I'd say that WalMart is getting close to a monopoly in towns I've visited where a few years before there were hardware stores, grocery stores, fabric stores etc, and a somewhat functional downtown, and now there is... Walmart. It's not the only place you can buy things in the country, but it has pretty much driven some whole towns out of business.
Interesting question. What use would this study be for Nasa? Why would they pay for it?
Nasa is one of the concrete government programs that has programs that are designed to run for decades. Space does not have an election cycle or quarterly reports. They build real things that have to be shepherded for years to get to the point where they can get results. That long-term vision might make a study like this useful.
If the economy collapses, engineers aren't going to be making much use of Hubble any more. So a few bucks to look at this, even as simply a potential future funding barrier seems ok by me. And yeah, like this costs as much as making a nice CGI video of the next Mars probe.
The simple solution to all concerns raised here is... huge taxation of the elite, and spend it all on cool Nasa stuff! They left that part out of the report.
Only Rich People can travel quite quickly and easily.
Try getting citizenship in Iceland, or getting past the immigrant holding-camps in Australia, or over the border separating Mexico from the North, or moving from Africa to most of the European countries.
It's a curiosity of the corporate-libertarian economic model that capitol is multinational, but labour is stuck with the economy their dealt. That's part of the problem that this study seems to address. The elite do not have to care about the majority, because they and their offspring will be able to run from the worst of the problems for the longest – probably. But unless the elite are forced to see themselves at risk, and lose some of the benefits of their elite status, they will oppose change, and with their concentration of power that will cause problems for everybody.
Pretty creepy stuff. Maybe some elitists will read this study and save us! Or some other plan....
I don't want to spend time carrying groceries because I have to do more important things like drive to the gym. Wait....
Cars designed the way Americans live. It is a unique lifestyle that has lasted less than a hundred years. It may well change in less time than that and be a historical curiosity. It is difficult to change it right away, but I do think most of us will live better as we drive less.
I've admired these folks – known only by their cheeky "Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI" name – since I first read about them 25 years ago. Their actions made the world a better place to work for change.
They brought to light (along with the Senate Church Committee hearings) that in the name of fighting terrorism (they used to call it "extremism") the FBI was functioning as a terrorist organization. The FBI itself used to define terrorism as using violence or breaking the law for political ends. The FBI did that. Their Cointelpro actions were illegal, and for political aims. They should have been investigating themselves.
But these folks did it for them! I thank them, and only wish I ever had the chance to contribute something so damn cool.
If they come back to Earth like that old Venus probe, we're in trouble. http://bionic.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Probe (Yeah, I remember these episodes of the Six Million Dollar Man from when they came out. I strongly suspect they were not as good as the Prisoner.)
Many, many more people run over their children in the driveway compared to the number of kids killed by their toys.
Cars are the number one cause of death for children after infancy. When we complain about people worrying about stupid things, this is what they should worry about. More than half of all kids are killed by automobiles, far more than any other cause. http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810803.PDF http://webappa.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe (Center for Disease Control, fun interactive graphs about death and dying).
If a specific kind of car adds even more danger to this carnage, (hmm, a pun) I see no reason why they shouldn't be removed from the road. I'm happy to blame drivers, but I'd like to take dangerous tools out of their hands too.
Now, whether the issue of regulating the minuscule number of these exotic cars matters in the overall issue of traffic danger, is another matter. We should not focus on a few cars without looking at what measures would actually increase safety in general. But if these cars (and the people who chose to drive them) are costing other people's lives, I'm happy to take their keys away. Let them drive a tricycle, no?
Eisenhower was talking about vast military spending, not helping poor people (or whole populations) with basic medical care. If the national debate was over whether we should have private military insurance, that would be interesting. "Sorry, no cheap oil for you, you didn't pay for your invasion insurance."
The PC will be standard technology for at least the next 100 years.
