Speaking somewhat less childishly, the "long tail" notion is already inherent in the conceptions of what constitutes a good Wikipedia article in Wiki Is Not Paper.
Sorry, that link was broken. Here's one that works: Wiki is not paper.
First among them, The Long Tail, and why it would benefit the site to take advantage of it rather than ignore it.
The whole "notability" criteria seems very much like 1980s thinking. So many lessons of the internet being ignored there.
And your whole "leapfrogging onto the latest buzzword bandwagon" is, like, so late-90s.
Speaking somewhat less childishly, the "long tail" notion is already inherent in the conceptions of what constitutes a good Wikipedia article in Wiki Is Not Paper.
But as the other person who replied to you indicated, there is a point where the tail for a topic is so long that contributed information is completely unverifiable. Unverifiable means, in any case, outright false. In many cases, these are vanity articles, hidden advertising, or simply utterly random garbage.
And also make the registration process effort consuming. Only people with accounts should be able to edit, set the minimum age to 21.
Vandalism happens, and would whether or not accounts were required. I don't really understand why people have such a hard time with anonymous edits. Fully open editing, which includes spontaneous anonymous edits, are exactly how Wikipedia got so huge in the first place.
Wikipedia entered mainstream consciousness by adopting a radically open position. Why is that now, that is finally is mainstream, that people consistently want to change the very thing that led to its success?
I've yet to see any evidence that the number of vandals is rising faster than the number of "honest" users. If vandalism was such a problem that it undermined the whole effort, don't you think Wikipedia would simply have never got off the ground in the first place?
Hells, why not link it up to the drivers license numbers.
Let's see, the first premise there is that any adult would-be-Wikipedian has a driver's licence. Even if this were the case, we would need to authenticate every sort of driver's licence from everyplace on Earth, since edits to Wikipedia can come from anywhere. Then there is the constant risk of exposing this data to would-be-identity thieves.
Finally, there is the fact that users with accounts have, as of now, a degree of anonymity in the sense that the only information presented to the world is what they choose to. Their IP addresses are exposed only to admins. This would be lost with your proposed system. I don't see why we should not allow edits from reasonable people who don't want to expose personal details.
To summarize, Wikipedia's success is due to its radical openness. The reports criticizing this position have (in my opinion) not exposed fundamental weaknesses in the system, but reflect simply a reactionary position towards it. To change the model would be to shut off Wikipedia's engine of growth. Don't change what ain't broke.
The result of taking the square root of a number and then squaring it will be the absolute value of the original number.
Really? What if the number is negative?
I think you mean to say "the original number", not "the absolute value of the original number". When given a negative argument, this composition will either return an error (because there is no support for complex numbers) or a negative result equal to the input.
Who is von Gravenreuth? My German isn't so good, but as far as I can tell from his bio page on the German wikipedia he seems to be some sort of anti-open-source provocateur. Am I way off?
I was just about to point this out since I'm from Canada. I wonder if we are double fined on the Zune over here then?
I hadn't heard this earlier, but apparently a judge decided in 2004 that iPods were exempt from the tax (see this Wikipedia link. So presumably the same would extend to the Zune.
Why on earth the iPods are exempt escapes me, but then I've never been able to appreciate why CDRs and DVDs were taxed but hard drives and USB keys are not (though I'm frankly not sure about the latter).
I think you're allowing your resentment of unsubstantiated generalizations make by idiotic atheists to colour your perceptions about public belief in a young Earth.
The fact is, there are lots of people alive today, many of whom are Americans, who beleive that the Earth is 6000 years old. I don't particularly care whether they do this because they are Biblical literalists, Quranic literalists, Talmudic literalists, or just plain nuts. The fact is they exist, and that's the only point I was interested in making.
That said, Catholicism is not a faith generally known by its adherents' rigid applications to doctrine -- no faith that stretches over the entire world and hundreds of languages and cultures could be otherwise -- so I am not particularly convinced by an argument that merely presents the Vatican's view on an issue with an estimate of the worldwide number of Catholics.
As for your statements about atheism being a faith, I'll agree to an extent. I think a belief in the non-intervention of a deity is a the only position with which to approach scientific questions, merely because of Occam's Razor. But I have yet not seen athiests whose atheism was inspired by science argue convincingly to me on the larger metaphysical questions on the existence of higher powers.
