I think slashdot should start with the correct definitions, being a technical community and all: Sex is, Gender does. Second, Slashdot of all places should know that the two are correlations, not causations. And lastly, I'd like to believe that as a community that espouses scientific values and intelligent discourse, the answer should be obvious:
You can't.
Life is full of delicious ambiguity, and people assume that two polar opposites (male and female) have nothing in between. But life isn't like that. Life is a spectrum, and any place we draw the line is arbitrary -- not natural. Nature has its own laws, which are not the laws of men.
I actually don't disagree with you, however, you should know that all women are sex objects. That's just how our brains our programmed to help propagate the species. People have this bizarre notion that we're not animals. We are -- and we actually behave a lot more like other animals when it comes to mating. Did you know that a woman's voice goes up slightly when she's ovulating? Or that she emits a hormone that attracts men during this period? Or that her skin glows every so slightly? All studied and all true.
You know, when I look in the mirror I don't see a sex object -- I see a person. That crap about men being wired for sex is just an excuse to continue perpetuating male privilege at the expense of a woman's self-esteem. We're not animals, we're human beings. Wrapping old prejudices around new science doesn't make it any less offensive.
"...and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time."
*face palm* Once it's on the internet, it's going to stay there til the end of days. People with billions of dollars have hired armies of lawyers to try and scrub data off the internet. They haven't yet succeeded. Hell, entire countries have tried. And to prove it... bomb president 9/11 terrorist airplane communist republican from france sucking down molitav cocktails and banging gay senators. There. Archived for infinity.
What's missing is the reciprocated love, but casual sex takes that pain away. It's a medicine, not a replacement.
It's still like eating three snickers bars in a row. It doesn't take away the pain, it just covers it up for a few minutes until you realize you're still hungry for something and go for the next bad coping mechanism on the list.
...but it fills the hole and takes the suffering away. It's the medicine that heals.
Having meaningless sex doesn't heal, it just obscures the real problem -- meaningless sex isn't real different from masturbation.
And please, don't condescend to me. You're way out of your depth here. You clearly do not understand how men work. We're built fundamentally differently from girls when it comes to emotions. What the emotional world looks like to you has no relation to how it is for guys.
I should apologize for advising people to build mutually empowering and beneficial long-term relationships instead of one night stands? I do have a good grasp on what the "emotional world" of the average guy looks like -- it's mostly a desolate wasteland of drinking buddies, hobbies that long ago lost their luster, and filled with cliched advice from so-called friends and coworkers. They're lucky if they've got that one guy-friend who they can be vulnerable to and trust not to rake their masculinity over the coals for doing so. The end result? When a man's heart breaks, it's not the quiet little death that us girls experience -- it's a suicidal plunge into darkness that takes years, sometimes decades, to repair. I've seen too many nice guys fall apart in the worst ways possible from a broken heart and never fully heal from it... and it's because of crap like what you're saying -- they try for years and years to fill that hole with sex, but it doesn't work and they feel miserable and long for a girl that'll respect and cherish them... But by the time they realize that, every woman in his life has run away for fear of being turned into a sex object. It's a stupid cycle of self-harm.
My question is why you need a vacuum tube in a vacuum?
You're laboring under the idea that space is empty. But it's not, and throwing highly charged particles around (required for RF transmission) is going to attract the wrong kind of folk to the party. -_-
You idiot... If you can't feel pain you can't learn. Adversity breeds character, but it also breeds common sense. People who can't feel pain have to be very careful because they won't know they're hurting themselves -- they will happily hold on to a burning-hot sauce pan and have no idea that in the process of making eggs they've just caused 3rd degree burns on their hand.
Besides, if you ever want to see the kind of damage not being able to feel pain can do -- go visit the hospital and head up to the department labeled "Chemical Dependency". You'll have a hundred new reasons to treasure your pain receptors after that...
Those are the two things I applied a year ago (and am still applying) to get over a broken heart. I left my country, started travelling and kept travelling, and have shagged lots of different lovely girls along the way. It really works. And I've met some great people.
