Maybe you can answer a question, since you work in "the industry".
Why are hardware manufacturers so protective of their firmware and so often against hackers and projects like these? Why burn your chips so they can't be reprogrammed by outside parties?
Here's why I'm puzzled about this. Hardware manufacturers make money by selling their hardware. The software is pretty much just overhead, something they're required to make, but it's not what they actually sell. If your product gets a reputation for being easy to hack, upgrade with custom software, shoehorn into situations it wasn't originally designed for, etc., it seems to me that this would make it more popular and sell more units. Given these assumptions, I'd think that hardware manufacturers would make it as easy as possible to put custom software onto their devices, by making openly-available loaders and by providing enough documentation on the hardware to get things going.
Obviously something in my set of assumptions is wrong. Is there something I'm overlooking, or are hardware companies just stupidly jealous?
Explain why, exactly the airplane would crash, as I'm very curious to know.
The pilots wouldn't black out. The pressurization system can break down without armed assistance, and as such the pilots almost certainly have oxygen. Even in exposure to an instant pure vacuum, a person can remain conscious for at least fifteen seconds, more than enough time to put on a mask. At thirty-whatever-thousand feet with a few small holes in the airplane, they would have plenty of time. And it's unlikely that the pilot and copilot (and everybody else who happened to be aboard and able to fly that type of airplane) would both be hit in the crossfire.
If there's no problem of loss of control, then it comes to structural failure of some kind. A few small holes in the walls won't cause any trouble, of course. Perhaps if the shooters were extremely good and managed to puncture all of the multiple-redundant hydraulic systems. Ridiculous to consider, truly.
So I can't come up with a single mechanism where shooting a gun could crash an airplane, unless that gun were in the hands of somebody who used it to kill the right people and then crash the airplane himself. If a gun were used by people defending the airplane, there would be no crash.
Also, rulers would chosen by a sort of council... so their wish to become leaders would be irrelevant.
That doesn't follow. Any council will have things that it will look for in a potential leader. You will also get network effects; the council will tend to choose people who it knows. Thus, people who want to become leaders will attempt to demonstrate the traits that the council looks for, and will likewise attempt to get in the council's good graces. Nothing can prevent this.
Again, I don't agree. I think that democracy allows for the authority to rule to go into the hands of a few, those few who control the means by which to sway public opinion. Western democracies present false choices, which all lead to the same conclusion.
Public opinion is manufactured, it is not persuaded through rational discource. There are a handful of companies which control virtually all media enterprises in the US. Do you honestly think they will ever present an alternative viewpoint to the false dichotomy of republicans and democrats?
In this context, the important thing about democracies is not the choice they give (or don't give) people, it's how they distribute power into the hands of many people. No one person can make the rules, no one person has the ability to decide anything important by himself.
I will trust someone absolutely dedicated to his or her ideals long before I trust someone who panders to public opinion.
I don't trust either. However, I will trust somebody who is always hamstrung by his need to make four hundred other people agree with what he wants before I will trust somebody who merely has to sign something he writes for it to become law. It is this, not the process of elections, that make modern democracies work. Government works best when it's too busy fighting itself to do any damage to the country.
No, I in fact revere nature. It is unnatural to believe all men are equal or that all men should have an equal voice in government. It is unnatural to believe all men should be guaranteed a certain life free of suffering without conditions of any sort. It is unnatural to allow the endless reproduction of the human race.
You are putting beliefs in my mouth that I have never stated. I never said any of the things above, so I don't know why you put them there. I merely state the historical track record of your beliefs, which have always lead to an incredible amount of death, destruction, and eventual removal of all holders of those beliefs from power.
If you believe men are monsters, then nothing I say will convince you otherwise. By I submit that the ideals presented in western democracies and communist governments are corrupt, inhuman, and destructive to our legacy of civilization.
The only relevant "ideal" in a democracy is the distribution of power, and the near-impossibliity of any "great leader" arising with unlimited power. I don't believe that humans are barbarians, but I do believe that humans who are given absolute power over a nation will, more often than not, become completely corrupt with that power. This is easily seen from the historical record, again. Those countries which are least stable and most destructive, both to themselves and others, are those lead by a single person with absolute or near-absolute power. Those countries which are lead by a group, where the leader must convince others of his cause before he can act, are those which are stable, which advance the sciences, arts, and the human spirit.
Further, I believe this corruption inevitably leads to war. Unrestricted population growth will lead to war, and the forced homoginization of internationalism will cause even more violent resistence throughout the world.
