If it can be shown that other animals have the capacity to understand, recognize, and uphold rights, then I'd be willing to accept granting them rights. Same goes for artificial intelligence: rights should only be granted when the entity receiving the rights is able to recognize the rights of others. So far as I've been able to observe, only humans have the concept of 'rights'. In the greater animal kingdom it's all about dominance and hereditary hierarchies, not 'rights'.
I think that the same applies to humans. We are generally ordered by dominat hereditary rulerships. That includes republics and democracies. Think the Kennedies, the Bush family, the Gore family, the Clintons, and others. We don't call them "nobles" over here, but some families tend to have the same effect although they play be different rules. I don't think that it's just an understanding of basic rights, but an understanding of which groups that will fight for their rights as well. Those that don't fight for their rights in various ways, lose them or never had them to begin with. IF an AI, or alien has enough raw power, they don't have to recongize any human rights, they cna force us to do anything that they want. If we are more equal in power, than the AI/aliens would have to respect the rights of the humans with power to match theirs. Rights are never natural. Rights all have to be earned, fought for, and fought to keep.
Exactly! And the same applies to human babies. I say human rights starts at age 2. It certainly shuts up those anti-abortionists.
I say parents shouldn't have the "right" to decide to murder/kill off their offspring at any time. Only governments should decide if a human has broken a law and needs to be killed. If you grant either parent the right to kill of an offspring, it shouldn't be time limited. Either paret should have the right to kill off any of their offspring reguardless if the offspring was just fertilized to on the brink of natural death after a complete 78-80 years of life or any time of their choosing between the two.
I'm anti-infanticide on general grounds. What I hate about abortion, is that only rich western countries can afford it and magically infanticide is o.k. as long as you can afford before the offspring is born. If you ever want to say murder or killing of humans is wrong at all, you need to apply those "rights" to preborns, newborns, childern and seniors. We generally only give rights to groups that can fight for them. So would you rather have a yearly fight for your rights, and if you loose, then you don't have any rights that year and can be treated like a slave, raped, or killed off by those with rights? I believe in population control, but we should have the resources to raise and take care of accidental births. The problem is that bad biological parents have any "legal" rights on their offspring at all. I think that if you want to kill of your offspring, than you should be allowed to, but then ALL your offspring will be killed, and you will have your entire reproductive organs removed to make sure that you won't have any more offsping in the future. I believe in evolution and breeding those that will commit infanticide out of the human gene pool.
- security rights that protect people against crimes such as murder, massacre, torture and rape... Please explain to me how these apply to animals? What we need is animal rights, a set of rules which apply to animals specifically.
This is the only human right that we might want to apply to animals. I'm a meat eater and don't intend to give it up. There are those out there that would try to give all animals "security rights" and then prevent humans from breeding, butchering, and eating them.
I think that we already have some laws about torturing animals and there are already strong taboos againt mulitspecial sex. The only thing that I'd be willing to grant some plants and animals is "lets not kill to eat that thing" right. If we aren't going to eat it, we should generally just ignore them unless they are damaging our property.
Basically, what it seems to be is a consumer thought that "Windows Vista Capable" meant that the computer would be able to do all the pretty things that Microsoft portrayed in ads.
To me, this is a little bit like suing because even after buying a bag of chocolate chips, you couldn't make cookies that look as nice as the ones on the package. Or even, for that matter, that even after buying an SUV, you are not suddenly scaling mountains in the wilderness.
I think better analogies would be buying a box of girl scout cookies pick your favorite type and opening them up and finding your least favorite type in the box. If you want a car analogy, how about a car maker stating that their new car was going to have GPS mapping, an ipod device, 100 mpg, and 1% of current emissions standard. Once you buy it though the GPS mapping is an interface or without maps and the maps for your area will cost extra, the ipod like device went from standard to optional and is over priced, it's lucky to get 20 mpg, and is only slightly better on the emissions. Wouldn't you be pissed? What's that those were ads and didn't have to have any thing relating to the truth in them? B.S.
I wonder why animated sci-fi was not included in the same vote. For example anime series such as Cowboy Bebop and Trigun could very easily compete with Serenity and Star Wars in all departments, especially in story and characters.
BTW: if you liked Firefly/Serenity, then watch Cowboy Bebop series - it gave a lot of inspiration to the Firefly. And Trigun is of very similar quality but with more humour and even more bitter end.
Totally different levels. Heck, look at Naruto. It's a just a kids show about ninjas. If you actually pay attention to it though, the ninja are genetically engineered bioweapons! They make a big deal about Naruto having some demon in him where by our standards almost every ninja pictured is a built fighting machine breed for war.
Take Dragon Ball Z, one of the really old animes. Forget about the martial arts stuff and just think about the scifi stuff in that one. They had small balls that would expand to contain vehicles or houses, they had anti-gravity tech, they eventually stole FTL tech and invented time travel tech.
Those were the lite plot ones meant for little kids! Ghost in the Shell, Guyver, Robotech (though that was more US kids show), and Exosquad all aimed at the younger teen market but really it was the young college set that adopted them into clut classics. Exosquad beat B5 by several years and on several key scifi topics.
