D&D is a crappy game system. Every fifth-level fighter is the same as every other fifth-level fighter. Every ninth-level magic user is the same as every other ninth-level magic user. The only way a character differs from others of the same class and level is in their strength, dexterity, etc., and those are (a) mostly not very important, and (b) generated by rolling dice, which is not very interesting.
If you think this, you really should look at 3.5 or pathfinder a bit more. There's a lot of customization. For example, sorcerers get a limited set of spells known, so pretty much any two sorcerers will have different abilities. A sorcerer gets around 40 spells to choose from (unlike the classical "Vancian" casting of a wizard who has to prepare spells, a sorcerer may cast their spells with no preparation). So every sorcerer has a slightly different set of strengths and weaknesses (in core alone there are over a hundred spells to choose from) Similarly, the Tome of Battle splatbook made a pretty similar system for combat classes where they can learn specific martial maneuvers. Again, the level of customization is high. And this is before we get into feats and prestige classes. I agree that GURPS does still do a better job in terms of overall flexibility (especially weaknesses which D&D never really handled that well) but the level of flexibility is still pretty high.
They have to release fifth edition because 4e has been such a dismal failure. A lot of people stuck with 3.5, probably a lot more than they anticipated. And some of the people just switched to Pathfinder which is effectively D&D 3.75. There was pretty big backlash on 4e. A lot of people have objected that all the classes feel similar (every class pretty much has some number of daily powers, some number of per an encounter powers and some number of at will powers), that magic has become too weak, that multiclassing is too inflexible (you can't just take a few levels of one class and a few of another but rather need to spend feats to get some limited multiclassing functionality), that it feels too much "like WoW" (this last encompasses many of the other objections but also gets to the feel that the game is not as simulationist but more gamist since NPCs and monsters are no longer working off the same rule set of players). There are other objections also, but the basic result is the same: not great sales for WoTC and a very fractured base.
It also doesn't help that WoTC took the time to also redo their forums around the same time and make a lot of good links to homebrew content and the like go simply dead, and then precede to dump all discussion for pre 4th edition into a single forum (why yes, it does make so much sense that people trying to design new prestige classes in 3.5 should be posting in the same forum where someone wants advice about how to run AD&D.).
I think that a lot of people are hoping that 5e will look more like 3.5 or 2e than it looks like 4e, but I'm not that optimistic. So far WoTC has shown that they have more business sense than TSR but less understanding of what players want (although TSR made some real doozies in that regard also).
The primary problem with the shuttle wasn't that it was reusable.
1) The shuttle was built to handle both lots of cargo and humans. That meant that it had to have the reliablity of a man-rated craft with the lifting capacity of a heavy lifter.
2) Not enough funding for a fullly reusable shuttle. Early plans involved a fully reusable shuttle. The shuttle as designed instead was a hybrid which in many respects combined the worst of both reuable and disposable spacecraft.
2) Two much flexibility in orbital parameters was insisted on. This is frequently not appreciated as a serious problem. The US military insisted that the shuttle be able to take off from a variety of other locations including Vandenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6. They wanted it to be able to launch into a near polar orbit, send out a satellite and land all in a single orbit of the Earth. This was so that if things ever got hot with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down, or could launch single use spy satellites for other purposes . This article http://www.space.com/1438-chapter-opens-space-shuttle-born-compromise.html discusses this in detail. There are also other requirements that the military had but it seems that the details remain classified, and it is possible that the public orbital parameters as required by the military were covers for other orbits. But the requirement that the shuttle be able to do absolutely every low Earth orbit that every civilian or military source could possibly want severely constricted the shuttle design in many ways that were never used or infrequently used.
There's another thing to remember though: the shuttle was the world's first reusable craft whereas there have been a lot of single-use craft. The first model of something will often have more problems. We shouldn't take the problems with the shuttle and make a blanket assumption that reusable craft can't be done efficiently.
It is hard for me to see why it would be unconstitutional. Fits within the Commerce Clause. Remember, as far as laws are concerned, stupid doesn't mean unconstitutional.
It isn't just porn. The charedi(ultra-orthodox) are having serious troubles with people leaving the fold due to simply learning about things on the internet, like evolution and the age of the Earth. Many of them don't become outright atheists or agnostics but instead transition to being some form of Modern Orthodox, or Yeshivish. But for most of the ultra-Orthodox population that's about as close to as bad as completely abandoning the religion. In some respects it is worse, because when they stay some form of Orthodox, it is a lot harder to get friends and families to shun a person who leaves, which means the person now becomes an influx of new ideas into the community. It also doesn't help the charedim, that there are organizations like Footsteps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footsteps_(organization) specifically geared to getting people to leave the fold.
Incidentally, it seems that people commenting on this article are slightly confused about terminology. Chassidic or hassidic is not a synonym for ultra-orthodox. The Chassidim are a specific movement founded around 1800 that have specific belief sets and communal organizations where each sect centers around a Rabbinic dynastic that leads that sect. Chassidim are essentially a subset of ultra-orthodox. The more general term for ultra-orthodox as whole is "charedi" (or in the plural "charedim"), although in some contexts that term is used to mean ultra-orthodox who aren't chassidic.
