Even if you went to the effort of saying "The two leads need to be supplied with a sine-wave alternating current peaking at 115 Volts" you have no way of knowing that in 50 years they'll be using Volts, AC, two leads, or know what a sine-wave is.
Um, we're talking 50 years from now...not 500. Many of students who created the time capsule could even be the ones digging it up. There will be plenty of people who understand its power requirements. There will be plenty of people who even know how to operated the thing with proficiency.
Just goes to show that customers are only buying new hardware when a newer (slower) version of Windows comes out and their existing hardware is inadequate to run it. Nobody is buying Vista, so nobody needs new hardware. 95% of users only do things that Windows NT 4.0 could do just as easily as Vista...yet Vista won't run on my old Pentium 1...why? Because each new version of Windows is bloated garbage designed to keep you upgrading.
I'm not sure why we're worried about contamination either. As soon as one human steps foot on Mars it will inevitably be contaminated anyway. We need these "contaminants" to stay alive...they permeate our living environments. Any artificial human martian habitat we place on Mars will ooze microorganisms like lava from a volcano. If we were at all interested in maintaining a pristine martian ecosystem we'd never land there. Trying to prevent it is ridiculous. Even if we could prevent it, it only takes one dissenting martian colonist to let some algae out the airlock.
[quote]China is no competition, because the hidebound nature of its corrupt "Communist" government is catching up on it. From the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace last month: "Runaway corruption in China poses a lethal threat to the nation's economic development and 'undermines the legitimacy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.'" [/quote]
Which is nothing like what we have here in the U.S.
Uh, you mean as immature as Physics right? Climatology started a long time ago - 10th or 16th century, depending on who is counting - about when people started studying that thing we sometimes call "Gravity" (again, depending on who is counting).
Oh please. You know what he meant by "immature". He means that the climate is not understood well enough to predict the climatological effects of the industrial revolution, much less how deliberately trying to counter those effects will affect things.
What protects us is that the army is made up of citizens who (we hope) believe in freedom, democracy, and (hopefully) take their oath to uphold the Constitution [1] seriously. The army would mutiny if it were ordered to occupy, say, New York City and enforce blatantly anti-Constitutional laws. That is what protects freedom in America. Not my guns, not the promises of politicians, but the simple fact that our army is made up of us
Ask yourself this...if there is a large group of people united in a just cause...and the government is willing to use force to pacify them...the military is just going to pop some tear gas in there and the problem is taken care. When the people are armed it's not so easy. You have to escalate matters to a whole new level. The military will be willing to pacify these unarmed people on a whim (just as the police do now). But if the people are armed, it requires deadly force to pacify them. The politicians giving the orders, and military personel doing the violent pacifying suddenly need a damn good reason to do it. If things ever got so bad that large portions of the population were willing to take up arms against the US government, a population carrying pitchforks could easily be dismissed. An armed population could not.
Lastly, it's NOT futile for a bunch of people armed with hunting rifles to take on a modern military. It's called guerrilla warfare and small bands of people employ it against large technologically advanced armies all the time and having been doing it for centuries... with varying degrees of success.
During Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime an Iraqi could walk into a gun shop and buy an AK-47 with the full auto function enabled. By your argument, therefore, Iraq under Saddam should have been a very free place, but you'll note that it wasn't
You're making the assumption that Saddam was so bad that the people were willing to risk their lives to overthrow him. Maybe the majority of people were willing to live with things as they were...especially considering Saddam's history of gassing whole towns to quell an uprising.
I could be wrong here, but wouldn't the easiest and most cost effective way of improving your image to be doing what you had described? Service improvements. Better pricing structures. Better policies.
I don't know. All hype and no service seems to work for politicians.
WTF? The test subjects have to pay $100,000 to get in on the study? This seems like a fairly promising treatment? Why isn't money pouring in to fund this?
As someone pointed out yesterday in another thread: One datapoint does not nullify a generalization.
It's been known for years that people who are lonely and/or stressed have higher incidences of cancer than those who are not.
You can't fight murder by banning knives, you can't fight hate by burning books and you can't fight conspiracy by banning privacy. Giving up your rights does not make you in any way safer. That's not true. Hitler's Germany was very safe...unless you were jewish...handicapped...or critical of the government...or...
