I haven't examined Badnarik's positions especially, but the Libertarian Party in general favors reducing accountability across the board
Well I have and I can definitely say you're smoking crack. One of their big pet peeves is the very notion of the limited liability corporation. As for the rest, you're totally out of your gourd. How is assault with toxic chemicals not still assault? How is a misleading contract and a defective product not fraud?
Corporations haven't even got that worry.
Of course they do. About the only times they can get away with xeing complete schmucks and alienating their own customers are when they have government-granted protection from the consequences (like the DMCA or the UCITA) or a government-granted monopoly (copyright or monopolies granted to power companies).
Combined with massively increasing shareholder and employee accountability for said corporation's actions. It's true that a faceless, unaccountable corporation is just as bad as a faceless, unaccountable government, but since when do those have to be our only choices?
Since when is there a speed limit on evolution? And who said human adaptation to recreational drugs would be overnight? It's certainly arguable that no such selection is taking place, since siring or bearing children is something most anyone with working hormones and plumbing can do, and few drugs mess around with that overly much. And in a civilization quickly advancing technologically, any net effect is likely to be lost in the noise over the centuries it would take to see results.
But why the vehement denial that humans are still subject to the depredations of our environment, even one of our own making? Evolution does not consist solely of speciation, you know. The post-Bubonic Plague population of Europe had a slightly different genetic composition than it did before the blight.
IRV is broken in that is trivial to contrive an example where a losing candidate would win by receiving fewer votes. I really fail to see how that can be considered a Good Thing.
The 20's social Darwinist ideologies also had a strong bent towards eugenics. I.e., "If these less perfect examples of humanity, whom we identify purely by their social status, are going to be snuffed out by natural processes anyways, why not help them along?". This is simply, "Drugs are going to be a problem to some people. Instead of protecting those few by inflicting Prohibition and the predictable consequences on everyone, how about we just let them do their thing in peace? If they OD or live with no company but their addiction or do anything _but_ breed, then the problem will ultimately take care of itself, without our having to run everyone's lives."
Not evolution? How so? Some people are genetically disposed to be uncontrollable addicts to some drugs, and perhaps to chemical recreation period. If by using them they remove themselves from the gene pool, how is that not evolution in response to a change in external stimuli?
That said, referring to this process as "adding chlorine to the gene pool" is rather insulting and totally incorrect. It assumes a great deal about the victims(?) that is no more substanciated than claiming that all the people who died of the flu in 1918 had it coming.
Drug addiction is simply a problem for which there is no solution apart from letting it run its course and giving help those who seek it. Declaring war on all users (and anyone else who gets in the way) is just about the worst way to handle it.
If it's a health problem then law enforcement need not get involved. It was stupid for cops to _ever_ get involved, because in the end they can only do one thing: arrest people and fuck up their lives. If that can't solve the problem, then they have no business trying to apply it as a solution.
A very large percentage of the crime we already have is caused by drugs
Hello, McFly? Did you leart nothing from prohibition? The crimes you associate with drugs are not caused by drugs, any more than organized crime in the 20's was caused by alcohol. They are caused by the illegality of drugs. And drugs being illegal doesn't help any of the poor slobs you're breaking your heart over. It just makes them criminals and marks them as The Enemy in the WoD.
You need to remember that for every sad junkie you see there's many more users who are totally invisible because they lead a normal life. What you want to do is use your pity for the unfortunate percentage as an excuse to bring a fucking war into _everyone's_ home.
They were on enough ballots to theoretically win. What other criteria do you need? Polling results aren't accurate, and in any event only allowing someone to run when their victory is a foregone conclusion defeats the whole purpose. If polls show Bush leading at 55%, should he be able to ban Kerry from the debate and arrest him if he shows up anyway?
The guy who responded to you griping about how we were all perpeutating the 'myth' that the Hindenburg being painted with thermite had anything to do with it going up like a torch.
The average Joe is stupid, yes, and often prides himself on knowing nothing, true, but he also loves flashy visuals. There's a video somewhere of a guy taking potshots at a typical H2 tank with a rifle and it doing nothing more than falling to the floor. Nobody in their right mind would try that with a sheet metal gas tank. If you're selling H2 cars, be sure to put that sort of thing in your ads for a while.
