Having an agreement does not make the agreement legal. If such an agreement *is* legal for a university that recieves public funds, then it shouldn't be.
Yes, this is censorship. The university is an arm of the government.
Now whether it's illegal depends on a couple of things. One is whether taking federal money should mean that you are constrained to do nothing that the US constitution doesn't permit the government to do. The other is whether the State constitution prohibits the State from abridging the citizens freedom of speech. (I'm assuming here that this is a state university.)
In *my* opinion taking federal grants should mean that you are acting as an agent of the US federal government, and therefore that you are prohibited from taking any action forbidden by the US Constitution. I don't have any knowledge of the state constitution in question. Many state constitutions also have protections for the citizens right to freedom of speech, some of which are stronger than the federal guarantees. As a state agency it is also limited to not taking any action forbidden by the state constitution.
So *I* believe that it was illegal censorship. I, however, am not a lawyer. I sure you can find one who with tell you that I am wrong. Also that green is purple.
Depends on what he meant by media. He might be complaining that Slashdot didn't notice it for two months, he might be complaining that CBS news didn't cover it, I don't know which.
(There *are* indications that he was thinking of traditional media, but I'm not sure that's exactly what he meant. [I guess I should read the original article, but I'm not interested enough.])
Note that while coverage is a problem, I'm not sure that an answer is possible. It's like the "information explosion" every day I'm deluged with requests that I sign this or that petition in favor of this or that worthy cause. There are too many, and I've got other things to do, so I only respond to a very few of them, not quite at random. (Note I'm only considering the causes that I deem worthy here.) And I never pay money except to a couple of pre-designated groups. And then only to renew membership. There's just too many worthy causes that I already hear about.
FWIW, the University appears to be clearly in the wrong here. But it's not high on my list of concerns. I don't live in the state, so I can't even vote against the people who appoint the regents of the University, and if I could, I expect I'd have more crucial issues that would determine my vote.
This particular case was close enough to my central values that I signed the petition against the University's actions, but not sufficiently close that I even customized the message.
Catholic organizations, as a consequent of their tax exempt status, SHOULD have strings attached to what they can do, regardless of whether they take government money. Othe tax exempt organizations do, why not the churches?
If you (voluntarily) get unusual benefits from the government, you should have unusual requirements. And you don't have the right to complain that you didn't want those requirements unless you first stop takeing the advantage.
There are, indeed, legal penalties. They are almost never enforced. Most "decent lawyers" defend the actions of the obviously criminally corrupt ones. Hatred of them is not irrational, when they are your deadly enemies. (As a class. Please note that there are significant exceptions.)
It's like the way doctors support other doctors who are criminally incompetent or careless. Or corporation heads support corporation heads. In each case the hatered is justified, because these are people who regularly and heedlessly injure "us".
You are making assumption. People IN ALL JOBS including terrorist can be expected to come in a variety of different levels of skill and training. Being incompetent doesn't mean that you either are or aren't a bad person.
I think, however, that we can be relatively certain that the idiots who so interpreted this message are bad people, even if we don't know their skill level or average competency. Or even what their purpose was. (Did they have a quota to fill?)
For some reason it's been decided the the border watchers don't need search warrants. To me this seems strictly unconstitutional, but I'm not making the decisions.
N.B.: This position has been maintained by both Democrats and Republicans for decades. And the border is defined as anywhere within 100? miles of either a national border or an airport at which international air flights land. So it covers most of the population of the US.
My gues would be that at least one of my partitions had aged sufficiently that it decided to run fsck on reboot, and I saw some sectors being corrected by the journaling. I've got around 6-7 partitions split between two drives, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what experimental systems I have installed, so it's quite likely that some of them were old enough the last time the power failed.
As I only paid attention to errors, this would explain why I still thought that "power failure means fsck runs". It's less likely to be true today, as a recent system upgrade required a reboot, and on coming up I noticed that at least one partition required fsck. (Note how much attention I paid: fsck had to run, but I don't really know on how many partitions. But there weren't any errors that needed recovery.) But next month it will be more likely.
However, as was said, as the disk space increases, this becomes more significant. Unless I start dealing with really strange data, however, no matter how large the disk gets I don't expect to use partitions larger than will fit on a DVD (or, if I upgrade my media, a bluray disk). I use disk mirroring for backup (nightly rather than streaming) but a power surge could take them both out, so occasional backup is to DVD.
