or not. Even if I'd agreed with their point of view, I'd want them off my side.

AC wrote: "Robotic Rick Perry 2032"

FTFY. And he will be following in a Robotic Sarah Palin's footsteps, since she governed a state with a basic income (from the Alasakn Permanent Fund). He'll get the robot vote, for sure.

Related on the rights of robots:
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6200005.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence

A related parable on economic change and robots that I created (which mentions robot lawyers):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

Warren buffet claims that he pays less in taxes than his executive secretary does.

Close. He said he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary:

Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticized the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.

Unfortunately we have neither at the moment.

Warren Buffett says so.

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/04/robot-rights.html
""If artificial intelligence is achieved and widely deployed (or if they can reproduce and improve themselves) calls may be made for human rights to be extended to robots," the report says. Warming to its theme, it goes on to say that such rights "would likely include" social responsibilities such as voting and paying taxes."

Also:
http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/TheRightsofRobots.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece

So, yes, your comment on "slavery" is very insightful.

The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If youâ(TM)re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.

and the article goes on to explain:

Mr Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent.

The above quotes are from an article titled "Buffett blasts system that lets him pay less tax than secretary": http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ece

Many people have posted to say that I was misinformed (or that I'm an evil "denier" for gullibly believing the disinformers' reports that the data was gone).

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEAâ(TM)s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals â" stored on paper and magnetic tape â" were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

(emphases mine)

Would you have believed it if Nixon said he dumped some of the Watergate tapes "to save space"? There is no way we can determine objectively - divorced from our native proclivities - the real reason WHY the original data was destroyed; saying it was done to save space might be credible, or it might be a cover-up.

Citation is a factless regurgitation. See The Sunday Times for the original source.

This is pretty common. The woman who wrote all those harry potter books did it on the dole. When she got her payout she ran for the US to prevent having to pay the UK tax rates that pay for things like the dole.

I don't get this post. You're completely wrong. J.K. Rowling did start the books while on the dole, but she did NOT "run for the US" to avoid taxes. On the contrary, she specifically refused to leave the UK (she currently resides in Edinburgh, Scotland), because she felt she owes a debt to the welfare state of Britain. Here are her actual words, from here:
 
 

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

It's pretty clear she's a better person than you are; and I don't understand why you'd post something as far from the truth as you did. Maybe there exists a pathological condition that afflicts conservatives and creates an irressistible compulsion to lie? Just like the other right-winger who suggested Stephen Hawking would have died had he depended on the British National Health Service? (see here or here.

Well there was a story a while back about Apple possibly becoming the first trillion dollar company by market cap which would provide some bragging for the Apple fans, but it wouldn't be true as there already was a company that reached the 1+ trillion dollar market cap. The company was PetroChina and did it on November 5, 2007

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NPR played a great interview with Andy Serkis last week. He has no trouble with being "typecast", but after hearing that interview I definitely will chase up Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Serkis sounded so much like Ian Dury.

And off topic some more, we already know about trying to raise a monkey as a human baby

By me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems. The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf "

I've been wondering if I should include attention and reputation in there too?

So, there are alternatives to the exchange economy. Also"
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6928744.ece
"Former teacher Heidemarie Schwermer has lived without money in Germany for 13 years. Our writer finds out how she does it."

Think also about did people live before money existed?
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

But back then not all land was "privatized" and hoarded and rented for money... So people could hunt and gather.

Note also that "money", like fiat dollars, is essentially imaginary.
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O’Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there’s George W Bush, Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: “To educate leaders who make a difference in the world.”

It just wasn’t the difference the school had hoped for.

...

In the late 1990s, their faculties rushed to write paeans to Enron, the firm of the future, the new economic paradigm. The admiration was mutual: Enron was stuffed with Harvard Business School alumni, from Jeff Skilling, the chief executive, down. When Enron, rotten to the core, collapsed, the old case studies were thrust in a closet and removed from the syllabus, and new ones were promptly written about the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron’s misadventures.

...

Is there a pattern here? Go back to the 1980s, and you find that Harvard MBAs played a big enough role in the insider trading scandals that washed through Wall Street for a former chairman of the SEC to consider it a good move to donate millions of dollars for the teaching of ethics at the school.

Time after time, and scandal after scandal, it seems that a school that graduates just 900 students a year finds itself in the thick of it. Yet there is remarkably little contrition.