And yes, I'm aware that Al2O3 is fairly inert. I already responded to your post about that. That's pretty cool about mercury, though. I'll be sure to try it out when I replace my thermostat.
Hmmm, true, though I have pretty much all green lights my whole trip:). Quite honestly, it'll never be popular if the margins for "drive whenever you need to" are that slim. But as a proof-of-concept, it's quite good.
Well, it'll never be totally closed. You'll still have H2 and water escaping from the system which will need replenishing; any O2 lost can be replaced from the air, unless of course you're driving in a de-oxygenated environment like downtown L.A.. It's just I was writing the bit about "having a car that could run 24 hours a day forever without refueling" when I thought about the problems of driving through a desert while voiding all that waste water into the air. Bad idea!
First off, they need to reword in that it allows legal P2P
They need to _start_ with rewording it so that it doesn't make VCRs illegal! Then _maybe_ they'll be competent enough to handle the subtleties of computer communications protocols. If the first draft can't even handle 20-year old technology, there's no chance of it being good enough for computers.
Second, just because everyone does something, does not make it right
Very true, but before you go off telling umpteen millions of your own constiuents that they are dastardly criminals who should be punished by law for their misdeeds, you need to think long and hard about the effectiveness, consequences, and benefits of attempting to do so.
As best I can tell, every attempt to condemn and ban an activity anywhere near this widespread in the past has required waging a war on one's own citizens to enforce. The parallels to Prohibition and the War on Drugs are obvious. In fact, the only situation I can think of where it ultimately _worked_ was the emancipation of the slaves 140 years ago, a practice which bears about as much resemblance to file trading as... as... I can't even think of a comparison stupid enough. Is this what we want? Yet another War on American citizens? Another president telling us that "copying bits" is public enemy #1, a social scourge which need to be stomped out, no matter how many real, innocent people get stomped on in the process?
The music and film industries in Norway will now be given a government subsidy for being too stupid to distribute their own products online in formats that don't suck ass. In exchange for this marvelous use of your money, the nation gets a reprieve from having half the population being labelled as criminals and sued for their last Norwegian øre. Brilliant!
Hatch was the guy who wanted to remotely destroy people's computers if they were found to contain items that infringed on copyright.
You give him too much credit. To say, "...if they were found to contain..." implies that a court of law or some kind of legal proceedings were involved. As I'm sure you're aware, he advocated a vigilante system wherein you could attack anyone you alone suspected of being naughty. The poor sap would then have to take you to court to prove that they were innocent (because the law grants immunity to the attacker) to get any sort of reparations whatsoever.
This actually strikes me as being more the result of donations from his lawyer friends than his music industry friends.
What you're talking about is copyright infringement. Definately something you can do about that long before DMCA.
Almost. What the DMCA does is let him send a nasty letter to the ISP in question and *poof* the claimed offender's content gets taken down. The parent likes the DMCA because it lets him dispense with that whole 'due process' and 'burden of proof' nonsense.
Which for many people, including myself, would be nearly sufficient to cover their daily commute (mine is 10 minutes each way, so 33 hours of charging needed per day). Throw in another m^2 of solar panels and I'd be all set. An auxilary charging system at home that could store up H2 for later transfer to the car would handle extra trips (though that does kind of defeat the purpose of have a car that runs on water and sunlight).
Still, that's not too shabby! We're less than 2 orders of magnitude from a vehicle that can run without any refueling whatsoever, assuming they recapture most of the waste water and can augment any shortfall with rain.
Minor nitpick. Aluminum Oxide is an output from the thermite combustion reaction. The inputs are iron oxide and aluminum. The outputs are aluminum oxide and iron and a whole whole mess of energy.
Got a link? Because every single Google result I checked, and I do mean every single one, turned up a skin coated in aluminum powder and iron oxide with poor conducting cables grounding it. Which _is_ thermite, and is a disaster waiting to happen. They actually tested it with an old piece of the skin, and with no H2 at all; it ignited instantly. Records research in Germany yielded reports from experiments done by Zeppelin Company engineers that showed that the skin, under the right circumstances, was a firebomb.
So please, enlighten us as to how the fact that the Hindenburg was painted with thermite and electrically bonded with poor conductors which would have caused a high-energy discharge during an electrical storm (and there was one) constitutes a myth.
