The only stuff likely worth sending to Earth would be gold, platinum, and other largely worthless materials
Your disdain for precious metals is as touching as it is naive. People have valued them for centuries and millenia — and not without reason. Gold is resistant to corrosion, suppressive of bacteria, beautiful, and easy to work. Pure gold is soft, but addition of trivial amounts of alloys solves that problem (when it is a problem) easily. Ask any dentist — golden crowns are still the best, even if one might prefer something else for front teeth.
Platinum is, probably, even more useful. I'd expect, that if we find a use for the serious amounts of what you call "really valuable stuff" (iron, nickel, copper) in space, we'll also need all the platinum and gold we can find there.
Processing them on the moon might make more sense, but if you have the ability to do that, why not just mine the moon?
The Moon may simply not have the particular stuff an asteroid has. Also, getting the stuff (whatever it is) from the Moon to Earth would require climbing out of Moon's gravity well, which, while much lesser than Earth's, is still significant.
Asteroids, on the other hand, are almost gravity-free. So mining the asteroids — in place — might make sense. Mining the Moon might too, but only for something, that's already there.
Weapons Systems That Kill According To Algorithms Are Coming
I don't get this... Aren't human soldiers killing based on something other than algorithms? Or is it that the implementations are coded in vague human languages, that makes them feel somehow warm and fuzzy? Well, Pentagon's Ada may be considered similar, but only in jest...
I'd say, whether such systems are bad or good is still up to the algorithms, not the hardware (nor pinkware), that executes them.
As we've seen, all a government needs to do is make a statement about support/regulation and the price drops in half.
The halving of the price followed the first time a government mentioned BitCoin... As such mentions become more frequent, the effects will gradually stop being as dramatic.
Personally, I still prefer gold — because it is useful by itself: as a non-corroding metal with high conductivity and easy to work. And most people find gold beautiful, whereas it takes a peculiar mind to appreciate prime numbers... Bitcoin is useless without the Internet, but gold has been valuable for thousands of years...
laissez faire ideas have been tried, tested, and discarded on the ash heap of history
Except they have not... But if such is your opening statement in a discussion that you purportedly enjoy, then I doubt strongly, you are engaging in anything fruitful. Certainly not with me.
You will sign this absentee voter ballot and leave it with me. If I find out it is discarded later because you voted in person on the day, I'll break your kneecaps.
Yes, this is a real danger is the reason, many locales discourage absentee votes — and require a good justification for their use.
My statement wasn't that verified voting was foolproof, but that it doesn't allow for any "new" subversion, and fixes many current ones.
Absentee votes are (or ought to be) a small portion of the overall vote — whereas under your proposal all votes will be known to all making retaliation of all sorts immediately possible. Does not even have to be about kneecaps: Fire Department may choose not to rush to a house, whose owner voted to keep their salaries capped, for example.
Anonymity is a good thing in general... Maybe, some way of publishing the votes anonymously can be found — the way students' grades are published... With some sort of digest of their name (instead of the name itself), for example — so everybody can verify their vote without knowing that of the others.
They didn't stop growing wheat because it was cheap to bring it in from Africa - the patricians (nobles) who owned the land switched from wheat to grapes because there was more profit in wine than in flour. Then, to keep the plebs from rioting, they voted in the senate to have the goverment subsidize shipments of wheat from Africa.
Which boils down to exactly (and *quite*) what I wrote — that bringing wheat from Egypt (and Sicily) was cheaper, than growing it locally.
Who exactly did the growing is irrelevant although your attempt to insert the class warfare aspect is noted — and discarded with prejudice.
If you really think that anyone who has not made it by age 30 has only themselves to blame you are an idiot.
Hans Christian Andersen — a most respectable European indeed — exposed this type of argument as rather fraudulent... And he did it in a manner, that was entertaining, educational and well-articulated (all traits, you ought to pursue developing in earnest). The fable was about emperor's new clothes, which only a fool ("idiot" being too rude a word for the times) would not see.
Everyone else, including the middle classes, ate better off with socialism.
