However, given local and national governments' propensity to legislate the way the political donors dictate, it would seem on reflection that not much would change.
And there are plenty of places... with high food availability and no significant obesity problem. Compare America to Japan.
We get that comparison a lot. I am certainly not suggesting there isn't more to it than this, but maybe the average Nippon metabolism is higher than that of an American's.
There are people who can eat anything they want without gaining weight, and others who struggle on diets their entire lives.
Many survivors of the Irish potato famine emigrated to America with their slower than average metabolisms, lest we forget skinny folks who require greater caloric energy are not typically selected for in nature.
I for one, am buoyed by the likelihood there is less chance of life elsewhere in the Universe.
As an earthling (a clumsy term for our planetary residents at best), any information that suggests we are farther along the great filter than probability would dare suggest is welcome news.
If there is no other life in our perceivable light cone, we just might be the universe's best shot at a colonizing species!
With the exception of a few isolated Waconian compounds, religious influence on science will continue to wane as information and education continue their spread. The goal here should not be to bring every last pocket of resistance in developed countries to the table, but to bring science, personal freedoms, and education to the parts of the World where God-Belief is still ubiquitous.
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The blanket objection to genetically-modified anything is pervasive in even otherwise intelligent citizens, and these blokes are not limited to Europe. I blame the health food industry. They jump on every bandwagon that comes along. Don't get me wrong, I do prefer my produce be as free of pesticides as possible and my meat unladen with antibiotics, but folks unwilling to do their own thinking instinctively believe everything in the store must be good for you. The stores exploit this.
Pseudoscience is only the enemy if it is growing and not shrinking, and it is expected to linger a while in a tribe of recently ill-informed and superstitious primates.
Will we get information from this rock concerning ancient life? There could have been life on mars in ancient times that was wiped out when the atmosphere disappeared.
Sandstone would be a natural repository for the building blocks of life and biosignatures the limited mining abilities of the rover could exploit; a fact not lost on the very smart folks at NASA.
This would be very intriguing for humanity.
Unfortunately, not even nearly as intriguing as a mysteriously missing plane or the daily weather report for most of the humans presently making up "humanity".
Not with planes flying by... it would be hit or miss whether the plane was filming overhead at the critical moment, a few seconds window at best to determine the aggressor.
In the end, I suspect, it will still be the black helicopters.
Snowden is in no danger in Russia for one very good reason: he doesn't know anything specific about Russian surveillance,
I question the collective exhaustiveness of your singularity.
and will never be hired to a position where he would. So he's no threat.
You don't think a young man with Edward's skills has sat on his ass in a, at best, Second World tech nation without access to an interface of some sort, do you?
It was a live call-in show. Yes, they have these things in Russia, and more amazingly, their President has the cajones to go on one and take callers. The Soviet Union fell a long, long time ago you know.
Comrade Putin is old school KGB. He exudes a kind of just look at me in the wrong tone special sort of madness that seems to rise like the cream to the top of a dictatorial kleptocracy.
Snowdens question was the first gambit in a line of attack that leads to parsing essentially the same lie the NSA still tries. They actually collect everything, and stick it in a database, but they arent really supposed to pull it back out without a reason, so since most of the stuff in the database never gets looked at by a human, they want to say they arent *really* collecting it all. They only want to admit to collecting the stuff they admit to going back and looking at later, and say it's not mass surveillance, it's targeted. But that's just not how the technology works.
This is the equivalent of me photographing my buddy's Vegas bachelor party...Say bro, what are we going to be needing the evidence for?*
If you want to be able to come back in 6 months and pick out a single call to listen to, you have to record ALL the calls and keep them stored for some time in order to enable this. And maybe there is one call in there that winds up being of use in a criminal investigation, great. Along with 200 that are useful for blackmail or extortion? Do we think the intelligence agents who have access to this information are angels who could never consider doing anything wrong, or incompetents who could work there every day for years but never find a way to get away with anything?
* = I believe it to be statistically more likely that my government will cease ladling pork projects onto critical budget legislation than the folks in charge will discontinue using an accessible resource.
It is a courage of a different order in the the den of the Bear.
He was an idealistic young programmer who, some would say, naively did what he thought was right in the U.S. He knew or at least suspected there would be a downside, but he is under no illusion what would happen if he attempts to publicly upset Putin's apple cart.
The first thing that comes to mind is we wouldn't have even heard of this video if it didn't go according to script.
Even wealthy people with aspirations to roles as activists only have so much time and energy to throw at this part of themselves, the part that needs to be seen as doing the good work. Anything packaged as "Save The Earth" catches their interest instinctively.
The article postulates the Dems are trying to pacify the environmental flag wavers by not signing until after the next election cycle, an eerie parallel to the Republican need to court the far right during Presidential primaries and then distance themselves from them in the general election.
They are going to allow the pipeline after instituting some measures in the approval that "make it safer". If they were going to kill it, he would do it now.
I, for one, am more concerned about the release of sequestered carbon from the exploitation of the field than I am how they get it here.
Slashdot Mirror
However, given local and national governments' propensity to legislate the way the political donors dictate, it would seem on reflection that not much would change.
And there are plenty of places... with high food availability and no significant obesity problem. Compare America to Japan.
We get that comparison a lot. I am certainly not suggesting there isn't more to it than this, but maybe the average Nippon metabolism is higher than that of an American's.
There are people who can eat anything they want without gaining weight, and others who struggle on diets their entire lives.
Many survivors of the Irish potato famine emigrated to America with their slower than average metabolisms, lest we forget skinny folks who require greater caloric energy are not typically selected for in nature.
Wouldn't that be ironic, with all our frailties and foibles, we're the Universe's best plan for creation of its own observer.
