Oh, I'm sorry, I should have written "Western civilisation" in the sense of the civilisation including NASA - predominantly EU/USA. The planet (fortunately) still has more than one civilisation.
Money is a daft way to measure quality of life. What has to be done to obtain that money? What is that money worth (now and over time)? What freedoms are available with that money? Under what circumstances might those freedoms be taken away? I couldn't give a damn how much money I have: what I want is to be productive without having to endure personal risk.
If you want to measure whether your system is working, you ask: are you happy? Predictably, the mixed economies which have tried to balance known approaches tend to be the happiest. This is somewhat reassuring when you consider that both extremes of the scale - US and Soviet - pound their citizens with propaganda.
So your solution to these problems is trying to 'stop people dying' and thus ensuring an ever increasing human population, then you go on to moan about lack of resources!
Do people spontaneously and involuntarily give birth just through staying alive for longer?
You do realise the space race has led to many, many discoveries that have helped mankind?
You do realise that the space race refers to something which hasn't happened for 20 years (30 if you discount what happened under Reagan)? NASA now is nothing like NASA 40 years ago.
Again, priorities. Why are you worrying about what might happen at some point in a few hundreds of thousands of years rather than people suffering right now who could be helped by much application of much simpler and well-understood science?
Well, advice is the smallest current coin. I think the satisfied demands of the average Slashdot poster are comparatively minimal, and their empty promises less gargantuan.
When the Apollo moon landings happened, people in poor areas crowded around the few radios they had to listen in. Why? Because as badly off as they were, they understood that some things really are achievements for humanity as a whole
Because you don't have to be rich to be taken in by marketing. And just because those Hollywoodesque videos create a montage of peoples from all cultures huddling round their radios/televisions in awe at this achievement, it doesn't mean the majority of people either listened or cared.
When I think about people gathered round the AV device I think about the coronation of Elizabeth II: it was a bit of post-war fantasy and a chance to play with a new toy. It's always possible to temporarily lift collective spirits with a bit of fantasy - organised religion's known that for longer than NASA - but it's hardly an effective way to solve problems.
In the long run, we're going to need to colonize space.
Or we could just not continue fucking up and overpopulating our current home.
If you're talking about the very long run and panicking about star death, there is no hurry (and your sense of priority is absurd). We can work on helping people here now first.
Science is a method, not an act. Just because some scientific endeavours have proven useful it does not mean that every act of research using the scientific method is worthwhile. And while we may have been limited by lack of understanding of physical processes one hundred years ago, this is not what is holding humanity back today. We have solved the hard physical/biological/environmental science required for the vast majority of humans currently on this earth to lead a comfortable life - we simply refuse to apply it. Instead we continue treating science as if it were either a dalliance for the gifted or a tool for the powerful.
Bitter that resources are being diverted away from saving lives? Well, I may think that it is wrong. I'm not sure it's relevant whether I'm bitter.
Human suffering would be reduced right now if we stop wasting time and money on this sort of stuff. It's a simple fact. Clever people choose to work on this sort of shit when they could be looking at how to stop people from dying, and how in general to stop situations where humans lack basic resources. All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.
I remember, decades ago, caring about this sort of stuff. Now I realise that it's just another way of appropriating resources to have fun while others suffer.
I realise that casual racism is compulsory on the Internet, but it's possible that some race-based arguments are correct. Every criticism of Israel is not anti-semitic, but every large database system with the ability to identify and catalogue humans certainly has the potential for abuse.
To stop this abuse requires a multi-pronged attack, one avenue being to prevent the system being created in the first place. Arguments that any tool is OK to build and deploy as long as it's used properly are naive and narrow-minded, deliberately denying the responsibility of every participant in wider society. When Hardy talked of his love for number theory, he talked of its purity and lack of applicability to nasty human behaviour: he was wrong, and hard cryptography has become a useful tool of war. Perhaps he can be forgiven for his ignorance. A geek who contributes to a human tracking system cannot be.
So you think that the current UK government attitude to child abuse is to ignore it
Government procurement policy and recommendation is to use the IWF to hide child porn.
and if it doesn't go away then to blame the victims?
