I think you underestimate the CPU load of driving, or overestimate the computing resources that will be made available.
OTOH, perhaps a car could accurately estimate how fast it's CPU could let it drive, and higher priced cars could have fancier computers. That, of course, would increase the need for inter-car communication, which would put even more load on the low end models, so they'd need to slow down even more.
There's all sorts of possible futures out there. Some of them look quite familiar, from a distance. And those are the ones that people tend to head for. When they get there they are often rudely surprised.
Do they distribute the code? If not, then they aren't required to share it back.
For that matter, would you want it? It probably essentially duplicates the changes that the NSA made, which most people find too inconvenient to apply, and many of those who do apply, do it incorrectly. I, personally, want to be able to read the contents of my disk even when it's not bootable, so I don't have the NSA changes installed. (Well, not any that haven't made it into the main kernel.) But if I were more interested in security from outside observation, I'd have made a bunch of different choices. (As it is I only take basic measures, like avoiding the installation of flash and not enabling Java in web pages.)
The official UN definition of terrorism exempts governments from inclusion. I know that's not reasonable, but those in power write the laws. So neither the NSA nor the Mossad can be terrorists. For criminal...that probably depends on where you live. In the US I don't think you're a criminal unless you've been convicted by a US court, but I've never seen an official definition, so I'm not sure. Anyway, that would exempt both the NSA and the Mossad.
Species is defined on populations, not on individuals. If Kekaimalu bred with another wholphin, they might have a chance to establish a breeding population. If, however Kekaimalu didn't breed, then it wouldn't count at all. If it bred with either a dolphin or another false killer whale, then it would most probably just act as a means in interspecific gene transport. It's quite unlikely that it would establish a viable breeding population. But if they did, then it could result in a new species. (I don't claim that the edges of a species are sharply defined. In fact I have already mentioned "ring species", which rather disproves that model.)
FWIW, I doubt that the species could become fixed, because killer whales commonly eat dolphins. This would limit the potential for new individuals to be born. OTOH, I don't know about "false killer whales".
Also note that Tiglons (tiger, lion crossbreeds) can be produced in captivity, but do not seem to exist in the wild. And IIRC, they are not fertile. This same is quite likely of wholphins. As such, they would be as irrelevant to any definition of species as any other mule.
These groups *were* largely reproductively isolated. This doesn't require that they couldn't interbreed. Not when the world is large, and travel is slow, dangerous, and uncomfortable. (Did you know that travel and travail were the same word with the combined meaning until around the time of the railroad.) So the groups didn't have much chance to interbreed. Populations were SMALL, especially in the north, and small isolated populations experience lots of genetic drift. If we were a smaller animal, and not as given to roaming, there would probably have been several separate species of homo by this time. But we kept interchanging genes at sufficient speed to keep a single species. There isn't really sufficient evidence to claim that Homo Neanderthalis is a separate species from Homo Sapiens. There's provocative indications in both directions. And perhaps the Denisovians combined with the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons were a ring species. (Check out Herring gulls.) I.e, it could be that Cro-Magnon essentially couldn't interbred with Neanderthals, but the could both interbreed with Denisovians. And there are likely to be several other intermediate groups out there that just haven't yet been discovered. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. First you need to ask "On what grounds would you expect to have the evidence? And how reasonable is that expectation?"
The problem is that there *IS* no scientific definition of race, and there probably can't be. Species is a natural group (with fuzzy boundaries, of course). Race is not only artificial, about it's only use is political. And because it doesn't have a scientific definition, and people WANT to have definitions for words that they believe model the world, people tend to believe the political definitions. This DOES have social consequences, but the consequences aren't inherent in any racial differences. (Though being raised in a stressful environment does tend to cause epigenetic changes that can be inherited. These can probably be ameliorated, but we don't know how just yet. Or if you can manage to raise the descendants in a non-stressful environment after a few generations the epigenetic markers will decay and not be renewed. How to manage that with people rather than lab rats and mice isn't clear.)
Species is fairly simple: Two animal varieties are of the same species if, given a chance, they interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
Now this causes problems when you adopt a simple model, and then encounter ring species, like herring gulls. But it works fine for local populations. Just don't expect a global definition and it's ok.
Genus is a totally artificial construct created by people to make their theories simpler to describe. It doesn't have any natural validity, any more than green or blue does. Where do you draw the line, and what do you call turquoise? It may be an artificial grouping, but it's a useful one. You build a Genus out of species that can be traced back to a common ancestral species. That defines the grouping mechanism. And within the constraints of that grouping mechanism, you draw the genus boundaries wherever it suits you.
And yes indeed, the tree of life is much more complex. Viruses, e.g., can transfer genes between kingdoms, not just species. There are animals that have acquired plant genes. But this never happens to such an extent as to blur even species boundaries, much less genus boundaries.
