Well that might defeat the purpose of such a system. The whole idea behind rail launching anything is to make launches cheaper and simpler. Having to use a rocket stage, to get to low orbit, to rendezvous with an orbital track, to propel a vehicle to its intended orbit probably doesn't match either of those criteria. Besides, the assumption that we would be launching from a track surrounded by atmosphere is pretty unimaginative. The way I see something like this working would involve building more of a tube than a track. Keep the vehicle suspended in the tube using a crapton of really big magnets. Keep the tube vacated of any and all atmosphere (keep it near vacuum). Fire up concentric rings of more magnets that would steadily push the levitating vehicle forward in the tube faster and faster. Ensure that the tube is long enough to get the acceleration and velocity necessary to reach a decent LEO parking orbit and there you have mankind's very first spacegun. Now, would this project be simply or easy? Not at first, no. But if we start doing research with high speed track systems, and taking data regarding the very same aero forces that you mention now, then a few decades down the line we might be better suited to build a spacegun off the coast of California...or wherever.
Depends on what engine and what launch vehicle you are talking about actually. Some of the larger, multi-stage vehicles will cut off the main booster or first stage before achieving a true orbit. This is usually followed by such a short coast that the primary cut-off doesn't matter. The rest of the launch vehicle will continue gaining altitude until ignition of the second stage. This isn't always the case, but, like I said, it depends on the vehicle and payload you are flying.
The first amendment was phrased that way because it was the position of the founding fathers that "All men are created equal, and endowed with certain unalienable rights..." or something like that. The point is, the U.S. was supposed to be the first country to assume not that its citizens were special, but that humanity was special. The initial assumption the the United States was founded upon was that all men (humans) are created as equal beings with certain rights inherent to their existence. Thus, setting up the Bill of Rights to state the the government shall not do A, B, and C was intentional. It was written on the assumption that human beings, all human beings, have certain rights simply by being human beings. The United States government was supposed to be set up as an entity that would not tread upon any human being's rights, not just it's citizens. Now whether that ever was, is, or will be the case is an entirely different discussion.
why is this guy allowed to continue publishing under the guise of being a news source?
It's not that hard to figure out. He gets away with it because he has money. He has a metric fuckton of money. He has more money than you have posts void of capital letters. When you are as rich as Rupert Murdoch, people don't take action against you. It's not because it is impossible. It's not because they accept you. It's because if anyone does try to take action, like trying to get his news sources labeled as fiction, then all he has to do is sue and/or buy the entire movement into oblivion. I guarantee you that if there was a huge public push to get his crap labeled as fiction, and some political group took up that cause, and it gained any momentum, that same political group would start having all sorts of trouble, from legal issues to 'scandals' involving its core members. When you have as much money as Rupert Murdoch, you get to run the world, not the other way around.
The funny part is that the quickest and simplest way to undo a position of such power involves a simple high-energy delivery gadget that society fears and loathes these days.
That's when you stand up, spit the dirt in their eyes, kick 'em in the nuts, and bite their damn ear off. If you can't defend yourself in a fight, fight dirty.;)
Okay, well you certainly seem to have thought of a lot of things going wrong with the current society, but I think you might also be forgetting to check out some of the cooler stuff going on. As you said yourself, we probably will start tapping a lot of new energy sources again soon. As we move away from the ICE as the primary means of transportable energy, you will start to see the spacecraft and launch vehicle markets expand significantly (as an Aero engineer I certainly consider the problem of local, transportable energy to be the foremost restriction in access to the stars). If that field keeps progressing and picking up speed as it has for the last decade or so, I don't think access to other celestial bodies for resources will be out of our reach or impossible. That also helps solve the problem of land access (though arable land could be a problem, but greenhouses could help with that).
However, if you want to look at other fields, that's fine to. Lately, I've noticed there are a lot more folks questioning the activities of the most established food producers (Monsanto, HFCS pushers, etc.) It seems like food is becoming a topic of interest for a lot of the population of Western societies and, with that knowledge, hopefully they will start to see that there really is enough food to feed the poor countries, it's simply corruption preventing it.
