Z-buffering, sticky pixels, or some other trivial thing. Ignore any changing pixels under the image of the weatherman. Pull in changing pixels from the video source only where they correspond to the green background behind your weatherman.
It could be tricky to do in 1950s era hardware, ala TVs, but in a computerized world it would be easy.
It might have that association for you, but for me it just looks smoother. Have you ever tried to read a sign or something that is moving across the movie screen?
I hope you and others never switch though. It gives me the giggles to think of cranky old farts bemoaning the new tech and refusing to use it. Makes it even sweeter when I do.
Pft, your whole intellectual-property wankfest is the unethical actor. The idea that copying information should be illegal is just ridiculous.
Go base a business off of something that doesn't rely entirely on government subsidies in the form of monopoly rights. Intellectual property laws hurt our actual inventors and creators and reward the large entrenched interests.
BTW, According to game companies it's piracy to install your game on two computers. Much like ripping your music CDs to listen to on a solid-state player is piracy. And skipping commercials is piracy...
As for who's at fault for DRM, there's someone at the game company whose whole job is to make the game not work under many circumstances. It's his fault. And the bosses who pay him, and the co-workers who benefit, etc. If you can't sell a legitimate and working product, don't sell anything. That you feel you may be screwed is no excuse for knowingly screwing others..
But terrorists can use it to pass code snippets! We're shutting it down tomorrow (or, leaving it up and putting everyone who uses it on the no-fly list.)
Depends, are you sitting there shooting down any edit you disagree with without making proper notes and without proving your side of the issue? Because if you do, you are acting like you own it.
I've seen revert battles where one person spells out their reasoning carefully - they're over in no time. Wars only last when someone pulls rank.
Sure, you can replace cable TV with Netflix, but the sports fan living with you might not be amused.
This means we're letting down the non-techies when it comes to piracy. Torrents should be great for sports because of their time-sensitive windows of interest and bandwidth sharing aspects. If only they streamed.
If you want to get information into an article, try citing scholarly or mainstream media which in turn cite the first-party "manufacturer's technical brochures". Wikipedia is not about the world; that'd be original research. It's about the reaction of the scholarly and mainstream media to the world.
Then the appropriate thing to do is take the inappropriate information and lump it into a section called 'Manufacturer's Specs' because they are that.
Too many people think deleting something will make it better.
Deletionists, especially notability trolls, are the ones who ruin things. Their entire purpose could be solved with an appropriate template such as "Warning - this page is about a very obscure subject, you may want the disambiguation page instead." or "This page's quality is ranked 'Horrible' - if you know about this topic please help fix it."
And instead they run around deleting things others, actual contributors, have done.
That's actually an interesting idea for moderation. Instead of giving out open mod points all the time give people specific ones, like two 'overrated' and three 'funny'..
Does "only testable with a 100 billion dollars budget" count ?
Yes. Untestable things couldn't possibly be tested, infinite budget or not.
For that matter, what defines science ?
Tautologically, an application of the scientific method. More usefully, making and testing hypothesis and keeping careful track of what you've proven and what you're assuming.
(and if you're going to say peer-reviewed, please take into account that the "fact" that the earth is flat is millions of times more peer-reviewed than any scientific theory, after all, anyone can obviously see the earth is flat.
It's not tested at all (in day-to-day life). What's the hypothesis? That the terrain over a large enough section of the Earth will appear flat? And how is this being observed? It's far from testing.
Add to that the fact that most scientific development before the 20th century was never peer-reviewed, yet is accepted as gospel truth today)
You really think people are just taking everything some old-dead-dude said for gospel, and not testing it? You think "they" are building giant super-colliders and moon-rockets with magnets the size of your car, without having tested their basic assumptions a few times?
So, really, you're just not going to be able to verify anything outside of classical physics on a reasonable budget. The total number of people world-wide that even have access to equipment that can be used to test even long-known aspects of quantum theory is a few hundred, a few thousand if [...]
You could probably replicate early cyclotrons for a few thousand dollars.
