But democracies plan years into the future all the time. We're debating Medicare changes because of a supposed issue 15 years down the road. Now, we might change our plans, but hey, what good is democracy if you can't change your mind?
You might mean that we aren't planning hundreds of years into the future. That's true. But we don't need to plan hundreds of years into the future. If we wanted to build a cathedral, we could do it in a year.
In fact, there really isn't anything we can plan hundreds of years for. We can't really make economic plans for more than a decade or two in advance, even for entitlement programs that don't kick in until a certain age--and we know how people we'll have reaching that age in each year! These days, there are very few places where planning so far in advance is an advantage.
"Don't forget the Egyptian pyramids, the Great wall of China, and Mont. St Michel (which took 500 years to complete)."
Yeah but then democracy happened and since then no democratic state can plan more than about 4 years ahead.
True, democracies tend not to build cathedrals with government funds. Have you ever considered that there's a reason for that? In particular, that democracies don't build cathedrals because they're not worth the cost?
Of the achievements listed in the post you quote, only one had any real value to the people that built it. The Great Wall did indeed make people safer. But the pyramids? What good did they do to the people who provided the labor that built them? They are monuments to the folly of man, to the oppression of people who don't choose their rulers, to the power of religious government in draining the fruits of a society. Imagine the investment of people, materials, and expertise that went into building those useless tombs. Think of the opportunity costs of building the pyramids.
In a democracy, people don't like building pyramids or cathedrals that serve to glorify the ruling classes. So if they don't build such things, good for them.
It's interesting to me that now that all of Earth now is claimed by some group or another that we would begin moving to other planets.
What about the oceans? There's plenty of room there, and plenty of exploitable resources. All we need is the technology, and it may well come before the technology that brings down the cost of sending a kilogram to Mars.
More or less, he's said nothing newsworthy at all... he's just trying to get the geek vote without offering much in return.
Maybe, but he's also trying to draw attention away from the main story of the week, which was that his former anti-terrorism chief testified under oath that Bush didn't do much about terrorism before 9/11 and that even afterwards he was distracted from fighting terrorism by his obsession with fighting Iraq. I think Bush was so desperate that he would have strangled a kitten on live TV if it would have changed the subject.
And please use the proper terminology. This isn't a part of the conservative playbook. Its part of the playbook of the neo-conservatives or, if you actually look at their policies and match it up to traditional political parties, the fascists.
No, the neo-conservative movement is about foreign policy. It's about things like PNAC (spoof) and the David Brooks humor column. Some of these people also support the Cheney-style "starve the beast" strategy, but that's a strategy that belongs to traditional small-government, cheap-labor conservatives. The neocons are the ones obsessed with "Middle East reform" and the like--reshaping governments, but chiefly foreign ones.
Re:When has he been to Mars?
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Methane on Mars?
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· Score: 5, Funny
That in mind, wouldn't using OOo for windows be preferable for Microsoft, when compared to someone pirating and sharing copies of their suite?
No. If someone isn't going to buy Microsoft's software anyway, what difference does it make (to MS) if that person uses Microsoft's software or not? Unlike the sort of piracy that involves eye patches, parrots, and accents, software piracy doesn't directly harm anyone. The harm only happens when the pirate would have actually bought the software.
If anything, MS would probably prefer that people pirate MS Office rather than using OOo, because market share and file formats are so important to their software strategy. Of course they'd prefer that everyone buy MS Office, but they realize that some people simply won't.
3. Armies of Clippy's seem training with assault weapons in wilderness camps in Idaho.
Couldn't they just use that clip of men in masks on an obstacle course? You know, that same clip that every station loves to show whenever they want to illustrate "terrorists" in a scary way? I swear, if I had a dime for every time I've seen that same group of supposed evildoers terrorizing the monkey bars...
This also happened during WWII. Children were sent out of the cities of Europe to protect them from the bombings those cities received. I don't know if this happened in Japan or China, but I assume it must have on some scale.