Oh isn't this typical! Someone says they're hurting because they've lost the one they love and the answer is "Yeah, I'd miss the sex too." A broken heart doesn't come from a lack of nookie you insensitive bastard. It comes from the gut-wrenching experience of having invested months or years into a relationship that suddenly ends. And usually because of that kind of investment, the other relationships in that person's life have suffered neglect to maintain the romantic one. So it's a double-whammy -- not only are they suddenly alone, but everyone they used to know is either gone or distant to boot. It's not just the rejection of a former lover that hurts, its waking up from that and discovering you don't have any friends around you either -- possibly because your ex has them all now!
Sex is not going to fill that hole if you have any kind of heart, okay? Every man seems to think it will and they go on a massive f*ck-fest. It doesn't work. After their 15 seconds of fame is over, they're still lonely. And it's not just men either -- women with low self-esteem do the same thing. That hurt you feel late at night that makes you want to clutch a pillow and imagine someone holding you does not come from a lack of sex. It comes from a lack of love. And for that, there's only one thing to do; Start meeting new people. Not just people you're sexually attracted to (chances are you're too depressed anyway to be objective about this) -- I mean anyone that seems even remotely interesting. Reconnect with the human race. Don't take pills, don't buy a big sack of condoms, and don't hit the frozen dairy aisle -- get up, go outside, and don't come back until you've learned at least one new thing about someone you didn't know before. And find friends that don't say things like this idiot did -- sex is not everything. Any real friend will tell you this.
Your spouse, be it a king or a queen, will also point you into various directions over the course of the game.
Yeah, but I bet your "spouse" won't be able to be a same-sex ruler, and will be about as useful as Superfly. If it were realistic, your spouse would be cheating on you with a nearby realm's ruler, feeding them information, complaining that they never have an equal say in ruling the realm, and raising a bunch of children that want to kill you and take over. And the peasants will scream "Come see the violence inherent in the system!" everytime you try to get information out of them.
I knew a friend once that did skip-tracing. He tracked a guy down who changed his name, flew to the middle-east under an assumed identity and fake passport, dyed his hair, and more. His big downfall? He used a credit card once he landed -- which was under his old name. And this was using just information available to the credit bureaus to find him. Also... witness protection program? Yup... he found a few of them too. I bet I could have this guy nailed in about four hours if I called the police up and said I was a famous celebrity and he was defaming me on Twitter. Game over.
All he's proving is that Joe Average doesn't have much power. Big deal. Your neighbor isn't the one you should be worried about finding you anyway -- they lack the technical resources, skills, and moral flexibility to do so. Now, if he wants to do a REAL test of his privacy -- photoshop some photos of a male politician in a pink tutu and make disparaging comments about his sexual orientation. I bet you get a knock on your door within a day. -_-
If you're convinced that one man can't make any difference then you're way too cynical for me.
One man can't -- He needs friends too. It doesn't matter how special, unique, smart, or otherwise gifted you are, because if you act alone against a social construct you're going up against a group of people who have learned how to blend their talents and skills together -- and they will always be stronger than an individual, even a very powerful one. You need friends if you want to realize your potential. That's the one thing this individualistic society refuses to acknowledge. It keeps telling people they can make a difference all by themselves -- and all that succeeds in doing is making people miserable, hopeless, and easy to control.
It has to do with the corporate right to be unbound by any rules and have the freedom to stifle competition and destroy the market for their own profit.
The monopoly Comcast has was created BECAUSE of government interference. It's not fair to expect that the power extended to these companies doesn't have strings attached -- Sue all they want. The government and Comcast now share a responsibility for the market's well-being. It's not one or the other.
I think it's clear that our strength is technology and our weakness is the legal system. The legal system will always be in favor of those with deep pockets and have (at best) a tenuous grip on the ethical and moral considerations of the larger society. It's become so ineffective, insepid and innane as to become harmful to society -- Forget them. Laws do not govern moral conduct and never have. Integrity has no need of rules! But that's just a stop-gap. We need new technology -- and I think we need to go back to the basics to get there.
We need to bring the internet back as a peer-to-peer exchange, but to do that we're going to need to create protocols that are specifically designed to resist attack and interference from intermediaries. The original concept of the internet was based on a flawed model that the network could be trusted to deliver packets from point A to point B using the same logic throughout; It was assumed that the network would be managed by a central authority. This hasn't been the case for awhile, and now we are seeing an increasing desire to bend and break the original standards to serve commercial interests. The protocols must be redesigned to only present the minimal amount of information necessary -- the source and destination, and the actual payload encrypted and made tamper-evident.