You must know interesting people. I could get the necessary stuff without much effort, but most of the obvious things that would be helpful (fertilizer, pipes, nails, charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter, prepaid cellphones) are stuff that I don't normally have in my apartment. Some household cleaning substances would be useful, but by and large I don't have enough. The more relevant issue seems to be that lots of people do have all of them with legitimate reasons, and that it is really easy to obtain them all. So your basic point seems correct but your phrasing is hyperbolic.
Man, I really wonder what will happen to all you Paul-fans when Romney gets the overwhelming number of delegates during the Convention.
The main question to ask is if they will wonder if they have good models of how politics and other humans think. The answer is essentially no. Paul fans haven't changed much since the last Presidential election. And there's a simple reason for this: they are libertarians, and libertarianism main problem is a confusion of how the world is with how they'd like the world to be. That's also why so many of them still think that Ron Paul has any chance of winning the nomination. So no, they won't adjust their views much at all.
That's not completely true. Wiles's proof only proves it for an exponent that is a prime p>=7. So one needs the classical results of n=3,4,5,7 also. This is to some extent a minor criticism. Your essential point is correct that sometimes a proof of a theorem comes out of a completely different direction. But, very often, it does come from a straightforward way of refining the same techniques more and more. For example, Catalan's Conjecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan's_conjecture (the claim that that the only consecutive positive perfect powers are 8 and 9) was proven by what in many ways amounted to slow and steady progress.
Work on this problem has been ongoing for about a hundred years now. First, Schnirelmann proved that there was some k such that every even integer could be expressed as a sum of at most k primes. The value for k had then been reduced over time. Vinogradov's proved that the Odd Golbach Conjecture (that every odd integer greater than 7 is the sum of three primes) was true for sufficiently large n. How large sufficiently large is has been slowly reduced. Later in the 1970s, Chen proved that every sufficiently large even integer is the sum of a number that is prime and another number that is either prime or a product of two primes. At this point, Chen's result is the strongest result known.
In general, there are two general methods of attack on this problem, one which uses Schinerlmann's method and variants thereof, and the other which uses sieve theoretic approaches with the Hardy-Littlewood circle method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy-Littlewood_circle_method (Chen used a version of this for his result and Tao's work uses a similar approach). Unfortunately, there's not much work on actually connecting the two methods. There's an excellent piece of Tao at his blog where he discusses his work on the problem and is understandable without much background. http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/every-odd-integer-larger-than-1-is-the-sum-of-at-most-five-primes/. Note that TFA is a little out of date since he announced this result with a preprint a few months ago, and it is only that now the result is being published.
It does not seem that this result really does put us much closer to proving the full Golbach Conjecture. At most this could be used to prove some version of the odd Goldbach Conjecture. The methods used would have a large amount of trouble dropping from 5 to 3. There's some bit of leeway, and if anyone is going to do it, it is going to to be Tao, but right now, I'm not optimistic.
I think you may be underestimating what the technology can eventually do. If it becomes sufficiently advanced, automated cars should be able to do the same things that human drivers can. Moreover, in the short term, even in the US, the use of automation will probably be primarily highway driving and switch over to manual control in cities. Highway driving is much more easily automatable because there isn't nearly as much of any the problems you outline (which exist in the US also but to a lesser extent).
As a side question, why are American cities planned without any personal touch, but so "professionally"?
To a large extent this is just because they have been planned, whereas many older cities in Europe and Asia were built up well before modern city planning. There are other factors as well- cities that are planned well become less well-planned as time goes on. You see this in Europe with some of the old Roman cities. Also, when one didn't have cars and trucks, smaller alleyways weren't a problem, whereas many expanded American cities happened just as cars were showing up (remember the frontier in the US doesn't close until the 1890s). There's also just a long tradition in the US of careful planning, that's dates back to the very early settlements. New York was gridded out when much of the city was still wilderness, and that started a general precedent. There are some cities that aren't as carefully gridded (such as Boston) but many cities modeled themselves in a similar way to New York. Also, in much of the US land was pretty cheap. Gridding with big roads takes a lot of land up- when you have the room it is easier to do it.
Or laziness and a problem of incentive. These companies get in a lot of trouble if their ATMs are hacked or broken into. They don't have to pay much if their voting machines screw up or are easily hackable.
I agree with a lot of your analysis. I don't think that any single one of these is going to solve things. But there's a lot of different stuff that we can do that doesn't require police states and one-world governments. Treaties exist, and treaties have been quite effective for a lot of things. Look for example at the Montreal Protocol which dealt quite successfully with the problem of CFCs. Now, obviously that's a smaller scale of what needs to happen. What needs to likely happen is going to be some mix of government intervention and regulation and letting markets figure things out (just as in the sulfur dioxide case where once a market incentive existed people found new ways to reduce production). Things could be quite bad a for a few years, and we likely aren't going to do enough to make things pretty unpleasant for a few years, but this doesn't require one-world governments and police states.
Interstate commerce, covered in Article I of the Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Clause. The websites in question are large sprawling entities like Facebook which have people in all states and have offices in multiple states. Once that's a common setup, regulation is almost certainly Constitutional. And even when websites are all in one state, packets and the like go very far afield. There might be an argument that they can't regulate an in-state employer wanting a password from a completely in-state website, but that case is both unlikely to come up, and even if it did, courts would likely consider that to be a a weak argument.
I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.
Yeah, so this isn't very productive. Maybe try to figure out which solutions are actually good and push for those? Remember, problems don't go away when we don't like the solutions.
Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime, or national socialism, or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness".
I'm curious incidentally which solutions you think fall into these categories. I agree that quite a bit falls into the feel good frippery category. Godwin's law aside, last I checked no one was advocating large scale genocide as a solution. At the very minimum, burning people in ovens would make more CO2.
I''m particularly interested into which category you put the most widely suggested method of dealing with CO2 - cap and trade. Cap and trade is a system that has worked quite well for other pollutants. For example, there's clear evidence that cap and trade has worked well in dealing with sulfur dioxide, both reducing emissions and having little negative economic impact. See for example http://www.epa.gov/capandtrade/documents/ctresults.pdf and http://www.jstor.org/stable/2647032 (although it certainly has had its bumps especially due to conflicting court cases and legislation. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704258604575360821005676554.html. Cap and trade works, since it hybridizes government regulation with market solutions. It estimates the cost of the pollutant to society and then lets the market figure out the most efficient way of keeping the pollutant down. There's a reason that George H. W. Bush helped get cap-and-trade in the Clean Air Act and that many see it is as example of a successful government regulation http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/politics/17cap.html?pagewanted=all.
I'm also curious as to what category you put improvements to the electric grid such as adding grid storage and smart grids. All of these can have real, substantial impact. And in the case of grid improvements, they have substantial other benefits as well. There isn't going to be one magic bullet solution to all our CO2 problems or a magic bullet to solve all our energy problems, and certainly not one that will solve both. But there are real, substantial steps that can be taken that don't involve loss of liberties. Comparisons to Nazis are unhelpful hyperbole.
Do you have data to back this claim up? It is true that Europe had a cold snap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_European_cold_wave where some countries, including France and Italy reported record low temperatures. But even given that, global temperature average on both land and air for February http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/2/were slightly above average and were very high for March http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/3 Since February was the height of the cold snap in Europe, and the global temperatures were still high, I'm not sure where you are getting your estimate.
Sure, and it is a valid point when one has a few weeks of cold or even a few months of cold. And by the same token, a year like this one by itself isn't that useful data. It is when data like this year is part of a larger pattern that it becomes a problem. In this context one has a very hot year by a variety of different metrics and that's on top of a gradual increase in average temperature over the last twenty years. Weather and climate are different, but lots of weather change over the long-term is eventually a sign of climate change.
This is deeply wrong. There are two major problems with your statement.
First , you should always pay attention to individual candidates. Different politicians even from the same parties can have wildly different attitudes and candidates from different parties can have surprisingly similar attitudes on many issues. For example, consider Rick Elser who is a gay Republican who ran for Congress in Connecticut- he was effectively a libertarian but ran as a Republican for a large variety of reasons. Individuals and their policies matter.
Second, your essential approach only makes sense if you have a very narrow attitude about certain specific economic issues and don't care about anything else. The Constitution Party for instance includes in its platform a complete moratorium on immigration. That includes all those helpful scientists and grad students from other countries, and all the legal immigrants who help do low level jobs keeping the service sector cheap. The Constitution Party also supports a "Biblical" basis for the US, which includes absolutely a complete ban on abortion, criminal penalties for gays, and strong restrictions on pornography. Similarly, a direct comparison of the various parties will show that on many science related issues, the only marginally reasonable options are the Republicans and Democrats (do you want funding for medical research, then Libertarians and Constitution Party aren't for you). There's a decent argument to make that Republicans have actually been better about direct funding of research than the Democrats have, but the Democrats have in general been better about listening to actual scientists on issues that impact policy (e.g. global warming, the teaching of evolution in schools).
Overall, your advocated approach is simplistic in that it ignores variance in individual candidates, and is simplistic in that focuses on a very narrow set of economic issues while ignoring the many other issues, policies and concerns in play.
That people are celebrating is not evidence that they want control. What is evidence of is that a large number of environmentalists are deeply ignorant about the pros and cons of different types of power and that they have absorbed a large number of anti-technology memes. That's not an indication of a desire for "control". Hanlon's razor seems a bit relevant here.
Most of your reply isn't really relevant because I've agreed with you that the US has serious problems and that some of them are getting worse. In that context, pointing to specific problems doesn't really do much. But it may be instructive to look at your examples:
Tarek Mehanna is an appalling example and not the only such case. Ward Churchill was guilty of severe plagiarism. It is true that people paid more attention to him and the plagiarism accusations because of his politically controversial statements, but that's a much weaker claim (and no one seriously disagrees with the plagiarism issue in his case). The issues related to recording the police are also a serious one and one that is really despicable. It varies a lot from state to state, and some states are actually improving (see for example, the ongoing legislation in Connecticut that will allow people to sue cops who try to interfere with recording http://stratford.patch.com/articles/bill-protects-citizens-recording-police-a8140340). In Pakistan, that wouldn't even be an issue because the police or military would just beat up the person recording and take the recording. Pihkal is a potential example of where someone was targeted for their speech, although actual violations of research and security policies were found in the lab. Your statement about the DMCA is just factually wrong- the DMCA prohibits circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms, it doesn't prohibit discussion of how to do so. The PROTECT_Act has some pretty stupid provisions, and trying to make virtual porn illegal is a violation of free speech by many notions. In Pakistan essentially all pornography is essentially illegal and they regularly block pornographic websites http://tribune.com.pk/story/293434/pta-approved-over-1000-porn-sites-blocked-in-pakistan/. Free speech zones are a really wretched idea and do implicitly violate actual free speech protections, although weak forms that only restrict time, place and manner without any content aspect are probably ok (and in fact courts in the last few years have struck down many attempts to restrict anything beyond that- see for example what happened with Texas Tech in 2004).
