I am a firm believer that no tap water is safe for human consumption
I mostly believe the opposite. Remember that before the invention of tap water, people drank out of rivers and streams that ran over lead and mercury deposits and had animals (and people) shitting in them. We can tolerate a good deal of crud in the stuff we consume.
That's not to say that pure water isn't preferred, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that tap water is unfit for human consumption altogether.
The concern over mother's milk is not completely without merit. There is no guarantee that the child will be exposed until he is older. There are lots of substances out there which are mostly harmless to adults, but harmful to children and babies. To take the first one off the top of my head, alcohol in moderation is fine for adults, but give it to a baby and you probably end up with developmental problems. Even chemicals which cause health problems in adults may be worse for the baby; slightly increased risk of cancer versus undeveloped brain, for example.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky has a rather horrifying subplot that revolves around exactly that idea. The Evil Thugs don't want to kill a certain Good Guy, and in fact they want to keep her nice, so whenever she finds out that the Evil Thugs are actually Evil, they stick her in the magic MRI and erase the memory.
This is strikingly similar to the stages of solving a computer problem.
1. "I don't have that problem, what are you talking about?"
2. "Where the hell is the problem? I can't find the damned problem!"
3. "Ok, maybe if I just change this, it will all go away."
4. "I hate life."
5. "It compiled, ship it!"
And very often, the solution is found sometime before you hit step 5. I think it's no coincidence that these are the same. Grief could be seen as a reaction to a problem which can't be solved. At this point, we don't know if this problem can be solved yet.
Actually, this is really the removal of a defect, not a kludge. Covering the external tank with an enormous amount of heavy insulation which is prone to come off in big chunks which are just dandy for knocking holes in things they happen to run into on the way down was a design mistake. Replacing the insulation with heaters is pretty much what they should have done in the first place, although I'll be the first to admit that it certainly didn't occur to me before. That is not to say that the system as a whole is good, but this is a very reasonable fix for a defect in the system.
Wow, this is the best evidence of moderators on crack I've seen all year.
The tanks that are referenced hold hydrogen and oxygen. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Both of these are really damned cold. The insulation serves two purposes. The primary purpose is to keep ice from forming on the outside of the tank from condensation. This ice would come off the tank in big hunks when the engines light off, which is bad. The secondary purpose is to keep the contents nice and cold. This is less important, because they keep themselves cold as their contents slowly boil off. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen are cheap, so losing a bit more from lack of insulation and some heaters is not such a big deal.
I agree that "It was designed before I was born" is not an interesting argument, if it stands alone. However, "It was designed before I was born" along with "and it still doesn't work right" is bad. It means that they have had twenty-five years to iron out the kinks in the system, and it still has massive, fatal problems. In that case, the "it's old, get rid of it" argument is a good one. It hasn't been fixed in twenty-five years, and a few more years into the future isn't going to help.
the S-II and the S-IVB worked absolutely perfectly (to my knowledge) throughout the Apollo program. (Almost--a single J-2 engine of the five on the S-II failed to ignite on Apollo 13. This alone had no impact on the mission, and certainly was the smallest issue that 13 faced.)
A small correction to an otherwise excellent post. The center engine failure on Apollo 13 was not failure to ignite, it was a premature shutdown. That in itself is not very interesting, but the reason why is. Both the first and second stages of Saturn were susceptible to a pogo effect, where vibrations in the structure could get into a feedback and shake things up quite a bit. Normally this wasn't too big of a problem; modifications were introduced to lessen the effect as the program went on, but even without the modifications there weren't much in the way of problems (aside from some things breaking in the payload during the launch of Apollo 6). But on Apollo 13's second stage, the pogo was particularly bad. It was a few seconds away from ripping the entire second stage to tiny pieces when the shutdown occurred. The vibration had started fuel sloshing around, which fooled a sensor into shutting the center engine down early, which stopped the pogo. I don't think this would have lead to a loss of the crew, but it certainly would have got their blood pumping, and of course the mission would have been completely scrapped. But it didn't blow up, and the launch went fine.
On the other side of things, Apollo 12 got hit by lightning on the way up. Twice. Aside from some electronics being reset and a whole bunch of near-heart attacks, the rocket just shrugged it off. And the shuttle's reaction to being launched when it's a tad too cold is to simply explode without warning. Sigh.
No, gets slung into a slightly different orbit. If it's worth the cost, you can recover it and put it back. Otherwise, you can put a new one up.
Snap in the middle, bottom falls down, top falls up.
Yes, and? The bottom part falls down and you lose it. The top part, again, goes into a different orbit, and then you have the same choice of recovering and reusing it, or putting a new one up.
