Why is it that most successful people believe in God
I wouldn't call myself entirely unsuccessful - and I don't believe in gods of any sort. I know other people who are also doing OK, and they have no need for an invisible man in the sky to guide their hand. IMO, successful people are successful not because they pray a lot but because they work a lot. This independence is an obstacle for many religious notions. The typically high IQ of successful people is yet another problem for religionists.
But if you have some specific religious and successful people (self-made, not inheritors!) in mind, then they have to face the Pascal's Wager. Those guys have a lot to lose. But a small candle and 15 minutes as a gratitude for another $1B in profits or for another year of good health is a small price to pay.
Your claim probably makes sense to a lot of people in modern industrialized societies, but actually depends on a lot of assumptions about what a god would want.
It may well be that the god in question is an aquatic creature whose only interest lies in counting numbers from 0 to infinity and enjoying the silence of depths. Such a god would indeed command us to do things that we'd never guess. However what use such a god would be for us if we do not share anything with him? If he commands us to go and jump into the water, shall we?
In practice, most (if not all) gods are somewhat homomorphic, and they pretend to be either the parents of the humankind or at least someone who is related to us. They exhibit human characteristics like anger and jealousy. This means that a modern god should be somewhat understandable by his believers. Even the Christian god is declared to be all-loving and such, as if anyone could know for sure. All the facts are, actually, against such a theory - the loving god has a very strange way of expressing his love, from fields of war to schools in small towns. You will find far more miracles in the old Star Trek, where they don't matter, than in real life - where they do.
The thing is that increasing the cost of an attack is a successful defense strategy
I don't want to refuse to disagree with those who think you are wrong here.
However the same works in the other direction - increasing the cost of defense is a successful attack strategy. Many believe that OBL intended it to be this way. A relatively small attack, as wars go, forced the USA to spend treasure on several wars that last more than a decade to this very day. The same attack destroyed the trust within the society and paved the way for creation of a massive, centrally operated police-like apparatus that many in the US government were already itching to implement. (Note that the Patriot Act, a large piece of legislation, sprung up out of nowhere within days.) This apparatus immediately started spreading onto trains and buses and streets. TSA workers are not armed, AFAIK and so far, but they don't have to be - the police is at their beck and call at any time.
Also there is a problem: once the criminal manages to go through the checkpoint, one way or another, he is in the clear and has the red carpet all the way to the airplane.
If enough people have the intent, they can carry a ton of explosives into the secure area, one gram at a time. Nobody would pay any attention to their actions, and small quantities of anything cannot be detected. So in the end it's just a matter of money.
Any RTCW player is well acquainted with this weapon. It is pretty good. Note that some Stens were silenced. Combined with extreme simplicity, this can become yet another design for underground gunsmiths. We are now way beyond a bicycle repair shop of 1930's; proliferation of firearms cannot be stopped because they are not getting any more complicated, but our machining capabilities keep growing. The 3D printing on the horizon is yet another example of that. As matter of fact, some 3D printers already can manufacture parts out of some metals. The important fact here is that the criminal underworld does not need too many weapons, and they have the money. It's the sporting market that consumes all the firearms and the ammo. When a criminal burns just one round we read about it in newspapers.
I may be right and all you lot are missing something essential. (possibly on purpose because you like to play with your guns so much that you prefer to suppres the thought that this obsession just killed 20 young kids - again).
Normally gun owners indeed like their weapons - for various reasons, not always because they can kill. Many high-end weapons are works of modern art. It is a challenge to shoot accurately, both on the physical level and on the mental level. Protection of the family was always high on men's "to do" list, as well as hunting for food. We are only a few hundred years removed from the days when people regularly hunted, with whatever tools they could scare up, and had to protect each other from [other] bandits. If you read the Huckleberry Finn, for example, you will find that a child casually hunted for dinner, even though the story did not unfold in times of our Cro-magnon ancestors.
Today the hunting part is waning among many; it is not a clean and nice job, after all. Much easier to buy the food in the store, ready to eat. This only outsources the slaughter, of course. Hunters always appreciate the nature and only hunt the game that they need (except non-game varmints, like rats, who are hunted to protect other species or cattle.)