In the US one is subject to such searches if one is going on a plane
This amounts to millions of people subjected to searches, in a systematic and humiliating way.
You cut off part of my sentence which ended with "and one doesn't go through the backscatter screening", and that's quite relevant here. About 2 million people are subject monthly to pat-downs http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2011/may/17/janet-napolitano/homeland-security-chief-stresses-very-very-very-fe/. That estimate includes people who are getting pat-downs after they've already triggered some sort of warning, not just randomized pat-downs or op-out pat-downs. Again, the Pakistan situation is very different- the police and military can stop anyone on the streets and search them with no justification. I don't know if that results in more total searches in the US, but if it does, it is only because the US is a much larger country. As a percentage matter, the result would be pretty clear.
Any violation of this sort in Pakistan is actually orders of magnitude worse than the US
Actually, ISPs in the US don't block copyright infringing websites, so your first bit doesn't hold. As to your claim that other areas of free speech are restricted in the US, exactly what speech are you talking about? In the US we have some of the strongest free speech rights on the planet. You can criticize politicians, or religous leaders, or the rich, or pretty much anything else. Please give a single example of some form of speech allowed in Pakistan that isn't allowed in the US.
So on the one hand, Pakistan has no privacy laws, and on the other the US simply ignores its privacy laws and publicly humiliates its citizens. Here is the question you were trying to answer, but failed to: does Pakistan grope its citizens en masse, the way the United States does?
The point you may have been missing is that the answer is essentially "yes, and far worse". In the US one is subject to such searches if one is going on a plane and one doesn't go through the backscatter screening. In contrast, in Pakistan, security forces can stop you on the street anywhere and do about the same level of search or more.
To put it another way, is it the US or Pakistan that has paramilitary police forces that shoot innocent people with assault rifles and add personal assets to their budgets, with the approval and encouragement of the government?
Any violation of this sort in Pakistan is actually orders of magnitude worse than the US. So, the answer in this context is "to some extent in the US and far far worse in Pakistan". Overall, the only bit you are correct on is that the situation is getting worse in the US. That's obviously a problem, but that doesn't change the fact that the situation is much worse in Pakistan.
Actually that's pretty inaccurate. I'm going to ignore the obnoxious racism in your comment and just address the freedoms issue. No major government body in the US is trying to block fifty million websites, and if they did, the entire Supreme Court would tell them no. And the US rejected any form of blasphemy laws as unconstitional quite some time ago. Pakistan still allows the execution of people for blasphemy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_Pakistan. Shabaz Bhatti http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahbaz_Bhatti was assassinated just for trying to lessen the penalties on the blasphemy laws. As to the matter of grope sessions to fly planes- Pakistan has essentially close to almost no equivalent of Fourth Amendment protections. The US and Europe are not in great shape right now, and there's no question that human rights have been getting better in Pakistan in the last few years (especially post-Musharraf), but let's not lose perspective here on overall which is set of countries is doing better for human rights.
That's a completely different type of society with different issues. No fair comparison can be made.
I can give many more similar examples in many different societies. At a certain point it is worth asking whether the claim is false for more societies than it is true.
Most of the rest of your comment is essentially repeating things you've already said. I do however want to draw attention to your last remark:
You have care of a young child who is starving. The child is so weak they can barely whimper about their hunger because they've had so little food. You have almost no food. You can steal food from a rich merchant with food. The rich person won't miss it but the child will die without it. Do you do so? If not, why not? If yes, how is this not an unethical use of aggression?
Yes, of course I would steal in that situation. But in this hypothetical we have moved squarely into anarchy. And yes, it is a form of agression. Ethics go out the window with anarchy. In a compassionate society this kind or anarchy would not be necessary. A system of governance cannot be compassionate when it is built on the threat of agression.
Famines and wealth inequality exist in many societies and often are a function of other features not the system of government. And that often occurs in contexts where one looking at the society would not generally call it a state of anarchy. The point is that you are willing to engage in "aggression" to solve more deep moral and ethical concerns. Saying that ethics has gone "out the window" is really avoiding the real issue- morality and ethics are still there, but you are placing a moral or ethical goal, not letting a child starve, as a higher priority than the ethic of liberty. And that's not unreasonable: humans balance competing ethical concerns all the time and sometimes need to give one a priority in one circumstance and another priority in a different circumstance. So the question becomes both where to draw the line and how to decide given a certain priority set what will work best. Simply claiming that charity and compassion will get better in a libertarian society is an empirical claim about reality, and similar remarks apply to whether a libertarian government work would be more effective. The question at that point should be empirical and derived from looking at reality and history, not from what we ideologically would fine most convenient.
The Piraha are in South America and they have a language that is lacking many words considered normal in other cultures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language. They give directions primarily in terms of the relation to the river (towards or away from the river or up or down the river) which may be what you are thinking of. There's a highly readable book about the tribe and their language- "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" by Daniel Everett, a linguist who spent decades with them. However, there's some degree of question by other scholars about how accurate Everett's description of their language was, and research is ongoing.