To be fair, it's not just Harvard. Rajanatnam, the Galleon hedge fund founder, went to the Warton MBA program. He was just convicted on insider trading.

And they're cheap because China has low wages and is efficient - devaluing their currency under market value wouldn't have helped in the long run.

China's currency is undervalued and the Chinese government has been intervening to keep it that way; both Europe and the US are constantly complaining about that.

I agree, I just don't think the USA keeps from devaluing out of care for international economic stability. It could have devalued slowly over a long period if that was the case.

Not only does the US pursue a strong dollar policy for that very reason, European finance ministers support it as well (this was in 2004, but it's the same every time the dollar falls):

European finance ministers have urged the US to revive the dollar, which stands near record lows against the euro, or wreak further damage on eurozone growth prospects. Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg Prime Minister and Finance Minister, urged the US to implement a strong dollar policy for the sake of global prosperity.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article391816.ece

Verbatim, from the horse's mouth.

They've been ignoring the threat of butt-bombs for years now, even though a terrorist actually used that technique in 2009: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6862247.ece

They also continue to ignore the fact that a liquid ban is ineffective when several travelers could combine their 3oz containers past the security checkpoint.

We reinforced the cabin doors, and that's all we ever needed to do to prevent another 9/11. The fact that we've allowed our government to waste billions while molesting innocent citizens is just sickening.

• http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1073135.ece/
• http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/scotnews11/110620-thirst.html/
• http://de-de.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=354349866505/

Cant' wait till we get it here. I'll be great.

Tell me more about this?

2008 2010.

tl;dr ;)

Seriously, sorry for getting you so riled up. I don't have time to dig out and link to backlogs of supporting articles / data, so I shouldn't have said anything in the first place.

I do appreciate your detailed discussion on the matter, however, and I will be taking a closer look at some of your discussion points. (e.g., I hadn't really looked into the science of recycling batteries, I just know there's a lot more 'dangerous' stuff in them in comparison to an aluminum or iron core motor, so I just assumed the recycling process has to be more difficult, dangerous and require more energy than simply melting down the metal scraps and recasting...) Many of them do seem like alarmist statements that have been thoroughly debunked already, but I will refresh my current reading on the latest AGW topics.

I must call bluff on your claim that AGW policies won't reduce the mitigation abilities in underdeveloped countries, however. In the name of cutting carbon, AGW supporters have actively tried (although thankfully not successfully) to block development of so-called 'dirty' energy sources in countries where having that energy available can literally mean life or death to the local populace.

I say, if they have the capability to build it, let them build coal- and natural gas-fired generating stations. It will raise the standard of life for everyone in the area, provide jobs and potentially provide enough supplemental work-energy so that people then have the time and energy to tackle building dikes or irrigation systems to prepare the region for the next wet/dry season. I'm not saying have no emissions controls on the plants whatsoever, but be sane about it and limit the emissions controls requirements to those chemicals that have been proven to cause direct harm. Don't just block them in a knee-jerk reaction, simply because they'll emit more CO2. CO2 feeds us, remember, by feeding the plants that we need to live...

I was 11 when I read the full edition of the Lord of the Rings after The Hobbit. It was a family copy, which meant it was not the edited crap that was mostly available in libraries throughout the 70's and 80's. My copy (now passed down to me) was published in the 50's.

It was indescribable to me what I went through reading that. The scope of that world, the "resolution" and "texture" that it took in my mind could never be replaced or compared too.

The day we lose the written word, is the day we start slipping into a Dark Age, or more likely Idiocracy realized complete.

Anyone who has read an original book, whether it be by Tolkien, Tolstoy or A.A. Milne would not for a moment confuse it with, nor prefer edited, disnified, film or T.V. versions. There are a handful of authors whose books lend themselves to film adaptations, Steinbeck, Dickens, Shakespeare and many modern authors (Crighton, Clancey, Grisham) who write with the knowledge that film rights can be far more lucrative than a publishing contract but even there, much bandwidth is lost in translation.

When writing for film, everything must be distilled down to two senses, what is heard and and what is seen. Other senses and thoughts must be expressed in these two... without sounding awkward. One sci fi author (Clark?) put it well when he said that the best mapping is not between a novel and a movie, but between a short story and a movie. So Moby Dick, 1984, Dune, Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, Never Let Me Go... _seem_ as thought they could be made into excellent movies, but the film adaptations pale in comparison to the originals.