The ideas of protection - largely of protection of the family - remain strong, at very least because the man faces the same danger as anyone else in the household. It is understood by everyone who is sane (that word again!) that shooting a burglar is a harsh experience, and it is not always the legally best outcome. I do not know anyone who would casually play with weapons; perhaps children can do that, but there is a reason why children are not allowed unsupervised access to firearms. With supervised access it is fine - and, in fact, it is the recommended way. Most children quickly satisfy their curiosity, learn that the bang is real loud, and do not want to hurt their ears again. Those who like the sport continue in the organized way.
All this means that you should have nothing to fear from lawful gun owners. They would make sure that their firearms are not accessible to strangers. By shooting them often they know what kind of a damage they can do - and they are very careful. The most danger that you can experience comes from a gangbanger who is looking for someone to rob and doesn't mind shooting you in the process.
This is, ultimately, a problem of crime and criminals. Those guys will be always killing us left and right, no matter what weapons they have. Highwaymen in middle ages were just fine with maces, sickles and other common household tools. Bows were expensive and usually forbidden... that hasn't saved anyone. In this case an obviously insane person committed an obviously insane act (because there is no rational benefit to be obtained from this massacre.) Insane people do that; always did and always will do. They are not stupid; quite opposite, they can be very smart, and they can spend time to prepare, like Anders Breivik. He used a bomb to kill the first batch of his victims; do we need another law that prohibits making and exploding bombs in cities? Then he used guns to kill other people; he would certainly find a gun somewhere even if he couldn't buy one. Black market is full of "hot" guns that the owner is willing to get rid of, and Breivik wouldn't care one way or another - not with his body count.
Finally, if you are not in the USA you may not pay attention, but the US economy turned into a true financial pyramid. The whole country is doing nothing, producing no goods except some agricultural items and a few Boeing jets. Nothing is shipped out, but there are hundreds of ships coming in from China with every consumer item in existence. The government finances all that, and more, by borrowing. For how long, do you think, this can continue? Not forever, that's for sure. The country needs to do honest work and to be paid honest money for it. This is not happening - nobody is willing to listen
Except that outside the base (where conflicts are just as natural) firearms are pretty much allowed.
But the base commander will not be responsible for anything that happens outside the gates.
If anyone wants to shoot for sports, let them buy an airgun. Guns make killers.
If guns make killers then we should be grateful that the Pope and Mother Theresa are legally not allowed to own them. Because then the last bastions of humanism would fall. A gun is stronger than a man, after all, and it corrupts man's mind in an instant. That's what guns are - devilishly sentient pieces of metal. No way a sane man can resist their lure.
Some shooting for sports can be done with airguns - specifically, with air pistols. But they are low energy weapons, so the range is very limited. As a competition tool they are OK. But airguns are useless at ranges exceeding 40-50 meters because the pellet drops too much, and the inherent accuracy of the barrel is worse than the accuracy of the shooter. This is not acceptable in the world of sport, otherwise Olympic winners could be assigned just by a random draw. A well measured powder charge, in a precisely made cartridge, is far more accurate, and the bullet's trajectory is more reliable. This helps when you just ran a few km on skis.
Airguns are not useful at all for hunting. There is an exception of hunting small varmints; but I'd be wary of that as well. The energy of the pellet is too small, and the animal can be wounded. Compare to.17HMR - the animal dies instantly from the hydrostatic shock. Naturally, airguns cannot be used to hunt coyotes, wolves, wild pigs or deer - for those a pellet would be just a torture device.
But even if those arms are also removed from the society, many remain that are just as accessible. Police carries guns; guards carry guns; military carries guns. There are many guns in circulation; if need be, a police officer can be ambushed, killed in a dark alley, and his firearm stolen. But an easier possibility exists today, in the age of CNC machining - new guns can be manufactured by an underground industry. 3D printing is a remote possibility today (plastic...) but you don't need more than a small warehouse to make smoothbore derringers. Criminals don't need barrel rifling, but that can be machined as well. Generally rifling is hard to make, it requires special tools, but handguns have short barrels, so this is very doable. They would have no serial numbers, of course, and no registration - just pay the money. So all you achieve is disarming legitimate sportsmen and giving the underground economy a reason to start making weapons. Some of those new weapons can be worse; take crossbows, for example - today materials exist to make them as large or as small as you want, the bolt is silent, and it will make devastating wounds.