I know that was obviously hyperbole, but 100 years ago you might have been typing up a note on a not-yet-standardized typewriter and sending it downstairs using a pneumatic tube from whence it would be taken to a telegraph for longer distances. Wikipedia actually says the first teletypewriter was invented at that time as the cutting-est of the cutting edge tech, so things were ramping up for ongoing rapid change. In San Francisco a hundred years ago, ice for iceboxes was still being delivered by horse drawn wagons. Things have changed more in the last two-hundred years than in the entire history of the species.
To think that anything will be the same 100 years out is folly. The only clear prediction would be a "backward" progression where civilization collapses and our great grand-children are growing food with known pre-industrial tech and using busted hard-drives full of a century's worth of data as hand-mirrors. On the other hand, where tech might head if it "keeps going" is anybody's guess but it won't be the same as today.
I'd recommend trying the various ergonomic keyboards as well. A few centimetres change in posture or desk/chair height can make a remarkable difference too.
Unfortunately, trial and error have been my most successful way of finding solutions. I tried three different keyboards before getting one of the portable Goldtouch ones with the adjustable keyboard angle. It helped a lot, quite quickly. (My issue was with the tendons on top of my hands so ymmv.)
Good job to get working on this now, better than waiting years with further damage.
Octavia Butler would be a key (and mind-altering) example of one black woman's perspective on cultural as different from "hard" sf. I'd start with the Patternist series (available in one book) which blew my mind.
Ursula LeGuin would be a great one too.
And Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin, for it's handling of created language as resistance.
If words are created by usage, unschooling is a word. I was actually surprised that the idea was new to Slashdot. The term's thirty years old, and it seems so close to the "DIY" ethic often lauded here. I first heard about it when I saw the entertaining "Teenage Liberation Handbook" fifteen years ago.
I totally support parents choices and different kids' needs. My own eight year old twin daughters weren't doing badly in school, but one was starting to fall behind in math and spelling, and really having a hard time dealing with that emotionally. Our kids are nice and well behaved, so the teachers aren't able to offer special attention (they're not causing problems, you know?) So this year we're opting to support her to do better at home, and we'll see how it goes.
We're in Vancouver, Canada and they were in French Immersion, so we're getting them a Francophone art-teacher tutor. We read a lot, we're working on math, they are interested, I'm not worried as long as their mom and I have the privilege to spend the time with them. For now we're all giving it a try.
It's obviously not something every family can do, but it's not an idea to be dismissed. They invented public school so parents could work, (since child-labor laws made them hire adults.) It's hard to find time to really support kids' education whether they're in school or not. Some successful kids do well in school, some are bored but get through it, some (like Einstein) fail and might have done better without school at all.
I think it would be quite interesting to have all public officials tested for this abnormality. From president/PM to beat cop and judges. Gotta start somewhere.
I support your plan to take away rights, you go first.
I thought cocaine was schedule 2 because it has approved medical uses, like as an anesthetic during eye surgery? If it didn't, I'm sure it would be sched 1. And if they were reasonable, heroin might be sched 2 with usage as a pain med for at least terminal patients, but they might become addicts.
If by "we" you mean "the USA," then "we" are already the largest exporter of arms (mostly small arms) to the rest of the world. Most of these got to thugs and dictators who are all about killing starving people, our kind of customers. It doesn't seem to be working, if anything such policies destabilize societies and lead to higher population growth due to uncertainty.
Not like it's really relevant, but in court I once saw a man approach the judge and set his cell-phone down in front of himself on the stand. Then while answering the questions the judge asked, he said he didn't have an address or phone number!
I've always been curious what the judge would have said had they noticed the phone sitting there in front of the guy. But I was either not a snitch, or next in line and too nervous to say anything.
I believe anonymous violation of a law you believe to be unjust can be a valid form of protest. If enough people started flaunting copyright laws (or whatever other law) it would bring the issue to a head and cause a response or change.
Clearly the fact that upsets the RIAA etc isn't that downloaders are anonymous, it's that they're losing money. File sharing will have "won" when enough people do it, even if they don't have an ideology to back it up. Casual human behavior changes the world all the time. I don't know if it's good or not, but it does seem to be happening.
