Billions wasted on the ISS. Billions wasted on the shuttle program. A series of spectacular moon landings that just sort of stopped once the PR value wore out. All of it justified by phony claims of space-based "research". The only true successes NASA has had in the past 30 years have been the unmanned programs and Hubble, most of which have yielded vastly greater scientific dividends relative to their cost than the entire manned program as a whole.
Let me say this real clearly so the Slashbots can understand: we don't have the technology to go to Mars. Instead of pouring billions of taxpayer money into a futile effort to make our Fearless Leader look decisive and bold and to enrich the fantasy lives of geeks, let's spend it on long-term research into cheaper propulsion methods and launching systems. Or better yet, let the private sector waste its own money figuring it out, if you really think space flight is economically viable. Setting ourselves a goal now of visiting Mars in X years is stupid, wasteful, and serves no purpose other than enriching campaign contributors and jerking off the American public.
An interesting comparison would be between NASA and the NSF or NIH. The latter two are primarily granting agencies; academic scientists compete for funding through a peer review process, and then conduct their research independently. It's much different from NASA's top-down approach. The drawback is that there's some resistance to wild new ideas and grand projects, but this decentralization makes boondoggles like the ISS more difficult.
Unfortunately, I can't see research universities mounting their own space programs any time soon - although if projects like SpaceShip One continue to work, maybe this will change.
Failing to fund NASA is failing to fund the future of our civilization and our economy.
The only thing this is funding is jobs for Tom DeLay's constituents and fat checks for aerospace contractors. And it's sort of a stretch to call ant farms in space the "future of our civilization."
Re:Welcome to capitalism
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1
If academia isn't producing the specific targetted research that society requires, that is because society isn't funding it to do so. If the billions that were spent on buying cheap-to-produce drugs were spent on university research, it would be possible to fund both basic and applied research properly.
I'm working towards my PhD in molecular biology right now, and this is dead wrong. Actually pushing a drug to market requires a huge amount of gruntwork and has to be done on a factory-type system. Universities are usually spectacularly poor places for this. I didn't go back to school so I could learn drug discovery - I want to learn science, and while there's some science involved in drug discovery, it's really more applied work. Not that academics haven't invented some great therapies, but they're just not equipped to use a brute-force approach that is so often necessary for developing useful drugs, or for going through brutal clinical trials.
Besides, with the current model, if a drug is a spectacular failure, the pharma company and/or investors gets soaked, not the taxpayers.
On this note, you should really look into the research done for it before you say it is a waist.
I'm saying it's a waste precisely because I have looked into the research, and come away thoroughly unimpressed. And pointing out that we had to do lots of research just to put men into space is circular reasoning; if that research was worthwhile, it could be done on its own for a fraction the cost.
As for the "research" that goes on in manned spaceflights, it's a joke. (I work in one of the fields that has been hyped as a use for the ISS, so this isn't just uninformed blather.)
Especially some of the medical research done to help support it. Also, once we get a space elevator up,the cost will come down dramatically.
The medical research I hadn't heard of before, but I've seen that such claims of side benefits are usually overblown anyway. The space elevator hasn't even been shown to be technically feasible, aside from the minor inconvenience that the technology doesn't exist yet.
which makes more sense economically? Terraforming the entire planet
I'm curious - has any serious science been done on the feasability of this concept? Generally speaking, I think manned spaceflight is a giant waste of time and money and a Mars mission would be a stupid idea, but IF we could actually make the surface inhabitable that might justify the enormous expense of transporting people there. However, I haven't seen any proof that it's possible to raise the temperature to standards tolerable for agriculture. Given the immense temperature variation just on Earth, how warm might we expect the equator on Mars to be? Does it have seasons?
Public or private? What's the cost of living like in the area?
I'm at Berkeley, which is public, but this doesn't make that much of a difference if you're a US citizen - our stipends largely come from federal training grants, which would be the same at a private university, and next year I'll be paid mostly by my boss (who gets funded by the NIH). Berkeley and Stanford (and UCSF) pay the same amount. On the other hand, my department pays tuition on top of my stipend, meaning I actually cost a lot more - but I'm subsidized by CA taxpayers, especially now that I'm an official resident.