Well, in the case of an army base that sounds like a bad idea
This question was raised immediately after the incident, and many military people confirmed that this is the standard policy pretty much on all bases where they served, except perhaps in the theater.
One MP gave his explanation: base commanders are scared $%^&less of a shooting between soldiers, on the base. This is not that unlikely because some families live there, and when you have several thousand men and women in prime age and prime health, conflicts are a natural occurrence. In this particular case the base commander is in the clear: he could not have known (on the surface of it) that Nidal Hasan brought firearms into the base, and the superficial check at the gate wasn't even designed to detect that.
So to summarize, it appears that the commanders do not trust their soldiers; they are more willing to lose some troops to a terrorist act than to lose some to a drunken brawl or a fit of jealousy. Perhaps those commanders are even right, after all. Terrorist acts are rare, but conflicts are not - and having weapons within reach is not helpful. In case of a brawl the base commander will be responsible, and he may lose the job.
Moar Production is the goal only when that product can be sold to attain more power. However at some point 90% of the world don't have anything that you need, and you already have all the power on the planet... then the game plan changes. For example, Earth could become a carefully constructed Paradise for a small number of aristocrats (also known as owners and operators of roboticized industry.) The rest of the population can be discarded, with a mere handful of those, perhaps, selected to work as trusted leutenants and assorted slaves. That's a path that is very likely, considering the natural human desire for unlimited power - and especially for power over other humans.
Even the Fort Hood shooting: The guy could kill 13 people before he was stopped in the middle of an army base filled with weapons and armed people!
The terrorist was able to kill so many people because NOBODY at the base, except two police officers, was allowed to be armed. Weapons were all locked up and unavailable.
To get a body count similar to this guy, all that a perp would need is two-three pipe bombs filled with nails in a crowded place.
Or two to three large bottles of Molotov Cocktail. In enclosed spaces (like a classroom) fire is deadly. Most victims would die from suffocation. How do you ban glass bottles, gasoline, a little cloth, and matches? Oh, by the way, these are not triggering the metal detector, and they are not making much of a noise. The resulting fire may well burn the whole school down and kill everyone inside.
The point is that rather that facing this guy, you would probably prefer to hide and avoid conflict... Meaning that you could have a gun at the school at it wouldn't change a thing... Because actually going out hunting for the lunatic is more dangerous than locking the door and/or fleeing out the window...
Your dilemma is still in trouble. A legitimate gun owner who hides simply is not part of the solution. He could have no gun on him and still hide. The real difference comes into play when the gunman is in front of you, aiming at you. In one case you have a gun and may have enough time to fire it. In another case you have nothing, and die you will.
With regard to "hunting," everyone who is sane understands that the #0 priority is to protect the children, and the best way to do it is by removing them from the harm's way. Only after that is done the adults may discuss what makes more sense in this specific situation - to hold the fort (and perhaps leave other, less protected people, to die) or to venture out and actively hunt the gunman.
And my E-book reader can go two weeks (of heavy usage) on a charge (you don't even need to turn it off!
It's not a useful metric. A paper book can go even longer without a charge. What does that prove? If a tablet lasts whole day of regular use, who would lose sleep over the need to drop it into the cradle for the night? Most tablets, as designed and as used, last several days.
Repeat with me: Automation is good. It makes we, human kind, more productive.
It is not the goal. If you want productivity you could also send 90% of the lesser performing humankind to death camps. But we don't do that - because productivity is not the goal. Well-being of all living humans is.
The people that do not need to do manual and repetitive jobs can move to a more creative work which produces more benefit for mankind.
So the only reason why a barely literate janitor is cleaning toilets instead of writing a bestseller is... he is too busy with toilets, do I get it right?
e-mail was good, despite removing works in the Post office. Hydraulic excavators are good.
There is no universal "good." If the USPS contracts, lots of useless work (delivery of paper waste) will stop. On the other hand, thousands of workers will be laid off. On the other hand, millions of advertisers will direct their ad expenses into something else - perhaps less harmful to the ecology (those flyers kill trees and pollute rivers.) Someone benefits, and someone loses.
The problem is not with automation, which is good for mankind as a whole; the problem is with the distribution of wealth.
