Years ago I described the ideal online music store. IIRC, I said that it would beat out Kazaa by being organized like a regular music store and have all the songs available in a variety of formats. And it would beat out iTunes and all the sad pathetic attempts at online stores by the RIAA by being hellaciously cheap and selling the tunes in plain simple formats unencumbered by DRM. For those of you who don't know, allofmp3.com sells music at $.02 per megabyte, so the average album at 192kbps will set you back by $1.50
In fact, the only part of my descriptions that allofmp3 hasn't done is the merchandising. Posters, album inserts, printed or printable cd labels, t-shirts, etc. Probably because they want to keep it an entirely non-meat-space endeavor. They should contract with some other companies to put up links to those.
Copyright has no provision for dealing with abandoned works
It used to. Copyright was 14 years long, and if someone still cared enough about the thing to fill out some paperwork you could renew it for another 14.
But of course now we have the automatic "Forever minus a day" copyrights, enacted entirely to protect the 0.001% of copyrighted works that are still moneymakers after a couple decades.
There have been a couple of suggestions here on/. for systems that combine a quick turnaround with the possibility for extended copyrights. E.g., the first 5 years is free, then $1 to renew it to year 10, then $2 for the next 5 years, then $4, $8, etc, etc, and no paying for it in advance. If Disney wants government protection for Mickey Mouse after 100 years, they can get it, but they'd best be prepared to pay through the nose for it ($2 million for the first century, $2 trillion for the second).
You know that most of the tremendous, amazing power that corporations have come to wield is due in great part to their legal status as people and the whole 'limited liability' thing? Both of these principles were enacted and are enforced by governments.
Limited Liability makes it so that only under the most egregious cases will the legal system penetrate the corporate veil and work on actual people (Enron, anyone?). The rest of the time, it's the corporation that takes responsibility for it's employees' actions. We The People are held to the law of "kill someone and go to jail". Corporations are more of the "kill someone and get fined $X" variety. Which means that if a Board considers doing something wholly illegal, the decision is purely a financial one; potential loss of personal freedom (i.e., prison), which is many times more valuable than money to most of us, rarely enters into it. Again, this is not some natural state of affairs, this situation was _created_, by people, and on purpose.
So, yes, Libertarians want to reduce government influence in our lives, but they also want to reduce corporate influence that has come about because of government meddling.
Compared to any other mode of transportation we have, especially when coupled with the fact that nearly _any_ failure at all is totally and completely fatal, 0.1% is astonishingly high.
IIRC, 0.1% is also about the casualty rate in skydiving. Not encouraging.
That assumes that a colony in space must maintain a bleeding-edge level of technology to survive. Honsetly, what is the _absolute_ minimum they need? A power source (nuclear or solar), lighting (powered is less efficient, solar requires transparency to outside), airlocks & suits, and digging equipment (a pickaxe if need be) is all comes to mind. The power source is obviously the hardest, both choices have their own (admittedly) extensive list of dependencies. But it's certain that the colonists don't absolutely need even 1960's electronics or other advanced tech.
Many of the aspects of surviving in space are similar to that of living on a submarine. And we've got a century of experience there. Nuclear sub crews could stay under until they ran out of fuel if they could also grow their own food (which would also solve any air supply problems).
It's also not as though a fledgling colony is going to have to exist in a vacuum (haha), totally independent from the industries on Earth. A colony as a microcosm of western culture would very quickly notice that anything that had to be shipped from the homeworld would be expensive as all hell, and they'd certainly come up with local alternatives.
So yes, it would be difficult, and the colonists would have to survive with mostly early to mid-20th or even 19th century technology for a time. But so what? I'd jump at the chance. So would a lot of others. The only thing holding us back is the price tag to get to LEO.
Lastly, bauxite (Al2O3)? With no free oxygen to react with, might it actually be possible to find chuncks of pure aluminum under the lunar soil or in an asteroid? Even if not, if my memory serves me correctly, the Bayer process is highly dependent on abundant electricity, something not available until the 20th century. But otherwise, it's a relatively simple process.
IC engines are about as good as they are ever going to get. Oil is only going to get more expensive to extract and it will be of steadily decreasing quality. That 4.8% efficiency (which is fairly accurate) gets lower with each passing year and there is nothing we can do about it.