Race, however, does not seem to be a useful category, unless you are primarily interested in hair styles or melanin. The other, less observable characteristics (e.g. blood type) do not appear to follow the same boundaries. I was, I'll admit, afraid to marry a black woman in my younger days, because I was afraid she would carry sickle cell anemia. That does seem to be a genuine association (though far from certain). But many Semites also carry that disease. Esp. the ones from North Africa. Because it's a useful survival trait in areas where malaria is endemic. So it's following an environmental boundary rather than a "racial" one.
That's not actually unlikely. And the same reasoning would show why Neanderthal mitochondria don't show up in modern humans.
In particular, it appears (or has appeared to a few anthropoligists several years ago) that Neanderthal women had a smaller birth canal that Cro-Magnon women, so if a normal Cro-Magnon infant were to attempt to be born to a Neanderthal woman, there would likely be a brith problem fatal to both the mother and the child. Going the other way around, however, should work. Neanderthal heads were slimmer than Cro-Magnon heads. And since mitochondria are only inherited along the maternal line, that would explain the absence of Neanderthal mitochondria in modern humans.
This may not be quite what you meant, but it's the way I think it happened.
You drastically overstate an otherwise reasonable case.
Yes, the US government has repeatedly betrayed it's citizens. That is a true statement. But we would have been much worse off if we had lost WWII. I'm much less convinced by the case for WWI. And the Civil War is also a mixture. The North basically stood for more centralized control than the South, but as the war progressed, the North also moved towards granting all races equal rights, which the South was opposed to. So at the start of the war I basically favor the South, but as it progresses my sympathies slide towards the North. Note, however, that the North was never in favor of equal rights in the terms that we mean them today. Also note that before the end of the war the government of the South had become as absolutist as that of the North. So the South gave up it's only real virtue to defend it's vices. That's pretty hard to support. There were, of course, economic reasons, and "traditional" reasons, and not all slaves had a worse life then the employees of northern factories. So it's a judgment call. But the position adopted by the South is, realistically, quite difficult to defend, especially towards the end of the war. They didn't really value their lack of central control, and that was their one moral advantage, and their claimed reason for starting the war.
Additionally, although the US government is basically unforgivably treasonous towards it's citizens, most other governments don't have any better history. There's something inherently corrupting about centralized accumulations of power being controlled by humans. I'm not saying anything against transformers. People have instincts that machinery doesn't possess. People have subtlety that mechanisms don't currently possess. Government may not be inherently bad, but only government run by people, as all historical examples have been. But I'm not sure. It could be that government is inherently bad, and what is needed is a distributed system of control, like a mesh network.
There isn't a single candidate running that I think qualified for office. And there are good reasons. Nobody sane would want the job, but would only do it as a duty. So those who are psychotically compelled to seek power are the only choices. This is true in nearly EVERY position of power, electable or not. Those who would do it as a duty do not have the same level of drive to achieve power as those psychotically driven.
Please note that when I say they are "psychotic" I'm not speaking of a clinically recognized disease. I mean that their motivations spring from irrational roots that I consider to be of a destructive nature. "Psychotic" isn't quite the correct meaning, but it's the closest of any word I know. I'd estimate that over half the population is psychotic in this sense in one area or another, but most only harm themselves, or at most a few people close to them. Those driven to seek power are viciously destructive to society at large, even without any malice, and malice isn't always absent.
I am planning on eventually deciding which candidate is least repulsive, but it's not going to be a pleasant task. I may settle for the one least likely to able to do damage, which means I'll be selecting from one of the minor parties. Clearly neither Obama nor Romney are qualified to even think about repairing the system.
The "natural state" of the market also doesn't include anyone doing much better than just scraping by.
For that matter, I challenge you to find EVER in ANY period of history a genuinely free market where the majority of the people were not on the edge of starvation. The only thing close in today's world are various "black markets" which depend for their operation on various gangs using illegal force. When such gangs become dominant, they are called either warlords or feudal baronies. And in such a case they don't allow anything even approaching a free market.
Calling something which has never existed natural is a perversion of the language. (FWIW, my suspicion is that even in the periods & places where it appears that a genuine free market existed, that appearance is due to lack of information. Even if it wasn't, these "free markets" generally excluded participation by foreigners...not that that was difficult, as the populations were so impoverished that there wasn't much profit to make anyway.
One trivial exception occurs on the frontier of the US in the period 1870-1880, where the markets in the undeveloped areas were largely free, and yet many of the people were not impoverished. (OTOH, many of them were so impoverished that they died of it.) This was basically because there was no government, so nobody could make rules. These markets only existed in small areas, where everyone knew each other, and there were clearly established dominance patterns. Calling it a free market seems a bit strange, though, when if you offered something for sale (or even if you didn't) and someone more powerful demanded it, you had to surrender it for whatever payment he was willing to make. It was, however, and unregulated market, except that the power of the strong over the weak was present. This made churches very important, and a community can exert power over an individual, even a powerful one. (Do you see a government starting to emerge?)
