I think the idea that democracy prevents "rogue states" is somewhat logical, but not necessarily as useful in the current global climate. The cost/benefit analysis of military action seems to me to be generally skewed towards peace, because war not only is really expensive in direct cost, but it also alienates all your trading partners.
That plus the fact that as the US has discovered in Iraq (and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan), even overwhelming resources and technology don't really make it feasible to occupy a hostile country in turn it into a productive and friendly entity. I see no reason why China wouldn't have similar "insurgency" problems with something like an invasion of Taiwan. Maybe they'd be more overtly hostile and brutal to the local population, but I don't think that would help much with the problem, and would also further alienate the international community.
The US has basically banked on the fact that its economy is such a significant part of the world economy that no matter how stupid or wrong Europe thinks we're being, they can't sanction us or anything. And to a degree that might be true, and could probably be true for China, but those powerful economies are still subject to powers beyond their control. It's just not worth it in general.
Now, you can make a pretty convincing argument that in the case of the US and Iraq, even though the war is contributing to economic woes for the US in general, there are certain industries(which are closely tied to the people in power) that are profiting handsomely off of the whole thing, but I don't think that that is any more likely in a democracy than in any other form of government.
So I guess my point is, I don't think the form of government matters too much. From time to time, by one way or another, certain people with hostile agendas will come to power, and they'll find a way to use whatever government is in place to further their cause.
It's people in general I think, and just the circumstances that have made Americans so susceptible to it as of late. In the past few decades the world has turned into this giant interconnected global economy, and the US was the sole superpower, and dammit if we weren't proud of that.
Unfortunately for many, that kind of pride can easily turn into stubbornness and overconfidence. This country fell into that pretty hard, convinced that we could do no wrong, and that all the factors that made us so prosperous in the past meant that anything we do would be undoubtedly successful, and undoubtedly moral.
Various powers in history have gone through basically the same process, so it shouldn't really be that much of a surprise. It's just kind of scarier now, because technology allows a powerful but misguided country to do some serious damage.
Yeah, the only reason the republican party even pretends to care about social issues is because it distracts a large group of voters who are otherwise wrecked by many republican policies.
Dick Cheney doesn't give a rats ass about gays marrying. He cares about money and power. But if he can use the issue of gay marriage to get some low class, uneducated, economically struggling voter to worry more about that than something like the economy, then he'll go for it. Whichever way the gay marriage debate goes doesn't affect the neo-cons' pursuit of money.
There were many Americans who thought the iraq war was a terrible idea from the get-go as well. The ones who spoke up were constantly ridiculed, called cowards, called unpatriotic, etc. The media was complicit in this, for a number of reasons. I'll summarize a few of them, but honestly you could probably write dozens of thesis papers about the failures of the media over the past decade or so.
The republican party has done a great job of bullying the media (Referring to the mainstream media). The constant accusations of "liberal media" left the press completely terrified of appearing biased. The result is that whenever there was any sort of debate, the media functions purely as a platform for each side to send a talking head to read their pre-approved lines and that's it. The reporters would barely question, wouldn't call out obvious falsehoods, and basically didn't do any real reporting. One of the reasons that so many americans believed that Saddam Hussein was complicit in the WTC attacks is because people would be on the evening news saying that it was true, and the reporters wouldn't call them out on it.
The administration also discouraged the media from questioning them by threatening to cut off their access. Go ahead and ask the president a challenging question, just don't expect to be invited back to the next press meeting. There's also plenty of examples of the same thing happening to government workers. Support the administration fully, or consider your job gone.
Third, the unfortunate truth is that for the media, war is good for business. In the short term at least. It puts eyes on the TV.
Basically, our media become nothing more than political party hacks yelling at each other. It was generally biased towards war, and that combined with Americans' love of being patriotic (and the linger desire for some ass-kicking revenge over 9/11), and now here we are.
What's the alternative? Just going about business as usual? Let's not have a global warming debate right now, but irregardless of that, there's a very real energy crisis on the horizon. Oil is going to become more scarce and go up in price, regardless of who we elect.
It's a consequence of our past actions, under the leadership of both republicans and democrats, that we've basically put ourselves in an unsustainable situation. We're going to have to deal with the problem eventually, and it's going to be painful and expensive and it's going to suck.
So we can bitch and moan about how hard it will be and just try to ignore it until we have no choice, or we can be honest with ourselves about the problem, take it on the chin, and get it over with. There's no easy solutions to many of the problems that we face. There's not even any perfect solutions.