Although the top 1% lives better — by the very definition of "top" — in any society, a street beggar in New York is better off than a North Korean general...
Having tried both — first in the Socialist USSR and now in the Capitalist USA — I can tell you first-hand, that you are wrong. But don't take my word for it — perfectly scientific evidence of you being wrong exists today. While many factors affect the country's success and happiness, several accurate and well-controlled experiments have been inadvertently staged in the last century, where the nearly identical societies have taken different routes. I invite you to compare:
Socialist East Germany with its Capitalist Western sister.
The poor being targeted by these laws generally don't travel much.
They don't vote much either. The point is, they are not allowed to travel despite the country being ruled by the Savvior for the last 6 years. The poor need an ID — and a number of other document — to receive government assistance, why can't they bring that to vote? Of course, they can...
Sorry, here you go: Snopes
Snopes refutes the claims made in one particular chain-mail, that was making rounds after the 2012 elections. Nothing in the Snopes article talks about the scale of voting fraud — very intelligent of them.
So not only do you refuse to accept actual journalism on the matter (why bother asking for evidence, them?)
I'm not asking you for evidence. I'm pointing out, it does not exist.
but you pop off that completely nutty bit at the end there that is rather apples to oranges.
What's "nutty"? If the number of prosecutions under a particular law were accepted as a valid benchmark of how prevalent the outlawed activity is — and that's the only evidence offered by all of those "actual journalists" you cited off of the first page of Google search — then we must also conclude, there is no anal sex taking place in any of the locales, where sodomy remains illegal.
Which means simply, that the method we are told to use is bogus and the evidence I was talking about simply is not there.
I do, but compared to the largely minimal hazard of vote fraud we have a far greater threat of gerrymandering and disenfranchisement being pursued aggressively by the GOP.
There you go again, repeating that "minimal hazard" canard... And making another unsubstantiated claim: that gerrymandering is pursued aggressively by the GOP.
Now, I'm asking you for the last time: what "masses" are those, who, while legally eligible to vote, have no identification deemed sufficient under any of the recently passed "voter-ID laws" — and no way to obtain it? Unlike the voting fraud, the numbers of such people really can be reliably estimated — and the estimation comes out as (what was that word?) miniscule, if not a simple and round zero.
Thus, anyone objecting to the voter-ID laws (who is not also suing against an ID being required to travel and to receive government assistance) is either soft in the head, or hopes to benefit (either personally or as part of a group) from the activity, which the laws aim to reduce: voting fraud.
If the history's first FDA-like authority approved of giraffe even for the Chosen, why should we be surprised, the unenlightened pagans ate it?
What is interesting in the article is that the Romans possessed the technology — and the economy — to bring such exotics foods into Italy from thousands of miles away in a manner, that, while possibly expensive, was still affordable for the citizenry.
But we've known of such achievements for ages — Romans, for example, have largely stopped growing wheat in Italy long before Julius Caesar. Because it was cheaper to bring stuff over from Africa. (This made Egypt the place of strategic importance in the later civil wars.)
There are two equalities, which people frequently confuse:
Equality of Opportunity (free-market Capitalism): everybody has, more or less, the same opportunities and their results depend on their talents and what they do with them. Whoever can not afford something they really want by the age of 30, have only themselves — and, perhaps, their parents — to blame.
Equality of Results (Socialism): whatever you do in life, your results are, more or less, the same as everybody else's: the more successful are taxed to compensate the less successful and the success itself is usually explained not by the person's talent, industry, or frugality, but "luck". The unsuccessful are usually called "unfortunate" — so as not to hurt their feelings by even a hint, that it may be their own fault, even partially.