Yes, because Fascism has such an excellent history of peace, doesn't it?
Can you name one long-term success of your system? Can you name a dozen?
I'm not familiar with all of these, so I can only commen
The problem is that for every person who wants to become a Philosopher King, there are ten people who want to become Undisputed Master of All. A good ruler does not want the job, and thus in nearly any setup he won't get the job. And note that it is impossible to tell the difference between somebody who really just wants to be a good king, and somebody who wants to take over the world but is willing to pretend to be nice until he's in power. The only way to avoid having an utterly corrupt person attain the position of absolute leader is to make the position unavailable. This is how Western Democracies work, no one person has any significant amount of power without requiring the assent or cooperation of a few dozen or hundred other people. If the position of President carried with it absolute authority, you can bet that within a few election cycles at most, some totally crazy fucker would get into power, running on a platform of "save the children", and would proceed to completely destroy the country.
Your fantasy land where everybody is honorable is just as removed from actual reality as the fantasy of Communists who say, if only it weren't for the evil Capitalists, everybody could come together and live in perfect Communism and everything would be happy. It's ignoring basic human nature.
I can name a dozen massive long-term successes of free markets and democracy without trying. Communists can't even name one long-term success of Communism. Can you name one long-term success of your system? Can you name a dozen?
Because the Palestinians refuse to become part of Israel. They want their own country, and they're willing to strap explosives to themselves and commit suicide in crowded areas to get it. One-sixth of Israel's population is Arab, non-Jewish, and if Palestinians really wanted to, they could all become Israeli citizens.
I don't see how Israel is your ideal state, though. The combat they engage in regularly is not very honorable. Either they're getting blown up without any kind of warning, or they're killing people with laser-guided weapons while their victims sit at home.
It seems pretty clear to me that your beliefs are due to your own ignorance. Israel does not exclude non-Jews from citizenship. I met several Israeli citizens who followed Islam, lived in tents, and rode camels! There aren't laws regulating cultural norms. Israel is a modern Western Democracy, meaning they have things like free speech, freedom of religion, and no racism at the legal level. Their regular wars are not by design but merely an unfortunate consequence of being surrounded by countries that hate them, and they would stop if they could. And depending on what you count as a "war", they haven't had one since 1973.
Israel is a beautiful place, but it's hardly Fascist. There is no strong leader, they have a parliament and a prime minister. Mandatory military service exists only because that's the only way for the country to stay alive. If it were no longer necessary it would be stopped. Aside from that, there is none of the state control of private affairs that is the hallmark of Fascism.
You're insane. Germany did not start the war out of a desire to unify the country, Germany started the war because its leader was totally fucking nuts, and he wanted to conquer the world. And it's not just a one-off thing. Vesting absolute power in a single person tends to drive that person totally fucking nuts and drive him to do insane things like get into three-front wars against countries with combined populations and industrial outputs many times greater than your own.
Great Britain and France declared war on Germany because Germany attacked and conquered Poland, a peaceful neighbor that can't be considered a part of a "unified Germany" in any way that makes sense. And Germany is not the only example, there's Italy, Japan, Spain, and a host of other minor Fascist nations. The net result has generally been a tremendous amount of destruction and death, and in most cases the near-total annihilation of the Fascist country. It's not just one example, it's every example of Fascism. This is not something that can be said of "modern liberalism".
Forget about the suffering; how can a philosophy that has always lead its followers to utter self-destruction be the path to enlightenment?
Any honest belief system must include recognition of what other people with similar beliefs have achieved or caused because of those beliefs.
Thus, Communists who believe the same things as the Russian revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, and their followers, who say, well, it just wasn't implemented well, while ignoring the tens of millions of murders that occured directly because of those beliefs, are being horribly dishonest.
Likewise, Fascists who ignore the fact that the most horrible war and many of the most horrible events in human history were directly caused by Fascism and Fascist beliefs are basically holding their hands over their ears while screaming "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Your beliefs don't match. Your principles don't result in your desired product of a utopia, they result in megadeaths and extreme suffering.
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
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I always find it astounding how people will readily admit that certain breeds of dogs have undeniable traits (Jack Russel Terriers are smart, Bloodhounds have highly sensitive noses, etc.) but then look at humans and refuse to admit any bio-level distinctions might be there.
You would find it much less astounding with the right amount of clue. Go to Africa, pick a group of chimpanzees living on a hill, then pick a group of chimpanzees living on a neighboring hill. There will be more genetic difference between those two groups of chimpanzees than you can find in the entire human race. We are pretty much the least genetically-diverse species on the planet. (This is not indicative of any breeding habits or anything, but merely a result of a very severe population bottleneck during an ice age.)