Slashdot Mirror
D&D is a crappy game system. Every fifth-level fighter is the same as every other fifth-level fighter. Every ninth-level magic user is the same as every other ninth-level magic user. The only way a character differs from others of the same class and level is in their strength, dexterity, etc., and those are (a) mostly not very important, and (b) generated by rolling dice, which is not very interesting.
If you think this, you really should look at 3.5 or pathfinder a bit more. There's a lot of customization. For example, sorcerers get a limited set of spells known, so pretty much any two sorcerers will have different abilities. A sorcerer gets around 40 spells to choose from (unlike the classical "Vancian" casting of a wizard who has to prepare spells, a sorcerer may cast their spells with no preparation). So every sorcerer has a slightly different set of strengths and weaknesses (in core alone there are over a hundred spells to choose from) Similarly, the Tome of Battle splatbook made a pretty similar system for combat classes where they can learn specific martial maneuvers. Again, the level of customization is high. And this is before we get into feats and prestige classes. I agree that GURPS does still do a better job in terms of overall flexibility (especially weaknesses which D&D never really handled that well) but the level of flexibility is still pretty high.
They have to release fifth edition because 4e has been such a dismal failure. A lot of people stuck with 3.5, probably a lot more than they anticipated. And some of the people just switched to Pathfinder which is effectively D&D 3.75. There was pretty big backlash on 4e. A lot of people have objected that all the classes feel similar (every class pretty much has some number of daily powers, some number of per an encounter powers and some number of at will powers), that magic has become too weak, that multiclassing is too inflexible (you can't just take a few levels of one class and a few of another but rather need to spend feats to get some limited multiclassing functionality), that it feels too much "like WoW" (this last encompasses many of the other objections but also gets to the feel that the game is not as simulationist but more gamist since NPCs and monsters are no longer working off the same rule set of players). There are other objections also, but the basic result is the same: not great sales for WoTC and a very fractured base.
It also doesn't help that WoTC took the time to also redo their forums around the same time and make a lot of good links to homebrew content and the like go simply dead, and then precede to dump all discussion for pre 4th edition into a single forum (why yes, it does make so much sense that people trying to design new prestige classes in 3.5 should be posting in the same forum where someone wants advice about how to run AD&D.).
I think that a lot of people are hoping that 5e will look more like 3.5 or 2e than it looks like 4e, but I'm not that optimistic. So far WoTC has shown that they have more business sense than TSR but less understanding of what players want (although TSR made some real doozies in that regard also).
The primary problem with the shuttle wasn't that it was reusable.
1) The shuttle was built to handle both lots of cargo and humans. That meant that it had to have the reliablity of a man-rated craft with the lifting capacity of a heavy lifter.
2) Not enough funding for a fullly reusable shuttle. Early plans involved a fully reusable shuttle. The shuttle as designed instead was a hybrid which in many respects combined the worst of both reuable and disposable spacecraft.
2) Two much flexibility in orbital parameters was insisted on. This is frequently not appreciated as a serious problem. The US military insisted that the shuttle be able to take off from a variety of other locations including Vandenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6. They wanted it to be able to launch into a near polar orbit, send out a satellite and land all in a single orbit of the Earth. This was so that if things ever got hot with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down, or could launch single use spy satellites for other purposes . This article http://www.space.com/1438-chapter-opens-space-shuttle-born-compromise.html discusses this in detail. There are also other requirements that the military had but it seems that the details remain classified, and it is possible that the public orbital parameters as required by the military were covers for other orbits. But the requirement that the shuttle be able to do absolutely every low Earth orbit that every civilian or military source could possibly want severely constricted the shuttle design in many ways that were never used or infrequently used.
There's another thing to remember though: the shuttle was the world's first reusable craft whereas there have been a lot of single-use craft. The first model of something will often have more problems. We shouldn't take the problems with the shuttle and make a blanket assumption that reusable craft can't be done efficiently.
It is hard for me to see why it would be unconstitutional. Fits within the Commerce Clause. Remember, as far as laws are concerned, stupid doesn't mean unconstitutional.
It isn't just porn. The charedi(ultra-orthodox) are having serious troubles with people leaving the fold due to simply learning about things on the internet, like evolution and the age of the Earth. Many of them don't become outright atheists or agnostics but instead transition to being some form of Modern Orthodox, or Yeshivish. But for most of the ultra-Orthodox population that's about as close to as bad as completely abandoning the religion. In some respects it is worse, because when they stay some form of Orthodox, it is a lot harder to get friends and families to shun a person who leaves, which means the person now becomes an influx of new ideas into the community. It also doesn't help the charedim, that there are organizations like Footsteps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footsteps_(organization) specifically geared to getting people to leave the fold.
Incidentally, it seems that people commenting on this article are slightly confused about terminology. Chassidic or hassidic is not a synonym for ultra-orthodox. The Chassidim are a specific movement founded around 1800 that have specific belief sets and communal organizations where each sect centers around a Rabbinic dynastic that leads that sect. Chassidim are essentially a subset of ultra-orthodox. The more general term for ultra-orthodox as whole is "charedi" (or in the plural "charedim"), although in some contexts that term is used to mean ultra-orthodox who aren't chassidic.