I agree with that. If we could transition overnight from a capitalist society where *individuals* own factories to the society where the entire society owns those factories then automation would only result in fewer work hours. Unfortunately this society has tons of other problems. Perhaps in the end, when workers do all the work and the humans are completely irrelevant, it would work. But the intermediate steps, such as socialism, do not work because they are unstable by nature (they depend on people acting against their best interests.) The abuse and unfairness that you mention are right up that alley.
When I studied in the university they had a few foreign students, including those from Africa, and they assured me that with their knowledge and education they will be ruling the roost back at home. They studied pretty hard, I must say.
Who gets to choose? The rich are going to survive? While we "grunts" get to perish?
In this scheme it will be you who will do the choosing, just by being smart enough to be wanted in the new society.
The transition from captalism to post-capitalism (perhaps communism) is not clear yet. But it will happen when a rich owner of a robotic factory finds out that nobody can buy his product because he employs only robots. Humans are not necessary in this society, except those that develop new robots.
There is a reason why in Star Trek you don't see too many scenes on planets where people do some work. In the original Star Trek some scenes in colonies were just ridiculous, with about 50 colonists just milling around in a public square. All the real work that you ever see in ST is the research done by the crew, and an occasional war.
Right now the society *already* has lots of people who are not needed. Younger ones join street gangs, perpetuating the classical pastime of humans - to kill each other for fun and goodies. Older ones stay at home and wait for the death to come. If this continues, the society will split into the people of arcologies (Todos Santos, for example) and the people of ghettos, with the permanent war between the two. The ghettos will win because they are more numerous; then the new Dark Ages begin.
I'd rather be in the bottom 20% in a high-income country such as the United States or Sweden, than in the top 10% in a Sub-Saharan country.
A top 10% income in Africa will give you a personal palace, personal guards, and personal concubines. You would be living if not like a king then pretty well anyway. All the roads upward will be open for you.
A bottom 20% income in the USA (assuming $80K/yr as a reference level) will place you into a cockroach-infested, 100 years old apartment building in a bad part of town. Your life expectancy will depend on how good you are with a knife (or with a gun, in Chicago.) You will be unemployable for many reasons, and your income will be officially around the poverty level.
I don't even read online newspapers, let alone paper versions. My news come from various blogs. If something of importance happens it will be there. All important events will propagate into free media (such as blogs) even if just as discussions about the event. If the event is of low importance (a common cat lost and then found 10 minutes later in a German village, 10,000 miles away from me) then I don't want to waste my time on it.
In other words, journalists lost their exclusive license to spread and explain news. Their attempts to charge for their work are mostly laughable. Can you charge for retelling rumors from the bazaar *at* the bazaar?
Elsewhere in this thread someone said that each ASIC miner takes 2.5W of power. This is not something that can stop a business in its tracks - certainly not a business that has enough cash to manufacture custom ASICs. No cooling is required at those power levels.
So. is there some way I can use something like a mouse pad as the interface (pinch, zoom, swipe, etc, etc) without having to touch the screen?
No, you can't - simply because you would not know where your touch would land. Mouse has a cursor for that purpose, and action buttons that you click after the cursor is positioned as necessary. The touch interface has no cursor, and it activates whatever it is at the point of touch. You'd have to have a screen underneath your touchpad... but then you can't see it well. Just forget the whole thing and use a mouse.
The primary utility of a company laptop is that you can give presentations with it in a meeting room next door.
IT prefers laptops because they are lighter and more portable, so they can be redeployed easily as needed, or sent for repairs without using a forklift, and there is no need to crawl in the dust under the desk. The maintenance loves the fact that laptops typically take less power than desktops. The road warrior appreciates that a laptop has built-in wireless and Bluetooth and has working sleep modes. The neighbors like the fact that a laptop is more quiet than a desktop.
I'm typing this on a desktop because the desktop gives me better performance. This is a good reason to keep a desktop if you need that performance. Most enterprise users do not need that.
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Why is it that most successful people believe in God
I wouldn't call myself entirely unsuccessful - and I don't believe in gods of any sort. I know other people who are also doing OK, and they have no need for an invisible man in the sky to guide their hand. IMO, successful people are successful not because they pray a lot but because they work a lot. This independence is an obstacle for many religious notions. The typically high IQ of successful people is yet another problem for religionists.