However, I am meaning to read more by Daniel Dennett, who apparently has argued something of this kind, and I have been generally impressed so far with his work.
I don't believe a huge number of people today believe Earth is 6000 years old, so I'm naivete.
Er, whether or not grub is an anti-religious troll, there are lots of believe who believe this. This was evident from the public reaction in American media to this court case.
all those Lennon-McCartney compositions would still be copyrighted until 2077, and until then you wouldn't be able to make copies of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" without paying composition royalties to... well... Michael Jackson, I guess.
Are we talking about new copies, or any copies? If I wanted to cover "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", presumably I'd be paying royalties to Jackson, but what if I wanted to put an mp3 of the original Beatles recording online? If I can't, in what sense can it plausibly be described as "public domain"?
As long as a musician's CDs continue to sell, I don't see a problem with that musician getting a piece of the action. (And that's not necessarily a copyright or "intellectual property" issue.)
Just out of curiosity, does this statement by you only extend for the life of the musician or artist? I remember reading in Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture about the original motivating example for the expiry of copyright, sometime in the 18th century, being some guy who had bought the rights to Shakespeare's works, and was licensing them for a pretty penny, almost 200 years after the author's death.
If the predictions are right then this is the calm before the storm. If the Arctic melts, which it is, it'll release vast amounts of methane.
Uh, perhaps this is a naive question, but the frozen Arctic is, well, ice. Where is the carbon going to come from to make CH4? Now, there are probably some levels of CO2 trapped in ice bubbles, but speaking naively I don't see how this is a hugely significant contribution to global atmospheric carbon levels?
Not that a thawed Arctic wouldn't suck for other reasons, of course.
Yeah, because those who claim that it is happening never have an agenda...
Well, of course they do. In general the agenda of scientists is to do science, while the agenda of politicans is to do politics. Now, I'm certainly not going to argue that scientists themselves are unswayed by political sentiments, and would never support one side for political and not scientific reasons.
But when I have not made my own quantitative analysis, my skepticism tells me to weigh which side has the least incentive to lie. While I think that it's possible for climatologists to be swayed by "the liberal agenda", I think it's much more likely for other side to be swayed by billions of dollars in lost revenue.
This is not to say I trust my conclusions hold: conclusions based on trusting hundreds of strangers are rarely completely sound. But these conclusions seem much stronger to me than any of the arguments for either side I've heard yet.
Thanks for the link; I'll have a look. After enough of these discussions I will eventually have to educate myself to the degree that my decisions are based less on trust (but as I'm not a climatologist, there will always have to be some trust involved.)
This is why your argument that Antarctica is melting is rarely used these days. Because your "verifiable fact" is not only false, but would disprove most climate models.
The only thing I described as a "verifiable fact" is the claim that "significant amounts of Antarctic ice that have never been thawed in recorded human history are now gone". At the same time I provided a link to a BBC article describing particular patches of ice that are gone.
If I understood you correctly earlier, you haven't refuted or denied this, but argued instead that other ice has been formed. You are generalizing what I said to the stronger claim that the net quantity of ice in Antarctica is declining. This is not what I claimed; you'll note that even in the first comment all I said was that "global warming has already significantly altered ice distribution around the poles."
Don't believe everything you hear in Hollywood movies. That argument has pretty much been refuted. Any change caused by the collapse of the Gulf Stream would be minor and likely offset by the warming that caused it in the first place.
You'll forgive me if I remain unconvinced without being provided with compelling evidence (or any evidence at all). This is not to say I'm confident that the Gulf Stream will stop: at this point I am skeptical of most universal claims on this subject (but especially those of people with an agenda to push, like most of those who claim it's not happening).
You're also not helping your case with the patronizing implication that I get my science knowledge from Hollywood. I don't even know what movie you're referring to, and in any case I certainly haven't seen it.
Thats a small part of the Antarctic ice sheet. The East Antarctic sheet is actually growing.