That a statement or type of statement is predictable or obvious doesn't make it less valid.
You must know interesting people. I could get the necessary stuff without much effort, but most of the obvious things that would be helpful (fertilizer, pipes, nails, charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter, prepaid cellphones) are stuff that I don't normally have in my apartment. Some household cleaning substances would be useful, but by and large I don't have enough. The more relevant issue seems to be that lots of people do have all of them with legitimate reasons, and that it is really easy to obtain them all. So your basic point seems correct but your phrasing is hyperbolic.
Man, I really wonder what will happen to all you Paul-fans when Romney gets the overwhelming number of delegates during the Convention.
The main question to ask is if they will wonder if they have good models of how politics and other humans think. The answer is essentially no. Paul fans haven't changed much since the last Presidential election. And there's a simple reason for this: they are libertarians, and libertarianism main problem is a confusion of how the world is with how they'd like the world to be. That's also why so many of them still think that Ron Paul has any chance of winning the nomination. So no, they won't adjust their views much at all.
Minor note: While that's true, in Goldbach's day it was actually common to include 1 as a prime. So the original conjectures allowed 1.
That's not completely true. Wiles's proof only proves it for an exponent that is a prime p>=7. So one needs the classical results of n=3,4,5,7 also. This is to some extent a minor criticism. Your essential point is correct that sometimes a proof of a theorem comes out of a completely different direction. But, very often, it does come from a straightforward way of refining the same techniques more and more. For example, Catalan's Conjecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan's_conjecture (the claim that that the only consecutive positive perfect powers are 8 and 9) was proven by what in many ways amounted to slow and steady progress.
Work on this problem has been ongoing for about a hundred years now. First, Schnirelmann proved that there was some k such that every even integer could be expressed as a sum of at most k primes. The value for k had then been reduced over time. Vinogradov's proved that the Odd Golbach Conjecture (that every odd integer greater than 7 is the sum of three primes) was true for sufficiently large n. How large sufficiently large is has been slowly reduced. Later in the 1970s, Chen proved that every sufficiently large even integer is the sum of a number that is prime and another number that is either prime or a product of two primes. At this point, Chen's result is the strongest result known.
In general, there are two general methods of attack on this problem, one which uses Schinerlmann's method and variants thereof, and the other which uses sieve theoretic approaches with the Hardy-Littlewood circle method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy-Littlewood_circle_method (Chen used a version of this for his result and Tao's work uses a similar approach). Unfortunately, there's not much work on actually connecting the two methods. There's an excellent piece of Tao at his blog where he discusses his work on the problem and is understandable without much background. http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/every-odd-integer-larger-than-1-is-the-sum-of-at-most-five-primes/. Note that TFA is a little out of date since he announced this result with a preprint a few months ago, and it is only that now the result is being published.
It does not seem that this result really does put us much closer to proving the full Golbach Conjecture. At most this could be used to prove some version of the odd Goldbach Conjecture. The methods used would have a large amount of trouble dropping from 5 to 3. There's some bit of leeway, and if anyone is going to do it, it is going to to be Tao, but right now, I'm not optimistic.
As a side question, why are American cities planned without any personal touch, but so "professionally"?
To a large extent this is just because they have been planned, whereas many older cities in Europe and Asia were built up well before modern city planning. There are other factors as well- cities that are planned well become less well-planned as time goes on. You see this in Europe with some of the old Roman cities. Also, when one didn't have cars and trucks, smaller alleyways weren't a problem, whereas many expanded American cities happened just as cars were showing up (remember the frontier in the US doesn't close until the 1890s). There's also just a long tradition in the US of careful planning, that's dates back to the very early settlements. New York was gridded out when much of the city was still wilderness, and that started a general precedent. There are some cities that aren't as carefully gridded (such as Boston) but many cities modeled themselves in a similar way to New York. Also, in much of the US land was pretty cheap. Gridding with big roads takes a lot of land up- when you have the room it is easier to do it.
Or laziness and a problem of incentive. These companies get in a lot of trouble if their ATMs are hacked or broken into. They don't have to pay much if their voting machines screw up or are easily hackable.
I agree with a lot of your analysis. I don't think that any single one of these is going to solve things. But there's a lot of different stuff that we can do that doesn't require police states and one-world governments. Treaties exist, and treaties have been quite effective for a lot of things. Look for example at the Montreal Protocol which dealt quite successfully with the problem of CFCs. Now, obviously that's a smaller scale of what needs to happen. What needs to likely happen is going to be some mix of government intervention and regulation and letting markets figure things out (just as in the sulfur dioxide case where once a market incentive existed people found new ways to reduce production). Things could be quite bad a for a few years, and we likely aren't going to do enough to make things pretty unpleasant for a few years, but this doesn't require one-world governments and police states.
Interstate commerce, covered in Article I of the Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Clause. The websites in question are large sprawling entities like Facebook which have people in all states and have offices in multiple states. Once that's a common setup, regulation is almost certainly Constitutional. And even when websites are all in one state, packets and the like go very far afield. There might be an argument that they can't regulate an in-state employer wanting a password from a completely in-state website, but that case is both unlikely to come up, and even if it did, courts would likely consider that to be a a weak argument.
I will admit that at least some of us basically troll for fun by denying part 1 and part 2 above, because we hate the "solutions" to part 3.
