I'm just a capitalist, and not being rich nor poor, don't feel represented by either party.
But I still have to ask you, do you think $ are being used for votes or not? My understanding is that is exactly what happened in NO with the subsidized flood insurance. Isn't it ironic how much fraud there is with FEMA? Sounds like a lot of $$s poured on to people with no real sense of how it was to be used effectively. It's easy to spend someone else's money.
Meanwhile, I find references to large parts of NO being built under sea level around 1900, in contradiction to your initial remarks. I think the problem is government trying to solve problems that are more effectively solved by private enterprise, and the reason is simple. It isn't republicans or democrats, just that it is easy to carelessly spend someone else's money, and there is a vested interest in getting votes, which means pressure to spend others money.
This changes the dynamics of decisions such as where is a good place to build. If you don't have to foot the insurance bill for living in a dangerous area, but others who are more prudent about where they live have to pay for your bad decisions, then you are more likely to make a "bad" decision.
Meanwhile, I think people should be able to live where ever they want, just so long as I don't have to pay for it.
So what? He's doing good, isn't he? Why do you care about the motives? Do you hate Bill Gates more than the good he is doing (this is not a rhetorical question)?
Regarding what he did to other companies, he outcompeted them. I was at Novell and saw the errors at Novell cause it to fail, not helped at all by uSoft, so I have every reason to be bitter, but I'm not.
Bill Gates (or rather uSoft) was caught violating the rules on a number of occasions, and they were punished, but it's not as if uSoft was an Enron or manipulated the US govt. as some large utilities and the ILECs do. I suspect breaking weak govt. rules is standard fare at the titan level too, and I don't think you can deprecate uSoft or Bill Gates for taking no prisoners. That's what business is all about: structured warfare, and the goal is to win. He won.
By the way, I'm certainly no uSoft fan, and I have zero insight into what Bill Gates is as a person, but I can admire his achievements without being either incredibly jealous or bitter.
you don't need to spread lies to make them look worse.
Oh, lie is such a harsh word. Thanks for the "correction," but I can't find anywhere that says New Orleans has sunk below sea level. I do find that it is sinking at the rate of 3 feet per century, but average depth below sea level is 8 feet and much of the under sea level area was built in 1900, after a pump system allowed it.
Regardless of all this, the fact remains, that the US government stepped in and helped to insure something that should not have been insured. Do you disagree with the main point here? Something similar is happening in CA, where levees are being built and developments made for areas that are prone to flooding. These decisions are being made today, and who ends up owning the liability for them?
Perhaps the most galling case involves a director in the New York City Chief Medical Examiner's office who is accused of scamming FEMA
I didn't find this in the article, but let's see. New Orleans was built below sea level, and the problem was just a matter of time. The US government has decided to take my money to pay for the problems in New Orleans? That sounds like a scam in and of itself.
The basic point is that the US government is buying votes with your money, including subsidizing insurance in flood planes with your money. Gee, that encourages it, but the worst part is that people aren't bothering to buy flood insurance, as they know the FEMA will bail them out!
The global warming people are stating global warming is here. But, they had an invalid model that showed it. So shouldn't all those people now invalidate their model? If not, then the model isn't showing anything, is it?
"Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
Also, I wonder what their model would do 450 million years ago when C02 levels were 10X what they are today, but the earth was extremely cold.
If they are scientists, and they "know" something,
They are going to publish in a scientific journal that Al Gore's sources aren't legitimate? Come on.
It's impossible to prove a negative. That's the problem with Global Warming, and a hundred other liberal claims.
But if you read the article, one very small point was that 450 million years ago, the earth was quite cold but the C02 levels were 10X what they are today. They also point out the many fallacies in the assertions in the movie, they point out that most of the majority of the "majority of scientists how claim global warming is here" aren't climatologists, and then call for an investigation of the science showing the relationship.
I for one think that makes a lot of sense: don't you?
My company decided to get rid of the 760Kbps service, to replace it with a more expensive 3Mbps service. I don't need nor want 3Mbps, but they now get to take an extra $3.00 per month. Or I can downgrade to the pathetic 100Kbps service. . .
It's just a way to grab more $. Competition is needed.
Socialism is the state controlling the means of production. I'm not interested in post modernist reconstruction of the term to make it more palatable.