Kind of intimidating, really.
As an earthling (a clumsy term for our planetary residents at best), any information that suggests we are farther along the great filter than probability would dare suggest is welcome news.
If there is no other life in our perceivable light cone, we just might be the universe's best shot at a colonizing species!
In other news, the damage from these abuses of democracy could be mitigated with some sane campaign contribution reform legislation.
Yes, wealth will always have more than its proportionate share of say, but it gets worse if you leave it alone to fix itself.
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The blanket objection to genetically-modified anything is pervasive in even otherwise intelligent citizens, and these blokes are not limited to Europe. I blame the health food industry. They jump on every bandwagon that comes along. Don't get me wrong, I do prefer my produce be as free of pesticides as possible and my meat unladen with antibiotics, but folks unwilling to do their own thinking instinctively believe everything in the store must be good for you. The stores exploit this.
Pseudoscience is only the enemy if it is growing and not shrinking, and it is expected to linger a while in a tribe of recently ill-informed and superstitious primates.
Will we get information from this rock concerning ancient life? There could have been life on mars in ancient times that was wiped out when the atmosphere disappeared.
Sandstone would be a natural repository for the building blocks of life and biosignatures the limited mining abilities of the rover could exploit; a fact not lost on the very smart folks at NASA.
This would be very intriguing for humanity.
Unfortunately, not even nearly as intriguing as a mysteriously missing plane or the daily weather report for most of the humans presently making up "humanity".
They're such a large market, though, so will we see television programmers tipping to the Chinese government's caveat?
The road to first post is plagued with face plants.
Reading for speed compromises comprehension.
But speed reading is still handy enough for perhaps 9 of 10 things you read, and 10% of the time it's worth slowing down and rereading.
It's only after we've lost everything that we are free to do anything.
T.Durden
The NSA intrusion into our everyday lives is now ubiquitous. They know we know they know and it's pretty fucking much business as fucking usual.
In the end, I suspect, it will still be the black helicopters.
Snowden is in no danger in Russia for one very good reason: he doesn't know anything specific about Russian surveillance,
I question the collective exhaustiveness of your singularity.
and will never be hired to a position where he would. So he's no threat.
You don't think a young man with Edward's skills has sat on his ass in a, at best, Second World tech nation without access to an interface of some sort, do you?
It was a live call-in show. Yes, they have these things in Russia, and more amazingly, their President has the cajones to go on one and take callers. The Soviet Union fell a long, long time ago you know.
Comrade Putin is old school KGB. He exudes a kind of just look at me in the wrong tone special sort of madness that seems to rise like the cream to the top of a dictatorial kleptocracy.
Snowdens question was the first gambit in a line of attack that leads to parsing essentially the same lie the NSA still tries. They actually collect everything, and stick it in a database, but they arent really supposed to pull it back out without a reason, so since most of the stuff in the database never gets looked at by a human, they want to say they arent *really* collecting it all. They only want to admit to collecting the stuff they admit to going back and looking at later, and say it's not mass surveillance, it's targeted. But that's just not how the technology works.
This is the equivalent of me photographing my buddy's Vegas bachelor party...Say bro, what are we going to be needing the evidence for?*
If you want to be able to come back in 6 months and pick out a single call to listen to, you have to record ALL the calls and keep them stored for some time in order to enable this. And maybe there is one call in there that winds up being of use in a criminal investigation, great. Along with 200 that are useful for blackmail or extortion? Do we think the intelligence agents who have access to this information are angels who could never consider doing anything wrong, or incompetents who could work there every day for years but never find a way to get away with anything?
* = I believe it to be statistically more likely that my government will cease ladling pork projects onto critical budget legislation than the folks in charge will discontinue using an accessible resource.
To be fair, it was subconsciously narrated with Gandalf's voice.
He was an idealistic young programmer who, some would say, naively did what he thought was right in the U.S. He knew or at least suspected there would be a downside, but he is under no illusion what would happen if he attempts to publicly upset Putin's apple cart.
The first thing that comes to mind is we wouldn't have even heard of this video if it didn't go according to script.
Let's not be so quick to the default presumption that his African heritage won out over the Irish he got from his Mum.
The article postulates the Dems are trying to pacify the environmental flag wavers by not signing until after the next election cycle, an eerie parallel to the Republican need to court the far right during Presidential primaries and then distance themselves from them in the general election.
They are going to allow the pipeline after instituting some measures in the approval that "make it safer". If they were going to kill it, he would do it now.
I, for one, am more concerned about the release of sequestered carbon from the exploitation of the field than I am how they get it here.
As it gets more expensive, there is economic pressure to use less, or to find more efficient ways to use the energy available.
Without market distortions, such as massive subsidies for current forms of energy production, higher costs lead to new energy generation methods.
How do those culpable enough to consummate such a transaction afford it after giving all that money to the Nigerian Prince?
If ever there was a moment to say, "You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they do," this was it.
FTFU.
Fixed that for us.
despite the virtual extinction of several crippling and deadly childhood diseases due to immunization,
well, hell yeah, the astronaut who didn't even get a C- in astrophysics should be divining our space program's anti-asteroid strat3gy.
How do those culpable enough to consummate such a transaction afford it after giving all that money to the Nigerian Prince?
Take off that mask Alpha Charlie, we welcome your traitorous ass back in the fold.
The great Godwin of my age.
That wound will never heal. I will carry it the rest of my life.
the discrepancy is too great between what the rich nation's populace is willing to work for vis a vis what the poor nation's people will accept.
Also, too, and neither should we discount the perceived value to a big company of another work force's local climate for labor laws and litigiousness.