We have several successful socialist countries
Actually, you do not. For just one example, a country, that can not defend itself, can not be considered "successful" and all of the Western European countries have relied on the US' protection for decades. Had it not been for us, "Warsaw Pact" would've reached the Atlantic by 1960-ies... Then you would've known, what real Socialism (a.k.a. "Communism lite") is...
continually come top of lists of good places to live
Unlike many of my fellow Americans, I travel quite a bit. I'm yet to see a European country, however exciting they all are to visit, that's better for living than the US (for all its faults). I may like the food better in some places — possibly because I myself grew up in Ukraine — but it is much more expensive than here. In fact, everything, that is not government-subsidized, is much more expensive (clothing, children's nannies, gasoline, you name it). Your apartments (a.k.a. "flats") are smaller and less comfortable (very few people own their own house) and showers tend to be outright cramped. Your cars are, likewise, smaller — as other traveled Americans put it (much to your annoyance), Europeans just make everything so damn small.
with real freedom and quality of life.
I hate to spoil your comfort, but real freedom begins with money. No, money is not sufficient for freedom, but it is required...
But even if we take your idea of "freedom" — do you suppose, Julian Assange would've been prosecuted for rape, had he not angered the world's powers? Do I need to remind you, which nice and free Socialist country is doing the prosecution?
In short, I posit, that it is not the Socialism, that makes those countries nice and comfortable, but what little Capitalism still remains in them. Oh, and some natural-resources wealth — like Norway's oil — that helps too.
They want you to have ID so that the masses who for some reason don't have ID can't vote.
What "masses" are these? Not only is ID de-facto required to travel around this country by air, you can't ride Amtrak without an ID either. Bus operators (I was told by one of them) are also supposed to check IDs, though nobody currently enforces the requirement.
So, if Obama-managed TSA has some good reason (whatever it is) to keep those "masses" from traveling, is not it logical, that same reason applies to keeping them from voting?
Plus, of course, the very good other reason — already cited — of preventing voting fraud, which you dismiss as "miniscule" problem without citing any evidence. We are told repeatedly by the ruling classes not to worry our pretty little heads about it, but the only evidence ever offered is the low rate of fraud-prosecutions... That's a rather bizarre logic — I wonder, if GLAAD would've accepted the argument claiming there being no gays in America based on absence of applications of anti-sodomy laws.
The conflict of interest is staggering — few politicians want to talk much about voting fraud, because that would endanger the validity of their own mandates. Why would you be willing to accept such claims without skepticism, is beyond me.
Don't worry, as it stands politicians have been doing it for years anyway.
Indeed. And thieves have been stealing for even longer time. But only fairly recently has it become possible to steal vast sums of money without physically going to were it is stored — without even traveling into the country, where the storage is located.
Once we create some sort of e-vote, the politicians — the incumbents, especially — will be in a position to rig not just a few precincts here and there, but an entire polity (city, state, nation). "If it's not close, they can't cheat," — was the saying about elections. With an electronic vote, much as I'd like the convenience, cheating will become easier and will no longer need a close vote...
Come, come, climate scientists doing non-climate research? In Antarctica? Do you realize, how much such a trip costs — a mere professor can not afford it, unless spending tax-payers' monies and that means, they are there in professional capacity.
But that's speculation, of course... Yet, here, for example, is what MSNBC had to say about them (emphasis mine):
The right wing had a field day, pointing and laughing at the global warming believers, who just to be clear, are only a group of scientists risking their lives for no monetary gain and little glory in order to help save the planet
But, of course, MSNBC aren't a reliable news-source... How about from the web-site of the expedition's main scientist — Chris Turney? He is a "Professor of Climate Change" (wow! a real scientist, not some nonsense-subject like "Womyn Studies"). And the "Latest News" from his very own front-page (last updated Oct 28, 2013) says (emphasis mine):
Inspired by the events surrounding 1912: The Year The World Discovered Antarctica, I am currently organising and leading the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013-2014, repeating century old measurements to discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.
What everyone needs to remember is that deniers are idiots
This comment — and its "insightful" moderation — are really telling...
Why would not neither TFA nor the/. write-up even mention, that the people, who needed to be rescued from the ice, went there in search of proof, the ice is melting?
If/when I ever need glasses, I'll certainly get the "loaded" ones like Google's or whatever the technology will be by then.
I am one of those people, who always lose things (gloves, umbrellas), so I like to carry as little as possible. Heck, I even sacrifice some privacy and carry only the employer-provided smart-phone — because I loath having to carry one more device. And I read e-books on it too — so as not to carry a separate item.