Even relativity is notoriously hard to verify (have you ever verified gravity bends light ? Try it.
Easily tested though, if you wish to try.
If your rockets weren't going where you thought they should you'd replay the logs from your guidance system and start testing your assumptions.
In my opinion, whether the government is just or not is not a binary thing, but rather a scale.
Funny, under the rule of law you advocate it's a pretty binary thing - murder just one person and all of a sudden you're totally illegitimate.
Yes, there comes a point on that scale at which aiding such a government in any endeavor is morally wrong; and there is a point even further where the only moral choice is to stand up and fight.
What would an organization have to do to qualify? Condone torture - including the very same acts they recognize as war crimes when other groups commit them? Cover up evidence of their war-mongering lies? Bomb civilians and cover it up? I'd have thought that they'd all make fine lines to draw.
I do not think that either of those two has been passed in US. For one thing, it is still a democracy - yes, despite the flawed electoral system and massive propaganda, the votes still count.
Which votes counted for stopping the war, or not persecuting wikileaks? Certainly not Obama's, and certainly not the republican. The mythical third party that will eventually, by losing enough, become popular?
Invalid without an option for 'None of the above, nor their system'. Another of those rule of law things.
And thus the "bullies and killers" are also part of that system, and not above it.
Where are the charges for George Bush (and MANY others) then, for faking evidence of weapons and starting an unjust war? Well, maybe they're busy working on all the conspiracy charges on wall-street. No?
To that extent, it is still possible to turn it back, reversing bad decisions without dismantling the whole system. But that only works insofar as the system itself is perceived as legitimate - and that means maintaining rule of law, such as that law may be.
"I don't like the Don, he is capricious and cruel, has killed many, but if we kill him chaos will erupt and many innocents will die."
Might be true but it's not very compelling.
As for your rule of law, governments have killed hundreds of millions of people in the last hundred years - far more than all natural disasters combined. Almost all, completely legal.
Consider also the deep-running anti-government sentiment so popular in US, but for reasons entirely different from yours.
Dunno, I think there's no legitimate form of government above the individual, that's a bit like one of those.
If you advance the argument that disobeying and hindering the unjust government is the way to go, you will find surprisingly many supporters of that idea
I'd imagine most Iraqis would prefer that our bombs never got built because of anti-war strikes, including if necessary the destruction of factories and deaths of guards defending them, rather than be shipped overseas and dropped on them.
This boils down to the fact that definition of "just" is subjective, and the one you have in mind is not particularly popular here.
On the contrary, my type of black and white "murder just one person and you're a murderer" views are incredibly popular, especially in the "red" states. The trick is to not tell them it's about them until they agree.
Now in my opinion that anti-government sentiment itself - even disregarding the aforementioned fringe groups that latch onto it - is in fact far more damaging than any support to war effort and such that going along has.
Any organization damaged by the truth probably wasn't doing much good.
The problem is that too many Americans view taxes much like you described - as a "protection fee" for the government to leave them alone.
They're right though. The fact that they're taken from you regardless of your wishes makes it theft.
And do what for other applications that you use and which fail in Wine?
Take it with the same compliance you take your proprietary masters' decrees, bitch.
Running Windows 7 means being shafted in many ways like EULAs and reg keys and the apps are no better.
Do you think it ever gets easier to stop using? Yes, you lose access to the proprietary glitz. But otherwise you're shackled in and what access you do have can be revoked in an instant. One threatening patent letter later and suddenly those apps you've bought have been remotely deleted or have had their signatures blocked. Apple and Google have proven they can do this on their phones, and it's pretty obvious Windows and OS X could do the same in mandatory upgrades (like the PS3), so lawsuits forcing them to remotely cripple your system won't be long. But perhaps it won't be apps you really need.
So war and murder is okay as long as you get bridges and hospitals?
War can be necessary ("okay", if you wish) or harmful, it depends on what it is waged for.
Iraq then, invaded over lies.
In any case, not paying taxes is not the way to go about stopping unjust wars.