Cost of living is awful, of course, but since I don't have a car I'm actually saving money. There are other schools that would have been much better deals financially, but I decided not to let that be a factor in my decision. (For instance, Rockefeller is in NYC and pays a few thousand less, but they have guaranteed subsidized on-campus housing that's about half as expensive as what I get to choose from here.)
I occasionally feel bad about the amount I'm getting paid by the government to go to school, but I work insane hours on extremely technical stuff and I'm pretty productive, so my libertarian guilt hasn't kicked in too bad yet. Besides, the equipment we use is far more expensive than us pitiful grad students.
I find it hard to believe that getting a masters in business and a phd in, say, physics or biochemistry, are at all comparable.
They're not. MBA students take classes, they don't do research, and they graduate in 2 or 3 years. A science PhD is a minimum of 4 years and most places it's more like 6 (if you're really unlucky, even longer). On the other hand, PhD students often get to do really awesome work, and at least we get paid to go to school. I also suspect that I'd much prefer my current classmates to a bunch of future MBAs.
And compared to people in biology, we get paid a lot; I know someone who gets $12,000 a year.
Ummmm. . . I'm in biology, and I get $24,500 starting out - more this semester because I'm also teaching. This is about the most any school pays, actually, but the top biology programs are all pretty comparable. For a single 20-something, it's good money, even if I took a large pay cut to go back to school. Students on external fellowships make even more: the NSF now pays upwards of $30,000 a year, and more if you teach.
Frankly, I couldn't be happier with my position, despite the attempts of our local grad student union to convince us that we're oppressed. However, after I graduate I can either go consult (shitloads of $$, but no science or fame), work for a biotech or big pharma (good $$, okay science, probably no fame), or become a perma-postdoc (no $$, awesome science, probably no fame). I could get all three as a faculty member at a good university, but there are vastly fewer jobs available than candidates, and you have to be some combination of brilliant, extremeley focused, well-connected, and just plain lucky. I'm well-connected, but only reasonably intelligent, and I can't focus worth shit, so unless I get really lucky I'm not getting one of those jobs. Sort of depressing, but at least I like the work I'm doing.
That and a few other things prove they are the same character in the series and the movie, regardless of the inconsistent spelling of the name.
I think this is the creators poking fun - at the audience or Russell, I'm not sure. It's like the classic DS9 episode where they worked the cast into the original episode "The Trouble With Tribbles." Someone asks Worf why the original series Klingons look so different, and he says "We don't like to talk about it."
There've been many Slashdot threads trying to explain this, but the answer is really quite simple: it's an in-joke, a nod to all the fans who've been worrying about this for years. Think of it as a shout-out to all the Comic Book Guys of the world. SG1 had another of these in the pilot where they use "MacGyver" as a verb.
They're just TV shows, there's nothing that dictates that they have to be absolutely 100% consistent over the years, and little throw-aways like this are the writers' way of acknowledging that yes, their internal consistency is sometimes not perfect.
however, his cautions on unfettered capitalism still have considerable merit. however, vigilence and a little regulation here and there to hold the corporations from getting too much power are usually enough
It's worth pointing out that even Friedrich Hayek, whose famous "The Road to Serfdom" is (rather unfortunately) much beloved by conservatives, fully endorsed regulation as necessary to ensure a level playing field and protect consumers. Hell, I think Adam Smith said something similar. Point being, there's nothing necessarily contradictory about combining free markets with regulation, and Marx wasn't really saying anything original or particularly insightful. You can be strongly pro-capitalism and also favor strong regulation; this was pretty much Clinton's position.
The problem is that most modern capitalism advocates tend to be strongly anti-regulation, for reasons ranging from absurdly idealistic to transparently selfish, and hence most people equate support for free-market capitalism with naked greed and opportunism. (Plus, of course, the dominant party in the USA is really just another group of mercantilists, pro-business instead of pro-capitalism.)
