He is facing "up to" 38 years. That means that if you take all of the charges against him, and he gets the max prison term for all of them, he will be in jail for 38 years. The chances of that happening are zero. What is going to happen is that if the evidence against him is good enough where he (his lawyers) think that he can't win, he will just make a plea deal with the prosecutors. If he serves any time after pleading guilty and making a plea deal, it will likely be under a year. In all likelihood he will just get put on probation for a few years. Probation sucks, but it beats prison... and well, it is supposed to suck. It is a punishment, and punishments tend to suck.
Here is what makes "terrorism" interesting. Terrorism on its own is close to harmless. The Spain bombings, 9/11, the London bombings... all of those bombings didn't even dent those nations. Even 9/11 was just a drop in the bucket. 4000 or so people dying in the US? It won't even register as a blip on US death rates for a year. A couple of knocked over towers? Those are a little costly, but they pale in comparison to even a minor hurricane.
The terrorist attack itself was a pin prick against a giant. The problem is that the giant in response decided to saw off its own hand to keep from ever being pricked again.
While the attack itself did minimal economic damage and a barely noticeable effect on the number of people living and dying in the US (especially next to such terrors as cancer or heart disease), our response to it did horrible.
I am not even pointing to the government response alone. The government did terrible damage to itself by implementing policies that make business harder, travel harder, and importing students and skilled laborers harder. Lets not even considered the more intangible damage done to civil liberties. Even worse, people's own reactions turned a minor disaster into a major disaster. Being terrified of airplanes despite the fact that you are vastly more likely to be struck dead in a car did terrible economic damage. Fear that lead to reduced spending did horrible economic damage.
My point is this. Terrorist are hardly worth mentioning for the acts that they commit. They rank far FAR below other dangers that are likely to kill you. McDonald's and swimming pools kill far more people than terrorist do in the US. Cars kill vastly more people, and yet we manage to soldier on in utter indifference. The only thing that hurts about a terrorist attack is our very own response. If we want to defend against terrorist attacks in the future, prevention isn't the answer. Snatching low hanging fruit, like reinforcing plane doors and telling passengers to kick the shit out of anyone trying to get into the cockpit is fine and relatively cheap. Where the REAL savings would come from is if policy makers could find a way to dampen their own and the publics responses to terrorism. The damage is done when we react by chopping our own limbs off. If we could find a way to not react so violently, terrorist attacks, while hardly a good thing, would be FAR less destructive.
This question makes no sense to me. How "tech savvy" will the president be? The internet is basically just a series of tubes. How hard could it to be to understand? What could possibly go wrong?
I personally think that this law might actually be a good thing. Due to the networked nature of the Internet, Sweden will be opening everyone's mail, not just the mail of their citizens. As a result, you might find that this prompts people to start truly using some decent encryption. If there was a sudden rise in encryption, individuals defending themselves might make this entire argument a moot point. If it takes a few dozen NASA (or Sweden's equivalent) super computers a few weeks to crack an e-mail, that fairly well rules out mass snooping.
The obvious counter is to make encryption without a back door illegal. With mobile open source projects which can set up home in any nation (or no nation) though, I think that the governments ability to enforce such absurdity would be rendered impotent.
Eh, I am not a big fan of the manned missions, but some relatively cheap robotic missions are hardly going to spell the difference between the end of the world and a happy utopia.
As for the "OMFG OIL!!!11!!!" comments, I would relax. We already have plenty of alternatives to oil, we just don't use them. The most obvious alternative to oil is expensive oil, as seen in the tar sands of Canada. Beyond that, you can merrily make synthetic oil, as Germany show way the hell back in WW2. Civilization is not going to collapse. At worst, prices climb, people switch to now relatively cheaper alternatives, and grumble about the price.
The US (you know, the home of NASA) in particular is pretty well isolated from the effects of rising oil costs. It is sitting on top of the world's largest supply of coal, meaning that power is not going to be a problem in this century providing CO2 emissions don't keep you up at night. It also has the worlds most productive farm land, meaning that it can merrily turn food into fuel without collapsing civilizations. Toss on top of this the merry fact that a half a dozen oil alternatives are waiting in the wings for the cost of oil to inch up just a little higher, and I sleep well at night.
There are good reasons to worry about energy. High energy prices suck, global warming is no fun, and not everywhere in the world can roll with the punches as easily as the industrialized west can. That said, it certainly is not to such a level that we need to stop tossing the few paltry bones at NASA that we currently do because "OMFG OIL!!!111!!"
Pirates of the Burning Sea reminds me a lot of Eve. It has a massive amount of potential. You can almost see how awesome the game could have been. You can almost grasp the edges of an interesting economy and combat system. You can almost see wide spread coordination and politics... but in the end, the honest truth is that the economy is crap, the combat tedious, and the politics barren. It has a great deal of potential, but it doesn't live up to any of it.
It seems that this patch add the missing substance that it lacks.
The US is actually set to dodge the demographic bullet. While US xenophobia is rising these days, it is still well below most of Europe and Japan. The result is that the US can merrily open the faucet a little and let more people in to keep the population rising. The US also tends to have higher access to skilled workers due to simply being frigging big and being a hot destination for graduate level work.
It will be interesting to see if the US can maintain its high levels of skilled immigrants in the face of rising global wealth. It is one thing to snag a skilled Indian engineer when India is one big impoverished wasteland. It is an entirely different challenge when sections of India approach American levels of comfort and wealth at a small fraction of the cost.
One point you miss in trying to stenotype the Chinese people as merrily accepting authority is that... well, they don't. Even by the Chinese government own statistics, they have ten of thousands of cases of civil disorder each year. The image of China as an orderly state that is unmovable is really not entirely true. China has serious and deep internal forces that constantly try and tear the nation apart. One reason why China is so leery of democracy is because given a chance, they are (rightfully) terrified that the nation would come apart at the seams.
The more important thing to point out about Chinese civil disorder (which is extremely common) and resistance to authority is that it is not pro-democracy. Even Tienanmen Square wasn't entirely about democracy. If you really want to make a generalization about what the Chinese people want, you could sum it up by saying that they want rule of law and order. I think many Chinese people would be happy with an authoritarian government that offered that not because they are accepting of authoritarianism, but because they want order and rule of law. It shouldn't come as much of a shock that the places where the Chinese people have these two things they are the most content... i.e. large prosperous cities where civil disorder is rare.