But if you have some specific religious and successful people (self-made, not inheritors!) in mind, then they have to face the Pascal's Wager. Those guys have a lot to lose. But a small candle and 15 minutes as a gratitude for another $1B in profits or for another year of good health is a small price to pay.
Your claim probably makes sense to a lot of people in modern industrialized societies, but actually depends on a lot of assumptions about what a god would want.
It may well be that the god in question is an aquatic creature whose only interest lies in counting numbers from 0 to infinity and enjoying the silence of depths. Such a god would indeed command us to do things that we'd never guess. However what use such a god would be for us if we do not share anything with him? If he commands us to go and jump into the water, shall we?
In practice, most (if not all) gods are somewhat homomorphic, and they pretend to be either the parents of the humankind or at least someone who is related to us. They exhibit human characteristics like anger and jealousy. This means that a modern god should be somewhat understandable by his believers. Even the Christian god is declared to be all-loving and such, as if anyone could know for sure. All the facts are, actually, against such a theory - the loving god has a very strange way of expressing his love, from fields of war to schools in small towns. You will find far more miracles in the old Star Trek, where they don't matter, than in real life - where they do.
The thing is that increasing the cost of an attack is a successful defense strategy
I don't want to refuse to disagree with those who think you are wrong here.
However the same works in the other direction - increasing the cost of defense is a successful attack strategy. Many believe that OBL intended it to be this way. A relatively small attack, as wars go, forced the USA to spend treasure on several wars that last more than a decade to this very day. The same attack destroyed the trust within the society and paved the way for creation of a massive, centrally operated police-like apparatus that many in the US government were already itching to implement. (Note that the Patriot Act, a large piece of legislation, sprung up out of nowhere within days.) This apparatus immediately started spreading onto trains and buses and streets. TSA workers are not armed, AFAIK and so far, but they don't have to be - the police is at their beck and call at any time.
Also there is a problem: once the criminal manages to go through the checkpoint, one way or another, he is in the clear and has the red carpet all the way to the airplane.
If enough people have the intent, they can carry a ton of explosives into the secure area, one gram at a time. Nobody would pay any attention to their actions, and small quantities of anything cannot be detected. So in the end it's just a matter of money.
Any RTCW player is well acquainted with this weapon. It is pretty good. Note that some Stens were silenced. Combined with extreme simplicity, this can become yet another design for underground gunsmiths. We are now way beyond a bicycle repair shop of 1930's; proliferation of firearms cannot be stopped because they are not getting any more complicated, but our machining capabilities keep growing. The 3D printing on the horizon is yet another example of that. As matter of fact, some 3D printers already can manufacture parts out of some metals. The important fact here is that the criminal underworld does not need too many weapons, and they have the money. It's the sporting market that consumes all the firearms and the ammo. When a criminal burns just one round we read about it in newspapers.
I may be right and all you lot are missing something essential. (possibly on purpose because you like to play with your guns so much that you prefer to suppres the thought that this obsession just killed 20 young kids - again).
Normally gun owners indeed like their weapons - for various reasons, not always because they can kill. Many high-end weapons are works of modern art. It is a challenge to shoot accurately, both on the physical level and on the mental level. Protection of the family was always high on men's "to do" list, as well as hunting for food. We are only a few hundred years removed from the days when people regularly hunted, with whatever tools they could scare up, and had to protect each other from [other] bandits. If you read the Huckleberry Finn, for example, you will find that a child casually hunted for dinner, even though the story did not unfold in times of our Cro-magnon ancestors.
Today the hunting part is waning among many; it is not a clean and nice job, after all. Much easier to buy the food in the store, ready to eat. This only outsources the slaughter, of course. Hunters always appreciate the nature and only hunt the game that they need (except non-game varmints, like rats, who are hunted to protect other species or cattle.)
The ideas of protection - largely of protection of the family - remain strong, at very least because the man faces the same danger as anyone else in the household. It is understood by everyone who is sane (that word again!) that shooting a burglar is a harsh experience, and it is not always the legally best outcome. I do not know anyone who would casually play with weapons; perhaps children can do that, but there is a reason why children are not allowed unsupervised access to firearms. With supervised access it is fine - and, in fact, it is the recommended way. Most children quickly satisfy their curiosity, learn that the bang is real loud, and do not want to hurt their ears again. Those who like the sport continue in the organized way.