Whereas additional power plants only need to be built, power transmission losses can be minimized, and H2 generation can be optimized with half a dozen lines of research. And furthermore, hydrogen generation can be powered by non-fossil-fuel sources; I would love to see you run a gasoline car off of hydro, tidal, or nuclear power.
Even if the two efficiencies were equal today, fuel cells (more flexible to begin with) are only getting better while IC engines are only getting worse.
First off, the amount of toxic waste produced by a fission plant is miniscule compared to what coal plants have been putting out for decades. Something like 150,000 tons of uranium alone burned into the atmosphere since the 30's from coal. Nice, huh?
Secondly, the worst of the nuclear waste can be reprocessed into... more fuel! Only thing keeping it from happening are pointless regulations passed by anti-nuclear FUDsters.
Thirdly, what waste remains (usually just equipment and consumables exposed to radiation) is easily bound into a nice, neat package which can be dumped into a continental subduction zone and will not be seen until it resurfaces harmlessly a billion years from now.
If I had to choose between a coal plant that'll spew heavy metals into the air, an oil/gas plant that'll become prohibitively expensive to fuel in a few years, a hydro plant that can't be built within 300 miles (not many dammable rivers in Florida), a solar plant that is unreliable on cloudy days, or a nuclear plant that can fuel itself with elements only slightly less common than lead and package all it's waste into bundles for safe disposal, I'll take the fission plant any day.
Soybeans, hemp, and a few other plants can be processed into reasonable plastic facsimilies (industrial plastics are a bit harder). Remove oil from transportation, power, fertilizer, and low-grade plastics, and we could very likely synthesize enough hydrocarbons for everything else we use them for.
Abortion: They didn't explicitly make it legal, they ruled that local, state, and federal governments could not make it illegal.
The gay marriage ruling in Massachusetts: They didn't say to the state legislature, "You will legalize gay marriage". They ruled that the government could not restrict giving out marriage liscenses based on the genders of the people involved.
Integration: There were no laws requiring integration. There _were_ laws requiring segregation, and it was those that the SCotUS smacked down.
They can legalize things that people do by way of illegalizing things that governments do. That's a direct consequence of the nature of freedom; anything not prohibited is permitted. But they can only take action on things that the govrnment is already doing. Superficially, this may often resemble the ability to legislate, but it's not. For instance, the SCotUS could never have created the EPA. They could never have passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. They could never force Congress into declaring war. They cannot do anything _new_. They cannot take action themselves except in response to selectively _undo_ things that have already been done by other government bodies. And even then, they must wait until someone brings a case to them.
It's sort of both. It's a single stage in that there are no big pieces falling off of it, but it's infinite stage in the sense that the launch is an ablative process using up linear increments of rocket whose length approaches zero.
Ummm, FYI, both of those were done in the 1950's as an explicitly religious response to 'godless communism' (the currency thing was off-and-on for awhile beforehand, but the motto was specifically changed in the 50's). Not that the US had particularly pronounced separation of church and state back in the 1800's; in fact I'd say we're better off today than at any point in the first 150 years of nationhood. But I think the concerted attack on the Enlightenment and secularism in general by the Christian Right _is_ rather new and particularly dangerous.
Other than that, very much in agreement. Combining religion and politics makes a mockery of both. But I won't for one minute think, "It can't happen here". You need look no further than the mideast for a fantastic example of a combined church and state becoming caricatures of their former selves.
Bush and stem cells is probably a good example of religion and science interacting properly
Are you kidding? He crippled the entire line of ESC research for years. And every argument given for doing so was entirely baseless. The Christian Right simply wouldn't ever shut up about how it encourages abortion, even though the one has utterly nothing to do with another. As a result, the US has already begun falling behind in biosciences. He puts _faith healers_ on medical boards. Money spent on actual scientific studies of environmental problems gets thrown away because the guys at the top don't like the results. The latest crop of republicans are about the worst thing to happen to science and they are making religion look like a caricature of itself. To the rest of the world, the most powerful nation on earth looks like it's becoming a Christian version of Saudi Arabia.