If that's not enough, we also are making huge progress in the fields of medicine and cybernetics. It may be that in a few decades we don't even need traditional food anymore because we can power our bodies off of batteries. Or maybe we'll just download our brains into the internet. No, this stuff isn't right around the corner, but at the current rate of technological development, if we manage to put off a cataclysmic decline for another 75 years, we start to reach the realm of reality. At least, I think so.
But even given that some of this progress does not occur. Even if we do assume that, currently, we are riding the peak of the wave and it will come crashing back down soon, I still consider it disingenuous to term us the peak of human civilization. I would wager that both the Golden-Age Greeks and the top-dog Romans thought that they were the peak of human civilization as well. I would wager that Senators and Representatives sat around in those societies, as the Vandals and Goths raided the city streets around them, and bemoaned the decline of human civilization. Nonetheless, after a few hundred years of scrapping and scraping through the mud, we all climbed out of that shit hole again and rebuilt bigger and better than ever before. Just like then, if our civilization comes crashing down around us now, a few hundred years later some folks smarter than us will learn from our mistakes and build a society that makes our civilization look positively barbaric and filthy. So perhaps we were speaking about different things, but I stand by my position that we are nowhere near the peak of human civilization.
And yet, that didn't prevent me or four other kids in my college dorm rooms (in California) from getting our hands on a few and testing them on the dorm hall walls. The nice thing about having an over-extensive penal code is that it makes the majority of it unenforceable. The not nice thing is that when you garner enough attention to merit any kind of enforcement, chances are there is a law that you've already broken on the books.
It's funny that, despite all of the founding father's hard work and explicit instruction, we've basically been incapable of doing just that from day one....It appears that enlightened philosophy is no match for the will of the mobs.
Well, exactly. Like you said, Einstein knew which books to pull. That's what made him a genius (well, that and his awesome ability to think through things). Similarly, back in Einstein's day, any boob could pick up a book about field theory or Maxwell's equations at the time, skim through it, and reproduce nothing but snake oil bullshit when trying to discuss the contents of the book he just read. So, like Einstein back in the early 1900's having to use the right book, we in the early 2000's have to use the right search engine. If I want to learn something about mathematical operations, I probably won't Google it, I will probably pull a query in Wolfram-Alpha. If I need to do some shopping, I'll use Google. If I want a quick second-hand reference, I'll bugger through Wikipedia and check sources. If I need a scientific journal, I will use one of the dozens of journal indexes out there, and so on and so on.
Stupid folks have used reference material improperly no matter what medium the reference material is housed in. Gogle didn't introduce this phenomenon any more than the Dewey decimal system did.
Civilization has peaked. This is it. You and I are among the ultimate consumers at the pinnacle of production and consumption.
Well that view certainly is derived from a lack of imagination. You think civilization has peaked now? When it comes down to it, the resources that humans consume and use for existence are really nothing more than different forms of one basic thing: energy. Given enough energy, our species has the capability to do a hell of a lot more than we are currently doing. That said, if we were at a point in civilization where there were no more useful forms of energy available for utilization I would agree with you. Fortunately, that is nowhere near the case. We have high energy density heavy metals peppering the surface of our small planet. We have an awesome light-radio called the sun that has an enormous amount of energy for us to utilize. Hell, we even have the entire magma driven core of our own planet that could provide us with enough energy to generate food and resources for our civilization. The coolest part is that we already have the means of easily using these energy sources. And as we grow and get bigger, do you think there will be a lack of energy then? Well let's see, there is pretty much an uncountable number of stars in our galaxy. There is a huge energy source at the center of this galaxy. If we make it to the point that we can utilize that energy, well, then, we probably can utilize the energy from the thousands of other galaxies out there in space.