Well, me too, partly because Canada seems to have fewer of the crazies (left- and right-wing) that necessitate such an absolutist constitution. Since I don't mind high taxes, the welfare state aspect doesn't bug me much - but I'd prefer a government that just stayed the fuck out of my life as much as possible, and Canada will never be that way.
Actually, bin Laden had never been known to give a shit about the Palestinians before they became a really trendy cause. He's had this jihad complex for most of his adult life, and they're just a convenient propaganda tool for him, since (at least until the Iraq war) they were the primary symbol of Western oppression of Islam. So he mentions them as an example of American perfidy, but it's hard to see how blowing up several hundred innocent Africans supports the Palestinian cause.
As has been discussed endlessly in stories about al Qaeda, bin Laden mostly just wants to restore the Caliphate, and roll back the clock 1400 years to when a vast Islamic empire stretched from Spain to India and beyond. The Caliphate was a cultural, economic, and military superpower, just like the USA is today, and (given the pathetic state of most of the Islamic world today) the comparison is humiliating. Furthermore, the continued dominance of the USA inhibits the rise of an Islamic empire. Only a truly isolationist USA would be satisfactory to the jihadists.
I suspect co-existence with these assholes is impossible. I have no problem with cultural imperialism; sorry, secular Western culture is superior to a theocracy that executes gays, treats women like property, and exercises the death penalty on people who drink. This isn't a statement about Islam versus Christianity - I find both equally absurd - but about secular liberalism versus theocratic statism. I do have a large problem with 100,000 civilian casualties from a US invasion, but, in principle, I agree with Bush that the Islamic world should adopt Western forms of government, where freedom of conscience, individual rights, and democracy are paramount. The bin Ladens of the world will never accept this - so as far as I'm concerned, the best way to respond to their demands is with napalm.
As for Israel - an equitable solution to the current mess is most certainly required, but this is totally irrelevant to dealing with bin Laden.
Also on the flipside, Canada actually has considerably less freedom of speech, thanks to the new hate speech laws. One person got arrested and fined for making derogatory remarks about a gay coworker - not in front of the coworker, but in the presence of a third party, who then reported him. A UBC lecturer also was fined for anti-American comments after September 11th. In neither case would their speech have been subject to any sort of legal penalty in the USA, and rightly so. All you lefties (or anti-gay conservatives) whining about "suppression of dissent" in the US: if we were living in Canada, your speech could be legally suppressed.
Canadians say "oh, but this type of speech shouldn't be protected anyway"; as an American, I find that attitude dangerous and idiotic. They simply don't have the same legal tradition of absolute liberty that we do (and yes, I'm aware that our legal traditions don't always translate into reality). They prefer to put their trust in their government; we prefer to put our trust in the Constitution. I'm not happy with what the Bush administration is trying to do to the country (though we've survived worse in the past), but the only thing standing between us and totalitarianism has always been the absolute freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. Sorry, Canada. Live free or die, bitch.
WTF? It ends where the book ends. Blame Tolkein for this if you must, but those of us who read the books got pretty much what we expected, minus "The Scouring of the Shire" (which is one of my favorite parts, but wouldn't really have fit well with the rest of the movies).
One preview I read that had access to a few select scenes (shown at a geek convention, maybe) showed some clips, one of which is John and Aeryn apparently just having been re-assembled. First thing John asks D'Argo is "How long were we out?" You can also find still frames that show the same weird aliens whose faces come apart.
There's nothing particularly significant about the supposed "death" at the end of the 4th season; they killed Aeryn in season 2 too, remember? (Of course, they killed off other main characters who didn't come back, which is part of what makes the series cool, but the season ender was meant to be a cliffhanger.)
How far does this MLAT extend? I'm wondering whether it would obligate nations to assist in cases where based on their own laws, the suspected crime wouldn't have been a crime at all. This is pretty relevant since the USA has significantly more anal-retentive IP laws right now, and Europe has significantly fewer protections on freedom of speech. Might a country that doesn't have anything like a DMCA be forced to help the FBI take down some infringing code? Would the FBI be forced to help some EU nation take down a website promoting "hate speech"?
