Think of it from Russian and Chinese leaders point of view.
I think that YOU need to think of it from their point of view. A nuclear always ends in both a national and personal loss. It is a national loss in that your civilization will be destroyed. Forget rebuilding, if the US drops even a tenth of the nukes they have on you, that is more then enough to drop a nuke on every single population center and still have a few left over to spare. If the US launches its entire arsenal, that is enough to blanket your nation in nukes. The places that are not destroyed will be left radioactive. Your civilization is done. Further, YOU are done. Even if you manage to secure a position in a nice cozy government bunker, you are now damned to live in a wasted and blasted nation. Your central government will be destroyed, and so even if you do emerge unscathed, you certainly will not be a ruler.
Further, you don't even need to consider the Chinese or Russia perspective because just examining the US perspective is more then enough to see that the idea of a preemptive nuclear strike against a nation you are at peace with is utterly stupid. What in the hell would the US gain from striking at China or Russia at any point in the future, even if they could not respond? We might plant bombs in the US and blow them up, as if you bomb China you are essentially bombing your own factories. China and Russia are tied into the global economy to such an extent that cutting them off is like cutting of a limb. Even if the US felt like suffering through the economic loss of China and Russia (which it isn't), the retaliation that all other nations would inflict on the US in terms of economic sanctions would ruin whatever little economy remains. The US is NOT self sufficient and almost certainly would be destroyed if such a thing were to happen.
Look, your entire argument in inane. If you truly believe that the leaders of Russia and China would forfeit their lives and the lives of all of their country men in a pissing contest, you need to go back and rethink your understanding of the world.
Would China and Russia be pissed if the US developed an anti-ballistic missile system? Absolutely. We would almost certainly have to pay a steep political price and certainly would pay a steep economic price. Would they throw in the towel and invite 10,000 American nuclear weapons to their backyard despite the fact that both nations have relatively good relations with the US? Hell no.
There are plenty of good reasons to be good against an anti-ballistic missile system that you don't need to make reasons up.
...an actual credible bona fide anti missile defense that really worked, the other major nuclear powers (china and russia) would be sorely tempted to launch a first strike before the new system was widely deployed.
This is a silly argument. China and Russia would not first strike the US if it developed a workable missile defense system. There is no such thing as a nuclear "first strike" against the US (or Russia or China for that matter). If you launch a few hundred missiles, the other guy is going to see you do it and launch their own. Even if Russia or China could teleport nukes onto US soil, that wouldn't save them from being wiped out by US allies and US subs. No one is going to first strike anyone.
The real danger is the US developing a missile defense system is that Russia and China will kick into an arms race with the US to develop missiles that can penetrate the missile defense system and develop their own missile shield. Arms races are expensive and bad for diplomacy. Russia and China would not commit suicide and launch a first strike against the US to prevent them from developing a nuke shield, but they WOULD be pissed that they have to start dumping even more money into nuke R&D. The real question is not if China and Russia will nuke the US for trying to develop a defense systems against ballistic nukes, but if it is worth the billions of dollars it would take to build such a system and the souring of relations that it would produce for a few extra years of safety before improved defenses were developed?
The fact is the US pressured another government to take down a site that was LEGAL in the country it was in.
The travesty of this situation is not what the US did, but what Swedenish politicians did (if early reports are to be believed). Many nations bitch to the US all the time about hosting web sites that are illegal and the US merrily ignores them. The US in turn gives China crap about the websites that they take down and China merrily ignores the US. Governments leaning on other governments to enforce their values is pretty normal. Hell, I expect my government to try and nudge other governments to hold similar values through diplomatic means.
The real crime here is if the Swedish authorities bent to US pressure; or more specifically, if Swedish politicians bent to US pressure and in turn pressured Swedish law enforcement agencies to take an illegal action.. The crime is not the US trying to get the Swedish authorities to take action. The crime is that the Swedish authorities responded illegally to pressure from another nation.
I am not saying I am a fan of US copyright law. US copyright law in fact sucks mightily. That said, I am far more worried that another nation's politicians would cave into US pressure and order their police to enforce a law that doesn't exist and Sweden.
Sony is not going to blow off their own foot, especially if they are going to sell a system that cost an arm and a leg. Sony is not going screw the used games market because the resulting hit in their sales would more then make up for the increased revenue from first time sales. It is a stupid idea, and any CEO who would advocate such a thing should be dragged from his office and shot by the shareholders.
I hate to quibble, but the summary is not quite right. It isn't like there were chimpanzees, humans evolved "up" from chimpanzees, and the chimpanzees remained the same. This isn't how evolution works. What happened was that a single species broke into two separate species. Both species continued to change and evolve. A chimpanzee has done just as much "evolving" as a human has, it just went in a different direction. Whatever the case though, if you were to compare a chimpanzee ancestor to a human and a modern chimp, you would find that you are looking at three very different species.
I am not saying that human evolution isn't teh pwn, but keep in mind that things don't "branch" like in a tree where the original branch remains. When things branch they move off in different directions and the original species before the branch is lost.
So your evidence that the industry cut its size in half each year or two because of the Apollo program is based upon a quote by a journalist who offers absolutely no evidence to the claim that it was the Apollo mission that forced them to do this? This isn't evidence of anything other then one journalist's opinion that Apollo helped to drive the industry forward.
It sure as hell isn't evidence of your initial claim which was that "Without the Apollo program, our computers might still be room-sized behemoths."
The trend doubling CPS every year or two is a solid 100 years old. It wasn't Apollo that made industry leaders suddenly want to cut the size of electronics as rapidly as possible. The utility of smaller circuitry has always been clear and there has always a rabid race to miniaturize for as long as we have had vacuum tubes and solid state transistors.
The claim that miniaturization would never have happened unless the Apollo program had spurred it forward is completely false. Industry had been demanding smaller components since day one and has been willing to shell out a lot more money then even the Apollo program for them. Hell, even the base research for the solid state transistor was conducted in a private lab, and you can't even begin to try and give the government credit for what Fairchild and the companies that it spawned did.
I am not claiming that government research is inherently bad. In fact, I fully support throwing some money at universities to do base research. The claim that the government is the only way things get done though, that is just silly and ignores reality, especially in the case of the semiconducting industry which is very much self motivated to drive forward as fast as possible.
I couldn't find the old article I found that described how often the radition detectors go off, but these two articles imply it and talk about the CIA operation.
Sort of true. The real issue is that the return on investment is: A) long-term and B) not easy to monopolize.
The first point you make is indeed true. Space is a long term investment that most companies are leery of. It isn't so much that companies are afraid of long term investment, they do it all the time in many industries. The real issue is that it is a very expensive and uncertain investment. Investing in space is massively expensive with absolutely no prospect of success. It is a highly risky, massively expensive, long term investment which is of course the worst kind, and so most companies avoid making it. The number of failed space ventures is a complete list of all space ventures outside of big companies doing massive government contracts.
All of that said, there are a handful of smaller companies just starting to get support from larger companies that are doing some innovative things in space. The challenge to companies investing in space is the great expense and the massive technological leaps it would take to reap a real return. Near earth asteroids might have trillions of dollars of resources, but the prospect of mining such an asteroid is daunting, extraordinarily expensive, and technologically very difficult. The rising interest in space tourism combined with some new innovative techniques of getting into space on a budget is starting to open up some possibilities though. Space tourism looks like a truly viable industry if the price can be brought under a few million to get someone into space. Hence, we see the small handful of space tourist startup companies racing shoot people into space.
The second reason you give is laughably silly. First, you don't need to monopolize space. If you could (relatively) cheaply mine in space, you wouldn't need a monopoly. There is enough minerals in space to keep everyone happy for a pretty damn long time. Further, the idea that a monopoly in space is hard is silly. The first people up would have a monopoly because no on else is up there except governments. There is a massive barrier to entry into space (both economic and physical) that puts whoever gets there first a pretty damn secure position. The issue is getting there. No company has ever seen a clear path to space and then done an about face because they were afraid of competition.
Without the Apollo program, our computers might still be room-sized behemoths.