So you think human civilization peaked? I think you suffer from an extraordinary case of cynicism. We have more than enough energy and potential available to grow our society exponentially. The only thing holding us back is overly cynical and overly dark bullshit attitudes like yours.;)
Well that's a grand notion but I don't think landownership should be the qualifying principle by which we separate the ignorant, uneducated, unwashed masses and the elite, rational, intelligent voters as you put it. You see, I am a college graduate. I work as an engineer and earn a steady, respectable wage. I keep myself up to date and educated regarding various political and social issues. I read numerous sources of philosophy, thought, culture, etc. I travel and meet new people so that I can gain new perspectives on my older views. I serve jury duty when it is asked of me. I even help my older neighbors walk their groceries from their car to their condo door. I have a very vested interest in my community. I consider myself rational and educated.
However, I choose not to invest in landownership because, at this point in my life, I have other priorities that I like to invest in (like the education of my friends and family, and some other things). So, should I be restrained from voting? Am I one of those tipping voters that reacts emotionally to whatever the latest media circus issue is? Am I consistently manipulated by politicians to give them what they want? I highly doubt that's the case. I don't vote for politicians in either of the major parties. I hardly listen to any of the crap that politicians spew out of their own mouths (I prefer to research their actual votes and actions and such). Hell, I even make a point to pay my taxes on time, after triple checking everything, to know that I have fulfilled my duty as a responsible citizen. And yet, you would deprive me of my right to vote just because I think investing in real estate, at this point in time, is a losing bet for me?
I think your classification criteria needs revising.
IMO monitoring is OK, but make the information freely available to the public;
I have ten bucks that says you'll change that attitude the moment you live in a place overseen by an HOA. As one of the men I look up to put it best last night: "I have two rules in life. I try to keep things simple. I want people to know as little about me and what I do as possible. That helps out with the first rule."
I think the point you missed was the splinter groups that use a uncontrolled "peaceful" protest to spark conflict.
If a small splinter group can so easily turn a massive, peaceful protest gathering into a violent conflict, perhaps you shouldn't be concluding that the splinter group is on the fringe and is causing problems. Perhaps such circumstance is more indicative of the possibility that all of those "peaceful" protesters are really pissed off and passionate enough that violent demonstration doesn't really look that unappealing to them.
Welcome to the 7th wonder of the internet: self-propagating citations. They're almost as fun as self-propagating code, but more dangerous because they make misinformed people feel smug and more intelligent than they really are.
They did. This article is just a deception used to trick us pitiful meatbags into a self-inflated sense of importance. That we humans could actually teach the far superior robotic overlords anything, much less deception, is laughable.
Now excuse me while I go sacrifice a lemur to my Roomba to satiate it's lust for primate blood.
I'm just going to make a wager here, but if Dove actually does torch a bunch of Koran copies, I would bet that the number of US casualties in Afghanistan does not increase noticeably. Of course, we won't know that unless he actually does something, but since your position is founded upon the supposition that people will die, I am going to hinge my position on the supposition that people won't. I look forward to seeing what will be the actual outcome. Until then, however, taking principled positions based on "what-ifs" and "more-than-likely's" seems a bit silly.
If, of course, you have any evidence whatsoever that people will actually be harmed due to this action, I would be very interested in seeing it.
This is trolling, and all it will achieve is angering muslims who didn't have anything to do with 9/11 and help those who did
I was raised Christian. These days I don't follow any religion, but I used to be very adamant. When I was in high school (when I was an adamant Christian) a kid I knew burned a Bible in front of me to get a rise out of me. I laughed at him because I thought it was funny that he was destroying his only copy of some very beautiful poetry. I figured if he didn't want access to some of the impressive lyricism and imagery found in Psalms and Revelations, that was his loss.
What's my point? It's the muslims that are making the choice to be angered by such a stupid act. If someone wants to shit on whatever it is that pleases you, let them. As long as they aren't depriving you of your copy, it's their loss.
You shouldn't put up with it. Your religion should keep trying to out-crazy the other religion so that Matt and Trey can have more material for their South Park episodes, and the rest of us can just kick back and laugh.;)
Meh, we've been bankrupt for 22 years of my 24 year long life. So far that hasn't seemed to stop us from expanding things, spending money, and generally continuing with a broken economy. Now I don't know how my state does it, but we've managed to spend money that we don't have for the majority of my life so I don't see why that habit would change any time soon.
Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.
Only the Sith deal in absolutes....
I don't disagree with any of your points regarding private education, but stating that governments can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution seems like a pretty broad brush stroke. For instance, my dederal government bred both the FDA and EPA. While both agencies have their flaws, and waste, and inefficiency, I trust both of those agencies to regulate poison in my food and pollution in my water far more than any private business (for example, take note of the private business of selling radioactive isotopes as medicines and elixirs back in the late 1800's, early 1900's).
I would say that, while government certainly can breed tyranny, it can also do some pretty cool stuff (like, say, Apollo, interstate freeways, gas and electric utility regulation, etc.). Similarly, while private institutions can do some very impressive stuff (like computers, software, electronics, and making music) they can also breed oppression, destruction, and tyranny. Watch those generalities buddy.
My AMD Athlon 3.2 Ghz processor in my desktop
My old piece of crap Pentium driven Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop
My AMD Athlon 3.0 GHz media box attached to my computer
My roomate's AMD Celeron laptop
My parent's Intel Core 2 Duo driven Windows XP machine
My best friends Indel Core 2 Duo driven HP laptop
...
Am I missing any? Nah I don't think so. Granted I am running older hardware, but at least a couple of those setups should outperform a smartphone and, in the realm of Flash, they don't. I have to say Flash applications, movies, and games are the single most pain in the ass thing that I stumble across on the internet anymore. Do I still use them? Sure, most folks do. Do I yearn for the day when something less crappy that doesn't make my screen flash like a schizophrenic display unit gets set as a standard? You're damn right I do. Until then, I'll just keep taking more of the same...
Yeah, I have a brother-in-law in the Airforce. He and his friends are very big on first person shooters. Judging by all of the men and women in uniform that I've met (and yes, many of them have been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq) this is just going to make them raise their eyebrow and ask "WTF?" Though, it will probably come with at least one or two more expletives...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still looking for the local Pay and Spray.
Well that might defeat the purpose of such a system. The whole idea behind rail launching anything is to make launches cheaper and simpler. Having to use a rocket stage, to get to low orbit, to rendezvous with an orbital track, to propel a vehicle to its intended orbit probably doesn't match either of those criteria. Besides, the assumption that we would be launching from a track surrounded by atmosphere is pretty unimaginative. The way I see something like this working would involve building more of a tube than a track. Keep the vehicle suspended in the tube using a crapton of really big magnets. Keep the tube vacated of any and all atmosphere (keep it near vacuum). Fire up concentric rings of more magnets that would steadily push the levitating vehicle forward in the tube faster and faster. Ensure that the tube is long enough to get the acceleration and velocity necessary to reach a decent LEO parking orbit and there you have mankind's very first spacegun. Now, would this project be simply or easy? Not at first, no. But if we start doing research with high speed track systems, and taking data regarding the very same aero forces that you mention now, then a few decades down the line we might be better suited to build a spacegun off the coast of California...or wherever.
Depends on what engine and what launch vehicle you are talking about actually. Some of the larger, multi-stage vehicles will cut off the main booster or first stage before achieving a true orbit. This is usually followed by such a short coast that the primary cut-off doesn't matter. The rest of the launch vehicle will continue gaining altitude until ignition of the second stage. This isn't always the case, but, like I said, it depends on the vehicle and payload you are flying.
The first amendment was phrased that way because it was the position of the founding fathers that "All men are created equal, and endowed with certain unalienable rights..." or something like that. The point is, the U.S. was supposed to be the first country to assume not that its citizens were special, but that humanity was special. The initial assumption the the United States was founded upon was that all men (humans) are created as equal beings with certain rights inherent to their existence. Thus, setting up the Bill of Rights to state the the government shall not do A, B, and C was intentional. It was written on the assumption that human beings, all human beings, have certain rights simply by being human beings. The United States government was supposed to be set up as an entity that would not tread upon any human being's rights, not just it's citizens. Now whether that ever was, is, or will be the case is an entirely different discussion.
why is this guy allowed to continue publishing under the guise of being a news source?