To hell with demands that we have protocols with data exposed for "law enforcement", "national security" or "protecting the children" or any other specious argument. The ultimate expression of democracy is the free flow of information between citizens, and that's an ideal that comes ahead of all other considerations: We need to make a conscious and deliberate choice to accept the risks that come in embracing those early ideals, and not let the edge cases (terrorism, sexual predators, and elvis) sway us from the immense benefits of doing this. If the signal is to travel at all, it must travel freely.
If this doesn't come to pass then our future as a democratic society is at an end. Democracy is more important to me (and I hope you as well) than my personal safety or material comforts. A free and open communication medium between all members of society must be a universal, because it's the only way to maximize our individual and collective potentials. This is another step in a slow descent into a life we do not want, and we won't notice until it's too late how much we've lost.
If you can figure out when fatigued metal will break under a certain sheer force, that's approximately the same class of problem. It hasn't happened yet, AFAIK.
Because it certainly has not had any impact on the orgy of irresponsible spending of President Obama and his fellow Democrats.
Context failure on line 1: Orgies not related to root topic "Moon Trip". Parsing failure on line 1: "President Obama" is not inherited from the class "Democrats".
Face it, it isn't because we "DON'T" have the money its because NASA != votes.
Illegal operand on line 3: !=; Class "Organization" cannot be compared with class "Citizen". Compiler warning: All caps statement does not need added quotations for emphasis. I/O:/projects/moon_trip/John_F_Kennedy.h include file missing.
Please don't toss out "Iraq". That old throw away line was childish during Bush's years and just as tired now. Iraq had no bearing either.
Compiler warning: Iraq.h included but not used. Compiler warning: George_Bush.h included but not used.
It is no more difficult than that. There is no conspiracy.
Compiler warning: Illuminati.h contains errors and was not included.
This not because of Iraq/Afghanistan. This is not because of a bloated defense budget.
Compiler warning: Iraq.h alread declared. File I/O error: Afghanistan.h not found. File I/O error: Function bloat() included multiple times in budget/defense.h Compiler warning: budget/defense.h required for NASA.c
It simply is because NASA does not generate votes or control and as such does not qualify for a President or Congress not interested in science.
Parsing failure on line 9: "Control" declared without operand. Parsing failure on line 9: if/then branch always returns false. Parsing failure on line 9: Class "NASA" not inherited from "Voter".
Please don't confuse a President who TALKS about being for science, just understand the science politicians support is the science that polls well.
Parsing failure on line 10: "President" cannot be confused by members of the class "Voter." Parsing failure on line 10: "science politicians" is ambiguous. Add an apostrophe to politicians or prefix statement with a linking verb. Parsing failure on line 10: "polls well" is ambiguous. Did you mean "does well in the polls" ?
Uhhhh-- You're not from around here, are you? The non-geek answer is here. The geek-trying-to-not-be answer is here. And the real geek answer is... well, anything modded +5 on this thread that isn't "Funny".
We're in the middle of a recession that's one of the longest on record. They're projecting that the budget they have now will be the same fifty years from now, and everyone panics over this? Oh please. Just wait until the Chinese start firing rockets into space with people on them and design their own Apollo program. I bet legislators will look between the couch cushions then and find the spare cash they need to one-up them. I've never credited Congress with an abundance of brains, but pride? Oh, they got that in spades.
There are two facial expressions that have the same universal meaning in every culture, expressed with the emotions of joy and disgust. Everything else has a cultural-context to varying degrees, but if you eat something that tastes horrible -- that face you make will be understood by anyone.
Virtual property may have a tangible value in a few circumstances, which are mostly tech-dependent; But rather than list hard rules, let's give some examples where there's a real cost;
The Domain Name System (DNS). The system has the constraint that only certain combinations of words or letters are easily remembered. For example, "www.fjoi323r9023vvnd.com" fails the test, while "www.buy-my-cheap-useless-crap.com" is not. The limits are mostly due to limitations of language, human memory, and legal considerations (ex. trademark and copyright law). As a result of this -- a domain name can have a real, material cost.
