Yes, in terms of raw dollars spent, the third largest military in the world (FR) is an order of magnitude lower than the first (US), once you get to number 26 it drops another order of magnitude so 90% of countries spend two orders of magnitude less. More than half of the world spends 3 orders of magnitude less. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
This copyright business isn't the only issue in New Zealand politics. The current government is also selling large numbers of public assets to overseas corporations, and also doing all the crazy tax reductions and public service cutting that we love so much about the US. Even if they did an about turn and abolished copyright in NZ I doubt I would want to vote for them. Also we have an MMP system so voting for those small parties with 11 seats can swing an election.
Firstly, you guys and the mayan eotw crowd need to get together and hammer out a compromise. The world can't end twice.
Secondly, 21st may is only a month away, it is bad business to predict the apocalypse so soon. It is going to take you at least that long just to put out a manuscript. Ideally you want to leave yourself six months for a really polished book ready, then a couple more months for negotiation with publishers and the actual printing process. Then ideally you want 2-3 years for the sales to peak properly, and for talkshow interviews and guest appearances. This way when the predicted date rolls around and your predictions are shown to be totally bogus, you have a nice pile of cash to retire with.
Thirdly, does it bother anyone else that the country with the highest per capita belief in an impending apocalypse, the USA, also happens to be the country with the largest nuclear arsenal and a rapidly deteriorating political and economic system? I sometimes get this terrible feeling that whatever nutcase is currently in the whitehouse is just sitting with his finger on a big red button waiting for a sign from god.
Hold on, we are talking about radioactive water here, you can't put some water in an ocean and expect it to stay in the same place until the earth swallows it. Clearly you would use a container but think about what happens when an undersea canyon closes on a container... the rock walls are just going to close in and crush the container, which will then mix its contents with the sea. If you could cut a deep hole at the bottom of the trench and actually seal it in the rock from the start it might work but I don't think we have the technology for a massive rock cutting operation at the bottom of a deep sea trench.
Firstly monotheism != faith. It is of course a faith, but not the definition of the word. With many spiritual faiths there are ways you can investigate and verify them. This does not negate the fact that they are faith based or elevate them to sciences in the strict sense. Many of the people in this thread seem to also be confusing some pure theoretical ideal of science with the reality of what is going on in people's minds. Maybe you personally don't take science on faith, but many people do. That is the main point of the article. There are a lot of people who need some constant they can view as immutable as a psychological foundation. It is not possible for these people to view the world as the chaotic collection of infinite mysteries that pure science shows it to be. So they take scientific theories like those produced by physicists and use them as a foundation for their world view. When these theories are called into question these people often have a very strong emotional reaction, anger or or fear. This is because their faith has been shaken. It doesn't matter to these people about verifiability or evidence except in that it makes their faith stronger and more righteous. An idealised scientist, when presented with evidence that everything he has previously believed about the world is completely false, will react with curiosity and excitement at the prospect of new information. The science faithful react with fear and anger. I can see in many of the reactions here this same fear and anger, as though science itself were threatened by this article. Science is not threatened by any information except lies, and even lies are not a major threat. Scientific faith is widespread, and it is damaging to the correct practice of the scientific method. It is simple to tell if people are taking science on faith, and that is by their reaction to change. People who stubbornly cling to their current scientific belief, or react with fear and anger to the suggestion that it is false, are taking science on faith. People who react with curiosity to the suggestion that it is false and want to know more about how and why, are the real lovers of knowledge and understanding.
If your definition of theft is that it results in a loss of profits, then competition is theft, making a superior product or advertising better than you competitors is theft. Telling the media that a company is putting poison in their powdered milk is theft. Demanding a replacement at a store for faulty merchandise is theft. You also assume that people would buy everything they pirate if piracy weren't an option, I assure you this is not the case. I for one could never afford it.
It seems to me that if you often find yourself walking into traffic or off ledges while texting, getting a new app on your phone is not the obvious solution.