This is just stupid and vaguely insulting to the pioneers of semiconducting. You do realize why they call Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, right? Silicon Valley didn't get its name from the dot com boom/bust. It got its name from the semiconducting foundries that started up there and resulted in the boom in semiconducting. In the 1960's Fairchild gave birth to the industry. The founding members of Fairchild then went on to build a handful of other semiconducting foundries in the area. The government played almost no role in the size reduction of computers. The industry didn't need to be spurred on to develop smaller computers. The industry has been on Moore's law since the dawn of the solid state transistor in early 50's. To argue that the Apollo program had anything to do with solid state transistors is stupid, ignorant, and flatly untrue. Do some historical research before making stupid claims that sound right.
False positives tend to be quickly ignored if they happen to often. For instance, in the US a bunch of CIA operatives just recently decided to test US border security to see if the border guards would stop a truck filled with dirty bomb material. Not many people know this, but the US has radiation detectors along its border. The CIA drove a truck with dirty bomb material in from Mexico using forged papers. They set off radiation alarms, had their papers briefly checked, and were sent through.
Now, why did this happen? You would think that setting off a radiation alarm would result in papers getting a good checking over such that their forged nature would be revealed. As it turns out, the radiation detectors along the border go off all the time. They go off roughly a 50-100 times a day at some points. The border guards were so used to the detectors going off that they stopped paying any attention to them.
If a system gives false positives, the danger isn't that the security people will spend too much time examining false positives, it is that they will ignore all positives. I have a feeling that this security system is borderline useless because of this. I find it very hard to believe that this security system can tell the difference between a piece of luggage that is sitting all by itself in a suspicious manner and a piece of luggage resting at a guy's feet who has just put it down so his hands are free to read a newspaper.
I think you are thinking far too hard. Are Klingons are indeed dark skinned, but the Borg are pasty mother fuckers. Does this mean that the Borg are an analogy for white people working in the corporate world? Are the pale Cardasians that love the heat and are semi-reptilian stereotypes for, hell, I don't know, southern war mongering Americans or Mormons or something?
You can kludge any stereotype you want into any Star Trek species you want because all the species tend to simply be exaggerations of humans. Most Star Trek species can be summed up with the line of thinking, "I wonder what society would look like if we were more X". All species in Star Trek essentially are stereotyped humans in that they are humans that obsess over something (be it logic, honor, order, exc.). Being built off of an extreme example of a human stereotype is going to result in some stereotypes conforming to real life stereotypes.
I think you are trying way too hard to shove broad stereotypes into narrow little holes. Calling the Klingons stereotyped Africans is silly. I don't recall any great black African empires that have challenged the West in any substantial way and served as a substantive enemy like the way the Klingons have. Further, I don't recall many stereotypes around Africans being obsessively honorable which is THE defining trait of a Klingon. If Klingons were to be stereotypes of anything, the original Klingons were pretty clearly the USSR, and the "new" Klingons are pretty clearly influenced by Samurai far more then anything else.
Finally, Star Trek has always been extremely progressive. We are talking about a show where of the original bridge staff of regular characters, Kirk was the only one that was an American.
All that money going into genetically engineered crops. Why not fix the socio-political problems of these regions so the infrastructures -> people can become healthy?
There are two reasons.
First, this is a biotech company. I highly doubt that they have much experience in how to "fix socio-political problems". On the other hand, they are probably pretty skillful at making genetically modified rice that could help reduce the number of people that die from one of the top 10 killers in the third world.
Second, all the money in the world can't fix the problems in many third world nations. You can throw as much money at the problem and it wont suddenly make good governance appear. If throwing money at a problem would make good governance, Iraq should be a flowering utopia. Instead, Iraq is a black hole where a billion dollars goes in, a million dollars come out in government coffers, and the rest vanishes in corruption.
Poor governance is the source of world poverty. Feeding everyone isn't that expensive. Hell, do all the things required to help bring a nation up to the point where it can stand on its own two feet is not that expensive. The issue is not paying for the things that these nations need. The issue is getting these things to these nations. Where the money starts to suddenly vanish is when you try and transport money/food/seeds, exc. If you hand these things over to the local government, large portions of it vanish. If you try and deliver it yourself, you risk getting expelled by the local government. What option does that leave you? Should you at that point invade and try and help people at the point of a gun? We tried that. It was called Somalia. In that one black hawk down incident a squad of American soldiers probably killed more Somali as they tried to retreat back to safety then they saved during the entire operation.
There is no easy fix to world poverty. Bitch that a biotech company is doing there small part to help the probably is counter productive and whiney at best.
Re:Creative is an evil company
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Creative Sues Apple
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
I would second that Creative actually just makes a great MP3 players. I have both an iPod nano and a Creative Zen Vision:M. I have to say, my Zen is absolutely awesome and beats my iPod by a long shot. The GUI is much better, the ability to make playlists on the fly is drastically improved, and the interface is roughly on par with Apple (better in some ways, worse then others). Throw on top of it Rhapsody's all you can eat service, and you have one very sick MP3 player. I loaded up a good 50 full albums and found a pile of new music in less then three days. That isn't even possible pirating, and it would have cost me well over 500 dollars using iTunes. I think Creative and Rhapsody have their shit together. They don't have the monster of an advertising machine that iPod has, but I think once the hype blows over people are going to realize that there are some vastly superior iPod/iTunes alternatives out there.
Re:Creative is an evil company
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Creative Sues Apple
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I can't speak for Creative's past as I know nothing of it. I can say that my Creative Zen Vision:M is one slick ass MP3 player that pounds my iPod into dust. A Creative Zen plus Rhapsody's all you can eat MP3 service is one kick ass combination. Personally, I think that this shows simply that competetion is good and can serve as a swift kick in the ass to get companies into gear and make decent products.
The government has and always will be incompetent in nearly all matters. The government is a necessary evil that serves as arbiter in domestic disputes and acts as a single unified voice and power in international disputes. It is useful in that it can fill those roles that the general citizenry can not fill themselves, but even then it should not be thought that it is any more competent in those matters then it is in planning supply chains for economies or regulating acceptable forms of expression and art.
The reason why limits were placed on the government in the very first place through the separations of powers and the constitution was because it was recognized form the start that government was generally incompetent, corruptible, and self serving in its desire for expanded powers. The danger in the dissolving of the separation of powers and the circumventing of the constitution is that you are handing over power to a corruptible and incompetent entity that obsesses over its own importance and power.
If the government feels that it needs expanded powers, instead of blatantly violating the constitution and our system of checks and balances, it should conduct itself as any lawful government should. It should get permission from the legislative branch of the government and pass laws authorizing their actions instead of blatantly violating existing laws. Democracy is pointless if people are not given even an inkling as to what powers their government has decided it is going to snap up. Perhaps the electorate does not need to know exactly how the government decides to use its powers (and even then, that is certainly dangerous), but at the very least it needs to know that the government has those powers such that the citizenry can decide to remove them.
I do not want the executive branch deciding what laws and parts of the constitution it wants to follow. I trust them with the power of law creation roughly as much as much as I trust them to plan an economy or regulate speech; which is to say I don't trust them at all. Where they are not corrupt or self serving, they are incompetent. I'll risk a nuke in New York over letting the government add power to itself in secret. I question the utility of the power it adds to itself in secret, but even if said powers are making a significant difference (which is doubtful by the administrations own admissions in regards to the NSA wire tapping program), cities, economies, and even societies can be rebuilt. The powers given to the government, especially with no timeframe for their return, are rarely relinquished. Relinquishing the ability for democratic and constitutional means of creating and upholding laws which the government must follow is the most dangerous power one could possibly give to any government, our government is no exception.
I could certainly go and read through 50 pages of installation notes and have. The point you are clearly missing is that your average Joe user is not going to do this. If you think the average user of any product bothers to pound through instillation notes, pass me some of whatever you are smoking. You can rail against how stupid the average consumer is, but all the whining in the world isn't going to make a father who has just come home from work at 6, wants to be in bed by 10, and is already getting yelled at by his wife and kids to sit down and spend an 60-90 minutes reading instillation notes.