I guess I realize why this sort of treaty is useful, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it avoids trampling on the local legal rules of each nation.
Similarly, I think the odds of a President Kerry suddenly getting tens of thousands of French and German troops into Iraq to be long at best and more likely wishful.
The odds of Kerry getting us into another giant military option because he just fucking feels like it are pretty low, too.
Agreed. This is social engineering at its worst - using the power of government to force citizens into involuntary servitude (that's what a draft is, folks) as a method of promoting peaceful thoughts? You don't have to be a diehard libertarian to object to this sort of interference in our personal lives.
Look, if we were really in a fight for our survival (I'd include WWII in that) and the volunteer army wasn't big enough, I'd support the draft - and probably volunteer, if they could find me a job wrangling computers instead of shooting at people. Under any other circumstances, Rangel can go fuck himself.
Americans as a whole haven't learned a thing from any of the administrations and are always going to vote for the majority candidate because it's easy to do.
I think Americans as a whole are turned off by the foaming-at-the-mouth Libertarians and the socialist Greens. Years of research has shown that most Americans want some level of government services (which the LP would flush down the toilet) but don't want to have to pay out the ass (the way the GP wants). And the "soak the rich" platform hasn't been entirely effective in recent years.
Sure, the major parties are often corrupt and wasteful, but how would electing Nader or Badnarik make things any better? Most people recognize that even though the country may be headed down the crapper already, those loons will just speed us up.
What really amuses me is that the people here whining about the lack of choice come from entirely opposite ends of the political spectrum.
But if Bush happened to be a conservative Democrat, and Kerry a liberal republican
There are very few of either left, which leaves those of us in the middle feeling very, very lonely. Whenever I hear Greens whining about how both major parties are the same, I think "God, I wish."
The big difference, of course, is that the conservative Democrats ran their party all through the 90s, while the liberal Republicans haven't been in control since at least 1994 and possibly earlier. There is no Democratic counterpart to Tom DeLay right now.
That's one of the most insightful comments regarding politics that I've read anywhere, let alone on Slashdot. As someone pretty close to the exact center of the American political spectrum (I'd call my beliefs "neoliberal", e.g. somewhere to the right Clinton; I've also referred to myself as a "McCain Democrat"), I couldn't agree more about the fringe parties. If someone really did offer an alternative party that wasn't a bunch of nutjobs, I'd vote for them in a second. Unfortunately, we're stuck with the pinkos, theocrats, and Ayn Rand fanboys running our third parties.
I guess I sort of agree, but the classical liberals were reacting to much more authoritarian regimes, and they never veered so close to anarchism. Most libertarians, as far as I can tell, believe that government should protect their lives and property and do nothing else. Although I can understand and to some degree respect this belief, I can't share it (maybe it's the ex-Democrat in me). I think limited government and greater personal liberty is an ideal we should aspire to, but I don't think this means that government can't play a positive role.
Hayek, for instance, makes a very clear distinction between laissez-faire policies and regulated free markets: he supports the latter, as long as the rule of law is paramount and the intent is to ensure fairness rather than central planning. Libertarians tend to be anti-regulation, even when the intent of regulations is to protect citizens rather than fuck corporations.
Classical liberals like Adam Smith are about as far away from either modern "liberals" or conservatives as you can get. The closest anyone comes is the libertarians, but they tend to be reflexively anti-government in a way that the classical liberals never were. There are some Republicans with integrity that lean this way, but the party has long since sold out to big business and the theocrats. (Note: pro-free-market does not mean that you favor giveaways to corporations, like the Bush administration does.)
It took me a long time to understand this distinction; Freidrich Hayek does a very good job explaining it. Oddly, he's much beloved by quite a few modern conservatives, even though he explicitly bashes conservatism, and is sympathetic to many of the ideals of leftism. (Just not the methods.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Depp looks a little blazed in that trailer. Does Wonka own a giant chocolate bong now?
