Private spaceflight is a lot more promising than NASA is. Especially if the goal is to find new habitable planets. With private spaceflight, every dollar is a dollar towards a goal. With NASA its a nickel towards a goal and 95 cents spent on pointless bureaucracies.
Cut funding to NASA, allow private space companies to use the R&D, blueprints and the like and watch us achieve heights that NASA never dreamed of.
I think the fact hardware improved was enough to make Windows 7 a better release.
Vista was designed for systems to have about 2 GB of RAM in an age where most typical PCs shipped with 512 MB of RAM or 1 GB, especially for laptops. People who either bought new PCs when Vista started shipping on all of them by default (and yes, a ton of them shipped with Vista pre-loaded and only like 512 MB of RAM) then thought Vista was crap. XP can run very comfortably on 512 MB or 1 gig of RAM, Vista cannot. By the time Windows 7 was released, even the cheapest of the cheap computers were shipping with 2 or 3 GB of RAM.
But would that have happened if we would have negotiated, had lots of American tourists in Russia, etc.
Compare China during the "cultural revolution" to China today. Yes, China isn't perfect, but because of increased trade and cooperation with the west China has grown more and more free. I still wouldn't want to live there, but given the choice between pre-westernized China during the early part of the 20th century to China today, I would pick China today.
Russia could have experienced the same thing, a gradual weakening of the government's grip on its citizens.
Instead, Russia had to endure 40 some years of tyranny before they experienced reforms at the cost of their entire economy and way of life crashing.
Stalin was not a good leader, but that is no excuse to almost destroy the world. The cold war was based on this idea that the other side was going to nuke them to oblivion. Neither the USSR or the US wanted that. But in the US, because of crap diplomacy we thought that the USSR intended to nuke us. In the USSR due to crap diplomacy they believed the US wanted to nuke them into oblivion. If we had diplomacy we could have diffused that problem and made the world a safer place. We might have even stopped slaughters like Vietnam, we might have diffused the Korean war thus preventing North Korea from forming, etc.
And what was the reason for all this? Simple ignorance. If we had actually talked with Russia which basically saved the West's asses from Hitler and included them with our projects, sharing intelligence and the like and had closer American-Russian ties perhaps we could have avoided the entire cold war. Perhaps with the opening of relations between the two countries conditions would be better for the Russians and Americans alike.
Our current diplomatic process will lead to another war like this, only the leaders of both countries might not be sane enough to avoid nuclear war next time.
Neither Russia nor the US wanted anything from the other country other than safety. If we had avoided mutual suspicion at the end of WWII and had closer ties, perhaps both nations could have prospered and accomplished much rather than simply building more bombs.
This idea that we need to launch 34423423423423 missiles as fast as possible is based on laughable ignorance.
No one person, be it the president, vice president, speaker of the house, a general, a soldier, etc. should be able to launch a nuclear weapon.
It should have to go through multiple people to determine whether or not to launch it and then let people state their reasons then finally come to an agreement.
Do we want a situation like the Cuban missile crisis again where one person had the ability to save the world or end it?
Don't think about the security those nooks have provided since WW2; there was and is absolutely no "risk" that another world wide conflagration might have or will happen without those risky missiles
Yeah "security" at what cost? The only "security" that nukes brought us was the "security" that if someone tried to completely wipe us out we could wipe them out too. That isn't security. Should it be considered security to wear a suicide vest because if someone tried to rob you, you could kill the robber?
And sure there hasn't been a world war on the scale of WWII, but for the inhabitants of countries like Vietnam and Korea where people's lives both westerners and natives alike were used as pawns in a silly game with the USSR and the US.
Nuclear weapons don't give us peace, only diplomacy can give lasting peace. If we, you know actually -talked- to nations like Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc. rather than shut the two countries lines of communications we might actually achieve true peace.
I'm not saying that the rest of the things aren't risky but if I was wearing a suicide vest, the first thing I'd want to do is make sure it wasn't going to blow up on me and perhaps even take it off.