For the "big asteroid counterweight to tension the cable design" at least, snap at the top, whole thing lays down along the equator.
No, the whole thing falls into the atmosphere, and all but the very last bit disintegrates and burns up on reentry. The elevator would have a very high tensile strength, which doesn't imply anything about its other strengths, or its behavior when subjected to extreme heating. It would vaporize like every other kind of material.
Worse case scenarios look about as bad as anything else with that much energy in it.
Absolute worst case scenario is that you lose the elevator and any cargo/people which were on it at the time. About as bad as the worst case scenario for every other way of getting things into space. With a projected cost of less than what the shuttle has cost us so far, I think it's a bargain.
You misunderstand. I do what I'm asked, and I don't make a mess of things. What I specifically don't do is anything 'above and beyond' what is asked. If there's a sign that says I need to take my laptop out of its bag, I take it out of its bag. If there is no sign, then I don't. Of course, when I get to the scanner, some guy is going to ask me to take it out anyway, at which point I do so. Same thing goes for shoes, belts, whatever. If something says I should remove it, I do. If I have to wait for a real live human being to ask me to remove it, I wait. The exception is my keys and other crap in my pockets, for whatever reason. I always take them out.
I respect the screeners. I do what I'm asked, and I don't dick around. I also don't say 'thank you' or make idle talk with them, because, well, they aren't forced to take the job either.
I'm not doing anything particularly remarkable for somebody on his first or second flight. The only difference is that I've flown a few hundred times in my life, and I mostly just pretend not to learn what makes the process go faster.
The screeners' job is not important, and the system is beyond 'not perfect'. The system is completely broken. Good security should accomplish two things: it should prevent the things we want it to prevent, and it should inconvenience people as little as possible. The current system is the complete, exact opposite. It inconveniences people as much as possible while still doing absolutely nothing to prevent anything that it is supposed to prevent. I wouldn't mind a bit of annoyance if I knew that it was actually stopping people from walking through with a bunch of explosives, but it's not. While I'm having to get to the airport three hours in advance to have a good chance of making my plane, anybody who wants to blow my plane up just has to spend a few extra minutes thinking about how to get around our completely useless security. We could easily eliminate 90% of the crap we have to go through, cut costs, and still end up with a safer system. But the thing is, people don't want real 'safe', they want the illusion of safety. They prefer waiting in line for hours and having security guards wand down grandmothers with metal detectors to anything that would actually be effective, because it makes them feel safer when the buckle their little seat belts and watch their little safety videos.
If the current airline security system were actually vaguely effective, I wouldn't be nearly as pissed with it as I am now.
One tip... Don't be "that guy" that slows everything down. While you're waiting in line take your change out of your pockets, take off that pimp chain, take your cell phone out of your pocket... Put all that stuff in your carry on before you're at the table.
Why the hell shouldn't I be "that guy" that slows everything down? I am not, in fact, the one slowing everything down anyway; the security people are. I don't see why I should go out of my way to make inconvenient, useless security work slightly more smoothly. The less smoothly it works, the better the chances are that somebody will wake up and overhaul our completely useless, broken system.
I hate almost every aspect of modern airline security. Just because I know it backwards and forwards doesn't mean I should be obligated to remove my frigging belt buckle without being asked. And while they're having me take it off and wanding me down for my trouble, I'll pass the time coming up with yet another dozen ways to bypass security and end up on the wrong side of the magic gate with a highly lethal object.
If you would have taken a deep breath before your knee-jerk reaction, you would have realized that I never made any claims regarding equality between secrecy and censorship. Read it again, I said that what you claimed to be secrecy was simply privacy. If you'd care to mosey on over to the correct context, I'd be glad to argue that point with you.
You misunderstood. I never said you claimed secrecy and censorship were equivalent. Another poster, a few posts up, said that. I was comparing your claim to his. They aren't the same, but they are equally misguided.
And, I'm sorry, but you are very wrong about censorship. Censorship takes on many more forms than simply through enforcement. Try not to look at it as though it were so black and white.
I have never stated or even implied that the issue is black and white. I have, however, only talked about the two extreme ends of the spectrum. That is, forceful government intervention is censorship and is wrong. Admonishing someone's ignorance is not censorship and is not wrong. Between those two extremes is an entire vista filled with shades of gray which I have not even mentioned. Just because I didn't mention them doesn't mean I don't believe they're there.
Read a little deeper into my example of your hypocritcal attitude that ended your first post and understand that your intended ignorance to any further responses is, in fact, a form a censorship, whether on an individual basis or larger scale. If you are not even willing to listen to a rebuttal, you have effectively censored the speaker. Get it? Some things are not so simple that they fall cleanly within your boundaries of definition. Censorship is one of them.