In Ecco the Dolphin on the Playstation, you could slip through a glitch in one of the high-speed tubes in the Hanging Gardens level and fly your little dolphin in the air all around the difficult maze of waterslides. It was pretty, way up high. I only managed it once accidentally, and there was no way to get back in.
There were more such "backstage" glitches, but that's the most spectacular. http://web8.orcaserver.de/ecco/glitches/ (They don't seem to have this exact one, hmmm.)
Corporations function as legal fictional entities. They pay taxes out of their income or wealth just like a real person. Legally they surely do pay taxes (or dodge them.)
Now, usually they are owned by individuals who use them to share (and avoid) responsibility for the corporation's actions. Those shareholders do end up gaining or losing relative to corporate taxes. The management (hired by the shareholders) may try to pass those tax expenses off to the customers, cut salaries and expenses, or cut shareholder profits and dividends.
So it's simplistic to say "corporations don't pay taxes." Then how can they make cars or have chain-stores or make life-saving (or not) new drugs? They do, otherwise, who legally owns all the stuff corporations own? They exist, they pay taxes, and I suppose they can even die can't they?
What seems to be happening here is that shareholders are getting the benefit when corporations avoid taxes on the profits from money they invest. They could invest locally and pay local taxes, but they funnel money off through a tax-haven to... dodge taxes. So, it ain't me who's gonna pay for taxing some scammer corporation. If they have to raise their prices to pay for inflated corporate profits, then I won't buy their stuff.
The clearest account of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle is probably the study by the RAND corporation, they are not a hippy-dippy group.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/MR1382.ch7.pdf
They found that clearly, the police started assaulting non-violent crowds before any windows were broken. The crowds were sitting down blocking access to the convention center, and the Seattle PD and co started gassing, pepper-spraying, and beating them at about 9 AM.
The window-smashing started later. There was a small group (maybe a hundred out of 30,000 demonstrators) who did plan to spray-paint and break windows. I think that was dumb myself, it obviously muddied the violence the police were engaging in.
The police lost all tactical control the didn't have a plan by then (they never confronted the window-smashers at all). And later they chased a bunch of people into Capitol Hill, panicked when locals were angry at them, and tear-gassed a residential neighborhood.
Since then we've seen several things:
1. cops try to preemptively intimidate and arrest people (months or years later, these are thrown out of court.)
2. They usually are more agressive at the beginning of an event (like the RNC), and then they get milder, like they've "learned from their mistakes." This might take the sting off, but it seems to be a pattern, so I wonder if it is a planned tactic.
Also, at the RNC in Philadelphia in 2000, the city took out insurance to pay for possible constitutional rights violations. I call that premeditation, and the city and the insurer should be liable.
Blah, blah, rant rant. The Rand Corp. document really is an interesting play by play.
I think the people giving orders should go to jail.
Up in NORTH America, Canada has these cell-monopolies you might have heard about. I am looking at switching to the Rogers/Fido branch of the beast - because my Telus phone doesn't work in my basement apartment in the middle of Vancouver, but Rogers does. (Oh, and I want an iPhone.)
It was very helpful to find this discussion about iPhone (3G) plans, strongly recommending not to get the "official" plans. This practical advice for those about to bite the bullet, is uncommon.
http://www.ehphone.ca/2008/07/have-you-signed-up-for-the-rogersfido-iphone-plans-or-not/#comment-1975
There's been reams of talk about how bad various plans are, or boycotting the iPhone, or Rogers, or cell-providers in general (my preference in many ways), but it's nice to see a little talk about "well if you're gonna do it, here's how to get screwed the least."
I appreciate that advice.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that WalMart is getting close to a monopoly in towns I've visited where a few years before there were hardware stores, grocery stores, fabric stores etc, and a somewhat functional downtown, and now there is ... Walmart. It's not the only place you can buy things in the country, but it has pretty much driven some whole towns out of business.
There's anecdotal evidence for you.
Man, I was changing a flat on my bike the other day and ran into that neutron damage thing. I decided to walk.