The last time I checked, the system required that fsck be run after a power loss. Also after the first reboot aften n days had passed. (I think n is somewhere around 200, but I haven't been interested enough to pin it down precisely.) And occasionally a system upgrade will require a reboot.
OTOH, recovery is definitely a lot faster than it used to be, thanks to journaling.
OTTH, all of my parftitions together are barely over 1TB, so this is only significant (to me) for future systems, when this will have changed anyway.
Actually, to weaken the point a bit, we essentially CAN "turn the patient off". It is, however, a rather extreme procedure, so it's rarely used. It involves hypothermia. You sure wouldn't get it for a simple operation like a tonsillectomy, or having your gall bladder or appendix removed. Surgery on you heart MIGHT call for it, but it still usually doesn't.
Well, one way it's different is that the Homestead Act has expired, and if it hadn't there wouldn't be anywhere to homestead anyway.
OTOH, the real answer is that if you go back before 1914 you had a bunch of bigots campaigning to keep the foreigners (mainly southern europeans) out. The goal these folk have is to keep out people different from us.
That said, it does make a lot of sense that there be limitations on what support is given to those who aren't already residents. The sense that is makes is that if you must support everyone equally, you can't support anyone. This is why the Supreme Court decision that cities couldn't limit their general assistance to residents was so bad. It turned social services into a race to the bottom.
There are accents (note the plural) called General American, and they are reasonably similar to each other. But the median accent has seemed to me to be drifting away from them.
Now I'll admit that I'm not a student of US dialects, but I'm enough of one to know that my dialect is one of those called General American. I think the massive divergence really started with President Carter, though Kennedy certainly also exerted an influence. These two dramatically lessened the importance of speaking in a General American dialect, and it seems to have continued to decline since then.
Most (much?) of the tea that was tossed overboard was recovered by smugglers, and resold. Yes, this was a protest against unfair and abusive taxation. It was also an act by smugglers to raise their profits. You can't disentangle the two.
Does "correctly" mean the way you pronounce it? Are you asserting that he should pronounce words the way the Queen of England pronounces them?
There are lots of dialects out there. Calling one of the "correct" is the action of an autocrat.
That said, there's much to be said in favor of a central tendency in pronunciation. But there is no such generally accepted "standard usage". Different areas of the US speak differently. Within those areas you will often find that different smaller areas have their own standard pattern. And within those different social-economic groups have their own dialect. And that's not even considering other countries.
No voice broadcast over a wide area can satisfy everyone's dialect.
Corporations have done a lot of both good and bad. If they hadn't done some particular action, one can argue that some other entity (company, government, individual) would have done it. These arguments, of course, come in varying shades of plausibility. But one thing to note is that as corporations have grown, non-corporate companies have been driven out. This has both good and bad aspects, for companies were playthings of their owners, but the owners (theoretically) *could* be held responsible. Occasionally they were. Chief Executive Officers and Board of Directors members can also theoretically be held responsible for their actions, but legal restrictions are much sparser, and they aren't free to invest in things that they can't expect to be quickly profitable.
I believe that there should be MUCH stronger limits on corporations, to the extent that corporate charters should only be valid for, say, 20 years. After 20 years they should be required to prove that they are a net benefit to three categories of citizen (defining these categories more precisely would be tricky, but economic numbers are clearly insufficient): 1) The average (mean) citizen. 2) The common (mode) citizen. 3) The general (median) citizen.
Clearly one of the components of the function being measured is "total available cash at the end of a month"(debt counting as negative). It's also clear that property ownership needs to be factored in. And happiness, or satisfaction. And prisoners MUST be counted as citizens if they are otherwise qualified (i.e., not even current condition of servitude should disbar one).
P.S.: If a corporation's charter is revoked, NONE of the resulting funds should go to ANY executive or Board of Directors member. This would need to be written into the law, as otherwise you can guess how their employment contracts would read. Ideally separate divisions would be sold off to bidders to be separate companies.
N.B.: This isn't quite like what contract law used to be, though it has certain similarities, but it's what it SHOULD be. Corporations should only be allowed to exist if they are beneficial to society. And I'm not proposing that they should be required to show that most of their effort is to benefit the average man (three varieties), merely to show that they benefit him more than they injure him.