The problem is that something else asymptotes much sooner. The work necessary to reach velocity v approaches infinity as v approaches c. Put another way, you'd need infinite energy just to get to Warp 1.0. Arguing about whether Warp 10 is possible is besides the point.
Neither the Ten Commandments nor any other parts of the Bible have much to do with the current government in the US or in any other country, Muslim theocracies excepted (e.g. Iran). Same with the Code of Hammurabi--like the Bible, it's full of eye-for-an-eye stuff, the law of revenge. This is the law of medieval despots, not of enlightened democracies.
Government has long favored economics over what you call "restraining evil actions". For most of human history, governments have engaged in wars of conquest, sanctioned slavery and prostitution, oppressed their people, and expected the poor masses to pay for it all. Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing, it's always happened. To the extent there's a trend, it's been towards greater individual rights and freedoms. This has coincided with the rise of democracy and the corresponding decline in the power of divine-right monarchs and their 20th century successors, the dictators and fascists. So if you take a long view of things, we're actually doing pretty well.
What ever happened to the concept that the simplest explaination is probably the best?
You're probably referring to Occam's Razor. One way of expressing that principle is that if two theories completely and correctly explain a phenomenon, the simpler one is preferred. If you think the simplest explanation is always correct, you're liable to believe that me when I say "apples fall towards the Earth because that's where you plant them" or "the Earth was created 5000 years ago". There's more to truth than simplicity.
The interesting trend here is for individual laws of nations to be "leveled" or "normalized" to reflect the laws of other nations only because it simplifies the economic situation to do so.
No, actually. That's not the interesting trend at all. That's been going on for thousands of years. Some historians think that the very first forms of government were enacted to harmonize trade laws. Governments have long sought to make economic systems compatible for trade.
There's absolutely nothing interest about this trend. That's like saying "the interesting trend is for governments to make murder illegal". It's happened since the beginning of civilization, and there's nothing new about it whatsoever.
Usually these are offset by the additional revenue that gambling brings into an area, so casinos are tolerated.
I've always wondered about this. Is the extra revenue something that would disappear if gambling were legalized everywhere? Or is it an inherent feature of gambling?
Right now gambling is legal in some parts of the US but not in others. So people go to the places where gambling is legal and spend money. But a lot of that money is spent on incidentals like hotels, restaurants, and so on. In other words, if people could gamble without travelling, would it still bring in as much money?
I have a feeling that the artificial scarcity of gambling is what makes it profitable. In other words, places that allow gambling have an interest in limiting competition.
We're talking about *shallow* depths. If it were that deep, it would be very expensive to build submarines to go down there. Also, there's plenty of life at just about every depth. It's just that we rarely see the life in the deep ocean, because we don't go there often.
Slashdot Mirror
But democracies plan years into the future all the time. We're debating Medicare changes because of a supposed issue 15 years down the road. Now, we might change our plans, but hey, what good is democracy if you can't change your mind?
You might mean that we aren't planning hundreds of years into the future. That's true. But we don't need to plan hundreds of years into the future. If we wanted to build a cathedral, we could do it in a year.
In fact, there really isn't anything we can plan hundreds of years for. We can't really make economic plans for more than a decade or two in advance, even for entitlement programs that don't kick in until a certain age--and we know how people we'll have reaching that age in each year! These days, there are very few places where planning so far in advance is an advantage.
Only in Chicago.
True, democracies tend not to build cathedrals with government funds. Have you ever considered that there's a reason for that? In particular, that democracies don't build cathedrals because they're not worth the cost?
Of the achievements listed in the post you quote, only one had any real value to the people that built it. The Great Wall did indeed make people safer. But the pyramids? What good did they do to the people who provided the labor that built them? They are monuments to the folly of man, to the oppression of people who don't choose their rulers, to the power of religious government in draining the fruits of a society. Imagine the investment of people, materials, and expertise that went into building those useless tombs. Think of the opportunity costs of building the pyramids.
In a democracy, people don't like building pyramids or cathedrals that serve to glorify the ruling classes. So if they don't build such things, good for them.
