The solution really seems quite simple, and it's definitely not the one they chose:
Don't allow him to board the plane yet, get him to stay for some days until management can confirm his documentation (call the universities, for example), then personally oversee his boarding the plane a couple of days later, after a reasonable, non-intrusive search.
Don't they have to do something like this when someone with special needs of medical attention/equipment needs to travel anyway?
If the guy happens to be famous enough to appear on the media, you might want to pay for the hotel and new airplane ticket just like when the airlines resell your ticket. But that's strictly a PR move.
Most likely, he takes charge of the extra expense on his trip, security takes charge of the extra expense of making a couple of phone calls and personally overseeing him for 20 minutes when he finally boards the plane.
No strip search, no destroyed equipment, little wasted time for other passengers and most likely no lawsuits.
As far as I am informed (which is not very well, I admit), when the antitrust case was brought against Microsoft the DOJ had to consider the multiple possible cases to bring to court.
One of them was Netscape. Another one was BeOS. I'm sure there were many other ones.
They chose to make Netscape their main case because it was recent and it had been the poster child of the Internet; I guess they expected the court would be more familiar with the case and less mystified by the computer industry, and maybe because Netscape's expected success was more of a truism in the middle of the Internet bubble.
BeOS was considered when the case was prepared. I remember a couple of articles that mentioned the DOJ didn't consider the effect of MS OEM contracts blocking alternative OSes strong enough, when compared with the Netscape case. I think one of them was in Salon; make a search on Slashdot, they link anything anti-MS anyway.
I'm not saying they should have brought the case in the middle of the trial. I'm saying that should have been their poster case from the beginning. The logical argument for the Netscape case was weak from the beginning, and it only stands because MS went out of their way to play hardball with the court, as well as with the competitors.
The logical argument for BeOS was much stronger, IMNHO, because there is no "consumer benefit" argument beyond the "monopoly is good". Even if BeOS would have been unsuccessful in any case, other OSes (including Linux) suffer the same problems. If the competitors in the market don't get the fair chance to compete against the monopoly, not because of features in a product, but because of de facto legislation by the monopoly... I just don't see how the Netscape case was considered a superior approach.
For some reason people tend to ignore that the DOJ went to court with the wrong case. They became enamoured with the Netscape case and left out much better arguments for a monopoly case.
I really don't think MS was inherently wrong by tying the browser to the OS. Maybe it was bad engineering (crippling the OS on purpose), but having an integrated browser did benefit me as a consumer.
Konqueror, for example, benefited me more as a Linux user, because it is a better integrated browser. I would also prefer a lightweight, less-buggy, integrated browser in Windows, but I don't see releasing a crappy product as an anti-competitive maneuver.
Forcing the market to accept a crappy product AND REJECT competition is an obvious anti-competitive maneuver. There is no way MS could give that the "benefits the consumer" spin. The BeOS case was a much more obvious evidence of monopoly abuse than anything Netscape-related.
It's not clear it's monopoly abuse to alter your product to compete with other companies. It is monopoly power to force legislation (OEM contracts) and/or artificial technical constraints (false incompatibility error messages with other OSes) upon the market.
Declaring MS a monopoly for the wrong reasons just makes it less likely for it to ever receive the punishment appropiate for the "right reasons".
I tried to apply this index to a couple of respected physicists with public webpages, but my computer keeps giving me this "overflow" message for an answer. What does that mean?
It also taught the developers that using computer cheats to increase the difficulty level is much easier than coding any AI, and reviewers will still praise you for substantially improving the AI of your computer game.
Although I was about to point to "Black & White" and some others, I guess they're about as representative of the state of AI in games as Infocom-adventures are of the importance of substance over flashy graphics.
At what point will people realize that lifestyles are not globalized by any means yet, and that part of the difference is the level of willingness to share that kind of information.
I'm not surprised this would work in Japan. Japan is "consumerism 'done right'", where 'done right' means there are no compromises. We're talking about a culture that has underwear vending machines, corporations live in a comfortable mercantilist marriage with the government, and the idea of opposing a keiretsu makes as much sense as voluntary amputation.
This doesn't mean it can work in the US, or many other places.
The fact that it may not work here doesn't mean it won't work there, either. Not every culture puts that much value in "privacy", not even the US's, and you require a very significant demographic actively opposing this, or your privacy advocates will end up being tomorrows "sovereign citizen"'s movement.