Destroying the welfare state while vilifying those who are receiving help is blaming the victims, putting the already vulnerable in an even worse position. Their rhetoric might not impart blame, but their actions do.
And you think preventing the dissemination of child sexual abuse imagery somehow removes the voice of those victims?
Instead of child porn, you see a 404. Saying "this evidence of abuse does not exist" indeed removes the voice of victims.
And one of the hings that victims of child sexual abuse hate the most is the thought that the images of that crime are still being circulated for others' viewing pleasure.
If you make a huge all-powerful death ray and promise not to do any evil with it, sooner or later someone will appropriate your death ray and do evil with it.
"Only following orders" / "only building the tools" are inexcusable from anyone but the most naive. Every engineer has a place in a wider society and must consider the potential in what he builds.
Which means, it's actually protection of child porn.
I completely agree. The modern approach of all governments, tackling any problem from homelessness to child abuse to chronic sickness to poor labourer conditions (especially Far Eastern) to abusive farming environments to dissemination of news itself, is to block out the truth about modern living with a thin veneer of respectability and neatness. Don't tackle the problem and don't wipe out the victim, but do make out like he doesn't exist and leave him alone to continue suffering. And, if they just won't go away, make out that it's their fault.
It's not child abuse that's bad. It's evidence of child abuse that's bad. Oh, and the victims, they're also bad. See, victims of abuse are often poor and desperate - they have no-one to trust and no-one to turn to. That's their own fault and it is not society's duty to stop people becoming poor and desperate in the first place.
I'd pay some Russian hacker to put child porn on their computers,
But what would come of the police "busting" those who are part of a private organisation which has special legal privilege to browse and catalogue child porn? That was part of my work, officer. No, under the British justice system, having friends in the right places is an absolute defence.
I've endured half a decade of being told I'm a tinfoil-hat-wearing maniac for suggesting that the IWF - already in a strange, anti-competitive position of being a private charity endorsed by government and given special legal privileges - is a slippery slope and that technology based on its list would eventually be used at a judicial level to block other sites.
It required lobby groups to step up the pressure in the courts. We've seen that over the past few years. It required an Act to consolidate the views of these lobby groups and set the legislative view of Internet censorship. That was the DEA. Next comes implementation.
Abusing children is wrong and the law has a duty to stop it.
Censoring 0s and 1s does not stop children being abused, but it does provide a framework for censorship.
The IWF list's implementation has not stopped any child abuse, but it has sat as the foundation stone for the Great Firewall of the UK.
Every one of you geeks who works for an ISP which has caved into government pressure to implement the list should be ashamed. You are the problem.
Erm, when we were collecting less than $10k/month, often less than half that, we had: (1) Monthly fee in the tens of dollars; (2) Per transaction fixed cost; (3) Per transaction discount; (4) Fine per chargeback.
(2) and (3) were cheaper than Paypal. (4) was a stickler but good incentive to carefully check data and identify+refuse suspicious orders.
I'm not hating on SpaceX. I am trying to counter overestimation of SpaceX's achievements at the expense of NASA.
You're quite right that the main problem with modern "NASA" launch vehicles is that they are in fact built by Lockheed/Boeing/etc.
NASA may be able to take advantage of SpaceX while it's offering free hits, but it must not lose what it has because it is inevitable (in the sense that it happens for all big government contractors without exception) that it will move from the phase of agile implementor to greedy siphon. Unfortunately there will be some who think that SpaceX means NASA's role should be permanently reduced, as if a single business demonstrating a degree of short term success has the scope to replace half a century of research/implementation work.
Is a Windows PC "Microsoft's platform"? Is your house built by Acme Inc. "Acme's platform"? Do Microsoft and Acme respectively get to choose what appears on your desktop PC and in your house?
It's not socialism at all. Socialism would retain worker control of the means of production by government's employing people directly rather than farming out to private corporations.