Did you know there are no known reliable genetic markers of race? You can't find some DNA at a crime scene and then decide the race of the assailant. Once you get past the skin, there are no racial differences; inside we're all pretty much the same, or perhaps it's better to say that we're all equally different.
There are, of course, certain internal things that are fairly racial. Sickle-cell anemia, for example, is very much an African disease. And Ashkenazi (sp?) Jews are known for certain genetic diseases. But these differences are extremely small, normally the result of a single defective gene. The idea of inheret genetic racial differences for something as unbelievably complex and environmentally-sensitive as intelligence is extremely silly.
In conclusion, using a horribly invalid comparison between dogs and humans to say that there must be large-scale genetic differences between different human races is intellectually dishonest.
Coming up with something better is the easy part. Eliminate 90% of airport security, leaving the 10% that's actually effective. 90% of what you go through is just for show anyway.
Of course, we can't do this, because then people would feel unsafe. And that is much, much worse than people being unsafe.
I wouldn't mind all the crap we have to go through if it were actually effective. What really, really bugs me is that waiting in line for hours, having to take off your shoes and be wanded, and having people sort through the contents of my carryon bags after they go through the scanners, doesn't do anything to improve security.
But, yes, we're talking past each other. You're saying, it's dumb to let some people "get out of line", we should all have to go through this crap. I'm saying, it's dumb to only let some people do it, when what the rest of is go through is ineffective anyway; let us all "get out of line".
Did you say the same thing about the telephone monopoly? After all, it wasn't oil, air, water, or food. Nobody died because of it. There were plenty of other choices.
If MS doesn't have a monopoly, their court case where they were convicted must have been pretty screwed up, then.
Plenty of people in the "real world" (as if we're in some fake world, hah) care about the MS monopoly. They hate the low quality of MS's offerings. They wish they could change. But they don't think they can because the interoperability isn't there, everybody uses MS, etc. etc.
Microsoft has been convicted of a crime, therefore it should be punished. I don't believe it putting random people in jail, but I do believe in putting criminals there. Likewise, it is possible to believe that MS should have terms dictated to it by the government, because of its anti-trust violations.
Yes, all the airports I've been in (and it's a lot) are the same. The thing I don't understand is that you somehow think that all of this moronic security is a good thing because it applies equally to everybody. It would be a lot better if it was unintrusive, effective security that didn't apply to anybody, and was therefore just as equal.
If they just hit everybody on the head with a lead pipe as they walked through the metal detector, that would be very equal, too.
Remember that EULAs have never been shown to have any legal standing. So far as we know, they're just a bunch of letters on a screen that don't affect anything meaningful. And I would wager this is likely to be the case, if and when they are ever tested in court; someone who may not even be the same person present in the courtroom clicking "Agree" to something that this person probably hasn't even read seems unlikely to attain the same legal standing as signing a physical contract.
I think I understood. My problem is that, in my eyes, your statement is roughly equivalent to saying, "Yes, the random public beatings are annoying, but at least everyone has an equal chance. Grandmothers, CEOs, leather-clad punks, all have the same chance to be chosen for a random public beating on any given day." Sure, it's equal, but it misses the fact that it shouldn't be happening in the first place.
The hydrogen naysayers always miss important real-world facts as well, though.
Such as the fact that burning oil is not 100% efficient. Also, burning oil in small engines tends to be quite a bit less efficient than burning oil in large engines.
People say, but hydrogen generation will result in inefficiencies, so it will always be less efficient than oil. They're looking at the wrong thing.
What you need to compare is the total loss in burning oil in your car engine with the total loss in burning oil in a large power plant, transmission losses to the hydrogen station, any losses from leaks in hydrogen transportation, and finally energy losses in generation and use of hydrogen.
It is not so obvious to me that hydrogen is necessarily an efficiency loss.
Another thing that needs to be considered is pollution. It's a lot easier to control pollution coming from a giant, centralized plant than it is to control pollution from an equivalent number of autonomous vehicles. Easier means cheaper. Even if hydrogen is less efficient, it must be less efficient to a point where the savings on pollution controls is less than the extra energy used, which I'm still not convinced is even there.
