Agnostics believe in a higher power, but not the Christian God. The I-don't-want-to-think-about-it description is what is often called agnosticism, but it most certainly is not (American dictionaries tend to follow popular, rather than historical definitions). Check the roots of the word.
What does "beg the question" mean, anyway? [strongbrains.com].
I would like to suggest that we solve this problem by never using the phrase "begs the question" at all. If you want to talk about circular reasoning, say "circular reasoning". If you want to talk about raising a question, say "raises the question".
And if you call f with an object that can't quack, do you find out at compile time or run time?
Compile time. That's what "Python imposes strong but dynamic typing" means. Every object has a type, but the compiler can figure it out for you based on what you ask the object to do. And if what you ask doesn't make sense, the compiler complains.
The truely wealthy don't work for money, the have money "work for them" by investing it, and owning bussinesses.
For tax purposes, interest, short term capital gains, and profits count as wages. Dividends and long term captial gains are taxed at a lower rate, about the same rate as income tax for middle-class people.
Corporate profits are taxed at a higher rate, then taxed again when distributed to shareholders.
I also enjoyed Weber's The Apocalypse Troll. (I find mentioning the Troll book very appropriate to this little review).
A while back, somebody posted a message about Apocalypse Troll on alt.books.davidweber. The title of the post was the title of the book, with "Apocalype" abbreviated to "A.".
There were jokes made at the time about truth-in-advertising laws.
Are you sure? I thought the "employer match" was only on the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare - personal income tax only comes out of your paycheck.
Granted, this is still deceptive, but it isn't as bad as if your employer also had to match the income tax.
I like not having to pay directly to use the library. I like not having to pay tolls whenever I drive. I'd also like it if the government sent me a few million dollars, but that wouldn't be fair to the people who had to pay for it.
Having every road be a toll road would be bad because of the delay and expense involved in collecting the tolls, not because it is bad for the users of the road to pay for the road. In the US, roads are paid for by a tax on gasoline, so roads are still paid for only by the people who use them, but the money is collected more efficiently.
I see little practical difference between publicly funding libraries and selling annual memberships. The former is slightly cheaper and slightly less hassle for the library users, while the latter is cheaper for people who never use libraries. If almost everyone either uses libraries or at least likes knowing that they're there, then public funding may be the way to go, but that doesn't make user fees evil in all cases.
I believe the ban is part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. Countries that had nukes when the treaty was written (US, UK, Russia, China, France) are exempt.
Foundation notwithstanding, nuclear power plants are currently a little too big for personal jetpacks and flying cars. It might be the solution for supersonic jets and space travel, but there are significant unsolved engineering problems, legitimate safety concerns, and uninformed paranoia that must be overcome first.
We have flying cars (1). They're called "Helicopters". They're expensive because they aren't mass produced on the scale of cars, which is because fuel costs are prohibitive for wide-scale use.
We have personal jetpacks (2). Earlier attempts ran out of gas too quickly to be useful, but this appears to be a solved problem now.
We have supersonic planes (4), but the fuel costs are prohibitive for commercial travel.
We have the technology to put people and equipment in space (5 and 6), but fuel costs are prohibitive for anything other than military applications and government funded scientific research.
The aerospace breakthroughs that occured in the early 20th century were all driven by the availability of mass-produced gasoline-driven engines, which brought the cost and weight of energy down by a large margin compared to coal burning steam engines. Jet and rocket engines became practical in the 30s and 40s, producing another round of breakthroughs. Steam engines lead to a round of breakthroughs when they first became practical.
The reason we've only been seeing incremental improvements is because we're still using the same basic technologies. As soon as a new power source which allows more power for less money and less weight, we'll have flying cars, personal jetpacks, space tourism, and space colonization.
I don't think it'll be fuel cells, since there's no order-of-magnitude improvements in power density there. My money is on a breakthrough in Uninterruptable Power Supplies.
$2.2 Billion is the average cost, with R&D expenses divided over the 20 units built (out of 144 units planned). I can't find a reference, but I believe the marginal cost of building one more B-2 is about $600 billion.
As a side note, the original mission of B-2s was to destroy enemy nukes on the ground before they're launched. Even if a B-2 only destroys one nuke in its lifetime, $2.2 billion is dirt cheap to keep a city from being nuked.
You've made a lot of good points throughout the thread. While I disagree with you about the value of the UN, I admire you for starting such a lively discussion and for keeping it civil. Thank you.
The US actions in afghanistan/iraq are, obstensibly, not occupation forces. The gov't will, in theory, be turned over to the elected rulers. Us invasions of Panama, etc were also not wars of conquest.
While the US does not intend permenant annexation, the major objective in those wars was to overthrow the governments of those countries and replace them with ones of our choosing. Whether or not that constitutes a war of conquest is a debatable question of definitions.