Bush was elected a second time because an sophisticated republican PR machine and a lazy press managed to keep the large problems that Bush has created for the country under the radar of most Americans. Our populace was under informed, for various reasons, and that doesn't lead to good decision making. It sucks that it turned out that way, and it's something that many americans are ashamed about.
At this point, things have gotten so bad that it's not really feasible to hide the problems, plus the current administration isn't running for reelection so they don't really care about hiding it. You don't have to look very hard to see the problems and how the affect you now. Just about everyone is feeling it at least in their wallets.
It's pretty depressing to see people so eager to automatically dismiss any politician as no different than any other. Politics is what it is and will always be full of spin, but there's a difference between being a politican and being a politician that starts ridiculously foolish and expensive wars.
You can make a reasonable argument that politics doesn't attract the most honest people, or that sometimes to win politicians have to compromise their goals/values/etc. You might even be able to convince me that politicians pretty much all suck. But there's a lot of different degrees of suckage, and those differences are plainly visible in the two presidential candidates. To pretend like the decision doesn't matter at all is just silly.
And your**AA comment is equally silly. The RIAA and MIAA are pretty terrible organizations, and it sucks what they're trying to do to the internet/technology/etc. But either way, it's not going to make or break our country. There are plenty of young people who realize that there are more important things in the world than their iPods.
Well if that's the case, then maybe the powers that be should've considered that maybe destroying a country and then trying to rebuild it isn't such a good idea if you're going to be utterly reliant on a single profit-driven corporation to actually have any hope of getting the work done.
If Iraq is as important as the government claims it is, then shouldn't they be quite concerned that our national security is basically in the hands of this one company, because without them it's hopeless?
Yeah, it was kind of a silly logic that led to the creation of the super-delegate system. As it's finally played out, I think the party has realized that it's a big problem. Even if the super-delegates overall preferred Clinton, overruling the standard delegate count would've caused some serious blowback. Like you said, it's made an already close and sometimes bitter primary even more convoluted, which didn't help.
I expect that the super-delegate system will be rethought before the next primary. Hopefully the whole primaries setup will be given a good examination, because it's a pretty bad system.
And government can work the same way. Our individual voice is usually smaller, but at the end of the day, politicians need votes. They might not particularly care whether or not public schools are worth a damn, but if enough citizens are loud enough about it, politicians will take notice and try to improve things. It sucks that they're only doing it in exchange for votes and not because they care, but at the end of the day, you still end up with better schools.
The republican party does the exact same thing, it's just less honest about it. The democrats will tax you and then do whatever with the money, but at least you see the money coming out of your wallet. The republicans don't tax you, but still do whatever with the money, pretending like it magically grows on trees. Eventually it catches up with you as prices rise and your income doesn't, not to mention the mountains of new debt we're piling up daily. Either party is going to spend your money, but at least the democrats respect your intelligence enough not to lie to you about it.
The only type of conservatism that currently exists in the republican party is social conservatism, and I'd think that you as a libertarian would have some serious issues with that.
The supermarket down the street doesn't give a damn how hungry I am, they just want to make money. But the way they've chosen to make money(by selling food), happens to align nicely with one of my priorities in life, which is obtaining food. I honestly could not care less if the manager of that supermarket gets paid well or is happy or whatever. We don't care about each other, but our interests align enough that I choose to go to that supermarket and spend my money.
The point is that it sucks that the government that we've got isn't as concerned with the citizens as it should be, but unless you've got some brilliant way to change it, we just need to work with what we've got, and make the best of it. Whatever the motivations of the democrats or the republicans are, they do tend to do some things differently, and there's certain areas where the goals of each party might align with my personal goals. What a senator in DC gets out of that whole deal might be completely different from what I get out of it, but that doesn't mean that the end result doesn't affect me and that I can't have an opinion on it.
It might be as simple as drawing up a list of the pros and cons of some of the basic direction that each party can be expected to go in when you see how it might affect you. Because it will affect you. Even if you believe that everyone at the top is motivated purely by greed, their selfishness leads them in different directions from each other, and one of those directions is bound to be more useful to you than the others.
Well, in regards to the first part of your comment, that's just the way things work. There's an ebb and flow, but in general, things are pretty close to 50-50. It's kind of amazing if you think about it.
But in regards to getting things done, it doesn't always work the way you describe. The republican party hates the idea of social security, and an administration like the current one would rather blow up the entire planet than create a system like that. Yet when they tried to even modify it a little bit (as they did a couple of years ago), they got absolutely nowhere. You can find an endless stream of republicans that will talk bad about the program, about how worthless it is, etc. But there's no real widespread support for getting rid of it.
