Without pioneering folks like Jack Kilby, you think we have electronic computers ?
Without hardware providers such as Intel which transformed CPU into affordable commodity items, you think we get $399 iPhone/iPad ?
I guess without the pioneering efforts of Intel, we would have iWidgets running on slightly slower, slightly warmer AMD CPUs, what the frigging hell is your point? What does that have to do with anything I said?
And by the way, what kind of "innovation" FB has brought to the world ?
They can absolutely fail, that they have not yet proves nothing. Nokia is barely hanging on, yet 10 years ago we would easily have believed that label on them.
Which is why Facebook is owned by Google, which in turn is owned by Microsoft, which in turn is owned by IBM, which.... oh wait.. nevermind. You can only buy if someone is willing to sell to you, no matter the size of your purse - if that is the entirety of your business road map you're bound to be left behind in the dust when someone comes along, innovative and unwilling to sell. Like Google+, Bing or OS2.
Right, and there is no way users would download and install a client in order to continue to pirate stuff? Technologies like torrents, DC++, IRC, ez-news etc. will utterly fail for that one reason.
You mean "Dansk Folkeparti"? The Republican Party would condemn it as wildly racist.
No, I don't mean DF. What I mean is, that if you project the entire political spectrum in Denmark (or any country inside the EU, I suspect) over onto a line, and plot in all the parties you get a line with pretty evenly spaced dots on it. If you then take the republican party and the democratic party and plot them on the same line, they would both land somewhere to the right of the middle.
"VP of sales: our sales have been dropping the last decade, it's because we make "PCs" and nobody wants them - they want something called a "tablet"
[panic and stuff - general mayhem]
"Analyst: hey wait, what if we count tablets as PCs? - That way our market is on the climb and we have lots of new potential costumers!" "President: yes... yes let's do that... then have cake" "Engineer:..."
Well the naming part is very much true, but that is because the people naming parties are idiots. The parties don't drift, the scale changes beneath them.
We have a party named "left" that is very much on the right. Originally they were the left party, and their opposition was named "right" - but then came those pesky communists and their labor unions and all of a sudden, left was on the right and the commies were on the left:) At least the original "right" party had the good sense to change name to "conservative". Left was just left with left, on the right.
tablets should probably be counted in a mobile category along with smartphones.
That would not make much sense. The tablets are picking up because the casual user had no other choice before - it was PC or nothing. Tablets and other light weight (not weight in the physical sense, but computing power) devices should be counted in a category of their own - "casual computing". Smart phones are devices in their own category entirely, a bloated phone or a crippled computer - take your pick, but they serve an altogether different purpose, which is the basis of the categorization.
This story however is complete horseshit, redefine the term PC and then declare PC sales rising. Uh, sure whatever, as long as you pass whatever you're smoking on - always left though, 'cause the right way is wrong.
No I don't. Around here (Denmark), a liberal is just a slightly less extreme version of a conservative, and both would be placed securely on the right side of the scale. I don't follow US politics very closely, but to me it seems the democrats and the republicans are pretty much the same thing - corporate apologists.
Around here, where I vote, a conservative and a liberal is pretty much the same thing. I think you're missing a part of the political spectrum if those are the only two words you have to fling around. And I'm no more closer to an explanation of the elusive communist nazi after reading your reply.
/. Title: Brain-Computer Interface Makes Learning As Simple As Waving Article Title: New tasks become as simple as waving a hand with brain-computer interfaces.
Now, University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that when humans use this technology – called a brain-computer interface – the brain behaves much like it does when completing simple motor skills such as kicking a ball, typing or waving a hand. Learning to control a robotic arm or a prosthetic limb could become second nature for people who are paralyzed.
It's not about learning, it's about an interface that makes controlling a robotic arm as easy as if it were your actual arm. Big difference.
As I said, lots of other races came, settled and integrated very well in the country, a lot of them of far different skin colour than us natives, with little to no problems at all. So it isn't that we didn't try, it is just that for integration to work, both parties must be willing to work for it, like in any relationship really (from two people, onwards to societies).