The worst anime scifi usually averages better plot and effects than the best US live action scifi movies including Star Wars & Star Trek.
This isn't that surprising; I've loaned or recommended the DVD set to several people, only to have them become devout fans of the series. Still, interest in Firefly is obviously still going strong, which is, again, notable. The other side to this is that the Star Wars fanbase has apparently grown increasingly apathetic -- and the blame for that can be laid squarely upon the prequel trilogy which left many Star Wars fans (myself included) feeling flat, and has taken a little of the shine off the franchise.
I think that it was more a difference between TV fan base and movie fan bases. I never really understood the whole reason why Star Wars could be so popular with only 3 movies. I liked Back to the Future, but I'd not have built a fan base around either movie. I just need more content. TV series do that well. Star Trek, B5, and Firefly just have longer to pull fans in with a sub plots and such. What's more important having an entire TV season allows bad episodes. Only have 6 total Star Wars movies doesn't allow for any bad ones without fan backlash. If Star Wars was a story being told over 6 TV seasons rather than 6 movies, there would be far more leeway for bad shows to be over looked or glossed over by fans.
Your small, lightweight 100mpg car will have high explosive charges placed in its bumpers; when it crashes into something they detonate, negating the threat. This will (1) eliminate the need for expensive, heavy crash-proofing, and (2) cause the Hummmers to think twice before bumping into a Mini Cooper.
Um, you do reliaze that the orginial hummer came with a crew mounted machine? Those hummer owners might opt to put 'em back on if then we'd have Mad Max with all these death dealing vehicles rolling around.
This makes be laugh. My first vehicle were all hand me down SUVs. I couldn't get a small vehicle because I had to haul around my brothers and their friends and all their crap in high school. I would have loved a single person motor cycle sized car with high mpg that was just for me and with the cargo carrying for my backpack and food stuffs. Ironically I'd have liked a non sexish car only because a sexy cute car would be have had to be shared with my brothers. They wanted a flashy sexy vehicle to show off and play in. I just wanted some thing to get me to school and back home.
If we ever get cars that on average get 100MPG, it'll be because the cost of fuel is $10 a gallon; even then, there will still be Hyundais and BMWs, econo-boxes and performance machines, minivans and maybe even a Hummer or two, because that's what people will want and have always wanted.
The problem isn't that we can't build a 100mpg car. It's that it wouldn't be useful for most families. Most of the prototypes that I've seen are just single person people movers with zero cargo space. That might work for me driving back and forth to work and lunch. The reason that I couldn't buy such a car is that it wouldn't work as a spare family vehicle if my wife's car breaks for any reason. I couldn't use it to haul my wife, two kids, and a decent load in the trunk if we needed to use a primary vehicle. The same reasoning would apply to why SUVs are popular now and why my wife couldn't use it for her vehicle. All her vehicles have been Taruses. If you could make her current Tarus magically use 100 MPG with the same passenger and carrying capacity with the other performace factors down played, we'd buy it. We won't be buying a smaller family vehicle though.
Light cars are not necessarily dangerous. They get to be dangerous if smug dickheads in Hummers think they are safe so they don't pay attention and squish smaller cars or people driving them are silly. Get the Hummers off the road.
Why do you need huge acceleration and top speed? You're using your car for transport, not racing. There's no need for a car that goes more than 70mph. There's no need for a car that burns rubber.
A lighter vehicle will always loose to a larger vehicle. Bicycles loose to almost any car. Subcompacts lose to most cars. Most cars lose to SUVs/trucks. SUVs/Trucks lose to Big Rigs and School Buses. Big Rigs and School Buses lose to tanks. Tanks and all other wheeled or tracked vehicles that I can think of loose to trains.
I don't advise just getting rid of the larger vehicles just because the smaller would lose in an accident with a larger one. Should we ban trains since they run over pedestrians?
I'll slightly disagree with you on top speed. You shouldn't need more than 80-90 mph as a top speed. Come on if you cap it off at 70 mph it won't sell in alot of markets where the highway speed limit is 70 mph, and the average traffic speed is 75 mph.
I generally agree with you on acceleration since every vehicle that I've ever used that had "good" acceleration took just an eye blink to get from 30 mph to 75-80 mph. That's a bit dangerous to me. You can't make laws to get rid of stupid people. The best we can hope for is slower average acceleration so most people would have time to adjust to speed change from 30 mph to 60 mph rather than easily going 60 mph in a 40 mph without noticing due to extreme acceleration. I want vehicles to drive themselves that's about the only thing that we can hope to prevent stupid drivers from killing us other than just staying off the roads in general. Laws don't fix stupidity. It only punishes stupidity once its harmed some one.
This list makes me sad that we're already forgetting important history from just a few years ago. In twenty years, people will be saying the Bill Gates invented the computer and taking that as fact.