Censorship is never something that happens on an individual level. If it is, then the word is meaningless, because we censor everything every day. If my not turning to channel 4 for the evening news because I don't want to can be considered 'censorship', then what word should we use for book burning?
Censorship involves prohibition of speech. It has nothing to do with who listens, modulo cases where listening is made a crime. If somebody gets on his soapbox and preaches, but nobody listens to him because he's a blithering idiot, that is not censorship. Likewise, if I choose to ignore someone because I don't feel a conversation with this person is productive, that is not censorship. If the government say that listening to someone is subversive and will result in fines, jail time, or execution, that is censorship.
I never even made your imaginary threat to ignore a response. I simply said that a response would be pointless if the original poster couldn't understand the fundamental differences between the terms he was using. That doesn't mean I wouldn't read his reply. I am too egotistical to completely ignore replies to one of my posts....
If my 'bullying' were ignored, I would be annoyed. If I were the government, and my 'bullying' were ignored, the poster would go to jail or be fined.
And if you weren't so powerless?
If I weren't so powerless, something bad might happen to the original poster, which is exactly why censorship is so evil, and why things like the first amendment are so precious. The government is in a very unique position of being the only entity which can legally take people's property, time, or lives against their will. As such, the government must be uniquely restricted from using this power to hinder free speech. Since nobody else has these powers, the same restrictions are not necessary for other entities. The worst that I, private citizen, can do to somebody who annoys me with speech is ignore him, hate him, or yell at him. The worst that I, government representative under the first amendment, can do to this person is the same. The worst that I, government representative with draconian censorship laws behind me, can do to this person is quite a bit more.
If you can resist your affection for shiny things for a few months, you can simply forgo buying the cinematic release and go straight to buying the extended version. No wasted money, everything's right there, everything's good.
No, sorry, there may be small bits of philosophy in The Matrix which are interesting, but none of it is new, and most of it is just boring rehash thrown together without a lot of thought.
All of that silly stuff about what's real and what's not has been done better, both in fiction and nonfiction, for a long time. The Matrix just put a lot of guns and special effects around it so that people who don't normally read these kinds of things get sucked in, and the leave having discovered an entire new world. Unfortunately, they think that because the world is new to them, it must be new to everybody.
The Matrix was an excellent movie. Its sequels were total crap. The original Matrix was good because of its story and execution, not its philosophy. The other were not good stories told poorly, they were poorly-made stories told poorly.
If you want great action sequences and an interesting story, watch The Matrix. If you want to shake your head in sorrow at lost potential, watch the sequels. If you want fascinating philosophical questions in an interesting SF setting, read Philip K. Dick.
I find it hilarious that you chose to end your post with a single sentence that completely contradicts everything you had previously said. Isn't discouraging a response through an ineffectual attempt at intellectual bullying a form of censorship, mild though it may be?
No. Censorship is when someone tells you "If you say something I don't like, I will kill you or your family, or put you or them in jail, or take your possessions, or force you into exile, or make you poor."
This is exactly the same kind of idiot turn of phrase that the other post made. Secrecy is not censorship. "Don't reply until you get a clue" is not censorship. Censorship is prohibition of speech enforced with force of arms and law. To see the difference is very simple. If my 'bullying' were ignored, I would be annoyed. If I were the government, and my 'bullying' were ignored, the poster would go to jail or be fined.
I am against censorship. I am not against secrecy.
Secrecy is saying, "I do not wish to publish my personal information."
Censorship is the government telling you, "Publishing your personal information is illegal, and we will put you in jail if you do so."
Secrecy is fine. If the government wants to keep secrets, that's fine, up until the point where it uses censorship to do so. Keeping secrets with encryption, lockboxes, barbed-wire fences, and armed guards is fine. Keeping secrets by forbidding publication of material gathered from public sources is not fine.
Until and unless you understand the difference between secrecy and censorship, and how it is possible to be completely against one while accepting of the other, there is no point in responding.
You have to love right-wing reactionaries who absolutely must jump down the throats of anybody who even makes a statement that could be construed as a vague reference to the possibility of gun control.
Please read my post again. I did not, and will not, say anything about the constitutionality or correctness of gun control. I merely stated that "automatic assault rifles with clips that hold over ten rounds" is a completely objective criterion. Give the same gun to two completely different people with completely different backgrounds and they will come up with the same answer to the question, "Does this gun conform to this rule?" Whereas any censorship of speech necessarily comes from subjective criteria; it is inherent in the nature of speech. Subjective criteria are much more dangerous, because they can easily be twisted by the enforcers of the law.