Two things: 1) public figures have less rights to control the presentation of facts about them. 2) as a Republican, Romney is less likely to want to extend the copyright act than a Democrat would be. (Different major support base.)
That said, I don't really think that he believe that just because he should be able to do something, others should also be able to do it. So don't count on his desiring equal enforcement.
I don't see him as being *quite* hypocritical here. Close, though.
If you want to paint the people who support those Democrats as that, I wouldn't object. Did you think I supported the Democrats (i.e., the public figures and those who support them) because I consider the Republicans (i.e., the public figures and those who support them) as either bigots or racists, and often crazy to boot?
I consider Obama to be a lieing abusive... perhaps I'd better not go on. But this doesn't mean I want to support a real loon. When I look at the choices, I'm probably going to vote third party. If I *must* waste my vote, I at least don't want to vote in favor of someone who intends to injure me.
And *YOU* may consider the marines to be the "finest, noblest, kindest people", but there are very many who would disagree with you. And if they support a loon, then they support a loon. Actually, I suspect that marines, when not in the line of duty, are very supportive of their in-group. This doesn't mean that they are supportive of those who *aren't* in their in-group. (It also doesn't mean they aren't, of course.) However I have observed marines, "in the line of duty", being quite abusive to innocuous people. So I suspect that the people who dislike them may have good reasons. When decent people will do what autocrats dictate without allowing their own ethical judgement, they stop being decent people.
If I recall my sources correctly: One of the things methane breaks down into is carbon dioxide (well, I think it's actually an ionized form of carbon monoxide, but that's unstable and I believe it ends up as carbon dioxide). And, of course, while it's being methane it's a more significant greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And, of course, it also yields water, which is at some altitudes a greenhouse gas, and at other altitudes a cooling gas. But IIRC in the stratosphere it's a greenhouse gas, and that's where the UV will be breaking down the methane.
Increasingly unstable weather would have been expectable anyway. We've left a period known as the "Little Cilmatic Optimum" where the weather was unusually stable compared to historic norms.
I said candidates, because as they are public figures they are relatively easy to check on. The other comment was based on my personal acquaintences, and they can't be checked by anyone besides me. Public figures is the real criterion, but I must admit that if I don't have a chance to vote either for or against them, I'll be less interested in them. If I happen to know that the chief executive of a corporation is a bigot (in a way that irritates me) or a racist (for reasons that I don't accept) then about all I can do is boycott the corporation. If it's a politician then I can have a smidgeon more effect. (And for corporations, I'm more interested in what the corporation does than in the character of the CEO, though admittedly there's a large correlation.)
If no suggestion of a checkable Republican who's neither bigoted nor racist is given, then I'll continue to presume that those who support them support the characteristics that they exhibit. I suppose that just supporting a bigot or a racist doesn't mean they you are one, but it certainly means that you are supportive of those actions.
For that matter, the moon's gravity well is shallow enough that you could build a space elevator using Kevlar for the cable. This would make lunar based material cheaper in earth orbit that stuff from the asteroids. (But asteroids or comets are a batter source of volatiles, even so.)
Once there's an industrial base in space, then space will pay for itself. That first step is a big one though.
For a starter, to me it seems like the most important problem to solve is how to run a closed ecosystem. And it's better to solve that on the surface of the Earth than anywhere else.
AI has greater benefits, but is also likely to have greater dangers.
OTOH, there are several people who believe that with proper funding, they could build an AI using just what they've already developed. They may, of course, be wrong, but it's difficult to be certain of that, because computation is still so expensive. To build a computer as powerful as the human brain is something that not even IBM has yet attempted. Watson ran on something that might have a powerful a brain as a terrapin. (That's a wild guess. Don't take it seriously. It's a double order of magnitude approximation.)
Still, one needs to remember that a lot of our brain's computation power is used to control our body. But it's also true that a lot of our thinking is done based on models of the world that we derive from sensations received by our body, and those sensors (well, something equivalent) would be needed by any strong AI that was intended to solve problems in the world and communicate the solutions to people. So it's not clear how much can be saved.