NASA's record speaks for itself.
Billions wasted on the ISS. Billions wasted on the shuttle program. A series of spectacular moon landings that just sort of stopped once the PR value wore out. All of it justified by phony claims of space-based "research". The only true successes NASA has had in the past 30 years have been the unmanned programs and Hubble, most of which have yielded vastly greater scientific dividends relative to their cost than the entire manned program as a whole.
Let me say this real clearly so the Slashbots can understand: we don't have the technology to go to Mars. Instead of pouring billions of taxpayer money into a futile effort to make our Fearless Leader look decisive and bold and to enrich the fantasy lives of geeks, let's spend it on long-term research into cheaper propulsion methods and launching systems. Or better yet, let the private sector waste its own money figuring it out, if you really think space flight is economically viable. Setting ourselves a goal now of visiting Mars in X years is stupid, wasteful, and serves no purpose other than enriching campaign contributors and jerking off the American public.
An interesting comparison would be between NASA and the NSF or NIH. The latter two are primarily granting agencies; academic scientists compete for funding through a peer review process, and then conduct their research independently. It's much different from NASA's top-down approach. The drawback is that there's some resistance to wild new ideas and grand projects, but this decentralization makes boondoggles like the ISS more difficult.
Unfortunately, I can't see research universities mounting their own space programs any time soon - although if projects like SpaceShip One continue to work, maybe this will change.
Failing to fund NASA is failing to fund the future of our civilization and our economy.
The only thing this is funding is jobs for Tom DeLay's constituents and fat checks for aerospace contractors. And it's sort of a stretch to call ant farms in space the "future of our civilization."
If academia isn't producing the specific targetted research that society requires, that is because society isn't funding it to do so. If the billions that were spent on buying cheap-to-produce drugs were spent on university research, it would be possible to fund both basic and applied research properly.
I'm working towards my PhD in molecular biology right now, and this is dead wrong. Actually pushing a drug to market requires a huge amount of gruntwork and has to be done on a factory-type system. Universities are usually spectacularly poor places for this. I didn't go back to school so I could learn drug discovery - I want to learn science, and while there's some science involved in drug discovery, it's really more applied work. Not that academics haven't invented some great therapies, but they're just not equipped to use a brute-force approach that is so often necessary for developing useful drugs, or for going through brutal clinical trials.
Besides, with the current model, if a drug is a spectacular failure, the pharma company and/or investors gets soaked, not the taxpayers.
On this note, you should really look into the research done for it before you say it is a waist.
I'm saying it's a waste precisely because I have looked into the research, and come away thoroughly unimpressed. And pointing out that we had to do lots of research just to put men into space is circular reasoning; if that research was worthwhile, it could be done on its own for a fraction the cost.
As for the "research" that goes on in manned spaceflights, it's a joke. (I work in one of the fields that has been hyped as a use for the ISS, so this isn't just uninformed blather.)
Especially some of the medical research done to help support it. Also, once we get a space elevator up,the cost will come down dramatically.
The medical research I hadn't heard of before, but I've seen that such claims of side benefits are usually overblown anyway. The space elevator hasn't even been shown to be technically feasible, aside from the minor inconvenience that the technology doesn't exist yet.
which makes more sense economically? Terraforming the entire planet
I'm curious - has any serious science been done on the feasability of this concept? Generally speaking, I think manned spaceflight is a giant waste of time and money and a Mars mission would be a stupid idea, but IF we could actually make the surface inhabitable that might justify the enormous expense of transporting people there. However, I haven't seen any proof that it's possible to raise the temperature to standards tolerable for agriculture. Given the immense temperature variation just on Earth, how warm might we expect the equator on Mars to be? Does it have seasons?
Public or private? What's the cost of living like in the area?
I'm at Berkeley, which is public, but this doesn't make that much of a difference if you're a US citizen - our stipends largely come from federal training grants, which would be the same at a private university, and next year I'll be paid mostly by my boss (who gets funded by the NIH). Berkeley and Stanford (and UCSF) pay the same amount. On the other hand, my department pays tuition on top of my stipend, meaning I actually cost a lot more - but I'm subsidized by CA taxpayers, especially now that I'm an official resident.