Does the US need a defense force, of course it does. Does the US need a few nuclear weapons? Quite possibly. Do we need enough nuclear weapons to wipe out every major city in Europe, South America, Europe, Africa and most of Asia? No. The more nuclear weapons we have the greater the risk is for the citizens are.
The problem with MS isn't the delay itself, its the fact it gets delayed with no improvement. The problem wasn't that Vista was delayed, it was because Vista was delayed and crap.
Theres nothing wrong with taking your time, but when you take a long time then still release a half-baked product, that is where the problem comes in.
They might have "owned" Palm but both platforms were complete crap when it came to actually getting stuff done. Not to mention the hardware has advanced to the point where mobile devices are at par with slower computers.
It is an entirely different market and a market I can't see Microsoft making a dent in. Windows Phone 7 has plenty of terrible design decisions, for example what does the YouTube app do? It is a shortcut to IE which goes to YouTube's mobile site which then loads in a Zune player. WTF? No multitasking for third-party apps? Even Apple allows that now!
Yes, I know that the iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/WebOS/Symbian/whatever wasn't perfect on day 1 either but Microsoft has no excuse to be making such brain-dead decisions. The way I see it, the iPhone can win for the UI, Android can win for openness, BlackBerry can win for corporate drones, WebOS can win in design elegance, Symbian can win in it seems like every market other than the US. But Windows Phones I don't think have a chance anymore unless MS releases a big "service pack" that puts them up to speed with iOS and Android at the very least.
But it is still a change towards the positive. I'm not saying that suddenly in the next election cycle they start running exactly who you want to get elected, but lets say they -do- get elected. Would you rather have someone who is elected (not by your vote because you are still voting for the third party) and shares, say, 70% of your beliefs or someone who is elected and shares only 35% of your beliefs?
The problem with the social compass is it puts moral issues into the domain of the state. For example, questions like
Sex outside marriage is usually immoral.
and
Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers.
It matters not if someone views something as moral or immoral when it comes to the state. For example, personally I believe that you should save sex until marriage, however I/strongly/ oppose any legislation that would legislate that. Morality shouldn't be legislated and yet I don't see that option on the political compass.
Really, the political compass makes the mistake in thinking that people believe that their personal values about things like morality should be legislated.
...Except for the fact you don't seem to understand what political analysts look at when they look at election reports. If in a given election year there are 40 people who voted democrat, 50 people who voted republican 7 people who voted libertarian and 3 people who voted for the green party, the republicans are going to try to win that 7% of libertarians to vote for their candidate next year by passing more libertarian-style laws or running a more libertarian-leaning candidate. Now, while this might not amount to much change and many times the changes are purely superficial, that vote for the third party made a difference.
But really, saying that you didn't vote then complaining is just as silly as saying you are hungry but you didn't even make an effort to find food.
Except for the fact that erodes the point of a political party.
The point of a political party is to find candidates where you don't have to do a shitload of research on every single one of them to find out what they believe. The point of a political party is to summarize the core of your beliefs in one or two words. Rather than spending several hours researching each candidate from a variety of biased sources, out-of-context quotes and the like, you would simply find the party which you closely identify with.
Voter apathy is a major issue in the US and having a fragmented party does nothing to reduce it. With a republican, unless you are willing to do several hours of research for each person, you don't know if you are getting a person like McCain or someone like Ron Paul.
By having several parties to choose from it makes it easy on election day to tell at a glance which candidates you identify most strongly with.
If you don't vote, you have no right to complain (assuming, of course you have the ability to vote and simply choose not to use it) at the state of affairs in the world.
Go ahead, vote for a third party, it might not mean much but it will go into a tally of people who said "fuck you" to the republicrats. If you don't like either candidate for local office make up something for the write in spot.
You might not be able to change the system, you might not be able to make a huge impact, but at the very least you will have your vote as "none of the above" registered.