The US has independent worker controlled companies too. We call them co-ops.
A "communist party" is less than a good reason to get upset. If they are elected in and don't promptly trash all civil and political liberty, no one really care what they do how they run their economics. What has defined "communism" in the 20th century, and what has caused the west and, in particular the US to react so violently against it, was a lack of civil and political liberty. A handful of democratically elected socialist and coops is hardly going to raise much hackles.
The point of violent rejection for US isn't the nitpicking of economic types, or even of political control. It is of ideology. Dictators are a dime a dozen, and failed economic policy is utterly common. These things don't spread on their own accord. Ideology spreads. This is why the US maintains its embargo. The US wants to utterly crush the ideology in the same way it and the western Allies crushed fascism completely.
Crushing communism as an ideology won't get rid of brutal political and civil repression. It will on the other hand prevent people seeking to rise to absolute power from having a readily accessible ideology to justify their actions.
Crushing fascism didn't end fascist policies, but it certainly did prevent mass fascist movements and fascist nations from joining together to be a threat to current order. The same is true for communism. Crushing communism utterly won't prevent the cruelties of communist regimes from being repeated, it just takes the banner and moral justification away for such brutality.
It has nothing to do with health care. Only an idiot would point to Cuba as a model for anything, as any idiot could also point out that an American bum panhandling makes more money per day than a Cuban makes in a month. There are some great examples of nations with good universal health care that don't have oppressive totalitarian governments and a deeply impoverished people. I would suggest pointing towards Europe for universal health care models.
Ideological the embargo certainly is though. After World War II, the west stamped out fascism. When it stamped it out, it stamped it out completely. Sure, you can argue that there are still states that might qualify as "fascist" depending upon you definition (yeah, I know spare me, "OMG OMG AMERICA IS FASCIST BUSH IS DICTATOR!!11!!"), but there is not a single state that declares itself fascist. As an ideology, fascism is dead utterly dead.
The US is doing the same thing to communism. The west all but stamped out communism. There doesn't exist a nation that declares itself communist without a wink and a nudge, except for Cuba. The embargo is about crushing a rival ideology as dead as fascism.
Honestly, I think the embargo is almost over. Raul has to give just an inch, and the US will drop the embargo. I think Raul is going to give that inch. It seems pretty clear to me that Raul is enamored with the China model. If Raul starts down that path, the US will stop wasting the effort. Cuba can keep calling itself communist if that is what gets them off, but a communist nation with private property is a joke. No communist revolutionaries point to China as a model for communism, and if the same thing happened in Cuba, the US would happily relent, declaring one more rival ideology dead.
If you are using the English language, American refers to people from the USA. If you want to refer to a continent, you don't say "America". There is no American continent. There is certainly a North America and a South America, but that is it. So, if a Brazilian wants to refer to themselves as a member of the South American content, in English, they say that they are South American. Canadians say North American. If you want to refer to both continents together, they are "the Americas".
Get off the PC high horse. Every nations chops down their nations name into something less than the full thing. In non-English languages they might have other conventions, but in English, the convention is pretty clear. If you call yourself an American in English, everyone who can speak English will assume that you come from the USA, not from Bolivia. No one is going to assume that you mean north or south America.
Words are worth their weight in gold. The best thing to do is give Russia a pat on the head, a hug, and a wad of cash Pats on the head and hugs are worth their weight in gold too. And giving money to dictatorships that do what we want tends to look pretty bad in the eyes of other countries. Either we support dictatorships, use empty words to decry them, let them continue their crimes unabated, or force their demise. We've done them all, and been hated no matter what. Quote my entire sentence next time and you won't be so confused. Let me quote it for you with the key words you missed in bold.
The best thing to do is give Russia a pat on the head, a hug, and a wad of cash when they do right, and wait for a less drunk and incompetent Yeltsin to appear to bring Russia back to something closer to a democracy. I am not advocating sending dictators fruit baskets. I am advocating a policy of measured indifference to dictators and warm and gooey treats for friends and leaders who bring about democratic change. If a country takes the plunge into something close to a liberal democracy, toss them the bone of favorable trade status. If a country kicks ass in the name of democracy, shower them with kindness.
So, to be really specific, pick the South American nation of your choice. Most of these nations have gone from having dictators to something we could call a liberal democracy. If we wanted to do something constructive, we could have rewarded the ones that were the most liberal (liberal in the traditional sense of the word, not the leftist sense) with the best trade perks. The US is a god damn huge market. Letting a little nation have unrestricted access and not demanding the same in return is pure gold. To the US, it is a trivial economic hit. To a small nation, it is like heaven opening up and raining down money. If you want to see this policy in action, look at Japan after World War II.
Bah, the advice is everyone babbles about is "don't be nice!" This is crap advice.
Look, it is true that certain behaviors will absolutely score you more women faster. Yes, being a smug over confident ass hole will likely score you some ass faster than trying to be everyone's friend. There are two things that this strategy misses:
1) This confuses getting some with dating another human whose company you actually enjoy. These are entirely different things. You can get laid without having any interest in the person you are screwing. You can be interested in a person and not want to screw them. Finally, you can be interested in someone and enjoy bumping uglies. Most the fucked up dating advice goes along the lines of âoebe a dick and you will get some!â fails to realize that these three states are different things.
2) The dating advice that revolves around "be a dick" relies pretty much exclusively on finding women with low self esteem who are emotionally unstable. It is like advising a hunter to just walk behind a herd of antelope until you find one instead of wasting time setting up an ambush that might fail. Yeah, you will find one if you keep walking, but the one you find will always be half dead and diseased. All of the "be a dick" dating advice also revolves around getting rejected often. The reason for the often repeated rejection is because the women that reject you are the desirable functional females, while the ones who fail the test go home with you. Again, great for getting laid, but counter productive for finding something more exciting than a glorified sex toy.