Hey, it's just like Gore inventing the internet. If you say it enough, some people will start to believe it. In 20 years when kids search about creators/inventors of the internet, Al Gore will pop up instead of the numerous techies that did build the internet.
I'd apply the same thoughts to global warming, environmentalism, religion, and evolution in general. You get "one thought" stuck in some one's head and just repeast the message over and over and over and over, and it becomes part of their belief. They might not actually "believe" in it or the presented facts of any given issue but overall the entire banner of the repeated message will be stuck in there and will be a basis for the thoughts. Think of it as those "raised Christian" but later become nonbelievers. They might not believe in Christainty, but alot of their viewpoints have been established around that mindset.
Is there anyone other than me who wants my browser to just be a browser?
Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?
What happened?/frank
Short answer? Firefox is now competing against IE rather than just being a fork of Mozilla that most folks have never heard of.
Really, what's the significance of gold? What good would it do you or anyone else? Why does it have value? It's just mutual agreement and the faith that it has a value that gives it its value.
I just had the idea of just being honest about what our money is made of. Let's label the coinage x quantity of y metal. I just was looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gold_Eagle and most of those were in troy oz which isn't a unit of measure that I'm familiar with.
I was thinking you could have many different types of coinage silver, gold, planitum, and normal coinage. Just make sure some where on the coin has the coin's weight and mineral content. I don't know the prices of various metals. Why limit ourselves ot silver, gold or our modern coinage? As long as we trade "standard units", it doesn't really matter what the medium is. We could be trading kilowatt/hours, bandwidth speed/storage units, volumes of fuel, or work-hours. Thinking about all the things that we could use for currency, I'm glad that we only have a limited amount of things that we readily use. It would be a nightmare trying to exchange all those various different currencies formats though. I have a feeling it would only seem that difficult to those of us in the US that don't have to deal with various coinages already.
I usually trust CR's ratings in several categories, but I have yet to put together how the vacuum revolutionized the industry (just look at the models offered in Walmart/Target/Kmart vs 10 yrs back - they are all Dyson copies now) with its poor showing.
About the only big thing about modern ones are that nearly all of them you can just take one peice out and dump all the dust/trashies in the trash and then rinse it out quick in the sink and stick back and forget about it. My mom had to change bags on hers. The no longer having to change bags is the one major improvement they've made. I think that the robot ones work will for households that are already clean.
The robot ones won't work for my household until they can go around the house to gather all the dirty laundry into its place, put the DVD/video games into their proper places, sort kids toys where they should go, move stuffed animals and such out of the way, and pick up/sort various bills/homework/junk mail on the floor, and then do their run through the house. My house doesn't stay clean of clutter for more than a day.
The world's agricultural system is at full stretch at present producing enough food for (most of) the world's population. But our machines consume far more calories than we do ourselves. So if we switch our machines from consuming fossil fuels to consuming bio-fuels, then all the worlds agricultural land put together is not enough.
We just need to figure out a way for our cars to run off our own fat. Fad diets would die quick if driving around burned massive amounts of fat. Overwieght people would be a thing of the past. Plus we'd be eco friendly by using human stored energy to do work.
A massive usage for corn is in fattening cattle. This is a hugely wasteful way to feed people compared to a more direct approach such as eating the corn or soy or whatever, Processing into beef is very wasteful. This would also drive up beef prices which would make McDonalds unhappy with DoE
I'd hope that McDonalds and other meat buyers would complain. Where it'll really hurt is those of us that live off of hamburger helper and other foods that the recipe starts with.5 - 1 lb of beef. Beef is expensive now. It's only going to get more expensive. Yes, the human race could stop eatting cows, pigs, and fish. Would we want to though? Not likely. If you can genetically engineer several species of planets that taste like and have the nutrients of beef, pork, or fish, then you'd have a shot and even then you'd have people that wouldn't touch the stuff for 2-3 generations due to fears of genetically engineering is evil hype.
What other large electronics chains are left that I can buy at? I don't want to support businesses who either cheat their customers (Best Buy) or who mistreat their employees (Wal-Mart, Circuit City.) I'm going to be running out of vendors, soon.
Simple truth? The highest paid slashdotter isn't magically worth more than that Wal-mart store greeter. We all should be making min. wage and min. wage should be enough to buy a house, car, food, pay monthly electric, cable, internet, cell phone bills, raise offspring on and then donate more money for boyscouts, girlscouts, schoolfund raisers, or other various charities, and let's not forget about Christmas were you are expected to buy tons of gifts for family and little gifts for special friends and family. (Pity you if you have a large family.) Oh, afford various insurances life, health, auto, home, and anything else that folks need.
You need to do all that on min. wage. Now, tell me what "min. wage" needs to be. It's been funny reading this. This article assumes that a college educated person can find a job that'll pay 4x5 times min. wage. Um, we aren't worth that much more than a highschool drop out though we'd like to think we deserve a lot more money than them because we made it through college.
Why is it so important to push evolution on to those that flat out don't like it? Would you say the same thing about Newton's theory of gravity, or the theory of relativity ?