As is too often the case, the slashdot summary is a bit inaccurate. First, the phrase "thus far not considered a danger." has a link to an article that says that the National National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) does not consider traces of iodine-131 in that air to be a danger. It says nothing about ships, containers or luggage. In addition I would like to encourage anyone writing these summaries not to use such ambiguous language: saying something is not considered dangerous is almost always untrue. Someone, somewhere considers everything to be a danger, and this goes double for radiation. Correct wordings include "not considered a danger by the NNSA", or "not considered a danger by the authorities" "is believed to not pose any danger". Simple negation goes a long way. While I am nitpicking, if they don't consider this dangerous why are they destroying people's luggage?
Any P2P veteran knows that you can download a lot of data in 6 months, in fact I am pretty sure my internet connection would take all of 20 hours to download all the music I have ever possessed. Mind you I am not with BT. This service would in fact be ideal for me as I never listen to new music anyway. I think that recorded music is like whiskey: it has to be 12 years old or it is not ready to consume. You could even set up a script to attempt to scrape the entire collection they were offering and just not bother saving any of the data. That way BT would have an official record of you owning a personal license to all their music meaning you could no longer be prosecuted for pirating it from anywhere later. That is assuming they even have a decent selection.
What kind of sociopath would go on an international public forum like this and deny that anyone had been hurt just to win a pro nuclear power debate. People have been hurt.
Or don't burns, hospitalisations and the potential of greatly increased cancer rates count as hurt to you? Not to mention the two who are 'missing', tell me with a straight face that you believe someone can go missing for weeks in an area where radiation suited workers are allowed to go for only 15 minutes per year and still be alive. The government is warning people for many mile around not to drink the water, and this in a disaster stricken region where access to water might be hard for many people anyway. Sometimes I despair of the human race. Nobody has been hurt!?
This is part of the planned failure mode of the reactor......this is not going to be a Chernobyl-level catastrophe.
Sarcasm: Great, you can store all the radioactive waste in my bedroom then, as long as the quantity/lethality of that waste is not 'Chernobyl level' I am sure I will be just fine. As we all know, if it is not Chernobyl, then it is perfectly safe.
Seriously: At what point are the slashdot nuclear cheerleaders going to stop saying "don't worry, everything is fine"? Everything is not fucking fine. Every day it seems to be getting worse, maybe I should come around to your house and murder your whole family, then at my trial you can say 'don't worry, it wasn't a Ted Bundy-level catastrophe.' and I will get let off all the charges.
Sure most modern international media is sensationalist. Now show me how you logically derive "nuclear power is safe" from "media is sensationalist". Every time new data emerges showing the extent of the disaster I think to myself, 'now finally, the nuclear fanboys and cheerleaders on slashdot will have to bite their tongues'. But here you are again. The Japanese government is warning residents in Tokyo not to let their children drink the tapwater. Maybe the Japanese government is just sensationalist and that of course proves that nuclear power is safe and that Fukushima wasn't a disaster. Get this off slashdot please? I know a lot of people get a hard on about the high tech aspects of nuclear power, as a geek myself I also find the science fascinating. I also find epidemiology fascinating, and psychopathy. This does not make me claim that smallpox and serial killers are safe. Please separate your scientific curiosity from the bigger picture of the wellbeing of human society. On the other hand if you are not a geek with a hard on for nuclear tech, and are instead a money grubbing shill for the nuclear power industry, you can just fuck right off. Nuclear power in the real world is about profit, it is not about technology, neither is it about supplying energy. When people are getting sick and dieing for the profit of a wealthy industry you should be ashamed of opening your mouth if all you have is excuses and justifications.
You are absolutely right, but I maintain you are not really disagreeing with me. I spoke of alleviating poverty but didn't go into detail about how. Most forms of economic aid as currently practised are flawed to the point of doing damage rather than helping. If you provide a nation with clean water, medicine, housing, and education (you missed that one), when you are finished, an economy will be there where once there was none. The trick is to use local manpower and local resources to build infrastructure. If the UN were to create a fund and an army of trainer personnel to start this infrastructure building effort, it would only take a decade or so for most countries (those with religious/ideological problems may be slower). Again the cost of all this is roughly comparable to half of what the US alone spends on its's various wars every year.
Of course much further discussion is required of how exactly we should implement such a process, we seem to be in agreement here that it can be done, and that the reason it is not done is purely greed and exploitation.