My advice? If you just want to get laid, follow the âoehunt the too wounded and diseased to run strategyâ (i.e. use tactics that specifically target screwed up women). You will find the human herdâ(TM)s equivalent of diseased and half dead whom you can take at will (rank as they might be).
If you have screwed around enough to realize that the occasional lay isnâ(TM)t worth the misery of dealing with a screwed up woman with no self esteem, stop trying. Seriously, give it a rest. I am not saying donâ(TM)t date. Date often in fact. Some times you have to kiss a few frogs. Just give up on the lame tactics. In fact, I would say give up on all the lame tactics. Donâ(TM)t castrate yourself to impress or try and be a dick, just be casual, be yourself, donâ(TM)t get worked up, and eventually you will find a female that is interesting, vaguely sane, and doesnâ(TM)t mind jumping the sack with you.
I just want to throw up my whole hearted support of GameTap. They have plenty of great old console games. Even better (and I know this isn't what you want), they have some truly awesome older computer games. You can really start to appreciate the quality of what came before. Games have gotten prettier, but after having fooled around on game tap of a good year so, I don't think they have actually gotten any better.
Yeah, I am pretty sure that a bunch of ornery 16 year old American kids are going to kick over the Russian political system to the cheers of the Russian people. Right.
I have a better idea. How about we just realize that people need to sort their own shit out? The best you can possibly do is elect a government that realizes that it isn't going to beat another nation into submission with rhetoric. If the west wants to do anything for the poor huddled masses of all the oppressed people around the world, it should happily and merrily jump in to help fledgling democracies, reward leaders who bring about democratic change, make some vague attempt to hold a little moral high ground, and serve as example and rewarder.
Tongue lashing Putin is a waste of breath. Words are worth their weight in gold. The best thing to do is give Russia a pat on the head, a hug, and a wad of cash when they do right, and wait for a less drunk and incompetent Yeltsin to appear to bring Russia back to something closer to a democracy.
...how about letting supply and demand of the American workforce take over giving pay raises to nearly all of us IT workers. Good idea. Lets let supply and demand take over and restrict the flow of labor. This way, we can make it really easy for companies. You can either pay ridiculously high wages to the small US work pool, or you can simply move your easily outsourced operations over to India! Great idea. Not only does the job leave, but the guy who was going to make money, spend it in the US, and pay taxes is now elsewhere. Awesome idea!
It is far better to keep wages at a sane level by letting the supply of workers rise, than it is for companies to simply be unable to compete without outsourcing. Better to have the workers here, regardless of where they are from, than to have them be somewhere else.
Immigration is probably the only thing keeping your job here in the US. I wouldn't complain. Think about it from a corporations point of view. You have an international corporation that simply wants the work done and are truly indifferent to where it is done. When deciding where to do the bulk of their programming, the US is not exactly the most inviting place. We have some of the highest corporate taxes in the world, we have the highest wages in the world, and in general there is a very high cost of doing business here.
There are good reasons to do work in the US. If the work is the for the US market, it doesn't hurt to have it done in the US to save time in cleaning it up make it presentable to the consumer and you have cleaner communication lines with the US marketers and business folks.
What the immigration does is make the choice a little easier for corporations to pick the US over India. Sure, immigration does, to some small extent push down US wages. Know what pushes down US wages even more though? When they say "fuck it" and simply have the entire thing done in India for a fraction of the cost.
So, you can either swallow that people from India (and elsewhere) come here for high wages while at the same time knocking your wages down a little, or simply have corporations throw their hands up at the high cost of doing business and simply farm it all out to India.
Take your pick.
Stringent immigration policies NEVER result in great economic booms that nationalist promise. Immigration has never hurt the US. The US has a long time of kicking ass and taking in the economics and academics BECAUSE it has such a liberal immigration policy. Taking in skilled workers from elsewhere is a good thing for the US and keeps jobs here. If anyone has anything to bitch about, it is India. The US is the one stealing away their skilled workers, adding them to our economy, and leaving them high and dry.
I don't think that is what he really meant. What MS is trying to do is actually the right thing. MS wants to make it access privileges more like Linux. It wants to make it so that random programs can't run a muck with admin privileges. This is MS's attempt to get application makers to stop requesting privileges that they don't need because they are too lazy to program it the right way.
Look, I'll be the first to decry Vista as a piece of shit, but despite all of Vista's flaws, trying to restrict access of programs is a good thing.
Personally, I think that MS is slowly learning. MS is in no danger of losing its business division so long as companies demand backwards compatibility, but in personal computing it is getting kicked around. MS looks old and faded while Apple has a solid product combined with a marketing machine of d00m (Microsoft always sucked at marketing). MS needs to make changes or else it is going to get run over by Apple. Lock in isn't going to last forever in the face of a comparable, if not outright better, product and vastly superior branding and marketing.
I mean hell, what do you think of when you think of Apple? Shinny plastic with a hipster in a coffee shop. What do you think of when you think of MS? A moldy office.
Even if a tiny black hole was stable, it still poses no threat. Ok, so lets pretend that there is a tiny black hole that eats a few atoms around it. Wow, at that rate it will consume the earth in 10^30 years (I actually didn't do the calculation)! "But wait!" you cry, "As the black hole gains mass, it will gain in gravity and consume at a greater rate!" No. Tossing in a handful of atoms into a mini black hole produces no real change in its gravity. That is the point. A tiny black hole grows so slowly and consumes so little that it poses no threat. The sun will go nova long before tiny black holes made by the Hadron eat the earth.
Bah, teacher can stop grading on a curve when they figure out what is worth teaching and how to test it. I was lucky and got to go to co-ops all through my chemical engineer degree. I realized pretty quickly that we were being taught a load of worthless garbage that we would never use.
The vast majority of engineering examines are really tests of rote memory, your differential equations skills, and how quickly you can rush through some silly problem. On the other hand, most professional engineers will never ever do differential equations by hand, will be smart enough to look something up if they don't know the answer off the top of their head, and never toss an arbitrary hour long time limit onto doing critical calculations. College engineering, especially BS degrees, teach you about an hour's worth of useful knowledge for every 100 hours you of your life you burn away trying to stuff seven differential equations into each other.