Actually, yes. We should have come up with a better theory of gravity by now. As for relativity, it only matters if you travel really fast. We don't need to worry about that for along time. Once we figure out how to travel that fast, then we can actually test relativity and other things.
the problem is that if you reject evolution and the means by which it is verified, you also reject the very scientific methods required to be a good scientist.
So if I reject one theory for any reason, then I am no longer allowed to use science for anything else? BS Just because the religious don't like evolution don't mean that they aren't good scientists and can use the sciientific method in any other field.
The Chinese or Indians (or both in concert) landing a man on the moon. I fully suspect that is what it's going to take.
Been there; done that. It won't even matter if it's 10, 20, 50, or 100 years into the future. That's how the PR spin on it would be in the US. It would take China/India building a really large space station or moon base, or manned mission to another planet for the US to get back into space for political reasons.
Not wanting to be nasty or anything, but America is going through a bit of a religious experience at the moment, with people rejecting science by the million.
That cannot happen and the US retain their technological advantage.
Point of interest, America was having similer problems pre Sputnik, and when it flew overhead Congress ordered that Science be given a priority in the classroom, and that evolution be taught everywhere. The result? America's rise to technological dominance in the information age.
I don't have any idea what teaching evolution would help instill a science mindset. I had to go through junior high, high school, and college in Arkansas. You could not avoid Christain thought here. I can barely ignore it though its like ignoring air.
I find the main problem is folks that tend to think that evolution is most of or even the basics of science and Christains or other religious folks can't do any science due to their beliefs. That's just pure flame bait. The religious can go into science and do just as much ground breaking work as the nonreligious. I think far too much time/money is wasted on evolution/global warming debates that could be spent on doing useful work in other areas.
Why is it so important to push evolution on to those that flat out don't like it? I view that mindset as the same mindset as those that want prayer or the ten commandments in schools. I've had to put up with both sides all my life. I've learned evolution because it was one of the many things that the government required be taught. I learned the ten commandments mainly because every other student would tell it to you or if you didn't have a church be attempted to be converted. I got both in Arkansas schools so I tend to find it funny that there are those that insist that our schools are godless because the government isn't enforcing their prayer or their version of the ten commandments. I'm just thankful for Kansas angering the evolution is holy science crowd rather than Arkansas.
I didn't really think evolution was that big of a deal in my education. It had little effect on my interest in science. I tended to hate evolution and global warming type subjects because they were both too political and difficult to find non-political sources.
As you should. We're not a bunch of panty wastes. If you don't welcome us properly we'll get in our longships and row our tall, blond asses over there and.... um.... call someone on our cellphones.
And my two thoughts are: 1. This will be very good for that part of New Mexico. As a whole, the state is relatively poor. 2. What on earth would you use a spaceport for? I don't think in terms of eighth grade pulp sci-fi these days (think Tek Jansen), so seriously, what would a spaceport be for?
Tourism. Instead of going NASA space camp, the NM space interested can just go visit their nice, nifty space port. If aliens ever come and visit, they'd have a "space port" ready for them.
Here's a summary of the parent post to save your eyes from the lack of whitespace:
I read this anti-nuclear power propaganda pamphlet and totally fell for it.
Um, the prolong was biased. The rest wasn't. Read it for the freaking history.
Read this pdf all about the 3 Mile Island bit and the actual history of the nuclear power. I used to actually think that nuclear power was really our hidden energy savior until reading this document. The creators are anti-nuke, but other than the prolong it isn't really presented that way. It appears to be very factual and informative. The biggest thing that I got out of that is the why do people hate nuclear power so much? Read this, and you'll find out. Short answer, the public was told that it was perfectly safe that nothing could go wrong and the locals really believed them. It wasn't that perfect and no proper emergency planning or drills took place. When 3 Mile Island took place no one any where knew what was happening. Remember the Hindenburg news reel footage? Well, 3MI was much, much worse. Instead of the plant just blowing up and people knowing something was wrong, no one knew. The media reporters apparently were making the situtation much, much worse as well. (Making the local public feel doom and gloom and the dead of everything.) This pdf is insteresting because it presents that the nuclear industry was "slowly dieing" by that time anyway. There was now new construction because of the cost. 3MI was just the straw and then all the anti-nuke folks really were able to prevent new nuclear plants. There is a part of me that thinks that we still need to have thorium nukes here, but reading this and you'll find out just how much hatred the nuclear industry/governmental oversite still has in certain corners. I found it insteresting because I had never actually read anything about 3 Mile Island and only heard it referenced. For others like me that just didn't know why the anti-nuke industry hates them so much, I encourage you to read it.
CRITICAL HOUR:THREE MILE ISLAND, THE NUCLEAR LEGACY, AND NATIONAL SECURITY by Albert J. Fritsch, Arthur H. Purcell, and Mary Byrd Davis June 11, 2006 UPDATE By Mary Byrd Davis & Albert J. Fritsch http://www.earthhealing.info/CH.pdf www.earthhealing.info/chupdate.html
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If it can be shown that other animals have the capacity to understand, recognize, and uphold rights, then I'd be willing to accept granting them rights. Same goes for artificial intelligence: rights should only be granted when the entity receiving the rights is able to recognize the rights of others. So far as I've been able to observe, only humans have the concept of 'rights'. In the greater animal kingdom it's all about dominance and hereditary hierarchies, not 'rights'.