With China's influence over the world continuing to grow, people should be reading about the Three Kingdoms — either the "dry" history, or the more popularized version.
Surprisingly enough, in 300 comments on this page already, no one has mentioned China yet...
I would replace some of the early philosophers (whom I personally found unreadable) with Plutarch. Parallel Lives in particular. And Tacitus' historical works.
Are you implying, Disney have caused these "orphan works" to appear? Because this is, what you wrote earlier:
The corruption of copyright by the likes of Disney and other mega-conglomerates has polluted that purpose. Now, copyright is a legal bludgeon used to deprive the public of its culture while perpetually forcing them to pay to get it back.
Now, what does any of this have to do with "orphan works"?
Works that are still covered by copyright are difficult to find even if you're willing to pay for them.
Then that is how their creators must have wanted it... Sure, there may be some author here and there, who was just otherworldly to mark his work "public domain" but in truth most people would rather get paid — if only as a cold affirmation, that their work is any good.
It was mutually beneficial: they get public protection for their work, and the public receives high quality art.
And this still works perfectly well today, thank you very much.
If they want perpetual ownership of their work, they should lose any public or legal protections of it
Defending property rights of the citizenry is among the top tasks of any government. Moreover, the "ownership" (perpetual or not) is only meaningful, if there are legal protections for it.
Now, copyright is a legal bludgeon used to deprive the public of its culture while perpetually forcing them to pay to get it back.
Are you "deprived" of food, because you have to pay for it?
Slashdot Mirror
Your disdain for precious metals is as touching as it is naive. People have valued them for centuries and millenia — and not without reason. Gold is resistant to corrosion, suppressive of bacteria, beautiful, and easy to work. Pure gold is soft, but addition of trivial amounts of alloys solves that problem (when it is a problem) easily. Ask any dentist — golden crowns are still the best, even if one might prefer something else for front teeth.
Platinum is, probably, even more useful. I'd expect, that if we find a use for the serious amounts of what you call "really valuable stuff" (iron, nickel, copper) in space, we'll also need all the platinum and gold we can find there.
The Moon may simply not have the particular stuff an asteroid has. Also, getting the stuff (whatever it is) from the Moon to Earth would require climbing out of Moon's gravity well, which, while much lesser than Earth's, is still significant.
Asteroids, on the other hand, are almost gravity-free. So mining the asteroids — in place — might make sense. Mining the Moon might too, but only for something, that's already there.
I don't get this... Aren't human soldiers killing based on something other than algorithms? Or is it that the implementations are coded in vague human languages, that makes them feel somehow warm and fuzzy? Well, Pentagon's Ada may be considered similar, but only in jest...
I'd say, whether such systems are bad or good is still up to the algorithms, not the hardware (nor pinkware), that executes them.
The halving of the price followed the first time a government mentioned BitCoin... As such mentions become more frequent, the effects will gradually stop being as dramatic.
Personally, I still prefer gold — because it is useful by itself: as a non-corroding metal with high conductivity and easy to work. And most people find gold beautiful, whereas it takes a peculiar mind to appreciate prime numbers... Bitcoin is useless without the Internet, but gold has been valuable for thousands of years...
Except they have not... But if such is your opening statement in a discussion that you purportedly enjoy, then I doubt strongly, you are engaging in anything fruitful. Certainly not with me.
Yes, this is a real danger is the reason, many locales discourage absentee votes — and require a good justification for their use.
Absentee votes are (or ought to be) a small portion of the overall vote — whereas under your proposal all votes will be known to all making retaliation of all sorts immediately possible. Does not even have to be about kneecaps: Fire Department may choose not to rush to a house, whose owner voted to keep their salaries capped, for example.
Anonymity is a good thing in general... Maybe, some way of publishing the votes anonymously can be found — the way students' grades are published... With some sort of digest of their name (instead of the name itself), for example — so everybody can verify their vote without knowing that of the others.
Which boils down to exactly (and *quite*) what I wrote — that bringing wheat from Egypt (and Sicily) was cheaper, than growing it locally.