The lunar missions ended because American leaders decided the money was better spent getting GIs killed in Vietman. The space program ultimately stagnated because US leaders made it a government monopoly run by a political committee. I see a solid week of news dedicated to ongoing technical problems with a single solitary shuttle (i.e., a third of our entire manned fleet) and I think, "We don't have a space program, we have a space hobby". And the reason people get pissed off with the expense is because it doesn't _do_ anything useful or even new anymore.
Anyway, it's not so much that there's a declining number of competent researchers and scientists. It's just that they are increasingly being told that neither they nor their work is wanted here. Fact is old and busted, faith-based-government is the new hotness. Average Joe is not just getting dumber, he's becoming more and more convinced that this is a virtue. Nothing could demonstrate this better than the studies showing that half the voting population would refuse to vote for a candidate for no other reason than because he was an atheist. I.e., competency and intelligence are secondary to whimsy and insanity.
"What's that? My company ABC Inc. has filed too many patent applications this year? Oh, no problem. Here's company XYZ Inc. submitting the application instead. Pay no mind to the fact that I am the sole stockholder of both entities."
Seriously, unscrupulous people cook up corporate identities the way you and I cook up dinner. Enron did it to great effect. It won't help here.
Ahh, but if imaginary people, i.e. corporations, were not allowed to hold patents or copyrights... _That_ might actually solve some problems.
And if eating with the Queen, know the silverware is set from the outside, in, in order of expected use
God damn it! _Now_ you tell me that. And just last week I made such a spectacle of myself with Lizzie over dinner. Here I was using my forks all out of order. Oh the humanity!
Wrong number of cars, but otherwise the point stands. Cars that are powered by the grid can always run about as cleanly as the grid. You can phase out coal, gas, and oil plants and replace them gradually, whereas upgrading a car is generally an all-or-nothing affair. And anyway, as power plants go, even the dirtiest coal-burning power source is still an order of magnitude cleaner and more efficient than a fleet of cars generating an equivalent amount of electricity. And there are many clean power sources that can be hooked up to the grid but are not portable (large-scale solar, tidal, wind, geothermal, hydro, etc, etc).
Electric and H2 cars appeal to my professional sense as a programmer. Their modularity is extreme compared to a IC engine. You can run an electric car off of old-school lead-acid batteries. Or replace them with lithium-ion or whatever, and nothing else about the car needs to change. And of course the batteries don't care where you got the electricity from in the first place. Likewise a fuel cell doesn't care how you store the H2 (compressed, liquid, metal hydride) or where you got it from (made from oil, broken up from water using algae or electricity, generated on the fly in the car from solar panels, whatever). You can mix and match solutions that are optimum for your needs, and whatever part is lacking in efficiency or cleanliness can be replaced or upgraded without having to make drastic changes to the rest of the system.
Hmmm, you must have missed the recurring Vatican decrees that "Condoms don't stop AIDS", or even the occasional "Condoms are laced with the AIDS virus as part of a western plot to kill you".
I think lying to millions of people about the contagion vectors of a plague and means of halting same qualifies as a 'pretty bad track record'.
So if the feds show up at your door tomorrow and haul you away with ZERO accountability (no charge, no attorney, no trial), you're ok with that too? Or are you just totally certain that bad things only ever happen to bad people as long as you wave your flag hard enough?
Christ, look at how many mistakes, lies, and abuses have been sent our way in the WoT, and you still happily take their word for it when they say, "It was a bad website run by bad men. Move along, nothing to see here."
Having every priest there claiming that condoms don't prevent AIDS and that they are actually laced with the virus as part of a western plot to kill africans doesn't help matters either.
Been saying that for years. The 'left' in the US is only left wing when you compare it to the right. On one hand you have the standard array right-wing nutjobs (massively jingoistic, 'with us or against us', deeply religious, totally in the corporate pocket, makes noises about stripping citizenship from whole demographics of Americans), who are unusual in that they are actually in power. But where are their left-wing nutjob countparts on the Democratic party? Ain't nobody advocating nationalization of major industries, government-provided universal health care, 90%+ taxes on things like capital gains, or massively expanded welfare programs. Heck, add in the top 4 minor parties (Green, Libertarian, Constitution, and Reform) and you still don't see anything really economically left wing.