N. Vietnam/S. Vietnam and Korea were both civil wars.
Permenant treaties were in place partitioning both Vietnam and Korea. They were wars of conquest, just as an Indian invasion of Pakistan (or vice versa) would be.
USSR/Afghanistan was not a war of conquest but a war to prop up the socialists in that country
This goes back to the same question of definitions discussed above.
Even by your definitions, I count seven wars of conquest between 1950 and 2000. Based on a quick scan of the list I linked in the grandparent post, I count six between 1900 and 1950, five between 1850 and 1900, six between 1800 and 1850, two between 1750 and 1800, and three between 1700 and 1750.
Some of the earlier wars escalated much further than any in the late 20th century, but I attribute that to nukes (providing a very strong disincentive to escalation) and to the fact that we've lived in a unipolar or dipolar world for the last fifty years instead of a multipolar world (more great powers leads to a combinatorial explosion of possible world wars).
You will also be hard pressed to find for me more than a handful of cases whereby in the last 50 years one country invaded and tried to take over another
2003 US invades Iraq 2001 US invades Afghanistan 1998-1999 Yugoslovia invades Kosovo 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait 1989 US invades Panama 1982 Argentina invades the Falklands 1980-1988 Iraq invades Iran 1979-1989 USSR invades Afghanistan 1973 Several arab countries invade Israel 1967 Several arab countries invade Israel 1964-1973 North Vietnam invades South Vietnam 1956 Israel invades Egypt 1950-1953 North Korea invades South Korea
Not much more or less than any random 50 year period.
Because the US and the USSR were both too powerful for the other to risk a full-scale war.
Has negotiated and enforced many peace treaties throughout that time.
Agreed.
Economic and other sanctions have had positive effects on some countries.
For example?
WHO has done some fantastic work in the 3rd world.
Agreed.
Is the world's first supra-national organization and, more remarkably, has had its power seriously challenged only a few times
Others have pointed out several examples of earlier supra-national organizations.
While the UN's power has rarely been directly challenged, that is because it tends to be more convenient to just ignore it. The UN has frequently been ignored.
Has, respectively, saved the countries of Korea, Kuwait,and many others i'm forgetting by using multinational forces to defeat a common agressor enemy.
I think credit should go to the US, for putting together the coalition and providing most of the troops, supplies, and funding. The UN just approved what we were going to do anyway.
Is the UN that great? Well no, but it has at least contributed to world peace, stability and such throughout its existence. Its main flaws being that it isn't really above an individual nation states power and is especially vulnerable to the power of the US.
The UN has value as a forum for diplomacy, and as a name to attach to international humanitarian organizations. It has never had any real power, and it should not be given any. The structure of the UN is fundamentally flawed if it is to become a world government (One dictator, one vote in the general assembly; five countries with widely seperated value systems in the security council; the assumption that all governments have a right to do whatever they want to their citizens; etc).
In 1492, there was no large scale private money market (there were some private banks, but they primarily did business with governments). If you wanted funding, you got a country to back you.
Today, the private money market in the US is larger than the entire federal budget. The money is there if somebody could turn a profit large enough to offset the risk.
Columbus did turn a profit, and if there had been a private money market at the time, he could have gotten private funding.
I'd like to hear from people who do not want to go back to the moon. Most of the soical programs they advocate funding in place of space exploration have their own difficulties, but maybe there are other reasons they have which get little/no attention.
I don't want the government to go back to the moon because I don't see any scientific or military reason to go back to the moon that can't wait at leat 5-10 years. Maybe if the Chinese start building a mass driver on the moon, maybe if launch costs drop to the point where a lunar telescope would generate better data than the same dollars worth of Earth-based or LEO-based telescope, but not now.
As for colonization, mining, or building solar panels, I think we should leave that to private industry. When it becomes profitable to go to the moon, somebody will do it. And that somebody will do it a lot cheaper than NASA would, because that somebody would be limited only by public saftey concerns and by their responsibility to return a profit to their shareholders.
I'd love to see a privately funded return to the moon, even if it was just a replay of the Apollo missions. It could probably be done with existing technology for the cost of a high-budget movie. I know I'd pay $10 to go to a theater and watch a live broadcast from the moon...
Re:Apple Computer needs to settle.
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Maybe Apple Computer should sue Apple Corp. for copying the look and feel of their lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
Agnostics believe in a higher power, but not the Christian God. The I-don't-want-to-think-about-it description is what is often called agnosticism, but it most certainly is not (American dictionaries tend to follow popular, rather than historical definitions). Check the roots of the word.
A- : not
Gnosis : knowing
-cism : belief system
Am I missing something here?
What does "beg the question" mean, anyway? [strongbrains.com].
I would like to suggest that we solve this problem by never using the phrase "begs the question" at all. If you want to talk about circular reasoning, say "circular reasoning". If you want to talk about raising a question, say "raises the question".