Worker owned companies is completely compatible with capitalism. What isn't is state ownership, nor the many things I listed in my original post about state control of individuals.
It's a real shame you don't see the difference. Go ahead and work with your like minded people, that's freedom and liberty. I see nothing wrong with it, and we have no bone to pick there.
Where we have a bone to pick is when I say that forcing people down certain paths because the state thinks it's right. For instance, let's say you put a gay collective together and wanted to include only gay people in your group. State control might say you have to hire straights, and that's wrong. I'm tired of people demanding "freedom" when it really only means everyone has to accept their version of it.
After years of the government providing "safety nets" in the form of massive social welfare programs, after years of socialists telling people "Government is the answer," you wonder why this result. After years of the smartest and best making law after law to protect give special protection to each minority group they can pander to, is it any wonder? The lawmakers tell what you can and can not say at work, the lawmakers talk about crimes of hate, the lawmakers make you give them money so they can give old people drugs, social security, etc.
Is it any wonder we fear terrorism. After years of our press telling us we can't understand anything, and hiding truth in euphamisms, is it any wonder we fear it. After years of making criminals into victims, and terrorists into criminals, is there any wonder why we fear we aren't being told the truth?
It's odd to me the same group of people worried about call lists in the NSA database are the same ones who create this massive nanny state.
I've read a lot of these comments, and wanted to point out Unions in and of themselves are not anti libertarian. It just says that it sometimes makes sense to collectively bargain. And why not? Provided the associations are voluntary, they do not violate libertarian principles of freedom of association and freedom from coersion. I don't even think they violate capitalist rules. Manpower is quite like a union, except the members don't own it.
So if IT workers, or computer programmers were to unionize, does it need to be in the same fashion as Unions of the past. Well, I don't see why they need to be. We could create our own unions with our own bylaws. Unions could be created to prevent things like outsourcing, lobbying the government for instance.
Furthermore, under the current climate it seems to me US companies are trying to devalue the creative talent that produces the products necessary to compete. Send the jobs to India or China, for instance, as if the real value is in having money in the first place. Sorry, but I don't believe that.
On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with outsourcing. Ideally, outsourcing would obtain the best talent at the best price, which would make for the best progress in the world. But I'm captive to the US prices for many things that my Indian colleagues are not. They can live lifestyles much better than my own on a lesser salary. So I say make laws that level the playing field. Some thoughts are to lobby congress for a worker program in the US, lobbying and advocating laws that will make home prices affordable (I live in San Jose, and I'm just amazed at the amount of space available that is untapped for home prices).
I have some work to do on my house, and the person wants $70.00/hour to do the work, not just a one day job either, but a month long job. That's ridiculous. That person is not competing for the fair value of the labor they do, and they can get away with it because they have a captive market. My job can be outsourced, but this person's can not. Let's get a union that lobbies congress for a guest worker program, so the cost of local labor is fair in the outsourced world.
Let's get a Union to lobby the local governments to open up development for housing, clustered work centers, for hub and spoke communities so homes are affordable, and get them off of their crazy let-them-live-in-a-sardine-can notions.
These two things will make home ownership equitable for all.
Let's lobby congress to get rid of the crazy perks they give out, such as the new prescription drug bill. They aren't doing that in India, and it's really expensive.
Anyway, I think that's what it takes. The economic forces have to be equalized. The current path is to create an enormous service sector in the US, and buy the creative labor elsewhere. That works so long as you have the strong military to keep the world open, but what happens once the macro shell game the US is engaging in with China, Japan, and our other creditors, collapses? It looks pretty grim. I don't see how you can keep the lead with a bunch of butger flipping people raised on feel good Dr. Phil mentality, to keep the US strong in the world.
We need to compete, but not by getting rid of the value we as a nation create. It isn't in funding things, though that's a part of it. It's in the million ideas that go into creating new things, and if you give that up, you give up everything.
What a ludite you are. People have made a lot of money off of antibiotics too, but if the measure of whether anything is worth anything is if it can't make money, then we wouldn't have them.
I'm so tired of everyone saying "Oh, its money, the money, the money." Well, so what. Money is there because it provides something people want or need.
The idea that the same person suggesting dropping radioactive materials into rain forests to keep evil man away is somehow linked to the people in Australia that want to make money is insane.