You have not demonstrated any evidence that this part which is growing is substantially larger than the portions which have thawed. This is the general problem when comparing multiple qualitative reports of two counterbalancing phenonema, whether it be global weather patterns, or insurgents in Iraq.
Of course, the same argument applies to my position, since we can draw no quantitative conclusions at all without the numbers. What we do know from both the qualitative reports we've discussed, is that ice levels in Antarctica and elsewhere are changing rapidly at previously unrecorded rates, whether it be melting or thawing (e.g. the snows of Kilimanjaro).
In any case, because weather is a chaotic system, it's entirely possible that a rise in global mean temperature could cause ice quantities to grow someplace, just as some people are predicting that the net effect of global warming will be the cooling of Europe though the collapse of the Gulf Stream. This is why people are now using the term "climate change" in place of "global warming".
You know what else alters ice distribution around the poles? The fact that it is summer in the southern hemisphere.
Oh, for God's sake. It's a verifiable fact that significant amounts of Antarctic ice that have never been thawed in recorded human history are now gone. See for example this article:
The Larsen A ice shelf, which measured 1,600 sq km, broke off in 1995. The 1,100 sq km Wilkins ice shelf fell off in 1998 and the 13,500 sq km Larsen B dropped away in 2002.
Though if you seriously think every person complaining about global warming is too stupid to know when it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere, then I don't think it's worth expending much effort talking to you.
IMO, that's the only sane viewing order, especially for someone watching it for the first time. It keeps the suspense, ymmv of course.
It does, however, give away the "Leia and Luke are siblings" fact before the "original" revelation of this in Episode 6. Which is not a particularly terrible thing. I've always thought that the manner in which it was revealed in Return of the Jedi — in a conversation between Luke and Obi Wan's ghost — was a bit anticlimatic. One of Leia or Darth Vader should've been onscreen for that moment.
Why would it have anything to do with global warming?
Because global warming has already significantly altered ice distribution around the poles, leaving thousands of what was once ice to be open water?
One could plausibly speculate that this iceberg's appearance is connected with climate change without being a ridiculous conspiracy theorist (and Bush doesn't even have to come into it).
You are trying to use the tragedy of the commons to try to justify the commons (communal ownership of the forest) as the best economic model. Very ironic.
Thats not really what he/she was doing. Communal ownership in the classical sense would mean that the private corporations doing the clearcutting would share the forest with the Indians, just as the village commons in the old economic parable was owned by everybody.
The "communalism" being proposed is sole communal ownership by the people living on the land (i.e. the Indians), with the exploiting corporations left out. Think of it as private ownership by a collective, if that makes any sense.
How long will it be until we start running into dilemmas concerned with whether data centers or people have priority over available electricity?
Electricity consumption has not risen proportionally with increase in CPU power. I haven't seen anything convincing demonstration that such data-processing plants would take more electricity than would, say, a factory.
At what point do the machines decide that instead of competing with humans for power, humans would make a useful power source?
Uh, never, because it makes no sense? (Unless you're the Wachowski brothers, I suppose.)
The same problem exists in many developed countries. There are just people who either don't want the help or cannot be helped. There are many people in the US who we classify as being below the poverty line that are happy and content with their lives. The problem is that we assign our standards of happiness to them and cannot contemplate how they can be in a state other than misery.
I'm not sure where to begin here. Yes, we humans are exceedingly good at adapting to extreme conditions imposed on is by our environment. Even in the developed world, where our economic freedom supposedly liberates us from the constraints of poverty, we have millions of people who climb into cars for harrowing, life-threatening hour-long commutes twice a day, every weekday!
Are poor people generally "happy and content with their lives"? Well, sure. But we should not think that, because they've managed to adapt to the circumstances of poverty, that there is anything natural or voluntary about it for the vast majority of them. Many people were able to be happy while suffering under feudalism, slavery, fascism, and apartheid, and there was nothing inevitable about those institutions.
Which is not to say, of course, that every spare penny must be sent to the poor, or the cause of the moment. Buying a latte is a lot different from building a twentieth presidential palace, and investment in "selfish" things -- architecture, the arts, theoretical science research -- can pay off too, in less tangible ways.