Continually paying taxes regardless of what the government does isn't going to do anything either, not paying taxes at least slows it down. (If only, as you suggest, because of the total lack of your economic output plus the cost of jailing you - but therein is the civilization you so proudly buy.)
You might as well suicide for the fear that you get conscripted to fight one eventually (given that US maintains the Selective Service registration, it's not unrealistic) - it's about as much logically connected.
People have gone to prison to avoid being drafted and being forced to murder people even if only indirectly.
It's not squandered at all, it's spent very deliberately and efficiently [...]
You give too much credit to US military-industrial complex.
You mistake pork for inefficiency. That's the system working as designed. But that's missing the point.
Or remember B-2 at $2B per item, without much to show for it. There are many similar examples in other areas. Nah, the "best of the best" is mostly propaganda, and in reality it's mostly a fertile grazing ground for enterprises involved in production of various military equipment.
How many B2s do you have? Or, at that, the entire rest of the world. And AWACS and carrier groups, etc.
Their unbeatable attitude is bravado. They'd be saying the same thing regardless of their prowess, like the famous Iraqi propaganda minister. But they are right this time - they do have far better toys (in war-capable numbers) than anyone else.
But yes, even if all they had was pointy sticks:
to build a [REDACTED] collection of killing machines and train the cultists to operate them.
This is the critical part.
Even if we don't directly buy the bombs we support governments that prop up the USA (and others, they're only the biggest) by refusing to call them on their abuses and sharing in the spoils.
I dunno, I don't exactly hide my views on US foreign policy. Aside from that, as I noted in my earlier post, my participation in political process is limited for reasons outside my control.
You may not sit quietly but if you end up paying the protection money, knowing where it'll go, you're still involved.
I don't think we've as much bought civilization as we've exported the barbarism our way of life depends on to foreign countries.
We did? Funny thing, considering that the standard of living in third world countries steadily grew throughout the last century or so.
The war we have though, we manage not to have at home. Or, usually, anywhere a majority of "us" came from.
That makes it palatable, or forgettable perhaps, and thus we don't think of the consequences. Oil is cheap because the USA, generally speaking, takes over the countries that won't sell it cheaply and installs a dictator (or rather, helps one install himself) and the rest of the world sits back and, while they may decry it, will buy the oil.
It's not the USA specifically that's the problem, it's just the current biggest of a class of problems.
Not the least, I suspect, because of all the humanitarian aid and development investments that are directed there. Bombs are not the only article of export, by far.
By dollar, especially if you count the cost of the bombers/infrastructure, they sure are.
Because they are unreliable, un-economical and lead to starvation. [...] You have to have enough traditional power plants to fully cover your electrical needs on days like that, unless you have want to have a blackout.
You'd only starve if you prioritized aluminum smelters over farming, hospitals, etc. While any loss of generating capacity would hurt - we have expanded to use it of course - this in no way shows that we couldn't survive comfortably on less if we transitioned gradually as prices came to reflect reality.
they just cost more for the amount of electricity they generate. We would not have wind or solar at all were it not for massive government subsidies.
Much like all other power sources. Dams would be uneconomical if the land was purchased on the market and they'd have as many problems with insurance as nuclear does if they were as new. Oil is only cheap because the USA goes to war with any oil-producing nation who doesn't sell it that way, and because the industry has essentially no liability for huge disasters.
No one can produce large scale power profitably using those technologies.
No, nobody can compete against government subsidized sources, especially non-renewable ones, if those sources externalize their environmental and social costs.
And lastly, in the case of some renewables (ethanol), they cause people to starve, destroy the environment and waste more energy. Corn ethanol is generally found to be an energy negative in most studies [...]Corn based ethanol is one of the WORST ideas around, bar none.
Well, bar at least one... The worst idea is government subsidies of industry. Look at what it leads to.
And yet the government massively subsidies it to keep the bad idea going, because they are scared to death to say no to farmer special interests.