One other thing that is often missed is the fact that your power source is not an exclusive choice. It's possible to use oil and coal and nuclear and hydro and... you get the idea. Every joule of energy that ends up coming from one of the non-hydrocarbon sources is a bit of oil saved, it doesn't matter if it's not 100%.
r), I've come to the conclusion that it really is one of the last few great equalizing experiences. Everybody suffers through it, regardless of who you (think you) are, and everybody should.
"Everybody should"? That's scary.
Let me make a somewhat controversial statement: airport security is ineffective. Its purpose is to make people feel safe.
So let me back it up briefly. Random screenings are utterly useless. They're good for things like customs inspections, where the possibility of being screened is enough to stop many people from trying to carry illegal things through. But a terrorist on a suicide mission isn't going to fret a 10% chance of being stopped by security; if the absolute best thing that can happen to you is to be dead in four hours, why would you worry about jail? And anyone who flies somewhat often and is familiar with airports and how they work can come up with a dozen different ways to get various types of contraband onto the secure side of the airport.
Given that, it then follows that airport security exists to keep wackos and crazies (as opposed to "professional" terrorists) from taking over airplanes, and to make the public feel safe. However, this first goal can be accomplished with much, much, much less security and intrusiveness than what we currently have. The very large majority of the current inconvenience is there simply to make people feel safe.
It is ridiculous to say that everybody should suffer through a great deal of waiting, inconvenience, embarassing situations, and cost, just to make the large population of morons feel safe. I agree that it is something people should be forced to participate in more or less equally (the qualifier is there because people who act suspiciously or are carrying a large amount of TNT should not be treated the same as a five-year-old girl, for example). However, people should participate equally at a level much less than what they have to go through today. Our airports could be as safe as they are today (which means not particularly...) which 90% less hassle.
Jane in Austin, Texas, deleted this mail without forwarding it to any of her friends. Two days later she was involved in a head-on collision with a tractor trailer. She died after five days in the burn unit.
Bob in St. Louis, Missouri, forwarded this mail to sixteen friends. Five days later he won sixty million dollars in the lottery.
Unlike certain other well-known OSes, Mac OS X has, so far, gotten faster with each release. The Public Beta was horribly slow, 10.0 was barely usable, 10.1 was finally somewhat decent, 10.2 was very good, and now 10.3 is fast as all hell.
AltiVec really is the only significant difference between the G3 and the G4 anyway. There are some other minor differences, but the "bolt on altivec and call it a G4" story is not new.
All DRM is whacko (I think I meant to say "wacko" there, oops). As another poster quoted, trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. This is the kind of feature that sounds cool if you're the sender, and sucks really hard if you're the recipient. It's fun to be able to send things to people and not allow them to forward it, but it's very annoying to recieve e-mail that you can't forward. It's also stupid, because it's ineffective; if the bits exist in your machine, you can get them out.
(If this is posted multiple times, sorry, slashdot is giving me those error 500s again. "Not reproducable" my ass.)
What's the other major accident? Everyone knows about Chernobyl, of course. And everyone talks about TMI, but the fact is that there is not a single death traceable to TMI, and there was basically no release of anything harmful.
The actual proportion in France is 75% of electric power generation from nuclear. Another 15% is other "clean" power, such as hydro. The remaining 10% is evil dirty "burning stuff" electricity. I live pretty close to about five reactors here, and I feel pretty safe. It's preferable to having a bunch of coal plants dumping crap (including a fair amount of uranium!) into the air.
Nuclear really is the way to go. The only major accident, Chernobyl, was only possible due to the collusion of a horribly unsafe plant design, and moronic operators who decided to run an experiment (i.e. try something out that was way beyond the design specs) and turn off all of the safety systems while they were doing it. So, surprise surprise, the thing made a big KABOOM.
If coal plants had to live under the same radiation emission guidelines as nuclear power, they would never be able to operate. So I agree completely, get rid of nuclear phobias (in other countries, there doesn't seem to be a lot of it here!) and get rid of heavy pollution in electrical generation.
Anyway, this who "can't forward" thing might have nice side effects. I'd love it if documents on the hard drive could be flagged "do not forward", so my dad would stop pestering me about "what if I get a virus and it sends my Quicken files?"
Don't make the rest of us pay just because you or someone you know is dumb enough not to open attachments from people he doesn't know. My 82-year-old grandfather knows better than that. Some whacko DRM is not the solution. The solution is to stop being stupid, and stop using e-mail programs with large, numerous security holes.
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Maybe you can answer a question, since you work in "the industry".
Why are hardware manufacturers so protective of their firmware and so often against hackers and projects like these? Why burn your chips so they can't be reprogrammed by outside parties?