As to whether SpaceX exists merely for government contracts, you're right: under the modern method of having a middle-man at every stage to siphon off money from government, we don't have SpaceX selling to the Luxembourg government, we have them selling to SES; meanwhile Iridium, the company launching $6 billion worth of satellites then mysteriously going bankrupt and being sold off for a few million to some guys in McLean...
And NASA has access to all the same research, launch sites and expertise...and yet they're still behind.
Behind on what? Explain precisely what it is which they (i) wanted to do and (ii) were at liberty to do but (iii) have not done. In your answer, make sure you compare and contrast the research output of the two organisations and demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between NASA and the private sector.
Privatisation cannot be "successful" any more than my stealing something from your house can be "successful". If well-regulated private industry is able to show that it can do a better job in the long term in some sector then no-one will have any need for the government's services. Privatisation isn't an attempt to solve a problem because all it is doing is taking away an option; it is instead an attempt to mandate an ideology by theft.
The classical NHS (pre-internal market) illustrates this beautifully. Even though everyone in the UK is at liberty to choose private medical care and there are a substantial number of private medical providers, the majority of people continue to choose the NHS because for most but not all medical care it is the better option and for those on lower incomes it is the only option. Where the NHS fails to deliver, we don't take away the option of private medical care just to be ideologically pure; where people cannot afford private medical care, we do not take away the option of the NHS just to be ideologically pure. The private sector strives to improve itself for greater profit, which means it must find willing clients; the public sector representing the people strives to improve the people's lot directly.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I'm sorry, I should have written "Western civilisation" in the sense of the civilisation including NASA - predominantly EU/USA. The planet (fortunately) still has more than one civilisation.
Money is a daft way to measure quality of life. What has to be done to obtain that money? What is that money worth (now and over time)? What freedoms are available with that money? Under what circumstances might those freedoms be taken away? I couldn't give a damn how much money I have: what I want is to be productive without having to endure personal risk.
If you want to measure whether your system is working, you ask: are you happy? Predictably, the mixed economies which have tried to balance known approaches tend to be the happiest. This is somewhat reassuring when you consider that both extremes of the scale - US and Soviet - pound their citizens with propaganda.
Overpopulation is caused (from a straight causal viewpoint and when considering a moral solution) by too many births, not too few deaths.
So your solution to these problems is trying to 'stop people dying' and thus ensuring an ever increasing human population, then you go on to moan about lack of resources!
Do people spontaneously and involuntarily give birth just through staying alive for longer?
You do realise the space race has led to many, many discoveries that have helped mankind?
You do realise that the space race refers to something which hasn't happened for 20 years (30 if you discount what happened under Reagan)? NASA now is nothing like NASA 40 years ago.
Again, priorities. Why are you worrying about what might happen at some point in a few hundreds of thousands of years rather than people suffering right now who could be helped by much application of much simpler and well-understood science?
Well, advice is the smallest current coin. I think the satisfied demands of the average Slashdot poster are comparatively minimal, and their empty promises less gargantuan.
When the Apollo moon landings happened, people in poor areas crowded around the few radios they had to listen in. Why? Because as badly off as they were, they understood that some things really are achievements for humanity as a whole
Because you don't have to be rich to be taken in by marketing. And just because those Hollywoodesque videos create a montage of peoples from all cultures huddling round their radios/televisions in awe at this achievement, it doesn't mean the majority of people either listened or cared.
When I think about people gathered round the AV device I think about the coronation of Elizabeth II: it was a bit of post-war fantasy and a chance to play with a new toy. It's always possible to temporarily lift collective spirits with a bit of fantasy - organised religion's known that for longer than NASA - but it's hardly an effective way to solve problems.
In the long run, we're going to need to colonize space.
Or we could just not continue fucking up and overpopulating our current home.
If you're talking about the very long run and panicking about star death, there is no hurry (and your sense of priority is absurd). We can work on helping people here now first.