It's not that hard to figure out. He gets away with it because he has money. He has a metric fuckton of money. He has more money than you have posts void of capital letters. When you are as rich as Rupert Murdoch, people don't take action against you. It's not because it is impossible. It's not because they accept you. It's because if anyone does try to take action, like trying to get his news sources labeled as fiction, then all he has to do is sue and/or buy the entire movement into oblivion. I guarantee you that if there was a huge public push to get his crap labeled as fiction, and some political group took up that cause, and it gained any momentum, that same political group would start having all sorts of trouble, from legal issues to 'scandals' involving its core members. When you have as much money as Rupert Murdoch, you get to run the world, not the other way around.
The funny part is that the quickest and simplest way to undo a position of such power involves a simple high-energy delivery gadget that society fears and loathes these days.
That's when you stand up, spit the dirt in their eyes, kick 'em in the nuts, and bite their damn ear off. If you can't defend yourself in a fight, fight dirty. ;)
Okay, well you certainly seem to have thought of a lot of things going wrong with the current society, but I think you might also be forgetting to check out some of the cooler stuff going on. As you said yourself, we probably will start tapping a lot of new energy sources again soon. As we move away from the ICE as the primary means of transportable energy, you will start to see the spacecraft and launch vehicle markets expand significantly (as an Aero engineer I certainly consider the problem of local, transportable energy to be the foremost restriction in access to the stars). If that field keeps progressing and picking up speed as it has for the last decade or so, I don't think access to other celestial bodies for resources will be out of our reach or impossible. That also helps solve the problem of land access (though arable land could be a problem, but greenhouses could help with that).
However, if you want to look at other fields, that's fine to. Lately, I've noticed there are a lot more folks questioning the activities of the most established food producers (Monsanto, HFCS pushers, etc.) It seems like food is becoming a topic of interest for a lot of the population of Western societies and, with that knowledge, hopefully they will start to see that there really is enough food to feed the poor countries, it's simply corruption preventing it.
If that's not enough, we also are making huge progress in the fields of medicine and cybernetics. It may be that in a few decades we don't even need traditional food anymore because we can power our bodies off of batteries. Or maybe we'll just download our brains into the internet. No, this stuff isn't right around the corner, but at the current rate of technological development, if we manage to put off a cataclysmic decline for another 75 years, we start to reach the realm of reality. At least, I think so.
But even given that some of this progress does not occur. Even if we do assume that, currently, we are riding the peak of the wave and it will come crashing back down soon, I still consider it disingenuous to term us the peak of human civilization. I would wager that both the Golden-Age Greeks and the top-dog Romans thought that they were the peak of human civilization as well. I would wager that Senators and Representatives sat around in those societies, as the Vandals and Goths raided the city streets around them, and bemoaned the decline of human civilization. Nonetheless, after a few hundred years of scrapping and scraping through the mud, we all climbed out of that shit hole again and rebuilt bigger and better than ever before. Just like then, if our civilization comes crashing down around us now, a few hundred years later some folks smarter than us will learn from our mistakes and build a society that makes our civilization look positively barbaric and filthy. So perhaps we were speaking about different things, but I stand by my position that we are nowhere near the peak of human civilization.
And yet, that didn't prevent me or four other kids in my college dorm rooms (in California) from getting our hands on a few and testing them on the dorm hall walls. The nice thing about having an over-extensive penal code is that it makes the majority of it unenforceable. The not nice thing is that when you garner enough attention to merit any kind of enforcement, chances are there is a law that you've already broken on the books.
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
- Princess Leia, A New Hope
but it is nice to avoid a witchhunt.
It's funny that, despite all of the founding father's hard work and explicit instruction, we've basically been incapable of doing just that from day one....It appears that enlightened philosophy is no match for the will of the mobs.