I stand corrected. Either I misrembered from my high school social studies classes or they misinformed me. Either way, it wouldn't be the first time.
If you want to send me your unsolicited message, then by God you ought to be the one paying for it, even if you are the leader of the free world.
Federal elected officials get unlimited free (pronounced "payed for by taxes") postage, so you're paying for the paper junk mail too.
If Jetblue jumped off a bridge, would you?
Not again, I won't.
And if you call f with an object that can't quack, do you find out at compile time or run time?
Compile time. That's what "Python imposes strong but dynamic typing" means. Every object has a type, but the compiler can figure it out for you based on what you ask the object to do. And if what you ask doesn't make sense, the compiler complains.
The truely wealthy don't work for money, the have money "work for them" by investing it, and owning bussinesses.
For tax purposes, interest, short term capital gains, and profits count as wages. Dividends and long term captial gains are taxed at a lower rate, about the same rate as income tax for middle-class people.
Corporate profits are taxed at a higher rate, then taxed again when distributed to shareholders.
I also enjoyed Weber's The Apocalypse Troll. (I find mentioning the Troll book very appropriate to this little review).
A while back, somebody posted a message about Apocalypse Troll on alt.books.davidweber. The title of the post was the title of the book, with "Apocalype" abbreviated to "A.".
There were jokes made at the time about truth-in-advertising laws.
Are you sure? I thought the "employer match" was only on the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare - personal income tax only comes out of your paycheck.
Granted, this is still deceptive, but it isn't as bad as if your employer also had to match the income tax.
I like not having to pay directly to use the library. I like not having to pay tolls whenever I drive. I'd also like it if the government sent me a few million dollars, but that wouldn't be fair to the people who had to pay for it.
Having every road be a toll road would be bad because of the delay and expense involved in collecting the tolls, not because it is bad for the users of the road to pay for the road. In the US, roads are paid for by a tax on gasoline, so roads are still paid for only by the people who use them, but the money is collected more efficiently.
I see little practical difference between publicly funding libraries and selling annual memberships. The former is slightly cheaper and slightly less hassle for the library users, while the latter is cheaper for people who never use libraries. If almost everyone either uses libraries or at least likes knowing that they're there, then public funding may be the way to go, but that doesn't make user fees evil in all cases.
How should a six-year-old girl who uses the library pay for it then?
Her parents buy her a library membership.
I believe the ban is part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. Countries that had nukes when the treaty was written (US, UK, Russia, China, France) are exempt.
s/Billion/Million
Foundation notwithstanding, nuclear power plants are currently a little too big for personal jetpacks and flying cars. It might be the solution for supersonic jets and space travel, but there are significant unsolved engineering problems, legitimate safety concerns, and uninformed paranoia that must be overcome first.
We have flying cars (1). They're called "Helicopters". They're expensive because they aren't mass produced on the scale of cars, which is because fuel costs are prohibitive for wide-scale use.
We have personal jetpacks (2). Earlier attempts ran out of gas too quickly to be useful, but this appears to be a solved problem now.
We have supersonic planes (4), but the fuel costs are prohibitive for commercial travel.
We have the technology to put people and equipment in space (5 and 6), but fuel costs are prohibitive for anything other than military applications and government funded scientific research.
The aerospace breakthroughs that occured in the early 20th century were all driven by the availability of mass-produced gasoline-driven engines, which brought the cost and weight of energy down by a large margin compared to coal burning steam engines. Jet and rocket engines became practical in the 30s and 40s, producing another round of breakthroughs. Steam engines lead to a round of breakthroughs when they first became practical.
The reason we've only been seeing incremental improvements is because we're still using the same basic technologies. As soon as a new power source which allows more power for less money and less weight, we'll have flying cars, personal jetpacks, space tourism, and space colonization.
I don't think it'll be fuel cells, since there's no order-of-magnitude improvements in power density there. My money is on a breakthrough in Uninterruptable Power Supplies.
One B-2 Stealth Bomber --> $2.2 Billion USD
$2.2 Billion is the average cost, with R&D expenses divided over the 20 units built (out of 144 units planned). I can't find a reference, but I believe the marginal cost of building one more B-2 is about $600 billion.
As a side note, the original mission of B-2s was to destroy enemy nukes on the ground before they're launched. Even if a B-2 only destroys one nuke in its lifetime, $2.2 billion is dirt cheap to keep a city from being nuked.
You've made a lot of good points throughout the thread. While I disagree with you about the value of the UN, I admire you for starting such a lively discussion and for keeping it civil. Thank you.
The US actions in afghanistan/iraq are, obstensibly, not occupation forces. The gov't will, in theory, be turned over to the elected rulers. Us invasions of Panama, etc were also not wars of conquest.