I asked a Republican friend of mine for the Democrat equivalent of Ann Coulter (wants Christian crusades in Muslim nations), Rush Limbaugh (wants an even higher per capita incarceration rate), and Pat Robertson (wants all gays and atheists 'removed' from the country). The best he could give me was... Michael Moore.
There is a difference between a society that is growing and a society that has a growing population. Bangladesh, Zaire, Madagascar, and Rwanda are all countries that have >2% annual increase in population. They aren't exactly making leaps and bounds into First World status. Whereas India and China are doing exactly that, and coincidentally enough, right after they managed to wrestle their population growth rates down to manageable levels.
Honestly, if you can make any argument about how population affects the ability to go out and kick ass (militarily, economically, whatever...), it would be this: You want a population density high enough to run the country, but not so high that, given your available technology/funds/infrastructure, there's no room to do anything but feed, clothe, and house them in abject poverty. And once you get there, drop down to replacement levels of growth ASAP.
Polygamy is problematic because, as you say, it's invariably beneficial only for some men, which is no good given the 50/50 gender split of human births. It usually ends up looking like the Mormons; some crufty 60-year old guy with another 14-year old wife. Ick. Even an equal treatment polygyny differs from, say, gay marriage in that so many fundamental legal notions (wills & last testaments, power of attorney, child care & visitation, etc, etc) assume that a civil union/marriage comprises only two people. E.g., a loan application probably doesn't have a checkbox for spouse gender, but it almost certainly only has _one_ field for spouse name.
The Anthropic Principle is basically a selection effect, or observation bias. That is, a system whose results are affected by the limitations of the means used to gather it. Polls taken over the phone these days have a selection effect in that they are missing out on a huge number of 20-somethings that exclusively use unlisted cell phones.
The Anthropic Principle means that attempts to study the circumstances surrounding the origin of life and the universe in general will always be hampered by the fact that we can never really see other universes in which intelligent life did not, cannot develop, since if we are there to see it, it must have occured. Likewise for the development of replicating biochemistry on planetary scales, though this can be (perhaps) put to rest if and when we start exploring nearby star systems.
Far from being mere circular reasoning, it is quite a powerful scientific tool for correcting flaws in reasoning and contaminated evidence. Case in point, the massive unliklihood of the config file for the universe seems to point to a universe specifically tailored for us, but start looking for observation biases, and you find a big one. With it in mind, alternative explanations like evolutionary developments within a multiverse or a continuous cycle of Big Bang-Big Crunches that eventually yield a habitable universe present themselves quite quickly.
Likewise irritating for me. Fortunately, I do a lot of my coding in programs that let me remap basic keystrokes, so instead of Ctrl-XCV, I have Ctrl-QJK.
Still a lot of programs that I can't do that on, though. I'm toying with the idea of getting a foot pedal control and mapping things like the Control key to it. So clipboard operations would be just a single key on the keyboard.
Re:Get a Kinesis with programmable macros
on
Blank Keyboard
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I can't stand those split keyboards, but that footswitch intrigues me. Is it possible to get it on it's own?
since at least half the time, they'd have to actually work for a living out in the real world
Sounds good. But what if they don't have to? When Shrub leaves the White House, do you really think he'll go out and try to start a small business? Or even if they do, do you think that, say, Dick Cheney's stay at Haliburton or Dubya's experience in running businesses into the ground in any way, shape, or form resembles 'real work'?
There's no amount of legislation that would solve it. Not just because it have to be written by the very guys who'd be trying to game the system, but because you can't create a hard set of rules about what kind of person is at all trustworthy for political office. You'd basically need to have a population with the mindset that any executive of a large business, unless he built it himself from rock bottom, cannot be trusted. Particularly those that just roam from company to company, soaking up bonuses. People born into wealthy families can certainly be honest and competent, but they will never quite know what it's like to have to work 40 hours a week to survive from one paycheck to the next. And as you said, the voters need to have an instinctive distrust of anyone who spends too long in politics. And they sure as hell shouldn't be putting so damned many lawyers in office!
But no. Instead we get Strom Thurmond in the senate for half a century. We get the entire Bush oil dynasty. We get congresses that have an order of magnitude or two more attorneys per capita than is found in the population.