Here's why I'm puzzled about this. Hardware manufacturers make money by selling their hardware. The software is pretty much just overhead, something they're required to make, but it's not what they actually sell. If your product gets a reputation for being easy to hack, upgrade with custom software, shoehorn into situations it wasn't originally designed for, etc., it seems to me that this would make it more popular and sell more units. Given these assumptions, I'd think that hardware manufacturers would make it as easy as possible to put custom software onto their devices, by making openly-available loaders and by providing enough documentation on the hardware to get things going.
Obviously something in my set of assumptions is wrong. Is there something I'm overlooking, or are hardware companies just stupidly jealous?
Explain why, exactly the airplane would crash, as I'm very curious to know.
The pilots wouldn't black out. The pressurization system can break down without armed assistance, and as such the pilots almost certainly have oxygen. Even in exposure to an instant pure vacuum, a person can remain conscious for at least fifteen seconds, more than enough time to put on a mask. At thirty-whatever-thousand feet with a few small holes in the airplane, they would have plenty of time. And it's unlikely that the pilot and copilot (and everybody else who happened to be aboard and able to fly that type of airplane) would both be hit in the crossfire.
If there's no problem of loss of control, then it comes to structural failure of some kind. A few small holes in the walls won't cause any trouble, of course. Perhaps if the shooters were extremely good and managed to puncture all of the multiple-redundant hydraulic systems. Ridiculous to consider, truly.
So I can't come up with a single mechanism where shooting a gun could crash an airplane, unless that gun were in the hands of somebody who used it to kill the right people and then crash the airplane himself. If a gun were used by people defending the airplane, there would be no crash.
Also, rulers would chosen by a sort of council... so their wish to become leaders would be irrelevant.
That doesn't follow. Any council will have things that it will look for in a potential leader. You will also get network effects; the council will tend to choose people who it knows. Thus, people who want to become leaders will attempt to demonstrate the traits that the council looks for, and will likewise attempt to get in the council's good graces. Nothing can prevent this.
Again, I don't agree. I think that democracy allows for the authority to rule to go into the hands of a few, those few who control the means by which to sway public opinion. Western democracies present false choices, which all lead to the same conclusion.
Public opinion is manufactured, it is not persuaded through rational discource. There are a handful of companies which control virtually all media enterprises in the US. Do you honestly think they will ever present an alternative viewpoint to the false dichotomy of republicans and democrats?
In this context, the important thing about democracies is not the choice they give (or don't give) people, it's how they distribute power into the hands of many people. No one person can make the rules, no one person has the ability to decide anything important by himself.
I will trust someone absolutely dedicated to his or her ideals long before I trust someone who panders to public opinion.
I don't trust either. However, I will trust somebody who is always hamstrung by his need to make four hundred other people agree with what he wants before I will trust somebody who merely has to sign something he writes for it to become law. It is this, not the process of elections, that make modern democracies work. Government works best when it's too busy fighting itself to do any damage to the country.
No, I in fact revere nature. It is unnatural to believe all men are equal or that all men should have an equal voice in government. It is unnatural to believe all men should be guaranteed a certain life free of suffering without conditions of any sort. It is unnatural to allow the endless reproduction of the human race.
You are putting beliefs in my mouth that I have never stated. I never said any of the things above, so I don't know why you put them there. I merely state the historical track record of your beliefs, which have always lead to an incredible amount of death, destruction, and eventual removal of all holders of those beliefs from power.
If you believe men are monsters, then nothing I say will convince you otherwise. By I submit that the ideals presented in western democracies and communist governments are corrupt, inhuman, and destructive to our legacy of civilization.
The only relevant "ideal" in a democracy is the distribution of power, and the near-impossibliity of any "great leader" arising with unlimited power. I don't believe that humans are barbarians, but I do believe that humans who are given absolute power over a nation will, more often than not, become completely corrupt with that power. This is easily seen from the historical record, again. Those countries which are least stable and most destructive, both to themselves and others, are those lead by a single person with absolute or near-absolute power. Those countries which are lead by a group, where the leader must convince others of his cause before he can act, are those which are stable, which advance the sciences, arts, and the human spirit.
Further, I believe this corruption inevitably leads to war. Unrestricted population growth will lead to war, and the forced homoginization of internationalism will cause even more violent resistence throughout the world.
Yes, because Fascism has such an excellent history of peace, doesn't it?
Can you name one long-term success of your system? Can you name a dozen?