We asked three high-school seniors to take these Corvettes and drive as fast as they could in the nearest highway, without regards for safety or concerns about law enforcement agencies.
The death toll is, so far, 23 victims, and 36 wounded.
We would like you to ask Ed, Bud and Chuck about their experiences, but unfortunately two of them died in the accidents; Ed made it to a Mexican brothel, but we haven't heard about him ever since.
Now, multiply that by the thousands of teenagers that get driving licenses before they get to college. This is not a problem that can be solved in short order. It's going to require education and discipline.
Above all, it's going to require that we increase the insurance fees for teenagers by a couple thousands per cent.
We ask you to support our cause by buying our compulsory insurance for houses with teenagers within three blocks of the residence area, and by keeping your irresponsible children away from the vehicles. This experiment of ours has clearly shown what happens in everyday America.
Excuse me, you have a question? Of course we believe these represented typical conditions of teenage driving. What do you mean by that? Security!
I really liked B5, but I have to admit in the end I watched it out of loyalty for the good parts of the series, rather than because of its final quality.
I still think it was one of the best SF shows ever, but I can't help but think they went downwards since the first season, even though the story was supposed to actually start much later.
It seems to me that B5 was at its best before it became an epic story. During the first seasons (the prelude?) the characters were complex and subtle, the politics made sense, the storylines were interesting... you had a great sense of foreboding.
But when the epic started, the characters became complicated and yes, pulpish. The acting quality decreased. All sense of subtlety was lost, which also killed almost all the sense of mistery in the storylines. It seems their ambitious story made them lose control of the narrative.
Definitely true on the crowd evaluation, but I think you're making a mistake by claiming that good design does not involve compromises.
Good design involves lots of compromises, you just have to set your priorities straight and know that your compromises are different from everyone else.
For lots of content a good presentation is necessary to express the information. For some content it would be inevitably a distraction (I want my Project Gutenberg book as a clean ASCII text file, thank you very much). For other content (games, entertaining and most advertising) the distraction is almost the whole point.
On the other hand, the perfect presentation is of no use if the site is practically inaccesible. Your visitors, and perhaps also your server, have practical technological limitations that should be taking into account in the design. Just like in software, there are some decisions that you cannot modify later without redesigning the page.
By all means, this means hiring an experienced graphics designer who knows how to present this information, and how to affect your target audience.
But this also means someone has to play the minimalist and try to keep things as close to the desired requirements for your visitors as possible.
Flash is not, in spite most Slashdot comments, a no-no. There are a number of successful sites that use Flash because it is the perfect medium for what they want. But it doesn't make sense if your target is unwilling to download the latest plugin of your perfect medium. They will go away. This also applies to gigantic and unnecessary Java applets that require Sun's plugin, or lots of streaming media.
Not only bandwidth is involved. Just common sense. If I go to some site like heavy.com I know I will need an assortment of plugins and will not be annoyed because, more or less, it's essential for what the site actually offers: I'm going there for animations or games.
But if I need Flash just for the welcome banner in your corporate site, that page will never finish loading, because I didn't go there for Flash content.
Actually taking arguments to its ultimate logical conclusion is one of the basic ways to demonstrate a logical argument is fallacious.
It has been quite accepted ever since Socrates popularized the method; and it is one of the basic tools for mathematical proof.
It seems to me that the courts would have an appreciation for such methods, unless they have a very good reason to consider the absurd case is introducing new premises, or ignoring some of the basis premises (quite common when the "extreme" is a simplified exaggeration).
If the premises are intact, I think the reductio ad absurdum method has a pretty good chance of standing before anyone who went through the years of college required for a Law degree.
I'm sure they're not just saying "you might as well ban the entire Internet". That's the conclusion, but they're presenting legal briefs, full of lengthy words explaining the whole situation.
Maybe I misread something in the article, but I get the impression the lawyers are not trying to blame anything on anyone.
This doesn't sound like an argument, it's a counterargument, they're trying to disprove the argument of the media companies by reduction to the absurd (excuse the mistranslated latin).
They're saying that if you're going to blame them, you might as well follow the logical fallacy to the extreme and blame the world that allows this to happen, including the media companies that are suing since they own ISPs. The plaintiffs don't get to choose up to which point their blame-the-tools logic applies.