But either way, government is a hard thing, and sometimes the only way to learn whether or not an idea will work is to try it. It's a shame that people have to suffer along the way when their are bad decisions, and then someone has to come in and clean up the mess, but government (like almost everything else in the world) is sometimes just trial and error. It's large-scale trial and error, sure, and that sucks even extra when a country with the sort of power that the US has had makes big mistakes, but that's just how it goes.
In the US there are two major political parties, and each one puts one candidate up for the election in the general election for President. But before the general election, each party has the primary campaign, where individuals within each party run against each other for the right to be the candidate in the election. These primary campaigns basically involve citizens (when it's their state's turn) going and voting for the candidate that they want to represent whichever party. Depending on the rules of the particular state, sometimes you have to be a registered member of that party in order to vote, and sometimes they're open to anyone registered to vote at all. Basically the way it works is that depending on how many votes you get in a primary, then you get a certain number of delegates. Delegates are basically voting representatives for that state, proportioned by the relative populations of each state,and are expected to vote in accordance with the results of the primary popular vote in that state.
You don't need to win one of the primaries to run for president, but you need to win one if you want the support of one of the major political parties. For various reasons, it's currently not particularly practical for a candidate to win the general election unless they are a candidate from one of the two main parties.
The two major parties in the US are the Democrats and the Republicans. Each party creates the specific rules that are used in their own primaries to select their candidates. The democrats, for various reasons, have come up with a complicated system that not only has regular delegates, but also has "super-delegates." Supers are usually (but not always) individuals considered particularly important to the democratic party (elected officials, party leaders, etc), and they are free to put their delegate vote towards whichever candidate they wish. Basically, they're individuals who's vote counts for way more than the average person's. Their role is restricted purely to the democratic primary however, in a general election, their vote counts for no more than anyone else's.
That's just a brief overview, without the history of why super-delegates exist, but there's plenty of information out there to be found on that.
I'm sure there's some exotic way in which this could be wrong, but I would think that regardless of what your universe actually entails, it'd be impossible to completely simulate it, because that would basically require a computer the size of the universe. But with enough energy/technology/knowledge etc. you can simulate an arbitrary portion of it. And if that simulation is designed to not allow the simulation any information about the universe around it, then as far as any being living in the simulation is concerned, the extents of the simulation would be extents of their universe. The "universes" that our current technology lets us simulate are significantly smaller/simpler than the universe that we live in, and as far as I know aren't populated with any intelligences capable of trying to simulate their own universe, but there's no reason to think that our ability to create more sophisticated simulations won't continue to increase.
So if one day, we do manage to create a simulation complex enough for "life" to arise in it, in an intelligent and self-aware manner, they in turn would never be able to simulate their own universe fully, but could potentially simulate a portion of it. And the cycle could repeat itself indefinitely, creating a series of increasingly smaller/simpler universes.
So if we are living in a simulation, then the universe that has been created for us should be smaller and/or simpler than the universe that lead to the creation of this simulation. And whether or not that simulation is just a simulation in another even larger universe...who knows? I guess somewhere back down the chain you'd end up with an initial universe that wasn't a simulation, it'd be the original.
I don't know how you could test any of this stuff though. The best that I can think of that you could hope for is to break the simulation. But it seems more likely that any limit in the simulation would be appear to you to just be some sort of fundamental limit in the universe. Or if the simulation is similar to most of the software that humans have written, then the whole thing would just crash and have to be reboot.
It's not just the weight that makes a difference, soil and concrete act very differently. I don't know any more about what they did than you do, but I imagine that even using a big tower as a lever, pushing through a 70 ton block of concrete is going to be much harder than pushing through crappy soil, because the concrete is basically one giant piece. Even if you focus all of your energy on one particular section of the concrete, the strength of that material is going to spread out that force and so you'd end up having to move a lot more concrete/soil.
I don't know if that explanation makes much sense. It'd be easy to explain with a quick diagram, but I'm too lazy to draw with text.
I think it depends on just how mission critical things are. If your business completely ceases to function if your website goes down, then remote redundancy certainly makes a lot of sense. If you can deal with a couple of days with no website, then maybe it's not worth the extra trouble. I'd imagine that a hardware failure confined to a single server is more common than explosions bringing entire data-centers offline, so maybe a backup server sitting right next to it isn't such a useless idea.
I think you're right. And in the grand scheme of things, webkit is probably the hard part. Since they're already working on that, sticking a browser around it is a no-brainer.