I'm not familiar with all of these, so I can only commen
The problem is that for every person who wants to become a Philosopher King, there are ten people who want to become Undisputed Master of All. A good ruler does not want the job, and thus in nearly any setup he won't get the job. And note that it is impossible to tell the difference between somebody who really just wants to be a good king, and somebody who wants to take over the world but is willing to pretend to be nice until he's in power. The only way to avoid having an utterly corrupt person attain the position of absolute leader is to make the position unavailable. This is how Western Democracies work, no one person has any significant amount of power without requiring the assent or cooperation of a few dozen or hundred other people. If the position of President carried with it absolute authority, you can bet that within a few election cycles at most, some totally crazy fucker would get into power, running on a platform of "save the children", and would proceed to completely destroy the country.
Your fantasy land where everybody is honorable is just as removed from actual reality as the fantasy of Communists who say, if only it weren't for the evil Capitalists, everybody could come together and live in perfect Communism and everything would be happy. It's ignoring basic human nature.
I can name a dozen massive long-term successes of free markets and democracy without trying. Communists can't even name one long-term success of Communism. Can you name one long-term success of your system? Can you name a dozen?
Because the Palestinians refuse to become part of Israel. They want their own country, and they're willing to strap explosives to themselves and commit suicide in crowded areas to get it. One-sixth of Israel's population is Arab, non-Jewish, and if Palestinians really wanted to, they could all become Israeli citizens.
I don't see how Israel is your ideal state, though. The combat they engage in regularly is not very honorable. Either they're getting blown up without any kind of warning, or they're killing people with laser-guided weapons while their victims sit at home.
It seems pretty clear to me that your beliefs are due to your own ignorance. Israel does not exclude non-Jews from citizenship. I met several Israeli citizens who followed Islam, lived in tents, and rode camels! There aren't laws regulating cultural norms. Israel is a modern Western Democracy, meaning they have things like free speech, freedom of religion, and no racism at the legal level. Their regular wars are not by design but merely an unfortunate consequence of being surrounded by countries that hate them, and they would stop if they could. And depending on what you count as a "war", they haven't had one since 1973.
Israel is a beautiful place, but it's hardly Fascist. There is no strong leader, they have a parliament and a prime minister. Mandatory military service exists only because that's the only way for the country to stay alive. If it were no longer necessary it would be stopped. Aside from that, there is none of the state control of private affairs that is the hallmark of Fascism.
You're insane. Germany did not start the war out of a desire to unify the country, Germany started the war because its leader was totally fucking nuts, and he wanted to conquer the world. And it's not just a one-off thing. Vesting absolute power in a single person tends to drive that person totally fucking nuts and drive him to do insane things like get into three-front wars against countries with combined populations and industrial outputs many times greater than your own.
Great Britain and France declared war on Germany because Germany attacked and conquered Poland, a peaceful neighbor that can't be considered a part of a "unified Germany" in any way that makes sense. And Germany is not the only example, there's Italy, Japan, Spain, and a host of other minor Fascist nations. The net result has generally been a tremendous amount of destruction and death, and in most cases the near-total annihilation of the Fascist country. It's not just one example, it's every example of Fascism. This is not something that can be said of "modern liberalism".
Forget about the suffering; how can a philosophy that has always lead its followers to utter self-destruction be the path to enlightenment?
Any honest belief system must include recognition of what other people with similar beliefs have achieved or caused because of those beliefs.
Thus, Communists who believe the same things as the Russian revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, and their followers, who say, well, it just wasn't implemented well, while ignoring the tens of millions of murders that occured directly because of those beliefs, are being horribly dishonest.
Likewise, Fascists who ignore the fact that the most horrible war and many of the most horrible events in human history were directly caused by Fascism and Fascist beliefs are basically holding their hands over their ears while screaming "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Your beliefs don't match. Your principles don't result in your desired product of a utopia, they result in megadeaths and extreme suffering.
I always find it astounding how people will readily admit that certain breeds of dogs have undeniable traits (Jack Russel Terriers are smart, Bloodhounds have highly sensitive noses, etc.) but then look at humans and refuse to admit any bio-level distinctions might be there.
You would find it much less astounding with the right amount of clue. Go to Africa, pick a group of chimpanzees living on a hill, then pick a group of chimpanzees living on a neighboring hill. There will be more genetic difference between those two groups of chimpanzees than you can find in the entire human race. We are pretty much the least genetically-diverse species on the planet. (This is not indicative of any breeding habits or anything, but merely a result of a very severe population bottleneck during an ice age.)