Also note that this was a brief transitory period, when the area was full of southern civil war veterans who had had their property confiscated, and their money rendered worthless.
It is reasonable to argue about the degree of regulation that should be imposed on a market. It's not reasonable to postulate a "free market" can call it natural. Natural is that the strong take what they want and the weak submit. (Saying this, I feel the need to emphasize that there are many different kinds of strength. Some forms act directly, other forms mobilize people in groups, other forms strike from the shadows. All are forms of strength.)
The problem is that the government is, itself, a monopoly. They monopolize the use of force, and various other things enabled by that.
I don't at all disagree with your analysis of the problem EXCEPT that you aren't including government as one of the abusive monopolies.
It's true that my analysis doesn't point to a nice solution. This doesn't make it incorrect. The government does not consider itself bound by the laws that it makes. Sometimes it specifically excludes itself, other times it just declines to enforce the laws against itself. This happens all up and down the spectrum, from crooked police to war making presidents. Even if the agents of government are punished, their punishment is a slap on the wrist compared to what a non-governmental agent would receive...unless such agent was working for another powerful player who had a deal (not necessarily explicit) with the government.
Please note that this is a structural flaw. When you combine it with common human tendencies, I do not see any solution. But I also don't see anything wrong with the analysis.
Sorry, but it needs to have an upper panel AND a lower panel, so I put one there. I, personally, prefer an upper panel. My wife would demand one.
You are redesigning the look of the screen, which is what I need to avoid doing, if I'm not to live with considerable flack, and continual requests for support.
I did look at Mate. (Not Cinnamon, I'll admit.) My conclusion was that it wasn't quite ready for prime time. Maybe by the time Debian stable stops supporting Gnome2 it will be. Maybe not. What I posted was based on current evaluations, because the future is hard to predict.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, use robot jammers (i.e., no operator required, so no loss to speak of when they get blown up) and booby trap them you you can't move them without them exploding. No need to hide them, just superglue them to the pavement in various unobtrusive places, and set them to start on a timer. Or on a wi-fi signal, but timer is probably better.
It's probably do-able, but I think the result would be more inconvenience than anything else. Everybody is just redirected to an alternate destination. So you'd be out a bunch of expense and the only benefit would be inconveniencing a lot of people. Now if you did several airports in the same general area at the same time, that WOULD be damaging. But it would also be a lot more difficult to carry out without getting caught ahead of time.
For encryption, the FAA holds the keys. It's not a perfect system, it won't stop all attacks. But it allows you to recognize unsigned packets, and it allows you to determine which issued key sent the invalid packets. (Only afterwards, unfortunately.) But you can pull key authentication if there's cause...like a plane being stolen. There *might* be too much time lag for that to be effective, but that depends on the attack vector. Actually, forget encryption. that doesn't buy you much, and it's expensive in bandwidth. But signing *is* important.
So. Signing is only a partial answer, but it IS a partial answer. Since each plane is required to have an FAA id, that can be a part of the key This allows decryption(?) to match the plain text. Encrypting the entire message rather than just signing it doesn't buy you much, and adds significantly to the bandwidth and computation requirements.
N.B.: The system needs to be as automatic as possible, but it also needs to be as simple as possible. And there needs to be a fallback fro when the system fails. (Probably redirect traffic to another airport, but even THAT requires communication. And those receiving the communication need to be able to verify that it's from the tower.)
Sorry, but my wife has no more trouble with Gnome2 than she has with other computer systems. So saying Gnome2 is for techies, and implying *only* for techies, is being stupid, or perhaps just lying. I'll admit she has trouble with thunderbird, but frankly, that program has a few persistent bugs. Modal dialogs that don't stay on top, e.g. (I suppose you could call that a Gnome2 problem..but I wouldn't.))
What she DOESN'T want is a redesigned interface. She learns how to do things by the positions that things are at on the screen, and if they move, she needs to learn all over again. So whenever I install an OS for her, it needs to be both stable and LTS. I wouldn't even consider either Unity or Gnome3. She would find them impossible, where I just find them ugly and hideously inflexible.
OTOH, I'm not sure what a good alternative would be. Both Xfce and LXDE have a problem with window title bars getting stuck up under the upper panel. This is difficult for *me* to deal with. She just couldn't. Possibly I should investigate fvwm. Or maybe she'd like KDE4 (I don't, but she might). But Gnome3 isn't even on the list.
He made sense until he jumped into fueling a starship. Only hydorgen fusion or anti-matter conversion are reasonable fuels for that level of energy need. Unless...
My personal favorite is a LOW speed LARGE spaceship. Something larger than James Blish's New York, but nowhere near as fast. It can't go fast, because it needs to scavenge interstellar materials as it goes. Small asteroids, comet heads, etc. By not going fast, it reduces it's energy needs considerably. But scavenging materials it picks up needed supplies en-route to where-ever. The purpose is the journey, not the arrival. When it encounters a large mass, say a small planet, it builds a new copy, and the population divides.