M'kay. Saying "It's easy, just go here!" and pointing towards a document that has 13,000+ words in it is a poor idea. I think the point that people have made is not that Linux is impossible. Linux can certainly do just about everything XP or OS X can do. The issue is that in order to get most things running in OS X or windows, I don't even need to think about pounding through 50 pages of installation notes. If that sort of light reading is your thing, Linux is for you. Most people are about as likely to read 50 pages of installation notes as they are to open up their hood and pull apart the guts of their car to fix it. Most people would rather just shell the money out of their pocket, get it fixed in a potentially half-assed way, and save themselves some time.
When you are living on your own and have time to blow, Linux is great. If you learn it at that point in your life, you might very well stick with it. When you have a wife that nags you the second you spend more then 10 minutes doing anything that she doesn't see the obvious utility in and you have two screaming children running circles around you, Linux is a joke. You are much better off to get XP or OS X and call it a day.
Linux is great for what it does. What it doesn't do is provide a practical solution for someone who wants to spend only a small amount of time frigging with their OS.
For most users, fear of the unknown will dominate. And they will run at the mere thought of a surprising dialogue box which actually demands they read and understand it...
I think you miss the point. There is little "fear of the unknown". It is more "fear of wasting my time". I have a lot of devices sitting around. I have an MP3 player, a coffee maker, a car, a TV, a PS2, some speakers, a VCR, a DVD, and all sorts of electronic junk. All of these devices some amount of learning. None of these devices take more then 5 minutes to learn to operate "good enough". They are either intuitive enough to operate without reading the instructions, or the instructions can be summed up in less then 5 pages in a 2" by 2" little book.
Linux fails miserably in this regard. That is not to say that Linux has gotten much better, but it still isn't going to be a home desktop for most users. Linux really only caters to the extremely competent or the extreme n00bs.
Linux is a great thing to give your mother who just wants to be able to read her e-mail and go to websites. You can set the system up and pretty much rest easily knowing that it is unlikely that she will break the system because she is far too ignorant to dig into its guts. She will likely never learn how to do anything other then things you give her to do simply because the learning curve looks like a cliff and it is highly unlikely that she will go brows the right Linux site, find the right tutorial, read the tutorial, understand the tutorial, and remember what she just did if by some act of god she completes the tutorial. This is good in that she can not fill her computer with viruses and spyware, but bad in that she will never do anything more then what I set the computer up to do because she is highly unlikely to invest multiple hours learning how to use any device (computers included).
Linux is also great for expert users who funnel a lot of their time into using computers for the obvious reasons of stability, customizability, and versatility. The problem is that the world is not made up of extreme n00bs and extreme power users with lots of time to invest into learning computers. The world is made up of mostly people who do not fit into either of those categories.
The issue is no "fear" of the unknown. The issue is spending time on the unknown. Mac OS X can be learned in a few minutes most users. Sure, things are a different, but things generally function how you expect to function. You don't need to compile binaries to get Mac OS X or Windows XP to run a program. You don't need to do a magical dance to make devices appear. If you double click on a file and it doesn't run, in these OSes go out and find what you need to run it. The learning curve for both XP and OS X while still higher then your average DVD player, are manageable. Linux on the other hand does not have a manageable. I have had more then one computer literate friend try to run a Linux box and give up simply because the amount of time they need to invest learning is too much for even them.
Linux does a lot of things great. Home computing for your average user isn't one of those things.
And when a lot of such so called crimes will be reported the public opinion will definitely change and get them legal status. In the mean time such people will suffer. But they are already suffering, although much less. It will increase the suffering for a short time but make it legal far more quickly.
This simply is not true. There is a proven track record that punishments do NOT fall in response to new technologies or ability to track and capture law breakers. The best example of this is file sharing. If you pirate a single CDs worth of music the punishment technically should be roughly 2 million dollars. Hundreds of millions of Americans have violated this law. Thousands of people have been prosecuted under this law and been driven into complete financial meltdown. Despite this, the fines for P2P piracy have gone up. The law shows absolutely no signs of catching up with the changing technology. Our political system is simply broken. The political system reacts to severely to special interest (RIAA) and far too slowly to changes in technology.
Crime right now is at a low. You stand almost no chance of being murdered in most places in the US and the UK. Even in the worst places, you only stand moderate probability of being murder if you engage in risky activity. Near perfect prosecution of all violations of the law, especially when the vast majority of the laws or their punishments are completely fucked, is like swatting a fly with a bazooka. I would happily take the extremely small risk getting murdered if it meant that I wouldn't be fined every time I J-walked across an empty street at 3 AM, sped a mile over the ridiculously slow speed limits set in the 60's, shelled out a 250 dollars each time the wind catches a candy wrapper out of my hand and I litter, or get fined a million dollars if I let a friend borrow a CD. These are all ridicules laws with ridicules fines.
Our political system simply sucks are lowering fines or getting rid of laws. I'll take perfect crime detection that snuffs out a miniscule amount of truly anti-social activity the day we get a new political system that truly adds and removes laws as needed.
The biggest issue is that you are introducing more perfect crime detection into a system built to be imperfect. Consider for a moment that half of all Americans have smoked pot at some point in their lives. Would it really do anything good for society if all of a sudden there was a magical way of detecting who had violated this law and punished them to the fullest extent of the law? What if you could detect everyone that had ever pirated something in their entire life. Would it be good if you could slam each one of those hundreds of millions (billions world wide) of people with mutli-million dollar lawsuits?
The true terror is not that people will be caught committing crimes. The problem is that people will be caught for every crime they commit. Imagine the sum total of the crimes you have committed in your life. Have you ever pirated? J-walked, speeded, not used a blinker, done a rolling stop at a stop sign, smoked pot, experimented with drugs, drank underage, been drunk in public, pissed in an alleyway, littered, gotten into a fight, or broken one of the literally millions of other laws that exist on the books? Imagine if suddenly you had to pay the debt for all of the laws you have broken over the course of your life time. I bet the vast majority of the population would be looking at fines that vastly outweigh what they will ever make in their life time, and I imagine that the majority of the population would serve some prison time.
I don't mind crime detection. I mind crime detection in a system built around shitty crime detection. Anything that improves crime detection should be met with a corresponding loosing of punishments or culling of poor laws. No offense, but I have absolutely no faith in politicians to actually actively work to change and remove laws in the face of improved crime detection. For that reason alone, I would say that I am pretty damn adamant that crime detection NOT be automated or improved on too greatly for most things outside of a handful of grievous crimes.
I imagine you would explain what happened to prosecutors, they would decide if you are telling the truth, and if it was an honest mistake let you off. I can't speak for the UK (though I assume it is no different in the US) but police generally don't come down on people for complete accidents. When I was younger and just got my license I left the scene of an accident I was involved in. I left because the woman who had crashed into me said she had no insurance and said she would pay for it out of pocket. I (stupidly) agreed, took her information, and had limped my car home. This was technically against the law. There was clearly at least $1000 worth of damage which means that by law we had to wait for a police officer to arrive on the scene before leaving.
As it turns out, when I got home my parents called the police, the police already knew that I had left the scene because a witness had reported the accident, and I went to the police station. At the police station the police officer told me that I had left the scene of an accident and that it was illegal, but that they would not press charges because it was an innocent mistake and I had clearly had no malicious intent or anything to gain. The woman who had fled the scene on the other hand, they prosecuted her leaving the scene of a crime. She had no insurance because she had been in a dozen crashes. She had fled because she was an unsafe driver and didn't want to be caught in an accident again.
My point? Police can be dicks some times, but generally when it comes to stuff like this they do what is right. The kid in question spammed intentionally just to be a dick and so should pay the price. If you accidentally spam because of a computer malfunction, you are probably okay. There is a world of difference between getting a thousand "SUP FAG!!11!!" e-mails and a thousand error message from server spam.
In order for a revolution (especially a peaceful one) to work, there needs to be SOME liberalism in the society. You need to have a leader that won't slaughter off 5% of its population if it shows up in a protest. Eastern Europe basically played chicken with their governments. The government had the power to crush the dissidents, but to do so it would have taken a mass killing. These governments were not will to commit such genocide and as a result (more or less) surrendered to the people.