I think that the same applies to humans. We are generally ordered by dominat hereditary rulerships. That includes republics and democracies. Think the Kennedies, the Bush family, the Gore family, the Clintons, and others. We don't call them "nobles" over here, but some families tend to have the same effect although they play be different rules. I don't think that it's just an understanding of basic rights, but an understanding of which groups that will fight for their rights as well. Those that don't fight for their rights in various ways, lose them or never had them to begin with. IF an AI, or alien has enough raw power, they don't have to recongize any human rights, they cna force us to do anything that they want. If we are more equal in power, than the AI/aliens would have to respect the rights of the humans with power to match theirs. Rights are never natural. Rights all have to be earned, fought for, and fought to keep.
Exactly! And the same applies to human babies. I say human rights starts at age 2. It certainly shuts up those anti-abortionists.
I say parents shouldn't have the "right" to decide to murder/kill off their offspring at any time. Only governments should decide if a human has broken a law and needs to be killed. If you grant either parent the right to kill of an offspring, it shouldn't be time limited. Either paret should have the right to kill off any of their offspring reguardless if the offspring was just fertilized to on the brink of natural death after a complete 78-80 years of life or any time of their choosing between the two.
I'm anti-infanticide on general grounds. What I hate about abortion, is that only rich western countries can afford it and magically infanticide is o.k. as long as you can afford before the offspring is born. If you ever want to say murder or killing of humans is wrong at all, you need to apply those "rights" to preborns, newborns, childern and seniors. We generally only give rights to groups that can fight for them. So would you rather have a yearly fight for your rights, and if you loose, then you don't have any rights that year and can be treated like a slave, raped, or killed off by those with rights? I believe in population control, but we should have the resources to raise and take care of accidental births. The problem is that bad biological parents have any "legal" rights on their offspring at all. I think that if you want to kill of your offspring, than you should be allowed to, but then ALL your offspring will be killed, and you will have your entire reproductive organs removed to make sure that you won't have any more offsping in the future. I believe in evolution and breeding those that will commit infanticide out of the human gene pool.
- security rights that protect people against crimes such as murder, massacre, torture and rape ...
Please explain to me how these apply to animals? What we need is animal rights, a set of rules which apply to animals specifically.
This is the only human right that we might want to apply to animals. I'm a meat eater and don't intend to give it up. There are those out there that would try to give all animals "security rights" and then prevent humans from breeding, butchering, and eating them.
I think that we already have some laws about torturing animals and there are already strong taboos againt mulitspecial sex. The only thing that I'd be willing to grant some plants and animals is "lets not kill to eat that thing" right. If we aren't going to eat it, we should generally just ignore them unless they are damaging our property.
Basically, what it seems to be is a consumer thought that "Windows Vista Capable" meant that the computer would be able to do all the pretty things that Microsoft portrayed in ads.
To me, this is a little bit like suing because even after buying a bag of chocolate chips, you couldn't make cookies that look as nice as the ones on the package. Or even, for that matter, that even after buying an SUV, you are not suddenly scaling mountains in the wilderness.
I think better analogies would be buying a box of girl scout cookies pick your favorite type and opening them up and finding your least favorite type in the box. If you want a car analogy, how about a car maker stating that their new car was going to have GPS mapping, an ipod device, 100 mpg, and 1% of current emissions standard. Once you buy it though the GPS mapping is an interface or without maps and the maps for your area will cost extra, the ipod like device went from standard to optional and is over priced, it's lucky to get 20 mpg, and is only slightly better on the emissions. Wouldn't you be pissed? What's that those were ads and didn't have to have any thing relating to the truth in them? B.S.
I wonder why animated sci-fi was not included in the same vote. For example anime series such as Cowboy Bebop and Trigun could very easily compete with Serenity and Star Wars in all departments, especially in story and characters.
BTW: if you liked Firefly/Serenity, then watch Cowboy Bebop series - it gave a lot of inspiration to the Firefly. And Trigun is of very similar quality but with more humour and even more bitter end.
Totally different levels. Heck, look at Naruto. It's a just a kids show about ninjas. If you actually pay attention to it though, the ninja are genetically engineered bioweapons! They make a big deal about Naruto having some demon in him where by our standards almost every ninja pictured is a built fighting machine breed for war.
Take Dragon Ball Z, one of the really old animes. Forget about the martial arts stuff and just think about the scifi stuff in that one. They had small balls that would expand to contain vehicles or houses, they had anti-gravity tech, they eventually stole FTL tech and invented time travel tech.
Those were the lite plot ones meant for little kids! Ghost in the Shell, Guyver, Robotech (though that was more US kids show), and Exosquad all aimed at the younger teen market but really it was the young college set that adopted them into clut classics. Exosquad beat B5 by several years and on several key scifi topics.