IP Address space. ipv4 doesn't have enough available addresses to account for every device that can/will be/is connected to the internet. It's a finite resource. This is a technical constraint caused by early planning decisions and the cost of infrastructure upgrades. Once that limit is met, the laws of supply and demand state that a price-point will be established. The infrastructure won't be upgraded until the cost of those IP addresses exceeds the cost of the upgrade to a different protocol (ipv6) -- despite the fact that most equipment today is capable of transitioning. The real cost is administrative, not technical.
Examples where "virtual property" is entirely or largely artificial; MP3s. Videos. Multimedia. The cost here is in terms of licensing -- the cost of storing and using such intangibles has almost no economic cost. Examples where "virtual property" is explicitly limited to create a cost point; Comcast, bandwidth restrictions, etc.
The problem isn't whether virtual property exists, or if it should exist (or not). The problem is that technical limitations are often used to justify the creation of an artificial market -- and in many cases this isn't due to entrenched infrastructure costs or a marginal need to upgrade or change it to remove those limitations, but rather is rather a deliberate act in order to monetize something that otherwise would have a marginal cost of near zero.
I would argue that virtual property is valid and needs some legal controls; But that laws should be carefully crafted to disallow constraints being intentionally created to create artificial markets. Changes in copyright law would address most of this problem. Changes in how our utilities operate and forcing businesses to set aside a portion of their profits for infrastucture upgrades (and then do so!) would solve most of the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
I think slashdot should start with the correct definitions, being a technical community and all: Sex is, Gender does. Second, Slashdot of all places should know that the two are correlations, not causations. And lastly, I'd like to believe that as a community that espouses scientific values and intelligent discourse, the answer should be obvious:
You can't.
Life is full of delicious ambiguity, and people assume that two polar opposites (male and female) have nothing in between. But life isn't like that. Life is a spectrum, and any place we draw the line is arbitrary -- not natural. Nature has its own laws, which are not the laws of men.
It's the woman on the pole that's causing the premature evacuation
Riiiight. Always the woman's fault. You know, there's pills for that little personal problem.
I actually don't disagree with you, however, you should know that all women are sex objects. That's just how our brains our programmed to help propagate the species. People have this bizarre notion that we're not animals. We are -- and we actually behave a lot more like other animals when it comes to mating. Did you know that a woman's voice goes up slightly when she's ovulating? Or that she emits a hormone that attracts men during this period? Or that her skin glows every so slightly? All studied and all true.
You know, when I look in the mirror I don't see a sex object -- I see a person. That crap about men being wired for sex is just an excuse to continue perpetuating male privilege at the expense of a woman's self-esteem. We're not animals, we're human beings. Wrapping old prejudices around new science doesn't make it any less offensive.
You're lucky. I've seen a person too busy with a mouse.
Yeah, but I've never seen a mouse with force feedback. XD
"...and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time."
*face palm* Once it's on the internet, it's going to stay there til the end of days. People with billions of dollars have hired armies of lawyers to try and scrub data off the internet. They haven't yet succeeded. Hell, entire countries have tried. And to prove it... bomb president 9/11 terrorist airplane communist republican from france sucking down molitav cocktails and banging gay senators. There. Archived for infinity.
What's missing is the reciprocated love, but casual sex takes that pain away. It's a medicine, not a replacement.
It's still like eating three snickers bars in a row. It doesn't take away the pain, it just covers it up for a few minutes until you realize you're still hungry for something and go for the next bad coping mechanism on the list.
...but it fills the hole and takes the suffering away. It's the medicine that heals.
Having meaningless sex doesn't heal, it just obscures the real problem -- meaningless sex isn't real different from masturbation.
And please, don't condescend to me. You're way out of your depth here. You clearly do not understand how men work. We're built fundamentally differently from girls when it comes to emotions. What the emotional world looks like to you has no relation to how it is for guys.