All this means that you should have nothing to fear from lawful gun owners. They would make sure that their firearms are not accessible to strangers. By shooting them often they know what kind of a damage they can do - and they are very careful. The most danger that you can experience comes from a gangbanger who is looking for someone to rob and doesn't mind shooting you in the process.
This is, ultimately, a problem of crime and criminals. Those guys will be always killing us left and right, no matter what weapons they have. Highwaymen in middle ages were just fine with maces, sickles and other common household tools. Bows were expensive and usually forbidden... that hasn't saved anyone. In this case an obviously insane person committed an obviously insane act (because there is no rational benefit to be obtained from this massacre.) Insane people do that; always did and always will do. They are not stupid; quite opposite, they can be very smart, and they can spend time to prepare, like Anders Breivik. He used a bomb to kill the first batch of his victims; do we need another law that prohibits making and exploding bombs in cities? Then he used guns to kill other people; he would certainly find a gun somewhere even if he couldn't buy one. Black market is full of "hot" guns that the owner is willing to get rid of, and Breivik wouldn't care one way or another - not with his body count.
Finally, if you are not in the USA you may not pay attention, but the US economy turned into a true financial pyramid. The whole country is doing nothing, producing no goods except some agricultural items and a few Boeing jets. Nothing is shipped out, but there are hundreds of ships coming in from China with every consumer item in existence. The government finances all that, and more, by borrowing. For how long, do you think, this can continue? Not forever, that's for sure. The country needs to do honest work and to be paid honest money for it. This is not happening - nobody is willing to listen
Except that outside the base (where conflicts are just as natural) firearms are pretty much allowed.
But the base commander will not be responsible for anything that happens outside the gates.
If anyone wants to shoot for sports, let them buy an airgun. Guns make killers.
If guns make killers then we should be grateful that the Pope and Mother Theresa are legally not allowed to own them. Because then the last bastions of humanism would fall. A gun is stronger than a man, after all, and it corrupts man's mind in an instant. That's what guns are - devilishly sentient pieces of metal. No way a sane man can resist their lure.
Some shooting for sports can be done with airguns - specifically, with air pistols. But they are low energy weapons, so the range is very limited. As a competition tool they are OK. But airguns are useless at ranges exceeding 40-50 meters because the pellet drops too much, and the inherent accuracy of the barrel is worse than the accuracy of the shooter. This is not acceptable in the world of sport, otherwise Olympic winners could be assigned just by a random draw. A well measured powder charge, in a precisely made cartridge, is far more accurate, and the bullet's trajectory is more reliable. This helps when you just ran a few km on skis.
Airguns are not useful at all for hunting. There is an exception of hunting small varmints; but I'd be wary of that as well. The energy of the pellet is too small, and the animal can be wounded. Compare to .17HMR - the animal dies instantly from the hydrostatic shock. Naturally, airguns cannot be used to hunt coyotes, wolves, wild pigs or deer - for those a pellet would be just a torture device.
But even if those arms are also removed from the society, many remain that are just as accessible. Police carries guns; guards carry guns; military carries guns. There are many guns in circulation; if need be, a police officer can be ambushed, killed in a dark alley, and his firearm stolen. But an easier possibility exists today, in the age of CNC machining - new guns can be manufactured by an underground industry. 3D printing is a remote possibility today (plastic...) but you don't need more than a small warehouse to make smoothbore derringers. Criminals don't need barrel rifling, but that can be machined as well. Generally rifling is hard to make, it requires special tools, but handguns have short barrels, so this is very doable. They would have no serial numbers, of course, and no registration - just pay the money. So all you achieve is disarming legitimate sportsmen and giving the underground economy a reason to start making weapons. Some of those new weapons can be worse; take crossbows, for example - today materials exist to make them as large or as small as you want, the bolt is silent, and it will make devastating wounds.
Well, in the case of an army base that sounds like a bad idea
This question was raised immediately after the incident, and many military people confirmed that this is the standard policy pretty much on all bases where they served, except perhaps in the theater.