Also, at the risk of starting a flame war, the first amendment is more important than the second. It is more important than the entire rest of the bill of rights combined. Without the right to speak out about injustice, none of your other rights are worth anything. Again, I'm not going to actually go into my position on gun control because that is completely off-topic, but given the choice between the two, I'd choose the first amendment over the second any day, any time, any place.
This is a straw man. We aren't talking about something that destroys all of humanity and can be built in someone's garage. There's no reason to believe that such a device could ever be created.
We aren't talking about hypothetical garage doomsday devices, we're talking about nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are very destructive, but they aren't doomsday devices. They also require an incredible amount of research and development to build, secrets or no secrets. The information in the article doesn't come from leaked secrets, it comes from things that were available at the time. Not only was the secrecy draconian, but it wasn't even effective. There are tremendous costs inherent in any nuclear weapons programs, and the costs associated with overcoming the overbearing secrecy surrounding will be a very tiny percentage of those costs. Not to say that we should give out complete designs to the world; there is an enormous difference between secrecy and censorship. Keeping things locked away is fine. Locking away what other people produce is not fine.
So my assumptions aren't what you claimed. My assumption is simply that a garage doomsday weapon is not possible. For any weapon which is actually physically possible, censorship will never be the appropriate option.
First, censorship is bad. Period. It is something where you can very easily and without any sort of a stretch apply the 'slippery slope' principle. As soon as you censor anything, you're well on the way to censoring everything. Unlike, say, automatic assault rifles with clips that hold over ten rounds, 'bad' speech is impossible to objectively define.
Second, the secrecy around the techniques for constructing nuclear weapons makes a lot of things secret as a byproduct, because of the incredible paranoia and perceived fear by the censors. To keep people from guessing the most secret techniques needed to construct a nuclear bomb, by extension you need to keep secret even the materials and quantities required for construction. From there, you have to make secrets out of a lot of what's involved in mining, refining, processing, and manufacturing. From there, it's very easy to do things like making accident statistics or radiation exposure documentation for the town where the reactor is secret.
It is also very easy to declare independently-created works as secrets, even though they were not derived from any government program. Imagine doing some heavy research in your local library, constructing a few tests, saying the wrong things to the wrong people, and shortly the FBI shows up and carts off all of your work. This has happened. In the article, they give the example of a member of the House who wrote a letter to the Department of Energy, asking some rather pressing questions about changes in their nuclear program. In their response, they said that not only were the responses secret, the very questions themselves were of a sensitive nature and were now classified. This very highest elected official was therefore not legally allowed to distribute these questions that only came from his own mind!
In the end, it comes down to something very simple. Freedom of speech is nearly an absolute, and it is also the most important freedom we have. Giving it up is foolish no matter what the reason.
This doesn't apply so much to things like MUTE, but BitTorrent is catching on as a replacement or simply a supplement for anything that you would traditionally download from someone's web site. For a group that survives off of donations or ancillary sales while providing enormous media files for free, such as Red vs Blue, BT provides an excellent way to reduce bandwidth use without inconveniencing their users. Such things could presumably be distributed via any P2P network, it's simply that BT integrates the best with the 'traditional' web site model. There's a ton of media out there which is free to distribute, and it's growing every day. Of course, I will admit that most P2P networks are mostly used for distributing copyrighted media without permission, but that's not to say there isn't a great potential for more legitimate uses.
I don't get it. Why did they sell it to him? You are not obligated to sell your property to anybody, no matter who it is or how much money they're offering.
I agree that the current system could stand some change. However, many people (and I felt the original post which I replied to was part of this) believe that patents in general are evil and should be eliminated. It is that sentiment which I was countering with my posts. I think patents are a bit too easy to get, and the Patent Office's attitude of "grant them all, let the courts sort them out" is terrible. But I believe that the basic idea is sound, and even the way things are now is preferable to eliminating patents altogether. It would be even better to fix the system, of course.
There's a difference between 'free' as in 'no cost', and 'free' as in 'no cost to the patient'. No matter how free medical care may be to SA's citizens, somebody is paying for that treatment. You can't simply legislate something's price. Economics always wins. It is a simple fact of life that various medical treatments require labor and materials to produce, which means that they will never be free as long as labor and materials are scarce.
And no, I don't consider South Africa to be particularly poor. According to the CIA world fact book, the per-capita GDP is $10,000. They also have a reputation for producing advanced weapons systems, and they had nuclear weapons at one point. So I rather doubt that SA is part of the set of nations that are 'economically deficient'.