I should apologize for advising people to build mutually empowering and beneficial long-term relationships instead of one night stands? I do have a good grasp on what the "emotional world" of the average guy looks like -- it's mostly a desolate wasteland of drinking buddies, hobbies that long ago lost their luster, and filled with cliched advice from so-called friends and coworkers. They're lucky if they've got that one guy-friend who they can be vulnerable to and trust not to rake their masculinity over the coals for doing so. The end result? When a man's heart breaks, it's not the quiet little death that us girls experience -- it's a suicidal plunge into darkness that takes years, sometimes decades, to repair. I've seen too many nice guys fall apart in the worst ways possible from a broken heart and never fully heal from it... and it's because of crap like what you're saying -- they try for years and years to fill that hole with sex, but it doesn't work and they feel miserable and long for a girl that'll respect and cherish them... But by the time they realize that, every woman in his life has run away for fear of being turned into a sex object. It's a stupid cycle of self-harm.
the only really intuitive interface, as some wit once remarked, is the nipple.
And yet I've never seen one person try to suckle a laptop pointer-nub.
They were too busy with the joystick. :P~
My question is why you need a vacuum tube in a vacuum?
You're laboring under the idea that space is empty. But it's not, and throwing highly charged particles around (required for RF transmission) is going to attract the wrong kind of folk to the party. -_-
Do The Evolution ;)
You idiot... If you can't feel pain you can't learn. Adversity breeds character, but it also breeds common sense. People who can't feel pain have to be very careful because they won't know they're hurting themselves -- they will happily hold on to a burning-hot sauce pan and have no idea that in the process of making eggs they've just caused 3rd degree burns on their hand.
Besides, if you ever want to see the kind of damage not being able to feel pain can do -- go visit the hospital and head up to the department labeled "Chemical Dependency". You'll have a hundred new reasons to treasure your pain receptors after that...
Those are the two things I applied a year ago (and am still applying) to get over a broken heart. I left my country, started travelling and kept travelling, and have shagged lots of different lovely girls along the way. It really works. And I've met some great people.
Oh isn't this typical! Someone says they're hurting because they've lost the one they love and the answer is "Yeah, I'd miss the sex too." A broken heart doesn't come from a lack of nookie you insensitive bastard. It comes from the gut-wrenching experience of having invested months or years into a relationship that suddenly ends. And usually because of that kind of investment, the other relationships in that person's life have suffered neglect to maintain the romantic one. So it's a double-whammy -- not only are they suddenly alone, but everyone they used to know is either gone or distant to boot. It's not just the rejection of a former lover that hurts, its waking up from that and discovering you don't have any friends around you either -- possibly because your ex has them all now!
Sex is not going to fill that hole if you have any kind of heart, okay? Every man seems to think it will and they go on a massive f*ck-fest. It doesn't work. After their 15 seconds of fame is over, they're still lonely. And it's not just men either -- women with low self-esteem do the same thing. That hurt you feel late at night that makes you want to clutch a pillow and imagine someone holding you does not come from a lack of sex. It comes from a lack of love. And for that, there's only one thing to do; Start meeting new people. Not just people you're sexually attracted to (chances are you're too depressed anyway to be objective about this) -- I mean anyone that seems even remotely interesting. Reconnect with the human race. Don't take pills, don't buy a big sack of condoms, and don't hit the frozen dairy aisle -- get up, go outside, and don't come back until you've learned at least one new thing about someone you didn't know before. And find friends that don't say things like this idiot did -- sex is not everything. Any real friend will tell you this.
Why was a skip tracer hunting people in witness protection? Maybe he didn't care too much about where his paycheck came from...
He did care--But people who enter the witness protection program aren't issued new social security numbers.
Your spouse, be it a king or a queen, will also point you into various directions over the course of the game.
Yeah, but I bet your "spouse" won't be able to be a same-sex ruler, and will be about as useful as Superfly. If it were realistic, your spouse would be cheating on you with a nearby realm's ruler, feeding them information, complaining that they never have an equal say in ruling the realm, and raising a bunch of children that want to kill you and take over. And the peasants will scream "Come see the violence inherent in the system!" everytime you try to get information out of them.
I knew a friend once that did skip-tracing. He tracked a guy down who changed his name, flew to the middle-east under an assumed identity and fake passport, dyed his hair, and more. His big downfall? He used a credit card once he landed -- which was under his old name. And this was using just information available to the credit bureaus to find him. Also... witness protection program? Yup... he found a few of them too. I bet I could have this guy nailed in about four hours if I called the police up and said I was a famous celebrity and he was defaming me on Twitter. Game over.