Why does firefox exist? They give that away too, that can't look good on a balance sheet.
IE was created well before firefox existed, and was arguably built to destroy netscape. Safari is newer, but I can think of a number of reasons why Apple might have felt it worthwhile. Maybe Apple felt that a cross-platform browser would never take full advantage of some of the features available in OSX. Maybe they felt the upgrade schedule for firefox was too slow. I think you could make a pretty strong argument that creating safari has been a very important part of their success with the iPhone. I don't know if that was the plan all along, or just a fortunate coincidence, but it seems to have worked out well for them.
Because there's lots of people who won't spend $20 for the music, when all they really want is maybe one or two songs that they could just download.
I'm a perfect example of that (Woohoo, anecdotal evidence!). The Cars just had an entire album released for RockBand. I'd say I like The Cars, there's a few songs on that album that are immediately recognizable to me. The rest of them, not so much. But bought the whole album on RockBand because I really enjoy Rock Band and I like having more songs for it. I paid $15 for it, but the only reason they got a whole album sale from me was because of Rock Band. I still have no desire to buy the CD, if they're lucky I might get one song stuck in my head enough that I'd buy that track off of iTunes. But if they had offered me the CD and the album on RockBand for $20, I probably would've jumped on that. I think of it almost as a bulk discount.
You can look at that as them selling the CD to me for only $5 instead of $15, but that's $5 that they aren't going to get from me otherwise. They're not losing $10 on the deal, they're getting a little extra, at basically no cost to them.
This is good, it means another potential revenue source for musicians, since the era of selling truckloads of plastic discs with songs encoded on them for 15 bucks is coming to an end. The ability to "rock out" along side of a song is the sort of added value that musicians and even the record companies should be offering people to keep us buying their product.
But selling tracks online isn't the only way they could do this. Why not sell your CD in stores, and include with the disc a code that lets you download all the songs into Rock Band/GH? That would go a lot further towards convincing me to shell out 20 bucks for it.
Yeah the economy is sucking and times are tough for many, but there are still lots and lots of people out there with more than enough money to buy a fancy phone. There's also the fact that 10 million is a pretty small number when you consider how many people use mobile phones. Not to mention the fact that Apple's starting to expand to many other countries, where the economy hasn't had as many issues and where currency values aren't a concern. 10 million seems entirely reachable.
There are a few systems that I've read about that are supposed to use optical fibers to bring sunlight into parts of the building, but it hasn't really taken off for a few reasons. First off, it's complicated. Any time you're running another set of pipes/conduit/cables through a building you're adding another layer of work/coordination/cost. And that's not including things like "irises", which would not only be expensive to purchase, but would likely also require a source of electricity and computer control, which adds more complexity/cost. You're also adding more points of mechanical failure, because the iris would have moving parts. It would be a maintenance nightmare.
It's far more desirable to instead design a building where all the spaces are close enough to an exterior window. Then you not only get access to natural light, but you also get other benefits like natural ventilation (if you go with operable windows) and view. In much of Europe there are laws that basically say that any sort of workstation/desk/etc. in an office building or whatever has to be within so many meters of a window.
I design buildings for a living, and am involved in a lot of projects that consider sustainable design important. One of the most interesting things about sustainable design as it's evolving right now is how many of its basic principles are really just rediscovering all the techniques that were used for hundreds (or even thousands) of years before air conditioning was invented. Old houses have plenty to teach us.
One of the best ways to design a house for natural lighting is to pretend that youo won't have any artificial lighting. It's a limitation that architects spend centuries finding solutions to. There are plenty of good answers out there. New technology and new materials are helping to create new answers, but it doesn't have to be anything crazy or even innovative. The same thing goes with heating/cooling strategies, there's a bazillion little design "tricks of the trade" that are incredibly straight-forward and easy. You don't need state-of-the-art materials, you don't need computer design tools, you don't need to be a highly educated architect. People were finding solutions to these problems hundreds of years ago when all they had to build out of was mud bricks.
The important part is how we can use technology to augment those techniques (things like low-e glass), or how we integrate those techniques with newer technologies (A/C, solar panels, etc.)
You're right about that, a game that plays to the strengths of the 360 or PS3 is probably not playing to the strengths of the Wii. It's a shame for people who can only afford one console that they're going to miss out on some games, and it's especially an issue with regards to the Wii because it's much more substantially different than the PS3 and 360 are from each other. But that's the compromise that Nintendo chose to make, and that gamers have to make when they choose consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the idea that democracy prevents "rogue states" is somewhat logical, but not necessarily as useful in the current global climate. The cost/benefit analysis of military action seems to me to be generally skewed towards peace, because war not only is really expensive in direct cost, but it also alienates all your trading partners.