If enough people started doing this rather than either voting for the "lesser evil" or staying home, perhaps the nation would wake up and pass some electoral reforms.
The concept of broadcasters operating as trustees of the public interest is an important one that we've drifted far from. Let's correct that.
This is an antiquated view and a laughable one at that. Before cable TV and before the internet, you might have a valid point, but today? If you want news you can get it from whatever slant you feel like it thanks to the internet, you can get your news from a republican, democrat, libertarian, green, anarchist, asian, european, mexican, christian, jewish, islamic, etc. slant. Similarly, the decrease in publishing costs mean that paper newspapers are also more affordable than ever to start up and print.
Broadcasters should operate to make a profit just like news agencies, web sites, etc. all do (the profit might not be monetary, but they want to accomplish at least some goal).
This idea that everything was fine and dandy and objective until different regulation happened comes in the view of rose-tinted glasses.
There is no such thing as a "pro-labor" party, parties are the ideals, either they want more economic freedom or less economic freedom, more state control over private issues or less control over private issues. A "pro-labor" party simply is a party that wants less economic freedom and more state control over what you can and can't buy/work.
Plus, there has never been a president that has completely stood up for their beliefs and not been a cooperate (or other special interest) whore.
I don't think you understand the word "liberal" in its oldest meanings. It used to be that liberal meant more freedoms, both economically and personally. Using that definition libertarians are the most liberal of parties. It is only in the last few years that liberal has become synonymous with the progressive movement, which isn't even liberal at all because most support less freedoms both personally and economically.
What the US really needs is more political parties so people could accurately state their belief system, because I don't think hardly anyone is truly a republican or democrat.
Exactly, really, we need to stop it with this "liberal" and "conservative" crap because neither qualifier tells how most people feel. There are two dimensions economic and personal freedoms. Either you want more state control of economic matters or you want more freedom in economic matters. Either you want more state control of personal matters or you want less.
This idea of left and right is so screwed up that no wonder most young people don't even vote.
Except for all those crimes (well, except for electrocution but I've never heard of anyone being denied electricity because of that) it is being enforced by the people who it directly influences.
The stop signs were put up by the department of transportation which has a role in issuing drivers licensing. Similarly, having hazardous waste in your trash can negatively impact the workers and the dump.
However, someone "pirating" content online has no impact on the network financially. If someone is downloading a 700 MB ISO or a 700 MB movie, the network has the same strain put on it. Because most ISPs have no financial stake in the music/movie "industry" they are not being deprived of any income.
It makes no sense for someone who has no stake in a "contract" to help enforce that "contract".
It doesn't matter how many people are affected by it when the law itself is corrupt. Using that logic you can make every law seem reasonable. Lynching blacks isn't bad because out of the million of blacks only a few hundred to a few thousands got lynched. Same logic.
First off, the idea of "piracy" is laughable. Our entire property system is based on the notion of physical property. If we could duplicate anything, cars, food, clean water, gold, etc. we wouldn't need laws to protect our property because we could just duplicate it. IP is not property. "Piracy" is not theft. The very idea that an unaffiliated party would have to disconnect someone because they were doing something "bad" is silly. Should we be deprived of electricity if we get a speeding ticket? Should we have our water shut off if we run a stop sign? Should they suspend trash pickup if we jaywalk? Those make about as much sense as an ISP with no connection to media companies trying to protect property which doesn't even exist.
An unjust law is unjust not because of how few or how many people it punishes but simply by the fact it exists.
Slashdot Mirror
Private spaceflight is a lot more promising than NASA is. Especially if the goal is to find new habitable planets. With private spaceflight, every dollar is a dollar towards a goal. With NASA its a nickel towards a goal and 95 cents spent on pointless bureaucracies.
Cut funding to NASA, allow private space companies to use the R&D, blueprints and the like and watch us achieve heights that NASA never dreamed of.
I think the fact hardware improved was enough to make Windows 7 a better release.