The second "problem" with ebooks is that they are inexpensive to publish. As we've seen with the internet, when it becomes very inexpensive to broadcast, SPAM dominates, advertising dominates, signal to noise ratio trends towards zero.

Your reference to editing brings to mind the third and what I see as the biggest risk in letting paper books disappear. If I have a paper book and I hand it to you and you pass it along to someone else anywhere in the English speaking world, at any time in history, we all have this book as a common experience. It isn't region-coded, it doesn't edit parts of itself to suit the biases of the reader, nor does it shape itself to the laws, customs, religion and political correctness whims of the reader's locale and time. While many in this century would be more comfortable reading Huck fin after passing it through sed 's/*igger/p.o.c./g', what would happen in a world where Huck Finn had shaped itself according to political correctness forces of its time when its portrayal of a friendship between a white boy and a black slave was "inappropriate?"

In the past century many forms of entertainment have moved from common to individualistic. If you have only a few radio channels or 3 TV channels, chances are good that your neighbor saw the same long-haired British band on Ed. Sullivan as you did. We lost the common experience, but we should value the choices we have in going from 3 channels to 300, or even more choices in selecting entertainment content on the Internet. Such choices _should_ allow us to become more well-rounded, to see things from more points of view. But studies have demonstrated that people tend to use these choices to select information which reinforces their own biases. Adolf Hitler was able to read such books as Uncle Tom's Cabin and value them as as great works, without allowing them to shape his opinions of non-aryan people.

Ebooks and the internet can present a feedback loop. If I always search websites which "prove" that Elvis is living with space aliens in Roswell, N.M., my searches of news and other topics can also be influenced by that bias. Paper books provide a "reader neutral" reality check. But if a book vendor wants to sell an Elvis biography, adding a chapter on Elvis's retirement in Roswell will make it sell to Elvis conspiracy theorists. There is no disincentive to allowing ebooks to morph into what we or our society expects of them.

Its completely different. You are talking about a sales tax (not sure why you added in rants about the legitimacy of government and how they handle what they collect). What is in question is undeclared income. Frankly what's surprising to me is simply the scale. They seem to be going after the small fry while corporations appear to get away (even more surprisingly, legally!) with paying little or no taxes (which is being hotly debated currently, and played a role in some of the protests against austerity measures. After all its a bit annoying when the government claims they need to make cuts to core services while corporations escape paying their fair share).

ps I do agree in the US it would be wonderful to see a shift to a better personal and corporate tax structure replacing the sales tax, for a host of reasons. Not least of which is the impact on a consumer-driven economy.

Say what you want about religion, but Catholicism has helped shape young minds to be fit for the workplace far better than the exceptional, honest scientist. The fact is that deep in the scientific subtext is a dangerous idea -- that if you remove any assumptions about social order, and begin applying science to your own life, your own personality and your own standards, that you can blindside the least desirable bits of the established order with your own ideas.

That leaves us with how to keep the wheels greased. The key notion is that American culture is not worth rescuing. Why would a child eat or want to be a STEM or any other kind of vegetable when he or she can feast on sugar? Foreign students are doing the work of getting the proper education just fine on their own -- the only metric is that there are enough of these professionals to wind up as the necessary cogs of industry. Indoctrinated, of course, with necessary subtext -- limit your interests to your own field, and never consider the implications in a broader context. Also, contracts are binding and non-negotiable; of course your mindshare is of the company's benefit solely.

To think of the average American child, therefore, we need only appeal to economics. I will take for given the idea that public schools are inefficient. That granted, the Catholic Church has considerable infrastructure already in place to take over a large breadth of education. Coursework would be greatly simplified into the substance necessary: respect for authority. The price of a penis entering an anus a normative corrective context could not possibly be lower, and this would be a critical part of education. Instead of a standardized test, we would get back to the individual teacher having discretion on which students pass; the metric would be solely if the child exhibits the necessary rate of submission.

In conclusion, we must affirm our societal values by applying them economically; these are corporate values at their best. Time-honored and conservative; easy to relate to and understand. Christian in every way.

Uh, you're a bit late. See: Prison-industrial complex. For extra fun, see this news item: judges being bribed to send people jail.