Iraq on the other hand is a nation where it is very clear that the majority of the people are unhappy and ready for a violent revolt. The Kurds in Iraq had already been waging a multi-year long war for independence. The Shiites had launched more then one rebellion. All acts of revolution were put down violently by Saddam. This is a guy who was more then happy to use chemical weapons inside of his own nation to prove a point. This is not a guy whom you hold peaceful protests against and don't expect to be shot down. The only way to remove Saddam really was through violence. Now, should the US have jumped in guns blazing, waving American flags, and screaming liberation, eh, I'll save that for other people to debate.
China is an interesting case. China is a nation that is teeters on the edge between mass violence and surrender when it is faced with a peaceful revolution. Tiananmen Square showed very well how China teeters. Tiananmen Square last for a few days. The first few days the Chinese government did nothing. As the protests grew, they finally sent the army in. The first time they sent the Army in the Army was actually peacefully repulsed. The Army didn't open fire, and the citizens didn't let them pass. There are scenes of Chinese literally grabbing army trucks and dragging them backwards through shear manpower, soldiers disembarking and listening to the citizens, and the sort of scenes you would expect from an army ruled by a constitution instead of a corrupt political group. It truly looked like Tiananmen Square was going to be a success and that China was going to go the way of Eastern Europe. Some Chinese leaders (now thrown out of the party and under arrest or dead) even talked about concessions. Right when it looked like China might cave to its people, a more disciplined army was sent in with orders to retake Tiananmen Square and to use violence if necessary... hence the pictures of tanks, the thousands dead, and the tens of thousands vanished.
Now where does China stand today? Would China react with violence against a popular peaceful revolution? Who knows. Personally, I think that China is a little more liberal these days and that the army might refuse to repeat Tiananmen Square. I doubt that such a revolution will happen in the current setting of China. The middle class is growing far too quick and are very unlikely to try and topple their government. That said, I could very well see things changing quickly if China was faced with economic disaster.
The Geneva Convention doesn't cover most of the wars that the US has been in. In order to get Geneva Convention protection, you need to be wearing a uniform when you are captured. The few times that the Geneva Convention has applied because it actually captured people that were wearing uniforms, the US has complied completely. The US did not see many uniformed prisoners even when it was fighting uniformed soldiers because the US tends to cause uniformed armies to designate (everyone dies or strips off their uniform and runs), rather then surrender. Everyone else though that the US has been fighting in the past few years have not been wearing uniforms, hence the US can justifiably say that it has no legal obligation to follow it.
Personally, I think that we need a new Geneva Convention for dealing with guerrilla fighters. The US is completely correct in saying that these people can not be treated like normal soldiers. In a normal war, once you win you simply let everyone go home who hasn't committed some crime against humanity. You can do this because if the nation's army is destroyed and victory declared the chances of them picking up a weapon again are very low. In these guerilla wars though there is no 'victory' that signals it is safe to send captured fighters home. True, some might happily go back to their farms, but others (perhaps many) are simply going to walk out, pick up another gun, and keep fighting. To make matters worse, you almost invariably pick up completely innocent people because the fighters all look like civilians. So, when you capture guerillas you have a group of people that range from hardened warriors who will immediately take up arms the second they are free, less hardened warriors who might or might not pick up arms when they are freed, and completely innocent people who were picked up because they were mistaken for warriors.
How the fuck do you deal with a situation like this? The hell if I know. What I do know is that this bickering about Gitmo and its legality is pointless until someone steps forward with a way to actually deal with these complexities. As to how to solve these paradoxes, I'll leave that to someone smarter then me.
Re:I agree - why no decentralization of energy?
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"H-Prize" Announced
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No, I would suggest investing in biotech as I have already suggested. Until there is a viable alternative, keep on burning dead dinos and try and be as efficient about it as possible. There are some interesting hybrid ideas floating around that might squeeze some extra juice out. Take a hybid, slap in a bigger battery, and have the car keep the battery almost empty while it is running. When the car is off, plug it into the wall and recharge the battery. This way, you might be able to travel the first 15 miles or so off the grid, then switch over to burning gas.
I am a ruthless optimist. I believe pretty strongly that there is a way out that doesn't involve raping the food production capacity of the world for almost zero net energy production; it is just a matter of time and incentive.
Re:I agree - why no decentralization of energy?
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"H-Prize" Announced
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I can sum up the problems with three things you point to quickly and easily.
The problem with any sort of bio-fuel is that they are horribly destructive on the environment, much more so (at least locally) then oil. Few people realize it, but farming is generally very destructive. When you farm you are either destroying the soil, pumping it full of fertilizer which is made from oil and polluting the area around the farm, or doing labor intensive sustainable organic farming. Further, you often times are just barely making energy. In the case of ethanol from corn, you barely break even or lose energy depending upon which study you believe. Growing your energy out of the soil is a really bad way of fueling the world and would lead to mass soil destruction, starvation, landslides, and all sorts of other unpleasantness.
That isn't to say that bio-fuels have no future. If you could coax some algae to produce some good biomass in a pool of water with a few chemicals tossed in, you might very well be looking at a solution. People are working this, but it is still early in development.
Being a chemical engineer myself, I know a fair amount about the Bhopal disaster. Anyone who does any sort of chemical engineering safety studies Bhopal. What happened in Bhopal was a travesty and a crime against humanity. The crime of it still continues to this day. You can walk into the Bhopal facility today and find bags of chemicals still laying around on the ground. There are two great crimes that happened in Bhopal.
1) Union Carbide is absolutely responsible for the first crime which was the initial release that killed thousands of people and severely affected 100,000 or so more. What exactly happened to this day is still something of a mystery. Basically, a there was a runaway reaction. When that runaway reaction was vented (as it was supposed to be), it went through a number of safety systems that were all turned off. Now, why these safety systems were off is no mystery. Some had been turned off for maintenance and some had been turned off to save money. Union Carbide is completely responsible for this. They should have not turned off safety systems to save money, and the manner in which they turned off other safety systems was completely flawed. The entire tragedy would have been completely averted if just one of these safety systems had been on. The blame at the factory falls on Union Carbide for not properly overseeing their facility, and on the managers of the facility for not insisting on proper safety protocol. Union Carbide might not have order the facility to operate in such an unsafe manner, but they damn well were responsible for not ensuring the safety of their facility.
Union Carbide also failed in that they were producing a very toxic chemical using a dangerous method in a very populated area. They stored a very toxic byproduct that was then later used to make the final product (pesticide). Normally, you would never store such large quantities of such a toxic product. Union Carbide did, and they did it in a heavily populated area. The storing of such vast quantities of chemicals was not even required, it was just cost effective to do so.
The great mystery of the whole thing though is what actually caused the accident. There are two theories. One theory is that someone royally fucked up during some basic maintenance, crossed some pipes, turned some valves, and managed to string together a series of coincidences that resulted in the disaster. The accident theory is somewhat improbable, but not entirely improbable given the poor state of the facility. The other theory is sabotage. The Bhopal facility was actually scheduled for shutdown. They were running with the safety systems off because they were trying to squeeze the last few drops of cash out of the facility before shutting it down. It is believed that one of the engineers that was soon to be laid off might have sabotaged the facility. The investigation into what happened was botched, so we are unlikely to ever know the truth.
2) The Indian government made a bad situation worse. After the accident the Indian government evicted Union Carbide from the facility giving them less then a months notice. They didn't let, much less insist that, Union Carbide clean up the mess. To this day you can walk into the old Bhopal facility and find vats of chemicals, pipes leaking corrosive substances, and bags of chemicals laying around the ruined facility. The Indian government kicked Union Carbide out, but never bothered to clean up the mess. The Indian government then failed to secure proper compensation to all of the victims from of Bhopal and failed to conduct a proper investigation as to what caused the accident. The first agreement that the Indian government made with Union Carbide absolved anyone of criminal wrong doing. This agreement was later struck down by the Indian Supreme Court. The debacle over Warren Anderson was just the latest is a series of failures. They served the extradition papers 17 years after the incident. Even if they managed to extradite him (which they won't be able to), the evidence as to what actually happened has long since been lost.