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We have enough experience with direct-descent entries (all lunar returns were this way, as was Mars Pathfinder, probably others)
Minor nit, there were six lunar returns that were not direct-descent, namely Apollos 11, 12, and 14 through 17. Of course, they weren't automated....
I am a firm believer that no tap water is safe for human consumption
I mostly believe the opposite. Remember that before the invention of tap water, people drank out of rivers and streams that ran over lead and mercury deposits and had animals (and people) shitting in them. We can tolerate a good deal of crud in the stuff we consume.
That's not to say that pure water isn't preferred, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that tap water is unfit for human consumption altogether.
The concern over mother's milk is not completely without merit. There is no guarantee that the child will be exposed until he is older. There are lots of substances out there which are mostly harmless to adults, but harmful to children and babies. To take the first one off the top of my head, alcohol in moderation is fine for adults, but give it to a baby and you probably end up with developmental problems. Even chemicals which cause health problems in adults may be worse for the baby; slightly increased risk of cancer versus undeveloped brain, for example.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky has a rather horrifying subplot that revolves around exactly that idea. The Evil Thugs don't want to kill a certain Good Guy, and in fact they want to keep her nice, so whenever she finds out that the Evil Thugs are actually Evil, they stick her in the magic MRI and erase the memory.
This is strikingly similar to the stages of solving a computer problem.
1. "I don't have that problem, what are you talking about?"
2. "Where the hell is the problem? I can't find the damned problem!"
3. "Ok, maybe if I just change this, it will all go away."
4. "I hate life."
5. "It compiled, ship it!"
And very often, the solution is found sometime before you hit step 5. I think it's no coincidence that these are the same. Grief could be seen as a reaction to a problem which can't be solved. At this point, we don't know if this problem can be solved yet.
Actually, this is really the removal of a defect, not a kludge. Covering the external tank with an enormous amount of heavy insulation which is prone to come off in big chunks which are just dandy for knocking holes in things they happen to run into on the way down was a design mistake. Replacing the insulation with heaters is pretty much what they should have done in the first place, although I'll be the first to admit that it certainly didn't occur to me before. That is not to say that the system as a whole is good, but this is a very reasonable fix for a defect in the system.
Wow, this is the best evidence of moderators on crack I've seen all year.
The tanks that are referenced hold hydrogen and oxygen. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Both of these are really damned cold. The insulation serves two purposes. The primary purpose is to keep ice from forming on the outside of the tank from condensation. This ice would come off the tank in big hunks when the engines light off, which is bad. The secondary purpose is to keep the contents nice and cold. This is less important, because they keep themselves cold as their contents slowly boil off. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen are cheap, so losing a bit more from lack of insulation and some heaters is not such a big deal.
I agree that "It was designed before I was born" is not an interesting argument, if it stands alone. However, "It was designed before I was born" along with "and it still doesn't work right" is bad. It means that they have had twenty-five years to iron out the kinks in the system, and it still has massive, fatal problems. In that case, the "it's old, get rid of it" argument is a good one. It hasn't been fixed in twenty-five years, and a few more years into the future isn't going to help.
the S-II and the S-IVB worked absolutely perfectly (to my knowledge) throughout the Apollo program. (Almost--a single J-2 engine of the five on the S-II failed to ignite on Apollo 13. This alone had no impact on the mission, and certainly was the smallest issue that 13 faced.)
A small correction to an otherwise excellent post. The center engine failure on Apollo 13 was not failure to ignite, it was a premature shutdown. That in itself is not very interesting, but the reason why is. Both the first and second stages of Saturn were susceptible to a pogo effect, where vibrations in the structure could get into a feedback and shake things up quite a bit. Normally this wasn't too big of a problem; modifications were introduced to lessen the effect as the program went on, but even without the modifications there weren't much in the way of problems (aside from some things breaking in the payload during the launch of Apollo 6). But on Apollo 13's second stage, the pogo was particularly bad. It was a few seconds away from ripping the entire second stage to tiny pieces when the shutdown occurred. The vibration had started fuel sloshing around, which fooled a sensor into shutting the center engine down early, which stopped the pogo. I don't think this would have lead to a loss of the crew, but it certainly would have got their blood pumping, and of course the mission would have been completely scrapped. But it didn't blow up, and the launch went fine.
On the other side of things, Apollo 12 got hit by lightning on the way up. Twice. Aside from some electronics being reset and a whole bunch of near-heart attacks, the rocket just shrugged it off. And the shuttle's reaction to being launched when it's a tad too cold is to simply explode without warning. Sigh.
Snap at the bottom, get slung into space.