Frankly, no one in the above thread has so far suggested that every spare penny be sent to the poor. You're setting up a bit of a straw man with your apparent suggestion that anyone who questions the value of a moon trip is value of "selfish" spending in general (and is a latte-sipping hypocrite for good measure).
Why the hell was this modded "Troll"? It's a very good point.
Presumably, one could gain some benefit from a system such as the on proposed -- without creating this particular problem -- by allowing the cryptographic stub to used merely for confirmation that _a vote had been counted_, but not whom it was cast for.
Such is the great conceit of Americans, to think that the legal system of a foreign country timed a verdict so as to coincide with our mid-term elections.
If there is any conceit here, it is that Americans might believe the rest of the world was as ignorant of international politics as they.
For God's sake, the U.S. is hardly just some other country to Iraq: they're occupying it now, and a major topic of the elections is what the hell to do there! Do you think that, just maybe, the administration of South Vietnam might have had some interest in the 1972 U.S. presidential election? How naive do you have to be to think that Iraqis, of whatever persuasion, have no interest in the outcome of the vote?
You know, when I see stuff like this, I wonder why we of the Rest of the World make fun of Americans for undermining public confidence in science (via intelligent design).
This is pure science fiction: no evolutionary biologist would ever, ever endorse this sort of hyper-speculative racist bullshit. And you won't see dear Dr. Curry publishing any academic papers on his little "theory" either.
The totality of the human species is interbreeding now at historically unprecedented rates; no evidence of any sort of impermeable castes exists, and in any case there is no obvious reason why these hypothetical castes would take the forms proposed, and definitely not in the last thousand years. Natural selection hasn't exactly been dormant for the last millenium, yet except for non-genetic nutritional differences we don't look so different from our ancestors of 1006 AD.
A special shout-out for the fact that the tall fellow is, except for his black hair and weak chin, more our less a nice gracile Nordic Superman, while the squat dwarfish one is obviously Asiatic. She might as well be wearing a friggin' straw hat, for God's sake.
What the hell is wrong with BBC here? Biology and anthropology overcame the ridiculous racist characterizations of the intelligence-testers and craniometricians decades ago. Why do they let this guy spout off like this, and why does it only happen in these fields? If another "scientist" attempted to publicize his disproof of relativity, would they gave him the time of day?
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Speaking somewhat less childishly, the "long tail" notion is already inherent in the conceptions of what constitutes a good Wikipedia article in Wiki Is Not Paper.
Sorry, that link was broken. Here's one that works: Wiki is not paper.
The whole "notability" criteria seems very much like 1980s thinking. So many lessons of the internet being ignored there.
And your whole "leapfrogging onto the latest buzzword bandwagon" is, like, so late-90s.
Speaking somewhat less childishly, the "long tail" notion is already inherent in the conceptions of what constitutes a good Wikipedia article in Wiki Is Not Paper.
But as the other person who replied to you indicated, there is a point where the tail for a topic is so long that contributed information is completely unverifiable. Unverifiable means, in any case, outright false. In many cases, these are vanity articles, hidden advertising, or simply utterly random garbage.
And also make the registration process effort consuming. Only people with accounts should be able to edit, set the minimum age to 21.
Vandalism happens, and would whether or not accounts were required. I don't really understand why people have such a hard time with anonymous edits. Fully open editing, which includes spontaneous anonymous edits, are exactly how Wikipedia got so huge in the first place.
Wikipedia entered mainstream consciousness by adopting a radically open position. Why is that now, that is finally is mainstream, that people consistently want to change the very thing that led to its success?
I've yet to see any evidence that the number of vandals is rising faster than the number of "honest" users. If vandalism was such a problem that it undermined the whole effort, don't you think Wikipedia would simply have never got off the ground in the first place?
Hells, why not link it up to the drivers license numbers.
Let's see, the first premise there is that any adult would-be-Wikipedian has a driver's licence. Even if this were the case, we would need to authenticate every sort of driver's licence from everyplace on Earth, since edits to Wikipedia can come from anywhere. Then there is the constant risk of exposing this data to would-be-identity thieves.
Finally, there is the fact that users with accounts have, as of now, a degree of anonymity in the sense that the only information presented to the world is what they choose to. Their IP addresses are exposed only to admins. This would be lost with your proposed system. I don't see why we should not allow edits from reasonable people who don't want to expose personal details.