All he's proving is that Joe Average doesn't have much power. Big deal. Your neighbor isn't the one you should be worried about finding you anyway -- they lack the technical resources, skills, and moral flexibility to do so. Now, if he wants to do a REAL test of his privacy -- photoshop some photos of a male politician in a pink tutu and make disparaging comments about his sexual orientation. I bet you get a knock on your door within a day. -_-
If you're convinced that one man can't make any difference then you're way too cynical for me.
One man can't -- He needs friends too. It doesn't matter how special, unique, smart, or otherwise gifted you are, because if you act alone against a social construct you're going up against a group of people who have learned how to blend their talents and skills together -- and they will always be stronger than an individual, even a very powerful one. You need friends if you want to realize your potential. That's the one thing this individualistic society refuses to acknowledge. It keeps telling people they can make a difference all by themselves -- and all that succeeds in doing is making people miserable, hopeless, and easy to control.
It has to do with the corporate right to be unbound by any rules and have the freedom to stifle competition and destroy the market for their own profit.
The monopoly Comcast has was created BECAUSE of government interference. It's not fair to expect that the power extended to these companies doesn't have strings attached -- Sue all they want. The government and Comcast now share a responsibility for the market's well-being. It's not one or the other.
...if one company tries not to use evil then it just accumulates somewhere else.
A systemic problem requires a systemic solution.
Its times like these where the landowners and cities that own ground where Comcast's wires are going through should have...
This isn't a problem for any self-respecting mad scientist with a penchant for high energy experiments on shielded wiring.
We can only hope that they're one Administration too late to pull it off.
If you're counting on one man to save the world, you've been watching too much TV.
I think it's clear that our strength is technology and our weakness is the legal system. The legal system will always be in favor of those with deep pockets and have (at best) a tenuous grip on the ethical and moral considerations of the larger society. It's become so ineffective, insepid and innane as to become harmful to society -- Forget them. Laws do not govern moral conduct and never have. Integrity has no need of rules! But that's just a stop-gap. We need new technology -- and I think we need to go back to the basics to get there.
We need to bring the internet back as a peer-to-peer exchange, but to do that we're going to need to create protocols that are specifically designed to resist attack and interference from intermediaries. The original concept of the internet was based on a flawed model that the network could be trusted to deliver packets from point A to point B using the same logic throughout; It was assumed that the network would be managed by a central authority. This hasn't been the case for awhile, and now we are seeing an increasing desire to bend and break the original standards to serve commercial interests. The protocols must be redesigned to only present the minimal amount of information necessary -- the source and destination, and the actual payload encrypted and made tamper-evident.
To hell with demands that we have protocols with data exposed for "law enforcement", "national security" or "protecting the children" or any other specious argument. The ultimate expression of democracy is the free flow of information between citizens, and that's an ideal that comes ahead of all other considerations: We need to make a conscious and deliberate choice to accept the risks that come in embracing those early ideals, and not let the edge cases (terrorism, sexual predators, and elvis) sway us from the immense benefits of doing this. If the signal is to travel at all, it must travel freely.
If this doesn't come to pass then our future as a democratic society is at an end. Democracy is more important to me (and I hope you as well) than my personal safety or material comforts. A free and open communication medium between all members of society must be a universal, because it's the only way to maximize our individual and collective potentials. This is another step in a slow descent into a life we do not want, and we won't notice until it's too late how much we've lost.
If you can figure out when fatigued metal will break under a certain sheer force, that's approximately the same class of problem. It hasn't happened yet, AFAIK.
Because it certainly has not had any impact on the orgy of irresponsible spending of President Obama and his fellow Democrats.
Context failure on line 1: Orgies not related to root topic "Moon Trip".
Parsing failure on line 1: "President Obama" is not inherited from the class "Democrats".
Face it, it isn't because we "DON'T" have the money its because NASA != votes.
Illegal operand on line 3: !=; Class "Organization" cannot be compared with class "Citizen". /projects/moon_trip/John_F_Kennedy.h include file missing.