Nobody, well maybe just a few people, is claiming that no regulation would _ever_ be a good thing. The worry here is that between having to work with all these bureaucratic nightmares (one of whom, NASA, will probably just want the whole endeavor killed right away) and anything else they come up with, Congress will, either through malice or just sheer ignorance, make it utterly impossible for private companies to build and launch craft into space. I can so totally see a bunch of politicians imposing design specifications they dreamed up on things they don't understand that keep every future private launch craft on the ground indefinitely.
As the parent pointed out, look how thoroughly they've bungled regulations re: computers and the internet. The SNR of electronics legislation has long since dropped into an unintelligible cacophany. Congress has proven that they react to new technologies about as well as Uruk the caveman. We're to entrust them with another one in its fledgling state?
Quite honestly, for the forseeable future, this will be a massively expensive toy for the rich and bored (though I hope with all my heart it becomes far more). The profit and success margins will be small enough that the companies can manage themselves far better than some ham-handed legality. For all the advanced technologies and big-money backers involved, it's barely more than a cottage industry. When it gets larger, when the private space firms are in a position to defend themselves from overeager congresscritters, when they are seen as something other than merely wealthy thrillseeking by the public (i.e., a source of real income and employment that's not to be wiped out by legal technicalities), and when theres a visible _need_ for such regulation, _that's_ when Congress needs to take a look at it. We've barely got proof-of-concept. And already Congress wants to dictate how the final product should work?
If a supermodel walks on my property can I do anything I want with her?
When your VCR develops both self awareness and a really nice rack, then we'll talk about extending rights and protections to your household appliances. Until then, comparisons to actions against real people don't make any sense.
If some drunk tard rams his truck into my living room can I do anything I want to him?
To him? Certainly not. Not unless he starts threatening you or anyone else, and even then the courts will think long and hard before letting you get away with using lethal force (there's a large and fascinating case history on this topic). Again, why are you making analogies to physical actions against real people?
If I get home to discover that a robber left a gun behind, can I do anything I want with that gun
I fail to see why not, short of using it to commit a crime yourself. If you report the break-in, the cops will want it as evidence and it would probably be pretty foolish not to call or give it to them. The regulated nature of firearms also muddies the water a bit, but what if he'd only dropped his wallet? Or a swiss army knife, or a camera, or so much as a pen? I am not aware of any law that says that perfectly ordinary, everyday legal things you find in your house must be reported under penalty of law.
I hope the EFF wins, and I'll send them some money tonight.
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe that all of the people killed from the advent of gas and chemical bombs would not equal to one of the nuclear bombs that the US government dropped on Japan
Tough call. They had a merry old time with chemical agents during WW1. Since then? Still a tough call, since there's umpteen third world two-bit one-man-rule hellholes that get their rocks off killing civilians by the thousands. If any of them got it into their heads to use chemicals instead of bullets or machetes, it wouldn't take long to rack up an impressive body count.
A kilo of antimatter reacting with a kilo of matter releases 2kg x (300,000,000 m/s)^2 = 1.8e17 Joules. The specific combustion energy of TNT is 4.6e6 J/kg, hence 1 kt TNT = 4.6e12 J, 1 Mt TNT = 4.6e15 J. Therefore 1.8e17 J / 4.6e15 J ~= 40 MT of TNT.
You get about 70 times as much energy as you would from fusing 2kg of hydrogen into helium. But then fusion is a viable power source, whereas antimatter is at best a battery. Unless we find a way to make antimatter without having to make matter as well; then the reaction would be a net gain in usable energy (at the expense of matter in the universe, of course)
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Well I have and I can definitely say you're smoking crack. One of their big pet peeves is the very notion of the limited liability corporation. As for the rest, you're totally out of your gourd. How is assault with toxic chemicals not still assault? How is a misleading contract and a defective product not fraud?
Corporations haven't even got that worry.
Of course they do. About the only times they can get away with xeing complete schmucks and alienating their own customers are when they have government-granted protection from the consequences (like the DMCA or the UCITA) or a government-granted monopoly (copyright or monopolies granted to power companies).
Same thing applies to the Orion pulsedrive. There's tons of propulsion methods that work great in space but are lousy inside an atmosphere.
Combined with massively increasing shareholder and employee accountability for said corporation's actions. It's true that a faceless, unaccountable corporation is just as bad as a faceless, unaccountable government, but since when do those have to be our only choices?