Since that doesn't make sense, you have to face the facts that they are not responsible for the actions of individual users.
They're not perpetuating the insanity. They're demonstrating why it is insane.
The original story was the origin of the obsession on whether Deckard was a replicant or not.
That's because the original story was written by Philip K. Dick. In case you don't know who PKD was, he was a remarkable science-fiction author who was obsessed with those kinds of questions himself.
Am I human? Is what I think is human human? What is human? Does human feel? Does non-human feel? How do I know I'm human? Am I human just because others tell me I'm human?.
I don't think those questions are trivial from a philosophical point of view. What defines you as human is definitely not on the level of a superhero deathmatch.
I think the reasons why Scott was silent on the subject until the 90s are more or less the following: - He expected people to stop asking him about that damn movie at some point; he would refer them to the original story and just shut up. At some point, he realized Blade Runner fans, like most people, don't really like to read. - PKD became insanely popular in the 90s among certain circles (Gnostic revival, I think). That probably motivated him to answer to certain versions of the question. News propagate. - I'm not sure if it fits the timeline, but new video/Laserdisc/DVD releases would make the studios press him a little to talk about the damn movie again.
Really, if you have any doubts about where the obsession with Deckard's humanity was invented by the fans read some of PKD's stories. You'll find it's one of his typical patterns, along with "what is reality?" and "where does this god concept come from", and it's much much more obvious than in the movie in part because that story was not one of his best.
As a matter of fact, just read some PKD for the sake of it. You might find some interesting works of philosophical significance that meet your standards.
The news media outlets are controlled by Bush and the far... RIGHT? Why don't they tell me when they change the conspiracy theories around here?
The US media has been for a long time biased to the left. Of course, only in the controlled, sanitized, topperware-packaged way that you can see every morning on the Benneton ads you pass by. This has little to do with a right-wing conspiracy (or left-wing conspiracy, for that matter) and a lot to do with the actual nature of their left-wing bias: a matter of aesthetics that shifts, but does not shape, business.
The main reasons they're giving G.W.Bush a break are two: - A national emergency (the terrorist attacks, not the war) means support the national leader. - The President's lack of depth is not big news. Clinton was a regular scandal factory.
Even so, criticism of Bush and the Republican Party abounds. It's just not as entertaining as Clinton, and there are better, juicier things to put in the front-page.
There are many interpretations of the word "Libertarian", with the greatest variance found among the interpretations of those who use it to label themselves.
Some libertarians believe in a place for government. Some do not.
Some libertarians fear a corporation acting as government (a monopoly regulating the market, as Microsoft has done with their OEM contracts, for example). Others are willing to give corporations the same trust they deny the government.
I think there have been sufficient attempts at breaking the Law in question (perpetual motion machines, for example) to make anyone feel said trust is warranted.
Also, everything we know about those particles is based pretty much in that law. If we discard the law, we may not even know if those particles exist... we have to come up with a whole new physics science to explain those measurements in the first place.
By "success" I do not mean wealth. I mean fair issue. That is all that natural selection selects for. Of course, it's been a very short time that humans have lived in large communities. Give us time, and somewhat restricted resources, and we might all see goals farther off.
Natural selection does not select for fair issue, it selects for success. That may mean wealth, or not, because the definition of success depends on the historical context, but it requires more than fair issue.
Natural selection selects for "alpha males" and "alpha females". In this thing we call civilization, this means acquiring power, recently wealth becoming the preferred form.
The best chance for an individual to get lots of descendants is to become an "alpha" and get first choice over the mating options. That's why we spend so much time building skyscrappers instead of chasing girls: we know that chasing girls is easier if we have cars, big houses, and we're architects (or lawyers or doctors).
This is not due to the recent large communities humans have formed. It's the pattern of behavior of all social mammals, so we had some millions of years to refine it.
Intelligence develop to help this behavior, not to direct it; it provides means, not motivation. A clear example of this resides in the fact that "alpha" humans are suddenly trying to have very few children to maximize their chances of "success", even that's not the best balance of resources/descendants for the survival of their line.
Therefore, although your position is rationally correct, there will not be a critical mass of mankind that considers it worth it, for very irrational reasons, and it just will not happen.