I find it hard to believe that a segment of a population over a 50 year period has the ability to act in a coordinated manner, as you describe. I think you might be a little bit biased by your experiences. That is of course the point of experience, but I'm concerned that it won't translate very well. In any case, I wasn't talking about immigration when I mentioned brown people, I was poking at the right wing slackjaws who seem to pull out the fear of anyone different as an argument to why we need to isolate ourselves more. I find that kind of attitude to be inhumane, and that is why it feels to me like we are failing as humans. What truly separates us from them is a line on a piece of paper, and sometimes the color of our skin - the rest is learned. That is why I believe it to be possible to co-exist, regardless of race and culture. And yes that is hugely idealistic, but I see no problem with that at all, and I certainly see no problem working towards that goal. My initial take on it was not to open our borders and let anybody in, but to expand the EU to include people where they live now. Subtle difference I fear might have gotten a little lost in all my other ramblings:)
Borders drawn on our globe are quite arbitrary, which was what I was trying to point out originally. In Europe borders have been redrawn whenever a ruler decided they needed more space/taxable income/subjects - and had the power to enact the change in borders. To the people living in Europe at the present time, the borders may as well have been set by the roll of a dice, which to me makes the notion of "nationality" laughable. I'm no more danish than the people living in southern Sweden, the difference is just that the Swedish army kicked our ass hundreds of years ago and took back the land, thereby changing the border and making the area Swedish. The same situation holds for pretty much any nation on the European continent.
Left wing bias in schools? Yes, we had a story about that here not so long ago, where members of a right wing party's youth division were being mocked in school, and looked down upon even by their teachers. I havn't seen any of that myself, but it's been a while since I last set foot on school grounds, so what do I know?
I fully agree with you that the EU as it looks now is a cumbersome beast of less than ideal value. The red tape I am willing to accept is a fair bit less than the amount present now. But I think you'd be kidding yourself if you think the red tape would go away just by disbanding the EU, it would just become invisible to the common man. As it is now, the red tape is clearly visible, and we have a say in how it works.
The free trade and free movement of workers is fine, but it only applies inside the EU. Expanding the EU to include more nations would afford those advantages to more people, I see that as a good thing. Clearly EUs neighbor states see that as an advantage too (Turkey for instance). And since there are rules that need to be followed in order to join the EU, we can, by sheer willingness to include more in our little club, enact our will on them - without drawing weapons.
Guns are a last resort, they are not made to help, they are there to force your will upon others. I don't see that ever going away (interesting question, what would happen if two EU members ended up in a state of war with each other? Would the rest intervene? In what way? Would they pick a side? What if support is split for the warring parties within the EU?)
Interesting, although that could happen with or without the EU. I believe
You may be over-estimating the will of developers who actually intend to build something secure out of the box.
Not only that, but he and the article are hugely overestimating the amount of control the developer has over a project that is done on contract for an agency. "Do it this way", "make it work that way", "no, remove that annoying button"... The story forgets to mention that, indeed the hackers utilized bugs in software to gain entry but the tech is already here to secure the targets, someone with decision power just decided not to, they are now trying to paw off the responsibility to the poor guys on the floor, for yet another match of ping pong.
Of course it would be super awesome fantastic if we could hold developers responsible for the bugs they introduce, similar how we hold mechanics responsible. The problem is though, that more often than not, the developer's boss is a fucking clueless moron, while the mechanics boss is another mechanic. The mechanic gets the time he needs to solve a problem on a given car, in order to cover his and his boss' ass. Developers get how ever much time is alotted to them by marketing, and that time does not include testing.
We have that in Denmark too, and a clause that leaves it up to the police officer to judge if you were driving in a hazardous manner. The problem with those kinds of laws is that they can only be applied after someone has already put someone else in danger. And many times the laws are applied to punish someone for actually harming someone else, and to a victim of someone else's negligence, those laws are quite useless - you've still been harmed.
Mandating technology that can detect distracted, tired or drunk drivers would stop many of those situations before they have a chance to inflict harm on others. That should be the ultimate goal, pride and fealings of justice very much comes second.
I've never been the the US to drink their legendary warm piss! I live in Denmark - we know how to make beer, well some of us, I personally have no clue. Drink it I do know how to do. I guess I could see the argument that would lead to a war based on spilled beer, so I retract that comment.