Bullshit. The government handed Monsanto their patent nonsense on a silver platter. If they were even slightly responsive to actual farmers that would never happen. What it really is is that government is in bed with big agribusiness and the lobbyists make this very profitable.
The answer is that taxes pay for far more than that, and certainly a lot of what I directly enjoy.
So war and murder is okay as long as you get bridges and hospitals? Happiness for you and yours?
Under the law it doesn't matter how much you gain, or how secure that oil makes you feel, murder is still murder.
It is regrettable that so much is squandered, and it is duty of the citizens of a democratic state to minimize that
It's not squandered at all, it's spent very deliberately and efficiently to build a state of the art collection of killing machines and train the cultists to operate them.
I wish I could help there, but alas there's little I can do with my present status.
I pretty much guarantee we'd suffer less for not paying taxes than the USA's victims do from their bombs. Even if we don't directly buy the bombs we support governments that prop up the USA (and others, they're only the biggest) by refusing to call them on their abuses and sharing in the spoils.
I don't think we've as much bought civilization as we've exported the barbarism our way of life depends on to foreign countries.
In all the times I've been called as a juror (and it happens every year without fail), I've found the current legal system is actually pretty good at this. Do you have experience otherwise?
Yes, everywhere and everyday. People don't understand why some detail isn't covered (perhaps the prosecution knows it'd be unprovable, perhaps it's inadmissible, perhaps the judge is on the take, etc). Because of this the results seem arbitrary and contrived, wrong.
We should stop trying to keep secrets from jury members, it's prone to manipulation and growing more unworkable over time, and switch to a system where we acknowledge people's biases (repeat offender, must be guilty this time as well) and counter them instead of hoping they don't discover the truth. There are already many cases where, for example, the defendant does something that could appear to make them appear guilty (refuse to testify) where this needs to be explained to the jury as their right - not to be taken as a sign of guilt.
Jurors are not entitled to decide matters of law. They can only find a defendant guilty or not guilty based on the instructions they are given, which are based on the law as currently written.
That seems incorrect in the USA. While it is what you're told, juries can find someone guilty and refuse to convict.
But moreover, they'll lie to avoid finding someone guilty, or innocent, if they feel the trial (or previous trials) isn't reasonable. That's certainly against the instructions but all too common.
The "jurors' biases and ignorance," as the GP describes, play no part in any of the social issues you describe.
Bull. That's why so much time and effort is spent weeding out the most obvious biases.
The most obvious bias, and one very structure of the courts encourage, is that the defendant must be guilty because there's a policeman who says so.
To see the truth behind patents we need only look at who lobbies for them; companies that hold patents and make nothing.
If it were helpful for the rest of society (ie, advances the state of the art, enables more production, etc) we'd see clamoring for more patent protection on other people's ideas, to encourage more of these fruitful ideas. Instead, the only people who want patents are those who hope to claim a monopoly on an obvious application of the prior art. Notably absent are the droves of little companies saying things like "this patented technology was so helpful and we'd have never discovered it ourselves based on the academic literature - thanks".
In fact, developers are told not to look at patents for ideas. Patents should be a useful tool, instead they're a minefield we deliberately don't peek at to avoid treble-damages when we inevitably step on one blocking the only reasonable way through a problem.
If we really wanted to reward helpful inventors and developers we'd take all the money wasted on patents - the patent office, federal agents enforcing it, time writing/fixing the laws, the money spent on patent lawyers, etc- and grant it to the people who'd developed the most critical and unobvious (as judged in retrospect, the only real way to know) framework of today's technology. Without making them jump through legal hoops, or screwing them for trivial errors in legalese, either. This would encourage teaching - if your methods made things easier you'd be nominated by everyone who you'd helped. Simultaneous inventors wouldn't be rewarded in a one-or-the-other fashion, but each in direct proportion to how accessible they made their methods and (to some degree) were successful in spreading the word.
But the lobbyists don't want to reward inventors, or spur progress, they're rent seeking.
the issue is circletimessquare who does not respect the techies. instead of educating them, he laughs at them
Fixed it for you, you egotistical dork.