(This comment has nothing to contribute really.)
Interesting question. What use would this study be for Nasa? Why would they pay for it?
Nasa is one of the concrete government programs that has programs that are designed to run for decades. Space does not have an election cycle or quarterly reports. They build real things that have to be shepherded for years to get to the point where they can get results. That long-term vision might make a study like this useful.
If the economy collapses, engineers aren't going to be making much use of Hubble any more. So a few bucks to look at this, even as simply a potential future funding barrier seems ok by me. And yeah, like this costs as much as making a nice CGI video of the next Mars probe.
The simple solution to all concerns raised here is... huge taxation of the elite, and spend it all on cool Nasa stuff! They left that part out of the report.
Only Rich People can travel quite quickly and easily.
Try getting citizenship in Iceland, or getting past the immigrant holding-camps in Australia, or over the border separating Mexico from the North, or moving from Africa to most of the European countries.
It's a curiosity of the corporate-libertarian economic model that capitol is multinational, but labour is stuck with the economy their dealt. That's part of the problem that this study seems to address. The elite do not have to care about the majority, because they and their offspring will be able to run from the worst of the problems for the longest – probably. But unless the elite are forced to see themselves at risk, and lose some of the benefits of their elite status, they will oppose change, and with their concentration of power that will cause problems for everybody.
Pretty creepy stuff. Maybe some elitists will read this study and save us! Or some other plan....
I don't want to spend time carrying groceries because I have to do more important things like drive to the gym. Wait....
Cars designed the way Americans live. It is a unique lifestyle that has lasted less than a hundred years. It may well change in less time than that and be a historical curiosity. It is difficult to change it right away, but I do think most of us will live better as we drive less.
I've admired these folks – known only by their cheeky "Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI" name – since I first read about them 25 years ago. Their actions made the world a better place to work for change.
They brought to light (along with the Senate Church Committee hearings) that in the name of fighting terrorism (they used to call it "extremism") the FBI was functioning as a terrorist organization. The FBI itself used to define terrorism as using violence or breaking the law for political ends. The FBI did that. Their Cointelpro actions were illegal, and for political aims. They should have been investigating themselves.
But these folks did it for them! I thank them, and only wish I ever had the chance to contribute something so damn cool.
They say in the video they could have dozens of them operating together. Did anybody else think of old TV shows, and prepare to panic?
The Rover, "a floating white ball that could coerce, and, if necessary, disable inhabitants of The Village, primarily Number Six."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rover_(The_Prisoner)
If they come back to Earth like that old Venus probe, we're in trouble.
http://bionic.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Probe
(Yeah, I remember these episodes of the Six Million Dollar Man from when they came out. I strongly suspect they were not as good as the Prisoner.)
"They delved too greedily" was for mithril in the Mines of Moria, the Arkenstone was buried in Tacoma.
Come now – "a tricycle can become deadly"?
Many, many more people run over their children in the driveway compared to the number of kids killed by their toys.
Cars are the number one cause of death for children after infancy. When we complain about people worrying about stupid things, this is what they should worry about. More than half of all kids are killed by automobiles, far more than any other cause.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810803.PDF
http://webappa.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe (Center for Disease Control, fun interactive graphs about death and dying).
If a specific kind of car adds even more danger to this carnage, (hmm, a pun) I see no reason why they shouldn't be removed from the road. I'm happy to blame drivers, but I'd like to take dangerous tools out of their hands too.
Now, whether the issue of regulating the minuscule number of these exotic cars matters in the overall issue of traffic danger, is another matter. We should not focus on a few cars without looking at what measures would actually increase safety in general. But if these cars (and the people who chose to drive them) are costing other people's lives, I'm happy to take their keys away. Let them drive a tricycle, no?
Oh, sorry, read that wrong.
Eisenhower was talking about vast military spending, not helping poor people (or whole populations) with basic medical care. If the national debate was over whether we should have private military insurance, that would be interesting. "Sorry, no cheap oil for you, you didn't pay for your invasion insurance."
The PC will be standard technology for at least the next 100 years.