The worst anime scifi usually averages better plot and effects than the best US live action scifi movies including Star Wars & Star Trek.
This isn't that surprising; I've loaned or recommended the DVD set to several people, only to have them become devout fans of the series. Still, interest in Firefly is obviously still going strong, which is, again, notable. The other side to this is that the Star Wars fanbase has apparently grown increasingly apathetic -- and the blame for that can be laid squarely upon the prequel trilogy which left many Star Wars fans (myself included) feeling flat, and has taken a little of the shine off the franchise.
I think that it was more a difference between TV fan base and movie fan bases. I never really understood the whole reason why Star Wars could be so popular with only 3 movies. I liked Back to the Future, but I'd not have built a fan base around either movie. I just need more content. TV series do that well. Star Trek, B5, and Firefly just have longer to pull fans in with a sub plots and such. What's more important having an entire TV season allows bad episodes. Only have 6 total Star Wars movies doesn't allow for any bad ones without fan backlash. If Star Wars was a story being told over 6 TV seasons rather than 6 movies, there would be far more leeway for bad shows to be over looked or glossed over by fans.
Simple answer: reactive armor.
Your small, lightweight 100mpg car will have high explosive charges placed in its bumpers; when it crashes into something they detonate, negating the threat. This will (1) eliminate the need for expensive, heavy crash-proofing, and (2) cause the Hummmers to think twice before bumping into a Mini Cooper.
Um, you do reliaze that the orginial hummer came with a crew mounted machine? Those hummer owners might opt to put 'em back on if then we'd have Mad Max with all these death dealing vehicles rolling around.
This makes be laugh. My first vehicle were all hand me down SUVs. I couldn't get a small vehicle because I had to haul around my brothers and their friends and all their crap in high school. I would have loved a single person motor cycle sized car with high mpg that was just for me and with the cargo carrying for my backpack and food stuffs. Ironically I'd have liked a non sexish car only because a sexy cute car would be have had to be shared with my brothers. They wanted a flashy sexy vehicle to show off and play in. I just wanted some thing to get me to school and back home.
If we ever get cars that on average get 100MPG, it'll be because the cost of fuel is $10 a gallon; even then, there will still be Hyundais and BMWs, econo-boxes and performance machines, minivans and maybe even a Hummer or two, because that's what people will want and have always wanted.
The problem isn't that we can't build a 100mpg car. It's that it wouldn't be useful for most families. Most of the prototypes that I've seen are just single person people movers with zero cargo space. That might work for me driving back and forth to work and lunch. The reason that I couldn't buy such a car is that it wouldn't work as a spare family vehicle if my wife's car breaks for any reason. I couldn't use it to haul my wife, two kids, and a decent load in the trunk if we needed to use a primary vehicle. The same reasoning would apply to why SUVs are popular now and why my wife couldn't use it for her vehicle. All her vehicles have been Taruses. If you could make her current Tarus magically use 100 MPG with the same passenger and carrying capacity with the other performace factors down played, we'd buy it. We won't be buying a smaller family vehicle though.
Light cars are not necessarily dangerous. They get to be dangerous if smug dickheads in Hummers think they are safe so they don't pay attention and squish smaller cars or people driving them are silly. Get the Hummers off the road.
Why do you need huge acceleration and top speed? You're using your car for transport, not racing. There's no need for a car that goes more than 70mph. There's no need for a car that burns rubber.
A lighter vehicle will always loose to a larger vehicle. Bicycles loose to almost any car. Subcompacts lose to most cars. Most cars lose to SUVs/trucks. SUVs/Trucks lose to Big Rigs and School Buses. Big Rigs and School Buses lose to tanks. Tanks and all other wheeled or tracked vehicles that I can think of loose to trains.
I don't advise just getting rid of the larger vehicles just because the smaller would lose in an accident with a larger one. Should we ban trains since they run over pedestrians?
I'll slightly disagree with you on top speed. You shouldn't need more than 80-90 mph as a top speed. Come on if you cap it off at 70 mph it won't sell in alot of markets where the highway speed limit is 70 mph, and the average traffic speed is 75 mph.
I generally agree with you on acceleration since every vehicle that I've ever used that had "good" acceleration took just an eye blink to get from 30 mph to 75-80 mph. That's a bit dangerous to me. You can't make laws to get rid of stupid people. The best we can hope for is slower average acceleration so most people would have time to adjust to speed change from 30 mph to 60 mph rather than easily going 60 mph in a 40 mph without noticing due to extreme acceleration. I want vehicles to drive themselves that's about the only thing that we can hope to prevent stupid drivers from killing us other than just staying off the roads in general. Laws don't fix stupidity. It only punishes stupidity once its harmed some one.
This list makes me sad that we're already forgetting important history from just a few years ago. In twenty years, people will be saying the Bill Gates invented the computer and taking that as fact.
Hey, it's just like Gore inventing the internet. If you say it enough, some people will start to believe it. In 20 years when kids search about creators/inventors of the internet, Al Gore will pop up instead of the numerous techies that did build the internet.