Cost of living is awful, of course, but since I don't have a car I'm actually saving money. There are other schools that would have been much better deals financially, but I decided not to let that be a factor in my decision. (For instance, Rockefeller is in NYC and pays a few thousand less, but they have guaranteed subsidized on-campus housing that's about half as expensive as what I get to choose from here.)
I occasionally feel bad about the amount I'm getting paid by the government to go to school, but I work insane hours on extremely technical stuff and I'm pretty productive, so my libertarian guilt hasn't kicked in too bad yet. Besides, the equipment we use is far more expensive than us pitiful grad students.
I find it hard to believe that getting a masters in business and a phd in, say, physics or biochemistry, are at all comparable.
They're not. MBA students take classes, they don't do research, and they graduate in 2 or 3 years. A science PhD is a minimum of 4 years and most places it's more like 6 (if you're really unlucky, even longer). On the other hand, PhD students often get to do really awesome work, and at least we get paid to go to school. I also suspect that I'd much prefer my current classmates to a bunch of future MBAs.
And compared to people in biology, we get paid a lot; I know someone who gets $12,000 a year.
Ummmm. . . I'm in biology, and I get $24,500 starting out - more this semester because I'm also teaching. This is about the most any school pays, actually, but the top biology programs are all pretty comparable. For a single 20-something, it's good money, even if I took a large pay cut to go back to school. Students on external fellowships make even more: the NSF now pays upwards of $30,000 a year, and more if you teach.
Frankly, I couldn't be happier with my position, despite the attempts of our local grad student union to convince us that we're oppressed. However, after I graduate I can either go consult (shitloads of $$, but no science or fame), work for a biotech or big pharma (good $$, okay science, probably no fame), or become a perma-postdoc (no $$, awesome science, probably no fame). I could get all three as a faculty member at a good university, but there are vastly fewer jobs available than candidates, and you have to be some combination of brilliant, extremeley focused, well-connected, and just plain lucky. I'm well-connected, but only reasonably intelligent, and I can't focus worth shit, so unless I get really lucky I'm not getting one of those jobs. Sort of depressing, but at least I like the work I'm doing.
That and a few other things prove they are the same character in the series and the movie, regardless of the inconsistent spelling of the name.
I think this is the creators poking fun - at the audience or Russell, I'm not sure. It's like the classic DS9 episode where they worked the cast into the original episode "The Trouble With Tribbles." Someone asks Worf why the original series Klingons look so different, and he says "We don't like to talk about it."
There've been many Slashdot threads trying to explain this, but the answer is really quite simple: it's an in-joke, a nod to all the fans who've been worrying about this for years. Think of it as a shout-out to all the Comic Book Guys of the world. SG1 had another of these in the pilot where they use "MacGyver" as a verb.
They're just TV shows, there's nothing that dictates that they have to be absolutely 100% consistent over the years, and little throw-aways like this are the writers' way of acknowledging that yes, their internal consistency is sometimes not perfect.
however, his cautions on unfettered capitalism still have considerable merit. however, vigilence and a little regulation here and there to hold the corporations from getting too much power are usually enough
It's worth pointing out that even Friedrich Hayek, whose famous "The Road to Serfdom" is (rather unfortunately) much beloved by conservatives, fully endorsed regulation as necessary to ensure a level playing field and protect consumers. Hell, I think Adam Smith said something similar. Point being, there's nothing necessarily contradictory about combining free markets with regulation, and Marx wasn't really saying anything original or particularly insightful. You can be strongly pro-capitalism and also favor strong regulation; this was pretty much Clinton's position.
The problem is that most modern capitalism advocates tend to be strongly anti-regulation, for reasons ranging from absurdly idealistic to transparently selfish, and hence most people equate support for free-market capitalism with naked greed and opportunism. (Plus, of course, the dominant party in the USA is really just another group of mercantilists, pro-business instead of pro-capitalism.)