Never been to Belgium, myself and a couple of co-workers took a road trip south but we accidently went straight to Amsterdam (when it was still legal for "foreigners" to smoke in their coffee shops), after that we didn't have the wits to drive anywhere else:-)
So there is some truth to the "Dangerous foreign people invading", much as I hate to say it. Just that the dangers may not be known for 50+ years. Some groups are happy to integrate and will do so. Others will not. Maybe if we managed to eliminate religion from the equation, even they would be able to, but religion has been with us for thousands of years, I can't think of a way of eliminating it (hell, even the communists couldn't stamp it out, and they were brutally athiest).
As for the rest you said, I agree with you completely. However short of banning television, I can't think of a way of stopping it. That invention has done more to damage critical thinking of an individual than anything else I can think of.
An angle I had not fully considered, so thank you for providing a new point of view. I think the problems you descibe have very little to do with the fact that people immigrated to your country. They we invited in and left to their own devices, that is a failure of integration not of "brown people" or any other kind of people. My objection is the projection that anyone not like us must be breeding like rabbits and are to be shunned/shot/denied entrance - in order to avoid what you describe, we shun the world around us. That is us failing as human beings.
Religion is, as far as I can tell, the cause of pretty much all of the world's troubles. There might be other causes layered on top of it, but at the root we have a tendency to define "our culture" from our shared religion, and cultural differences underlie most of the conflicts on the globe. We can't get rid of religion, but we can push it to the side where it does not have an influence on lives other than those who opt-in. I think education plays a vital role in this.
By expanding the reach of the EU, we first of all set a stage where differences can be discussed without drawing weapons, we also set a stage where differences are not capital offenses. There are other fora for discussions, but the EU is the only one not spawned from a militaristic standpoint (UN and NATO would be of that category), a property I very much applaud. For the benefits of unification, I am very willing to let go of my national pride, and accept the massive amounts of red tape it takes to govern a united Europe, because as you say, I fear where we are headed if we don't start working together, not just in Europe, but as a planet. I know where we have been, and by all accounts that wasn't pretty - so to me the solution is not in going back to something we have tried before, but moving forward with a new construction.
The only thing that could counter it is education, but what government would want to do that? An educated populace is one that they can't easily control nor pull the wool over.
That is an overly bleak view. I don't believe governments in western Europe has come to that point, not even close. Other governments might be, and I see no solution to this yet. What I do see is that the guns we employ right now aren't really helping either, nor the mentality of isolation.
The actual problem is that people aren't for or against EU, but are for or against completely unrelated issues, that via spin gets projected onto the debate of whether or not EU is a good idea. And that is what pisses me off.
Now, that is true, but that is very much due to a lack of critical thinking on part of the population. However, it is in the interests of politicians across the spectrum (and the rich) that they stay that way. Let me know when you work out a way of countering that, for I've not found one yet (that didn't involve a bloody revolution).
The solution is two-fold: First of all, a voter must prove basic knowledge of the issues he/she is voting on, a voter's license if you will. Second, remove individuals from politics and let ideas, solutions and plans stand on their own. If voters knew what they were doing and w
Wow, what a bitter tirade! In one fell swoop you've shown exactly the problem with the EU and its supporters. You don't want democracy, you don't want people to choose, you want to decide what is good for them, and if they resist, or don't like it, then they are stupid/lazy/far-right-nuts. Democracy means giving people the right to choose, and includes letting them choose the "wrong" option.
I guess I'm pretty sick and tired of listening to extremist agendas that has nothing to do with the actual issues at hand. I'm fed up with talk of the dangerous brown people invading, I'm sick of listening to idiots mouth off about things they deep down have no fucking clue about. I'm sick of people forming their opinions from two lines of text on a billboard, or a 5 second spot on whatever news channel reenforces your viewpoint. Generally, I'm sick of uninformed neanderthals setting the agenda. So yeah, I do agree that democracy is the only real way of government, I just wish my fellow voters would use more than 2 seconds making up their minds.
Why on earth would bombs start flying again? Even if the EU was dissolved tomorrow, I don't see why suddenly war would break out. I mean, people have been living together for a while now in peace, intermarriages, etc... Shengen and free trade did more to build peace than any other part of the EU.