I'd apply the same thoughts to global warming, environmentalism, religion, and evolution in general. You get "one thought" stuck in some one's head and just repeast the message over and over and over and over, and it becomes part of their belief. They might not actually "believe" in it or the presented facts of any given issue but overall the entire banner of the repeated message will be stuck in there and will be a basis for the thoughts. Think of it as those "raised Christian" but later become nonbelievers. They might not believe in Christainty, but alot of their viewpoints have been established around that mindset.
Is there anyone other than me who wants my browser to just be a browser?
/frank
Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?
What happened?
Short answer? Firefox is now competing against IE rather than just being a fork of Mozilla that most folks have never heard of.
Really, what's the significance of gold? What good would it do you or anyone else? Why does it have value? It's just mutual agreement and the faith that it has a value that gives it its value.
I just had the idea of just being honest about what our money is made of. Let's label the coinage x quantity of y metal.
I just was looking at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gold_Eagle
and most of those were in troy oz which isn't a unit of measure that I'm familiar with.
I was thinking you could have many different types of coinage silver, gold, planitum, and normal coinage. Just make sure some where on the coin has the coin's weight and mineral content. I don't know the prices of various metals. Why limit ourselves ot silver, gold or our modern coinage? As long as we trade "standard units", it doesn't really matter what the medium is. We could be trading kilowatt/hours, bandwidth speed/storage units, volumes of fuel, or work-hours. Thinking about all the things that we could use for currency, I'm glad that we only have a limited amount of things that we readily use. It would be a nightmare trying to exchange all those various different currencies formats though. I have a feeling it would only seem that difficult to those of us in the US that don't have to deal with various coinages already.
I usually trust CR's ratings in several categories, but I have yet to put together how the vacuum revolutionized the industry (just look at the models offered in Walmart/Target/Kmart vs 10 yrs back - they are all Dyson copies now) with its poor showing.
About the only big thing about modern ones are that nearly all of them you can just take one peice out and dump all the dust/trashies in the trash and then rinse it out quick in the sink and stick back and forget about it. My mom had to change bags on hers. The no longer having to change bags is the one major improvement they've made. I think that the robot ones work will for households that are already clean.
The robot ones won't work for my household until they can go around the house to gather all the dirty laundry into its place, put the DVD/video games into their proper places, sort kids toys where they should go, move stuffed animals and such out of the way, and pick up/sort various bills/homework/junk mail on the floor, and then do their run through the house. My house doesn't stay clean of clutter for more than a day.
The world's agricultural system is at full stretch at present producing enough food for (most of) the world's population. But our machines consume far more calories than we do ourselves. So if we switch our machines from consuming fossil fuels to consuming bio-fuels, then all the worlds agricultural land put together is not enough.
We just need to figure out a way for our cars to run off our own fat. Fad diets would die quick if driving around burned massive amounts of fat. Overwieght people would be a thing of the past. Plus we'd be eco friendly by using human stored energy to do work.
A massive usage for corn is in fattening cattle. This is a hugely wasteful way to feed people compared to a more direct approach such as eating the corn or soy or whatever, Processing into beef is very wasteful. This would also drive up beef prices which would make McDonalds unhappy with DoE
.5 - 1 lb of beef. Beef is expensive now. It's only going to get more expensive. Yes, the human race could stop eatting cows, pigs, and fish. Would we want to though? Not likely. If you can genetically engineer several species of planets that taste like and have the nutrients of beef, pork, or fish, then you'd have a shot and even then you'd have people that wouldn't touch the stuff for 2-3 generations due to fears of genetically engineering is evil hype.
I'd hope that McDonalds and other meat buyers would complain. Where it'll really hurt is those of us that live off of hamburger helper and other foods that the recipe starts with
What other large electronics chains are left that I can buy at? I don't want to support businesses who either cheat their customers (Best Buy) or who mistreat their employees (Wal-Mart, Circuit City.) I'm going to be running out of vendors, soon.
Simple truth? The highest paid slashdotter isn't magically worth more than that Wal-mart store greeter. We all should be making min. wage and min. wage should be enough to buy a house, car, food, pay monthly electric, cable, internet, cell phone bills, raise offspring on and then donate more money for boyscouts, girlscouts, schoolfund raisers, or other various charities, and let's not forget about Christmas were you are expected to buy tons of gifts for family and little gifts for special friends and family. (Pity you if you have a large family.) Oh, afford various insurances life, health, auto, home, and anything else that folks need.
You need to do all that on min. wage. Now, tell me what "min. wage" needs to be. It's been funny reading this. This article assumes that a college educated person can find a job that'll pay 4x5 times min. wage. Um, we aren't worth that much more than a highschool drop out though we'd like to think we deserve a lot more money than them because we made it through college.
Why is it so important to push evolution on to those that flat out don't like it?
Would you say the same thing about Newton's theory of gravity, or the theory of relativity ?