Personally, I'd rather live in Canada.
Well, me too, partly because Canada seems to have fewer of the crazies (left- and right-wing) that necessitate such an absolutist constitution. Since I don't mind high taxes, the welfare state aspect doesn't bug me much - but I'd prefer a government that just stayed the fuck out of my life as much as possible, and Canada will never be that way.
the things that appear to rile OBL the most
Actually, bin Laden had never been known to give a shit about the Palestinians before they became a really trendy cause. He's had this jihad complex for most of his adult life, and they're just a convenient propaganda tool for him, since (at least until the Iraq war) they were the primary symbol of Western oppression of Islam. So he mentions them as an example of American perfidy, but it's hard to see how blowing up several hundred innocent Africans supports the Palestinian cause.
As has been discussed endlessly in stories about al Qaeda, bin Laden mostly just wants to restore the Caliphate, and roll back the clock 1400 years to when a vast Islamic empire stretched from Spain to India and beyond. The Caliphate was a cultural, economic, and military superpower, just like the USA is today, and (given the pathetic state of most of the Islamic world today) the comparison is humiliating. Furthermore, the continued dominance of the USA inhibits the rise of an Islamic empire. Only a truly isolationist USA would be satisfactory to the jihadists.
I suspect co-existence with these assholes is impossible. I have no problem with cultural imperialism; sorry, secular Western culture is superior to a theocracy that executes gays, treats women like property, and exercises the death penalty on people who drink. This isn't a statement about Islam versus Christianity - I find both equally absurd - but about secular liberalism versus theocratic statism. I do have a large problem with 100,000 civilian casualties from a US invasion, but, in principle, I agree with Bush that the Islamic world should adopt Western forms of government, where freedom of conscience, individual rights, and democracy are paramount. The bin Ladens of the world will never accept this - so as far as I'm concerned, the best way to respond to their demands is with napalm.
As for Israel - an equitable solution to the current mess is most certainly required, but this is totally irrelevant to dealing with bin Laden.
Also on the flipside, Canada actually has considerably less freedom of speech, thanks to the new hate speech laws. One person got arrested and fined for making derogatory remarks about a gay coworker - not in front of the coworker, but in the presence of a third party, who then reported him. A UBC lecturer also was fined for anti-American comments after September 11th. In neither case would their speech have been subject to any sort of legal penalty in the USA, and rightly so. All you lefties (or anti-gay conservatives) whining about "suppression of dissent" in the US: if we were living in Canada, your speech could be legally suppressed.
Canadians say "oh, but this type of speech shouldn't be protected anyway"; as an American, I find that attitude dangerous and idiotic. They simply don't have the same legal tradition of absolute liberty that we do (and yes, I'm aware that our legal traditions don't always translate into reality). They prefer to put their trust in their government; we prefer to put our trust in the Constitution. I'm not happy with what the Bush administration is trying to do to the country (though we've survived worse in the past), but the only thing standing between us and totalitarianism has always been the absolute freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. Sorry, Canada. Live free or die, bitch.
WTF? It ends where the book ends. Blame Tolkein for this if you must, but those of us who read the books got pretty much what we expected, minus "The Scouring of the Shire" (which is one of my favorite parts, but wouldn't really have fit well with the rest of the movies).
One preview I read that had access to a few select scenes (shown at a geek convention, maybe) showed some clips, one of which is John and Aeryn apparently just having been re-assembled. First thing John asks D'Argo is "How long were we out?" You can also find still frames that show the same weird aliens whose faces come apart.
There's nothing particularly significant about the supposed "death" at the end of the 4th season; they killed Aeryn in season 2 too, remember? (Of course, they killed off other main characters who didn't come back, which is part of what makes the series cool, but the season ender was meant to be a cliffhanger.)
How far does this MLAT extend? I'm wondering whether it would obligate nations to assist in cases where based on their own laws, the suspected crime wouldn't have been a crime at all. This is pretty relevant since the USA has significantly more anal-retentive IP laws right now, and Europe has significantly fewer protections on freedom of speech. Might a country that doesn't have anything like a DMCA be forced to help the FBI take down some infringing code? Would the FBI be forced to help some EU nation take down a website promoting "hate speech"?