I have no real point to this post, just spewing information.
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Think of it from Russian and Chinese leaders point of view.
I think that YOU need to think of it from their point of view. A nuclear always ends in both a national and personal loss. It is a national loss in that your civilization will be destroyed. Forget rebuilding, if the US drops even a tenth of the nukes they have on you, that is more then enough to drop a nuke on every single population center and still have a few left over to spare. If the US launches its entire arsenal, that is enough to blanket your nation in nukes. The places that are not destroyed will be left radioactive. Your civilization is done. Further, YOU are done. Even if you manage to secure a position in a nice cozy government bunker, you are now damned to live in a wasted and blasted nation. Your central government will be destroyed, and so even if you do emerge unscathed, you certainly will not be a ruler.
Further, you don't even need to consider the Chinese or Russia perspective because just examining the US perspective is more then enough to see that the idea of a preemptive nuclear strike against a nation you are at peace with is utterly stupid. What in the hell would the US gain from striking at China or Russia at any point in the future, even if they could not respond? We might plant bombs in the US and blow them up, as if you bomb China you are essentially bombing your own factories. China and Russia are tied into the global economy to such an extent that cutting them off is like cutting of a limb. Even if the US felt like suffering through the economic loss of China and Russia (which it isn't), the retaliation that all other nations would inflict on the US in terms of economic sanctions would ruin whatever little economy remains. The US is NOT self sufficient and almost certainly would be destroyed if such a thing were to happen.
Look, your entire argument in inane. If you truly believe that the leaders of Russia and China would forfeit their lives and the lives of all of their country men in a pissing contest, you need to go back and rethink your understanding of the world.
Would China and Russia be pissed if the US developed an anti-ballistic missile system? Absolutely. We would almost certainly have to pay a steep political price and certainly would pay a steep economic price. Would they throw in the towel and invite 10,000 American nuclear weapons to their backyard despite the fact that both nations have relatively good relations with the US? Hell no.
There are plenty of good reasons to be good against an anti-ballistic missile system that you don't need to make reasons up.
...an actual credible bona fide anti missile defense that really worked, the other major nuclear powers (china and russia) would be sorely tempted to launch a first strike before the new system was widely deployed.
This is a silly argument. China and Russia would not first strike the US if it developed a workable missile defense system. There is no such thing as a nuclear "first strike" against the US (or Russia or China for that matter). If you launch a few hundred missiles, the other guy is going to see you do it and launch their own. Even if Russia or China could teleport nukes onto US soil, that wouldn't save them from being wiped out by US allies and US subs. No one is going to first strike anyone.
The real danger is the US developing a missile defense system is that Russia and China will kick into an arms race with the US to develop missiles that can penetrate the missile defense system and develop their own missile shield. Arms races are expensive and bad for diplomacy. Russia and China would not commit suicide and launch a first strike against the US to prevent them from developing a nuke shield, but they WOULD be pissed that they have to start dumping even more money into nuke R&D. The real question is not if China and Russia will nuke the US for trying to develop a defense systems against ballistic nukes, but if it is worth the billions of dollars it would take to build such a system and the souring of relations that it would produce for a few extra years of safety before improved defenses were developed?
The fact is the US pressured another government to take down a site that was LEGAL in the country it was in.
The travesty of this situation is not what the US did, but what Swedenish politicians did (if early reports are to be believed). Many nations bitch to the US all the time about hosting web sites that are illegal and the US merrily ignores them. The US in turn gives China crap about the websites that they take down and China merrily ignores the US. Governments leaning on other governments to enforce their values is pretty normal. Hell, I expect my government to try and nudge other governments to hold similar values through diplomatic means.
The real crime here is if the Swedish authorities bent to US pressure; or more specifically, if Swedish politicians bent to US pressure and in turn pressured Swedish law enforcement agencies to take an illegal action.. The crime is not the US trying to get the Swedish authorities to take action. The crime is that the Swedish authorities responded illegally to pressure from another nation.
I am not saying I am a fan of US copyright law. US copyright law in fact sucks mightily. That said, I am far more worried that another nation's politicians would cave into US pressure and order their police to enforce a law that doesn't exist and Sweden.
Sony is not going to blow off their own foot, especially if they are going to sell a system that cost an arm and a leg. Sony is not going screw the used games market because the resulting hit in their sales would more then make up for the increased revenue from first time sales. It is a stupid idea, and any CEO who would advocate such a thing should be dragged from his office and shot by the shareholders.
I hate to quibble, but the summary is not quite right. It isn't like there were chimpanzees, humans evolved "up" from chimpanzees, and the chimpanzees remained the same. This isn't how evolution works. What happened was that a single species broke into two separate species. Both species continued to change and evolve. A chimpanzee has done just as much "evolving" as a human has, it just went in a different direction. Whatever the case though, if you were to compare a chimpanzee ancestor to a human and a modern chimp, you would find that you are looking at three very different species.
I am not saying that human evolution isn't teh pwn, but keep in mind that things don't "branch" like in a tree where the original branch remains. When things branch they move off in different directions and the original species before the branch is lost.
So your evidence that the industry cut its size in half each year or two because of the Apollo program is based upon a quote by a journalist who offers absolutely no evidence to the claim that it was the Apollo mission that forced them to do this? This isn't evidence of anything other then one journalist's opinion that Apollo helped to drive the industry forward.
It sure as hell isn't evidence of your initial claim which was that "Without the Apollo program, our computers might still be room-sized behemoths."
I have a better link.
The trend doubling CPS every year or two is a solid 100 years old. It wasn't Apollo that made industry leaders suddenly want to cut the size of electronics as rapidly as possible. The utility of smaller circuitry has always been clear and there has always a rabid race to miniaturize for as long as we have had vacuum tubes and solid state transistors.
The claim that miniaturization would never have happened unless the Apollo program had spurred it forward is completely false. Industry had been demanding smaller components since day one and has been willing to shell out a lot more money then even the Apollo program for them. Hell, even the base research for the solid state transistor was conducted in a private lab, and you can't even begin to try and give the government credit for what Fairchild and the companies that it spawned did.
I am not claiming that government research is inherently bad. In fact, I fully support throwing some money at universities to do base research. The claim that the government is the only way things get done though, that is just silly and ignores reality, especially in the case of the semiconducting industry which is very much self motivated to drive forward as fast as possible.
I couldn't find the old article I found that described how often the radition detectors go off, but these two articles imply it and talk about the CIA operation.
e -weapons/nonproliferation/42576.html
i d=a.6ODqglGQO0&refer=us
http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/nuk
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&s
Sort of true. The real issue is that the return on investment is: A) long-term and B) not easy to monopolize.
The first point you make is indeed true. Space is a long term investment that most companies are leery of. It isn't so much that companies are afraid of long term investment, they do it all the time in many industries. The real issue is that it is a very expensive and uncertain investment. Investing in space is massively expensive with absolutely no prospect of success. It is a highly risky, massively expensive, long term investment which is of course the worst kind, and so most companies avoid making it. The number of failed space ventures is a complete list of all space ventures outside of big companies doing massive government contracts.
All of that said, there are a handful of smaller companies just starting to get support from larger companies that are doing some innovative things in space. The challenge to companies investing in space is the great expense and the massive technological leaps it would take to reap a real return. Near earth asteroids might have trillions of dollars of resources, but the prospect of mining such an asteroid is daunting, extraordinarily expensive, and technologically very difficult. The rising interest in space tourism combined with some new innovative techniques of getting into space on a budget is starting to open up some possibilities though. Space tourism looks like a truly viable industry if the price can be brought under a few million to get someone into space. Hence, we see the small handful of space tourist startup companies racing shoot people into space.
The second reason you give is laughably silly. First, you don't need to monopolize space. If you could (relatively) cheaply mine in space, you wouldn't need a monopoly. There is enough minerals in space to keep everyone happy for a pretty damn long time. Further, the idea that a monopoly in space is hard is silly. The first people up would have a monopoly because no on else is up there except governments. There is a massive barrier to entry into space (both economic and physical) that puts whoever gets there first a pretty damn secure position. The issue is getting there. No company has ever seen a clear path to space and then done an about face because they were afraid of competition.