One MP gave his explanation: base commanders are scared $%^&less of a shooting between soldiers, on the base. This is not that unlikely because some families live there, and when you have several thousand men and women in prime age and prime health, conflicts are a natural occurrence. In this particular case the base commander is in the clear: he could not have known (on the surface of it) that Nidal Hasan brought firearms into the base, and the superficial check at the gate wasn't even designed to detect that.
So to summarize, it appears that the commanders do not trust their soldiers; they are more willing to lose some troops to a terrorist act than to lose some to a drunken brawl or a fit of jealousy. Perhaps those commanders are even right, after all. Terrorist acts are rare, but conflicts are not - and having weapons within reach is not helpful. In case of a brawl the base commander will be responsible, and he may lose the job.
Only if you're too stupid to move out of an overpriced city to a more reasonable place to live.
75% of the US population live in cities. Draw your own conclusions...
Moar Production is the goal only when that product can be sold to attain more power. However at some point 90% of the world don't have anything that you need, and you already have all the power on the planet... then the game plan changes. For example, Earth could become a carefully constructed Paradise for a small number of aristocrats (also known as owners and operators of roboticized industry.) The rest of the population can be discarded, with a mere handful of those, perhaps, selected to work as trusted leutenants and assorted slaves. That's a path that is very likely, considering the natural human desire for unlimited power - and especially for power over other humans.
If I were so inclined as to kill a bunch of innocent strangers, guns would not even make the top 10.
Palestinians use bombs and missiles. Resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan used bombs. The primary weapon of the US Air Force is bombs and missiles.
Even the Fort Hood shooting: The guy could kill 13 people before he was stopped in the middle of an army base filled with weapons and armed people!
The terrorist was able to kill so many people because NOBODY at the base, except two police officers, was allowed to be armed. Weapons were all locked up and unavailable.
To get a body count similar to this guy, all that a perp would need is two-three pipe bombs filled with nails in a crowded place.
Or two to three large bottles of Molotov Cocktail. In enclosed spaces (like a classroom) fire is deadly. Most victims would die from suffocation. How do you ban glass bottles, gasoline, a little cloth, and matches? Oh, by the way, these are not triggering the metal detector, and they are not making much of a noise. The resulting fire may well burn the whole school down and kill everyone inside.
Do you know what happens to panicked people, children or otherwise, who get in the middle of firefights?
No. Something worse than death, I presume? Because death is what they get for sure if their teacher has no gun.
The point is that rather that facing this guy, you would probably prefer to hide and avoid conflict... Meaning that you could have a gun at the school at it wouldn't change a thing... Because actually going out hunting for the lunatic is more dangerous than locking the door and/or fleeing out the window...
Your dilemma is still in trouble. A legitimate gun owner who hides simply is not part of the solution. He could have no gun on him and still hide. The real difference comes into play when the gunman is in front of you, aiming at you. In one case you have a gun and may have enough time to fire it. In another case you have nothing, and die you will.
With regard to "hunting," everyone who is sane understands that the #0 priority is to protect the children, and the best way to do it is by removing them from the harm's way. Only after that is done the adults may discuss what makes more sense in this specific situation - to hold the fort (and perhaps leave other, less protected people, to die) or to venture out and actively hunt the gunman.
And my E-book reader can go two weeks (of heavy usage) on a charge (you don't even need to turn it off!
It's not a useful metric. A paper book can go even longer without a charge. What does that prove? If a tablet lasts whole day of regular use, who would lose sleep over the need to drop it into the cradle for the night? Most tablets, as designed and as used, last several days.
Repeat with me: Automation is good. It makes we, human kind, more productive.
It is not the goal. If you want productivity you could also send 90% of the lesser performing humankind to death camps. But we don't do that - because productivity is not the goal. Well-being of all living humans is.
The people that do not need to do manual and repetitive jobs can move to a more creative work which produces more benefit for mankind.
So the only reason why a barely literate janitor is cleaning toilets instead of writing a bestseller is ... he is too busy with toilets, do I get it right?
e-mail was good, despite removing works in the Post office. Hydraulic excavators are good.
There is no universal "good." If the USPS contracts, lots of useless work (delivery of paper waste) will stop. On the other hand, thousands of workers will be laid off. On the other hand, millions of advertisers will direct their ad expenses into something else - perhaps less harmful to the ecology (those flyers kill trees and pollute rivers.) Someone benefits, and someone loses.