Why indeed? I have no fucking clue why, generally it is to support a handful of egomaniacs' personal view of the world, sometimes it happens to kick start the economy. Hell, I bet wars have been started over a girl or a spilled beer. I'm not making any predictions of what will happen if we abandon the EU. I guess we could look at our history as a continent and draw some conclusions. Who knows?
Again, politicians showing complete disregard for democracy. "The masses aren't voting for my ideas, they must be stupid/brainwashed/fascists, therefore I must not ask them". That will do nothing but breed resentment, regardless of whether what the politicians are doing is better for them in the long term.
The actual problem is that people aren't for or against EU, but are for or against completely unrelated issues, that via spin gets projected onto the debate of whether or not EU is a good idea. And that is what pisses me off.
There is a difference in the approach to the unification "under one rule" - namely the lack of bombs dropping. I guess it basically comes down to whether you think sovereignty is worth holding on to at all costs, or not. I honestly don't see the benefit of isolation compared to the benefit of accepting, that in order to work together better, we need to not isolate ourselves.
You're right though, there is a disturbing lack of rational discussion about this. It is always either do or die.
The reason you don't get much say in it is because most of your voters are too fucking dumb/lazy to actually produce an informed opinion on the subject. All they see is oh no, we lost some of our sovereignty, we're less British now. You just know that whenever the subject of EU comes up, right wing fanatics are going to jump on it and declare it a war on eggs & bacon, pubs and football, because national pride buys votes. So moderate politicians keep everything they can out of the referendums, because they know a bunch of hacks are going to screw it all up, for no other reason than personal gain - hey look at me, I oppose this, vote for me so I can continue my fat cat lifestyle.
There is no rational discussion of "will this be good for us and the people around us", it's all just "what do I get?". If you started asking questions like "how can we make this work, so that in 50 years the bombs don't start flying again", then you might find your politicians willing to listen. They're doing pretty much the same thing in Denmark, arguing tooth and nail that this or that issue does not warrant asking the people, for the very reasons I stated above. They're not going to come out and say it, but you don't need many brain cells to figure it out. Especially not if you've been around for the last couple of referendums on EU, and seen the sheer idiocy of propaganda shoveled onto voters.
It is laughable to talk of sovereignty with respect to Europe. The fact that the EU member countries surrendered a part of their sovereignty is what has secured the relatively peaceful period in the continent's history (and the cause for awarding the EU with the goddamn Nobel Peace Prize). The borders in the continent have had a habit of changing every 50 years, some even less. Most of the borders in Eastern Europe are just shy of 20 years old (redrawn from before the Soviet Union decided it needed a buffer zone). Some date back to the second World War, and yet they were only 30 years old back then.
The positive consequences of joining the European Union far outweigh the perceived (and often incorrect) negative effects, such as loss of sovereignty. So yeah, take the goddamn sovereignty if that's what it takes to stop shelling each other every 50 years.
What you're referring to is the "dead man's switch" that disables the engine/equipment when the driver is not in his seat/pressing a button or some other trivial option to verify that a driver is present. This works really well for placing blame once the accident has happened, but really doesn't do much in the grand scheme of things (I know, I worked in a warehouse before my IT career - there are fairly trivial ways of disabling the dead man's switch. Last summer a tourist in Copenhagen got run over and killed by a garbage vehicle, because the switch had been tampered with official statement from Copenhagen city sorry the article is in danish).
The dead man's switch does not work because it is too simple, and all you need to do to disable it is apply pressure to the detector, similar to how you would disable the annoying sound of the seat belt alarm. What is really needed is a mechanism that is ingrained so deeply into the vehicle that you need to take the damn thing apart in order to disable it, thereby putting the alteration out of reach of most people.
Besides, we don't really want to detect if a driver is present or not, we want to detect if the driver is paying attention. I'm pointing out that the tech is already there to some degree, all it takes now is some fine tuning and political will to make the roads we all use safer. I don't really give a shit about the paranoid fucks who come out of the woodwork every time this kind of discussion comes up, I just want to be able to get into my car and drive - and be safe knowing that my fellow drivers around me are paying attention, like I am.
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Without pioneering folks like Jack Kilby, you think we have electronic computers ?
Without hardware providers such as Intel which transformed CPU into affordable commodity items, you think we get $399 iPhone/iPad ?