Well, exactly. Like you said, Einstein knew which books to pull. That's what made him a genius (well, that and his awesome ability to think through things). Similarly, back in Einstein's day, any boob could pick up a book about field theory or Maxwell's equations at the time, skim through it, and reproduce nothing but snake oil bullshit when trying to discuss the contents of the book he just read. So, like Einstein back in the early 1900's having to use the right book, we in the early 2000's have to use the right search engine. If I want to learn something about mathematical operations, I probably won't Google it, I will probably pull a query in Wolfram-Alpha. If I need to do some shopping, I'll use Google. If I want a quick second-hand reference, I'll bugger through Wikipedia and check sources. If I need a scientific journal, I will use one of the dozens of journal indexes out there, and so on and so on.
Stupid folks have used reference material improperly no matter what medium the reference material is housed in. Gogle didn't introduce this phenomenon any more than the Dewey decimal system did.
Civilization has peaked. This is it. You and I are among the ultimate consumers at the pinnacle of production and consumption.
Well that view certainly is derived from a lack of imagination. You think civilization has peaked now? When it comes down to it, the resources that humans consume and use for existence are really nothing more than different forms of one basic thing: energy. Given enough energy, our species has the capability to do a hell of a lot more than we are currently doing. That said, if we were at a point in civilization where there were no more useful forms of energy available for utilization I would agree with you. Fortunately, that is nowhere near the case. We have high energy density heavy metals peppering the surface of our small planet. We have an awesome light-radio called the sun that has an enormous amount of energy for us to utilize. Hell, we even have the entire magma driven core of our own planet that could provide us with enough energy to generate food and resources for our civilization. The coolest part is that we already have the means of easily using these energy sources. And as we grow and get bigger, do you think there will be a lack of energy then? Well let's see, there is pretty much an uncountable number of stars in our galaxy. There is a huge energy source at the center of this galaxy. If we make it to the point that we can utilize that energy, well, then, we probably can utilize the energy from the thousands of other galaxies out there in space.
;)
So you think human civilization peaked? I think you suffer from an extraordinary case of cynicism. We have more than enough energy and potential available to grow our society exponentially. The only thing holding us back is overly cynical and overly dark bullshit attitudes like yours.
That makes a bit more sense.
Well that's a grand notion but I don't think landownership should be the qualifying principle by which we separate the ignorant, uneducated, unwashed masses and the elite, rational, intelligent voters as you put it. You see, I am a college graduate. I work as an engineer and earn a steady, respectable wage. I keep myself up to date and educated regarding various political and social issues. I read numerous sources of philosophy, thought, culture, etc. I travel and meet new people so that I can gain new perspectives on my older views. I serve jury duty when it is asked of me. I even help my older neighbors walk their groceries from their car to their condo door. I have a very vested interest in my community. I consider myself rational and educated.
However, I choose not to invest in landownership because, at this point in my life, I have other priorities that I like to invest in (like the education of my friends and family, and some other things). So, should I be restrained from voting? Am I one of those tipping voters that reacts emotionally to whatever the latest media circus issue is? Am I consistently manipulated by politicians to give them what they want? I highly doubt that's the case. I don't vote for politicians in either of the major parties. I hardly listen to any of the crap that politicians spew out of their own mouths (I prefer to research their actual votes and actions and such). Hell, I even make a point to pay my taxes on time, after triple checking everything, to know that I have fulfilled my duty as a responsible citizen. And yet, you would deprive me of my right to vote just because I think investing in real estate, at this point in time, is a losing bet for me?
I think your classification criteria needs revising.
IMO monitoring is OK, but make the information freely available to the public;
I have ten bucks that says you'll change that attitude the moment you live in a place overseen by an HOA. As one of the men I look up to put it best last night: "I have two rules in life. I try to keep things simple. I want people to know as little about me and what I do as possible. That helps out with the first rule."
I think the point you missed was the splinter groups that use a uncontrolled "peaceful" protest to spark conflict.
If a small splinter group can so easily turn a massive, peaceful protest gathering into a violent conflict, perhaps you shouldn't be concluding that the splinter group is on the fringe and is causing problems. Perhaps such circumstance is more indicative of the possibility that all of those "peaceful" protesters are really pissed off and passionate enough that violent demonstration doesn't really look that unappealing to them.