Vista was designed for systems to have about 2 GB of RAM in an age where most typical PCs shipped with 512 MB of RAM or 1 GB, especially for laptops. People who either bought new PCs when Vista started shipping on all of them by default (and yes, a ton of them shipped with Vista pre-loaded and only like 512 MB of RAM) then thought Vista was crap. XP can run very comfortably on 512 MB or 1 gig of RAM, Vista cannot. By the time Windows 7 was released, even the cheapest of the cheap computers were shipping with 2 or 3 GB of RAM.
But would that have happened if we would have negotiated, had lots of American tourists in Russia, etc.
Compare China during the "cultural revolution" to China today. Yes, China isn't perfect, but because of increased trade and cooperation with the west China has grown more and more free. I still wouldn't want to live there, but given the choice between pre-westernized China during the early part of the 20th century to China today, I would pick China today.
Russia could have experienced the same thing, a gradual weakening of the government's grip on its citizens.
Instead, Russia had to endure 40 some years of tyranny before they experienced reforms at the cost of their entire economy and way of life crashing.
Stalin was not a good leader, but that is no excuse to almost destroy the world. The cold war was based on this idea that the other side was going to nuke them to oblivion. Neither the USSR or the US wanted that. But in the US, because of crap diplomacy we thought that the USSR intended to nuke us. In the USSR due to crap diplomacy they believed the US wanted to nuke them into oblivion. If we had diplomacy we could have diffused that problem and made the world a safer place. We might have even stopped slaughters like Vietnam, we might have diffused the Korean war thus preventing North Korea from forming, etc.
And what was the reason for all this? Simple ignorance. If we had actually talked with Russia which basically saved the West's asses from Hitler and included them with our projects, sharing intelligence and the like and had closer American-Russian ties perhaps we could have avoided the entire cold war. Perhaps with the opening of relations between the two countries conditions would be better for the Russians and Americans alike.
Our current diplomatic process will lead to another war like this, only the leaders of both countries might not be sane enough to avoid nuclear war next time.
Neither Russia nor the US wanted anything from the other country other than safety. If we had avoided mutual suspicion at the end of WWII and had closer ties, perhaps both nations could have prospered and accomplished much rather than simply building more bombs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNASH
Go crazy.
And the same thing could be said about Flash too.
As it should be.
This idea that we need to launch 34423423423423 missiles as fast as possible is based on laughable ignorance.
No one person, be it the president, vice president, speaker of the house, a general, a soldier, etc. should be able to launch a nuclear weapon.
It should have to go through multiple people to determine whether or not to launch it and then let people state their reasons then finally come to an agreement.
Do we want a situation like the Cuban missile crisis again where one person had the ability to save the world or end it?
Don't think about the security those nooks have provided since WW2; there was and is absolutely no "risk" that another world wide conflagration might have or will happen without those risky missiles
Yeah "security" at what cost? The only "security" that nukes brought us was the "security" that if someone tried to completely wipe us out we could wipe them out too. That isn't security. Should it be considered security to wear a suicide vest because if someone tried to rob you, you could kill the robber?
And sure there hasn't been a world war on the scale of WWII, but for the inhabitants of countries like Vietnam and Korea where people's lives both westerners and natives alike were used as pawns in a silly game with the USSR and the US.
Nuclear weapons don't give us peace, only diplomacy can give lasting peace. If we, you know actually -talked- to nations like Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc. rather than shut the two countries lines of communications we might actually achieve true peace.
I'm not saying that the rest of the things aren't risky but if I was wearing a suicide vest, the first thing I'd want to do is make sure it wasn't going to blow up on me and perhaps even take it off.
Does the US need a defense force, of course it does. Does the US need a few nuclear weapons? Quite possibly. Do we need enough nuclear weapons to wipe out every major city in Europe, South America, Europe, Africa and most of Asia? No. The more nuclear weapons we have the greater the risk is for the citizens are.