Is there actually an official division of China's government tasked with waging cyber warfare against the US?

I think this is not even in doubt. Their army has a division that is explicitly tasked with hacking foreign governments and businesses.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2409865.ece

That's a stupefyingly facile take on the situation.

The wealth does not belong to the country, nor could the wealth exist without the structure of the civilization upon which it hangs. Should 90% of the cost to run the country be paid by those who take in 90% of the wealth benefit of the society? Sure seems like a fair way to approach the situation to me.

And to the AC below who claims that the 90%ers pay 90% of the taxes already, you are sorely mistaken. Do a little research into income tax vs. capital gains tax and what proportion of income is derived from each stream at various income levels. This is how Warren Buffett gets away with paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Oh really? http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/IAC_report/IAC%20Report.pdf

"Independent Judgment. When requested to provide advice on a particular issue, the IAC assembles an
international panel of experts. Serving on a voluntary basis, panel members meet and review current,
cutting-edge knowledge on the topic; and prepare a draft report on its findings, conclusions, and
recommendations. All IAC draft reports undergo an intensive process of peer-review by other
international experts. Only when the IAC Board is satisfied that feedback from the peer review has been
thoughtfully considered and incorporated is a final report released to the requesting organization and the
public. Every effort is made to ensure that IAC reports are free from any national or regional bias",

But then again, THAT report was only signed by 2500 scientists...

Right, nothing ever gets past the IPCC...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece

Here is a much better method. Note that they only failed because they filled in the electronic fund transfer forms incorrectly! Almost the world's most brilliant bank heist.

If Scotland goes, will it pay back the remainder of the UK for having to bail out Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax Bank of Scotland? About £470 billion should cover it (that's about 300% of the Scottish GDP). That's an awful lot of North Sea gas that'll need pumpin' to pay off that bill.

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article7022678.ece

SNP politicians used to talk of an "arc of prosperity" of North Atlantic nations, with the Scottish economy similarly aligned with those of Iceland, Ireland and Norway. Iceland and Ireland both went bankrupt, and Scotland would have done if RBS and HBOS didn't have the UK's large economy to prop them up. If nothing else, it proves nothing is plain sailing for a small independent European nation.

Welcome to the UK...well, for the cameras anyway: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article5834725.ece

300 times a day...

Oh, and I know that this information is collected in squad cars and transmitted wirelessly every time the car docks at the station, both video and audio...

Did you even read the article you cited? I'll copy the important bit:

The second was the tendency for the statistic to mutate, [...] A New Statesman columnist had it as the “average Londoner going about his or her business... may be monitored by 300 cameras each day”, and a Daily Mail report that “it has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily”.

I managed to find a copy of the Norris book online. The footnoted page was towards the back of a chapter detailing a day in the life of a man called Thomas Reams, as he did various things in and around London. By the end “Thomas had been filmed by over three hundred cameras on over thirty separate CCTV systems”, the authors wrote, adding: “While this contrived account is, of course, a fictional construction, it is a fiction that increasingly mirrors the reality of routine surveillance.”

The hypothetical person:

is a City type who, rather unusually, lives on a drug-infested estate. He manages to visit two schools, the maternity wing of a hospital, goes to work, shops, is caught speeding in his car, crosses a level-crossing, parks in several car parks before switching to public transport. He goes to Heathrow airport, then a football match at Chelsea, after which he drives through London's most notorious red-light district (by mistake, I hasten to reassure the fictional Mrs Reams). His “could” is better paraphrased as “might conceivably”.

Welcome to the UK...well, for the cameras anyway: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article5834725.ece

300 times a day...

Oh, and I know that this information is collected in squad cars and transmitted wirelessly every time the car docks at the station, both video and audio...

Say what you want about religion, but Catholicism has helped shape young minds to be fit for the workplace far better than the exceptional, honest scientist. The fact is that deep in the scientific subtext is a dangerous idea -- that if you remove any assumptions about social order, and begin applying science to your own life, your own personality and your own standards, that you can blindside the least desirable bits of the established order with your own ideas.