So long as you are going to argue that closed source has all the qualities of open source, yeah, sure. Who can argue with that? There's not point to it.
I'm arguing about the specific point that open source advocates make about open source being more secure: there are all these eyeballs looking at the source so the bugs are found more quickly.
Now let's take a moment to recap this particular security bug. The claim of the article is that the security hole was found, patched, and posted, but before administrators took the image from a very trusted source and loaded it on their machines, the bug was exploited as a part of being exposed by having a fix for it, and that caused damage.
There is very little way to keep the hole smaller than that.
Open source by its very nature is meant to operate such that outsiders find the bugs, isn't it true? So how can you argue that open source is better than that? But it won't stop you.
Oh, they might. But that's not the point, and I think you must be ignoring it.
So, once again. When does the security bug become visible in the open source world? Shortly after the discovery. The uSoft bug became only visible after the bug was found, fixed, QAd, built, and posted.
Oh, I see, the open source distrubtion is faster, and people accept it more readily. No, not really. This is just the open source religion in you wanting to not have to accept the obvious.
I don't think that is what the author of the article was saying at all. He is saying that certain kinds of research are not being funded because there is a huge amount of money and political cache for the alarmists.
I don't even think he said global warming isn't happening, just that it hasn't been proven, and research is being biased.
We hear a lot about how open source systems are more secure because security bugs are exposed. But in this case, the system failed precisely because the security bug was exposed, even though there was already a fix.
Meanwhile, it was less than a week after the uSoft announcement of the fix that the worm was created, so the problem happened precisely because of exposure.
So let's say, bug is found (in this case by the good guys), code is written, tested, release created, then there is the window during which the millions of users need to apply the new image. In the closed source case of this bug, the hackers only got a chance to violate security after there was already a release image. In the open source world, they get access to the bug much earlier, presumably shortly after it is found or latest after code is written.
Let's see. The US (read, me) spends oodles of money to stabalize the world economy and you don't see how that affects your cell phone price.
Start by imagining Europe dominated by a person intent on global domination. Imagine if Pakistan and India were lobbing nukes at each other. Imagine if Taiwan were overrun by the communists, or perhaps if Asia were largely dominated by Japan.
Now imagine how that would affect the cost of your cell phone.
So blackberry is hurting because the Chinese protected their monopoly. So what. The US spends $420 Billion a year on military, the Canadians $13 billion a year.
If Canadians want to benefit from the global market place made possible by the stabalizing force of the US, then start supporting us in our efforts in the middle east. Otherwise, I don't really care about the minor problem of loss of revenue by protectionist trade practices. Ha ha.
I don't agree with the assertions of the author. I know it is in vogue to believe it's a special relationship between events, people, etc., that makes a genius, but I don't agree. You are or you aren't. Whether the genius' contributions are recognized, whether the genius finds an appropriate subject in which to expend his creative energy, these are the questions.
The article goes on to discuss how Einstein had all the benefits of other great physicists. But wait, he dropped out of high school, barely made it into college, and couldn't even find a job. He taught himself calculus, and developed special relativity on his own.
History is rife with examples of genius forgotten, and who knows how much is lost. The Fourier Transform was rejected by the Academy of Sciences of Paris, yet look at the applications today, from digital image processing, communications theory, and the profound impact it had on the revolutionary idea of function. Consider others, such as Fermat, a great mathematician, for whom math was only a hobby. This extends to other things like music. Bach, little known in his own time, and completely forgotten until he was discovered by Mendelssohn, is now considered by many to be the greatest composer of all time.
No, I think that people who like to say there is no Genius, only environment, are merely mediocre thinkers, socialists, and those who would rob the wonderful talent of the great contributers of our world. The goal? To diminish individual contribution and aggrandize socialism.
The real question we ought to be asking, is given there are as many people alive today as ever, why don't we have 10000 geniuses making enormous progress in the sciences, when largely we hear about questionable things like "cold fusion," and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just a capitalist, and not being rich nor poor, don't feel represented by either party.
But I still have to ask you, do you think $ are being used for votes or not? My understanding is that is exactly what happened in NO with the subsidized flood insurance. Isn't it ironic how much fraud there is with FEMA? Sounds like a lot of $$s poured on to people with no real sense of how it was to be used effectively. It's easy to spend someone else's money.