Yeah, so this isn't very productive. Maybe try to figure out which solutions are actually good and push for those? Remember, problems don't go away when we don't like the solutions.
Usually part 3 is the establishment of a neo-pol pot regime, or national socialism, or some financial scam to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, or most commonly meaningless feel good frippery that will do absolutely nothing but "raise awareness".
I'm curious incidentally which solutions you think fall into these categories. I agree that quite a bit falls into the feel good frippery category. Godwin's law aside, last I checked no one was advocating large scale genocide as a solution. At the very minimum, burning people in ovens would make more CO2.
I''m particularly interested into which category you put the most widely suggested method of dealing with CO2 - cap and trade. Cap and trade is a system that has worked quite well for other pollutants. For example, there's clear evidence that cap and trade has worked well in dealing with sulfur dioxide, both reducing emissions and having little negative economic impact. See for example http://www.epa.gov/capandtrade/documents/ctresults.pdf and http://www.jstor.org/stable/2647032 (although it certainly has had its bumps especially due to conflicting court cases and legislation. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704258604575360821005676554.html. Cap and trade works, since it hybridizes government regulation with market solutions. It estimates the cost of the pollutant to society and then lets the market figure out the most efficient way of keeping the pollutant down. There's a reason that George H. W. Bush helped get cap-and-trade in the Clean Air Act and that many see it is as example of a successful government regulation http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/politics/17cap.html?pagewanted=all.
I'm also curious as to what category you put improvements to the electric grid such as adding grid storage and smart grids. All of these can have real, substantial impact. And in the case of grid improvements, they have substantial other benefits as well. There isn't going to be one magic bullet solution to all our CO2 problems or a magic bullet to solve all our energy problems, and certainly not one that will solve both. But there are real, substantial steps that can be taken that don't involve loss of liberties. Comparisons to Nazis are unhelpful hyperbole.
Do you have data to back this claim up? It is true that Europe had a cold snap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_European_cold_wave where some countries, including France and Italy reported record low temperatures. But even given that, global temperature average on both land and air for February http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/2/were slightly above average and were very high for March http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/3 Since February was the height of the cold snap in Europe, and the global temperatures were still high, I'm not sure where you are getting your estimate.
Sure, and it is a valid point when one has a few weeks of cold or even a few months of cold. And by the same token, a year like this one by itself isn't that useful data. It is when data like this year is part of a larger pattern that it becomes a problem. In this context one has a very hot year by a variety of different metrics and that's on top of a gradual increase in average temperature over the last twenty years. Weather and climate are different, but lots of weather change over the long-term is eventually a sign of climate change.
This is deeply wrong. There are two major problems with your statement.
First , you should always pay attention to individual candidates. Different politicians even from the same parties can have wildly different attitudes and candidates from different parties can have surprisingly similar attitudes on many issues. For example, consider Rick Elser who is a gay Republican who ran for Congress in Connecticut- he was effectively a libertarian but ran as a Republican for a large variety of reasons. Individuals and their policies matter.
Second, your essential approach only makes sense if you have a very narrow attitude about certain specific economic issues and don't care about anything else. The Constitution Party for instance includes in its platform a complete moratorium on immigration. That includes all those helpful scientists and grad students from other countries, and all the legal immigrants who help do low level jobs keeping the service sector cheap. The Constitution Party also supports a "Biblical" basis for the US, which includes absolutely a complete ban on abortion, criminal penalties for gays, and strong restrictions on pornography. Similarly, a direct comparison of the various parties will show that on many science related issues, the only marginally reasonable options are the Republicans and Democrats (do you want funding for medical research, then Libertarians and Constitution Party aren't for you). There's a decent argument to make that Republicans have actually been better about direct funding of research than the Democrats have, but the Democrats have in general been better about listening to actual scientists on issues that impact policy (e.g. global warming, the teaching of evolution in schools).
Overall, your advocated approach is simplistic in that it ignores variance in individual candidates, and is simplistic in that focuses on a very narrow set of economic issues while ignoring the many other issues, policies and concerns in play.
That people are celebrating is not evidence that they want control. What is evidence of is that a large number of environmentalists are deeply ignorant about the pros and cons of different types of power and that they have absorbed a large number of anti-technology memes. That's not an indication of a desire for "control". Hanlon's razor seems a bit relevant here.
Most of your reply isn't really relevant because I've agreed with you that the US has serious problems and that some of them are getting worse. In that context, pointing to specific problems doesn't really do much. But it may be instructive to look at your examples:
Tarek Mehanna is an appalling example and not the only such case. Ward Churchill was guilty of severe plagiarism. It is true that people paid more attention to him and the plagiarism accusations because of his politically controversial statements, but that's a much weaker claim (and no one seriously disagrees with the plagiarism issue in his case). The issues related to recording the police are also a serious one and one that is really despicable. It varies a lot from state to state, and some states are actually improving (see for example, the ongoing legislation in Connecticut that will allow people to sue cops who try to interfere with recording http://stratford.patch.com/articles/bill-protects-citizens-recording-police-a8140340). In Pakistan, that wouldn't even be an issue because the police or military would just beat up the person recording and take the recording. Pihkal is a potential example of where someone was targeted for their speech, although actual violations of research and security policies were found in the lab. Your statement about the DMCA is just factually wrong- the DMCA prohibits circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms, it doesn't prohibit discussion of how to do so. The PROTECT_Act has some pretty stupid provisions, and trying to make virtual porn illegal is a violation of free speech by many notions. In Pakistan essentially all pornography is essentially illegal and they regularly block pornographic websites http://tribune.com.pk/story/293434/pta-approved-over-1000-porn-sites-blocked-in-pakistan/. Free speech zones are a really wretched idea and do implicitly violate actual free speech protections, although weak forms that only restrict time, place and manner without any content aspect are probably ok (and in fact courts in the last few years have struck down many attempts to restrict anything beyond that- see for example what happened with Texas Tech in 2004).