I guess without the pioneering efforts of Intel, we would have iWidgets running on slightly slower, slightly warmer AMD CPUs, what the frigging hell is your point? What does that have to do with anything I said?
And by the way, what kind of "innovation" FB has brought to the world ?
...
You sir, are trolling. For shame!
They can absolutely fail, that they have not yet proves nothing. Nokia is barely hanging on, yet 10 years ago we would easily have believed that label on them.
Which is why Facebook is owned by Google, which in turn is owned by Microsoft, which in turn is owned by IBM, which.... oh wait.. nevermind. You can only buy if someone is willing to sell to you, no matter the size of your purse - if that is the entirety of your business road map you're bound to be left behind in the dust when someone comes along, innovative and unwilling to sell. Like Google+, Bing or OS2.
tcp, ip, http, https, ftp, smtp.... you get the picture?
Right, and there is no way users would download and install a client in order to continue to pirate stuff? Technologies like torrents, DC++, IRC, ez-news etc. will utterly fail for that one reason.
You mean "Dansk Folkeparti"? The Republican Party would condemn it as wildly racist.
No, I don't mean DF. What I mean is, that if you project the entire political spectrum in Denmark (or any country inside the EU, I suspect) over onto a line, and plot in all the parties you get a line with pretty evenly spaced dots on it. If you then take the republican party and the democratic party and plot them on the same line, they would both land somewhere to the right of the middle.
Uhm.. I can just imagine that board meeting..
"VP of sales: our sales have been dropping the last decade, it's because we make "PCs" and nobody wants them - they want something called a "tablet"
[panic and stuff - general mayhem]
"Analyst: hey wait, what if we count tablets as PCs? - That way our market is on the climb and we have lots of new potential costumers!" ..."
"President: yes... yes let's do that... then have cake"
"Engineer:
Well the naming part is very much true, but that is because the people naming parties are idiots. The parties don't drift, the scale changes beneath them.
We have a party named "left" that is very much on the right. Originally they were the left party, and their opposition was named "right" - but then came those pesky communists and their labor unions and all of a sudden, left was on the right and the commies were on the left :) At least the original "right" party had the good sense to change name to "conservative". Left was just left with left, on the right.
tablets should probably be counted in a mobile category along with smartphones.
That would not make much sense. The tablets are picking up because the casual user had no other choice before - it was PC or nothing. Tablets and other light weight (not weight in the physical sense, but computing power) devices should be counted in a category of their own - "casual computing". Smart phones are devices in their own category entirely, a bloated phone or a crippled computer - take your pick, but they serve an altogether different purpose, which is the basis of the categorization.
This story however is complete horseshit, redefine the term PC and then declare PC sales rising. Uh, sure whatever, as long as you pass whatever you're smoking on - always left though, 'cause the right way is wrong.
Why? You won't ship any more units just because the term gets redefined.
You must live in the USA
No I don't. Around here (Denmark), a liberal is just a slightly less extreme version of a conservative, and both would be placed securely on the right side of the scale. I don't follow US politics very closely, but to me it seems the democrats and the republicans are pretty much the same thing - corporate apologists.
Around here, where I vote, a conservative and a liberal is pretty much the same thing. I think you're missing a part of the political spectrum if those are the only two words you have to fling around. And I'm no more closer to an explanation of the elusive communist nazi after reading your reply.
The title is very much misleading, as per usual.
Article Title: New tasks become as simple as waving a hand with brain-computer interfaces.
Now, University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that when humans use this technology – called a brain-computer interface – the brain behaves much like it does when completing simple motor skills such as kicking a ball, typing or waving a hand. Learning to control a robotic arm or a prosthetic limb could become second nature for people who are paralyzed.
It's not about learning, it's about an interface that makes controlling a robotic arm as easy as if it were your actual arm. Big difference.
What the fuck is a communist nazi?
As I said, lots of other races came, settled and integrated very well in the country, a lot of them of far different skin colour than us natives, with little to no problems at all. So it isn't that we didn't try, it is just that for integration to work, both parties must be willing to work for it, like in any relationship really (from two people, onwards to societies).