Many people, techies or otherwise, are hostile to learning.. If they come to you with a question they'll be upset it you give them a hint (ie, that they should look it up on their own, from here) instead of step-by-step directions. Similarly, if you can't convince someone of something with absolute proof they'll believe what they saw on TV, and they'll wield their disbelief like a weapon to avoid having to admit that they could look it up and learn something, instead getting pissed off and shouting about agreeing to disagree.
The "Common Man" is usually someone who has abrogated responsibility for their own life and actions anywhere taking responsibility would require reading any instructions. Tech or not, willful ignorance smells the same.
Oh grow up. You're inventing ridiculous extremes to justify not considering how things could, and must, change.
When keeping someone from the news meant stopping them from buying newspapers it might have been practical. Now that almost every electronic device is networkable it's less practical. Moreso, when everything is online it's less reasonable to sequester a jury member - at least for the pittance they receive.
We need to realize that it's not practical to keep people in the dark and start designing trials to counter this. As someone said, let the jurors ask questions and give the defense time to address this. Yes, it does totally change trials, but we need to realize it's a losing battle otherwise, to try to embargo ever-smaller and more-essential technology, from jurors.
Also, if someone would have watched FOX and been influenced by the scare tactics they peddle they'd have already watched FOX and this needs to be addressed You can't just pretend that because they're not being preached to right now that they're free from it. So once again, design a new form of trial where jurors' biases and ignorance (which are, of course, society's biases and ignorance) get addressed. If not we're just ensuring that the FOX watchers won't be happy with the results because they'll seem wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Z-buffering, sticky pixels, or some other trivial thing. Ignore any changing pixels under the image of the weatherman. Pull in changing pixels from the video source only where they correspond to the green background behind your weatherman.
It could be tricky to do in 1950s era hardware, ala TVs, but in a computerized world it would be easy.
It might have that association for you, but for me it just looks smoother. Have you ever tried to read a sign or something that is moving across the movie screen?
I hope you and others never switch though. It gives me the giggles to think of cranky old farts bemoaning the new tech and refusing to use it. Makes it even sweeter when I do.
Oh my god. He thought about something and did something he deemed 'not harmful' despite the law. Burn him!
If I cared about "the law" I'd still be listening to my music from spinning pieces of plastic. Ridiculous.
Pft, your whole intellectual-property wankfest is the unethical actor. The idea that copying information should be illegal is just ridiculous.
Go base a business off of something that doesn't rely entirely on government subsidies in the form of monopoly rights. Intellectual property laws hurt our actual inventors and creators and reward the large entrenched interests.
BTW, According to game companies it's piracy to install your game on two computers. Much like ripping your music CDs to listen to on a solid-state player is piracy. And skipping commercials is piracy...
As for who's at fault for DRM, there's someone at the game company whose whole job is to make the game not work under many circumstances. It's his fault. And the bosses who pay him, and the co-workers who benefit, etc. If you can't sell a legitimate and working product, don't sell anything. That you feel you may be screwed is no excuse for knowingly screwing others..
But terrorists can use it to pass code snippets! We're shutting it down tomorrow (or, leaving it up and putting everyone who uses it on the no-fly list.)
What, that you can't help people too apathetic to help themselves?
Depends, are you sitting there shooting down any edit you disagree with without making proper notes and without proving your side of the issue? Because if you do, you are acting like you own it.
I've seen revert battles where one person spells out their reasoning carefully - they're over in no time. Wars only last when someone pulls rank.
Sure, you can replace cable TV with Netflix, but the sports fan living with you might not be amused.
This means we're letting down the non-techies when it comes to piracy. Torrents should be great for sports because of their time-sensitive windows of interest and bandwidth sharing aspects. If only they streamed.
If you want to get information into an article, try citing scholarly or mainstream media which in turn cite the first-party "manufacturer's technical brochures". Wikipedia is not about the world; that'd be original research. It's about the reaction of the scholarly and mainstream media to the world.