As others have mentioned, this is clearly GM propaganda advertising. Quite apart from curbing wastage there are also subsidies in most developed companies which pay farmers for not growing crops. If there were a problem feeding the population (and it may not be at 9 bil but it will come eventually) the solution will be in curbing population growth not in creating more food. Other resources even scarcer than food like energy and clean water will be a major problem before food is. There is a clear and obvious way to rein in population growth, and no white elitists, it is not to kill off all the poor brown people. Even ignoring the ethical side of this suggestion it is still merely a temporary drop in population. We are talking about a growth problem not a numbers problem and any solution that does not curb growth is not a solution at all. Statistically richer developed countries have little to no population growth outside of immigration, and even in those countries the impoverished contribute much more to the birth rate. The statistics clearly show a connection between poverty and population growth. The key then to bringing world population growth under control is eliminating poverty. The cost of eliminating poverty worldwide would run into the 100s of billions for a few years and would then be self sustaining. In terms of global spending for example defence spending, this is peanuts. Given the clear solutions available for the actual problem at hand, and the relative cheapness and massive cost effectiveness of those solutions, anyone who claims that this is an issue of food production is either failing to look at the big picture, or has another agenda. I can understand that the rich elites of the world don't want to give up their stranglehold on world economics, but I won't swallow this crap about it being a food problem. We have a population growth problem, which is caused by a poverty problem, prevented from solution by a greed problem.
Is flickr just one person? If not you have your argument back to front. The question was about why corporations with lawyers don't stand up against corruption, the answer that it is hard for individuals to stand up suggests the opposite of what actually happened. I think what the earlier poster meant by "Of course, we already know the answer." was "Greed"
I can fly frigates, cruisers and industrials from every race, battlecruisers from 3/4 races, plus just about every minmatar ship that exists apart from super capitals. Comparing ship classes in eve to character class in other MMO's is wrong. I also played wow since the beta. I stopped playing wow because the gameplay is thinner than a lawyers smile, while I am also a little tired of eve I do plan to go back to it, whereas with wow I never will. If someone says they don't like MMO's I nod and agree with their reasons, if someone says eve is worse than the other MMO's they will have huge problems convincing me of that. If you like spaceships, and you don't hate MMO's, don't let these naysayers form your opinion for you. If you have already played it and didn't like it, that is just fine but don't tell other people what to think.
As long as eye candy is the yardstick upon which all progress is measured I will have no interest in any debate about where and how progress is being made. It feels like marrying a woman because of her bra size, or buying a car because you like the colour of the paint, or voting for a politician because he has a nice smile. PC's make consoles look obsolete because there are tangible advances in gameplay and in the art's of storytelling and depth of content. PC's have always made consoles look obsolete in my eyes, and due to the nature of the technology consoles are unlikely to ever catch up. Another area where consoles are always lacking is modding and customisation of games. Consoles are to PC's what internet porn is to real sex, it may look prettier sometimes, it may be easier to use, it may be more accessible to children, but it will never beat the real thing.
I realise that in ask slashdot you were probably looking for geek/technical replies, so feel free to ignore this. I think the Tao principle of uselessness is the best solution to both privacy and security. The parable of the useless tree illustrates this well. If you have no money, you give out all your intellectual property free on the internet, and you don't have a need for expensive possessions, there should be no need for privacy and security. Naturally in the real world this is more a guideline than foolproof rule, to be useless to the US government you have to either have no interest in any kind of politics, or live in a country who's politics don't interest them. With the current economic rules regarding debt it has become virtually impossible to be useless to big corporations. But nevertheless I think it is an important principle to take into account when working out how to secure yourself. Think about how you are most useful to people who would harm you to use you, and see if there are ways you can become less useful to them.
I would like to retract comments I have made in the past about the mafiaa using a failed business model. I was watching a lawyer show when it dawned on me that these companies aren't the only ones who are trying to make more and more of their money from litigation. In the US there are a whole industry of companies and individuals whose whole income is based in litigation. While we can all agree that their old model, sell a cd for $30 and give 50c to the artist is failing, their new litigation model has the potential to be fairly successful. I will henceforth be complaining about the failed legal system in the US instead.
This crap really bugs me.