Fission provides enough power for that mode, but you need a *really good* closed ecology. And a better sociology than we've managed so far. (N.B.: This mode will depend on lasers for communication links to other humans, because large as the society I've proposed is, it's probably not large enough to maintain a technological civilization on its own (although AIs might change that requirement).
It's more complicated than that. A reliable supply that you don't need to fight for is worth a lot.
OTOH, IIUC extraction of Uranium from sea water is only marginally economically feasible. This could be improved in several ways. One way is by designing better reactors. Fast neutron reactors are frequently mentioned here, as they have the potential to burn their fuel down to safe essentially non-radioactive. But they are a trifle dangerous, as along the way they produce fuel that is quite radioactive. Still, if they live up to their promise, they might make seawater extraction viable even with current technology. Any improvements in extraction technology would, of course, only improve the economics.
OTOH, solar cells are getting cheaper faster than nuclear reactors are. And they don't come with the same associated dangers. They need improved ways to store the output for times when it's dark and you need energy. Current methods are bulky, expensive, or both. Still, these methods are used in some wind-farm systems, so they could be used by solar cells, too. But they all require either a centralized distribution system, or they add considerable overhead. (Batteries to back up the solar cells on my rooftop would have doubled the cost of they system. As they don't produce quite enough to satisfy our needs, that would have been foolish. I'd have needed a system twice the size of the current system to have enough excess capacity, and if you add in batteries that means the price has quadrupled.)
FWIW, I don't really like nuclear reactors. They aren't safe enough, and they aren't properly regulated ANYWHERE. Only wealthy corporations can afford to buy them, and they always seem to have enough political influence to avoid annoying safety regulations without significant penalty. Mind you this criticism only applies to the operational systems. The designs have different problems (of a related nature). The contractors who build them like expensive systems, but they don't like design changes. And they have also captured their regulators. This tends to result in obsolete systems being built with some safety measures ridiculously over-designed, and other crucial ones nearly ignored.
N.B.: I'm not an expert in the area, but I've listened to a few people who were. Don't ask me for specifics, ask an expert. I'd give you at best a half answer, and on some points I might have totally misunderstood what was meant. But the criticisms of the process appear to me quite solid.
Selection isn't addition. Adding genes from external sources inserted in non-standard places is as much of a change as a change in species. When you want to eat a new food from a different species, you test it carefully, Otherwise you'll eat a deadly nightshade because you like potatoes.
OK, that's a bit over the top oration. But the basic idea is correct, even if the degree of danger isn't. And the more likely problem is allergens than actual poison (if you can really draw a distinction). And it's quite likely that for any particular allergen, some people will be more sensitive than others. So testing is as hard as testing any other drug. (And, yes, I count GMO foods as being in the exact same category as drugs. Just because they also supply calories doesn't change the mode of operation for the rest of their characteristics.)
P.S.: Drugs. Yes, I count GMO foods as drugs. And some drugs are worthwhile, while others should be avoided, and others are useful for some people but not for others.
Given the lack of testing, I'm not sure that NOT being biased against GMO foods is particularly sane. You are beta-testing something that might kill you, though it probably won't even injure you. How much bias one should have is a reasonable matter for debate, however. I doubt that I'd pay $10/pound extra for potatoes that were non-GMO. My wife might. And it's been suggested that some "food allergies" are actually allergies to GMO ingredients. Not sure if I believe it, but I see no reason to doubt it, so I tend to give that belief the benefit of the doubt.
Think of GMO foods as beta testing on a large population of test subjects, that you don't monitor for adverse effects. If things work our right, there won't be any adverse effects. If there are, they can't prove it's because of your beta-testing. But if people CAN avoid GMO foods, all of a sudden you've divided the population into experimental subjects and a control group.
It wouldn't matter how perfectly the broken design was implemented. I haven't actually run into any bugs, but I find the *DESIGN* too atrocious to use. This is the same problem I had with KDE4, only much worse. KDE4 is actually usable. I've used it for a week or two before giving up. I didn't give up because of bugs. I didn't encounter any. I gave up because the DESIGN was bad. But it's not nearly as bad as the Gnome3 design. That one I haven't even been able to try for a week, because it's essentially unusable.
When my distro stops supporting Gnome2 (which I switched to when KDE3 stopped being supported), I'll switch to either Xfce, Mate, or, possibly, Cinnamon. Unless Trinity is available. If it is, I might choose that.
And saying that I can fix the problems with Gnome3 by using unsupported extensions is not as satisfactory answer. Particularly when it has been previously announced that support for extensions will be terminated in the future.
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I think you underestimate the CPU load of driving, or overestimate the computing resources that will be made available.
OTOH, perhaps a car could accurately estimate how fast it's CPU could let it drive, and higher priced cars could have fancier computers. That, of course, would increase the need for inter-car communication, which would put even more load on the low end models, so they'd need to slow down even more.