I find it hard to believe that a segment of a population over a 50 year period has the ability to act in a coordinated manner, as you describe. I think you might be a little bit biased by your experiences. That is of course the point of experience, but I'm concerned that it won't translate very well. In any case, I wasn't talking about immigration when I mentioned brown people, I was poking at the right wing slackjaws who seem to pull out the fear of anyone different as an argument to why we need to isolate ourselves more. :)
I find that kind of attitude to be inhumane, and that is why it feels to me like we are failing as humans. What truly separates us from them is a line on a piece of paper, and sometimes the color of our skin - the rest is learned. That is why I believe it to be possible to co-exist, regardless of race and culture. And yes that is hugely idealistic, but I see no problem with that at all, and I certainly see no problem working towards that goal. My initial take on it was not to open our borders and let anybody in, but to expand the EU to include people where they live now. Subtle difference I fear might have gotten a little lost in all my other ramblings
Borders drawn on our globe are quite arbitrary, which was what I was trying to point out originally. In Europe borders have been redrawn whenever a ruler decided they needed more space/taxable income/subjects - and had the power to enact the change in borders. To the people living in Europe at the present time, the borders may as well have been set by the roll of a dice, which to me makes the notion of "nationality" laughable. I'm no more danish than the people living in southern Sweden, the difference is just that the Swedish army kicked our ass hundreds of years ago and took back the land, thereby changing the border and making the area Swedish. The same situation holds for pretty much any nation on the European continent.
Left wing bias in schools? Yes, we had a story about that here not so long ago, where members of a right wing party's youth division were being mocked in school, and looked down upon even by their teachers. I havn't seen any of that myself, but it's been a while since I last set foot on school grounds, so what do I know?
I fully agree with you that the EU as it looks now is a cumbersome beast of less than ideal value. The red tape I am willing to accept is a fair bit less than the amount present now. But I think you'd be kidding yourself if you think the red tape would go away just by disbanding the EU, it would just become invisible to the common man. As it is now, the red tape is clearly visible, and we have a say in how it works.
The free trade and free movement of workers is fine, but it only applies inside the EU. Expanding the EU to include more nations would afford those advantages to more people, I see that as a good thing. Clearly EUs neighbor states see that as an advantage too (Turkey for instance). And since there are rules that need to be followed in order to join the EU, we can, by sheer willingness to include more in our little club, enact our will on them - without drawing weapons.
Guns are a last resort, they are not made to help, they are there to force your will upon others. I don't see that ever going away (interesting question, what would happen if two EU members ended up in a state of war with each other? Would the rest intervene? In what way? Would they pick a side? What if support is split for the warring parties within the EU?)
Interesting, although that could happen with or without the EU. I believe
You may be over-estimating the will of developers who actually intend to build something secure out of the box.
Not only that, but he and the article are hugely overestimating the amount of control the developer has over a project that is done on contract for an agency. "Do it this way", "make it work that way", "no, remove that annoying button"...
The story forgets to mention that, indeed the hackers utilized bugs in software to gain entry but the tech is already here to secure the targets, someone with decision power just decided not to, they are now trying to paw off the responsibility to the poor guys on the floor, for yet another match of ping pong.
Of course it would be super awesome fantastic if we could hold developers responsible for the bugs they introduce, similar how we hold mechanics responsible. The problem is though, that more often than not, the developer's boss is a fucking clueless moron, while the mechanics boss is another mechanic. The mechanic gets the time he needs to solve a problem on a given car, in order to cover his and his boss' ass. Developers get how ever much time is alotted to them by marketing, and that time does not include testing.
We have that in Denmark too, and a clause that leaves it up to the police officer to judge if you were driving in a hazardous manner. The problem with those kinds of laws is that they can only be applied after someone has already put someone else in danger. And many times the laws are applied to punish someone for actually harming someone else, and to a victim of someone else's negligence, those laws are quite useless - you've still been harmed.
Mandating technology that can detect distracted, tired or drunk drivers would stop many of those situations before they have a chance to inflict harm on others. That should be the ultimate goal, pride and fealings of justice very much comes second.
I've never been the the US to drink their legendary warm piss! I live in Denmark - we know how to make beer, well some of us, I personally have no clue. Drink it I do know how to do. I guess I could see the argument that would lead to a war based on spilled beer, so I retract that comment.