The problem with MS isn't the delay itself, its the fact it gets delayed with no improvement. The problem wasn't that Vista was delayed, it was because Vista was delayed and crap.
Theres nothing wrong with taking your time, but when you take a long time then still release a half-baked product, that is where the problem comes in.
They might have "owned" Palm but both platforms were complete crap when it came to actually getting stuff done. Not to mention the hardware has advanced to the point where mobile devices are at par with slower computers.
It is an entirely different market and a market I can't see Microsoft making a dent in. Windows Phone 7 has plenty of terrible design decisions, for example what does the YouTube app do? It is a shortcut to IE which goes to YouTube's mobile site which then loads in a Zune player. WTF? No multitasking for third-party apps? Even Apple allows that now!
Yes, I know that the iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/WebOS/Symbian/whatever wasn't perfect on day 1 either but Microsoft has no excuse to be making such brain-dead decisions. The way I see it, the iPhone can win for the UI, Android can win for openness, BlackBerry can win for corporate drones, WebOS can win in design elegance, Symbian can win in it seems like every market other than the US. But Windows Phones I don't think have a chance anymore unless MS releases a big "service pack" that puts them up to speed with iOS and Android at the very least.
But it is still a change towards the positive. I'm not saying that suddenly in the next election cycle they start running exactly who you want to get elected, but lets say they -do- get elected. Would you rather have someone who is elected (not by your vote because you are still voting for the third party) and shares, say, 70% of your beliefs or someone who is elected and shares only 35% of your beliefs?
Sex outside marriage is usually immoral.
and
Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers.
It matters not if someone views something as moral or immoral when it comes to the state. For example, personally I believe that you should save sex until marriage, however I /strongly/ oppose any legislation that would legislate that. Morality shouldn't be legislated and yet I don't see that option on the political compass.
Really, the political compass makes the mistake in thinking that people believe that their personal values about things like morality should be legislated.
Yeah, and the BIOS is IBM's property which is why you can only buy IBM-made PCs....
...Except for the fact you don't seem to understand what political analysts look at when they look at election reports. If in a given election year there are 40 people who voted democrat, 50 people who voted republican 7 people who voted libertarian and 3 people who voted for the green party, the republicans are going to try to win that 7% of libertarians to vote for their candidate next year by passing more libertarian-style laws or running a more libertarian-leaning candidate. Now, while this might not amount to much change and many times the changes are purely superficial, that vote for the third party made a difference.
But really, saying that you didn't vote then complaining is just as silly as saying you are hungry but you didn't even make an effort to find food.
Except for the fact that erodes the point of a political party.
The point of a political party is to find candidates where you don't have to do a shitload of research on every single one of them to find out what they believe. The point of a political party is to summarize the core of your beliefs in one or two words. Rather than spending several hours researching each candidate from a variety of biased sources, out-of-context quotes and the like, you would simply find the party which you closely identify with.
Voter apathy is a major issue in the US and having a fragmented party does nothing to reduce it. With a republican, unless you are willing to do several hours of research for each person, you don't know if you are getting a person like McCain or someone like Ron Paul.
By having several parties to choose from it makes it easy on election day to tell at a glance which candidates you identify most strongly with.
If you don't vote, you have no right to complain (assuming, of course you have the ability to vote and simply choose not to use it) at the state of affairs in the world.
Go ahead, vote for a third party, it might not mean much but it will go into a tally of people who said "fuck you" to the republicrats. If you don't like either candidate for local office make up something for the write in spot.
You might not be able to change the system, you might not be able to make a huge impact, but at the very least you will have your vote as "none of the above" registered.
If enough people started doing this rather than either voting for the "lesser evil" or staying home, perhaps the nation would wake up and pass some electoral reforms.
The concept of broadcasters operating as trustees of the public interest is an important one that we've drifted far from. Let's correct that.