There's all sorts of possible futures out there. Some of them look quite familiar, from a distance. And those are the ones that people tend to head for. When they get there they are often rudely surprised.
Do they distribute the code? If not, then they aren't required to share it back.
For that matter, would you want it? It probably essentially duplicates the changes that the NSA made, which most people find too inconvenient to apply, and many of those who do apply, do it incorrectly. I, personally, want to be able to read the contents of my disk even when it's not bootable, so I don't have the NSA changes installed. (Well, not any that haven't made it into the main kernel.) But if I were more interested in security from outside observation, I'd have made a bunch of different choices. (As it is I only take basic measures, like avoiding the installation of flash and not enabling Java in web pages.)
The official UN definition of terrorism exempts governments from inclusion. I know that's not reasonable, but those in power write the laws. So neither the NSA nor the Mossad can be terrorists. For criminal...that probably depends on where you live. In the US I don't think you're a criminal unless you've been convicted by a US court, but I've never seen an official definition, so I'm not sure. Anyway, that would exempt both the NSA and the Mossad.
Species is defined on populations, not on individuals. If Kekaimalu bred with another wholphin, they might have a chance to establish a breeding population. If, however Kekaimalu didn't breed, then it wouldn't count at all. If it bred with either a dolphin or another false killer whale, then it would most probably just act as a means in interspecific gene transport. It's quite unlikely that it would establish a viable breeding population. But if they did, then it could result in a new species. (I don't claim that the edges of a species are sharply defined. In fact I have already mentioned "ring species", which rather disproves that model.)
FWIW, I doubt that the species could become fixed, because killer whales commonly eat dolphins. This would limit the potential for new individuals to be born. OTOH, I don't know about "false killer whales".
Also note that Tiglons (tiger, lion crossbreeds) can be produced in captivity, but do not seem to exist in the wild. And IIRC, they are not fertile. This same is quite likely of wholphins. As such, they would be as irrelevant to any definition of species as any other mule.
A worthy point, but an invalid one.
These groups *were* largely reproductively isolated. This doesn't require that they couldn't interbreed. Not when the world is large, and travel is slow, dangerous, and uncomfortable. (Did you know that travel and travail were the same word with the combined meaning until around the time of the railroad.) So the groups didn't have much chance to interbreed. Populations were SMALL, especially in the north, and small isolated populations experience lots of genetic drift. If we were a smaller animal, and not as given to roaming, there would probably have been several separate species of homo by this time. But we kept interchanging genes at sufficient speed to keep a single species. There isn't really sufficient evidence to claim that Homo Neanderthalis is a separate species from Homo Sapiens. There's provocative indications in both directions. And perhaps the Denisovians combined with the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons were a ring species. (Check out Herring gulls.) I.e, it could be that Cro-Magnon essentially couldn't interbred with Neanderthals, but the could both interbreed with Denisovians. And there are likely to be several other intermediate groups out there that just haven't yet been discovered. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. First you need to ask "On what grounds would you expect to have the evidence? And how reasonable is that expectation?"
The problem is that there *IS* no scientific definition of race, and there probably can't be. Species is a natural group (with fuzzy boundaries, of course). Race is not only artificial, about it's only use is political. And because it doesn't have a scientific definition, and people WANT to have definitions for words that they believe model the world, people tend to believe the political definitions. This DOES have social consequences, but the consequences aren't inherent in any racial differences. (Though being raised in a stressful environment does tend to cause epigenetic changes that can be inherited. These can probably be ameliorated, but we don't know how just yet. Or if you can manage to raise the descendants in a non-stressful environment after a few generations the epigenetic markers will decay and not be renewed. How to manage that with people rather than lab rats and mice isn't clear.)
Species is fairly simple:
Two animal varieties are of the same species if, given a chance, they interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
Now this causes problems when you adopt a simple model, and then encounter ring species, like herring gulls. But it works fine for local populations. Just don't expect a global definition and it's ok.
Genus is a totally artificial construct created by people to make their theories simpler to describe. It doesn't have any natural validity, any more than green or blue does. Where do you draw the line, and what do you call turquoise? It may be an artificial grouping, but it's a useful one. You build a Genus out of species that can be traced back to a common ancestral species. That defines the grouping mechanism. And within the constraints of that grouping mechanism, you draw the genus boundaries wherever it suits you.
And yes indeed, the tree of life is much more complex. Viruses, e.g., can transfer genes between kingdoms, not just species. There are animals that have acquired plant genes. But this never happens to such an extent as to blur even species boundaries, much less genus boundaries.
Race, however, does not seem to be a useful category, unless you are primarily interested in hair styles or melanin. The other, less observable characteristics (e.g. blood type) do not appear to follow the same boundaries. I was, I'll admit, afraid to marry a black woman in my younger days, because I was afraid she would carry sickle cell anemia. That does seem to be a genuine association (though far from certain). But many Semites also carry that disease. Esp. the ones from North Africa. Because it's a useful survival trait in areas where malaria is endemic. So it's following an environmental boundary rather than a "racial" one.