Did you know there are no known reliable genetic markers of race? You can't find some DNA at a crime scene and then decide the race of the assailant. Once you get past the skin, there are no racial differences; inside we're all pretty much the same, or perhaps it's better to say that we're all equally different.
There are, of course, certain internal things that are fairly racial. Sickle-cell anemia, for example, is very much an African disease. And Ashkenazi (sp?) Jews are known for certain genetic diseases. But these differences are extremely small, normally the result of a single defective gene. The idea of inheret genetic racial differences for something as unbelievably complex and environmentally-sensitive as intelligence is extremely silly.
In conclusion, using a horribly invalid comparison between dogs and humans to say that there must be large-scale genetic differences between different human races is intellectually dishonest.
Coming up with something better is the easy part. Eliminate 90% of airport security, leaving the 10% that's actually effective. 90% of what you go through is just for show anyway.
Of course, we can't do this, because then people would feel unsafe. And that is much, much worse than people being unsafe.
I wouldn't mind all the crap we have to go through if it were actually effective. What really, really bugs me is that waiting in line for hours, having to take off your shoes and be wanded, and having people sort through the contents of my carryon bags after they go through the scanners, doesn't do anything to improve security.
But, yes, we're talking past each other. You're saying, it's dumb to let some people "get out of line", we should all have to go through this crap. I'm saying, it's dumb to only let some people do it, when what the rest of is go through is ineffective anyway; let us all "get out of line".
Did you say the same thing about the telephone monopoly? After all, it wasn't oil, air, water, or food. Nobody died because of it. There were plenty of other choices.
If MS doesn't have a monopoly, their court case where they were convicted must have been pretty screwed up, then.
Plenty of people in the "real world" (as if we're in some fake world, hah) care about the MS monopoly. They hate the low quality of MS's offerings. They wish they could change. But they don't think they can because the interoperability isn't there, everybody uses MS, etc. etc.
Microsoft has been convicted of a crime, therefore it should be punished. I don't believe it putting random people in jail, but I do believe in putting criminals there. Likewise, it is possible to believe that MS should have terms dictated to it by the government, because of its anti-trust violations.
Yes, all the airports I've been in (and it's a lot) are the same. The thing I don't understand is that you somehow think that all of this moronic security is a good thing because it applies equally to everybody. It would be a lot better if it was unintrusive, effective security that didn't apply to anybody, and was therefore just as equal.
If they just hit everybody on the head with a lead pipe as they walked through the metal detector, that would be very equal, too.
Remember that EULAs have never been shown to have any legal standing. So far as we know, they're just a bunch of letters on a screen that don't affect anything meaningful. And I would wager this is likely to be the case, if and when they are ever tested in court; someone who may not even be the same person present in the courtroom clicking "Agree" to something that this person probably hasn't even read seems unlikely to attain the same legal standing as signing a physical contract.
I think I understood. My problem is that, in my eyes, your statement is roughly equivalent to saying, "Yes, the random public beatings are annoying, but at least everyone has an equal chance. Grandmothers, CEOs, leather-clad punks, all have the same chance to be chosen for a random public beating on any given day." Sure, it's equal, but it misses the fact that it shouldn't be happening in the first place.
The hydrogen naysayers always miss important real-world facts as well, though.
Such as the fact that burning oil is not 100% efficient. Also, burning oil in small engines tends to be quite a bit less efficient than burning oil in large engines.
People say, but hydrogen generation will result in inefficiencies, so it will always be less efficient than oil. They're looking at the wrong thing.
What you need to compare is the total loss in burning oil in your car engine with the total loss in burning oil in a large power plant, transmission losses to the hydrogen station, any losses from leaks in hydrogen transportation, and finally energy losses in generation and use of hydrogen.
It is not so obvious to me that hydrogen is necessarily an efficiency loss.
Another thing that needs to be considered is pollution. It's a lot easier to control pollution coming from a giant, centralized plant than it is to control pollution from an equivalent number of autonomous vehicles. Easier means cheaper. Even if hydrogen is less efficient, it must be less efficient to a point where the savings on pollution controls is less than the extra energy used, which I'm still not convinced is even there.
One other thing that is often missed is the fact that your power source is not an exclusive choice. It's possible to use oil and coal and nuclear and hydro and... you get the idea. Every joule of energy that ends up coming from one of the non-hydrocarbon sources is a bit of oil saved, it doesn't matter if it's not 100%.
r), I've come to the conclusion that it really is one of the last few great equalizing experiences. Everybody suffers through it, regardless of who you (think you) are, and everybody should.