One day a King decided to make war with a neighboring country because they had something he wanted. So he went to his subjects and declared the neighbor an enemy. Many of his generals didn't believe him and protested. So the King gathered up his army and marched them into the neighboring country and began burning villages. Not surprising, the people in this country grabbed whatever weapons they could and fought back. Upon seeing the villagers battling his army, the King felt reassured. He walked over to his generals and said, "See! This country is chock full of enemies!"
Why should I be forced to pay for someone else's higher medical expenses? What about my rights? You have insurance right now do you not? You're already doing this through your insurance. So, what happens when people healthy than yourself start saying the same thing about you?
My insurance is currently paying the health care of useless retirees who are dying of age related diseases. Why even bother treating them? Why don't we just let them die. We know that older people get sick more often than younger people. Wouldn't it be more economic to euthanize everyone over 55? Or would the younger generation stop slaving away to support the older generation if they knew those benefits would not be available to them once they are that old....just something to think about.
We're already wrecking a planet, we should have learned something from that.
Considering that there's no ecosystem on the moon to destroy, what would be the point in not mining it? It's not like you'd notice a difference on earth. All you'd be doing is ruining the pristine meteor impacted, waterless, airless, dust dunes.
If we're ever going to move beyond the earth, we need to build infrastructure in space, and it's simply too expensive to bring it from earth. The Americas would never have been developed if you couldn't cut down any trees. And preventing others from doing it would have bankrupted the superpowers of that era. Simply put, if the means exist to get there, it will eventually be mined. What you're suggesting is like putting a beaver in on a forest with a creek and asking it not to fell trees. It's going to die unless it kills trees and builds dams. Same would happen with humans on the moon.
We don't use woman and children as suicide bombers. No, but we work them to death in Chinese sweatshops by vigorously and enthusiastically importing the products they produce. Our philosophy is: "Why kill people when you can milk them until they dry up...it's perfectly ethical until the bad publicity starts...then you just say you knew nothing about it and move your operations to a new sweatshop. God Bless cheap labor. "
The dictionary frequently shows definitions based on a frequent usage of a word. But people frequently exagerate too. I'd agree with the forcible indoctrination. But not persuasion by propadanda or salesmanship, because you ultimately still have free will to deviate. Brainwashing to me, is forced psychological manipulation. If it's not, then what term do we use for forced psychological manipulation?
I still think that most chinese do agree with the censorship; after all, they have been brain-washed into beleiving that the internet is dangerous. All societies and governments do a certain amount of subtle (or not so subtle) "perspective tweaking". But let's not get dramatic. Brain-washing involves torturing someone. This is much different than influencing people's opinions with propaganda, social indoctrination, or threat of violence/incarceration/ostracization,
Not when it affects those in society. Ie, if you overdose and cannot afford health insurance, are rushed to the ER and tax payer money pays for your treatment and recovery, then it is our business. So, if I have insurance you'll let me snort my cocaine in peace?
No "sensible" person leaves their car wide open, with the engine running... because no insurer would ever pay out for the theft of that car
This analogy is flawed. Just as car manufacturers gives is the ability to lock our cars, Microsoft does provide some ability to lock your computer. But that security is easily undermined. Should car owners be responsible for someone slim-jiming their car to break in? That is a better analogy. Or what if they just break a window and you didn't buy the *optional* security system. And what if you did, but the thief knew how to disable the security system. How many countermeasures is the automotive layman expected to take?
All they have to do is shout "Think of the children" or "We need this to fight terrorism" and the majority who have no interest in delving into the consequences of any given action will line up behind them like good little citizens. That'll only work for so long. Then they'll need a new boogey man to scare the shit out of everyone. It's almost amusing sometimes to watch old movies to see how our nation's top boogey man evolves... right now I'm thinking of Back to the Future. During that era, the boogey men were Libyans. They used to be Russians, and Germans/Japanese before that, and now it's Al Qaida. Is there ever a time when we don't single out someone as the enemy and use them as an excuse to gain more control of the domestic population? I guess I just hate freedom...don't listen to me.
It causes cancer in that it disrupts your Circadian rhythms. In much the same that people at high latitudes use lights to ease the problems of the long winter nights, having the lights on *all* night can screw up your body chemistry too. It's been shown that people who work night shifts for long periods of their lives are more likely to get cancer.
That right, people spew poison into the air, but everyone has to move to accommodate that.