That's not actually unlikely. And the same reasoning would show why Neanderthal mitochondria don't show up in modern humans.
In particular, it appears (or has appeared to a few anthropoligists several years ago) that Neanderthal women had a smaller birth canal that Cro-Magnon women, so if a normal Cro-Magnon infant were to attempt to be born to a Neanderthal woman, there would likely be a brith problem fatal to both the mother and the child. Going the other way around, however, should work. Neanderthal heads were slimmer than Cro-Magnon heads. And since mitochondria are only inherited along the maternal line, that would explain the absence of Neanderthal mitochondria in modern humans.
This may not be quite what you meant, but it's the way I think it happened.
You drastically overstate an otherwise reasonable case.
Yes, the US government has repeatedly betrayed it's citizens. That is a true statement. But we would have been much worse off if we had lost WWII. I'm much less convinced by the case for WWI. And the Civil War is also a mixture. The North basically stood for more centralized control than the South, but as the war progressed, the North also moved towards granting all races equal rights, which the South was opposed to. So at the start of the war I basically favor the South, but as it progresses my sympathies slide towards the North. Note, however, that the North was never in favor of equal rights in the terms that we mean them today. Also note that before the end of the war the government of the South had become as absolutist as that of the North. So the South gave up it's only real virtue to defend it's vices. That's pretty hard to support. There were, of course, economic reasons, and "traditional" reasons, and not all slaves had a worse life then the employees of northern factories. So it's a judgment call. But the position adopted by the South is, realistically, quite difficult to defend, especially towards the end of the war. They didn't really value their lack of central control, and that was their one moral advantage, and their claimed reason for starting the war.
Additionally, although the US government is basically unforgivably treasonous towards it's citizens, most other governments don't have any better history. There's something inherently corrupting about centralized accumulations of power being controlled by humans. I'm not saying anything against transformers. People have instincts that machinery doesn't possess. People have subtlety that mechanisms don't currently possess. Government may not be inherently bad, but only government run by people, as all historical examples have been. But I'm not sure. It could be that government is inherently bad, and what is needed is a distributed system of control, like a mesh network.
There isn't a single candidate running that I think qualified for office. And there are good reasons. Nobody sane would want the job, but would only do it as a duty. So those who are psychotically compelled to seek power are the only choices. This is true in nearly EVERY position of power, electable or not. Those who would do it as a duty do not have the same level of drive to achieve power as those psychotically driven.
Please note that when I say they are "psychotic" I'm not speaking of a clinically recognized disease. I mean that their motivations spring from irrational roots that I consider to be of a destructive nature. "Psychotic" isn't quite the correct meaning, but it's the closest of any word I know. I'd estimate that over half the population is psychotic in this sense in one area or another, but most only harm themselves, or at most a few people close to them. Those driven to seek power are viciously destructive to society at large, even without any malice, and malice isn't always absent.
I am planning on eventually deciding which candidate is least repulsive, but it's not going to be a pleasant task. I may settle for the one least likely to able to do damage, which means I'll be selecting from one of the minor parties. Clearly neither Obama nor Romney are qualified to even think about repairing the system.
The "natural state" of the market also doesn't include anyone doing much better than just scraping by.
For that matter, I challenge you to find EVER in ANY period of history a genuinely free market where the majority of the people were not on the edge of starvation. The only thing close in today's world are various "black markets" which depend for their operation on various gangs using illegal force. When such gangs become dominant, they are called either warlords or feudal baronies. And in such a case they don't allow anything even approaching a free market.
Calling something which has never existed natural is a perversion of the language. (FWIW, my suspicion is that even in the periods & places where it appears that a genuine free market existed, that appearance is due to lack of information. Even if it wasn't, these "free markets" generally excluded participation by foreigners...not that that was difficult, as the populations were so impoverished that there wasn't much profit to make anyway.
One trivial exception occurs on the frontier of the US in the period 1870-1880, where the markets in the undeveloped areas were largely free, and yet many of the people were not impoverished. (OTOH, many of them were so impoverished that they died of it.) This was basically because there was no government, so nobody could make rules. These markets only existed in small areas, where everyone knew each other, and there were clearly established dominance patterns. Calling it a free market seems a bit strange, though, when if you offered something for sale (or even if you didn't) and someone more powerful demanded it, you had to surrender it for whatever payment he was willing to make. It was, however, and unregulated market, except that the power of the strong over the weak was present. This made churches very important, and a community can exert power over an individual, even a powerful one. (Do you see a government starting to emerge?)
Also note that this was a brief transitory period, when the area was full of southern civil war veterans who had had their property confiscated, and their money rendered worthless.