That leaves us with how to keep the wheels greased. The key notion is that American culture is not worth rescuing. Why would a child eat or want to be a STEM or any other kind of vegetable when he or she can feast on sugar? Foreign students are doing the work of getting the proper education just fine on their own -- the only metric is that there are enough of these professionals to wind up as the necessary cogs of industry. Indoctrinated, of course, with necessary subtext -- limit your interests to your own field, and never consider the implications in a broader context. Also, contracts are binding and non-negotiable; of course your mindshare is of the company's benefit solely.

To think of the average American child, therefore, we need only appeal to economics. I will take for given the idea that public schools are inefficient. That granted, the Catholic Church has considerable infrastructure already in place to take over a large breadth of education. Coursework would be greatly simplified into the substance necessary: respect for authority. The price of a penis entering an anus in a normative corrective context could not possibly be lower, and this would be a critical part of education. Instead of a standardized test, we would get back to the individual teacher having discretion on which students pass; the metric would be solely if the child exhibits the necessary rate of submission.

In conclusion, we must affirm our societal values by applying them economically; these are corporate values at their best. Time-honored and conservative; easy to relate to and understand. Christian in every way.

"Ok, but our murder rates are still ~5 time that of Europe."

Not true. Or almost certainly not true, anyway. It's frankly impossible to compare different countries in a very meaningful way, simply because the ways they report crimes are so different. Take the UK for instance. If somebody is killed, it isn't recorded as a "murder" unless and until the case is solved. So all those dead people whose murders were never caught were not, by UK statistics, "murdered" at all.

But you can see how that skews things in comparison to, say, the U.S., where it is recorded as a murder whether they catch the culprit or not.

Scotland is actually among the world's worst countries for violent crime.

And while it is at least possible to compare violent crimes among most countries, trying to compare "crimes rates" in general has virtually no validity, because something that is a crime in one of the countries is legal in the other, and vice versa.

And it isn't a matter of what "I think" about unwanted children and crime. Those are the statistics. I didn't make them up, nor am I judging them. But they are pretty clear. It is the only thing found so far that does, in fact, strongly correlate with the reduction in crime.

    I was at KSC for the launch. We toured the visitors center while we were there. It's really sad to see the Apollo capsules, and the great advances to the Space Shuttle, and now we're looking "forward" to the Orion, which is just a slightly larger Apollo capsule.

    We may have been advancing from 1957 through 1981, and then a final burst of activity in the 1990's with the ISS. What significant advances have we made in the last 20 years? No innovated new spacecraft. No new propulsion technologies. Everything that we've thrown into space from this rock we call home, was conceived decades earlier.

    I've said for many years that we will keep advancing. We will innovate newer and better things. If we planned an interstellar craft in the 1980's and launched in the 1990's, in the following decade we'd have something bigger, better, and faster, to pick up the original crew with, and get there in a fraction of the time.

    I guess it's good that a generational interstellar craft was never launched. In a few decades, we will have found ourselves traveling no farther than orbiting our own rock. There was some excitement about probes finally reaching the heliopause. In the direction that we're heading, no human will ever see it. In 100 years, we'll have forgotten about that mysterious place beyond our own atmosphere. In a couple hundred years, humans will probably believe the earth is flat, and the stars are marks high in our own sky, rather than understanding that they are really distant stars, planets, solar systems, and entire galaxies with billion of stars and planets in each.

    Yes, in a couple hundred years, we will again be alone in the universe, because we took it on faith that we are alone, and ignored science. Science would have shown us that we aren't alone in the universe, because we would have colonized planets throughout our own galaxy. And then maybe, just maybe, we would have a bit of insight into how the universe really works, which is something we just guess at now.

    But as you said, financial and market domination are for more interesting than knowledge and expansion of the human domain. More was lost in the stock market from Oct 2007 to Nov 2008 ($21 trillion) than was spent from 1958 through 2008 ($471 billion or $9.4 billion/year). If just 2.25% of that "lost" money had been put into NASA or an cooperative international space agency (a real cooperation, not competition between agencies), there would have been a budget surplus for almost 50 years. What kind of spacecraft would 50 years worth of budget built today? This conversation wouldn't be between people sitting on the same rock in space. We'd be discussing this between distant planets and possibly galaxies.

{sigh}

    Unfortunately, the general public, or even the majority of the politicians and decision makers, will ever understand or comprehend this. They'll continue to want the newer car, nicer house, and fight over the limited resource of the year.