Compiler warning: All caps statement does not need added quotations for emphasis.
I/O:
Please don't toss out "Iraq". That old throw away line was childish during Bush's years and just as tired now. Iraq had no bearing either.
Compiler warning: Iraq.h included but not used.
Compiler warning: George_Bush.h included but not used.
It is no more difficult than that. There is no conspiracy.
Compiler warning: Illuminati.h contains errors and was not included.
This not because of Iraq/Afghanistan. This is not because of a bloated defense budget.
Compiler warning: Iraq.h alread declared.
File I/O error: Afghanistan.h not found.
File I/O error: Function bloat() included multiple times in budget/defense.h
Compiler warning: budget/defense.h required for NASA.c
It simply is because NASA does not generate votes or control and as such does not qualify for a President or Congress not interested in science.
Parsing failure on line 9: "Control" declared without operand.
Parsing failure on line 9: if/then branch always returns false.
Parsing failure on line 9: Class "NASA" not inherited from "Voter".
Please don't confuse a President who TALKS about being for science, just understand the science politicians support is the science that polls well.
Parsing failure on line 10: "President" cannot be confused by members of the class "Voter."
Parsing failure on line 10: "science politicians" is ambiguous. Add an apostrophe to politicians or prefix statement with a linking verb.
Parsing failure on line 10: "polls well" is ambiguous. Did you mean "does well in the polls" ?
Why exactly are we going to the moon again?
Uhhhh-- You're not from around here, are you? The non-geek answer is here. The geek-trying-to-not-be answer is here. And the real geek answer is... well, anything modded +5 on this thread that isn't "Funny".
We're in the middle of a recession that's one of the longest on record. They're projecting that the budget they have now will be the same fifty years from now, and everyone panics over this? Oh please. Just wait until the Chinese start firing rockets into space with people on them and design their own Apollo program. I bet legislators will look between the couch cushions then and find the spare cash they need to one-up them. I've never credited Congress with an abundance of brains, but pride? Oh, they got that in spades.
There are two facial expressions that have the same universal meaning in every culture, expressed with the emotions of joy and disgust. Everything else has a cultural-context to varying degrees, but if you eat something that tastes horrible -- that face you make will be understood by anyone.
Virtual property may have a tangible value in a few circumstances, which are mostly tech-dependent; But rather than list hard rules, let's give some examples where there's a real cost;
The Domain Name System (DNS). The system has the constraint that only certain combinations of words or letters are easily remembered. For example, "www.fjoi323r9023vvnd.com" fails the test, while "www.buy-my-cheap-useless-crap.com" is not. The limits are mostly due to limitations of language, human memory, and legal considerations (ex. trademark and copyright law). As a result of this -- a domain name can have a real, material cost.
IP Address space. ipv4 doesn't have enough available addresses to account for every device that can/will be/is connected to the internet. It's a finite resource. This is a technical constraint caused by early planning decisions and the cost of infrastructure upgrades. Once that limit is met, the laws of supply and demand state that a price-point will be established. The infrastructure won't be upgraded until the cost of those IP addresses exceeds the cost of the upgrade to a different protocol (ipv6) -- despite the fact that most equipment today is capable of transitioning. The real cost is administrative, not technical.
Examples where "virtual property" is entirely or largely artificial; MP3s. Videos. Multimedia. The cost here is in terms of licensing -- the cost of storing and using such intangibles has almost no economic cost. Examples where "virtual property" is explicitly limited to create a cost point; Comcast, bandwidth restrictions, etc.
The problem isn't whether virtual property exists, or if it should exist (or not). The problem is that technical limitations are often used to justify the creation of an artificial market -- and in many cases this isn't due to entrenched infrastructure costs or a marginal need to upgrade or change it to remove those limitations, but rather is rather a deliberate act in order to monetize something that otherwise would have a marginal cost of near zero.
I would argue that virtual property is valid and needs some legal controls; But that laws should be carefully crafted to disallow constraints being intentionally created to create artificial markets. Changes in copyright law would address most of this problem. Changes in how our utilities operate and forcing businesses to set aside a portion of their profits for infrastucture upgrades (and then do so!) would solve most of the rest.