To summarize, Wikipedia's success is due to its radical openness. The reports criticizing this position have (in my opinion) not exposed fundamental weaknesses in the system, but reflect simply a reactionary position towards it. To change the model would be to shut off Wikipedia's engine of growth. Don't change what ain't broke.
The result of taking the square root of a number and then squaring it will be the absolute value of the original number.
Really? What if the number is negative?
I think you mean to say "the original number", not "the absolute value of the original number". When given a negative argument, this composition will either return an error (because there is no support for complex numbers) or a negative result equal to the input.
Who is von Gravenreuth? My German isn't so good, but as far as I can tell from his bio page on the German wikipedia he seems to be some sort of anti-open-source provocateur. Am I way off?
I was just about to point this out since I'm from Canada. I wonder if we are double fined on the Zune over here then?
I hadn't heard this earlier, but apparently a judge decided in 2004 that iPods were exempt from the tax (see this Wikipedia link. So presumably the same would extend to the Zune.
Why on earth the iPods are exempt escapes me, but then I've never been able to appreciate why CDRs and DVDs were taxed but hard drives and USB keys are not (though I'm frankly not sure about the latter).
I think you're allowing your resentment of unsubstantiated generalizations make by idiotic atheists to colour your perceptions about public belief in a young Earth.
The fact is, there are lots of people alive today, many of whom are Americans, who beleive that the Earth is 6000 years old. I don't particularly care whether they do this because they are Biblical literalists, Quranic literalists, Talmudic literalists, or just plain nuts. The fact is they exist, and that's the only point I was interested in making.
That said, Catholicism is not a faith generally known by its adherents' rigid applications to doctrine -- no faith that stretches over the entire world and hundreds of languages and cultures could be otherwise -- so I am not particularly convinced by an argument that merely presents the Vatican's view on an issue with an estimate of the worldwide number of Catholics.
As for your statements about atheism being a faith, I'll agree to an extent. I think a belief in the non-intervention of a deity is a the only position with which to approach scientific questions, merely because of Occam's Razor. But I have yet not seen athiests whose atheism was inspired by science argue convincingly to me on the larger metaphysical questions on the existence of higher powers.
However, I am meaning to read more by Daniel Dennett, who apparently has argued something of this kind, and I have been generally impressed so far with his work.
I don't believe a huge number of people today believe Earth is 6000 years old, so I'm naivete.
Er, whether or not grub is an anti-religious troll, there are lots of believe who believe this. This was evident from the public reaction in American media to this court case.
all those Lennon-McCartney compositions would still be copyrighted until 2077, and until then you wouldn't be able to make copies of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" without paying composition royalties to... well... Michael Jackson, I guess.
Are we talking about new copies, or any copies? If I wanted to cover "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", presumably I'd be paying royalties to Jackson, but what if I wanted to put an mp3 of the original Beatles recording online? If I can't, in what sense can it plausibly be described as "public domain"?
As long as a musician's CDs continue to sell, I don't see a problem with that musician getting a piece of the action. (And that's not necessarily a copyright or "intellectual property" issue.)
Just out of curiosity, does this statement by you only extend for the life of the musician or artist? I remember reading in Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture about the original motivating example for the expiry of copyright, sometime in the 18th century, being some guy who had bought the rights to Shakespeare's works, and was licensing them for a pretty penny, almost 200 years after the author's death.
Thanks very much, that answers my question nicely.
If the predictions are right then this is the calm before the storm. If the Arctic melts, which it is, it'll release vast amounts of methane.
Uh, perhaps this is a naive question, but the frozen Arctic is, well, ice. Where is the carbon going to come from to make CH4? Now, there are probably some levels of CO2 trapped in ice bubbles, but speaking naively I don't see how this is a hugely significant contribution to global atmospheric carbon levels?
Not that a thawed Arctic wouldn't suck for other reasons, of course.
Yeah, because those who claim that it is happening never have an agenda...
Well, of course they do. In general the agenda of scientists is to do science, while the agenda of politicans is to do politics. Now, I'm certainly not going to argue that scientists themselves are unswayed by political sentiments, and would never support one side for political and not scientific reasons.