But why the vehement denial that humans are still subject to the depredations of our environment, even one of our own making? Evolution does not consist solely of speciation, you know. The post-Bubonic Plague population of Europe had a slightly different genetic composition than it did before the blight.
IRV is broken in that is trivial to contrive an example where a losing candidate would win by receiving fewer votes. I really fail to see how that can be considered a Good Thing.
Not evolution? How so? Some people are genetically disposed to be uncontrollable addicts to some drugs, and perhaps to chemical recreation period. If by using them they remove themselves from the gene pool, how is that not evolution in response to a change in external stimuli?
That said, referring to this process as "adding chlorine to the gene pool" is rather insulting and totally incorrect. It assumes a great deal about the victims(?) that is no more substanciated than claiming that all the people who died of the flu in 1918 had it coming.
Drug addiction is simply a problem for which there is no solution apart from letting it run its course and giving help those who seek it. Declaring war on all users (and anyone else who gets in the way) is just about the worst way to handle it.
A very large percentage of the crime we already have is caused by drugs
Hello, McFly? Did you leart nothing from prohibition? The crimes you associate with drugs are not caused by drugs, any more than organized crime in the 20's was caused by alcohol. They are caused by the illegality of drugs. And drugs being illegal doesn't help any of the poor slobs you're breaking your heart over. It just makes them criminals and marks them as The Enemy in the WoD.
You need to remember that for every sad junkie you see there's many more users who are totally invisible because they lead a normal life. What you want to do is use your pity for the unfortunate percentage as an excuse to bring a fucking war into _everyone's_ home.
Minus the empty pizza boxes, but pretty much, yeah.
Why else do you think we're training legions of people to be skilled in battling the forces of the burning hells?
They were on enough ballots to theoretically win. What other criteria do you need? Polling results aren't accurate, and in any event only allowing someone to run when their victory is a foregone conclusion defeats the whole purpose. If polls show Bush leading at 55%, should he be able to ban Kerry from the debate and arrest him if he shows up anyway?
The guy who responded to you griping about how we were all perpeutating the 'myth' that the Hindenburg being painted with thermite had anything to do with it going up like a torch.
The average Joe is stupid, yes, and often prides himself on knowing nothing, true, but he also loves flashy visuals. There's a video somewhere of a guy taking potshots at a typical H2 tank with a rifle and it doing nothing more than falling to the floor. Nobody in their right mind would try that with a sheet metal gas tank. If you're selling H2 cars, be sure to put that sort of thing in your ads for a while.
And yes, I'm aware that Al2O3 is fairly inert. I already responded to your post about that. That's pretty cool about mercury, though. I'll be sure to try it out when I replace my thermostat.
Well, it'll never be totally closed. You'll still have H2 and water escaping from the system which will need replenishing; any O2 lost can be replaced from the air, unless of course you're driving in a de-oxygenated environment like downtown L.A.. It's just I was writing the bit about "having a car that could run 24 hours a day forever without refueling" when I thought about the problems of driving through a desert while voiding all that waste water into the air. Bad idea!
They need to _start_ with rewording it so that it doesn't make VCRs illegal! Then _maybe_ they'll be competent enough to handle the subtleties of computer communications protocols. If the first draft can't even handle 20-year old technology, there's no chance of it being good enough for computers.
Second, just because everyone does something, does not make it right
Very true, but before you go off telling umpteen millions of your own constiuents that they are dastardly criminals who should be punished by law for their misdeeds, you need to think long and hard about the effectiveness, consequences, and benefits of attempting to do so.
As best I can tell, every attempt to condemn and ban an activity anywhere near this widespread in the past has required waging a war on one's own citizens to enforce. The parallels to Prohibition and the War on Drugs are obvious. In fact, the only situation I can think of where it ultimately _worked_ was the emancipation of the slaves 140 years ago, a practice which bears about as much resemblance to file trading as ... as ... I can't even think of a comparison stupid enough. Is this what we want? Yet another War on American citizens? Another president telling us that "copying bits" is public enemy #1, a social scourge which need to be stomped out, no matter how many real, innocent people get stomped on in the process?
The music and film industries in Norway will now be given a government subsidy for being too stupid to distribute their own products online in formats that don't suck ass. In exchange for this marvelous use of your money, the nation gets a reprieve from having half the population being labelled as criminals and sued for their last Norwegian øre. Brilliant!