First, in a philosophical discourse in which two parties are trying to put forward opposing points (eg. 'god exists' vs 'god does not exist'), the onus of proof is on both parties. Simply saying 'the onus of proof is on you' and thinking that wins you the argument shows you to be a very shallow thinker. Saying it in all caps additionally shows that you either have unresolved anger issues, or that you are a teenager.
Secondly, I abhor the assumption that 'god' means 'The-Monotheistic-Middle-Eastern-Islamo-Judeo-Christian-God'. Sure it is pretty plain that this god doesn't exist, as middle eastern religions have built up a wonderful old man in the sky image that, while comforting, has not been found in our extensive studies of the sky. If however, I were a pantheist reading this thread your argument amounts to subscribing to nihilism, which I consider an untenable philosophical position, especially from a scientific standpoint. If on the the other hand I were a sun worshipper, your position amounts to total idiocy. Sun worshippers can prove that their god exists with thousands of rigorously tested facts and figures. They can additionally prove that their god gives life to all living things, and that it's energy pervades almost everywhere (where almost everywhere is a sphere with a radius = the the age of the sun*speed of light).
I have no problem with having a debate about the middle eastern god exclusively, but please call an apple an apple and state what you are arguing about at the outset. The phrase 'god does not exist' is just plain incorrect unless you carefully define what you mean by the word god, and after defining god in the middle eastern way you will find that you have created a contradictory definition and that such a god tautologically does not exist, making such a discussion pointless anyway.
I asked for an explanation of the difference, not two examples. I can furnish examples on my own. I also would like to point out that crystals are not a good example of pseudoscience as they are used for hundreds of valid scientific uses, eg. digital clocks, record players, cigarette lighters. Sure some people do crazy things with them but people also stab other people with ice picks, this does not invalidate the field of surgical medicine. Crystals have many amazing properties that we don't understand well, this is scientific fact. Does anyone here have an actual way to tell the difference between speculative science and pseudoscience?
Can anyone explain to me the difference between 'highly speculative research' and pseudoscience? Apart from acceptance by the scientific community as being deserving of funds I am having trouble differentiating them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, in terms of raw dollars spent, the third largest military in the world (FR) is an order of magnitude lower than the first (US), once you get to number 26 it drops another order of magnitude so 90% of countries spend two orders of magnitude less. More than half of the world spends 3 orders of magnitude less. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
This copyright business isn't the only issue in New Zealand politics. The current government is also selling large numbers of public assets to overseas corporations, and also doing all the crazy tax reductions and public service cutting that we love so much about the US. Even if they did an about turn and abolished copyright in NZ I doubt I would want to vote for them. Also we have an MMP system so voting for those small parties with 11 seats can swing an election.
Firstly, you guys and the mayan eotw crowd need to get together and hammer out a compromise. The world can't end twice.
Secondly, 21st may is only a month away, it is bad business to predict the apocalypse so soon. It is going to take you at least that long just to put out a manuscript. Ideally you want to leave yourself six months for a really polished book ready, then a couple more months for negotiation with publishers and the actual printing process. Then ideally you want 2-3 years for the sales to peak properly, and for talkshow interviews and guest appearances. This way when the predicted date rolls around and your predictions are shown to be totally bogus, you have a nice pile of cash to retire with.
Thirdly, does it bother anyone else that the country with the highest per capita belief in an impending apocalypse, the USA, also happens to be the country with the largest nuclear arsenal and a rapidly deteriorating political and economic system? I sometimes get this terrible feeling that whatever nutcase is currently in the whitehouse is just sitting with his finger on a big red button waiting for a sign from god.
Hold on, we are talking about radioactive water here, you can't put some water in an ocean and expect it to stay in the same place until the earth swallows it. Clearly you would use a container but think about what happens when an undersea canyon closes on a container... the rock walls are just going to close in and crush the container, which will then mix its contents with the sea. If you could cut a deep hole at the bottom of the trench and actually seal it in the rock from the start it might work but I don't think we have the technology for a massive rock cutting operation at the bottom of a deep sea trench.