Then the appropriate thing to do is take the inappropriate information and lump it into a section called 'Manufacturer's Specs' because they are that.
Too many people think deleting something will make it better.
Deletionists, especially notability trolls, are the ones who ruin things. Their entire purpose could be solved with an appropriate template such as "Warning - this page is about a very obscure subject, you may want the disambiguation page instead." or "This page's quality is ranked 'Horrible' - if you know about this topic please help fix it."
And instead they run around deleting things others, actual contributors, have done.
That's actually an interesting idea for moderation. Instead of giving out open mod points all the time give people specific ones, like two 'overrated' and three 'funny'..
But yes, sadly true.
Are you like this (pissy when others don't show appropriate respect to your traditions) all the time?
And having your dates nicely ordered, even where you haven't bothered to sort by date, doesn't serve you?
Go and henceforth write your dates longhand "The year of our lord two-thousand and eleven, April 8th, a Friday" just to spite your computer.
And "testable" is somewhat nebulous concept.
No, it's not.
Does "only testable with a 100 billion dollars budget" count ?
Yes. Untestable things couldn't possibly be tested, infinite budget or not.
For that matter, what defines science ?
Tautologically, an application of the scientific method. More usefully, making and testing hypothesis and keeping careful track of what you've proven and what you're assuming.
(and if you're going to say peer-reviewed, please take into account that the "fact" that the earth is flat is millions of times more peer-reviewed than any scientific theory, after all, anyone can obviously see the earth is flat.
It's not tested at all (in day-to-day life). What's the hypothesis? That the terrain over a large enough section of the Earth will appear flat? And how is this being observed? It's far from testing.
Add to that the fact that most scientific development before the 20th century was never peer-reviewed, yet is accepted as gospel truth today)
You really think people are just taking everything some old-dead-dude said for gospel, and not testing it? You think "they" are building giant super-colliders and moon-rockets with magnets the size of your car, without having tested their basic assumptions a few times?
So, really, you're just not going to be able to verify anything outside of classical physics on a reasonable budget. The total number of people world-wide that even have access to equipment that can be used to test even long-known aspects of quantum theory is a few hundred, a few thousand if [...]
You could probably replicate early cyclotrons for a few thousand dollars.
Even relativity is notoriously hard to verify (have you ever verified gravity bends light ? Try it.
Easily tested though, if you wish to try.
If your rockets weren't going where you thought they should you'd replay the logs from your guidance system and start testing your assumptions.
You said they had nothing to do with each other. You were proved wrong.
You're evidently some useless crackpot who can't tell "similar" from "same".
In my opinion, whether the government is just or not is not a binary thing, but rather a scale.
Funny, under the rule of law you advocate it's a pretty binary thing - murder just one person and all of a sudden you're totally illegitimate.
Yes, there comes a point on that scale at which aiding such a government in any endeavor is morally wrong; and there is a point even further where the only moral choice is to stand up and fight.
What would an organization have to do to qualify? Condone torture - including the very same acts they recognize as war crimes when other groups commit them? Cover up evidence of their war-mongering lies? Bomb civilians and cover it up? I'd have thought that they'd all make fine lines to draw.
I do not think that either of those two has been passed in US. For one thing, it is still a democracy - yes, despite the flawed electoral system and massive propaganda, the votes still count.
Which votes counted for stopping the war, or not persecuting wikileaks? Certainly not Obama's, and certainly not the republican. The mythical third party that will eventually, by losing enough, become popular?
Invalid without an option for 'None of the above, nor their system'. Another of those rule of law things.
And thus the "bullies and killers" are also part of that system, and not above it.
Where are the charges for George Bush (and MANY others) then, for faking evidence of weapons and starting an unjust war? Well, maybe they're busy working on all the conspiracy charges on wall-street. No?
To that extent, it is still possible to turn it back, reversing bad decisions without dismantling the whole system. But that only works insofar as the system itself is perceived as legitimate - and that means maintaining rule of law, such as that law may be.