Meanwhile, I find references to large parts of NO being built under sea level around 1900, in contradiction to your initial remarks. I think the problem is government trying to solve problems that are more effectively solved by private enterprise, and the reason is simple. It isn't republicans or democrats, just that it is easy to carelessly spend someone else's money, and there is a vested interest in getting votes, which means pressure to spend others money.
This changes the dynamics of decisions such as where is a good place to build. If you don't have to foot the insurance bill for living in a dangerous area, but others who are more prudent about where they live have to pay for your bad decisions, then you are more likely to make a "bad" decision.
Meanwhile, I think people should be able to live where ever they want, just so long as I don't have to pay for it.
"flood plane" is a typo. flood plane should read "flood plain".
So what? He's doing good, isn't he? Why do you care about the motives? Do you hate Bill Gates more than the good he is doing (this is not a rhetorical question)?
Regarding what he did to other companies, he outcompeted them. I was at Novell and saw the errors at Novell cause it to fail, not helped at all by uSoft, so I have every reason to be bitter, but I'm not.
Bill Gates (or rather uSoft) was caught violating the rules on a number of occasions, and they were punished, but it's not as if uSoft was an Enron or manipulated the US govt. as some large utilities and the ILECs do. I suspect breaking weak govt. rules is standard fare at the titan level too, and I don't think you can deprecate uSoft or Bill Gates for taking no prisoners. That's what business is all about: structured warfare, and the goal is to win. He won.
By the way, I'm certainly no uSoft fan, and I have zero insight into what Bill Gates is as a person, but I can admire his achievements without being either incredibly jealous or bitter.
you don't need to spread lies to make them look worse.
Oh, lie is such a harsh word. Thanks for the "correction," but I can't find anywhere that says New Orleans has sunk below sea level. I do find that it is sinking at the rate of 3 feet per century, but average depth below sea level is 8 feet and much of the under sea level area was built in 1900, after a pump system allowed it.
Regardless of all this, the fact remains, that the US government stepped in and helped to insure something that should not have been insured. Do you disagree with the main point here? Something similar is happening in CA, where levees are being built and developments made for areas that are prone to flooding. These decisions are being made today, and who ends up owning the liability for them?
Please post your references.
I didn't find this in the article, but let's see. New Orleans was built below sea level, and the problem was just a matter of time. The US government has decided to take my money to pay for the problems in New Orleans? That sounds like a scam in and of itself.
Check out this opinion
The basic point is that the US government is buying votes with your money, including subsidizing insurance in flood planes with your money. Gee, that encourages it, but the worst part is that people aren't bothering to buy flood insurance, as they know the FEMA will bail them out!
So a scammer scammed a scammer? Big deal.
This post is hysterical. Someone needs to mod it up!
Also, I wonder what their model would do 450 million years ago when C02 levels were 10X what they are today, but the earth was extremely cold.
If they are scientists, and they "know" something,
They are going to publish in a scientific journal that Al Gore's sources aren't legitimate? Come on.
It's impossible to prove a negative. That's the problem with Global Warming, and a hundred other liberal claims.
But if you read the article, one very small point was that 450 million years ago, the earth was quite cold but the C02 levels were 10X what they are today. They also point out the many fallacies in the assertions in the movie, they point out that most of the majority of the "majority of scientists how claim global warming is here" aren't climatologists, and then call for an investigation of the science showing the relationship.
I for one think that makes a lot of sense: don't you?
So silly. You are missing the point between felon being chipped and you being chipped
"And then they threw out the constition, and they chipped me because we were living in some liberal's fantasy communist state."
I'm not sleuth of disasters, but how about these:
Italian dam causes tidal wave
Chernobyl
Space shuttle disasters (pretty worthless program, costing 145 Billion dollars)
Columbia
Challenger
Chemical explosion in India
Galloping Gertie
My company decided to get rid of the 760Kbps service, to replace it with a more expensive 3Mbps service. I don't need nor want 3Mbps, but they now get to take an extra $3.00 per month. Or I can downgrade to the pathetic 100Kbps service. . .
It's just a way to grab more $. Competition is needed.
Socialism is the state controlling the means of production. I'm not interested in post modernist reconstruction of the term to make it more palatable.