No, gets slung into a slightly different orbit. If it's worth the cost, you can recover it and put it back. Otherwise, you can put a new one up.
Snap in the middle, bottom falls down, top falls up.
Yes, and? The bottom part falls down and you lose it. The top part, again, goes into a different orbit, and then you have the same choice of recovering and reusing it, or putting a new one up.
For the "big asteroid counterweight to tension the cable design" at least, snap at the top, whole thing lays down along the equator.
No, the whole thing falls into the atmosphere, and all but the very last bit disintegrates and burns up on reentry. The elevator would have a very high tensile strength, which doesn't imply anything about its other strengths, or its behavior when subjected to extreme heating. It would vaporize like every other kind of material.
Worse case scenarios look about as bad as anything else with that much energy in it.
Absolute worst case scenario is that you lose the elevator and any cargo/people which were on it at the time. About as bad as the worst case scenario for every other way of getting things into space. With a projected cost of less than what the shuttle has cost us so far, I think it's a bargain.
You misunderstand. I do what I'm asked, and I don't make a mess of things. What I specifically don't do is anything 'above and beyond' what is asked. If there's a sign that says I need to take my laptop out of its bag, I take it out of its bag. If there is no sign, then I don't. Of course, when I get to the scanner, some guy is going to ask me to take it out anyway, at which point I do so. Same thing goes for shoes, belts, whatever. If something says I should remove it, I do. If I have to wait for a real live human being to ask me to remove it, I wait. The exception is my keys and other crap in my pockets, for whatever reason. I always take them out.
I respect the screeners. I do what I'm asked, and I don't dick around. I also don't say 'thank you' or make idle talk with them, because, well, they aren't forced to take the job either.
I'm not doing anything particularly remarkable for somebody on his first or second flight. The only difference is that I've flown a few hundred times in my life, and I mostly just pretend not to learn what makes the process go faster.
The screeners' job is not important, and the system is beyond 'not perfect'. The system is completely broken. Good security should accomplish two things: it should prevent the things we want it to prevent, and it should inconvenience people as little as possible. The current system is the complete, exact opposite. It inconveniences people as much as possible while still doing absolutely nothing to prevent anything that it is supposed to prevent. I wouldn't mind a bit of annoyance if I knew that it was actually stopping people from walking through with a bunch of explosives, but it's not. While I'm having to get to the airport three hours in advance to have a good chance of making my plane, anybody who wants to blow my plane up just has to spend a few extra minutes thinking about how to get around our completely useless security. We could easily eliminate 90% of the crap we have to go through, cut costs, and still end up with a safer system. But the thing is, people don't want real 'safe', they want the illusion of safety. They prefer waiting in line for hours and having security guards wand down grandmothers with metal detectors to anything that would actually be effective, because it makes them feel safer when the buckle their little seat belts and watch their little safety videos.
If the current airline security system were actually vaguely effective, I wouldn't be nearly as pissed with it as I am now.
One tip... Don't be "that guy" that slows everything down. While you're waiting in line take your change out of your pockets, take off that pimp chain, take your cell phone out of your pocket... Put all that stuff in your carry on before you're at the table.
Why the hell shouldn't I be "that guy" that slows everything down? I am not, in fact, the one slowing everything down anyway; the security people are. I don't see why I should go out of my way to make inconvenient, useless security work slightly more smoothly. The less smoothly it works, the better the chances are that somebody will wake up and overhaul our completely useless, broken system.
I hate almost every aspect of modern airline security. Just because I know it backwards and forwards doesn't mean I should be obligated to remove my frigging belt buckle without being asked. And while they're having me take it off and wanding me down for my trouble, I'll pass the time coming up with yet another dozen ways to bypass security and end up on the wrong side of the magic gate with a highly lethal object.
You misunderstood. I never said you claimed secrecy and censorship were equivalent. Another poster, a few posts up, said that. I was comparing your claim to his. They aren't the same, but they are equally misguided.
And, I'm sorry, but you are very wrong about censorship. Censorship takes on many more forms than simply through enforcement. Try not to look at it as though it were so black and white.
I have never stated or even implied that the issue is black and white. I have, however, only talked about the two extreme ends of the spectrum. That is, forceful government intervention is censorship and is wrong. Admonishing someone's ignorance is not censorship and is not wrong. Between those two extremes is an entire vista filled with shades of gray which I have not even mentioned. Just because I didn't mention them doesn't mean I don't believe they're there.
Read a little deeper into my example of your hypocritcal attitude that ended your first post and understand that your intended ignorance to any further responses is, in fact, a form a censorship, whether on an individual basis or larger scale. If you are not even willing to listen to a rebuttal, you have effectively censored the speaker. Get it? Some things are not so simple that they fall cleanly within your boundaries of definition. Censorship is one of them.