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Years ago I described the ideal online music store. IIRC, I said that it would beat out Kazaa by being organized like a regular music store and have all the songs available in a variety of formats. And it would beat out iTunes and all the sad pathetic attempts at online stores by the RIAA by being hellaciously cheap and selling the tunes in plain simple formats unencumbered by DRM. For those of you who don't know, allofmp3.com sells music at $.02 per megabyte, so the average album at 192kbps will set you back by $1.50
In fact, the only part of my descriptions that allofmp3 hasn't done is the merchandising. Posters, album inserts, printed or printable cd labels, t-shirts, etc. Probably because they want to keep it an entirely non-meat-space endeavor. They should contract with some other companies to put up links to those.
Copyright has no provision for dealing with abandoned works
/. for systems that combine a quick turnaround with the possibility for extended copyrights. E.g., the first 5 years is free, then $1 to renew it to year 10, then $2 for the next 5 years, then $4, $8, etc, etc, and no paying for it in advance. If Disney wants government protection for Mickey Mouse after 100 years, they can get it, but they'd best be prepared to pay through the nose for it ($2 million for the first century, $2 trillion for the second).
It used to. Copyright was 14 years long, and if someone still cared enough about the thing to fill out some paperwork you could renew it for another 14.
But of course now we have the automatic "Forever minus a day" copyrights, enacted entirely to protect the 0.001% of copyrighted works that are still moneymakers after a couple decades.
There have been a couple of suggestions here on
You know that most of the tremendous, amazing power that corporations have come to wield is due in great part to their legal status as people and the whole 'limited liability' thing? Both of these principles were enacted and are enforced by governments.
Limited Liability makes it so that only under the most egregious cases will the legal system penetrate the corporate veil and work on actual people (Enron, anyone?). The rest of the time, it's the corporation that takes responsibility for it's employees' actions. We The People are held to the law of "kill someone and go to jail". Corporations are more of the "kill someone and get fined $X" variety. Which means that if a Board considers doing something wholly illegal, the decision is purely a financial one; potential loss of personal freedom (i.e., prison), which is many times more valuable than money to most of us, rarely enters into it. Again, this is not some natural state of affairs, this situation was _created_, by people, and on purpose.
So, yes, Libertarians want to reduce government influence in our lives, but they also want to reduce corporate influence that has come about because of government meddling.
So these could rightly be called autoautomobiles?
Compared to any other mode of transportation we have, especially when coupled with the fact that nearly _any_ failure at all is totally and completely fatal, 0.1% is astonishingly high.
IIRC, 0.1% is also about the casualty rate in skydiving. Not encouraging.
That assumes that a colony in space must maintain a bleeding-edge level of technology to survive. Honsetly, what is the _absolute_ minimum they need? A power source (nuclear or solar), lighting (powered is less efficient, solar requires transparency to outside), airlocks & suits, and digging equipment (a pickaxe if need be) is all comes to mind. The power source is obviously the hardest, both choices have their own (admittedly) extensive list of dependencies. But it's certain that the colonists don't absolutely need even 1960's electronics or other advanced tech.
Many of the aspects of surviving in space are similar to that of living on a submarine. And we've got a century of experience there. Nuclear sub crews could stay under until they ran out of fuel if they could also grow their own food (which would also solve any air supply problems).
It's also not as though a fledgling colony is going to have to exist in a vacuum (haha), totally independent from the industries on Earth. A colony as a microcosm of western culture would very quickly notice that anything that had to be shipped from the homeworld would be expensive as all hell, and they'd certainly come up with local alternatives.
So yes, it would be difficult, and the colonists would have to survive with mostly early to mid-20th or even 19th century technology for a time. But so what? I'd jump at the chance. So would a lot of others. The only thing holding us back is the price tag to get to LEO.
Lastly, bauxite (Al2O3)? With no free oxygen to react with, might it actually be possible to find chuncks of pure aluminum under the lunar soil or in an asteroid? Even if not, if my memory serves me correctly, the Bayer process is highly dependent on abundant electricity, something not available until the 20th century. But otherwise, it's a relatively simple process.