Firstly monotheism != faith. It is of course a faith, but not the definition of the word. With many spiritual faiths there are ways you can investigate and verify them. This does not negate the fact that they are faith based or elevate them to sciences in the strict sense. Many of the people in this thread seem to also be confusing some pure theoretical ideal of science with the reality of what is going on in people's minds. Maybe you personally don't take science on faith, but many people do. That is the main point of the article. There are a lot of people who need some constant they can view as immutable as a psychological foundation. It is not possible for these people to view the world as the chaotic collection of infinite mysteries that pure science shows it to be. So they take scientific theories like those produced by physicists and use them as a foundation for their world view. When these theories are called into question these people often have a very strong emotional reaction, anger or or fear. This is because their faith has been shaken. It doesn't matter to these people about verifiability or evidence except in that it makes their faith stronger and more righteous. An idealised scientist, when presented with evidence that everything he has previously believed about the world is completely false, will react with curiosity and excitement at the prospect of new information. The science faithful react with fear and anger. I can see in many of the reactions here this same fear and anger, as though science itself were threatened by this article. Science is not threatened by any information except lies, and even lies are not a major threat. Scientific faith is widespread, and it is damaging to the correct practice of the scientific method. It is simple to tell if people are taking science on faith, and that is by their reaction to change. People who stubbornly cling to their current scientific belief, or react with fear and anger to the suggestion that it is false, are taking science on faith. People who react with curiosity to the suggestion that it is false and want to know more about how and why, are the real lovers of knowledge and understanding.
If your definition of theft is that it results in a loss of profits, then competition is theft, making a superior product or advertising better than you competitors is theft. Telling the media that a company is putting poison in their powdered milk is theft. Demanding a replacement at a store for faulty merchandise is theft. You also assume that people would buy everything they pirate if piracy weren't an option, I assure you this is not the case. I for one could never afford it.
It seems to me that if you often find yourself walking into traffic or off ledges while texting, getting a new app on your phone is not the obvious solution.
As is too often the case, the slashdot summary is a bit inaccurate. First, the phrase "thus far not considered a danger." has a link to an article that says that the National National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) does not consider traces of iodine-131 in that air to be a danger. It says nothing about ships, containers or luggage. In addition I would like to encourage anyone writing these summaries not to use such ambiguous language: saying something is not considered dangerous is almost always untrue. Someone, somewhere considers everything to be a danger, and this goes double for radiation. Correct wordings include "not considered a danger by the NNSA", or "not considered a danger by the authorities" "is believed to not pose any danger". Simple negation goes a long way. While I am nitpicking, if they don't consider this dangerous why are they destroying people's luggage?
Any P2P veteran knows that you can download a lot of data in 6 months, in fact I am pretty sure my internet connection would take all of 20 hours to download all the music I have ever possessed. Mind you I am not with BT. This service would in fact be ideal for me as I never listen to new music anyway. I think that recorded music is like whiskey: it has to be 12 years old or it is not ready to consume. You could even set up a script to attempt to scrape the entire collection they were offering and just not bother saving any of the data. That way BT would have an official record of you owning a personal license to all their music meaning you could no longer be prosecuted for pirating it from anywhere later. That is assuming they even have a decent selection.
So, who's been hurt? So far, nobody.
What kind of sociopath would go on an international public forum like this and deny that anyone had been hurt just to win a pro nuclear power debate. People have been hurt.
Or don't burns, hospitalisations and the potential of greatly increased cancer rates count as hurt to you? Not to mention the two who are 'missing', tell me with a straight face that you believe someone can go missing for weeks in an area where radiation suited workers are allowed to go for only 15 minutes per year and still be alive. The government is warning people for many mile around not to drink the water, and this in a disaster stricken region where access to water might be hard for many people anyway. Sometimes I despair of the human race. Nobody has been hurt!?
This is part of the planned failure mode of the reactor... ...this is not going to be a Chernobyl-level catastrophe.
Sarcasm: Great, you can store all the radioactive waste in my bedroom then, as long as the quantity/lethality of that waste is not 'Chernobyl level' I am sure I will be just fine. As we all know, if it is not Chernobyl, then it is perfectly safe.
Seriously: At what point are the slashdot nuclear cheerleaders going to stop saying "don't worry, everything is fine"? Everything is not fucking fine. Every day it seems to be getting worse, maybe I should come around to your house and murder your whole family, then at my trial you can say 'don't worry, it wasn't a Ted Bundy-level catastrophe.' and I will get let off all the charges.
the burden of proof lies on those making the claim.