While the US does not intend permenant annexation, the major objective in those wars was to overthrow the governments of those countries and replace them with ones of our choosing. Whether or not that constitutes a war of conquest is a debatable question of definitions.
N. Vietnam/S. Vietnam and Korea were both civil wars.
Permenant treaties were in place partitioning both Vietnam and Korea. They were wars of conquest, just as an Indian invasion of Pakistan (or vice versa) would be.
Iraq/Iran was a religous war
No, it wasn't
USSR/Afghanistan was not a war of conquest but a war to prop up the socialists in that country
This goes back to the same question of definitions discussed above.
Even by your definitions, I count seven wars of conquest between 1950 and 2000. Based on a quick scan of the list I linked in the grandparent post, I count six between 1900 and 1950, five between 1850 and 1900, six between 1800 and 1850, two between 1750 and 1800, and three between 1700 and 1750.
Some of the earlier wars escalated much further than any in the late 20th century, but I attribute that to nukes (providing a very strong disincentive to escalation) and to the fact that we've lived in a unipolar or dipolar world for the last fifty years instead of a multipolar world (more great powers leads to a combinatorial explosion of possible world wars).
You will also be hard pressed to find for me more than a handful of cases whereby in the last 50 years one country invaded and tried to take over another
2003 US invades Iraq
2001 US invades Afghanistan
1998-1999 Yugoslovia invades Kosovo
1990 Iraq invades Kuwait
1989 US invades Panama
1982 Argentina invades the Falklands
1980-1988 Iraq invades Iran
1979-1989 USSR invades Afghanistan
1973 Several arab countries invade Israel
1967 Several arab countries invade Israel
1964-1973 North Vietnam invades South Vietnam
1956 Israel invades Egypt
1950-1953 North Korea invades South Korea
Not much more or less than any random 50 year period.
Source
No world wars in 50+ years
Because the US and the USSR were both too powerful for the other to risk a full-scale war.
Has negotiated and enforced many peace treaties throughout that time.
Agreed.
Economic and other sanctions have had positive effects on some countries.
For example?
WHO has done some fantastic work in the 3rd world.
Agreed.
Is the world's first supra-national organization and, more remarkably, has had its power seriously challenged only a few times
Others have pointed out several examples of earlier supra-national organizations.
While the UN's power has rarely been directly challenged, that is because it tends to be more convenient to just ignore it. The UN has frequently been ignored.
Has, respectively, saved the countries of Korea, Kuwait,and many others i'm forgetting by using multinational forces to defeat a common agressor enemy.
I think credit should go to the US, for putting together the coalition and providing most of the troops, supplies, and funding. The UN just approved what we were going to do anyway.
Is the UN that great? Well no, but it has at least contributed to world peace, stability and such throughout its existence. Its main flaws being that it isn't really above an individual nation states power and is especially vulnerable to the power of the US.
The UN has value as a forum for diplomacy, and as a name to attach to international humanitarian organizations. It has never had any real power, and it should not be given any. The structure of the UN is fundamentally flawed if it is to become a world government (One dictator, one vote in the general assembly; five countries with widely seperated value systems in the security council; the assumption that all governments have a right to do whatever they want to their citizens; etc).
In 1492, there was no large scale private money market (there were some private banks, but they primarily did business with governments). If you wanted funding, you got a country to back you.
Today, the private money market in the US is larger than the entire federal budget. The money is there if somebody could turn a profit large enough to offset the risk.
Columbus did turn a profit, and if there had been a private money market at the time, he could have gotten private funding.
I'd like to hear from people who do not want to go back to the moon. Most of the soical programs they advocate funding in place of space exploration have their own difficulties, but maybe there are other reasons they have which get little/no attention.
I don't want the government to go back to the moon because I don't see any scientific or military reason to go back to the moon that can't wait at leat 5-10 years. Maybe if the Chinese start building a mass driver on the moon, maybe if launch costs drop to the point where a lunar telescope would generate better data than the same dollars worth of Earth-based or LEO-based telescope, but not now.
As for colonization, mining, or building solar panels, I think we should leave that to private industry. When it becomes profitable to go to the moon, somebody will do it. And that somebody will do it a lot cheaper than NASA would, because that somebody would be limited only by public saftey concerns and by their responsibility to return a profit to their shareholders.
I'd love to see a privately funded return to the moon, even if it was just a replay of the Apollo missions. It could probably be done with existing technology for the cost of a high-budget movie. I know I'd pay $10 to go to a theater and watch a live broadcast from the moon...
Maybe Apple Computer should sue Apple Corp. for copying the look and feel of their lawsuits.
Is he writing things like Romanes Eunt Domus?
The great circle route from Seattle to London passes over the North Pole, and need never cross land. Why didn't Concorde ever fly that route?
I'll give you a hint. What else travels supersonically and flies over the pole?
Give up?
No commercial flights went over the pole until 2000.