Who exactly did the growing is irrelevant although your attempt to insert the class warfare aspect is noted — and discarded with prejudice.
Hans Christian Andersen — a most respectable European indeed — exposed this type of argument as rather fraudulent... And he did it in a manner, that was entertaining, educational and well-articulated (all traits, you ought to pursue developing in earnest). The fable was about emperor's new clothes, which only a fool ("idiot" being too rude a word for the times) would not see.
Although the top 1% lives better — by the very definition of "top" — in any society, a street beggar in New York is better off than a North Korean general...
Having tried both — first in the Socialist USSR and now in the Capitalist USA — I can tell you first-hand, that you are wrong. But don't take my word for it — perfectly scientific evidence of you being wrong exists today. While many factors affect the country's success and happiness, several accurate and well-controlled experiments have been inadvertently staged in the last century, where the nearly identical societies have taken different routes. I invite you to compare:
Can you offer even one counter-example?
They don't vote much either. The point is, they are not allowed to travel despite the country being ruled by the Savvior for the last 6 years. The poor need an ID — and a number of other document — to receive government assistance, why can't they bring that to vote? Of course, they can...
Snopes refutes the claims made in one particular chain-mail, that was making rounds after the 2012 elections. Nothing in the Snopes article talks about the scale of voting fraud — very intelligent of them.
I'm not asking you for evidence. I'm pointing out, it does not exist.
What's "nutty"? If the number of prosecutions under a particular law were accepted as a valid benchmark of how prevalent the outlawed activity is — and that's the only evidence offered by all of those "actual journalists" you cited off of the first page of Google search — then we must also conclude, there is no anal sex taking place in any of the locales, where sodomy remains illegal.
Which means simply, that the method we are told to use is bogus and the evidence I was talking about simply is not there.
There you go again, repeating that "minimal hazard" canard... And making another unsubstantiated claim: that gerrymandering is pursued aggressively by the GOP.
Now, I'm asking you for the last time: what "masses" are those, who, while legally eligible to vote, have no identification deemed sufficient under any of the recently passed "voter-ID laws" — and no way to obtain it? Unlike the voting fraud, the numbers of such people really can be reliably estimated — and the estimation comes out as (what was that word?) miniscule, if not a simple and round zero.
Thus, anyone objecting to the voter-ID laws (who is not also suing against an ID being required to travel and to receive government assistance) is either soft in the head, or hopes to benefit (either personally or as part of a group) from the activity, which the laws aim to reduce: voting fraud.
If the history's first FDA-like authority approved of giraffe even for the Chosen, why should we be surprised, the unenlightened pagans ate it?
What is interesting in the article is that the Romans possessed the technology — and the economy — to bring such exotics foods into Italy from thousands of miles away in a manner, that, while possibly expensive, was still affordable for the citizenry.
But we've known of such achievements for ages — Romans, for example, have largely stopped growing wheat in Italy long before Julius Caesar. Because it was cheaper to bring stuff over from Africa. (This made Egypt the place of strategic importance in the later civil wars.)
You can also bully or otherwise coerce the same human, which is what the anonymity was meant to prevent.
So, your proposal is to abolish the voting anonymity... Interesting, but I'm not sure, I like that.
Something leads me to believe, you'd consider "because John Keynes said so" acceptable, if not outright praise-worthy...
There are two equalities, which people frequently confuse:
Actually, you do not. For just one example, a country, that can not defend itself, can not be considered "successful" and all of the Western European countries have relied on the US' protection for decades. Had it not been for us, "Warsaw Pact" would've reached the Atlantic by 1960-ies... Then you would've known, what real Socialism (a.k.a. "Communism lite") is...
Unlike many of my fellow Americans, I travel quite a bit. I'm yet to see a European country, however exciting they all are to visit, that's better for living than the US (for all its faults). I may like the food better in some places — possibly because I myself grew up in Ukraine — but it is much more expensive than here. In fact, everything, that is not government-subsidized, is much more expensive (clothing, children's nannies, gasoline, you name it). Your apartments (a.k.a. "flats") are smaller and less comfortable (very few people own their own house) and showers tend to be outright cramped. Your cars are, likewise, smaller — as other traveled Americans put it (much to your annoyance), Europeans just make everything so damn small.