Censorship is never something that happens on an individual level. If it is, then the word is meaningless, because we censor everything every day. If my not turning to channel 4 for the evening news because I don't want to can be considered 'censorship', then what word should we use for book burning?
Censorship involves prohibition of speech. It has nothing to do with who listens, modulo cases where listening is made a crime. If somebody gets on his soapbox and preaches, but nobody listens to him because he's a blithering idiot, that is not censorship. Likewise, if I choose to ignore someone because I don't feel a conversation with this person is productive, that is not censorship. If the government say that listening to someone is subversive and will result in fines, jail time, or execution, that is censorship.
I never even made your imaginary threat to ignore a response. I simply said that a response would be pointless if the original poster couldn't understand the fundamental differences between the terms he was using. That doesn't mean I wouldn't read his reply. I am too egotistical to completely ignore replies to one of my posts....
And if you weren't so powerless?
If I weren't so powerless, something bad might happen to the original poster, which is exactly why censorship is so evil, and why things like the first amendment are so precious. The government is in a very unique position of being the only entity which can legally take people's property, time, or lives against their will. As such, the government must be uniquely restricted from using this power to hinder free speech. Since nobody else has these powers, the same restrictions are not necessary for other entities. The worst that I, private citizen, can do to somebody who annoys me with speech is ignore him, hate him, or yell at him. The worst that I, government representative under the first amendment, can do to this person is the same. The worst that I, government representative with draconian censorship laws behind me, can do to this person is quite a bit more.
If you can resist your affection for shiny things for a few months, you can simply forgo buying the cinematic release and go straight to buying the extended version. No wasted money, everything's right there, everything's good.
No, sorry, there may be small bits of philosophy in The Matrix which are interesting, but none of it is new, and most of it is just boring rehash thrown together without a lot of thought.
All of that silly stuff about what's real and what's not has been done better, both in fiction and nonfiction, for a long time. The Matrix just put a lot of guns and special effects around it so that people who don't normally read these kinds of things get sucked in, and the leave having discovered an entire new world. Unfortunately, they think that because the world is new to them, it must be new to everybody.
The Matrix was an excellent movie. Its sequels were total crap. The original Matrix was good because of its story and execution, not its philosophy. The other were not good stories told poorly, they were poorly-made stories told poorly.
If you want great action sequences and an interesting story, watch The Matrix. If you want to shake your head in sorrow at lost potential, watch the sequels. If you want fascinating philosophical questions in an interesting SF setting, read Philip K. Dick.
I find it hilarious that you chose to end your post with a single sentence that completely contradicts everything you had previously said. Isn't discouraging a response through an ineffectual attempt at intellectual bullying a form of censorship, mild though it may be?
No. Censorship is when someone tells you "If you say something I don't like, I will kill you or your family, or put you or them in jail, or take your possessions, or force you into exile, or make you poor."
This is exactly the same kind of idiot turn of phrase that the other post made. Secrecy is not censorship. "Don't reply until you get a clue" is not censorship. Censorship is prohibition of speech enforced with force of arms and law. To see the difference is very simple. If my 'bullying' were ignored, I would be annoyed. If I were the government, and my 'bullying' were ignored, the poster would go to jail or be fined.
You misunderstand, badly.
I am against censorship. I am not against secrecy.
Secrecy is saying, "I do not wish to publish my personal information."
Censorship is the government telling you, "Publishing your personal information is illegal, and we will put you in jail if you do so."
Secrecy is fine. If the government wants to keep secrets, that's fine, up until the point where it uses censorship to do so. Keeping secrets with encryption, lockboxes, barbed-wire fences, and armed guards is fine. Keeping secrets by forbidding publication of material gathered from public sources is not fine.
Until and unless you understand the difference between secrecy and censorship, and how it is possible to be completely against one while accepting of the other, there is no point in responding.
You have to love right-wing reactionaries who absolutely must jump down the throats of anybody who even makes a statement that could be construed as a vague reference to the possibility of gun control.
Please read my post again. I did not, and will not, say anything about the constitutionality or correctness of gun control. I merely stated that "automatic assault rifles with clips that hold over ten rounds" is a completely objective criterion. Give the same gun to two completely different people with completely different backgrounds and they will come up with the same answer to the question, "Does this gun conform to this rule?" Whereas any censorship of speech necessarily comes from subjective criteria; it is inherent in the nature of speech. Subjective criteria are much more dangerous, because they can easily be twisted by the enforcers of the law.