Just like there is no critical mass of population encouraging space exploration, or even a decent budget for research on new ways to obtain resources. Our motivations have evolved to be myopic.
True. The problem is that in order to get the resources for a project of this size, the human race has to be able to allocate a massive amount of resources. Yet whenever we have slightly more resources than necessary for survival, "ambitions, convenience and laziness" become efficient behavior.
Think about it this way:
Right now, I could put a few thousand dollars in a trust and ensure that my descendants, 300 years from now, are multibillionaries. Practically no risk, almost no effort.
Yet no one does that.
People are more than willing to kill themselves to get a few hundred thousand dollars for their old age, and/or for their immediate descendants. Giving resources to your grandchildren provides immediate satisfaction: you know your line is receiving them.
Giving money to your descendants centuries after your death, even when you have a good chance of getting immense benefits for your line, feels too distant to get any satisfaction. YOU are not THERE, you don't see it happen, so you could really care less if your grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-children own the world.
Human intelligence is almost incapable of deriving satisfaction from truly long-term plans. It evolved for day-to-day survival, and to transmit experience to the immediate offspring. It was not designed, and it develops little to no empathy for some abstract offspring which it has no hope of actually meeting.
You can also see that in the difficulties we face with environmental issues. We never really cared about what we left for our descendants to fix until the problem was only one-two generations away; only when "descendants" became "grandsons and granddaughters, sons and daughters, and maybe even us".
Slashdot Mirror
The solution really seems quite simple, and it's definitely not the one they chose:
Don't allow him to board the plane yet, get him to stay for some days until management can confirm his documentation (call the universities, for example), then personally oversee his boarding the plane a couple of days later, after a reasonable, non-intrusive search.
Don't they have to do something like this when someone with special needs of medical attention/equipment needs to travel anyway?
If the guy happens to be famous enough to appear on the media, you might want to pay for the hotel and new airplane ticket just like when the airlines resell your ticket. But that's strictly a PR move.
Most likely, he takes charge of the extra expense on his trip, security takes charge of the extra expense of making a couple of phone calls and personally overseeing him for 20 minutes when he finally boards the plane.
No strip search, no destroyed equipment, little wasted time for other passengers and most likely no lawsuits.
As far as I am informed (which is not very well, I admit), when the antitrust case was brought against Microsoft the DOJ had to consider the multiple possible cases to bring to court.
One of them was Netscape. Another one was BeOS. I'm sure there were many other ones.
They chose to make Netscape their main case because it was recent and it had been the poster child of the Internet; I guess they expected the court would be more familiar with the case and less mystified by the computer industry, and maybe because Netscape's expected success was more of a truism in the middle of the Internet bubble.
BeOS was considered when the case was prepared. I remember a couple of articles that mentioned the DOJ didn't consider the effect of MS OEM contracts blocking alternative OSes strong enough, when compared with the Netscape case. I think one of them was in Salon; make a search on Slashdot, they link anything anti-MS anyway.
I'm not saying they should have brought the case in the middle of the trial. I'm saying that should have been their poster case from the beginning. The logical argument for the Netscape case was weak from the beginning, and it only stands because MS went out of their way to play hardball with the court, as well as with the competitors.
The logical argument for BeOS was much stronger, IMNHO, because there is no "consumer benefit" argument beyond the "monopoly is good". Even if BeOS would have been unsuccessful in any case, other OSes (including Linux) suffer the same problems. If the competitors in the market don't get the fair chance to compete against the monopoly, not because of features in a product, but because of de facto legislation by the monopoly... I just don't see how the Netscape case was considered a superior approach.
For some reason people tend to ignore that the DOJ went to court with the wrong case. They became enamoured with the Netscape case and left out much better arguments for a monopoly case.
I really don't think MS was inherently wrong by tying the browser to the OS. Maybe it was bad engineering (crippling the OS on purpose), but having an integrated browser did benefit me as a consumer.
Konqueror, for example, benefited me more as a Linux user, because it is a better integrated browser. I would also prefer a lightweight, less-buggy, integrated browser in Windows, but I don't see releasing a crappy product as an anti-competitive maneuver.