I can't tell you about other engineering degrees, but I can tell you that the chemical engineering curriculum has not change in the slightest since 1950, yet most chemical engineers these days shoot for jobs in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and solid state devices... fields that didn't even exist in 1950. This should give you an idea of the worthlessness of chemical engineering degrees these days.
I can't speak for the other engineering degrees, but I can say that a chemical engineer offers only two things. First, it shows that you have some basic understanding of chemistry and physics. Second, that you have the perseverance of a saint, are smart, or both. The "I must not be an complete idiot degree" is nice, but I personally look back on those years with disappointment at how little real education I got in a field that interests me. If it had not been for co-ops, I would have chalked up the academic aspects of getting an engineer as a complete loss.
What makes it worse is that having spent time in industry I realize how much I could have learned if we didn't blow all of our time trying to kludge a dozen different equations into a solvable form or memorizing worthless equations.
You can't entirely "withhold" the information. If the CEO of a company suddenly dumps stocks in his own company, that should be a signal that something is up. The whole point of a stock price is that it moves with the financial viability of the company. There are in fact legal ways for a CEO to go ahead and sell of his stock based upon insider information, but there are a pile of loops he has to jump through and the move needs to be made public. This isn't a bad thing. Simply by selling stock you cause the price to fall. If you are selling stock because you know the price will fall in the future, you are actually evening out the eventual drop and making it take place slowly over time rather than suddenly all at once.
All trading that isn't done with a coin flip is "insider trading" to some small extent. If you think you see a pattern in the markets and make a trade, your trade is only worth something if everyone else hasn't already spotted that same pattern. In a sense, you think you have information that other people don't and make a trade based upon that information. This is what Milton Friedman is talking about when he says that insider trading is good.
There are real issues with insider trading, but it isn't necessarily true that all insider trading is bad. It is one thing for a CEO to declare he is about to make a trade based upon information he has. It is another entirely to make a trade in secret and then make some sort of move with his company to capitalize upon that trade at the expense of the company.
Their obsession with conformity has also graced them with the highest suicide rate in the world.
People miss the point of citing statistics like wealth and crime. Wealth and crime in it of themselves are worthless. Crime in particular is a silly stat to obsess over. If you want to eliminate crime, just knock everyone into a coma and keep them alive with feeding tubes. The reason why we want wealth and low crime is to bring about happiness. When your pursuit of these things fail to produce more happiness, you are failing. The real purpose of a government should be to bring about the greatest happiness for their citizens and sustain their happiness. All the wealth and low crime in the world won't make a damned bit of difference if you are so miserable you throw yourself off a bridge.
If the point of life is happiness, the Japanese fail spectacularly. The Japanese are roughly the last people in this world we should be seeking to emulate. Don't get me wrong, a lot of great things come out of Japan that I have met have been great people, but the emulation of their miserable and unhappy society ranks roughly last on my list of things to do.
Sure, there are no "true" western democracies, but all of these systems of elements of democratic and non-democratic institutions. The US is a good example because it provides some very stark contrasts.
The US constitution is a very undemocratic document. The document can't be overturned by a popular vote. In fact, the change anything in the US constitution you need to go through a complex and painful process that involves getting more than a super-majority. Thus, it is very anti-democratic in its nature. It offers up resistance to the popular vote. Further, the document itself (especially the bill of rights) describes what rights the majority can't take away, no matter how badly they want to. The US constitution is an inherently very undemocratic document. It also offers up the best protections against the kind of insanity we now face. Clearly, the document is far from perfect as it has slowly over the past few hundred years been stripped of its teeth. Even in its current degraded form, it has offered up the best defense against the new insanity.
Compare this to election of representatives for government. True, this isn't "democracy" in its truest form, but it is certainly closer than something like the constitution. Representatives who are indeed elected through a democratic or near democratic way react violently to the will of the masses. Crap like the patriot act or this silliness in Britain come from the action or inaction of representatives. There are democratic methods of tossing these people to the curb to prevent these policies, but the simple fact of the matter is that the majority is either indifferent or for these changes. Hence, we see that a democratic institution is the cause of the current hysteria, while an utterly non-democratic institution like the US constitution and the court system are offering up the only defense against the current hysteria. Sadly, the forces against the current madness and losing slowly to the democratic will of the masses.
Look, I am not offering up a solution. I don't know what government system remains just, rational, liberal (in the traditional sense of the word), free of tyranny, AND retains the ability to change in a rational way to meet new (real) threats. I can just safely say that democracy isn't the answer.
The measures we go through to stop terrorism have reached such a point of insanity that I am simply blown away. The way to react to a tiny handful of deaths has been so out of proportion to the threat, that I wake up thankful every single day that US Constitution provides at least some (admittedly constantly weakening) safeguards against democracy.
This latest scheme in Britain is just one more example of the utter insanity of the masses and their complete and utter inability to make rational decisions. You are radically more likely to be killed by your pool or a car than you are to be struck down by a terrorist. Despite this, we go through insane, fanatical, and expensive measures to prevent one of the rarest ways to die in a western democracy. Death through airplane exploded by terrorist rates somewhere near the absolute bottom in terms of likely ways to die... well below being struck down by lightening.
Honestly, I think that we have seen why democracies don't work. If we continue down this utterly insane path spending more and more resources to defend utterly insignificant attacks with wildly out of proportion, expensive, AND a costly to civil liberties methods, we might actually succeed where terrorist always fail. Terrorist in the west always fail to cause any real significant or costly damage. Even 9/11 was a drop in the bucket next to auto accident, cancer, heart attacks, or hurricanes. Yet, we treat a tragedy that can normally be shrugged off without flinching in such a violent way that we cause incalculable harm to ourselves. The money and lives lost in the response to 9/11 or the London bombings make the actual attacks like like pock change.
It is like getting a pin prick on your finger tip and responding by chopping your own arm off. Uh, yeah, you can't get pin pricked again... but you chopped off your fucking arm.