"I don't like the Don, he is capricious and cruel, has killed many, but if we kill him chaos will erupt and many innocents will die."
Might be true but it's not very compelling.
As for your rule of law, governments have killed hundreds of millions of people in the last hundred years - far more than all natural disasters combined. Almost all, completely legal.
Consider also the deep-running anti-government sentiment so popular in US, but for reasons entirely different from yours.
Dunno, I think there's no legitimate form of government above the individual, that's a bit like one of those.
If you advance the argument that disobeying and hindering the unjust government is the way to go, you will find surprisingly many supporters of that idea
I'd imagine most Iraqis would prefer that our bombs never got built because of anti-war strikes, including if necessary the destruction of factories and deaths of guards defending them, rather than be shipped overseas and dropped on them.
This boils down to the fact that definition of "just" is subjective, and the one you have in mind is not particularly popular here.
On the contrary, my type of black and white "murder just one person and you're a murderer" views are incredibly popular, especially in the "red" states. The trick is to not tell them it's about them until they agree.
Now in my opinion that anti-government sentiment itself - even disregarding the aforementioned fringe groups that latch onto it - is in fact far more damaging than any support to war effort and such that going along has.
Any organization damaged by the truth probably wasn't doing much good.
The problem is that too many Americans view taxes much like you described - as a "protection fee" for the government to leave them alone.
They're right though. The fact that they're taken from you regardless of your wishes makes it theft.
Our law doesn't allow such
The best, of course, is to stop using windows
And do what for other applications that you use and which fail in Wine?
Take it with the same compliance you take your proprietary masters' decrees, bitch.
Running Windows 7 means being shafted in many ways like EULAs and reg keys and the apps are no better.
Do you think it ever gets easier to stop using? Yes, you lose access to the proprietary glitz. But otherwise you're shackled in and what access you do have can be revoked in an instant. One threatening patent letter later and suddenly those apps you've bought have been remotely deleted or have had their signatures blocked. Apple and Google have proven they can do this on their phones, and it's pretty obvious Windows and OS X could do the same in mandatory upgrades (like the PS3), so lawsuits forcing them to remotely cripple your system won't be long. But perhaps it won't be apps you really need.
So war and murder is okay as long as you get bridges and hospitals?
War can be necessary ("okay", if you wish) or harmful, it depends on what it is waged for.
Iraq then, invaded over lies.
In any case, not paying taxes is not the way to go about stopping unjust wars.
Continually paying taxes regardless of what the government does isn't going to do anything either, not paying taxes at least slows it down. (If only, as you suggest, because of the total lack of your economic output plus the cost of jailing you - but therein is the civilization you so proudly buy.)
You might as well suicide for the fear that you get conscripted to fight one eventually (given that US maintains the Selective Service registration, it's not unrealistic) - it's about as much logically connected.
People have gone to prison to avoid being drafted and being forced to murder people even if only indirectly.
It's not squandered at all, it's spent very deliberately and efficiently [...]
You give too much credit to US military-industrial complex.
You mistake pork for inefficiency. That's the system working as designed. But that's missing the point.
Or remember B-2 at $2B per item, without much to show for it. There are many similar examples in other areas. Nah, the "best of the best" is mostly propaganda, and in reality it's mostly a fertile grazing ground for enterprises involved in production of various military equipment.
How many B2s do you have? Or, at that, the entire rest of the world. And AWACS and carrier groups, etc.
Their unbeatable attitude is bravado. They'd be saying the same thing regardless of their prowess, like the famous Iraqi propaganda minister. But they are right this time - they do have far better toys (in war-capable numbers) than anyone else.
But yes, even if all they had was pointy sticks:
to build a [REDACTED] collection of killing machines and train the cultists to operate them.
This is the critical part.
Even if we don't directly buy the bombs we support governments that prop up the USA (and others, they're only the biggest) by refusing to call them on their abuses and sharing in the spoils.
I dunno, I don't exactly hide my views on US foreign policy. Aside from that, as I noted in my earlier post, my participation in political process is limited for reasons outside my control.