For that matter, *I* have a theory of "How to build a stong AI", but my problem isn't just funding, I have theoretical problems that I can't solve. But the basic essence is "People aren't of one mind. They have lots and lots of rather simple special purpose processes that do things like signal processing in ways that we already know how to handle more efficiently than the body has handled them. (Because we don't need to solve every problem with a specialized connectionist network.) That which we think of as our conscious mind evolved from a serialization mechanism which was needed to store memories in a retrievable manner. Language started from sounds that got attached to the serialization mechanism, so that a sound would recall a specific memory. This evolved into something more complex when the brain became larger as the body became larger. Who we *really* are is the parallel processing computer that doesn't use language at all, but the part of us that uses words, logic, etc. is evolved from this rudimentary memory manager. Of course, as it bacame more useful, it evolved to become more powerful, but it's still a quite minor part of the whole. And it's basic function limits it to (essentially) serial operation.
Unfortunately, it's mainly the serialization that I more or less understand how to build. The scheduler isn't a solved problem. It may not be soluble. (I.e., I suspect that like much of the rest of our body, it's a sub-optimal solution. One that just "works good enough". And that the real problem is NP-hard, and a propsed answer can't even be checked in polynomial time.) But we are currently working on schedulers for multi-processor systems, and we may some have a better solution than is implemented by our brain. (My language choice is "implemented by our brain" or "used by our mind",) That this is the case is hinted at by the number of specialized areas in the brain that essentially cut themselves off from the global scheduler. This reduction of the number of connections that need to be scheduled wouldn't be as important if the algorithm were less sensitive to the number of processes that it needed to schedule. (OTOH, do note that the structure of the brain is significantly different from that of a multi-core CPU. It's slower to move signals, so there's a greater gain in localizing the processing. This is an alternative explanation, so perhaps the problem isn't NP-hard except in special cases. We do lots of things by heuristics which work "most of the time". If the situations where they fail are rare enough, we won't evolve away from that choice.)
But please note, using genetic programming to select actions of a strong AI could be a very bad decision. This will inherently evolve in the direction of choices benefiting the AI, and ignoring whether or not they benefit humans.
Slashdot Mirror
Having an agreement does not make the agreement legal. If such an agreement *is* legal for a university that recieves public funds, then it shouldn't be.
Yes, this is censorship. The university is an arm of the government.
Now whether it's illegal depends on a couple of things. One is whether taking federal money should mean that you are constrained to do nothing that the US constitution doesn't permit the government to do. The other is whether the State constitution prohibits the State from abridging the citizens freedom of speech. (I'm assuming here that this is a state university.)
In *my* opinion taking federal grants should mean that you are acting as an agent of the US federal government, and therefore that you are prohibited from taking any action forbidden by the US Constitution. I don't have any knowledge of the state constitution in question. Many state constitutions also have protections for the citizens right to freedom of speech, some of which are stronger than the federal guarantees. As a state agency it is also limited to not taking any action forbidden by the state constitution.
So *I* believe that it was illegal censorship. I, however, am not a lawyer. I sure you can find one who with tell you that I am wrong. Also that green is purple.
Depends on what he meant by media. He might be complaining that Slashdot didn't notice it for two months, he might be complaining that CBS news didn't cover it, I don't know which.
(There *are* indications that he was thinking of traditional media, but I'm not sure that's exactly what he meant. [I guess I should read the original article, but I'm not interested enough.])
Note that while coverage is a problem, I'm not sure that an answer is possible. It's like the "information explosion" every day I'm deluged with requests that I sign this or that petition in favor of this or that worthy cause. There are too many, and I've got other things to do, so I only respond to a very few of them, not quite at random. (Note I'm only considering the causes that I deem worthy here.) And I never pay money except to a couple of pre-designated groups. And then only to renew membership. There's just too many worthy causes that I already hear about.
FWIW, the University appears to be clearly in the wrong here. But it's not high on my list of concerns. I don't live in the state, so I can't even vote against the people who appoint the regents of the University, and if I could, I expect I'd have more crucial issues that would determine my vote.
This particular case was close enough to my central values that I signed the petition against the University's actions, but not sufficiently close that I even customized the message.
Catholic organizations, as a consequent of their tax exempt status, SHOULD have strings attached to what they can do, regardless of whether they take government money. Othe tax exempt organizations do, why not the churches?
If you (voluntarily) get unusual benefits from the government, you should have unusual requirements. And you don't have the right to complain that you didn't want those requirements unless you first stop takeing the advantage.