That plus the fact that as the US has discovered in Iraq (and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan), even overwhelming resources and technology don't really make it feasible to occupy a hostile country in turn it into a productive and friendly entity. I see no reason why China wouldn't have similar "insurgency" problems with something like an invasion of Taiwan. Maybe they'd be more overtly hostile and brutal to the local population, but I don't think that would help much with the problem, and would also further alienate the international community.
The US has basically banked on the fact that its economy is such a significant part of the world economy that no matter how stupid or wrong Europe thinks we're being, they can't sanction us or anything. And to a degree that might be true, and could probably be true for China, but those powerful economies are still subject to powers beyond their control. It's just not worth it in general.
Now, you can make a pretty convincing argument that in the case of the US and Iraq, even though the war is contributing to economic woes for the US in general, there are certain industries(which are closely tied to the people in power) that are profiting handsomely off of the whole thing, but I don't think that that is any more likely in a democracy than in any other form of government.
So I guess my point is, I don't think the form of government matters too much. From time to time, by one way or another, certain people with hostile agendas will come to power, and they'll find a way to use whatever government is in place to further their cause.
It's people in general I think, and just the circumstances that have made Americans so susceptible to it as of late. In the past few decades the world has turned into this giant interconnected global economy, and the US was the sole superpower, and dammit if we weren't proud of that.
Unfortunately for many, that kind of pride can easily turn into stubbornness and overconfidence. This country fell into that pretty hard, convinced that we could do no wrong, and that all the factors that made us so prosperous in the past meant that anything we do would be undoubtedly successful, and undoubtedly moral.
Various powers in history have gone through basically the same process, so it shouldn't really be that much of a surprise. It's just kind of scarier now, because technology allows a powerful but misguided country to do some serious damage.
Yeah, the only reason the republican party even pretends to care about social issues is because it distracts a large group of voters who are otherwise wrecked by many republican policies.
Dick Cheney doesn't give a rats ass about gays marrying. He cares about money and power. But if he can use the issue of gay marriage to get some low class, uneducated, economically struggling voter to worry more about that than something like the economy, then he'll go for it. Whichever way the gay marriage debate goes doesn't affect the neo-cons' pursuit of money.
There were many Americans who thought the iraq war was a terrible idea from the get-go as well. The ones who spoke up were constantly ridiculed, called cowards, called unpatriotic, etc. The media was complicit in this, for a number of reasons. I'll summarize a few of them, but honestly you could probably write dozens of thesis papers about the failures of the media over the past decade or so.
The republican party has done a great job of bullying the media (Referring to the mainstream media). The constant accusations of "liberal media" left the press completely terrified of appearing biased. The result is that whenever there was any sort of debate, the media functions purely as a platform for each side to send a talking head to read their pre-approved lines and that's it. The reporters would barely question, wouldn't call out obvious falsehoods, and basically didn't do any real reporting. One of the reasons that so many americans believed that Saddam Hussein was complicit in the WTC attacks is because people would be on the evening news saying that it was true, and the reporters wouldn't call them out on it.
The administration also discouraged the media from questioning them by threatening to cut off their access. Go ahead and ask the president a challenging question, just don't expect to be invited back to the next press meeting. There's also plenty of examples of the same thing happening to government workers. Support the administration fully, or consider your job gone.
Third, the unfortunate truth is that for the media, war is good for business. In the short term at least. It puts eyes on the TV.
Basically, our media become nothing more than political party hacks yelling at each other. It was generally biased towards war, and that combined with Americans' love of being patriotic (and the linger desire for some ass-kicking revenge over 9/11), and now here we are.
What's the alternative? Just going about business as usual? Let's not have a global warming debate right now, but irregardless of that, there's a very real energy crisis on the horizon. Oil is going to become more scarce and go up in price, regardless of who we elect.
It's a consequence of our past actions, under the leadership of both republicans and democrats, that we've basically put ourselves in an unsustainable situation. We're going to have to deal with the problem eventually, and it's going to be painful and expensive and it's going to suck.
So we can bitch and moan about how hard it will be and just try to ignore it until we have no choice, or we can be honest with ourselves about the problem, take it on the chin, and get it over with. There's no easy solutions to many of the problems that we face. There's not even any perfect solutions.