Science is a method, not an act. Just because some scientific endeavours have proven useful it does not mean that every act of research using the scientific method is worthwhile. And while we may have been limited by lack of understanding of physical processes one hundred years ago, this is not what is holding humanity back today. We have solved the hard physical/biological/environmental science required for the vast majority of humans currently on this earth to lead a comfortable life - we simply refuse to apply it. Instead we continue treating science as if it were either a dalliance for the gifted or a tool for the powerful.
Bitter that resources are being diverted away from saving lives? Well, I may think that it is wrong. I'm not sure it's relevant whether I'm bitter.
Human suffering would be reduced right now if we stop wasting time and money on this sort of stuff. It's a simple fact. Clever people choose to work on this sort of shit when they could be looking at how to stop people from dying, and how in general to stop situations where humans lack basic resources. All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.
Or does a more subtle lie prolong suffering? It's not clear cut.
But guys guys there might be salty water on Mars!
I remember, decades ago, caring about this sort of stuff. Now I realise that it's just another way of appropriating resources to have fun while others suffer.
I realise that casual racism is compulsory on the Internet, but it's possible that some race-based arguments are correct. Every criticism of Israel is not anti-semitic, but every large database system with the ability to identify and catalogue humans certainly has the potential for abuse.
To stop this abuse requires a multi-pronged attack, one avenue being to prevent the system being created in the first place. Arguments that any tool is OK to build and deploy as long as it's used properly are naive and narrow-minded, deliberately denying the responsibility of every participant in wider society. When Hardy talked of his love for number theory, he talked of its purity and lack of applicability to nasty human behaviour: he was wrong, and hard cryptography has become a useful tool of war. Perhaps he can be forgiven for his ignorance. A geek who contributes to a human tracking system cannot be.
So you think that the current UK government attitude to child abuse is to ignore it
Government procurement policy and recommendation is to use the IWF to hide child porn.
and if it doesn't go away then to blame the victims?
Destroying the welfare state while vilifying those who are receiving help is blaming the victims, putting the already vulnerable in an even worse position. Their rhetoric might not impart blame, but their actions do.
And you think preventing the dissemination of child sexual abuse imagery somehow removes the voice of those victims?
Instead of child porn, you see a 404. Saying "this evidence of abuse does not exist" indeed removes the voice of victims.
And one of the hings that victims of child sexual abuse hate the most is the thought that the images of that crime are still being circulated for others' viewing pleasure.
Really? Evidence and relevance?
If you make a huge all-powerful death ray and promise not to do any evil with it, sooner or later someone will appropriate your death ray and do evil with it.
"Only following orders" / "only building the tools" are inexcusable from anyone but the most naive. Every engineer has a place in a wider society and must consider the potential in what he builds.
I am a capitalist.
I guess civilisation cannot exist without religion.
Which means, it's actually protection of child porn.
I completely agree. The modern approach of all governments, tackling any problem from homelessness to child abuse to chronic sickness to poor labourer conditions (especially Far Eastern) to abusive farming environments to dissemination of news itself, is to block out the truth about modern living with a thin veneer of respectability and neatness. Don't tackle the problem and don't wipe out the victim, but do make out like he doesn't exist and leave him alone to continue suffering. And, if they just won't go away, make out that it's their fault.
It's not child abuse that's bad. It's evidence of child abuse that's bad. Oh, and the victims, they're also bad. See, victims of abuse are often poor and desperate - they have no-one to trust and no-one to turn to. That's their own fault and it is not society's duty to stop people becoming poor and desperate in the first place.
I'd pay some Russian hacker to put child porn on their computers,
But what would come of the police "busting" those who are part of a private organisation which has special legal privilege to browse and catalogue child porn? That was part of my work, officer. No, under the British justice system, having friends in the right places is an absolute defence.
I've endured half a decade of being told I'm a tinfoil-hat-wearing maniac for suggesting that the IWF - already in a strange, anti-competitive position of being a private charity endorsed by government and given special legal privileges - is a slippery slope and that technology based on its list would eventually be used at a judicial level to block other sites.
It required lobby groups to step up the pressure in the courts. We've seen that over the past few years. It required an Act to consolidate the views of these lobby groups and set the legislative view of Internet censorship. That was the DEA. Next comes implementation.