It's not that most lawyers are politicians. Very few are. It's that most politicians are lawyers. Almost all are.
There are, indeed, legal penalties. They are almost never enforced. Most "decent lawyers" defend the actions of the obviously criminally corrupt ones. Hatred of them is not irrational, when they are your deadly enemies. (As a class. Please note that there are significant exceptions.)
It's like the way doctors support other doctors who are criminally incompetent or careless. Or corporation heads support corporation heads. In each case the hatered is justified, because these are people who regularly and heedlessly injure "us".
Now let's talk about programmers...
You are making assumption. People IN ALL JOBS including terrorist can be expected to come in a variety of different levels of skill and training. Being incompetent doesn't mean that you either are or aren't a bad person.
I think, however, that we can be relatively certain that the idiots who so interpreted this message are bad people, even if we don't know their skill level or average competency. Or even what their purpose was. (Did they have a quota to fill?)
For some reason it's been decided the the border watchers don't need search warrants. To me this seems strictly unconstitutional, but I'm not making the decisions.
N.B.: This position has been maintained by both Democrats and Republicans for decades. And the border is defined as anywhere within 100? miles of either a national border or an airport at which international air flights land. So it covers most of the population of the US.
My gues would be that at least one of my partitions had aged sufficiently that it decided to run fsck on reboot, and I saw some sectors being corrected by the journaling. I've got around 6-7 partitions split between two drives, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what experimental systems I have installed, so it's quite likely that some of them were old enough the last time the power failed.
As I only paid attention to errors, this would explain why I still thought that "power failure means fsck runs". It's less likely to be true today, as a recent system upgrade required a reboot, and on coming up I noticed that at least one partition required fsck. (Note how much attention I paid: fsck had to run, but I don't really know on how many partitions. But there weren't any errors that needed recovery.) But next month it will be more likely.
However, as was said, as the disk space increases, this becomes more significant. Unless I start dealing with really strange data, however, no matter how large the disk gets I don't expect to use partitions larger than will fit on a DVD (or, if I upgrade my media, a bluray disk). I use disk mirroring for backup (nightly rather than streaming) but a power surge could take them both out, so occasional backup is to DVD.
The last time I checked, the system required that fsck be run after a power loss. Also after the first reboot aften n days had passed. (I think n is somewhere around 200, but I haven't been interested enough to pin it down precisely.) And occasionally a system upgrade will require a reboot.
OTOH, recovery is definitely a lot faster than it used to be, thanks to journaling.
OTTH, all of my parftitions together are barely over 1TB, so this is only significant (to me) for future systems, when this will have changed anyway.
See today's Groklaw. The /. articel is inflamatory, haven't checked the original.
Actually, to weaken the point a bit, we essentially CAN "turn the patient off". It is, however, a rather extreme procedure, so it's rarely used. It involves hypothermia. You sure wouldn't get it for a simple operation like a tonsillectomy, or having your gall bladder or appendix removed. Surgery on you heart MIGHT call for it, but it still usually doesn't.
Well, one way it's different is that the Homestead Act has expired, and if it hadn't there wouldn't be anywhere to homestead anyway.
OTOH, the real answer is that if you go back before 1914 you had a bunch of bigots campaigning to keep the foreigners (mainly southern europeans) out. The goal these folk have is to keep out people different from us.
That said, it does make a lot of sense that there be limitations on what support is given to those who aren't already residents. The sense that is makes is that if you must support everyone equally, you can't support anyone. This is why the Supreme Court decision that cities couldn't limit their general assistance to residents was so bad. It turned social services into a race to the bottom.
There are accents (note the plural) called General American, and they are reasonably similar to each other. But the median accent has seemed to me to be drifting away from them.
Now I'll admit that I'm not a student of US dialects, but I'm enough of one to know that my dialect is one of those called General American. I think the massive divergence really started with President Carter, though Kennedy certainly also exerted an influence. These two dramatically lessened the importance of speaking in a General American dialect, and it seems to have continued to decline since then.
They could refuse goatse citing FCC regulations. But the real bar is the cost of the ad.
One thing to remember about the Boston Tea Party:
Most (much?) of the tea that was tossed overboard was recovered by smugglers, and resold. Yes, this was a protest against unfair and abusive taxation. It was also an act by smugglers to raise their profits. You can't disentangle the two.