Hay, I'm at a Bus stop, but now I have to move and possible miss the bus so someone can smoke? I have to have my risk of cancer increased because of some jack hole? I think if I were you I'd be more concerned about the automobile emissions from the thousands of cars driving by acculating in the air around you. It's screwing up your lungs a lot worse than that whiff of second hand smoke you might occassionally get at the bus stop.
Any shelter you make is going to have a hard time withstanding a direct hit. That's just not the point. You have blast shelters and you have fallout shelters. Blast shelters are designed to withstand some blast damage. The further you are from ground zero the less blast damage you will take. That's where the blast shelter shines. You might be in an area close enough to the ground zero where you would otherwise be killed by the pressure and heat and flying debris, but if you're in a blast shelter you have a much better chance of surviving.
The blast damage alone isn't the only killer. Fallout shelters are designed to protect the blast survivors from the subsequent radiation and provide them with enough food and water until they have to leave.
These things will increase survivability even with a large h-bomb attack. While the chances of this happening have gone down since the Soviet collapse, the shelters themselves are far from obsolete. The wide spread notion that we're all dead in the event of a large scale nuclear exchange is simply not true.
And despite the frequent criticism of the old duck and cover movies, this is still the best thing to do if you see bright flash on the horizon. It's far better than standing there mouth agape looking stupid when the blast wave hits.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you went to the effort of saying "The two leads need to be supplied with a sine-wave alternating current peaking at 115 Volts" you have no way of knowing that in 50 years they'll be using Volts, AC, two leads, or know what a sine-wave is.
Um, we're talking 50 years from now...not 500. Many of students who created the time capsule could even be the ones digging it up. There will be plenty of people who understand its power requirements. There will be plenty of people who even know how to operated the thing with proficiency.
Just goes to show that customers are only buying new hardware when a newer (slower) version of Windows comes out and their existing hardware is inadequate to run it. Nobody is buying Vista, so nobody needs new hardware. 95% of users only do things that Windows NT 4.0 could do just as easily as Vista...yet Vista won't run on my old Pentium 1...why? Because each new version of Windows is bloated garbage designed to keep you upgrading.
I'm not sure why we're worried about contamination either. As soon as one human steps foot on Mars it will inevitably be contaminated anyway. We need these "contaminants" to stay alive...they permeate our living environments. Any artificial human martian habitat we place on Mars will ooze microorganisms like lava from a volcano. If we were at all interested in maintaining a pristine martian ecosystem we'd never land there. Trying to prevent it is ridiculous. Even if we could prevent it, it only takes one dissenting martian colonist to let some algae out the airlock.
[quote]China is no competition, because the hidebound nature of its corrupt "Communist" government is catching up on it. From the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace last month: "Runaway corruption in China poses a lethal threat to the nation's economic development and 'undermines the legitimacy of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.'" [/quote]
Which is nothing like what we have here in the U.S.
Uh, you mean as immature as Physics right? Climatology started a long time ago - 10th or 16th century, depending on who is counting - about when people started studying that thing we sometimes call "Gravity" (again, depending on who is counting).
Oh please. You know what he meant by "immature". He means that the climate is not understood well enough to predict the climatological effects of the industrial revolution, much less how deliberately trying to counter those effects will affect things.
Technically, this can be done now.
Let's see how cavalier they are about this when we find the gene that tells us how often one masturbates.
What protects us is that the army is made up of citizens who (we hope) believe in freedom, democracy, and (hopefully) take their oath to uphold the Constitution [1] seriously. The army would mutiny if it were ordered to occupy, say, New York City and enforce blatantly anti-Constitutional laws. That is what protects freedom in America. Not my guns, not the promises of politicians, but the simple fact that our army is made up of us
Ask yourself this...if there is a large group of people united in a just cause...and the government is willing to use force to pacify them...the military is just going to pop some tear gas in there and the problem is taken care. When the people are armed it's not so easy. You have to escalate matters to a whole new level. The military will be willing to pacify these unarmed people on a whim (just as the police do now). But if the people are armed, it requires deadly force to pacify them. The politicians giving the orders, and military personel doing the violent pacifying suddenly need a damn good reason to do it. If things ever got so bad that large portions of the population were willing to take up arms against the US government, a population carrying pitchforks could easily be dismissed. An armed population could not. Lastly, it's NOT futile for a bunch of people armed with hunting rifles to take on a modern military. It's called guerrilla warfare and small bands of people employ it against large technologically advanced armies all the time and having been doing it for centuries... with varying degrees of success.
During Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime an Iraqi could walk into a gun shop and buy an AK-47 with the full auto function enabled. By your argument, therefore, Iraq under Saddam should have been a very free place, but you'll note that it wasn't
You're making the assumption that Saddam was so bad that the people were willing to risk their lives to overthrow him. Maybe the majority of people were willing to live with things as they were...especially considering Saddam's history of gassing whole towns to quell an uprising.
I could be wrong here, but wouldn't the easiest and most cost effective way of improving your image to be doing what you had described? Service improvements. Better pricing structures. Better policies.
I don't know. All hype and no service seems to work for politicians.
WTF? The test subjects have to pay $100,000 to get in on the study? This seems like a fairly promising treatment? Why isn't money pouring in to fund this?
As someone pointed out yesterday in another thread: One datapoint does not nullify a generalization. It's been known for years that people who are lonely and/or stressed have higher incidences of cancer than those who are not.
There are plenty of people who would counter this by saying that this could never happy in my country. They'd be fools, but they'd still say it.
One day a King decided to make war with a neighboring country because they had something he wanted. So he went to his subjects and declared the neighbor an enemy. Many of his generals didn't believe him and protested. So the King gathered up his army and marched them into the neighboring country and began burning villages. Not surprising, the people in this country grabbed whatever weapons they could and fought back. Upon seeing the villagers battling his army, the King felt reassured. He walked over to his generals and said, "See! This country is chock full of enemies!"
My insurance is currently paying the health care of useless retirees who are dying of age related diseases. Why even bother treating them? Why don't we just let them die. We know that older people get sick more often than younger people. Wouldn't it be more economic to euthanize everyone over 55? Or would the younger generation stop slaving away to support the older generation if they knew those benefits would not be available to them once they are that old.
Considering that there's no ecosystem on the moon to destroy, what would be the point in not mining it? It's not like you'd notice a difference on earth. All you'd be doing is ruining the pristine meteor impacted, waterless, airless, dust dunes.
If we're ever going to move beyond the earth, we need to build infrastructure in space, and it's simply too expensive to bring it from earth. The Americas would never have been developed if you couldn't cut down any trees. And preventing others from doing it would have bankrupted the superpowers of that era. Simply put, if the means exist to get there, it will eventually be mined. What you're suggesting is like putting a beaver in on a forest with a creek and asking it not to fell trees. It's going to die unless it kills trees and builds dams. Same would happen with humans on the moon.
The dictionary frequently shows definitions based on a frequent usage of a word. But people frequently exagerate too. I'd agree with the forcible indoctrination. But not persuasion by propadanda or salesmanship, because you ultimately still have free will to deviate. Brainwashing to me, is forced psychological manipulation. If it's not, then what term do we use for forced psychological manipulation?
This analogy is flawed. Just as car manufacturers gives is the ability to lock our cars, Microsoft does provide some ability to lock your computer. But that security is easily undermined. Should car owners be responsible for someone slim-jiming their car to break in? That is a better analogy. Or what if they just break a window and you didn't buy the *optional* security system. And what if you did, but the thief knew how to disable the security system. How many countermeasures is the automotive layman expected to take?
It causes cancer in that it disrupts your Circadian rhythms. In much the same that people at high latitudes use lights to ease the problems of the long winter nights, having the lights on *all* night can screw up your body chemistry too. It's been shown that people who work night shifts for long periods of their lives are more likely to get cancer.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution#Effects_on_human_health_and_psychology
Any shelter you make is going to have a hard time withstanding a direct hit. That's just not the point. You have blast shelters and you have fallout shelters. Blast shelters are designed to withstand some blast damage. The further you are from ground zero the less blast damage you will take. That's where the blast shelter shines. You might be in an area close enough to the ground zero where you would otherwise be killed by the pressure and heat and flying debris, but if you're in a blast shelter you have a much better chance of surviving.
The blast damage alone isn't the only killer. Fallout shelters are designed to protect the blast survivors from the subsequent radiation and provide them with enough food and water until they have to leave.
These things will increase survivability even with a large h-bomb attack. While the chances of this happening have gone down since the Soviet collapse, the shelters themselves are far from obsolete. The wide spread notion that we're all dead in the event of a large scale nuclear exchange is simply not true.
And despite the frequent criticism of the old duck and cover movies, this is still the best thing to do if you see bright flash on the horizon. It's far better than standing there mouth agape looking stupid when the blast wave hits.