Abusing children is wrong and the law has a duty to stop it.
Censoring 0s and 1s does not stop children being abused, but it does provide a framework for censorship.
The IWF list's implementation has not stopped any child abuse, but it has sat as the foundation stone for the Great Firewall of the UK.
Every one of you geeks who works for an ISP which has caved into government pressure to implement the list should be ashamed. You are the problem.
Erm, when we were collecting less than $10k/month, often less than half that, we had:
(1) Monthly fee in the tens of dollars;
(2) Per transaction fixed cost;
(3) Per transaction discount;
(4) Fine per chargeback.
(2) and (3) were cheaper than Paypal. (4) was a stickler but good incentive to carefully check data and identify+refuse suspicious orders.
What's so expensive now?
Like the guy who has "figured out" that he can...
...troll telephone support.
I'm not hating on SpaceX. I am trying to counter overestimation of SpaceX's achievements at the expense of NASA.
You're quite right that the main problem with modern "NASA" launch vehicles is that they are in fact built by Lockheed/Boeing/etc.
NASA may be able to take advantage of SpaceX while it's offering free hits, but it must not lose what it has because it is inevitable (in the sense that it happens for all big government contractors without exception) that it will move from the phase of agile implementor to greedy siphon. Unfortunately there will be some who think that SpaceX means NASA's role should be permanently reduced, as if a single business demonstrating a degree of short term success has the scope to replace half a century of research/implementation work.
Is a Windows PC "Microsoft's platform"? Is your house built by Acme Inc. "Acme's platform"? Do Microsoft and Acme respectively get to choose what appears on your desktop PC and in your house?
It's not socialism at all. Socialism would retain worker control of the means of production by government's employing people directly rather than farming out to private corporations.
As to whether SpaceX exists merely for government contracts, you're right: under the modern method of having a middle-man at every stage to siphon off money from government, we don't have SpaceX selling to the Luxembourg government, we have them selling to SES; meanwhile Iridium, the company launching $6 billion worth of satellites then mysteriously going bankrupt and being sold off for a few million to some guys in McLean...
And NASA has access to all the same research, launch sites and expertise...and yet they're still behind.
Behind on what? Explain precisely what it is which they (i) wanted to do and (ii) were at liberty to do but (iii) have not done. In your answer, make sure you compare and contrast the research output of the two organisations and demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between NASA and the private sector.
Privatisation cannot be "successful" any more than my stealing something from your house can be "successful". If well-regulated private industry is able to show that it can do a better job in the long term in some sector then no-one will have any need for the government's services. Privatisation isn't an attempt to solve a problem because all it is doing is taking away an option; it is instead an attempt to mandate an ideology by theft.
The classical NHS (pre-internal market) illustrates this beautifully. Even though everyone in the UK is at liberty to choose private medical care and there are a substantial number of private medical providers, the majority of people continue to choose the NHS because for most but not all medical care it is the better option and for those on lower incomes it is the only option. Where the NHS fails to deliver, we don't take away the option of private medical care just to be ideologically pure; where people cannot afford private medical care, we do not take away the option of the NHS just to be ideologically pure. The private sector strives to improve itself for greater profit, which means it must find willing clients; the public sector representing the people strives to improve the people's lot directly.
I was not referring to geniuses being superior at all.
And yet you feel the need for Sonderbehandlung.
You're going to sit there at your keyboard and pretend it did not take something of a special mind to invent something
Discover. It certainly took something of a special mind. Did you read otherwise?
at a rate that other intelligent people struggle to learn it?
Intelligent people do not struggle to learn it. They certainly don't take as long as Newton did to discover it. This is no surprise.
(and while the pool of educated people was smaller back then they often went further than those who study to bacherlor or masters level today).
What does this mean? There are way more people studying difficult mathematics today than then.
Also if you do actually know your history you'll realise that Leibniz went no where near as far as Newton.
Wrt/ calculus? Please justify.
Yeah, the first one's always free.
Call me when SpaceX have done a century of their own "research" at commercial prices and we'll see how things are going.