Also, at the risk of starting a flame war, the first amendment is more important than the second. It is more important than the entire rest of the bill of rights combined. Without the right to speak out about injustice, none of your other rights are worth anything. Again, I'm not going to actually go into my position on gun control because that is completely off-topic, but given the choice between the two, I'd choose the first amendment over the second any day, any time, any place.
This is a straw man. We aren't talking about something that destroys all of humanity and can be built in someone's garage. There's no reason to believe that such a device could ever be created.
We aren't talking about hypothetical garage doomsday devices, we're talking about nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are very destructive, but they aren't doomsday devices. They also require an incredible amount of research and development to build, secrets or no secrets. The information in the article doesn't come from leaked secrets, it comes from things that were available at the time. Not only was the secrecy draconian, but it wasn't even effective. There are tremendous costs inherent in any nuclear weapons programs, and the costs associated with overcoming the overbearing secrecy surrounding will be a very tiny percentage of those costs. Not to say that we should give out complete designs to the world; there is an enormous difference between secrecy and censorship. Keeping things locked away is fine. Locking away what other people produce is not fine.
So my assumptions aren't what you claimed. My assumption is simply that a garage doomsday weapon is not possible. For any weapon which is actually physically possible, censorship will never be the appropriate option.
RTFA, because this is fairly well covered there.
First, censorship is bad. Period. It is something where you can very easily and without any sort of a stretch apply the 'slippery slope' principle. As soon as you censor anything, you're well on the way to censoring everything. Unlike, say, automatic assault rifles with clips that hold over ten rounds, 'bad' speech is impossible to objectively define.
Second, the secrecy around the techniques for constructing nuclear weapons makes a lot of things secret as a byproduct, because of the incredible paranoia and perceived fear by the censors. To keep people from guessing the most secret techniques needed to construct a nuclear bomb, by extension you need to keep secret even the materials and quantities required for construction. From there, you have to make secrets out of a lot of what's involved in mining, refining, processing, and manufacturing. From there, it's very easy to do things like making accident statistics or radiation exposure documentation for the town where the reactor is secret.
It is also very easy to declare independently-created works as secrets, even though they were not derived from any government program. Imagine doing some heavy research in your local library, constructing a few tests, saying the wrong things to the wrong people, and shortly the FBI shows up and carts off all of your work. This has happened. In the article, they give the example of a member of the House who wrote a letter to the Department of Energy, asking some rather pressing questions about changes in their nuclear program. In their response, they said that not only were the responses secret, the very questions themselves were of a sensitive nature and were now classified. This very highest elected official was therefore not legally allowed to distribute these questions that only came from his own mind!
In the end, it comes down to something very simple. Freedom of speech is nearly an absolute, and it is also the most important freedom we have. Giving it up is foolish no matter what the reason.
But it is expensive. Having your multi-billion-dollar reactor destroyed in an earthquake or typhoon would be embarrassing.
This doesn't apply so much to things like MUTE, but BitTorrent is catching on as a replacement or simply a supplement for anything that you would traditionally download from someone's web site. For a group that survives off of donations or ancillary sales while providing enormous media files for free, such as Red vs Blue, BT provides an excellent way to reduce bandwidth use without inconveniencing their users. Such things could presumably be distributed via any P2P network, it's simply that BT integrates the best with the 'traditional' web site model. There's a ton of media out there which is free to distribute, and it's growing every day. Of course, I will admit that most P2P networks are mostly used for distributing copyrighted media without permission, but that's not to say there isn't a great potential for more legitimate uses.
I don't get it. Why did they sell it to him? You are not obligated to sell your property to anybody, no matter who it is or how much money they're offering.
I agree that the current system could stand some change. However, many people (and I felt the original post which I replied to was part of this) believe that patents in general are evil and should be eliminated. It is that sentiment which I was countering with my posts. I think patents are a bit too easy to get, and the Patent Office's attitude of "grant them all, let the courts sort them out" is terrible. But I believe that the basic idea is sound, and even the way things are now is preferable to eliminating patents altogether. It would be even better to fix the system, of course.
There's a difference between 'free' as in 'no cost', and 'free' as in 'no cost to the patient'. No matter how free medical care may be to SA's citizens, somebody is paying for that treatment. You can't simply legislate something's price. Economics always wins. It is a simple fact of life that various medical treatments require labor and materials to produce, which means that they will never be free as long as labor and materials are scarce.
And no, I don't consider South Africa to be particularly poor. According to the CIA world fact book, the per-capita GDP is $10,000. They also have a reputation for producing advanced weapons systems, and they had nuclear weapons at one point. So I rather doubt that SA is part of the set of nations that are 'economically deficient'.