But when I have not made my own quantitative analysis, my skepticism tells me to weigh which side has the least incentive to lie. While I think that it's possible for climatologists to be swayed by "the liberal agenda", I think it's much more likely for other side to be swayed by billions of dollars in lost revenue.
This is not to say I trust my conclusions hold: conclusions based on trusting hundreds of strangers are rarely completely sound. But these conclusions seem much stronger to me than any of the arguments for either side I've heard yet.
Thanks for the link; I'll have a look. After enough of these discussions I will eventually have to educate myself to the degree that my decisions are based less on trust (but as I'm not a climatologist, there will always have to be some trust involved.)
This is why your argument that Antarctica is melting is rarely used these days. Because your "verifiable fact" is not only false, but would disprove most climate models.
The only thing I described as a "verifiable fact" is the claim that "significant amounts of Antarctic ice that have never been thawed in recorded human history are now gone". At the same time I provided a link to a BBC article describing particular patches of ice that are gone.
If I understood you correctly earlier, you haven't refuted or denied this, but argued instead that other ice has been formed. You are generalizing what I said to the stronger claim that the net quantity of ice in Antarctica is declining. This is not what I claimed; you'll note that even in the first comment all I said was that "global warming has already significantly altered ice distribution around the poles."
Don't believe everything you hear in Hollywood movies. That argument has pretty much been refuted. Any change caused by the collapse of the Gulf Stream would be minor and likely offset by the warming that caused it in the first place.
You'll forgive me if I remain unconvinced without being provided with compelling evidence (or any evidence at all). This is not to say I'm confident that the Gulf Stream will stop: at this point I am skeptical of most universal claims on this subject (but especially those of people with an agenda to push, like most of those who claim it's not happening).
You're also not helping your case with the patronizing implication that I get my science knowledge from Hollywood. I don't even know what movie you're referring to, and in any case I certainly haven't seen it.
Thats a small part of the Antarctic ice sheet. The East Antarctic sheet is actually growing.
You have not demonstrated any evidence that this part which is growing is substantially larger than the portions which have thawed. This is the general problem when comparing multiple qualitative reports of two counterbalancing phenonema, whether it be global weather patterns, or insurgents in Iraq.
Of course, the same argument applies to my position, since we can draw no quantitative conclusions at all without the numbers. What we do know from both the qualitative reports we've discussed, is that ice levels in Antarctica and elsewhere are changing rapidly at previously unrecorded rates, whether it be melting or thawing (e.g. the snows of Kilimanjaro).
In any case, because weather is a chaotic system, it's entirely possible that a rise in global mean temperature could cause ice quantities to grow someplace, just as some people are predicting that the net effect of global warming will be the cooling of Europe though the collapse of the Gulf Stream. This is why people are now using the term "climate change" in place of "global warming".
Oh, for God's sake. It's a verifiable fact that significant amounts of Antarctic ice that have never been thawed in recorded human history are now gone. See for example this article:
Though if you seriously think every person complaining about global warming is too stupid to know when it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere, then I don't think it's worth expending much effort talking to you.
IMO, that's the only sane viewing order, especially for someone watching it for the first time. It keeps the suspense, ymmv of course.
It does, however, give away the "Leia and Luke are siblings" fact before the "original" revelation of this in Episode 6. Which is not a particularly terrible thing. I've always thought that the manner in which it was revealed in Return of the Jedi — in a conversation between Luke and Obi Wan's ghost — was a bit anticlimatic. One of Leia or Darth Vader should've been onscreen for that moment.
Why would it have anything to do with global warming?
Because global warming has already significantly altered ice distribution around the poles, leaving thousands of what was once ice to be open water?
One could plausibly speculate that this iceberg's appearance is connected with climate change without being a ridiculous conspiracy theorist (and Bush doesn't even have to come into it).
You are trying to use the tragedy of the commons to try to justify the commons (communal ownership of the forest) as the best economic model. Very ironic.
Thats not really what he/she was doing. Communal ownership in the classical sense would mean that the private corporations doing the clearcutting would share the forest with the Indians, just as the village commons in the old economic parable was owned by everybody.