You give him too much credit. To say, "...if they were found to contain..." implies that a court of law or some kind of legal proceedings were involved. As I'm sure you're aware, he advocated a vigilante system wherein you could attack anyone you alone suspected of being naughty. The poor sap would then have to take you to court to prove that they were innocent (because the law grants immunity to the attacker) to get any sort of reparations whatsoever.
This actually strikes me as being more the result of donations from his lawyer friends than his music industry friends.
Almost. What the DMCA does is let him send a nasty letter to the ISP in question and *poof* the claimed offender's content gets taken down. The parent likes the DMCA because it lets him dispense with that whole 'due process' and 'burden of proof' nonsense.
Still, that's not too shabby! We're less than 2 orders of magnitude from a vehicle that can run without any refueling whatsoever, assuming they recapture most of the waste water and can augment any shortfall with rain.
Minor nitpick. Aluminum Oxide is an output from the thermite combustion reaction. The inputs are iron oxide and aluminum. The outputs are aluminum oxide and iron and a whole whole mess of energy.
So please, enlighten us as to how the fact that the Hindenburg was painted with thermite and electrically bonded with poor conductors which would have caused a high-energy discharge during an electrical storm (and there was one) constitutes a myth.
As the parent pointed out, look how thoroughly they've bungled regulations re: computers and the internet. The SNR of electronics legislation has long since dropped into an unintelligible cacophany. Congress has proven that they react to new technologies about as well as Uruk the caveman. We're to entrust them with another one in its fledgling state?
Quite honestly, for the forseeable future, this will be a massively expensive toy for the rich and bored (though I hope with all my heart it becomes far more). The profit and success margins will be small enough that the companies can manage themselves far better than some ham-handed legality. For all the advanced technologies and big-money backers involved, it's barely more than a cottage industry. When it gets larger, when the private space firms are in a position to defend themselves from overeager congresscritters, when they are seen as something other than merely wealthy thrillseeking by the public (i.e., a source of real income and employment that's not to be wiped out by legal technicalities), and when theres a visible _need_ for such regulation, _that's_ when Congress needs to take a look at it. We've barely got proof-of-concept. And already Congress wants to dictate how the final product should work?
When your VCR develops both self awareness and a really nice rack, then we'll talk about extending rights and protections to your household appliances. Until then, comparisons to actions against real people don't make any sense.
If some drunk tard rams his truck into my living room can I do anything I want to him?
To him? Certainly not. Not unless he starts threatening you or anyone else, and even then the courts will think long and hard before letting you get away with using lethal force (there's a large and fascinating case history on this topic). Again, why are you making analogies to physical actions against real people?
If I get home to discover that a robber left a gun behind, can I do anything I want with that gun
I fail to see why not, short of using it to commit a crime yourself. If you report the break-in, the cops will want it as evidence and it would probably be pretty foolish not to call or give it to them. The regulated nature of firearms also muddies the water a bit, but what if he'd only dropped his wallet? Or a swiss army knife, or a camera, or so much as a pen? I am not aware of any law that says that perfectly ordinary, everyday legal things you find in your house must be reported under penalty of law.
I hope the EFF wins, and I'll send them some money tonight.
A commendable action sir. I salute you.
Tough call. They had a merry old time with chemical agents during WW1. Since then? Still a tough call, since there's umpteen third world two-bit one-man-rule hellholes that get their rocks off killing civilians by the thousands. If any of them got it into their heads to use chemicals instead of bullets or machetes, it wouldn't take long to rack up an impressive body count.
I would not turn down an invite. jdlessl@hotmail.com
Which raises an excellent question. Just what does antimatter _look_ like?
A kilo of antimatter reacting with a kilo of matter releases 2kg x (300,000,000 m/s)^2 = 1.8e17 Joules. The specific combustion energy of TNT is 4.6e6 J/kg, hence 1 kt TNT = 4.6e12 J, 1 Mt TNT = 4.6e15 J. Therefore 1.8e17 J / 4.6e15 J ~= 40 MT of TNT.
You get about 70 times as much energy as you would from fusing 2kg of hydrogen into helium. But then fusion is a viable power source, whereas antimatter is at best a battery. Unless we find a way to make antimatter without having to make matter as well; then the reaction would be a net gain in usable energy (at the expense of matter in the universe, of course)