I know that was obviously hyperbole, but 100 years ago you might have been typing up a note on a not-yet-standardized typewriter and sending it downstairs using a pneumatic tube from whence it would be taken to a telegraph for longer distances. Wikipedia actually says the first teletypewriter was invented at that time as the cutting-est of the cutting edge tech, so things were ramping up for ongoing rapid change. In San Francisco a hundred years ago, ice for iceboxes was still being delivered by horse drawn wagons. Things have changed more in the last two-hundred years than in the entire history of the species.
To think that anything will be the same 100 years out is folly. The only clear prediction would be a "backward" progression where civilization collapses and our great grand-children are growing food with known pre-industrial tech and using busted hard-drives full of a century's worth of data as hand-mirrors. On the other hand, where tech might head if it "keeps going" is anybody's guess but it won't be the same as today.
I'd recommend trying the various ergonomic keyboards as well. A few centimetres change in posture or desk/chair height can make a remarkable difference too.
Unfortunately, trial and error have been my most successful way of finding solutions. I tried three different keyboards before getting one of the portable Goldtouch ones with the adjustable keyboard angle. It helped a lot, quite quickly. (My issue was with the tendons on top of my hands so ymmv.)
Good job to get working on this now, better than waiting years with further damage.
Octavia Butler would be a key (and mind-altering) example of one black woman's perspective on cultural as different from "hard" sf. I'd start with the Patternist series (available in one book) which blew my mind.
Ursula LeGuin would be a great one too.
And Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin, for it's handling of created language as resistance.
And for gosh-sakes the more-recent Perdido Street Station by China Miéville would surely be memorable, as would John C. Wright's Golden Age, the great hyper-punk masterpiece.
If words are created by usage, unschooling is a word. I was actually surprised that the idea was new to Slashdot. The term's thirty years old, and it seems so close to the "DIY" ethic often lauded here. I first heard about it when I saw the entertaining "Teenage Liberation Handbook" fifteen years ago.
I totally support parents choices and different kids' needs. My own eight year old twin daughters weren't doing badly in school, but one was starting to fall behind in math and spelling, and really having a hard time dealing with that emotionally. Our kids are nice and well behaved, so the teachers aren't able to offer special attention (they're not causing problems, you know?) So this year we're opting to support her to do better at home, and we'll see how it goes.
We're in Vancouver, Canada and they were in French Immersion, so we're getting them a Francophone art-teacher tutor. We read a lot, we're working on math, they are interested, I'm not worried as long as their mom and I have the privilege to spend the time with them. For now we're all giving it a try.
It's obviously not something every family can do, but it's not an idea to be dismissed. They invented public school so parents could work, (since child-labor laws made them hire adults.) It's hard to find time to really support kids' education whether they're in school or not. Some successful kids do well in school, some are bored but get through it, some (like Einstein) fail and might have done better without school at all.
I think it would be quite interesting to have all public officials tested for this abnormality. From president/PM to beat cop and judges. Gotta start somewhere.
I support your plan to take away rights, you go first.
I thought cocaine was schedule 2 because it has approved medical uses, like as an anesthetic during eye surgery? If it didn't, I'm sure it would be sched 1. And if they were reasonable, heroin might be sched 2 with usage as a pain med for at least terminal patients, but they might become addicts.
If by "we" you mean "the USA," then "we" are already the largest exporter of arms (mostly small arms) to the rest of the world. Most of these got to thugs and dictators who are all about killing starving people, our kind of customers. It doesn't seem to be working, if anything such policies destabilize societies and lead to higher population growth due to uncertainty.
Not like it's really relevant, but in court I once saw a man approach the judge and set his cell-phone down in front of himself on the stand. Then while answering the questions the judge asked, he said he didn't have an address or phone number!
I've always been curious what the judge would have said had they noticed the phone sitting there in front of the guy. But I was either not a snitch, or next in line and too nervous to say anything.
I believe anonymous violation of a law you believe to be unjust can be a valid form of protest. If enough people started flaunting copyright laws (or whatever other law) it would bring the issue to a head and cause a response or change.