Without the Apollo program, our computers might still be room-sized behemoths.
This is just stupid and vaguely insulting to the pioneers of semiconducting. You do realize why they call Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, right? Silicon Valley didn't get its name from the dot com boom/bust. It got its name from the semiconducting foundries that started up there and resulted in the boom in semiconducting. In the 1960's Fairchild gave birth to the industry. The founding members of Fairchild then went on to build a handful of other semiconducting foundries in the area. The government played almost no role in the size reduction of computers. The industry didn't need to be spurred on to develop smaller computers. The industry has been on Moore's law since the dawn of the solid state transistor in early 50's. To argue that the Apollo program had anything to do with solid state transistors is stupid, ignorant, and flatly untrue. Do some historical research before making stupid claims that sound right.
False positives tend to be quickly ignored if they happen to often. For instance, in the US a bunch of CIA operatives just recently decided to test US border security to see if the border guards would stop a truck filled with dirty bomb material. Not many people know this, but the US has radiation detectors along its border. The CIA drove a truck with dirty bomb material in from Mexico using forged papers. They set off radiation alarms, had their papers briefly checked, and were sent through.
Now, why did this happen? You would think that setting off a radiation alarm would result in papers getting a good checking over such that their forged nature would be revealed. As it turns out, the radiation detectors along the border go off all the time. They go off roughly a 50-100 times a day at some points. The border guards were so used to the detectors going off that they stopped paying any attention to them.
If a system gives false positives, the danger isn't that the security people will spend too much time examining false positives, it is that they will ignore all positives. I have a feeling that this security system is borderline useless because of this. I find it very hard to believe that this security system can tell the difference between a piece of luggage that is sitting all by itself in a suspicious manner and a piece of luggage resting at a guy's feet who has just put it down so his hands are free to read a newspaper.
I think you are thinking far too hard. Are Klingons are indeed dark skinned, but the Borg are pasty mother fuckers. Does this mean that the Borg are an analogy for white people working in the corporate world? Are the pale Cardasians that love the heat and are semi-reptilian stereotypes for, hell, I don't know, southern war mongering Americans or Mormons or something?
You can kludge any stereotype you want into any Star Trek species you want because all the species tend to simply be exaggerations of humans. Most Star Trek species can be summed up with the line of thinking, "I wonder what society would look like if we were more X". All species in Star Trek essentially are stereotyped humans in that they are humans that obsess over something (be it logic, honor, order, exc.). Being built off of an extreme example of a human stereotype is going to result in some stereotypes conforming to real life stereotypes.
I think you are trying way too hard to shove broad stereotypes into narrow little holes. Calling the Klingons stereotyped Africans is silly. I don't recall any great black African empires that have challenged the West in any substantial way and served as a substantive enemy like the way the Klingons have. Further, I don't recall many stereotypes around Africans being obsessively honorable which is THE defining trait of a Klingon. If Klingons were to be stereotypes of anything, the original Klingons were pretty clearly the USSR, and the "new" Klingons are pretty clearly influenced by Samurai far more then anything else.
Finally, Star Trek has always been extremely progressive. We are talking about a show where of the original bridge staff of regular characters, Kirk was the only one that was an American.
All that money going into genetically engineered crops. Why not fix the socio-political problems of these regions so the infrastructures -> people can become healthy?
There are two reasons.
First, this is a biotech company. I highly doubt that they have much experience in how to "fix socio-political problems". On the other hand, they are probably pretty skillful at making genetically modified rice that could help reduce the number of people that die from one of the top 10 killers in the third world.
Second, all the money in the world can't fix the problems in many third world nations. You can throw as much money at the problem and it wont suddenly make good governance appear. If throwing money at a problem would make good governance, Iraq should be a flowering utopia. Instead, Iraq is a black hole where a billion dollars goes in, a million dollars come out in government coffers, and the rest vanishes in corruption.
Poor governance is the source of world poverty. Feeding everyone isn't that expensive. Hell, do all the things required to help bring a nation up to the point where it can stand on its own two feet is not that expensive. The issue is not paying for the things that these nations need. The issue is getting these things to these nations. Where the money starts to suddenly vanish is when you try and transport money/food/seeds, exc. If you hand these things over to the local government, large portions of it vanish. If you try and deliver it yourself, you risk getting expelled by the local government. What option does that leave you? Should you at that point invade and try and help people at the point of a gun? We tried that. It was called Somalia. In that one black hawk down incident a squad of American soldiers probably killed more Somali as they tried to retreat back to safety then they saved during the entire operation.
There is no easy fix to world poverty. Bitch that a biotech company is doing there small part to help the probably is counter productive and whiney at best.
I would second that Creative actually just makes a great MP3 players. I have both an iPod nano and a Creative Zen Vision:M. I have to say, my Zen is absolutely awesome and beats my iPod by a long shot. The GUI is much better, the ability to make playlists on the fly is drastically improved, and the interface is roughly on par with Apple (better in some ways, worse then others). Throw on top of it Rhapsody's all you can eat service, and you have one very sick MP3 player. I loaded up a good 50 full albums and found a pile of new music in less then three days. That isn't even possible pirating, and it would have cost me well over 500 dollars using iTunes. I think Creative and Rhapsody have their shit together. They don't have the monster of an advertising machine that iPod has, but I think once the hype blows over people are going to realize that there are some vastly superior iPod/iTunes alternatives out there.
I can't speak for Creative's past as I know nothing of it. I can say that my Creative Zen Vision:M is one slick ass MP3 player that pounds my iPod into dust. A Creative Zen plus Rhapsody's all you can eat MP3 service is one kick ass combination. Personally, I think that this shows simply that competetion is good and can serve as a swift kick in the ass to get companies into gear and make decent products.
The government has and always will be incompetent in nearly all matters. The government is a necessary evil that serves as arbiter in domestic disputes and acts as a single unified voice and power in international disputes. It is useful in that it can fill those roles that the general citizenry can not fill themselves, but even then it should not be thought that it is any more competent in those matters then it is in planning supply chains for economies or regulating acceptable forms of expression and art.
The reason why limits were placed on the government in the very first place through the separations of powers and the constitution was because it was recognized form the start that government was generally incompetent, corruptible, and self serving in its desire for expanded powers. The danger in the dissolving of the separation of powers and the circumventing of the constitution is that you are handing over power to a corruptible and incompetent entity that obsesses over its own importance and power.
If the government feels that it needs expanded powers, instead of blatantly violating the constitution and our system of checks and balances, it should conduct itself as any lawful government should. It should get permission from the legislative branch of the government and pass laws authorizing their actions instead of blatantly violating existing laws. Democracy is pointless if people are not given even an inkling as to what powers their government has decided it is going to snap up. Perhaps the electorate does not need to know exactly how the government decides to use its powers (and even then, that is certainly dangerous), but at the very least it needs to know that the government has those powers such that the citizenry can decide to remove them.
I do not want the executive branch deciding what laws and parts of the constitution it wants to follow. I trust them with the power of law creation roughly as much as much as I trust them to plan an economy or regulate speech; which is to say I don't trust them at all. Where they are not corrupt or self serving, they are incompetent. I'll risk a nuke in New York over letting the government add power to itself in secret. I question the utility of the power it adds to itself in secret, but even if said powers are making a significant difference (which is doubtful by the administrations own admissions in regards to the NSA wire tapping program), cities, economies, and even societies can be rebuilt. The powers given to the government, especially with no timeframe for their return, are rarely relinquished. Relinquishing the ability for democratic and constitutional means of creating and upholding laws which the government must follow is the most dangerous power one could possibly give to any government, our government is no exception.
I could certainly go and read through 50 pages of installation notes and have. The point you are clearly missing is that your average Joe user is not going to do this. If you think the average user of any product bothers to pound through instillation notes, pass me some of whatever you are smoking. You can rail against how stupid the average consumer is, but all the whining in the world isn't going to make a father who has just come home from work at 6, wants to be in bed by 10, and is already getting yelled at by his wife and kids to sit down and spend an 60-90 minutes reading instillation notes.