What about the oceans? There's plenty of room there, and plenty of exploitable resources. All we need is the technology, and it may well come before the technology that brings down the cost of sending a kilogram to Mars.
Maybe, but he's also trying to draw attention away from the main story of the week, which was that his former anti-terrorism chief testified under oath that Bush didn't do much about terrorism before 9/11 and that even afterwards he was distracted from fighting terrorism by his obsession with fighting Iraq. I think Bush was so desperate that he would have strangled a kitten on live TV if it would have changed the subject.
Where exactly are those places?
No, the neo-conservative movement is about foreign policy. It's about things like PNAC (spoof) and the David Brooks humor column. Some of these people also support the Cheney-style "starve the beast" strategy, but that's a strategy that belongs to traditional small-government, cheap-labor conservatives. The neocons are the ones obsessed with "Middle East reform" and the like--reshaping governments, but chiefly foreign ones.
Actually, they found it on the smelloscope.
It gets worse: MacOS X is based on BSD.
No. If someone isn't going to buy Microsoft's software anyway, what difference does it make (to MS) if that person uses Microsoft's software or not? Unlike the sort of piracy that involves eye patches, parrots, and accents, software piracy doesn't directly harm anyone. The harm only happens when the pirate would have actually bought the software.
If anything, MS would probably prefer that people pirate MS Office rather than using OOo, because market share and file formats are so important to their software strategy. Of course they'd prefer that everyone buy MS Office, but they realize that some people simply won't.
Couldn't they just use that clip of men in masks on an obstacle course? You know, that same clip that every station loves to show whenever they want to illustrate "terrorists" in a scary way? I swear, if I had a dime for every time I've seen that same group of supposed evildoers terrorizing the monkey bars...
I think KDE does this now, though I'm not sure if you have to use KDM. There's no inherent limitation in X11.
Yeah, but at least it has a spelling checker...
This also happened during WWII. Children were sent out of the cities of Europe to protect them from the bombings those cities received. I don't know if this happened in Japan or China, but I assume it must have on some scale.
No, just in a trend (of 2) in slashdot stories. No one really uses these languages.
They might have closed their Texas offices. Just a thought....
Your post would be funnier if you knew the difference between "formally" and "formerly".
Doesn't matter; a flying crocodile could kick its ass anyway.
The problem is that something else asymptotes much sooner. The work necessary to reach velocity v approaches infinity as v approaches c. Put another way, you'd need infinite energy just to get to Warp 1.0. Arguing about whether Warp 10 is possible is besides the point.
I should point out a couple of things:
You're probably referring to Occam's Razor. One way of expressing that principle is that if two theories completely and correctly explain a phenomenon, the simpler one is preferred. If you think the simplest explanation is always correct, you're liable to believe that me when I say "apples fall towards the Earth because that's where you plant them" or "the Earth was created 5000 years ago". There's more to truth than simplicity.
No, actually. That's not the interesting trend at all. That's been going on for thousands of years. Some historians think that the very first forms of government were enacted to harmonize trade laws. Governments have long sought to make economic systems compatible for trade.
There's absolutely nothing interest about this trend. That's like saying "the interesting trend is for governments to make murder illegal". It's happened since the beginning of civilization, and there's nothing new about it whatsoever.
Entertainment. Ever noticed how gambling advocates like to call it "gaming"?
I've always wondered about this. Is the extra revenue something that would disappear if gambling were legalized everywhere? Or is it an inherent feature of gambling?
Right now gambling is legal in some parts of the US but not in others. So people go to the places where gambling is legal and spend money. But a lot of that money is spent on incidentals like hotels, restaurants, and so on. In other words, if people could gamble without travelling, would it still bring in as much money?
I have a feeling that the artificial scarcity of gambling is what makes it profitable. In other words, places that allow gambling have an interest in limiting competition.
We're talking about *shallow* depths. If it were that deep, it would be very expensive to build submarines to go down there. Also, there's plenty of life at just about every depth. It's just that we rarely see the life in the deep ocean, because we don't go there often.