Worker owned companies is completely compatible with capitalism. What isn't is state ownership, nor the many things I listed in my original post about state control of individuals.
It's a real shame you don't see the difference. Go ahead and work with your like minded people, that's freedom and liberty. I see nothing wrong with it, and we have no bone to pick there.
Where we have a bone to pick is when I say that forcing people down certain paths because the state thinks it's right. For instance, let's say you put a gay collective together and wanted to include only gay people in your group. State control might say you have to hire straights, and that's wrong. I'm tired of people demanding "freedom" when it really only means everyone has to accept their version of it.
You also seem to not understand what a Socialist system is. --Very simply, it's a system where the means of production are owned by the workers.
I guess the US is pretty socialist then, with all the small businesses it has. Gee, that's also completely compatible with capitalism.
Regarding your utopia, the Israeli Kibutz has largely been a failure, and on a grander scale so was the USSR.
Keep on dreaming.
After years of the government providing "safety nets" in the form of massive social welfare programs, after years of socialists telling people "Government is the answer," you wonder why this result. After years of the smartest and best making law after law to protect give special protection to each minority group they can pander to, is it any wonder? The lawmakers tell what you can and can not say at work, the lawmakers talk about crimes of hate, the lawmakers make you give them money so they can give old people drugs, social security, etc.
Is it any wonder we fear terrorism. After years of our press telling us we can't understand anything, and hiding truth in euphamisms, is it any wonder we fear it. After years of making criminals into victims, and terrorists into criminals, is there any wonder why we fear we aren't being told the truth?
It's odd to me the same group of people worried about call lists in the NSA database are the same ones who create this massive nanny state.
I've read a lot of these comments, and wanted to point out Unions in and of themselves are not anti libertarian. It just says that it sometimes makes sense to collectively bargain. And why not? Provided the associations are voluntary, they do not violate libertarian principles of freedom of association and freedom from coersion. I don't even think they violate capitalist rules. Manpower is quite like a union, except the members don't own it.
So if IT workers, or computer programmers were to unionize, does it need to be in the same fashion as Unions of the past. Well, I don't see why they need to be. We could create our own unions with our own bylaws. Unions could be created to prevent things like outsourcing, lobbying the government for instance.
Furthermore, under the current climate it seems to me US companies are trying to devalue the creative talent that produces the products necessary to compete. Send the jobs to India or China, for instance, as if the real value is in having money in the first place. Sorry, but I don't believe that.
On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with outsourcing. Ideally, outsourcing would obtain the best talent at the best price, which would make for the best progress in the world. But I'm captive to the US prices for many things that my Indian colleagues are not. They can live lifestyles much better than my own on a lesser salary. So I say make laws that level the playing field. Some thoughts are to lobby congress for a worker program in the US, lobbying and advocating laws that will make home prices affordable (I live in San Jose, and I'm just amazed at the amount of space available that is untapped for home prices).
I have some work to do on my house, and the person wants $70.00/hour to do the work, not just a one day job either, but a month long job. That's ridiculous. That person is not competing for the fair value of the labor they do, and they can get away with it because they have a captive market. My job can be outsourced, but this person's can not. Let's get a union that lobbies congress for a guest worker program, so the cost of local labor is fair in the outsourced world.
Let's get a Union to lobby the local governments to open up development for housing, clustered work centers, for hub and spoke communities so homes are affordable, and get them off of their crazy let-them-live-in-a-sardine-can notions.
These two things will make home ownership equitable for all.
Let's lobby congress to get rid of the crazy perks they give out, such as the new prescription drug bill. They aren't doing that in India, and it's really expensive.
Anyway, I think that's what it takes. The economic forces have to be equalized. The current path is to create an enormous service sector in the US, and buy the creative labor elsewhere. That works so long as you have the strong military to keep the world open, but what happens once the macro shell game the US is engaging in with China, Japan, and our other creditors, collapses? It looks pretty grim. I don't see how you can keep the lead with a bunch of butger flipping people raised on feel good Dr. Phil mentality, to keep the US strong in the world.
We need to compete, but not by getting rid of the value we as a nation create. It isn't in funding things, though that's a part of it. It's in the million ideas that go into creating new things, and if you give that up, you give up everything.
What a ludite you are. People have made a lot of money off of antibiotics too, but if the measure of whether anything is worth anything is if it can't make money, then we wouldn't have them.