Does "correctly" mean the way you pronounce it? Are you asserting that he should pronounce words the way the Queen of England pronounces them?
There are lots of dialects out there. Calling one of the "correct" is the action of an autocrat.
That said, there's much to be said in favor of a central tendency in pronunciation. But there is no such generally accepted "standard usage". Different areas of the US speak differently. Within those areas you will often find that different smaller areas have their own standard pattern. And within those different social-economic groups have their own dialect. And that's not even considering other countries.
No voice broadcast over a wide area can satisfy everyone's dialect.
Corporations have done a lot of both good and bad. If they hadn't done some particular action, one can argue that some other entity (company, government, individual) would have done it. These arguments, of course, come in varying shades of plausibility. But one thing to note is that as corporations have grown, non-corporate companies have been driven out. This has both good and bad aspects, for companies were playthings of their owners, but the owners (theoretically) *could* be held responsible. Occasionally they were. Chief Executive Officers and Board of Directors members can also theoretically be held responsible for their actions, but legal restrictions are much sparser, and they aren't free to invest in things that they can't expect to be quickly profitable.
I believe that there should be MUCH stronger limits on corporations, to the extent that corporate charters should only be valid for, say, 20 years. After 20 years they should be required to prove that they are a net benefit to three categories of citizen (defining these categories more precisely would be tricky, but economic numbers are clearly insufficient):
1) The average (mean) citizen.
2) The common (mode) citizen.
3) The general (median) citizen.
Clearly one of the components of the function being measured is "total available cash at the end of a month"(debt counting as negative). It's also clear that property ownership needs to be factored in. And happiness, or satisfaction. And prisoners MUST be counted as citizens if they are otherwise qualified (i.e., not even current condition of servitude should disbar one).
P.S.: If a corporation's charter is revoked, NONE of the resulting funds should go to ANY executive or Board of Directors member. This would need to be written into the law, as otherwise you can guess how their employment contracts would read. Ideally separate divisions would be sold off to bidders to be separate companies.
N.B.: This isn't quite like what contract law used to be, though it has certain similarities, but it's what it SHOULD be. Corporations should only be allowed to exist if they are beneficial to society. And I'm not proposing that they should be required to show that most of their effort is to benefit the average man (three varieties), merely to show that they benefit him more than they injure him.
Two things:
1) public figures have less rights to control the presentation of facts about them.
2) as a Republican, Romney is less likely to want to extend the copyright act than a Democrat would be. (Different major support base.)
That said, I don't really think that he believe that just because he should be able to do something, others should also be able to do it. So don't count on his desiring equal enforcement.
I don't see him as being *quite* hypocritical here. Close, though.
If you want to paint the people who support those Democrats as that, I wouldn't object. Did you think I supported the Democrats (i.e., the public figures and those who support them) because I consider the Republicans (i.e., the public figures and those who support them) as either bigots or racists, and often crazy to boot?
I consider Obama to be a lieing abusive ... perhaps I'd better not go on. But this doesn't mean I want to support a real loon. When I look at the choices, I'm probably going to vote third party. If I *must* waste my vote, I at least don't want to vote in favor of someone who intends to injure me.
And *YOU* may consider the marines to be the "finest, noblest, kindest people", but there are very many who would disagree with you. And if they support a loon, then they support a loon. Actually, I suspect that marines, when not in the line of duty, are very supportive of their in-group. This doesn't mean that they are supportive of those who *aren't* in their in-group. (It also doesn't mean they aren't, of course.) However I have observed marines, "in the line of duty", being quite abusive to innocuous people. So I suspect that the people who dislike them may have good reasons. When decent people will do what autocrats dictate without allowing their own ethical judgement, they stop being decent people.
If I recall my sources correctly:
One of the things methane breaks down into is carbon dioxide (well, I think it's actually an ionized form of carbon monoxide, but that's unstable and I believe it ends up as carbon dioxide). And, of course, while it's being methane it's a more significant greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And, of course, it also yields water, which is at some altitudes a greenhouse gas, and at other altitudes a cooling gas. But IIRC in the stratosphere it's a greenhouse gas, and that's where the UV will be breaking down the methane.