    When the end of the human race comes, it won't be with a bang. It'll will be with a soft whimper. People losing their money, power, and fame, and a few of us crying with the knowledge that it could have been different. Theorized catastrophes such as "global warming" "next ice age", "killer meteorite" or other ELE's wouldn't be the end of humanity as we know it. It will only be a reason to evacuate to another home. Future archeologists may find that we were on a good path for surviving these, and completely failed at our own ability to save ourselves.

The BBC may have performed yeoman service over the years, but it is not without flaws.

BBC report damns its ‘culture of bias’

Right, and because the BBC is unique in the whole world by not being 100% perfect, it is therefore totally valueless and evil, and no more to be trusted than the insane far right wing ravings of semi-literate bloogers.

The BBC may have performed yeoman service over the years, but it is not without flaws.

BBC report damns its ‘culture of bias’

The day the first McDonalds open in Taipei, Taiwan, a line stretched out the front door more than 300 meters. And according The Times:

"In terms of profit, France is second only to the US itself."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article4560082.ece

It has been previously reported that steganography porn is used by Islamic terrorists and it must be true as I read it on the Internet ...

Link between child porn and Muslim terrorists

link

OBL's family wasn't anywhere near OBL, otherwise they would either be dead or in position to describe what happened, neither of these two cases being true.

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Amal al-Sada was shot in the leg as she rushed the Navy SEALs, according to U.S. officials. She is now in Pakistani custody, along with her daughter and two other bin Laden wives, according to Pakistani officials, who say they eventually will be repatriated.-- Bin Laden's Wife: I'll Stand With You

Next.

Please show us a video of OBL that is after 2001. I bet you cannot find one. The 2007 video is clearly a fake, since he appears younger.

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Oct. 29, 2004: Osama Bin Laden Video Message

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Wanted: dyed and alive. Bin Laden reappears – and he’s had a makeover
Of course you weren't thinking that hair dye isn't invented till the year 2200, were you?

Next.

The locals know nothing more about OBL than we do. If they did know more, OBL would have been betrayed along time ago.

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BACKGROUND: The Haqqani group, al-Qaeda's own Taliban

Next.

Osama is dead from 2001. US waited a long time to present his death to us, when the time was right.

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See video from 2004, and this: Osama bin Laden Killed: 'Justice Is Done,' President Says

Next.

If Al Qaeda is driven by CIA, MI6 and Mossad, then its no wonder Al Qaeda announced OBL's death. Why would they need to announce it anyway?

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The US had the body, there was nowhere for Al Qaeda to go, was there? Try to say, "He's not dead!", and the US could produce either the body or the photos. Then there would be the awkward question of, "If he's not dead, why isn't he saying anything?" For Al Qaeda to try to cover up Bin Laden's death would have been more pathetic than the idea that, "Al Qaeda is driven by CIA, MI6 and Mossad". Well, there is also the fact that Muslims from around the world have been recruited to fight and die for Al Qaeda, and apparently none of them would have noticed that it was run by Americans, British, and Jews? Really? The fact that Bin Laden's wife saw him killed would also make that awkward, wouldn't it? If you've paid attention, you know that al Qaeda has announced the death of its regional leader in other places, such as Iraq.

You might want to try reading from a broader range of media - you've got things pretty much backwards. Maybe you can start here

Let's call it a Colosseum-Complex.

That may be true for those savages in the middle east that stone people to death, but hardly that's the case in western culture.

Are you claiming that western culture is somehow above morbid curiosity and vengeance? How else do you explain Gapers delay(block) (purportedly coined in Chicago) or Faces of Death, a USA-produced movie advertised entirely about watching people die? How about YouTube animal cruelty, many from the USA or UKA (according to TFA)? Get off of your xenophobic horse.

Around 1987 I simulated cannibalistic robot by accident on a Symbolics 3600 in ZetaLisp+Flavors. It was perhaps one of the first simulations of self-replicating robots in a 2D sea of spare parts. The parts were something like a computer, a welder, a gripper, a battery, a radar, and another rock-like item. The first robot was programmed to collect parts to attach to itself to duplicate itself as two similar halves as a sort of repair process back towards and ideal, and then cut itself in two, and then each separate piece was supposed to go off and do the same. But I did not think it through all the way, and the first thing the original robot did as the copy started up was to start to cut the copy in two to reuse the parts because they were the closest available that were not in itself. So, the robot was both cannibalistic and killing its own offspring.