So you claim, but can you prove this?
By the way your last paragraph makes no sense, at least not to me.
Sure most modern international media is sensationalist. Now show me how you logically derive "nuclear power is safe" from "media is sensationalist". Every time new data emerges showing the extent of the disaster I think to myself, 'now finally, the nuclear fanboys and cheerleaders on slashdot will have to bite their tongues'. But here you are again. The Japanese government is warning residents in Tokyo not to let their children drink the tapwater. Maybe the Japanese government is just sensationalist and that of course proves that nuclear power is safe and that Fukushima wasn't a disaster. Get this off slashdot please? I know a lot of people get a hard on about the high tech aspects of nuclear power, as a geek myself I also find the science fascinating. I also find epidemiology fascinating, and psychopathy. This does not make me claim that smallpox and serial killers are safe. Please separate your scientific curiosity from the bigger picture of the wellbeing of human society. On the other hand if you are not a geek with a hard on for nuclear tech, and are instead a money grubbing shill for the nuclear power industry, you can just fuck right off. Nuclear power in the real world is about profit, it is not about technology, neither is it about supplying energy. When people are getting sick and dieing for the profit of a wealthy industry you should be ashamed of opening your mouth if all you have is excuses and justifications.
You are absolutely right, but I maintain you are not really disagreeing with me. I spoke of alleviating poverty but didn't go into detail about how. Most forms of economic aid as currently practised are flawed to the point of doing damage rather than helping. If you provide a nation with clean water, medicine, housing, and education (you missed that one), when you are finished, an economy will be there where once there was none. The trick is to use local manpower and local resources to build infrastructure. If the UN were to create a fund and an army of trainer personnel to start this infrastructure building effort, it would only take a decade or so for most countries (those with religious/ideological problems may be slower). Again the cost of all this is roughly comparable to half of what the US alone spends on its's various wars every year.
Of course much further discussion is required of how exactly we should implement such a process, we seem to be in agreement here that it can be done, and that the reason it is not done is purely greed and exploitation.
As others have mentioned, this is clearly GM propaganda advertising. Quite apart from curbing wastage there are also subsidies in most developed companies which pay farmers for not growing crops. If there were a problem feeding the population (and it may not be at 9 bil but it will come eventually) the solution will be in curbing population growth not in creating more food. Other resources even scarcer than food like energy and clean water will be a major problem before food is. There is a clear and obvious way to rein in population growth, and no white elitists, it is not to kill off all the poor brown people. Even ignoring the ethical side of this suggestion it is still merely a temporary drop in population. We are talking about a growth problem not a numbers problem and any solution that does not curb growth is not a solution at all. Statistically richer developed countries have little to no population growth outside of immigration, and even in those countries the impoverished contribute much more to the birth rate. The statistics clearly show a connection between poverty and population growth. The key then to bringing world population growth under control is eliminating poverty. The cost of eliminating poverty worldwide would run into the 100s of billions for a few years and would then be self sustaining. In terms of global spending for example defence spending, this is peanuts. Given the clear solutions available for the actual problem at hand, and the relative cheapness and massive cost effectiveness of those solutions, anyone who claims that this is an issue of food production is either failing to look at the big picture, or has another agenda. I can understand that the rich elites of the world don't want to give up their stranglehold on world economics, but I won't swallow this crap about it being a food problem. We have a population growth problem, which is caused by a poverty problem, prevented from solution by a greed problem.
Is flickr just one person? If not you have your argument back to front. The question was about why corporations with lawyers don't stand up against corruption, the answer that it is hard for individuals to stand up suggests the opposite of what actually happened. I think what the earlier poster meant by "Of course, we already know the answer." was "Greed"
I can fly frigates, cruisers and industrials from every race, battlecruisers from 3/4 races, plus just about every minmatar ship that exists apart from super capitals. Comparing ship classes in eve to character class in other MMO's is wrong. I also played wow since the beta. I stopped playing wow because the gameplay is thinner than a lawyers smile, while I am also a little tired of eve I do plan to go back to it, whereas with wow I never will. If someone says they don't like MMO's I nod and agree with their reasons, if someone says eve is worse than the other MMO's they will have huge problems convincing me of that. If you like spaceships, and you don't hate MMO's, don't let these naysayers form your opinion for you. If you have already played it and didn't like it, that is just fine but don't tell other people what to think.