This is an antiquated view and a laughable one at that. Before cable TV and before the internet, you might have a valid point, but today? If you want news you can get it from whatever slant you feel like it thanks to the internet, you can get your news from a republican, democrat, libertarian, green, anarchist, asian, european, mexican, christian, jewish, islamic, etc. slant. Similarly, the decrease in publishing costs mean that paper newspapers are also more affordable than ever to start up and print.
Broadcasters should operate to make a profit just like news agencies, web sites, etc. all do (the profit might not be monetary, but they want to accomplish at least some goal).
This idea that everything was fine and dandy and objective until different regulation happened comes in the view of rose-tinted glasses.
No. Every single party/candidate fits along these lines in many ways.
For example, the libertarian party believes in maximizing both economic and personal freedom.
Candidates such as Palin might want to increase economic freedoms in some areas but want to bring the state into many personal issues.
Based on Obama's actions, he has wanted to decrease economic freedom and keep the level of personal freedoms roughly the same.
The green party wants to increase personal freedoms while limiting economic freedoms to better the environment.
Etc.
There is no such thing as a "pro-labor" party, parties are the ideals, either they want more economic freedom or less economic freedom, more state control over private issues or less control over private issues. A "pro-labor" party simply is a party that wants less economic freedom and more state control over what you can and can't buy/work.
Plus, there has never been a president that has completely stood up for their beliefs and not been a cooperate (or other special interest) whore.
I don't think you understand the word "liberal" in its oldest meanings. It used to be that liberal meant more freedoms, both economically and personally. Using that definition libertarians are the most liberal of parties. It is only in the last few years that liberal has become synonymous with the progressive movement, which isn't even liberal at all because most support less freedoms both personally and economically.
What the US really needs is more political parties so people could accurately state their belief system, because I don't think hardly anyone is truly a republican or democrat.
Exactly, really, we need to stop it with this "liberal" and "conservative" crap because neither qualifier tells how most people feel. There are two dimensions economic and personal freedoms. Either you want more state control of economic matters or you want more freedom in economic matters. Either you want more state control of personal matters or you want less.
This idea of left and right is so screwed up that no wonder most young people don't even vote.
Except for all those crimes (well, except for electrocution but I've never heard of anyone being denied electricity because of that) it is being enforced by the people who it directly influences.
The stop signs were put up by the department of transportation which has a role in issuing drivers licensing. Similarly, having hazardous waste in your trash can negatively impact the workers and the dump.
However, someone "pirating" content online has no impact on the network financially. If someone is downloading a 700 MB ISO or a 700 MB movie, the network has the same strain put on it. Because most ISPs have no financial stake in the music/movie "industry" they are not being deprived of any income.
It makes no sense for someone who has no stake in a "contract" to help enforce that "contract".
The problem isn't how many people, its the fact that the law is on the books and is being enforced.
Would slavery be any more justified if only 31 people died in a year of the slave trade? Would murder be justified if you only killed 31 people?
It doesn't matter how many people are affected by it when the law itself is corrupt. Using that logic you can make every law seem reasonable. Lynching blacks isn't bad because out of the million of blacks only a few hundred to a few thousands got lynched. Same logic.
First off, the idea of "piracy" is laughable. Our entire property system is based on the notion of physical property. If we could duplicate anything, cars, food, clean water, gold, etc. we wouldn't need laws to protect our property because we could just duplicate it. IP is not property. "Piracy" is not theft. The very idea that an unaffiliated party would have to disconnect someone because they were doing something "bad" is silly. Should we be deprived of electricity if we get a speeding ticket? Should we have our water shut off if we run a stop sign? Should they suspend trash pickup if we jaywalk? Those make about as much sense as an ISP with no connection to media companies trying to protect property which doesn't even exist.
An unjust law is unjust not because of how few or how many people it punishes but simply by the fact it exists.
No, instead they just ban the lightbulb.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/09/11/171200/GE-Closes-Last-US-Light-Bulb-Factory
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1632204