M'kay. Saying "It's easy, just go here!" and pointing towards a document that has 13,000+ words in it is a poor idea. I think the point that people have made is not that Linux is impossible. Linux can certainly do just about everything XP or OS X can do. The issue is that in order to get most things running in OS X or windows, I don't even need to think about pounding through 50 pages of installation notes. If that sort of light reading is your thing, Linux is for you. Most people are about as likely to read 50 pages of installation notes as they are to open up their hood and pull apart the guts of their car to fix it. Most people would rather just shell the money out of their pocket, get it fixed in a potentially half-assed way, and save themselves some time.
When you are living on your own and have time to blow, Linux is great. If you learn it at that point in your life, you might very well stick with it. When you have a wife that nags you the second you spend more then 10 minutes doing anything that she doesn't see the obvious utility in and you have two screaming children running circles around you, Linux is a joke. You are much better off to get XP or OS X and call it a day.
Linux is great for what it does. What it doesn't do is provide a practical solution for someone who wants to spend only a small amount of time frigging with their OS.
For most users, fear of the unknown will dominate. And they will run at the mere thought of a surprising dialogue box which actually demands they read and understand it...
I think you miss the point. There is little "fear of the unknown". It is more "fear of wasting my time". I have a lot of devices sitting around. I have an MP3 player, a coffee maker, a car, a TV, a PS2, some speakers, a VCR, a DVD, and all sorts of electronic junk. All of these devices some amount of learning. None of these devices take more then 5 minutes to learn to operate "good enough". They are either intuitive enough to operate without reading the instructions, or the instructions can be summed up in less then 5 pages in a 2" by 2" little book.
Linux fails miserably in this regard. That is not to say that Linux has gotten much better, but it still isn't going to be a home desktop for most users. Linux really only caters to the extremely competent or the extreme n00bs.
Linux is a great thing to give your mother who just wants to be able to read her e-mail and go to websites. You can set the system up and pretty much rest easily knowing that it is unlikely that she will break the system because she is far too ignorant to dig into its guts. She will likely never learn how to do anything other then things you give her to do simply because the learning curve looks like a cliff and it is highly unlikely that she will go brows the right Linux site, find the right tutorial, read the tutorial, understand the tutorial, and remember what she just did if by some act of god she completes the tutorial. This is good in that she can not fill her computer with viruses and spyware, but bad in that she will never do anything more then what I set the computer up to do because she is highly unlikely to invest multiple hours learning how to use any device (computers included).
Linux is also great for expert users who funnel a lot of their time into using computers for the obvious reasons of stability, customizability, and versatility. The problem is that the world is not made up of extreme n00bs and extreme power users with lots of time to invest into learning computers. The world is made up of mostly people who do not fit into either of those categories.
The issue is no "fear" of the unknown. The issue is spending time on the unknown. Mac OS X can be learned in a few minutes most users. Sure, things are a different, but things generally function how you expect to function. You don't need to compile binaries to get Mac OS X or Windows XP to run a program. You don't need to do a magical dance to make devices appear. If you double click on a file and it doesn't run, in these OSes go out and find what you need to run it. The learning curve for both XP and OS X while still higher then your average DVD player, are manageable. Linux on the other hand does not have a manageable. I have had more then one computer literate friend try to run a Linux box and give up simply because the amount of time they need to invest learning is too much for even them.
Linux does a lot of things great. Home computing for your average user isn't one of those things.
And when a lot of such so called crimes will be reported the public opinion will definitely change and get them legal status. In the mean time such people will suffer. But they are already suffering, although much less. It will increase the suffering for a short time but make it legal far more quickly.
This simply is not true. There is a proven track record that punishments do NOT fall in response to new technologies or ability to track and capture law breakers. The best example of this is file sharing. If you pirate a single CDs worth of music the punishment technically should be roughly 2 million dollars. Hundreds of millions of Americans have violated this law. Thousands of people have been prosecuted under this law and been driven into complete financial meltdown. Despite this, the fines for P2P piracy have gone up. The law shows absolutely no signs of catching up with the changing technology. Our political system is simply broken. The political system reacts to severely to special interest (RIAA) and far too slowly to changes in technology.
Crime right now is at a low. You stand almost no chance of being murdered in most places in the US and the UK. Even in the worst places, you only stand moderate probability of being murder if you engage in risky activity. Near perfect prosecution of all violations of the law, especially when the vast majority of the laws or their punishments are completely fucked, is like swatting a fly with a bazooka. I would happily take the extremely small risk getting murdered if it meant that I wouldn't be fined every time I J-walked across an empty street at 3 AM, sped a mile over the ridiculously slow speed limits set in the 60's, shelled out a 250 dollars each time the wind catches a candy wrapper out of my hand and I litter, or get fined a million dollars if I let a friend borrow a CD. These are all ridicules laws with ridicules fines.
Our political system simply sucks are lowering fines or getting rid of laws. I'll take perfect crime detection that snuffs out a miniscule amount of truly anti-social activity the day we get a new political system that truly adds and removes laws as needed.
The biggest issue is that you are introducing more perfect crime detection into a system built to be imperfect. Consider for a moment that half of all Americans have smoked pot at some point in their lives. Would it really do anything good for society if all of a sudden there was a magical way of detecting who had violated this law and punished them to the fullest extent of the law? What if you could detect everyone that had ever pirated something in their entire life. Would it be good if you could slam each one of those hundreds of millions (billions world wide) of people with mutli-million dollar lawsuits?
The true terror is not that people will be caught committing crimes. The problem is that people will be caught for every crime they commit. Imagine the sum total of the crimes you have committed in your life. Have you ever pirated? J-walked, speeded, not used a blinker, done a rolling stop at a stop sign, smoked pot, experimented with drugs, drank underage, been drunk in public, pissed in an alleyway, littered, gotten into a fight, or broken one of the literally millions of other laws that exist on the books? Imagine if suddenly you had to pay the debt for all of the laws you have broken over the course of your life time. I bet the vast majority of the population would be looking at fines that vastly outweigh what they will ever make in their life time, and I imagine that the majority of the population would serve some prison time.
I don't mind crime detection. I mind crime detection in a system built around shitty crime detection. Anything that improves crime detection should be met with a corresponding loosing of punishments or culling of poor laws. No offense, but I have absolutely no faith in politicians to actually actively work to change and remove laws in the face of improved crime detection. For that reason alone, I would say that I am pretty damn adamant that crime detection NOT be automated or improved on too greatly for most things outside of a handful of grievous crimes.
I imagine you would explain what happened to prosecutors, they would decide if you are telling the truth, and if it was an honest mistake let you off. I can't speak for the UK (though I assume it is no different in the US) but police generally don't come down on people for complete accidents. When I was younger and just got my license I left the scene of an accident I was involved in. I left because the woman who had crashed into me said she had no insurance and said she would pay for it out of pocket. I (stupidly) agreed, took her information, and had limped my car home. This was technically against the law. There was clearly at least $1000 worth of damage which means that by law we had to wait for a police officer to arrive on the scene before leaving.
As it turns out, when I got home my parents called the police, the police already knew that I had left the scene because a witness had reported the accident, and I went to the police station. At the police station the police officer told me that I had left the scene of an accident and that it was illegal, but that they would not press charges because it was an innocent mistake and I had clearly had no malicious intent or anything to gain. The woman who had fled the scene on the other hand, they prosecuted her leaving the scene of a crime. She had no insurance because she had been in a dozen crashes. She had fled because she was an unsafe driver and didn't want to be caught in an accident again.
My point? Police can be dicks some times, but generally when it comes to stuff like this they do what is right. The kid in question spammed intentionally just to be a dick and so should pay the price. If you accidentally spam because of a computer malfunction, you are probably okay. There is a world of difference between getting a thousand "SUP FAG!!11!!" e-mails and a thousand error message from server spam.
In order for a revolution (especially a peaceful one) to work, there needs to be SOME liberalism in the society. You need to have a leader that won't slaughter off 5% of its population if it shows up in a protest. Eastern Europe basically played chicken with their governments. The government had the power to crush the dissidents, but to do so it would have taken a mass killing. These governments were not will to commit such genocide and as a result (more or less) surrendered to the people.