Forcing the market to accept a crappy product AND REJECT competition is an obvious anti-competitive maneuver. There is no way MS could give that the "benefits the consumer" spin. The BeOS case was a much more obvious evidence of monopoly abuse than anything Netscape-related.
It's not clear it's monopoly abuse to alter your product to compete with other companies. It is monopoly power to force legislation (OEM contracts) and/or artificial technical constraints (false incompatibility error messages with other OSes) upon the market.
Declaring MS a monopoly for the wrong reasons just makes it less likely for it to ever receive the punishment appropiate for the "right reasons".
I tried to apply this index to a couple of respected physicists with public webpages, but my computer keeps giving me this "overflow" message for an answer. What does that mean?
Well, depending on which files it deletes and/or overwrites, it could be arguably correct.
It also taught the developers that using computer cheats to increase the difficulty level is much easier than coding any AI, and reviewers will still praise you for substantially improving the AI of your computer game.
Although I was about to point to "Black & White" and some others, I guess they're about as representative of the state of AI in games as Infocom-adventures are of the importance of substance over flashy graphics.
Either that or we'll have another, real, dot.com recession.
Just think about it: constant collection of personal information, a record of surfing habits... pr0n sales will plummet.
The Internet was designed to survive nuclear warfare, but nothing can be designed to survive the lack of pr0n.
At what point will people realize that lifestyles are not globalized by any means yet, and that part of the difference is the level of willingness to share that kind of information.
I'm not surprised this would work in Japan. Japan is "consumerism 'done right'", where 'done right' means there are no compromises. We're talking about a culture that has underwear vending machines, corporations live in a comfortable mercantilist marriage with the government, and the idea of opposing a keiretsu makes as much sense as voluntary amputation.
This doesn't mean it can work in the US, or many other places.
The fact that it may not work here doesn't mean it won't work there, either. Not every culture puts that much value in "privacy", not even the US's, and you require a very significant demographic actively opposing this, or your privacy advocates will end up being tomorrows "sovereign citizen"'s movement.
We asked three high-school seniors to take these Corvettes and drive as fast as they could in the nearest highway, without regards for safety or concerns about law enforcement agencies.
The death toll is, so far, 23 victims, and 36 wounded.
We would like you to ask Ed, Bud and Chuck about their experiences, but unfortunately two of them died in the accidents; Ed made it to a Mexican brothel, but we haven't heard about him ever since.
Now, multiply that by the thousands of teenagers that get driving licenses before they get to college. This is not a problem that can be solved in short order. It's going to require education and discipline.
Above all, it's going to require that we increase the insurance fees for teenagers by a couple thousands per cent.
We ask you to support our cause by buying our compulsory insurance for houses with teenagers within three blocks of the residence area, and by keeping your irresponsible children away from the vehicles. This experiment of ours has clearly shown what happens in everyday America.
Excuse me, you have a question? Of course we believe these represented typical conditions of teenage driving. What do you mean by that? Security!
I really liked B5, but I have to admit in the end I watched it out of loyalty for the good parts of the series, rather than because of its final quality.
I still think it was one of the best SF shows ever, but I can't help but think they went downwards since the first season, even though the story was supposed to actually start much later.
It seems to me that B5 was at its best before it became an epic story. During the first seasons (the prelude?) the characters were complex and subtle, the politics made sense, the storylines were interesting... you had a great sense of foreboding.
But when the epic started, the characters became complicated and yes, pulpish. The acting quality decreased. All sense of subtlety was lost, which also killed almost all the sense of mistery in the storylines. It seems their ambitious story made them lose control of the narrative.
Definitely true on the crowd evaluation, but I think you're making a mistake by claiming that good design does not involve compromises.
Good design involves lots of compromises, you just have to set your priorities straight and know that your compromises are different from everyone else.
For lots of content a good presentation is necessary to express the information. For some content it would be inevitably a distraction (I want my Project Gutenberg book as a clean ASCII text file, thank you very much). For other content (games, entertaining and most advertising) the distraction is almost the whole point.
On the other hand, the perfect presentation is of no use if the site is practically inaccesible. Your visitors, and perhaps also your server, have practical technological limitations that should be taking into account in the design. Just like in software, there are some decisions that you cannot modify later without redesigning the page.
By all means, this means hiring an experienced graphics designer who knows how to present this information, and how to affect your target audience.