Bush was elected a second time because an sophisticated republican PR machine and a lazy press managed to keep the large problems that Bush has created for the country under the radar of most Americans. Our populace was under informed, for various reasons, and that doesn't lead to good decision making. It sucks that it turned out that way, and it's something that many americans are ashamed about.
At this point, things have gotten so bad that it's not really feasible to hide the problems, plus the current administration isn't running for reelection so they don't really care about hiding it. You don't have to look very hard to see the problems and how the affect you now. Just about everyone is feeling it at least in their wallets.
It's pretty depressing to see people so eager to automatically dismiss any politician as no different than any other. Politics is what it is and will always be full of spin, but there's a difference between being a politican and being a politician that starts ridiculously foolish and expensive wars.
You can make a reasonable argument that politics doesn't attract the most honest people, or that sometimes to win politicians have to compromise their goals/values/etc. You might even be able to convince me that politicians pretty much all suck. But there's a lot of different degrees of suckage, and those differences are plainly visible in the two presidential candidates. To pretend like the decision doesn't matter at all is just silly.
And your**AA comment is equally silly. The RIAA and MIAA are pretty terrible organizations, and it sucks what they're trying to do to the internet/technology/etc. But either way, it's not going to make or break our country. There are plenty of young people who realize that there are more important things in the world than their iPods.
Well if that's the case, then maybe the powers that be should've considered that maybe destroying a country and then trying to rebuild it isn't such a good idea if you're going to be utterly reliant on a single profit-driven corporation to actually have any hope of getting the work done.
If Iraq is as important as the government claims it is, then shouldn't they be quite concerned that our national security is basically in the hands of this one company, because without them it's hopeless?
Yeah, it was kind of a silly logic that led to the creation of the super-delegate system. As it's finally played out, I think the party has realized that it's a big problem. Even if the super-delegates overall preferred Clinton, overruling the standard delegate count would've caused some serious blowback. Like you said, it's made an already close and sometimes bitter primary even more convoluted, which didn't help.
I expect that the super-delegate system will be rethought before the next primary. Hopefully the whole primaries setup will be given a good examination, because it's a pretty bad system.
And government can work the same way. Our individual voice is usually smaller, but at the end of the day, politicians need votes. They might not particularly care whether or not public schools are worth a damn, but if enough citizens are loud enough about it, politicians will take notice and try to improve things. It sucks that they're only doing it in exchange for votes and not because they care, but at the end of the day, you still end up with better schools.
The republican party does the exact same thing, it's just less honest about it. The democrats will tax you and then do whatever with the money, but at least you see the money coming out of your wallet. The republicans don't tax you, but still do whatever with the money, pretending like it magically grows on trees. Eventually it catches up with you as prices rise and your income doesn't, not to mention the mountains of new debt we're piling up daily. Either party is going to spend your money, but at least the democrats respect your intelligence enough not to lie to you about it.
The only type of conservatism that currently exists in the republican party is social conservatism, and I'd think that you as a libertarian would have some serious issues with that.
The supermarket down the street doesn't give a damn how hungry I am, they just want to make money. But the way they've chosen to make money(by selling food), happens to align nicely with one of my priorities in life, which is obtaining food. I honestly could not care less if the manager of that supermarket gets paid well or is happy or whatever. We don't care about each other, but our interests align enough that I choose to go to that supermarket and spend my money.
The point is that it sucks that the government that we've got isn't as concerned with the citizens as it should be, but unless you've got some brilliant way to change it, we just need to work with what we've got, and make the best of it. Whatever the motivations of the democrats or the republicans are, they do tend to do some things differently, and there's certain areas where the goals of each party might align with my personal goals. What a senator in DC gets out of that whole deal might be completely different from what I get out of it, but that doesn't mean that the end result doesn't affect me and that I can't have an opinion on it.
It might be as simple as drawing up a list of the pros and cons of some of the basic direction that each party can be expected to go in when you see how it might affect you. Because it will affect you. Even if you believe that everyone at the top is motivated purely by greed, their selfishness leads them in different directions from each other, and one of those directions is bound to be more useful to you than the others.
Well, in regards to the first part of your comment, that's just the way things work. There's an ebb and flow, but in general, things are pretty close to 50-50. It's kind of amazing if you think about it.
But in regards to getting things done, it doesn't always work the way you describe. The republican party hates the idea of social security, and an administration like the current one would rather blow up the entire planet than create a system like that. Yet when they tried to even modify it a little bit (as they did a couple of years ago), they got absolutely nowhere. You can find an endless stream of republicans that will talk bad about the program, about how worthless it is, etc. But there's no real widespread support for getting rid of it.