Never been to Belgium, myself and a couple of co-workers took a road trip south but we accidently went straight to Amsterdam (when it was still legal for "foreigners" to smoke in their coffee shops), after that we didn't have the wits to drive anywhere else :-)
So there is some truth to the "Dangerous foreign people invading", much as I hate to say it. Just that the dangers may not be known for 50+ years. Some groups are happy to integrate and will do so. Others will not. Maybe if we managed to eliminate religion from the equation, even they would be able to, but religion has been with us for thousands of years, I can't think of a way of eliminating it (hell, even the communists couldn't stamp it out, and they were brutally athiest).
As for the rest you said, I agree with you completely. However short of banning television, I can't think of a way of stopping it. That invention has done more to damage critical thinking of an individual than anything else I can think of.
An angle I had not fully considered, so thank you for providing a new point of view. I think the problems you descibe have very little to do with the fact that people immigrated to your country. They we invited in and left to their own devices, that is a failure of integration not of "brown people" or any other kind of people. My objection is the projection that anyone not like us must be breeding like rabbits and are to be shunned/shot/denied entrance - in order to avoid what you describe, we shun the world around us. That is us failing as human beings.
Religion is, as far as I can tell, the cause of pretty much all of the world's troubles. There might be other causes layered on top of it, but at the root we have a tendency to define "our culture" from our shared religion, and cultural differences underlie most of the conflicts on the globe. We can't get rid of religion, but we can push it to the side where it does not have an influence on lives other than those who opt-in. I think education plays a vital role in this.
By expanding the reach of the EU, we first of all set a stage where differences can be discussed without drawing weapons, we also set a stage where differences are not capital offenses. There are other fora for discussions, but the EU is the only one not spawned from a militaristic standpoint (UN and NATO would be of that category), a property I very much applaud. For the benefits of unification, I am very willing to let go of my national pride, and accept the massive amounts of red tape it takes to govern a united Europe, because as you say, I fear where we are headed if we don't start working together, not just in Europe, but as a planet. I know where we have been, and by all accounts that wasn't pretty - so to me the solution is not in going back to something we have tried before, but moving forward with a new construction.
The only thing that could counter it is education, but what government would want to do that? An educated populace is one that they can't easily control nor pull the wool over.
That is an overly bleak view. I don't believe governments in western Europe has come to that point, not even close. Other governments might be, and I see no solution to this yet. What I do see is that the guns we employ right now aren't really helping either, nor the mentality of isolation.
The actual problem is that people aren't for or against EU, but are for or against completely unrelated issues, that via spin gets projected onto the debate of whether or not EU is a good idea. And that is what pisses me off.
Now, that is true, but that is very much due to a lack of critical thinking on part of the population. However, it is in the interests of politicians across the spectrum (and the rich) that they stay that way. Let me know when you work out a way of countering that, for I've not found one yet (that didn't involve a bloody revolution).
The solution is two-fold: First of all, a voter must prove basic knowledge of the issues he/she is voting on, a voter's license if you will. Second, remove individuals from politics and let ideas, solutions and plans stand on their own. If voters knew what they were doing and w
Wow, what a bitter tirade! In one fell swoop you've shown exactly the problem with the EU and its supporters. You don't want democracy, you don't want people to choose, you want to decide what is good for them, and if they resist, or don't like it, then they are stupid/lazy/far-right-nuts. Democracy means giving people the right to choose, and includes letting them choose the "wrong" option.
I guess I'm pretty sick and tired of listening to extremist agendas that has nothing to do with the actual issues at hand. I'm fed up with talk of the dangerous brown people invading, I'm sick of listening to idiots mouth off about things they deep down have no fucking clue about. I'm sick of people forming their opinions from two lines of text on a billboard, or a 5 second spot on whatever news channel reenforces your viewpoint. Generally, I'm sick of uninformed neanderthals setting the agenda. So yeah, I do agree that democracy is the only real way of government, I just wish my fellow voters would use more than 2 seconds making up their minds.
Why on earth would bombs start flying again? Even if the EU was dissolved tomorrow, I don't see why suddenly war would break out. I mean, people have been living together for a while now in peace, intermarriages, etc... Shengen and free trade did more to build peace than any other part of the EU.