Welcome to the 7th wonder of the internet: self-propagating citations. They're almost as fun as self-propagating code, but more dangerous because they make misinformed people feel smug and more intelligent than they really are.
For further information please see this article about Wikipedia. Also try Googling recursion.
They did. This article is just a deception used to trick us pitiful meatbags into a self-inflated sense of importance. That we humans could actually teach the far superior robotic overlords anything, much less deception, is laughable.
Now excuse me while I go sacrifice a lemur to my Roomba to satiate it's lust for primate blood.
I'm just going to make a wager here, but if Dove actually does torch a bunch of Koran copies, I would bet that the number of US casualties in Afghanistan does not increase noticeably. Of course, we won't know that unless he actually does something, but since your position is founded upon the supposition that people will die, I am going to hinge my position on the supposition that people won't. I look forward to seeing what will be the actual outcome. Until then, however, taking principled positions based on "what-ifs" and "more-than-likely's" seems a bit silly.
If, of course, you have any evidence whatsoever that people will actually be harmed due to this action, I would be very interested in seeing it.
This is trolling, and all it will achieve is angering muslims who didn't have anything to do with 9/11 and help those who did
I was raised Christian. These days I don't follow any religion, but I used to be very adamant. When I was in high school (when I was an adamant Christian) a kid I knew burned a Bible in front of me to get a rise out of me. I laughed at him because I thought it was funny that he was destroying his only copy of some very beautiful poetry. I figured if he didn't want access to some of the impressive lyricism and imagery found in Psalms and Revelations, that was his loss.
What's my point? It's the muslims that are making the choice to be angered by such a stupid act. If someone wants to shit on whatever it is that pleases you, let them. As long as they aren't depriving you of your copy, it's their loss.
How long do we have to put up with it?
You shouldn't put up with it. Your religion should keep trying to out-crazy the other religion so that Matt and Trey can have more material for their South Park episodes, and the rest of us can just kick back and laugh. ;)
Meh, we've been bankrupt for 22 years of my 24 year long life. So far that hasn't seemed to stop us from expanding things, spending money, and generally continuing with a broken economy. Now I don't know how my state does it, but we've managed to spend money that we don't have for the majority of my life so I don't see why that habit would change any time soon.
Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.
Only the Sith deal in absolutes....
I don't disagree with any of your points regarding private education, but stating that governments can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution seems like a pretty broad brush stroke. For instance, my dederal government bred both the FDA and EPA. While both agencies have their flaws, and waste, and inefficiency, I trust both of those agencies to regulate poison in my food and pollution in my water far more than any private business (for example, take note of the private business of selling radioactive isotopes as medicines and elixirs back in the late 1800's, early 1900's).
I would say that, while government certainly can breed tyranny, it can also do some pretty cool stuff (like, say, Apollo, interstate freeways, gas and electric utility regulation, etc.). Similarly, while private institutions can do some very impressive stuff (like computers, software, electronics, and making music) they can also breed oppression, destruction, and tyranny. Watch those generalities buddy.
Let's see, of my machines, flash sucks on:
...
My AMD Athlon 3.2 Ghz processor in my desktop
My old piece of crap Pentium driven Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop
My AMD Athlon 3.0 GHz media box attached to my computer
My roomate's AMD Celeron laptop
My parent's Intel Core 2 Duo driven Windows XP machine
My best friends Indel Core 2 Duo driven HP laptop
Am I missing any? Nah I don't think so. Granted I am running older hardware, but at least a couple of those setups should outperform a smartphone and, in the realm of Flash, they don't. I have to say Flash applications, movies, and games are the single most pain in the ass thing that I stumble across on the internet anymore. Do I still use them? Sure, most folks do. Do I yearn for the day when something less crappy that doesn't make my screen flash like a schizophrenic display unit gets set as a standard? You're damn right I do. Until then, I'll just keep taking more of the same...
Yeah, I have a brother-in-law in the Airforce. He and his friends are very big on first person shooters. Judging by all of the men and women in uniform that I've met (and yes, many of them have been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq) this is just going to make them raise their eyebrow and ask "WTF?" Though, it will probably come with at least one or two more expletives...