It is reasonable to argue about the degree of regulation that should be imposed on a market. It's not reasonable to postulate a "free market" can call it natural. Natural is that the strong take what they want and the weak submit. (Saying this, I feel the need to emphasize that there are many different kinds of strength. Some forms act directly, other forms mobilize people in groups, other forms strike from the shadows. All are forms of strength.)
The problem is that the government is, itself, a monopoly. They monopolize the use of force, and various other things enabled by that.
I don't at all disagree with your analysis of the problem EXCEPT that you aren't including government as one of the abusive monopolies.
It's true that my analysis doesn't point to a nice solution. This doesn't make it incorrect. The government does not consider itself bound by the laws that it makes. Sometimes it specifically excludes itself, other times it just declines to enforce the laws against itself. This happens all up and down the spectrum, from crooked police to war making presidents. Even if the agents of government are punished, their punishment is a slap on the wrist compared to what a non-governmental agent would receive...unless such agent was working for another powerful player who had a deal (not necessarily explicit) with the government.
Please note that this is a structural flaw. When you combine it with common human tendencies, I do not see any solution. But I also don't see anything wrong with the analysis.
Sorry, but it needs to have an upper panel AND a lower panel, so I put one there. I, personally, prefer an upper panel. My wife would demand one.
You are redesigning the look of the screen, which is what I need to avoid doing, if I'm not to live with considerable flack, and continual requests for support.
I did look at Mate. (Not Cinnamon, I'll admit.) My conclusion was that it wasn't quite ready for prime time. Maybe by the time Debian stable stops supporting Gnome2 it will be. Maybe not. What I posted was based on current evaluations, because the future is hard to predict.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, use robot jammers (i.e., no operator required, so no loss to speak of when they get blown up) and booby trap them you you can't move them without them exploding. No need to hide them, just superglue them to the pavement in various unobtrusive places, and set them to start on a timer. Or on a wi-fi signal, but timer is probably better.
It's probably do-able, but I think the result would be more inconvenience than anything else. Everybody is just redirected to an alternate destination. So you'd be out a bunch of expense and the only benefit would be inconveniencing a lot of people. Now if you did several airports in the same general area at the same time, that WOULD be damaging. But it would also be a lot more difficult to carry out without getting caught ahead of time.
I don't know if you can judge their real opinions and intent by their public statements. Lying to the public isn't only practiced by politicians.
For encryption, the FAA holds the keys. It's not a perfect system, it won't stop all attacks. But it allows you to recognize unsigned packets, and it allows you to determine which issued key sent the invalid packets. (Only afterwards, unfortunately.) But you can pull key authentication if there's cause...like a plane being stolen. There *might* be too much time lag for that to be effective, but that depends on the attack vector. Actually, forget encryption. that doesn't buy you much, and it's expensive in bandwidth. But signing *is* important.
So. Signing is only a partial answer, but it IS a partial answer. Since each plane is required to have an FAA id, that can be a part of the key This allows decryption(?) to match the plain text. Encrypting the entire message rather than just signing it doesn't buy you much, and adds significantly to the bandwidth and computation requirements.
N.B.: The system needs to be as automatic as possible, but it also needs to be as simple as possible. And there needs to be a fallback fro when the system fails. (Probably redirect traffic to another airport, but even THAT requires communication. And those receiving the communication need to be able to verify that it's from the tower.)
Sorry, but my wife has no more trouble with Gnome2 than she has with other computer systems. So saying Gnome2 is for techies, and implying *only* for techies, is being stupid, or perhaps just lying. I'll admit she has trouble with thunderbird, but frankly, that program has a few persistent bugs. Modal dialogs that don't stay on top, e.g. (I suppose you could call that a Gnome2 problem..but I wouldn't.))
What she DOESN'T want is a redesigned interface. She learns how to do things by the positions that things are at on the screen, and if they move, she needs to learn all over again. So whenever I install an OS for her, it needs to be both stable and LTS. I wouldn't even consider either Unity or Gnome3. She would find them impossible, where I just find them ugly and hideously inflexible.
OTOH, I'm not sure what a good alternative would be. Both Xfce and LXDE have a problem with window title bars getting stuck up under the upper panel. This is difficult for *me* to deal with. She just couldn't. Possibly I should investigate fvwm. Or maybe she'd like KDE4 (I don't, but she might). But Gnome3 isn't even on the list.
He made sense until he jumped into fueling a starship. Only hydorgen fusion or anti-matter conversion are reasonable fuels for that level of energy need. Unless...
My personal favorite is a LOW speed LARGE spaceship. Something larger than James Blish's New York, but nowhere near as fast. It can't go fast, because it needs to scavenge interstellar materials as it goes. Small asteroids, comet heads, etc. By not going fast, it reduces it's energy needs considerably. But scavenging materials it picks up needed supplies en-route to where-ever. The purpose is the journey, not the arrival. When it encounters a large mass, say a small planet, it builds a new copy, and the population divides.