As much as I want to blame the politicians/corporations/neo-cons/fill-in-evil-entity-of-choice-here, the real problem is democracy. A system that changes itself in response to the utterly stupid and irrational emotions of the masses dooms itself. What is the alternative? The hell of I know. I thought that the US constitution offers up a good alternative to democracy as it seems to be written in pretty clear and absolute language. Despite this, the US has reverted to democracy in its most vile of forms. It might not be as far gone as Britain, but it is desperately trying. I honestly don't know the answer You can't ignore the irrational masses as you will fall into the trap of tyranny. That said, if you listen to the stupid cows, you get this crap, which is tyranny in another form.
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He is facing "up to" 38 years. That means that if you take all of the charges against him, and he gets the max prison term for all of them, he will be in jail for 38 years. The chances of that happening are zero. What is going to happen is that if the evidence against him is good enough where he (his lawyers) think that he can't win, he will just make a plea deal with the prosecutors. If he serves any time after pleading guilty and making a plea deal, it will likely be under a year. In all likelihood he will just get put on probation for a few years. Probation sucks, but it beats prison... and well, it is supposed to suck. It is a punishment, and punishments tend to suck.
Here is what makes "terrorism" interesting. Terrorism on its own is close to harmless. The Spain bombings, 9/11, the London bombings... all of those bombings didn't even dent those nations. Even 9/11 was just a drop in the bucket. 4000 or so people dying in the US? It won't even register as a blip on US death rates for a year. A couple of knocked over towers? Those are a little costly, but they pale in comparison to even a minor hurricane.
The terrorist attack itself was a pin prick against a giant. The problem is that the giant in response decided to saw off its own hand to keep from ever being pricked again.
While the attack itself did minimal economic damage and a barely noticeable effect on the number of people living and dying in the US (especially next to such terrors as cancer or heart disease), our response to it did horrible.
I am not even pointing to the government response alone. The government did terrible damage to itself by implementing policies that make business harder, travel harder, and importing students and skilled laborers harder. Lets not even considered the more intangible damage done to civil liberties. Even worse, people's own reactions turned a minor disaster into a major disaster. Being terrified of airplanes despite the fact that you are vastly more likely to be struck dead in a car did terrible economic damage. Fear that lead to reduced spending did horrible economic damage.
My point is this. Terrorist are hardly worth mentioning for the acts that they commit. They rank far FAR below other dangers that are likely to kill you. McDonald's and swimming pools kill far more people than terrorist do in the US. Cars kill vastly more people, and yet we manage to soldier on in utter indifference. The only thing that hurts about a terrorist attack is our very own response. If we want to defend against terrorist attacks in the future, prevention isn't the answer. Snatching low hanging fruit, like reinforcing plane doors and telling passengers to kick the shit out of anyone trying to get into the cockpit is fine and relatively cheap. Where the REAL savings would come from is if policy makers could find a way to dampen their own and the publics responses to terrorism. The damage is done when we react by chopping our own limbs off. If we could find a way to not react so violently, terrorist attacks, while hardly a good thing, would be FAR less destructive.
This question makes no sense to me. How "tech savvy" will the president be? The internet is basically just a series of tubes. How hard could it to be to understand? What could possibly go wrong?
I personally think that this law might actually be a good thing. Due to the networked nature of the Internet, Sweden will be opening everyone's mail, not just the mail of their citizens. As a result, you might find that this prompts people to start truly using some decent encryption. If there was a sudden rise in encryption, individuals defending themselves might make this entire argument a moot point. If it takes a few dozen NASA (or Sweden's equivalent) super computers a few weeks to crack an e-mail, that fairly well rules out mass snooping.
The obvious counter is to make encryption without a back door illegal. With mobile open source projects which can set up home in any nation (or no nation) though, I think that the governments ability to enforce such absurdity would be rendered impotent.
Eh, I am not a big fan of the manned missions, but some relatively cheap robotic missions are hardly going to spell the difference between the end of the world and a happy utopia.
As for the "OMFG OIL!!!11!!!" comments, I would relax. We already have plenty of alternatives to oil, we just don't use them. The most obvious alternative to oil is expensive oil, as seen in the tar sands of Canada. Beyond that, you can merrily make synthetic oil, as Germany show way the hell back in WW2. Civilization is not going to collapse. At worst, prices climb, people switch to now relatively cheaper alternatives, and grumble about the price.
The US (you know, the home of NASA) in particular is pretty well isolated from the effects of rising oil costs. It is sitting on top of the world's largest supply of coal, meaning that power is not going to be a problem in this century providing CO2 emissions don't keep you up at night. It also has the worlds most productive farm land, meaning that it can merrily turn food into fuel without collapsing civilizations. Toss on top of this the merry fact that a half a dozen oil alternatives are waiting in the wings for the cost of oil to inch up just a little higher, and I sleep well at night.
There are good reasons to worry about energy. High energy prices suck, global warming is no fun, and not everywhere in the world can roll with the punches as easily as the industrialized west can. That said, it certainly is not to such a level that we need to stop tossing the few paltry bones at NASA that we currently do because "OMFG OIL!!!111!!"
Pirates of the Burning Sea reminds me a lot of Eve. It has a massive amount of potential. You can almost see how awesome the game could have been. You can almost grasp the edges of an interesting economy and combat system. You can almost see wide spread coordination and politics... but in the end, the honest truth is that the economy is crap, the combat tedious, and the politics barren. It has a great deal of potential, but it doesn't live up to any of it.
It seems that this patch add the missing substance that it lacks.
The US is actually set to dodge the demographic bullet. While US xenophobia is rising these days, it is still well below most of Europe and Japan. The result is that the US can merrily open the faucet a little and let more people in to keep the population rising. The US also tends to have higher access to skilled workers due to simply being frigging big and being a hot destination for graduate level work.
It will be interesting to see if the US can maintain its high levels of skilled immigrants in the face of rising global wealth. It is one thing to snag a skilled Indian engineer when India is one big impoverished wasteland. It is an entirely different challenge when sections of India approach American levels of comfort and wealth at a small fraction of the cost.
One point you miss in trying to stenotype the Chinese people as merrily accepting authority is that... well, they don't. Even by the Chinese government own statistics, they have ten of thousands of cases of civil disorder each year. The image of China as an orderly state that is unmovable is really not entirely true. China has serious and deep internal forces that constantly try and tear the nation apart. One reason why China is so leery of democracy is because given a chance, they are (rightfully) terrified that the nation would come apart at the seams.