"Everybody should"? That's scary.
Let me make a somewhat controversial statement: airport security is ineffective. Its purpose is to make people feel safe.
So let me back it up briefly. Random screenings are utterly useless. They're good for things like customs inspections, where the possibility of being screened is enough to stop many people from trying to carry illegal things through. But a terrorist on a suicide mission isn't going to fret a 10% chance of being stopped by security; if the absolute best thing that can happen to you is to be dead in four hours, why would you worry about jail? And anyone who flies somewhat often and is familiar with airports and how they work can come up with a dozen different ways to get various types of contraband onto the secure side of the airport.
Given that, it then follows that airport security exists to keep wackos and crazies (as opposed to "professional" terrorists) from taking over airplanes, and to make the public feel safe. However, this first goal can be accomplished with much, much, much less security and intrusiveness than what we currently have. The very large majority of the current inconvenience is there simply to make people feel safe.
It is ridiculous to say that everybody should suffer through a great deal of waiting, inconvenience, embarassing situations, and cost, just to make the large population of morons feel safe. I agree that it is something people should be forced to participate in more or less equally (the qualifier is there because people who act suspiciously or are carrying a large amount of TNT should not be treated the same as a five-year-old girl, for example). However, people should participate equally at a level much less than what they have to go through today. Our airports could be as safe as they are today (which means not particularly...) which 90% less hassle.
Jane in Austin, Texas, deleted this mail without forwarding it to any of her friends. Two days later she was involved in a head-on collision with a tractor trailer. She died after five days in the burn unit.
Bob in St. Louis, Missouri, forwarded this mail to sixteen friends. Five days later he won sixty million dollars in the lottery.
This got scored funny, but it actually has a very good point.
Without people trying weird unsafe yellowish funny-smelling water, people never would have invented beer. And what a sad world it would be today.
If everybody took that attitude, we'd still be living in caves and eating our meat cold. Oh, but we'd be safe!
Or you could get, I dunno, iTunes for Windows, also free.
Unlike certain other well-known OSes, Mac OS X has, so far, gotten faster with each release. The Public Beta was horribly slow, 10.0 was barely usable, 10.1 was finally somewhat decent, 10.2 was very good, and now 10.3 is fast as all hell.
AltiVec really is the only significant difference between the G3 and the G4 anyway. There are some other minor differences, but the "bolt on altivec and call it a G4" story is not new.
Yeah, because it's SO difficult to install a new version of Mac OS X. It'll probably take you at LEAST twenty minutes, oh the horror!
All DRM is whacko (I think I meant to say "wacko" there, oops). As another poster quoted, trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. This is the kind of feature that sounds cool if you're the sender, and sucks really hard if you're the recipient. It's fun to be able to send things to people and not allow them to forward it, but it's very annoying to recieve e-mail that you can't forward. It's also stupid, because it's ineffective; if the bits exist in your machine, you can get them out.
(If this is posted multiple times, sorry, slashdot is giving me those error 500s again. "Not reproducable" my ass.)
What's the other major accident? Everyone knows about Chernobyl, of course. And everyone talks about TMI, but the fact is that there is not a single death traceable to TMI, and there was basically no release of anything harmful.
The actual proportion in France is 75% of electric power generation from nuclear. Another 15% is other "clean" power, such as hydro. The remaining 10% is evil dirty "burning stuff" electricity. I live pretty close to about five reactors here, and I feel pretty safe. It's preferable to having a bunch of coal plants dumping crap (including a fair amount of uranium!) into the air.
Nuclear really is the way to go. The only major accident, Chernobyl, was only possible due to the collusion of a horribly unsafe plant design, and moronic operators who decided to run an experiment (i.e. try something out that was way beyond the design specs) and turn off all of the safety systems while they were doing it. So, surprise surprise, the thing made a big KABOOM.
If coal plants had to live under the same radiation emission guidelines as nuclear power, they would never be able to operate. So I agree completely, get rid of nuclear phobias (in other countries, there doesn't seem to be a lot of it here!) and get rid of heavy pollution in electrical generation.
Anyway, this who "can't forward" thing might have nice side effects. I'd love it if documents on the hard drive could be flagged "do not forward", so my dad would stop pestering me about "what if I get a virus and it sends my Quicken files?"
Don't make the rest of us pay just because you or someone you know is dumb enough not to open attachments from people he doesn't know. My 82-year-old grandfather knows better than that. Some whacko DRM is not the solution. The solution is to stop being stupid, and stop using e-mail programs with large, numerous security holes.