I guess I realize why this sort of treaty is useful, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it avoids trampling on the local legal rules of each nation.
Similarly, I think the odds of a President Kerry suddenly getting tens of thousands of French and German troops into Iraq to be long at best and more likely wishful.
The odds of Kerry getting us into another giant military option because he just fucking feels like it are pretty low, too.
Agreed. This is social engineering at its worst - using the power of government to force citizens into involuntary servitude (that's what a draft is, folks) as a method of promoting peaceful thoughts? You don't have to be a diehard libertarian to object to this sort of interference in our personal lives.
Look, if we were really in a fight for our survival (I'd include WWII in that) and the volunteer army wasn't big enough, I'd support the draft - and probably volunteer, if they could find me a job wrangling computers instead of shooting at people. Under any other circumstances, Rangel can go fuck himself.
Americans as a whole haven't learned a thing from any of the administrations and are always going to vote for the majority candidate because it's easy to do.
I think Americans as a whole are turned off by the foaming-at-the-mouth Libertarians and the socialist Greens. Years of research has shown that most Americans want some level of government services (which the LP would flush down the toilet) but don't want to have to pay out the ass (the way the GP wants). And the "soak the rich" platform hasn't been entirely effective in recent years.
Sure, the major parties are often corrupt and wasteful, but how would electing Nader or Badnarik make things any better? Most people recognize that even though the country may be headed down the crapper already, those loons will just speed us up.
What really amuses me is that the people here whining about the lack of choice come from entirely opposite ends of the political spectrum.
But if Bush happened to be a conservative Democrat, and Kerry a liberal republican
There are very few of either left, which leaves those of us in the middle feeling very, very lonely. Whenever I hear Greens whining about how both major parties are the same, I think "God, I wish."
The big difference, of course, is that the conservative Democrats ran their party all through the 90s, while the liberal Republicans haven't been in control since at least 1994 and possibly earlier. There is no Democratic counterpart to Tom DeLay right now.
That's one of the most insightful comments regarding politics that I've read anywhere, let alone on Slashdot. As someone pretty close to the exact center of the American political spectrum (I'd call my beliefs "neoliberal", e.g. somewhere to the right Clinton; I've also referred to myself as a "McCain Democrat"), I couldn't agree more about the fringe parties. If someone really did offer an alternative party that wasn't a bunch of nutjobs, I'd vote for them in a second. Unfortunately, we're stuck with the pinkos, theocrats, and Ayn Rand fanboys running our third parties.
I guess I sort of agree, but the classical liberals were reacting to much more authoritarian regimes, and they never veered so close to anarchism. Most libertarians, as far as I can tell, believe that government should protect their lives and property and do nothing else. Although I can understand and to some degree respect this belief, I can't share it (maybe it's the ex-Democrat in me). I think limited government and greater personal liberty is an ideal we should aspire to, but I don't think this means that government can't play a positive role.
Hayek, for instance, makes a very clear distinction between laissez-faire policies and regulated free markets: he supports the latter, as long as the rule of law is paramount and the intent is to ensure fairness rather than central planning. Libertarians tend to be anti-regulation, even when the intent of regulations is to protect citizens rather than fuck corporations.
Amusingly enough Adam Smith was a liberal.
Classical liberals like Adam Smith are about as far away from either modern "liberals" or conservatives as you can get. The closest anyone comes is the libertarians, but they tend to be reflexively anti-government in a way that the classical liberals never were. There are some Republicans with integrity that lean this way, but the party has long since sold out to big business and the theocrats. (Note: pro-free-market does not mean that you favor giveaways to corporations, like the Bush administration does.)
It took me a long time to understand this distinction; Freidrich Hayek does a very good job explaining it. Oddly, he's much beloved by quite a few modern conservatives, even though he explicitly bashes conservatism, and is sympathetic to many of the ideals of leftism. (Just not the methods.)