The more important thing to point out about Chinese civil disorder (which is extremely common) and resistance to authority is that it is not pro-democracy. Even Tienanmen Square wasn't entirely about democracy. If you really want to make a generalization about what the Chinese people want, you could sum it up by saying that they want rule of law and order. I think many Chinese people would be happy with an authoritarian government that offered that not because they are accepting of authoritarianism, but because they want order and rule of law. It shouldn't come as much of a shock that the places where the Chinese people have these two things they are the most content... i.e. large prosperous cities where civil disorder is rare.
The US has independent worker controlled companies too. We call them co-ops.
A "communist party" is less than a good reason to get upset. If they are elected in and don't promptly trash all civil and political liberty, no one really care what they do how they run their economics. What has defined "communism" in the 20th century, and what has caused the west and, in particular the US to react so violently against it, was a lack of civil and political liberty. A handful of democratically elected socialist and coops is hardly going to raise much hackles.
The point of violent rejection for US isn't the nitpicking of economic types, or even of political control. It is of ideology. Dictators are a dime a dozen, and failed economic policy is utterly common. These things don't spread on their own accord. Ideology spreads. This is why the US maintains its embargo. The US wants to utterly crush the ideology in the same way it and the western Allies crushed fascism completely.
Crushing communism as an ideology won't get rid of brutal political and civil repression. It will on the other hand prevent people seeking to rise to absolute power from having a readily accessible ideology to justify their actions.
Crushing fascism didn't end fascist policies, but it certainly did prevent mass fascist movements and fascist nations from joining together to be a threat to current order. The same is true for communism. Crushing communism utterly won't prevent the cruelties of communist regimes from being repeated, it just takes the banner and moral justification away for such brutality.
You joke, but the full name for Norway is the Kingdom of Norway.
It has nothing to do with health care. Only an idiot would point to Cuba as a model for anything, as any idiot could also point out that an American bum panhandling makes more money per day than a Cuban makes in a month. There are some great examples of nations with good universal health care that don't have oppressive totalitarian governments and a deeply impoverished people. I would suggest pointing towards Europe for universal health care models.
Ideological the embargo certainly is though. After World War II, the west stamped out fascism. When it stamped it out, it stamped it out completely. Sure, you can argue that there are still states that might qualify as "fascist" depending upon you definition (yeah, I know spare me, "OMG OMG AMERICA IS FASCIST BUSH IS DICTATOR!!11!!"), but there is not a single state that declares itself fascist. As an ideology, fascism is dead utterly dead.
The US is doing the same thing to communism. The west all but stamped out communism. There doesn't exist a nation that declares itself communist without a wink and a nudge, except for Cuba. The embargo is about crushing a rival ideology as dead as fascism.
Honestly, I think the embargo is almost over. Raul has to give just an inch, and the US will drop the embargo. I think Raul is going to give that inch. It seems pretty clear to me that Raul is enamored with the China model. If Raul starts down that path, the US will stop wasting the effort. Cuba can keep calling itself communist if that is what gets them off, but a communist nation with private property is a joke. No communist revolutionaries point to China as a model for communism, and if the same thing happened in Cuba, the US would happily relent, declaring one more rival ideology dead.
If you are using the English language, American refers to people from the USA. If you want to refer to a continent, you don't say "America". There is no American continent. There is certainly a North America and a South America, but that is it. So, if a Brazilian wants to refer to themselves as a member of the South American content, in English, they say that they are South American. Canadians say North American. If you want to refer to both continents together, they are "the Americas".
Get off the PC high horse. Every nations chops down their nations name into something less than the full thing. In non-English languages they might have other conventions, but in English, the convention is pretty clear. If you call yourself an American in English, everyone who can speak English will assume that you come from the USA, not from Bolivia. No one is going to assume that you mean north or south America.
So, to be really specific, pick the South American nation of your choice. Most of these nations have gone from having dictators to something we could call a liberal democracy. If we wanted to do something constructive, we could have rewarded the ones that were the most liberal (liberal in the traditional sense of the word, not the leftist sense) with the best trade perks. The US is a god damn huge market. Letting a little nation have unrestricted access and not demanding the same in return is pure gold. To the US, it is a trivial economic hit. To a small nation, it is like heaven opening up and raining down money. If you want to see this policy in action, look at Japan after World War II.
Bah, the advice is everyone babbles about is "don't be nice!" This is crap advice.
Look, it is true that certain behaviors will absolutely score you more women faster. Yes, being a smug over confident ass hole will likely score you some ass faster than trying to be everyone's friend. There are two things that this strategy misses:
1) This confuses getting some with dating another human whose company you actually enjoy. These are entirely different things. You can get laid without having any interest in the person you are screwing. You can be interested in a person and not want to screw them. Finally, you can be interested in someone and enjoy bumping uglies. Most the fucked up dating advice goes along the lines of âoebe a dick and you will get some!â fails to realize that these three states are different things.
2) The dating advice that revolves around "be a dick" relies pretty much exclusively on finding women with low self esteem who are emotionally unstable. It is like advising a hunter to just walk behind a herd of antelope until you find one instead of wasting time setting up an ambush that might fail. Yeah, you will find one if you keep walking, but the one you find will always be half dead and diseased. All of the "be a dick" dating advice also revolves around getting rejected often. The reason for the often repeated rejection is because the women that reject you are the desirable functional females, while the ones who fail the test go home with you. Again, great for getting laid, but counter productive for finding something more exciting than a glorified sex toy.
My advice? If you just want to get laid, follow the âoehunt the too wounded and diseased to run strategyâ (i.e. use tactics that specifically target screwed up women). You will find the human herdâ(TM)s equivalent of diseased and half dead whom you can take at will (rank as they might be).