Increasingly unstable weather would have been expectable anyway. We've left a period known as the "Little Cilmatic Optimum" where the weather was unusually stable compared to historic norms.
I said candidates, because as they are public figures they are relatively easy to check on. The other comment was based on my personal acquaintences, and they can't be checked by anyone besides me. Public figures is the real criterion, but I must admit that if I don't have a chance to vote either for or against them, I'll be less interested in them. If I happen to know that the chief executive of a corporation is a bigot (in a way that irritates me) or a racist (for reasons that I don't accept) then about all I can do is boycott the corporation. If it's a politician then I can have a smidgeon more effect. (And for corporations, I'm more interested in what the corporation does than in the character of the CEO, though admittedly there's a large correlation.)
If no suggestion of a checkable Republican who's neither bigoted nor racist is given, then I'll continue to presume that those who support them support the characteristics that they exhibit. I suppose that just supporting a bigot or a racist doesn't mean they you are one, but it certainly means that you are supportive of those actions.
For that matter, the moon's gravity well is shallow enough that you could build a space elevator using Kevlar for the cable. This would make lunar based material cheaper in earth orbit that stuff from the asteroids. (But asteroids or comets are a batter source of volatiles, even so.)
Once there's an industrial base in space, then space will pay for itself. That first step is a big one though.
For a starter, to me it seems like the most important problem to solve is how to run a closed ecosystem. And it's better to solve that on the surface of the Earth than anywhere else.
AI has greater benefits, but is also likely to have greater dangers.
OTOH, there are several people who believe that with proper funding, they could build an AI using just what they've already developed. They may, of course, be wrong, but it's difficult to be certain of that, because computation is still so expensive. To build a computer as powerful as the human brain is something that not even IBM has yet attempted. Watson ran on something that might have a powerful a brain as a terrapin. (That's a wild guess. Don't take it seriously. It's a double order of magnitude approximation.)
Still, one needs to remember that a lot of our brain's computation power is used to control our body. But it's also true that a lot of our thinking is done based on models of the world that we derive from sensations received by our body, and those sensors (well, something equivalent) would be needed by any strong AI that was intended to solve problems in the world and communicate the solutions to people. So it's not clear how much can be saved.
For that matter, *I* have a theory of "How to build a stong AI", but my problem isn't just funding, I have theoretical problems that I can't solve. But the basic essence is "People aren't of one mind. They have lots and lots of rather simple special purpose processes that do things like signal processing in ways that we already know how to handle more efficiently than the body has handled them. (Because we don't need to solve every problem with a specialized connectionist network.) That which we think of as our conscious mind evolved from a serialization mechanism which was needed to store memories in a retrievable manner. Language started from sounds that got attached to the serialization mechanism, so that a sound would recall a specific memory. This evolved into something more complex when the brain became larger as the body became larger. Who we *really* are is the parallel processing computer that doesn't use language at all, but the part of us that uses words, logic, etc. is evolved from this rudimentary memory manager. Of course, as it bacame more useful, it evolved to become more powerful, but it's still a quite minor part of the whole. And it's basic function limits it to (essentially) serial operation.
Unfortunately, it's mainly the serialization that I more or less understand how to build. The scheduler isn't a solved problem. It may not be soluble. (I.e., I suspect that like much of the rest of our body, it's a sub-optimal solution. One that just "works good enough". And that the real problem is NP-hard, and a propsed answer can't even be checked in polynomial time.) But we are currently working on schedulers for multi-processor systems, and we may some have a better solution than is implemented by our brain. (My language choice is "implemented by our brain" or "used by our mind",) That this is the case is hinted at by the number of specialized areas in the brain that essentially cut themselves off from the global scheduler. This reduction of the number of connections that need to be scheduled wouldn't be as important if the algorithm were less sensitive to the number of processes that it needed to schedule. (OTOH, do note that the structure of the brain is significantly different from that of a multi-core CPU. It's slower to move signals, so there's a greater gain in localizing the processing. This is an alternative explanation, so perhaps the problem isn't NP-hard except in special cases. We do lots of things by heuristics which work "most of the time". If the situations where they fail are rare enough, we won't evolve away from that choice.)
But please note, using genetic programming to select actions of a strong AI could be a very bad decision. This will inherently evolve in the direction of choices benefiting the AI, and ignoring whether or not they benefit humans.