As long as eye candy is the yardstick upon which all progress is measured I will have no interest in any debate about where and how progress is being made. It feels like marrying a woman because of her bra size, or buying a car because you like the colour of the paint, or voting for a politician because he has a nice smile. PC's make consoles look obsolete because there are tangible advances in gameplay and in the art's of storytelling and depth of content. PC's have always made consoles look obsolete in my eyes, and due to the nature of the technology consoles are unlikely to ever catch up. Another area where consoles are always lacking is modding and customisation of games. Consoles are to PC's what internet porn is to real sex, it may look prettier sometimes, it may be easier to use, it may be more accessible to children, but it will never beat the real thing.
I realise that in ask slashdot you were probably looking for geek/technical replies, so feel free to ignore this. I think the Tao principle of uselessness is the best solution to both privacy and security. The parable of the useless tree illustrates this well. If you have no money, you give out all your intellectual property free on the internet, and you don't have a need for expensive possessions, there should be no need for privacy and security. Naturally in the real world this is more a guideline than foolproof rule, to be useless to the US government you have to either have no interest in any kind of politics, or live in a country who's politics don't interest them. With the current economic rules regarding debt it has become virtually impossible to be useless to big corporations. But nevertheless I think it is an important principle to take into account when working out how to secure yourself. Think about how you are most useful to people who would harm you to use you, and see if there are ways you can become less useful to them.
I would like to retract comments I have made in the past about the mafiaa using a failed business model. I was watching a lawyer show when it dawned on me that these companies aren't the only ones who are trying to make more and more of their money from litigation. In the US there are a whole industry of companies and individuals whose whole income is based in litigation. While we can all agree that their old model, sell a cd for $30 and give 50c to the artist is failing, their new litigation model has the potential to be fairly successful. I will henceforth be complaining about the failed legal system in the US instead.
This crap really bugs me.
First, in a philosophical discourse in which two parties are trying to put forward opposing points (eg. 'god exists' vs 'god does not exist'), the onus of proof is on both parties. Simply saying 'the onus of proof is on you' and thinking that wins you the argument shows you to be a very shallow thinker. Saying it in all caps additionally shows that you either have unresolved anger issues, or that you are a teenager.
Secondly, I abhor the assumption that 'god' means 'The-Monotheistic-Middle-Eastern-Islamo-Judeo-Christian-God'. Sure it is pretty plain that this god doesn't exist, as middle eastern religions have built up a wonderful old man in the sky image that, while comforting, has not been found in our extensive studies of the sky. If however, I were a pantheist reading this thread your argument amounts to subscribing to nihilism, which I consider an untenable philosophical position, especially from a scientific standpoint. If on the the other hand I were a sun worshipper, your position amounts to total idiocy. Sun worshippers can prove that their god exists with thousands of rigorously tested facts and figures. They can additionally prove that their god gives life to all living things, and that it's energy pervades almost everywhere (where almost everywhere is a sphere with a radius = the the age of the sun*speed of light).
I have no problem with having a debate about the middle eastern god exclusively, but please call an apple an apple and state what you are arguing about at the outset. The phrase 'god does not exist' is just plain incorrect unless you carefully define what you mean by the word god, and after defining god in the middle eastern way you will find that you have created a contradictory definition and that such a god tautologically does not exist, making such a discussion pointless anyway.
I asked for an explanation of the difference, not two examples. I can furnish examples on my own. I also would like to point out that crystals are not a good example of pseudoscience as they are used for hundreds of valid scientific uses, eg. digital clocks, record players, cigarette lighters. Sure some people do crazy things with them but people also stab other people with ice picks, this does not invalidate the field of surgical medicine. Crystals have many amazing properties that we don't understand well, this is scientific fact. Does anyone here have an actual way to tell the difference between speculative science and pseudoscience?
Can anyone explain to me the difference between 'highly speculative research' and pseudoscience? Apart from acceptance by the scientific community as being deserving of funds I am having trouble differentiating them.
Congratulations, you win the prize.
Not to mention the DOD already put out a statement saying the release of the files didn't put any of the soldiers or civilians at risk