If you have screwed around enough to realize that the occasional lay isnâ(TM)t worth the misery of dealing with a screwed up woman with no self esteem, stop trying. Seriously, give it a rest. I am not saying donâ(TM)t date. Date often in fact. Some times you have to kiss a few frogs. Just give up on the lame tactics. In fact, I would say give up on all the lame tactics. Donâ(TM)t castrate yourself to impress or try and be a dick, just be casual, be yourself, donâ(TM)t get worked up, and eventually you will find a female that is interesting, vaguely sane, and doesnâ(TM)t mind jumping the sack with you.
I just want to throw up my whole hearted support of GameTap. They have plenty of great old console games. Even better (and I know this isn't what you want), they have some truly awesome older computer games. You can really start to appreciate the quality of what came before. Games have gotten prettier, but after having fooled around on game tap of a good year so, I don't think they have actually gotten any better.
Yeah, I am pretty sure that a bunch of ornery 16 year old American kids are going to kick over the Russian political system to the cheers of the Russian people. Right.
I have a better idea. How about we just realize that people need to sort their own shit out? The best you can possibly do is elect a government that realizes that it isn't going to beat another nation into submission with rhetoric. If the west wants to do anything for the poor huddled masses of all the oppressed people around the world, it should happily and merrily jump in to help fledgling democracies, reward leaders who bring about democratic change, make some vague attempt to hold a little moral high ground, and serve as example and rewarder.
Tongue lashing Putin is a waste of breath. Words are worth their weight in gold. The best thing to do is give Russia a pat on the head, a hug, and a wad of cash when they do right, and wait for a less drunk and incompetent Yeltsin to appear to bring Russia back to something closer to a democracy.
...how about letting supply and demand of the American workforce take over giving pay raises to nearly all of us IT workers. Good idea. Lets let supply and demand take over and restrict the flow of labor. This way, we can make it really easy for companies. You can either pay ridiculously high wages to the small US work pool, or you can simply move your easily outsourced operations over to India! Great idea. Not only does the job leave, but the guy who was going to make money, spend it in the US, and pay taxes is now elsewhere. Awesome idea!It is far better to keep wages at a sane level by letting the supply of workers rise, than it is for companies to simply be unable to compete without outsourcing. Better to have the workers here, regardless of where they are from, than to have them be somewhere else.
Immigration is probably the only thing keeping your job here in the US. I wouldn't complain. Think about it from a corporations point of view. You have an international corporation that simply wants the work done and are truly indifferent to where it is done. When deciding where to do the bulk of their programming, the US is not exactly the most inviting place. We have some of the highest corporate taxes in the world, we have the highest wages in the world, and in general there is a very high cost of doing business here.
There are good reasons to do work in the US. If the work is the for the US market, it doesn't hurt to have it done in the US to save time in cleaning it up make it presentable to the consumer and you have cleaner communication lines with the US marketers and business folks.
What the immigration does is make the choice a little easier for corporations to pick the US over India. Sure, immigration does, to some small extent push down US wages. Know what pushes down US wages even more though? When they say "fuck it" and simply have the entire thing done in India for a fraction of the cost.
So, you can either swallow that people from India (and elsewhere) come here for high wages while at the same time knocking your wages down a little, or simply have corporations throw their hands up at the high cost of doing business and simply farm it all out to India.
Take your pick.
Stringent immigration policies NEVER result in great economic booms that nationalist promise. Immigration has never hurt the US. The US has a long time of kicking ass and taking in the economics and academics BECAUSE it has such a liberal immigration policy. Taking in skilled workers from elsewhere is a good thing for the US and keeps jobs here. If anyone has anything to bitch about, it is India. The US is the one stealing away their skilled workers, adding them to our economy, and leaving them high and dry.
I don't think that is what he really meant. What MS is trying to do is actually the right thing. MS wants to make it access privileges more like Linux. It wants to make it so that random programs can't run a muck with admin privileges. This is MS's attempt to get application makers to stop requesting privileges that they don't need because they are too lazy to program it the right way.
Look, I'll be the first to decry Vista as a piece of shit, but despite all of Vista's flaws, trying to restrict access of programs is a good thing.
Personally, I think that MS is slowly learning. MS is in no danger of losing its business division so long as companies demand backwards compatibility, but in personal computing it is getting kicked around. MS looks old and faded while Apple has a solid product combined with a marketing machine of d00m (Microsoft always sucked at marketing). MS needs to make changes or else it is going to get run over by Apple. Lock in isn't going to last forever in the face of a comparable, if not outright better, product and vastly superior branding and marketing.
I mean hell, what do you think of when you think of Apple? Shinny plastic with a hipster in a coffee shop. What do you think of when you think of MS? A moldy office.
Even if a tiny black hole was stable, it still poses no threat. Ok, so lets pretend that there is a tiny black hole that eats a few atoms around it. Wow, at that rate it will consume the earth in 10^30 years (I actually didn't do the calculation)! "But wait!" you cry, "As the black hole gains mass, it will gain in gravity and consume at a greater rate!" No. Tossing in a handful of atoms into a mini black hole produces no real change in its gravity. That is the point. A tiny black hole grows so slowly and consumes so little that it poses no threat. The sun will go nova long before tiny black holes made by the Hadron eat the earth.
Bah, teacher can stop grading on a curve when they figure out what is worth teaching and how to test it. I was lucky and got to go to co-ops all through my chemical engineer degree. I realized pretty quickly that we were being taught a load of worthless garbage that we would never use.
The vast majority of engineering examines are really tests of rote memory, your differential equations skills, and how quickly you can rush through some silly problem. On the other hand, most professional engineers will never ever do differential equations by hand, will be smart enough to look something up if they don't know the answer off the top of their head, and never toss an arbitrary hour long time limit onto doing critical calculations. College engineering, especially BS degrees, teach you about an hour's worth of useful knowledge for every 100 hours you of your life you burn away trying to stuff seven differential equations into each other.
I can't tell you about other engineering degrees, but I can tell you that the chemical engineering curriculum has not change in the slightest since 1950, yet most chemical engineers these days shoot for jobs in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and solid state devices... fields that didn't even exist in 1950. This should give you an idea of the worthlessness of chemical engineering degrees these days.