But either way, government is a hard thing, and sometimes the only way to learn whether or not an idea will work is to try it. It's a shame that people have to suffer along the way when their are bad decisions, and then someone has to come in and clean up the mess, but government (like almost everything else in the world) is sometimes just trial and error. It's large-scale trial and error, sure, and that sucks even extra when a country with the sort of power that the US has had makes big mistakes, but that's just how it goes.
In the US there are two major political parties, and each one puts one candidate up for the election in the general election for President. But before the general election, each party has the primary campaign, where individuals within each party run against each other for the right to be the candidate in the election. These primary campaigns basically involve citizens (when it's their state's turn) going and voting for the candidate that they want to represent whichever party. Depending on the rules of the particular state, sometimes you have to be a registered member of that party in order to vote, and sometimes they're open to anyone registered to vote at all. Basically the way it works is that depending on how many votes you get in a primary, then you get a certain number of delegates. Delegates are basically voting representatives for that state, proportioned by the relative populations of each state,and are expected to vote in accordance with the results of the primary popular vote in that state.
You don't need to win one of the primaries to run for president, but you need to win one if you want the support of one of the major political parties. For various reasons, it's currently not particularly practical for a candidate to win the general election unless they are a candidate from one of the two main parties.
The two major parties in the US are the Democrats and the Republicans. Each party creates the specific rules that are used in their own primaries to select their candidates. The democrats, for various reasons, have come up with a complicated system that not only has regular delegates, but also has "super-delegates." Supers are usually (but not always) individuals considered particularly important to the democratic party (elected officials, party leaders, etc), and they are free to put their delegate vote towards whichever candidate they wish. Basically, they're individuals who's vote counts for way more than the average person's. Their role is restricted purely to the democratic primary however, in a general election, their vote counts for no more than anyone else's.
That's just a brief overview, without the history of why super-delegates exist, but there's plenty of information out there to be found on that.
I'm sure there's some exotic way in which this could be wrong, but I would think that regardless of what your universe actually entails, it'd be impossible to completely simulate it, because that would basically require a computer the size of the universe. But with enough energy/technology/knowledge etc. you can simulate an arbitrary portion of it. And if that simulation is designed to not allow the simulation any information about the universe around it, then as far as any being living in the simulation is concerned, the extents of the simulation would be extents of their universe. The "universes" that our current technology lets us simulate are significantly smaller/simpler than the universe that we live in, and as far as I know aren't populated with any intelligences capable of trying to simulate their own universe, but there's no reason to think that our ability to create more sophisticated simulations won't continue to increase.
So if one day, we do manage to create a simulation complex enough for "life" to arise in it, in an intelligent and self-aware manner, they in turn would never be able to simulate their own universe fully, but could potentially simulate a portion of it. And the cycle could repeat itself indefinitely, creating a series of increasingly smaller/simpler universes.
So if we are living in a simulation, then the universe that has been created for us should be smaller and/or simpler than the universe that lead to the creation of this simulation. And whether or not that simulation is just a simulation in another even larger universe...who knows? I guess somewhere back down the chain you'd end up with an initial universe that wasn't a simulation, it'd be the original.
I don't know how you could test any of this stuff though. The best that I can think of that you could hope for is to break the simulation. But it seems more likely that any limit in the simulation would be appear to you to just be some sort of fundamental limit in the universe. Or if the simulation is similar to most of the software that humans have written, then the whole thing would just crash and have to be reboot.
It's not just the weight that makes a difference, soil and concrete act very differently. I don't know any more about what they did than you do, but I imagine that even using a big tower as a lever, pushing through a 70 ton block of concrete is going to be much harder than pushing through crappy soil, because the concrete is basically one giant piece. Even if you focus all of your energy on one particular section of the concrete, the strength of that material is going to spread out that force and so you'd end up having to move a lot more concrete/soil.
I don't know if that explanation makes much sense. It'd be easy to explain with a quick diagram, but I'm too lazy to draw with text.
I think it depends on just how mission critical things are. If your business completely ceases to function if your website goes down, then remote redundancy certainly makes a lot of sense. If you can deal with a couple of days with no website, then maybe it's not worth the extra trouble. I'd imagine that a hardware failure confined to a single server is more common than explosions bringing entire data-centers offline, so maybe a backup server sitting right next to it isn't such a useless idea.
I think you're right. And in the grand scheme of things, webkit is probably the hard part. Since they're already working on that, sticking a browser around it is a no-brainer.