Fission provides enough power for that mode, but you need a *really good* closed ecology. And a better sociology than we've managed so far. (N.B.: This mode will depend on lasers for communication links to other humans, because large as the society I've proposed is, it's probably not large enough to maintain a technological civilization on its own (although AIs might change that requirement).
It's more complicated than that. A reliable supply that you don't need to fight for is worth a lot.
OTOH, IIUC extraction of Uranium from sea water is only marginally economically feasible. This could be improved in several ways. One way is by designing better reactors. Fast neutron reactors are frequently mentioned here, as they have the potential to burn their fuel down to safe essentially non-radioactive. But they are a trifle dangerous, as along the way they produce fuel that is quite radioactive. Still, if they live up to their promise, they might make seawater extraction viable even with current technology. Any improvements in extraction technology would, of course, only improve the economics.
OTOH, solar cells are getting cheaper faster than nuclear reactors are. And they don't come with the same associated dangers. They need improved ways to store the output for times when it's dark and you need energy. Current methods are bulky, expensive, or both. Still, these methods are used in some wind-farm systems, so they could be used by solar cells, too. But they all require either a centralized distribution system, or they add considerable overhead. (Batteries to back up the solar cells on my rooftop would have doubled the cost of they system. As they don't produce quite enough to satisfy our needs, that would have been foolish. I'd have needed a system twice the size of the current system to have enough excess capacity, and if you add in batteries that means the price has quadrupled.)
FWIW, I don't really like nuclear reactors. They aren't safe enough, and they aren't properly regulated ANYWHERE. Only wealthy corporations can afford to buy them, and they always seem to have enough political influence to avoid annoying safety regulations without significant penalty. Mind you this criticism only applies to the operational systems. The designs have different problems (of a related nature). The contractors who build them like expensive systems, but they don't like design changes. And they have also captured their regulators. This tends to result in obsolete systems being built with some safety measures ridiculously over-designed, and other crucial ones nearly ignored.
N.B.: I'm not an expert in the area, but I've listened to a few people who were. Don't ask me for specifics, ask an expert. I'd give you at best a half answer, and on some points I might have totally misunderstood what was meant. But the criticisms of the process appear to me quite solid.
The thing is, you get problems as well as benefits via the same process. And they aren't all obvious without massive testing...which isn't being done.
??
Selection isn't addition. Adding genes from external sources inserted in non-standard places is as much of a change as a change in species. When you want to eat a new food from a different species, you test it carefully, Otherwise you'll eat a deadly nightshade because you like potatoes.
OK, that's a bit over the top oration. But the basic idea is correct, even if the degree of danger isn't. And the more likely problem is allergens than actual poison (if you can really draw a distinction). And it's quite likely that for any particular allergen, some people will be more sensitive than others. So testing is as hard as testing any other drug. (And, yes, I count GMO foods as being in the exact same category as drugs. Just because they also supply calories doesn't change the mode of operation for the rest of their characteristics.)
P.S.: Drugs. Yes, I count GMO foods as drugs. And some drugs are worthwhile, while others should be avoided, and others are useful for some people but not for others.
Given the lack of testing, I'm not sure that NOT being biased against GMO foods is particularly sane. You are beta-testing something that might kill you, though it probably won't even injure you. How much bias one should have is a reasonable matter for debate, however. I doubt that I'd pay $10/pound extra for potatoes that were non-GMO. My wife might. And it's been suggested that some "food allergies" are actually allergies to GMO ingredients. Not sure if I believe it, but I see no reason to doubt it, so I tend to give that belief the benefit of the doubt.
Think of GMO foods as beta testing on a large population of test subjects, that you don't monitor for adverse effects. If things work our right, there won't be any adverse effects. If there are, they can't prove it's because of your beta-testing. But if people CAN avoid GMO foods, all of a sudden you've divided the population into experimental subjects and a control group.
That's why my wife is on Ubuntu stable.
But if she EVER opts for Gnome3 *or* Unity, I'll be extremely surprised.
It's not the quality, it the *DESIGN*!!
It wouldn't matter how perfectly the broken design was implemented. I haven't actually run into any bugs, but I find the *DESIGN* too atrocious to use. This is the same problem I had with KDE4, only much worse. KDE4 is actually usable. I've used it for a week or two before giving up. I didn't give up because of bugs. I didn't encounter any. I gave up because the DESIGN was bad. But it's not nearly as bad as the Gnome3 design. That one I haven't even been able to try for a week, because it's essentially unusable.
When my distro stops supporting Gnome2 (which I switched to when KDE3 stopped being supported), I'll switch to either Xfce, Mate, or, possibly, Cinnamon. Unless Trinity is available. If it is, I might choose that.
And saying that I can fix the problems with Gnome3 by using unsupported extensions is not as satisfactory answer. Particularly when it has been previously announced that support for extensions will be terminated in the future.