In the US one is subject to such searches if one is going on a plane
This amounts to millions of people subjected to searches, in a systematic and humiliating way.
You cut off part of my sentence which ended with "and one doesn't go through the backscatter screening", and that's quite relevant here. About 2 million people are subject monthly to pat-downs http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2011/may/17/janet-napolitano/homeland-security-chief-stresses-very-very-very-fe/. That estimate includes people who are getting pat-downs after they've already triggered some sort of warning, not just randomized pat-downs or op-out pat-downs. Again, the Pakistan situation is very different- the police and military can stop anyone on the streets and search them with no justification. I don't know if that results in more total searches in the US, but if it does, it is only because the US is a much larger country. As a percentage matter, the result would be pretty clear.
Any violation of this sort in Pakistan is actually orders of magnitude worse than the US
[citation needed]
Sure. http://www.hrw.org/asia/pakistan, http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/sca/154485.htm,
So on the one hand, Pakistan has no privacy laws, and on the other the US simply ignores its privacy laws and publicly humiliates its citizens. Here is the question you were trying to answer, but failed to: does Pakistan grope its citizens en masse, the way the United States does?
The point you may have been missing is that the answer is essentially "yes, and far worse". In the US one is subject to such searches if one is going on a plane and one doesn't go through the backscatter screening. In contrast, in Pakistan, security forces can stop you on the street anywhere and do about the same level of search or more.
To put it another way, is it the US or Pakistan that has paramilitary police forces that shoot innocent people with assault rifles and add personal assets to their budgets, with the approval and encouragement of the government?
Any violation of this sort in Pakistan is actually orders of magnitude worse than the US. So, the answer in this context is "to some extent in the US and far far worse in Pakistan". Overall, the only bit you are correct on is that the situation is getting worse in the US. That's obviously a problem, but that doesn't change the fact that the situation is much worse in Pakistan.
Actually that's pretty inaccurate. I'm going to ignore the obnoxious racism in your comment and just address the freedoms issue. No major government body in the US is trying to block fifty million websites, and if they did, the entire Supreme Court would tell them no. And the US rejected any form of blasphemy laws as unconstitional quite some time ago. Pakistan still allows the execution of people for blasphemy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_Pakistan. Shabaz Bhatti http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahbaz_Bhatti was assassinated just for trying to lessen the penalties on the blasphemy laws. As to the matter of grope sessions to fly planes- Pakistan has essentially close to almost no equivalent of Fourth Amendment protections. The US and Europe are not in great shape right now, and there's no question that human rights have been getting better in Pakistan in the last few years (especially post-Musharraf), but let's not lose perspective here on overall which is set of countries is doing better for human rights.
That's a completely different type of society with different issues. No fair comparison can be made.
I can give many more similar examples in many different societies. At a certain point it is worth asking whether the claim is false for more societies than it is true. Most of the rest of your comment is essentially repeating things you've already said. I do however want to draw attention to your last remark:
You have care of a young child who is starving. The child is so weak they can barely whimper about their hunger because they've had so little food. You have almost no food. You can steal food from a rich merchant with food. The rich person won't miss it but the child will die without it. Do you do so? If not, why not? If yes, how is this not an unethical use of aggression?
Yes, of course I would steal in that situation. But in this hypothetical we have moved squarely into anarchy. And yes, it is a form of agression. Ethics go out the window with anarchy. In a compassionate society this kind or anarchy would not be necessary. A system of governance cannot be compassionate when it is built on the threat of agression.
Famines and wealth inequality exist in many societies and often are a function of other features not the system of government. And that often occurs in contexts where one looking at the society would not generally call it a state of anarchy. The point is that you are willing to engage in "aggression" to solve more deep moral and ethical concerns. Saying that ethics has gone "out the window" is really avoiding the real issue- morality and ethics are still there, but you are placing a moral or ethical goal, not letting a child starve, as a higher priority than the ethic of liberty. And that's not unreasonable: humans balance competing ethical concerns all the time and sometimes need to give one a priority in one circumstance and another priority in a different circumstance. So the question becomes both where to draw the line and how to decide given a certain priority set what will work best. Simply claiming that charity and compassion will get better in a libertarian society is an empirical claim about reality, and similar remarks apply to whether a libertarian government work would be more effective. The question at that point should be empirical and derived from looking at reality and history, not from what we ideologically would fine most convenient.
The Piraha are in South America and they have a language that is lacking many words considered normal in other cultures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language. They give directions primarily in terms of the relation to the river (towards or away from the river or up or down the river) which may be what you are thinking of. There's a highly readable book about the tribe and their language- "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" by Daniel Everett, a linguist who spent decades with them. However, there's some degree of question by other scholars about how accurate Everett's description of their language was, and research is ongoing.