Clearly the fact that upsets the RIAA etc isn't that downloaders are anonymous, it's that they're losing money. File sharing will have "won" when enough people do it, even if they don't have an ideology to back it up. Casual human behavior changes the world all the time. I don't know if it's good or not, but it does seem to be happening.
In Ecco the Dolphin on the Playstation, you could slip through a glitch in one of the high-speed tubes in the Hanging Gardens level and fly your little dolphin in the air all around the difficult maze of waterslides. It was pretty, way up high. I only managed it once accidentally, and there was no way to get back in.
There were more such "backstage" glitches, but that's the most spectacular.
http://web8.orcaserver.de/ecco/glitches/ (They don't seem to have this exact one, hmmm.)
If a company owns the patent on the gene that makes me sick, can I sue them for causing my illness?
Corporations function as legal fictional entities. They pay taxes out of their income or wealth just like a real person. Legally they surely do pay taxes (or dodge them.)
Now, usually they are owned by individuals who use them to share (and avoid) responsibility for the corporation's actions. Those shareholders do end up gaining or losing relative to corporate taxes. The management (hired by the shareholders) may try to pass those tax expenses off to the customers, cut salaries and expenses, or cut shareholder profits and dividends.
So it's simplistic to say "corporations don't pay taxes." Then how can they make cars or have chain-stores or make life-saving (or not) new drugs? They do, otherwise, who legally owns all the stuff corporations own? They exist, they pay taxes, and I suppose they can even die can't they?
What seems to be happening here is that shareholders are getting the benefit when corporations avoid taxes on the profits from money they invest. They could invest locally and pay local taxes, but they funnel money off through a tax-haven to... dodge taxes. So, it ain't me who's gonna pay for taxing some scammer corporation. If they have to raise their prices to pay for inflated corporate profits, then I won't buy their stuff.
The clearest account of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle is probably the study by the RAND corporation, they are not a hippy-dippy group. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/MR1382.ch7.pdf They found that clearly, the police started assaulting non-violent crowds before any windows were broken. The crowds were sitting down blocking access to the convention center, and the Seattle PD and co started gassing, pepper-spraying, and beating them at about 9 AM. The window-smashing started later. There was a small group (maybe a hundred out of 30,000 demonstrators) who did plan to spray-paint and break windows. I think that was dumb myself, it obviously muddied the violence the police were engaging in. The police lost all tactical control the didn't have a plan by then (they never confronted the window-smashers at all). And later they chased a bunch of people into Capitol Hill, panicked when locals were angry at them, and tear-gassed a residential neighborhood. Since then we've seen several things: 1. cops try to preemptively intimidate and arrest people (months or years later, these are thrown out of court.) 2. They usually are more agressive at the beginning of an event (like the RNC), and then they get milder, like they've "learned from their mistakes." This might take the sting off, but it seems to be a pattern, so I wonder if it is a planned tactic. Also, at the RNC in Philadelphia in 2000, the city took out insurance to pay for possible constitutional rights violations. I call that premeditation, and the city and the insurer should be liable. Blah, blah, rant rant. The Rand Corp. document really is an interesting play by play. I think the people giving orders should go to jail.
Up in NORTH America, Canada has these cell-monopolies you might have heard about. I am looking at switching to the Rogers/Fido branch of the beast - because my Telus phone doesn't work in my basement apartment in the middle of Vancouver, but Rogers does. (Oh, and I want an iPhone.) It was very helpful to find this discussion about iPhone (3G) plans, strongly recommending not to get the "official" plans. This practical advice for those about to bite the bullet, is uncommon. http://www.ehphone.ca/2008/07/have-you-signed-up-for-the-rogersfido-iphone-plans-or-not/#comment-1975 There's been reams of talk about how bad various plans are, or boycotting the iPhone, or Rogers, or cell-providers in general (my preference in many ways), but it's nice to see a little talk about "well if you're gonna do it, here's how to get screwed the least." I appreciate that advice.