I'm so tired of everyone saying "Oh, its money, the money, the money." Well, so what. Money is there because it provides something people want or need.
The idea that the same person suggesting dropping radioactive materials into rain forests to keep evil man away is somehow linked to the people in Australia that want to make money is insane.
So now the truth hurts so much someone has to label this a "troll." How funny.
So long as you are going to argue that closed source has all the qualities of open source, yeah, sure. Who can argue with that? There's not point to it.
I'm arguing about the specific point that open source advocates make about open source being more secure: there are all these eyeballs looking at the source so the bugs are found more quickly.
Now let's take a moment to recap this particular security bug. The claim of the article is that the security hole was found, patched, and posted, but before administrators took the image from a very trusted source and loaded it on their machines, the bug was exploited as a part of being exposed by having a fix for it, and that caused damage.
There is very little way to keep the hole smaller than that.
Open source by its very nature is meant to operate such that outsiders find the bugs, isn't it true? So how can you argue that open source is better than that? But it won't stop you.
Oh, they might. But that's not the point, and I think you must be ignoring it.
So, once again. When does the security bug become visible in the open source world? Shortly after the discovery. The uSoft bug became only visible after the bug was found, fixed, QAd, built, and posted.
Oh, I see, the open source distrubtion is faster, and people accept it more readily. No, not really. This is just the open source religion in you wanting to not have to accept the obvious.
I don't think that is what the author of the article was saying at all. He is saying that certain kinds of research are not being funded because there is a huge amount of money and political cache for the alarmists.
I don't even think he said global warming isn't happening, just that it hasn't been proven, and research is being biased.
We hear a lot about how open source systems are more secure because security bugs are exposed. But in this case, the system failed precisely because the security bug was exposed, even though there was already a fix.
Meanwhile, it was less than a week after the uSoft announcement of the fix that the worm was created, so the problem happened precisely because of exposure.
So let's say, bug is found (in this case by the good guys), code is written, tested, release created, then there is the window during which the millions of users need to apply the new image. In the closed source case of this bug, the hackers only got a chance to violate security after there was already a release image. In the open source world, they get access to the bug much earlier, presumably shortly after it is found or latest after code is written.
Let's see. The US (read, me) spends oodles of money to stabalize the world economy and you don't see how that affects your cell phone price.
Start by imagining Europe dominated by a person intent on global domination. Imagine if Pakistan and India were lobbing nukes at each other. Imagine if Taiwan were overrun by the communists, or perhaps if Asia were largely dominated by Japan.
Now imagine how that would affect the cost of your cell phone.
So blackberry is hurting because the Chinese protected their monopoly. So what. The US spends $420 Billion a year on military, the Canadians $13 billion a year.
If Canadians want to benefit from the global market place made possible by the stabalizing force of the US, then start supporting us in our efforts in the middle east. Otherwise, I don't really care about the minor problem of loss of revenue by protectionist trade practices. Ha ha.
I don't agree with the assertions of the author. I know it is in vogue to believe it's a special relationship between events, people, etc., that makes a genius, but I don't agree. You are or you aren't. Whether the genius' contributions are recognized, whether the genius finds an appropriate subject in which to expend his creative energy, these are the questions.
The article goes on to discuss how Einstein had all the benefits of other great physicists. But wait, he dropped out of high school, barely made it into college, and couldn't even find a job. He taught himself calculus, and developed special relativity on his own.
History is rife with examples of genius forgotten, and who knows how much is lost. The Fourier Transform was rejected by the Academy of Sciences of Paris, yet look at the applications today, from digital image processing, communications theory, and the profound impact it had on the revolutionary idea of function. Consider others, such as Fermat, a great mathematician, for whom math was only a hobby. This extends to other things like music. Bach, little known in his own time, and completely forgotten until he was discovered by Mendelssohn, is now considered by many to be the greatest composer of all time.
No, I think that people who like to say there is no Genius, only environment, are merely mediocre thinkers, socialists, and those who would rob the wonderful talent of the great contributers of our world. The goal? To diminish individual contribution and aggrandize socialism.
The real question we ought to be asking, is given there are as many people alive today as ever, why don't we have 10000 geniuses making enormous progress in the sciences, when largely we hear about questionable things like "cold fusion," and the like.