I hate to spoil your comfort, but real freedom begins with money. No, money is not sufficient for freedom, but it is required...
But even if we take your idea of "freedom" — do you suppose, Julian Assange would've been prosecuted for rape, had he not angered the world's powers? Do I need to remind you, which nice and free Socialist country is doing the prosecution?
In short, I posit, that it is not the Socialism, that makes those countries nice and comfortable, but what little Capitalism still remains in them. Oh, and some natural-resources wealth — like Norway's oil — that helps too.
What "masses" are these? Not only is ID de-facto required to travel around this country by air, you can't ride Amtrak without an ID either. Bus operators (I was told by one of them) are also supposed to check IDs, though nobody currently enforces the requirement.
So, if Obama-managed TSA has some good reason (whatever it is) to keep those "masses" from traveling, is not it logical, that same reason applies to keeping them from voting?
Plus, of course, the very good other reason — already cited — of preventing voting fraud, which you dismiss as "miniscule" problem without citing any evidence. We are told repeatedly by the ruling classes not to worry our pretty little heads about it, but the only evidence ever offered is the low rate of fraud-prosecutions... That's a rather bizarre logic — I wonder, if GLAAD would've accepted the argument claiming there being no gays in America based on absence of applications of anti-sodomy laws.
The conflict of interest is staggering — few politicians want to talk much about voting fraud, because that would endanger the validity of their own mandates. Why would you be willing to accept such claims without skepticism, is beyond me.
Indeed. And thieves have been stealing for even longer time. But only fairly recently has it become possible to steal vast sums of money without physically going to were it is stored — without even traveling into the country, where the storage is located.
Once we create some sort of e-vote, the politicians — the incumbents, especially — will be in a position to rig not just a few precincts here and there, but an entire polity (city, state, nation). "If it's not close, they can't cheat," — was the saying about elections. With an electronic vote, much as I'd like the convenience, cheating will become easier and will no longer need a close vote...
How interesting, you should bring up Stalin... Scratch a Global Warming "activist" and you'll find a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath.
And so the spin begins... But still, why not mention, what these people were doing there — especially if such a handy explanation exists, huh?
But that's speculation, of course... Yet, here, for example, is what MSNBC had to say about them (emphasis mine):
But, of course, MSNBC aren't a reliable news-source... How about from the web-site of the expedition's main scientist — Chris Turney? He is a "Professor of Climate Change" (wow! a real scientist, not some nonsense-subject like "Womyn Studies"). And the "Latest News" from his very own front-page (last updated Oct 28, 2013) says (emphasis mine):
This comment — and its "insightful" moderation — are really telling...
Why would not neither TFA nor the /. write-up even mention, that the people, who needed to be rescued from the ice, went there in search of proof, the ice is melting?
If/when I ever need glasses, I'll certainly get the "loaded" ones like Google's or whatever the technology will be by then.
I am one of those people, who always lose things (gloves, umbrellas), so I like to carry as little as possible. Heck, I even sacrifice some privacy and carry only the employer-provided smart-phone — because I loath having to carry one more device. And I read e-books on it too — so as not to carry a separate item.
Surprisingly enough, in 300 comments on this page already, no one has mentioned China yet...
I would replace some of the early philosophers (whom I personally found unreadable) with Plutarch. Parallel Lives in particular. And Tacitus' historical works.
Now, what does any of this have to do with "orphan works"?
Then that is how their creators must have wanted it... Sure, there may be some author here and there, who was just otherworldly to mark his work "public domain" but in truth most people would rather get paid — if only as a cold affirmation, that their work is any good.
And this still works perfectly well today, thank you very much.
Defending property rights of the citizenry is among the top tasks of any government. Moreover, the "ownership" (perpetual or not) is only meaningful, if there are legal protections for it.
Are you "deprived" of food, because you have to pay for it?