Why does firefox exist? They give that away too, that can't look good on a balance sheet.
IE was created well before firefox existed, and was arguably built to destroy netscape. Safari is newer, but I can think of a number of reasons why Apple might have felt it worthwhile. Maybe Apple felt that a cross-platform browser would never take full advantage of some of the features available in OSX. Maybe they felt the upgrade schedule for firefox was too slow. I think you could make a pretty strong argument that creating safari has been a very important part of their success with the iPhone. I don't know if that was the plan all along, or just a fortunate coincidence, but it seems to have worked out well for them.
Because there's lots of people who won't spend $20 for the music, when all they really want is maybe one or two songs that they could just download.
I'm a perfect example of that (Woohoo, anecdotal evidence!). The Cars just had an entire album released for RockBand. I'd say I like The Cars, there's a few songs on that album that are immediately recognizable to me. The rest of them, not so much. But bought the whole album on RockBand because I really enjoy Rock Band and I like having more songs for it. I paid $15 for it, but the only reason they got a whole album sale from me was because of Rock Band. I still have no desire to buy the CD, if they're lucky I might get one song stuck in my head enough that I'd buy that track off of iTunes. But if they had offered me the CD and the album on RockBand for $20, I probably would've jumped on that. I think of it almost as a bulk discount.
You can look at that as them selling the CD to me for only $5 instead of $15, but that's $5 that they aren't going to get from me otherwise. They're not losing $10 on the deal, they're getting a little extra, at basically no cost to them.
This is good, it means another potential revenue source for musicians, since the era of selling truckloads of plastic discs with songs encoded on them for 15 bucks is coming to an end. The ability to "rock out" along side of a song is the sort of added value that musicians and even the record companies should be offering people to keep us buying their product.
But selling tracks online isn't the only way they could do this. Why not sell your CD in stores, and include with the disc a code that lets you download all the songs into Rock Band/GH? That would go a lot further towards convincing me to shell out 20 bucks for it.
Yeah the economy is sucking and times are tough for many, but there are still lots and lots of people out there with more than enough money to buy a fancy phone. There's also the fact that 10 million is a pretty small number when you consider how many people use mobile phones. Not to mention the fact that Apple's starting to expand to many other countries, where the economy hasn't had as many issues and where currency values aren't a concern. 10 million seems entirely reachable.
There are a few systems that I've read about that are supposed to use optical fibers to bring sunlight into parts of the building, but it hasn't really taken off for a few reasons. First off, it's complicated. Any time you're running another set of pipes/conduit/cables through a building you're adding another layer of work/coordination/cost. And that's not including things like "irises", which would not only be expensive to purchase, but would likely also require a source of electricity and computer control, which adds more complexity/cost. You're also adding more points of mechanical failure, because the iris would have moving parts. It would be a maintenance nightmare.
It's far more desirable to instead design a building where all the spaces are close enough to an exterior window. Then you not only get access to natural light, but you also get other benefits like natural ventilation (if you go with operable windows) and view. In much of Europe there are laws that basically say that any sort of workstation/desk/etc. in an office building or whatever has to be within so many meters of a window.
I design buildings for a living, and am involved in a lot of projects that consider sustainable design important. One of the most interesting things about sustainable design as it's evolving right now is how many of its basic principles are really just rediscovering all the techniques that were used for hundreds (or even thousands) of years before air conditioning was invented. Old houses have plenty to teach us.
One of the best ways to design a house for natural lighting is to pretend that youo won't have any artificial lighting. It's a limitation that architects spend centuries finding solutions to. There are plenty of good answers out there. New technology and new materials are helping to create new answers, but it doesn't have to be anything crazy or even innovative. The same thing goes with heating/cooling strategies, there's a bazillion little design "tricks of the trade" that are incredibly straight-forward and easy. You don't need state-of-the-art materials, you don't need computer design tools, you don't need to be a highly educated architect. People were finding solutions to these problems hundreds of years ago when all they had to build out of was mud bricks.
The important part is how we can use technology to augment those techniques (things like low-e glass), or how we integrate those techniques with newer technologies (A/C, solar panels, etc.)
You're right about that, a game that plays to the strengths of the 360 or PS3 is probably not playing to the strengths of the Wii. It's a shame for people who can only afford one console that they're going to miss out on some games, and it's especially an issue with regards to the Wii because it's much more substantially different than the PS3 and 360 are from each other. But that's the compromise that Nintendo chose to make, and that gamers have to make when they choose consoles.