IC engines are about as good as they are ever going to get. Oil is only going to get more expensive to extract and it will be of steadily decreasing quality. That 4.8% efficiency (which is fairly accurate) gets lower with each passing year and there is nothing we can do about it.
Whereas additional power plants only need to be built, power transmission losses can be minimized, and H2 generation can be optimized with half a dozen lines of research. And furthermore, hydrogen generation can be powered by non-fossil-fuel sources; I would love to see you run a gasoline car off of hydro, tidal, or nuclear power.
Even if the two efficiencies were equal today, fuel cells (more flexible to begin with) are only getting better while IC engines are only getting worse.
Typical NIMBY FUD.
... more fuel! Only thing keeping it from happening are pointless regulations passed by anti-nuclear FUDsters.
First off, the amount of toxic waste produced by a fission plant is miniscule compared to what coal plants have been putting out for decades. Something like 150,000 tons of uranium alone burned into the atmosphere since the 30's from coal. Nice, huh?
Secondly, the worst of the nuclear waste can be reprocessed into
Thirdly, what waste remains (usually just equipment and consumables exposed to radiation) is easily bound into a nice, neat package which can be dumped into a continental subduction zone and will not be seen until it resurfaces harmlessly a billion years from now.
If I had to choose between a coal plant that'll spew heavy metals into the air, an oil/gas plant that'll become prohibitively expensive to fuel in a few years, a hydro plant that can't be built within 300 miles (not many dammable rivers in Florida), a solar plant that is unreliable on cloudy days, or a nuclear plant that can fuel itself with elements only slightly less common than lead and package all it's waste into bundles for safe disposal, I'll take the fission plant any day.
Soybeans, hemp, and a few other plants can be processed into reasonable plastic facsimilies (industrial plastics are a bit harder). Remove oil from transportation, power, fertilizer, and low-grade plastics, and we could very likely synthesize enough hydrocarbons for everything else we use them for.
Abortion: They didn't explicitly make it legal, they ruled that local, state, and federal governments could not make it illegal.
The gay marriage ruling in Massachusetts: They didn't say to the state legislature, "You will legalize gay marriage". They ruled that the government could not restrict giving out marriage liscenses based on the genders of the people involved.
Integration: There were no laws requiring integration. There _were_ laws requiring segregation, and it was those that the SCotUS smacked down.
They can legalize things that people do by way of illegalizing things that governments do. That's a direct consequence of the nature of freedom; anything not prohibited is permitted. But they can only take action on things that the govrnment is already doing. Superficially, this may often resemble the ability to legislate, but it's not. For instance, the SCotUS could never have created the EPA. They could never have passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. They could never force Congress into declaring war. They cannot do anything _new_. They cannot take action themselves except in response to selectively _undo_ things that have already been done by other government bodies. And even then, they must wait until someone brings a case to them.
It's sort of both. It's a single stage in that there are no big pieces falling off of it, but it's infinite stage in the sense that the launch is an ablative process using up linear increments of rocket whose length approaches zero.
Ummm, FYI, both of those were done in the 1950's as an explicitly religious response to 'godless communism' (the currency thing was off-and-on for awhile beforehand, but the motto was specifically changed in the 50's). Not that the US had particularly pronounced separation of church and state back in the 1800's; in fact I'd say we're better off today than at any point in the first 150 years of nationhood. But I think the concerted attack on the Enlightenment and secularism in general by the Christian Right _is_ rather new and particularly dangerous.
Other than that, very much in agreement. Combining religion and politics makes a mockery of both. But I won't for one minute think, "It can't happen here". You need look no further than the mideast for a fantastic example of a combined church and state becoming caricatures of their former selves.
Bush and stem cells is probably a good example of religion and science interacting properly
Are you kidding? He crippled the entire line of ESC research for years. And every argument given for doing so was entirely baseless. The Christian Right simply wouldn't ever shut up about how it encourages abortion, even though the one has utterly nothing to do with another. As a result, the US has already begun falling behind in biosciences. He puts _faith healers_ on medical boards. Money spent on actual scientific studies of environmental problems gets thrown away because the guys at the top don't like the results. The latest crop of republicans are about the worst thing to happen to science and they are making religion look like a caricature of itself. To the rest of the world, the most powerful nation on earth looks like it's becoming a Christian version of Saudi Arabia.