But this also means someone has to play the minimalist and try to keep things as close to the desired requirements for your visitors as possible.
Flash is not, in spite most Slashdot comments, a no-no. There are a number of successful sites that use Flash because it is the perfect medium for what they want. But it doesn't make sense if your target is unwilling to download the latest plugin of your perfect medium. They will go away. This also applies to gigantic and unnecessary Java applets that require Sun's plugin, or lots of streaming media.
Not only bandwidth is involved. Just common sense. If I go to some site like heavy.com I know I will need an assortment of plugins and will not be annoyed because, more or less, it's essential for what the site actually offers: I'm going there for animations or games.
But if I need Flash just for the welcome banner in your corporate site, that page will never finish loading, because I didn't go there for Flash content.
Actually taking arguments to its ultimate logical conclusion is one of the basic ways to demonstrate a logical argument is fallacious.
It has been quite accepted ever since Socrates popularized the method; and it is one of the basic tools for mathematical proof.
It seems to me that the courts would have an appreciation for such methods, unless they have a very good reason to consider the absurd case is introducing new premises, or ignoring some of the basis premises (quite common when the "extreme" is a simplified exaggeration).
If the premises are intact, I think the reductio ad absurdum method has a pretty good chance of standing before anyone who went through the years of college required for a Law degree.
I'm sure they're not just saying "you might as well ban the entire Internet". That's the conclusion, but they're presenting legal briefs, full of lengthy words explaining the whole situation.
Maybe I misread something in the article, but I get the impression the lawyers are not trying to blame anything on anyone.
This doesn't sound like an argument, it's a counterargument, they're trying to disprove the argument of the media companies by reduction to the absurd (excuse the mistranslated latin).
They're saying that if you're going to blame them, you might as well follow the logical fallacy to the extreme and blame the world that allows this to happen, including the media companies that are suing since they own ISPs. The plaintiffs don't get to choose up to which point their blame-the-tools logic applies.
Since that doesn't make sense, you have to face the facts that they are not responsible for the actions of individual users.
They're not perpetuating the insanity. They're demonstrating why it is insane.
FBI Agent #1: "What do you mean there is no illegal activity here? Isn't this a hacker convention?!"
FBI Agent #2: "Hey there, young man! Put down that equipment! Unauthorized cloning violates the DMCA!"
Money? You post on slashdot and you want to make money?
Everyone here knows that you can only save the world by playing Quake and giving free broadband to everyone in Angola.
Why would you want to make money?
Are you with the MPAA/RIAA or something?
The original story was the origin of the obsession on whether Deckard was a replicant or not.
That's because the original story was written by Philip K. Dick. In case you don't know who PKD was, he was a remarkable science-fiction author who was obsessed with those kinds of questions himself.
Am I human? Is what I think is human human? What is human? Does human feel? Does non-human feel? How do I know I'm human? Am I human just because others tell me I'm human?.
I don't think those questions are trivial from a philosophical point of view. What defines you as human is definitely not on the level of a superhero deathmatch.
I think the reasons why Scott was silent on the subject until the 90s are more or less the following:
- He expected people to stop asking him about that damn movie at some point; he would refer them to the original story and just shut up. At some point, he realized Blade Runner fans, like most people, don't really like to read.
- PKD became insanely popular in the 90s among certain circles (Gnostic revival, I think). That probably motivated him to answer to certain versions of the question. News propagate.
- I'm not sure if it fits the timeline, but new video/Laserdisc/DVD releases would make the studios press him a little to talk about the damn movie again.
Really, if you have any doubts about where the obsession with Deckard's humanity was invented by the fans read some of PKD's stories. You'll find it's one of his typical patterns, along with "what is reality?" and "where does this god concept come from", and it's much much more obvious than in the movie in part because that story was not one of his best.
As a matter of fact, just read some PKD for the sake of it. You might find some interesting works of philosophical significance that meet your standards.
The pro-marijuana commercials do not fit into the pasteurized liberalism the media represents. Really, read my complete comment.
The news media outlets are controlled by Bush and the far... RIGHT? Why don't they tell me when they change the conspiracy theories around here?
The US media has been for a long time biased to the left. Of course, only in the controlled, sanitized, topperware-packaged way that you can see every morning on the Benneton ads you pass by. This has little to do with a right-wing conspiracy (or left-wing conspiracy, for that matter) and a lot to do with the actual nature of their left-wing bias: a matter of aesthetics that shifts, but does not shape, business.