The problem is not with automation, which is good for mankind as a whole; the problem is with the distribution of wealth.
I agree with that. If we could transition overnight from a capitalist society where *individuals* own factories to the society where the entire society owns those factories then automation would only result in fewer work hours. Unfortunately this society has tons of other problems. Perhaps in the end, when workers do all the work and the humans are completely irrelevant, it would work. But the intermediate steps, such as socialism, do not work because they are unstable by nature (they depend on people acting against their best interests.) The abuse and unfairness that you mention are right up that alley.
When I studied in the university they had a few foreign students, including those from Africa, and they assured me that with their knowledge and education they will be ruling the roost back at home. They studied pretty hard, I must say.
They did for decades, why not again?
Because there are five hungry lawyers protecting every striking worker, in hope that the business owner just looks wrong at the poor guy.
Who gets to choose? The rich are going to survive? While we "grunts" get to perish?
In this scheme it will be you who will do the choosing, just by being smart enough to be wanted in the new society.
The transition from captalism to post-capitalism (perhaps communism) is not clear yet. But it will happen when a rich owner of a robotic factory finds out that nobody can buy his product because he employs only robots. Humans are not necessary in this society, except those that develop new robots.
There is a reason why in Star Trek you don't see too many scenes on planets where people do some work. In the original Star Trek some scenes in colonies were just ridiculous, with about 50 colonists just milling around in a public square. All the real work that you ever see in ST is the research done by the crew, and an occasional war.
Right now the society *already* has lots of people who are not needed. Younger ones join street gangs, perpetuating the classical pastime of humans - to kill each other for fun and goodies. Older ones stay at home and wait for the death to come. If this continues, the society will split into the people of arcologies (Todos Santos, for example) and the people of ghettos, with the permanent war between the two. The ghettos will win because they are more numerous; then the new Dark Ages begin.
I'd rather be in the bottom 20% in a high-income country such as the United States or Sweden, than in the top 10% in a Sub-Saharan country.
A top 10% income in Africa will give you a personal palace, personal guards, and personal concubines. You would be living if not like a king then pretty well anyway. All the roads upward will be open for you.
A bottom 20% income in the USA (assuming $80K/yr as a reference level) will place you into a cockroach-infested, 100 years old apartment building in a bad part of town. Your life expectancy will depend on how good you are with a knife (or with a gun, in Chicago.) You will be unemployable for many reasons, and your income will be officially around the poverty level.
I don't even read online newspapers, let alone paper versions. My news come from various blogs. If something of importance happens it will be there. All important events will propagate into free media (such as blogs) even if just as discussions about the event. If the event is of low importance (a common cat lost and then found 10 minutes later in a German village, 10,000 miles away from me) then I don't want to waste my time on it.
In other words, journalists lost their exclusive license to spread and explain news. Their attempts to charge for their work are mostly laughable. Can you charge for retelling rumors from the bazaar *at* the bazaar?
Elsewhere in this thread someone said that each ASIC miner takes 2.5W of power. This is not something that can stop a business in its tracks - certainly not a business that has enough cash to manufacture custom ASICs. No cooling is required at those power levels.
So. is there some way I can use something like a mouse pad as the interface (pinch, zoom, swipe, etc, etc) without having to touch the screen?
No, you can't - simply because you would not know where your touch would land. Mouse has a cursor for that purpose, and action buttons that you click after the cursor is positioned as necessary. The touch interface has no cursor, and it activates whatever it is at the point of touch. You'd have to have a screen underneath your touchpad... but then you can't see it well. Just forget the whole thing and use a mouse.
The primary utility of a company laptop is that you can give presentations with it in a meeting room next door.
IT prefers laptops because they are lighter and more portable, so they can be redeployed easily as needed, or sent for repairs without using a forklift, and there is no need to crawl in the dust under the desk. The maintenance loves the fact that laptops typically take less power than desktops. The road warrior appreciates that a laptop has built-in wireless and Bluetooth and has working sleep modes. The neighbors like the fact that a laptop is more quiet than a desktop.
I'm typing this on a desktop because the desktop gives me better performance. This is a good reason to keep a desktop if you need that performance. Most enterprise users do not need that.