The lunar missions ended because American leaders decided the money was better spent getting GIs killed in Vietman. The space program ultimately stagnated because US leaders made it a government monopoly run by a political committee. I see a solid week of news dedicated to ongoing technical problems with a single solitary shuttle (i.e., a third of our entire manned fleet) and I think, "We don't have a space program, we have a space hobby". And the reason people get pissed off with the expense is because it doesn't _do_ anything useful or even new anymore.
Anyway, it's not so much that there's a declining number of competent researchers and scientists. It's just that they are increasingly being told that neither they nor their work is wanted here. Fact is old and busted, faith-based-government is the new hotness. Average Joe is not just getting dumber, he's becoming more and more convinced that this is a virtue. Nothing could demonstrate this better than the studies showing that half the voting population would refuse to vote for a candidate for no other reason than because he was an atheist. I.e., competency and intelligence are secondary to whimsy and insanity.
"What's that? My company ABC Inc. has filed too many patent applications this year? Oh, no problem. Here's company XYZ Inc. submitting the application instead. Pay no mind to the fact that I am the sole stockholder of both entities."
Seriously, unscrupulous people cook up corporate identities the way you and I cook up dinner. Enron did it to great effect. It won't help here.
Ahh, but if imaginary people, i.e. corporations, were not allowed to hold patents or copyrights... _That_ might actually solve some problems.
And if eating with the Queen, know the silverware is set from the outside, in, in order of expected use
God damn it! _Now_ you tell me that. And just last week I made such a spectacle of myself with Lizzie over dinner. Here I was using my forks all out of order. Oh the humanity!
Wrong number of cars, but otherwise the point stands. Cars that are powered by the grid can always run about as cleanly as the grid. You can phase out coal, gas, and oil plants and replace them gradually, whereas upgrading a car is generally an all-or-nothing affair. And anyway, as power plants go, even the dirtiest coal-burning power source is still an order of magnitude cleaner and more efficient than a fleet of cars generating an equivalent amount of electricity. And there are many clean power sources that can be hooked up to the grid but are not portable (large-scale solar, tidal, wind, geothermal, hydro, etc, etc).
Electric and H2 cars appeal to my professional sense as a programmer. Their modularity is extreme compared to a IC engine. You can run an electric car off of old-school lead-acid batteries. Or replace them with lithium-ion or whatever, and nothing else about the car needs to change. And of course the batteries don't care where you got the electricity from in the first place. Likewise a fuel cell doesn't care how you store the H2 (compressed, liquid, metal hydride) or where you got it from (made from oil, broken up from water using algae or electricity, generated on the fly in the car from solar panels, whatever). You can mix and match solutions that are optimum for your needs, and whatever part is lacking in efficiency or cleanliness can be replaced or upgraded without having to make drastic changes to the rest of the system.
Hmmm, you must have missed the recurring Vatican decrees that "Condoms don't stop AIDS", or even the occasional "Condoms are laced with the AIDS virus as part of a western plot to kill you".
I think lying to millions of people about the contagion vectors of a plague and means of halting same qualifies as a 'pretty bad track record'.
So if the feds show up at your door tomorrow and haul you away with ZERO accountability (no charge, no attorney, no trial), you're ok with that too? Or are you just totally certain that bad things only ever happen to bad people as long as you wave your flag hard enough?
Christ, look at how many mistakes, lies, and abuses have been sent our way in the WoT, and you still happily take their word for it when they say, "It was a bad website run by bad men. Move along, nothing to see here."
Having every priest there claiming that condoms don't prevent AIDS and that they are actually laced with the virus as part of a western plot to kill africans doesn't help matters either.
Been saying that for years. The 'left' in the US is only left wing when you compare it to the right. On one hand you have the standard array right-wing nutjobs (massively jingoistic, 'with us or against us', deeply religious, totally in the corporate pocket, makes noises about stripping citizenship from whole demographics of Americans), who are unusual in that they are actually in power. But where are their left-wing nutjob countparts on the Democratic party? Ain't nobody advocating nationalization of major industries, government-provided universal health care, 90%+ taxes on things like capital gains, or massively expanded welfare programs. Heck, add in the top 4 minor parties (Green, Libertarian, Constitution, and Reform) and you still don't see anything really economically left wing.