It goes to show how easy it is to make a mistake designing artificial life. I had to add a sense of "smell" to prevent that from happening, where the robots would set a smell on each item they used and would leave similar smelling items (in offspring) alone.

I gave a talk about the simulation around 1988 at a workshop on AI and Simulation at CHI+GI in Minnesota, and talked about how easy it was to make robots that were destructive and how much harder it would be to make them cooperative. Afterwards someone from the Army working with DARPA literally patted me on the back and told me to keep up the good work. And that was one reason I stopped working on it. :-)

And since then we have sadly seen the rise or an ironic use of military robots when robotics could otherwise bring us abundance (like President Obama authorizing a drone strike within days of taking office that allegedly lead to the deaths of three Pakistani children).
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece

But, to the army officer's credit back then, I don't know if he was more interested in the destructive or constructive aspects of what I had to say. And in truth, both construction and destruction are both related in this plane of existence. And we all need some security, the issue is how we go about getting it. An essay I wrote on that:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

I do believe robots will learn cooperation. The issue is more if humanity will be wiped out first and then later any robots (if they too survive) might be regretful, or whether we will co-evolve together somehow. As long as much of our R&D is mostly driven by short-term profit maximization and the push to privatize profits and to socialize risks and costs, I don't know...

Corollary - investors who put faith in good companies are rewarded. investors who do not are not.

The problem is that many of these investors did not have much choice, they were simply working for Nortel and their pension was in company stock. If I work for a company and get a company pension I have very little choice how that is invested on my behalf. Some of these people losing out have probably worked 20 or 30 years thinking their retirement was covered and have just discovered they are redundant and also looking forward to a pennyless old age.

Actually not quite pennyless, but capped at £28,000 per year in the UK and $54,000 in the US. Also in the US people will only be able to claim their pension at the age of 65, so if you are 55 and have just retired or are about to you now have no money and have to try and rejoin the job market. The IT and mobile device sector is not exactly the best place to have to find work if you are in your late 50's.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5536942.ece
http://wraltechwire.com/business/tech_wire/news/story/5596907/

Not just that. Reno pushed cases to the supreme court to establsh precedent, then the white house started lobbying for more crackdowns on "the coming plague of online child pornography."

There were lots of articles about it at the time, including warnings of the toxic effects this increased focus on child porn would have on our society.

I argue that these laws, intended to protect children from sexual exploitation, threaten to reinforce the very problem they attack. The legal tool that we designed to liberate children from sexual abuse threatens to enslave us all, by constructing a world in which we are enthralled - anguished, enticed, bombarded - by the spectacle of the sexual child.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ilaw/Speech/Adler_full.html

Of course, those articles were dismissed. Still are today, and yet....

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5516511.ece

Ah, Dear Sir Patrick Moore... Has he stopped being a misogynist? My share of reverence disappeared after reading his various comments regarding women. He's a relic of the 1900s, not even 20th Century. I hope he retires from public life soon without further damaging himself.

I know it's fun to claim that the National Health Service is being privatised - but that doesn't make it true and it's not.

Perhaps when you were studying the government's plans you skipped over the privatisation of management (including resource allocation) and use of private healthcare providers. Worse, perhaps you're so young that you forget what it was like before the proto-marketplace of "trusts".

The NHS is a (1) national (2) health (3) service. Trusts eroded (1) but the GP consortia plan destroys the notion entirely. (3) does not apply if the government merely allocates funds but does not actually provide a service. As for (2), good health is primarily about good nutrition, good sanitation and good observation. They are social goals - the first two countering the "squalor" of Beveridge's five giants, the last countering "ignorance" - not goals for individuals.

There is currently a strong focus in cancer care in the UK on early detection, which saves lives as well as money

There is currently a strong focus on early detection for specific cancers for specific risk groups.

though in some cases aggressive screening programmes have been found to do neither

You're probably thinking of a problem like this one which manifests itself particularly in the fashionable alarm-inducing cancers. Unfortunately, certain groups are misinterpreting (and I use that word inappropriately generously) the problem as being one of too much screening, rather than an understanding that sometimes the best approach is watch and wait rather than immediately aggressively treat. IOW, the aggression is in the response to screening.

Aside from breast, do you have any other "aggressive screening programmes" you have on your mind to criticise?