The "communalism" being proposed is sole communal ownership by the people living on the land (i.e. the Indians), with the exploiting corporations left out. Think of it as private ownership by a collective, if that makes any sense.
How long will it be until we start running into dilemmas concerned with whether data centers or people have priority over available electricity?
Electricity consumption has not risen proportionally with increase in CPU power. I haven't seen anything convincing demonstration that such data-processing plants would take more electricity than would, say, a factory.
At what point do the machines decide that instead of competing with humans for power, humans would make a useful power source?
Uh, never, because it makes no sense? (Unless you're the Wachowski brothers, I suppose.)
The same problem exists in many developed countries. There are just people who either don't want the help or cannot be helped. There are many people in the US who we classify as being below the poverty line that are happy and content with their lives. The problem is that we assign our standards of happiness to them and cannot contemplate how they can be in a state other than misery.
I'm not sure where to begin here. Yes, we humans are exceedingly good at adapting to extreme conditions imposed on is by our environment. Even in the developed world, where our economic freedom supposedly liberates us from the constraints of poverty, we have millions of people who climb into cars for harrowing, life-threatening hour-long commutes twice a day, every weekday!
Are poor people generally "happy and content with their lives"? Well, sure. But we should not think that, because they've managed to adapt to the circumstances of poverty, that there is anything natural or voluntary about it for the vast majority of them. Many people were able to be happy while suffering under feudalism, slavery, fascism, and apartheid, and there was nothing inevitable about those institutions.
Which is not to say, of course, that every spare penny must be sent to the poor, or the cause of the moment. Buying a latte is a lot different from building a twentieth presidential palace, and investment in "selfish" things -- architecture, the arts, theoretical science research -- can pay off too, in less tangible ways.
Frankly, no one in the above thread has so far suggested that every spare penny be sent to the poor. You're setting up a bit of a straw man with your apparent suggestion that anyone who questions the value of a moon trip is value of "selfish" spending in general (and is a latte-sipping hypocrite for good measure).
Why the hell was this modded "Troll"? It's a very good point.
Presumably, one could gain some benefit from a system such as the on proposed -- without creating this particular problem -- by allowing the cryptographic stub to used merely for confirmation that _a vote had been counted_, but not whom it was cast for.
Such is the great conceit of Americans, to think that the legal system of a foreign country timed a verdict so as to coincide with our mid-term elections.
If there is any conceit here, it is that Americans might believe the rest of the world was as ignorant of international politics as they.
For God's sake, the U.S. is hardly just some other country to Iraq: they're occupying it now, and a major topic of the elections is what the hell to do there! Do you think that, just maybe, the administration of South Vietnam might have had some interest in the 1972 U.S. presidential election? How naive do you have to be to think that Iraqis, of whatever persuasion, have no interest in the outcome of the vote?
That sound you just heard was a million spelling and grammar nazi's exploding.
I believe that would be "Nazis". Apostrophe-s is only used for genitives and contractions.
You know, when I see stuff like this, I wonder why we of the Rest of the World make fun of Americans for undermining public confidence in science (via intelligent design).
This is pure science fiction: no evolutionary biologist would ever, ever endorse this sort of hyper-speculative racist bullshit. And you won't see dear Dr. Curry publishing any academic papers on his little "theory" either.
The totality of the human species is interbreeding now at historically unprecedented rates; no evidence of any sort of impermeable castes exists, and in any case there is no obvious reason why these hypothetical castes would take the forms proposed, and definitely not in the last thousand years. Natural selection hasn't exactly been dormant for the last millenium, yet except for non-genetic nutritional differences we don't look so different from our ancestors of 1006 AD.
A special shout-out for the fact that the tall fellow is, except for his black hair and weak chin, more our less a nice gracile Nordic Superman, while the squat dwarfish one is obviously Asiatic. She might as well be wearing a friggin' straw hat, for God's sake.
What the hell is wrong with BBC here? Biology and anthropology overcame the ridiculous racist characterizations of the intelligence-testers and craniometricians decades ago. Why do they let this guy spout off like this, and why does it only happen in these fields? If another "scientist" attempted to publicize his disproof of relativity, would they gave him the time of day?