Actually, yes. We should have come up with a better theory of gravity by now. As for relativity, it only matters if you travel really fast. We don't need to worry about that for along time. Once we figure out how to travel that fast, then we can actually test relativity and other things.
the problem is that if you reject evolution and the means by which it is verified, you also reject the very scientific methods required to be a good scientist.
So if I reject one theory for any reason, then I am no longer allowed to use science for anything else? BS Just because the religious don't like evolution don't mean that they aren't good scientists and can use the sciientific method in any other field.
Fairly easy to answer -
The Chinese or Indians (or both in concert) landing a man on the moon.
I fully suspect that is what it's going to take.
Been there; done that. It won't even matter if it's 10, 20, 50, or 100 years into the future. That's how the PR spin on it would be in the US. It would take China/India building a really large space station or moon base, or manned mission to another planet for the US to get back into space for political reasons.
Not wanting to be nasty or anything, but America is going through a bit of a religious experience at the moment, with people rejecting science by the million.
That cannot happen and the US retain their technological advantage.
Point of interest, America was having similer problems pre Sputnik, and when it flew overhead Congress ordered that Science be given a priority in the classroom, and that evolution be taught everywhere. The result? America's rise to technological dominance in the information age.
I don't have any idea what teaching evolution would help instill a science mindset. I had to go through junior high, high school, and college in Arkansas. You could not avoid Christain thought here. I can barely ignore it though its like ignoring air.
I find the main problem is folks that tend to think that evolution is most of or even the basics of science and Christains or other religious folks can't do any science due to their beliefs. That's just pure flame bait. The religious can go into science and do just as much ground breaking work as the nonreligious. I think far too much time/money is wasted on evolution/global warming debates that could be spent on doing useful work in other areas.
Why is it so important to push evolution on to those that flat out don't like it? I view that mindset as the same mindset as those that want prayer or the ten commandments in schools. I've had to put up with both sides all my life. I've learned evolution because it was one of the many things that the government required be taught. I learned the ten commandments mainly because every other student would tell it to you or if you didn't have a church be attempted to be converted. I got both in Arkansas schools so I tend to find it funny that there are those that insist that our schools are godless because the government isn't enforcing their prayer or their version of the ten commandments. I'm just thankful for Kansas angering the evolution is holy science crowd rather than Arkansas.
I didn't really think evolution was that big of a deal in my education. It had little effect on my interest in science. I tended to hate evolution and global warming type subjects because they were both too political and difficult to find non-political sources.
As you should. We're not a bunch of panty wastes. If you don't welcome us properly we'll get in our longships and row our tall, blond asses over there and.... um.... call someone on our cellphones.
You must have an awesome P.E. program!
And my two thoughts are:
1. This will be very good for that part of New Mexico. As a whole, the state is relatively poor.
2. What on earth would you use a spaceport for? I don't think in terms of eighth grade pulp sci-fi these days (think Tek Jansen), so seriously, what would a spaceport be for?
Tourism. Instead of going NASA space camp, the NM space interested can just go visit their nice, nifty space port. If aliens ever come and visit, they'd have a "space port" ready for them.
Here's a summary of the parent post to save your eyes from the lack of whitespace:
I read this anti-nuclear power propaganda pamphlet and totally fell for it.
Um, the prolong was biased. The rest wasn't. Read it for the freaking history.
Read this pdf all about the 3 Mile Island bit and the actual history of the nuclear power. I used to actually think that nuclear power was really our hidden energy savior until reading this document. The creators are anti-nuke, but other than the prolong it isn't really presented that way. It appears to be very factual and informative. The biggest thing that I got out of that is the why do people hate nuclear power so much? Read this, and you'll find out. Short answer, the public was told that it was perfectly safe that nothing could go wrong and the locals really believed them. It wasn't that perfect and no proper emergency planning or drills took place. When 3 Mile Island took place no one any where knew what was happening. Remember the Hindenburg news reel footage? Well, 3MI was much, much worse. Instead of the plant just blowing up and people knowing something was wrong, no one knew. The media reporters apparently were making the situtation much, much worse as well. (Making the local public feel doom and gloom and the dead of everything.) This pdf is insteresting because it presents that the nuclear industry was "slowly dieing" by that time anyway. There was now new construction because of the cost. 3MI was just the straw and then all the anti-nuke folks really were able to prevent new nuclear plants. There is a part of me that thinks that we still need to have thorium nukes here, but reading this and you'll find out just how much hatred the nuclear industry/governmental oversite still has in certain corners. I found it insteresting because I had never actually read anything about 3 Mile Island and only heard it referenced. For others like me that just didn't know why the anti-nuke industry hates them so much, I encourage you to read it.
CRITICAL HOUR:THREE MILE ISLAND, THE NUCLEAR LEGACY,
AND NATIONAL SECURITY
by Albert J. Fritsch, Arthur H. Purcell, and Mary Byrd Davis
June 11, 2006
UPDATE By Mary Byrd Davis & Albert J. Fritsch
http://www.earthhealing.info/CH.pdf
www.earthhealing.info/chupdate.html