Why indeed? I have no fucking clue why, generally it is to support a handful of egomaniacs' personal view of the world, sometimes it happens to kick start the economy. Hell, I bet wars have been started over a girl or a spilled beer. I'm not making any predictions of what will happen if we abandon the EU. I guess we could look at our history as a continent and draw some conclusions. Who knows?
Again, politicians showing complete disregard for democracy. "The masses aren't voting for my ideas, they must be stupid/brainwashed/fascists, therefore I must not ask them". That will do nothing but breed resentment, regardless of whether what the politicians are doing is better for them in the long term.
The actual problem is that people aren't for or against EU, but are for or against completely unrelated issues, that via spin gets projected onto the debate of whether or not EU is a good idea. And that is what pisses me off.
There is a difference in the approach to the unification "under one rule" - namely the lack of bombs dropping. I guess it basically comes down to whether you think sovereignty is worth holding on to at all costs, or not. I honestly don't see the benefit of isolation compared to the benefit of accepting, that in order to work together better, we need to not isolate ourselves.
You're right though, there is a disturbing lack of rational discussion about this. It is always either do or die.
The reason you don't get much say in it is because most of your voters are too fucking dumb/lazy to actually produce an informed opinion on the subject. All they see is oh no, we lost some of our sovereignty, we're less British now. You just know that whenever the subject of EU comes up, right wing fanatics are going to jump on it and declare it a war on eggs & bacon, pubs and football, because national pride buys votes. So moderate politicians keep everything they can out of the referendums, because they know a bunch of hacks are going to screw it all up, for no other reason than personal gain - hey look at me, I oppose this, vote for me so I can continue my fat cat lifestyle.
There is no rational discussion of "will this be good for us and the people around us", it's all just "what do I get?". If you started asking questions like "how can we make this work, so that in 50 years the bombs don't start flying again", then you might find your politicians willing to listen. They're doing pretty much the same thing in Denmark, arguing tooth and nail that this or that issue does not warrant asking the people, for the very reasons I stated above. They're not going to come out and say it, but you don't need many brain cells to figure it out. Especially not if you've been around for the last couple of referendums on EU, and seen the sheer idiocy of propaganda shoveled onto voters.
It is laughable to talk of sovereignty with respect to Europe. The fact that the EU member countries surrendered a part of their sovereignty is what has secured the relatively peaceful period in the continent's history (and the cause for awarding the EU with the goddamn Nobel Peace Prize). The borders in the continent have had a habit of changing every 50 years, some even less. Most of the borders in Eastern Europe are just shy of 20 years old (redrawn from before the Soviet Union decided it needed a buffer zone). Some date back to the second World War, and yet they were only 30 years old back then.
The positive consequences of joining the European Union far outweigh the perceived (and often incorrect) negative effects, such as loss of sovereignty. So yeah, take the goddamn sovereignty if that's what it takes to stop shelling each other every 50 years.
So your flight got ruined by some screaming kid in the seat behind you?
A hero with a gun would have solved the problem!
What you're referring to is the "dead man's switch" that disables the engine/equipment when the driver is not in his seat/pressing a button or some other trivial option to verify that a driver is present. This works really well for placing blame once the accident has happened, but really doesn't do much in the grand scheme of things (I know, I worked in a warehouse before my IT career - there are fairly trivial ways of disabling the dead man's switch. Last summer a tourist in Copenhagen got run over and killed by a garbage vehicle, because the switch had been tampered with official statement from Copenhagen city sorry the article is in danish).
The dead man's switch does not work because it is too simple, and all you need to do to disable it is apply pressure to the detector, similar to how you would disable the annoying sound of the seat belt alarm. What is really needed is a mechanism that is ingrained so deeply into the vehicle that you need to take the damn thing apart in order to disable it, thereby putting the alteration out of reach of most people.
Besides, we don't really want to detect if a driver is present or not, we want to detect if the driver is paying attention. I'm pointing out that the tech is already there to some degree, all it takes now is some fine tuning and political will to make the roads we all use safer. I don't really give a shit about the paranoid fucks who come out of the woodwork every time this kind of discussion comes up, I just want to be able to get into my car and drive - and be safe knowing that my fellow drivers around me are paying attention, like I am.