... Michael Moore.
I asked a Republican friend of mine for the Democrat equivalent of Ann Coulter (wants Christian crusades in Muslim nations), Rush Limbaugh (wants an even higher per capita incarceration rate), and Pat Robertson (wants all gays and atheists 'removed' from the country). The best he could give me was
There is a difference between a society that is growing and a society that has a growing population. Bangladesh, Zaire, Madagascar, and Rwanda are all countries that have >2% annual increase in population. They aren't exactly making leaps and bounds into First World status. Whereas India and China are doing exactly that, and coincidentally enough, right after they managed to wrestle their population growth rates down to manageable levels.
Honestly, if you can make any argument about how population affects the ability to go out and kick ass (militarily, economically, whatever...), it would be this: You want a population density high enough to run the country, but not so high that, given your available technology/funds/infrastructure, there's no room to do anything but feed, clothe, and house them in abject poverty. And once you get there, drop down to replacement levels of growth ASAP.
Polygamy is problematic because, as you say, it's invariably beneficial only for some men, which is no good given the 50/50 gender split of human births. It usually ends up looking like the Mormons; some crufty 60-year old guy with another 14-year old wife. Ick. Even an equal treatment polygyny differs from, say, gay marriage in that so many fundamental legal notions (wills & last testaments, power of attorney, child care & visitation, etc, etc) assume that a civil union/marriage comprises only two people. E.g., a loan application probably doesn't have a checkbox for spouse gender, but it almost certainly only has _one_ field for spouse name.
The Anthropic Principle is basically a selection effect, or observation bias. That is, a system whose results are affected by the limitations of the means used to gather it. Polls taken over the phone these days have a selection effect in that they are missing out on a huge number of 20-somethings that exclusively use unlisted cell phones.
The Anthropic Principle means that attempts to study the circumstances surrounding the origin of life and the universe in general will always be hampered by the fact that we can never really see other universes in which intelligent life did not, cannot develop, since if we are there to see it, it must have occured. Likewise for the development of replicating biochemistry on planetary scales, though this can be (perhaps) put to rest if and when we start exploring nearby star systems.
Far from being mere circular reasoning, it is quite a powerful scientific tool for correcting flaws in reasoning and contaminated evidence. Case in point, the massive unliklihood of the config file for the universe seems to point to a universe specifically tailored for us, but start looking for observation biases, and you find a big one. With it in mind, alternative explanations like evolutionary developments within a multiverse or a continuous cycle of Big Bang-Big Crunches that eventually yield a habitable universe present themselves quite quickly.
Likewise irritating for me. Fortunately, I do a lot of my coding in programs that let me remap basic keystrokes, so instead of Ctrl-XCV, I have Ctrl-QJK.
Still a lot of programs that I can't do that on, though. I'm toying with the idea of getting a foot pedal control and mapping things like the Control key to it. So clipboard operations would be just a single key on the keyboard.
I can't stand those split keyboards, but that footswitch intrigues me. Is it possible to get it on it's own?
since at least half the time, they'd have to actually work for a living out in the real world Sounds good. But what if they don't have to? When Shrub leaves the White House, do you really think he'll go out and try to start a small business? Or even if they do, do you think that, say, Dick Cheney's stay at Haliburton or Dubya's experience in running businesses into the ground in any way, shape, or form resembles 'real work'? There's no amount of legislation that would solve it. Not just because it have to be written by the very guys who'd be trying to game the system, but because you can't create a hard set of rules about what kind of person is at all trustworthy for political office. You'd basically need to have a population with the mindset that any executive of a large business, unless he built it himself from rock bottom, cannot be trusted. Particularly those that just roam from company to company, soaking up bonuses. People born into wealthy families can certainly be honest and competent, but they will never quite know what it's like to have to work 40 hours a week to survive from one paycheck to the next. And as you said, the voters need to have an instinctive distrust of anyone who spends too long in politics. And they sure as hell shouldn't be putting so damned many lawyers in office! But no. Instead we get Strom Thurmond in the senate for half a century. We get the entire Bush oil dynasty. We get congresses that have an order of magnitude or two more attorneys per capita than is found in the population.