I can't speak for the other engineering degrees, but I can say that a chemical engineer offers only two things. First, it shows that you have some basic understanding of chemistry and physics. Second, that you have the perseverance of a saint, are smart, or both. The "I must not be an complete idiot degree" is nice, but I personally look back on those years with disappointment at how little real education I got in a field that interests me. If it had not been for co-ops, I would have chalked up the academic aspects of getting an engineer as a complete loss.
What makes it worse is that having spent time in industry I realize how much I could have learned if we didn't blow all of our time trying to kludge a dozen different equations into a solvable form or memorizing worthless equations.
You can't entirely "withhold" the information. If the CEO of a company suddenly dumps stocks in his own company, that should be a signal that something is up. The whole point of a stock price is that it moves with the financial viability of the company. There are in fact legal ways for a CEO to go ahead and sell of his stock based upon insider information, but there are a pile of loops he has to jump through and the move needs to be made public. This isn't a bad thing. Simply by selling stock you cause the price to fall. If you are selling stock because you know the price will fall in the future, you are actually evening out the eventual drop and making it take place slowly over time rather than suddenly all at once.
All trading that isn't done with a coin flip is "insider trading" to some small extent. If you think you see a pattern in the markets and make a trade, your trade is only worth something if everyone else hasn't already spotted that same pattern. In a sense, you think you have information that other people don't and make a trade based upon that information. This is what Milton Friedman is talking about when he says that insider trading is good.
There are real issues with insider trading, but it isn't necessarily true that all insider trading is bad. It is one thing for a CEO to declare he is about to make a trade based upon information he has. It is another entirely to make a trade in secret and then make some sort of move with his company to capitalize upon that trade at the expense of the company.
Their obsession with conformity has also graced them with the highest suicide rate in the world.
People miss the point of citing statistics like wealth and crime. Wealth and crime in it of themselves are worthless. Crime in particular is a silly stat to obsess over. If you want to eliminate crime, just knock everyone into a coma and keep them alive with feeding tubes. The reason why we want wealth and low crime is to bring about happiness. When your pursuit of these things fail to produce more happiness, you are failing. The real purpose of a government should be to bring about the greatest happiness for their citizens and sustain their happiness. All the wealth and low crime in the world won't make a damned bit of difference if you are so miserable you throw yourself off a bridge.
If the point of life is happiness, the Japanese fail spectacularly. The Japanese are roughly the last people in this world we should be seeking to emulate. Don't get me wrong, a lot of great things come out of Japan that I have met have been great people, but the emulation of their miserable and unhappy society ranks roughly last on my list of things to do.
Sure, there are no "true" western democracies, but all of these systems of elements of democratic and non-democratic institutions. The US is a good example because it provides some very stark contrasts.
The US constitution is a very undemocratic document. The document can't be overturned by a popular vote. In fact, the change anything in the US constitution you need to go through a complex and painful process that involves getting more than a super-majority. Thus, it is very anti-democratic in its nature. It offers up resistance to the popular vote. Further, the document itself (especially the bill of rights) describes what rights the majority can't take away, no matter how badly they want to. The US constitution is an inherently very undemocratic document. It also offers up the best protections against the kind of insanity we now face. Clearly, the document is far from perfect as it has slowly over the past few hundred years been stripped of its teeth. Even in its current degraded form, it has offered up the best defense against the new insanity.
Compare this to election of representatives for government. True, this isn't "democracy" in its truest form, but it is certainly closer than something like the constitution. Representatives who are indeed elected through a democratic or near democratic way react violently to the will of the masses. Crap like the patriot act or this silliness in Britain come from the action or inaction of representatives. There are democratic methods of tossing these people to the curb to prevent these policies, but the simple fact of the matter is that the majority is either indifferent or for these changes. Hence, we see that a democratic institution is the cause of the current hysteria, while an utterly non-democratic institution like the US constitution and the court system are offering up the only defense against the current hysteria. Sadly, the forces against the current madness and losing slowly to the democratic will of the masses.
Look, I am not offering up a solution. I don't know what government system remains just, rational, liberal (in the traditional sense of the word), free of tyranny, AND retains the ability to change in a rational way to meet new (real) threats. I can just safely say that democracy isn't the answer.
The measures we go through to stop terrorism have reached such a point of insanity that I am simply blown away. The way to react to a tiny handful of deaths has been so out of proportion to the threat, that I wake up thankful every single day that US Constitution provides at least some (admittedly constantly weakening) safeguards against democracy.
This latest scheme in Britain is just one more example of the utter insanity of the masses and their complete and utter inability to make rational decisions. You are radically more likely to be killed by your pool or a car than you are to be struck down by a terrorist. Despite this, we go through insane, fanatical, and expensive measures to prevent one of the rarest ways to die in a western democracy. Death through airplane exploded by terrorist rates somewhere near the absolute bottom in terms of likely ways to die... well below being struck down by lightening.
Honestly, I think that we have seen why democracies don't work. If we continue down this utterly insane path spending more and more resources to defend utterly insignificant attacks with wildly out of proportion, expensive, AND a costly to civil liberties methods, we might actually succeed where terrorist always fail. Terrorist in the west always fail to cause any real significant or costly damage. Even 9/11 was a drop in the bucket next to auto accident, cancer, heart attacks, or hurricanes. Yet, we treat a tragedy that can normally be shrugged off without flinching in such a violent way that we cause incalculable harm to ourselves. The money and lives lost in the response to 9/11 or the London bombings make the actual attacks like like pock change.
It is like getting a pin prick on your finger tip and responding by chopping your own arm off. Uh, yeah, you can't get pin pricked again... but you chopped off your fucking arm.
As much as I want to blame the politicians/corporations/neo-cons/fill-in-evil-entity-of-choice-here, the real problem is democracy. A system that changes itself in response to the utterly stupid and irrational emotions of the masses dooms itself. What is the alternative? The hell of I know. I thought that the US constitution offers up a good alternative to democracy as it seems to be written in pretty clear and absolute language. Despite this, the US has reverted to democracy in its most vile of forms. It might not be as far gone as Britain, but it is desperately trying. I honestly don't know the answer You can't ignore the irrational masses as you will fall into the trap of tyranny. That said, if you listen to the stupid cows, you get this crap, which is tyranny in another form.