Iraq on the other hand is a nation where it is very clear that the majority of the people are unhappy and ready for a violent revolt. The Kurds in Iraq had already been waging a multi-year long war for independence. The Shiites had launched more then one rebellion. All acts of revolution were put down violently by Saddam. This is a guy who was more then happy to use chemical weapons inside of his own nation to prove a point. This is not a guy whom you hold peaceful protests against and don't expect to be shot down. The only way to remove Saddam really was through violence. Now, should the US have jumped in guns blazing, waving American flags, and screaming liberation, eh, I'll save that for other people to debate.
China is an interesting case. China is a nation that is teeters on the edge between mass violence and surrender when it is faced with a peaceful revolution. Tiananmen Square showed very well how China teeters. Tiananmen Square last for a few days. The first few days the Chinese government did nothing. As the protests grew, they finally sent the army in. The first time they sent the Army in the Army was actually peacefully repulsed. The Army didn't open fire, and the citizens didn't let them pass. There are scenes of Chinese literally grabbing army trucks and dragging them backwards through shear manpower, soldiers disembarking and listening to the citizens, and the sort of scenes you would expect from an army ruled by a constitution instead of a corrupt political group. It truly looked like Tiananmen Square was going to be a success and that China was going to go the way of Eastern Europe. Some Chinese leaders (now thrown out of the party and under arrest or dead) even talked about concessions. Right when it looked like China might cave to its people, a more disciplined army was sent in with orders to retake Tiananmen Square and to use violence if necessary... hence the pictures of tanks, the thousands dead, and the tens of thousands vanished.
Now where does China stand today? Would China react with violence against a popular peaceful revolution? Who knows. Personally, I think that China is a little more liberal these days and that the army might refuse to repeat Tiananmen Square. I doubt that such a revolution will happen in the current setting of China. The middle class is growing far too quick and are very unlikely to try and topple their government. That said, I could very well see things changing quickly if China was faced with economic disaster.
The Geneva Convention doesn't cover most of the wars that the US has been in. In order to get Geneva Convention protection, you need to be wearing a uniform when you are captured. The few times that the Geneva Convention has applied because it actually captured people that were wearing uniforms, the US has complied completely. The US did not see many uniformed prisoners even when it was fighting uniformed soldiers because the US tends to cause uniformed armies to designate (everyone dies or strips off their uniform and runs), rather then surrender. Everyone else though that the US has been fighting in the past few years have not been wearing uniforms, hence the US can justifiably say that it has no legal obligation to follow it.
Personally, I think that we need a new Geneva Convention for dealing with guerrilla fighters. The US is completely correct in saying that these people can not be treated like normal soldiers. In a normal war, once you win you simply let everyone go home who hasn't committed some crime against humanity. You can do this because if the nation's army is destroyed and victory declared the chances of them picking up a weapon again are very low. In these guerilla wars though there is no 'victory' that signals it is safe to send captured fighters home. True, some might happily go back to their farms, but others (perhaps many) are simply going to walk out, pick up another gun, and keep fighting. To make matters worse, you almost invariably pick up completely innocent people because the fighters all look like civilians. So, when you capture guerillas you have a group of people that range from hardened warriors who will immediately take up arms the second they are free, less hardened warriors who might or might not pick up arms when they are freed, and completely innocent people who were picked up because they were mistaken for warriors.
How the fuck do you deal with a situation like this? The hell if I know. What I do know is that this bickering about Gitmo and its legality is pointless until someone steps forward with a way to actually deal with these complexities. As to how to solve these paradoxes, I'll leave that to someone smarter then me.
No, I would suggest investing in biotech as I have already suggested. Until there is a viable alternative, keep on burning dead dinos and try and be as efficient about it as possible. There are some interesting hybrid ideas floating around that might squeeze some extra juice out. Take a hybid, slap in a bigger battery, and have the car keep the battery almost empty while it is running. When the car is off, plug it into the wall and recharge the battery. This way, you might be able to travel the first 15 miles or so off the grid, then switch over to burning gas.
I am a ruthless optimist. I believe pretty strongly that there is a way out that doesn't involve raping the food production capacity of the world for almost zero net energy production; it is just a matter of time and incentive.
I can sum up the problems with three things you point to quickly and easily.
The problem with any sort of bio-fuel is that they are horribly destructive on the environment, much more so (at least locally) then oil. Few people realize it, but farming is generally very destructive. When you farm you are either destroying the soil, pumping it full of fertilizer which is made from oil and polluting the area around the farm, or doing labor intensive sustainable organic farming. Further, you often times are just barely making energy. In the case of ethanol from corn, you barely break even or lose energy depending upon which study you believe. Growing your energy out of the soil is a really bad way of fueling the world and would lead to mass soil destruction, starvation, landslides, and all sorts of other unpleasantness.
That isn't to say that bio-fuels have no future. If you could coax some algae to produce some good biomass in a pool of water with a few chemicals tossed in, you might very well be looking at a solution. People are working this, but it is still early in development.
Being a chemical engineer myself, I know a fair amount about the Bhopal disaster. Anyone who does any sort of chemical engineering safety studies Bhopal. What happened in Bhopal was a travesty and a crime against humanity. The crime of it still continues to this day. You can walk into the Bhopal facility today and find bags of chemicals still laying around on the ground. There are two great crimes that happened in Bhopal.
1) Union Carbide is absolutely responsible for the first crime which was the initial release that killed thousands of people and severely affected 100,000 or so more. What exactly happened to this day is still something of a mystery. Basically, a there was a runaway reaction. When that runaway reaction was vented (as it was supposed to be), it went through a number of safety systems that were all turned off. Now, why these safety systems were off is no mystery. Some had been turned off for maintenance and some had been turned off to save money. Union Carbide is completely responsible for this. They should have not turned off safety systems to save money, and the manner in which they turned off other safety systems was completely flawed. The entire tragedy would have been completely averted if just one of these safety systems had been on. The blame at the factory falls on Union Carbide for not properly overseeing their facility, and on the managers of the facility for not insisting on proper safety protocol. Union Carbide might not have order the facility to operate in such an unsafe manner, but they damn well were responsible for not ensuring the safety of their facility.
Union Carbide also failed in that they were producing a very toxic chemical using a dangerous method in a very populated area. They stored a very toxic byproduct that was then later used to make the final product (pesticide). Normally, you would never store such large quantities of such a toxic product. Union Carbide did, and they did it in a heavily populated area. The storing of such vast quantities of chemicals was not even required, it was just cost effective to do so.
The great mystery of the whole thing though is what actually caused the accident. There are two theories. One theory is that someone royally fucked up during some basic maintenance, crossed some pipes, turned some valves, and managed to string together a series of coincidences that resulted in the disaster. The accident theory is somewhat improbable, but not entirely improbable given the poor state of the facility. The other theory is sabotage. The Bhopal facility was actually scheduled for shutdown. They were running with the safety systems off because they were trying to squeeze the last few drops of cash out of the facility before shutting it down. It is believed that one of the engineers that was soon to be laid off might have sabotaged the facility. The investigation into what happened was botched, so we are unlikely to ever know the truth.
2) The Indian government made a bad situation worse. After the accident the Indian government evicted Union Carbide from the facility giving them less then a months notice. They didn't let, much less insist that, Union Carbide clean up the mess. To this day you can walk into the old Bhopal facility and find vats of chemicals, pipes leaking corrosive substances, and bags of chemicals laying around the ruined facility. The Indian government kicked Union Carbide out, but never bothered to clean up the mess. The Indian government then failed to secure proper compensation to all of the victims from of Bhopal and failed to conduct a proper investigation as to what caused the accident. The first agreement that the Indian government made with Union Carbide absolved anyone of criminal wrong doing. This agreement was later struck down by the Indian Supreme Court. The debacle over Warren Anderson was just the latest is a series of failures. They served the extradition papers 17 years after the incident. Even if they managed to extradite him (which they won't be able to), the evidence as to what actually happened has long since been lost.
I have no real point to this post, just spewing information.