The main reasons they're giving G.W.Bush a break are two:
- A national emergency (the terrorist attacks, not the war) means support the national leader.
- The President's lack of depth is not big news. Clinton was a regular scandal factory.
Even so, criticism of Bush and the Republican Party abounds. It's just not as entertaining as Clinton, and there are better, juicier things to put in the front-page.
There are many interpretations of the word "Libertarian", with the greatest variance found among the interpretations of those who use it to label themselves.
Some libertarians believe in a place for government. Some do not.
Some libertarians fear a corporation acting as government (a monopoly regulating the market, as Microsoft has done with their OEM contracts, for example). Others are willing to give corporations the same trust they deny the government.
Yup. But there's a big difference between releasing a big amount of energy, and releasing a big amount of energy in a small space in very short time.
Explosives don't come out of nowhere, but they are quite more dangerous than the work that was put into their creation.
I think there have been sufficient attempts at breaking the Law in question (perpetual motion machines, for example) to make anyone feel said trust is warranted.
Also, everything we know about those particles is based pretty much in that law. If we discard the law, we may not even know if those particles exist... we have to come up with a whole new physics science to explain those measurements in the first place.
By "success" I do not mean wealth. I mean fair issue. That is all that natural selection selects for. Of course, it's been a very short time that humans have lived in large communities. Give us time, and somewhat restricted resources, and we might all see goals farther off.
Natural selection does not select for fair issue, it selects for success. That may mean wealth, or not, because the definition of success depends on the historical context, but it requires more than fair issue.
Natural selection selects for "alpha males" and "alpha females". In this thing we call civilization, this means acquiring power, recently wealth becoming the preferred form.
The best chance for an individual to get lots of descendants is to become an "alpha" and get first choice over the mating options. That's why we spend so much time building skyscrappers instead of chasing girls: we know that chasing girls is easier if we have cars, big houses, and we're architects (or lawyers or doctors).
This is not due to the recent large communities humans have formed. It's the pattern of behavior of all social mammals, so we had some millions of years to refine it.
Intelligence develop to help this behavior, not to direct it; it provides means, not motivation. A clear example of this resides in the fact that "alpha" humans are suddenly trying to have very few children to maximize their chances of "success", even that's not the best balance of resources/descendants for the survival of their line.
Therefore, although your position is rationally correct, there will not be a critical mass of mankind that considers it worth it, for very irrational reasons, and it just will not happen.
Just like there is no critical mass of population encouraging space exploration, or even a decent budget for research on new ways to obtain resources. Our motivations have evolved to be myopic.
I know this is stating the obvious, but:
A large wooden gift from your rivals?
And you accept it at face value and bring it into your fortress?
And it just happens to have a secret compartment with an electronic spy hidden in it?
Hello?
Weren't diplomats supposed to have gone to Ivy Schools where they teach all that literature in dead languages?
True. The problem is that in order to get the resources for a project of this size, the human race has to be able to allocate a massive amount of resources. Yet whenever we have slightly more resources than necessary for survival, "ambitions, convenience and laziness" become efficient behavior.
Think about it this way:
Right now, I could put a few thousand dollars in a trust and ensure that my descendants, 300 years from now, are multibillionaries. Practically no risk, almost no effort.
Yet no one does that.
People are more than willing to kill themselves to get a few hundred thousand dollars for their old age, and/or for their immediate descendants. Giving resources to your grandchildren provides immediate satisfaction: you know your line is receiving them.
Giving money to your descendants centuries after your death, even when you have a good chance of getting immense benefits for your line, feels too distant to get any satisfaction. YOU are not THERE, you don't see it happen, so you could really care less if your grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-children own the world.
Human intelligence is almost incapable of deriving satisfaction from truly long-term plans. It evolved for day-to-day survival, and to transmit experience to the immediate offspring. It was not designed, and it develops little to no empathy for some abstract offspring which it has no hope of actually meeting.
You can also see that in the difficulties we face with environmental issues. We never really cared about what we left for our descendants to fix until the problem was only one-two generations away; only when "descendants" became "grandsons and granddaughters, sons and daughters, and maybe even us".