You may not sit quietly but if you end up paying the protection money, knowing where it'll go, you're still involved.
I don't think we've as much bought civilization as we've exported the barbarism our way of life depends on to foreign countries.
We did? Funny thing, considering that the standard of living in third world countries steadily grew throughout the last century or so.
The war we have though, we manage not to have at home. Or, usually, anywhere a majority of "us" came from.
That makes it palatable, or forgettable perhaps, and thus we don't think of the consequences. Oil is cheap because the USA, generally speaking, takes over the countries that won't sell it cheaply and installs a dictator (or rather, helps one install himself) and the rest of the world sits back and, while they may decry it, will buy the oil.
It's not the USA specifically that's the problem, it's just the current biggest of a class of problems.
Not the least, I suspect, because of all the humanitarian aid and development investments that are directed there. Bombs are not the only article of export, by far.
By dollar, especially if you count the cost of the bombers/infrastructure, they sure are.
But anyways, yes. We do appease our guil
Because they are unreliable, un-economical and lead to starvation. [...] You have to have enough traditional power plants to fully cover your electrical needs on days like that, unless you have want to have a blackout.
You'd only starve if you prioritized aluminum smelters over farming, hospitals, etc. While any loss of generating capacity would hurt - we have expanded to use it of course - this in no way shows that we couldn't survive comfortably on less if we transitioned gradually as prices came to reflect reality.
they just cost more for the amount of electricity they generate. We would not have wind or solar at all were it not for massive government subsidies.
Much like all other power sources. Dams would be uneconomical if the land was purchased on the market and they'd have as many problems with insurance as nuclear does if they were as new. Oil is only cheap because the USA goes to war with any oil-producing nation who doesn't sell it that way, and because the industry has essentially no liability for huge disasters.
No one can produce large scale power profitably using those technologies.
No, nobody can compete against government subsidized sources, especially non-renewable ones, if those sources externalize their environmental and social costs.
And lastly, in the case of some renewables (ethanol), they cause people to starve, destroy the environment and waste more energy. Corn ethanol is generally found to be an energy negative in most studies [...]Corn based ethanol is one of the WORST ideas around, bar none.
Well, bar at least one... The worst idea is government subsidies of industry. Look at what it leads to.
And yet the government massively subsidies it to keep the bad idea going, because they are scared to death to say no to farmer special interests.
Bullshit. The government handed Monsanto their patent nonsense on a silver platter. If they were even slightly responsive to actual farmers that would never happen. What it really is is that government is in bed with big agribusiness and the lobbyists make this very profitable.
The answer is that taxes pay for far more than that, and certainly a lot of what I directly enjoy.
So war and murder is okay as long as you get bridges and hospitals? Happiness for you and yours?
Under the law it doesn't matter how much you gain, or how secure that oil makes you feel, murder is still murder.
It is regrettable that so much is squandered, and it is duty of the citizens of a democratic state to minimize that
It's not squandered at all, it's spent very deliberately and efficiently to build a state of the art collection of killing machines and train the cultists to operate them.
I wish I could help there, but alas there's little I can do with my present status.
I pretty much guarantee we'd suffer less for not paying taxes than the USA's victims do from their bombs. Even if we don't directly buy the bombs we support governments that prop up the USA (and others, they're only the biggest) by refusing to call them on their abuses and sharing in the spoils.
I don't think we've as much bought civilization as we've exported the barbarism our way of life depends on to foreign countries.
In all the times I've been called as a juror (and it happens every year without fail), I've found the current legal system is actually pretty good at this. Do you have experience otherwise?
Yes, everywhere and everyday. People don't understand why some detail isn't covered (perhaps the prosecution knows it'd be unprovable, perhaps it's inadmissible, perhaps the judge is on the take, etc). Because of this the results seem arbitrary and contrived, wrong.
We should stop trying to keep secrets from jury members, it's prone to manipulation and growing more unworkable over time, and switch to a system where we acknowledge people's biases (repeat offender, must be guilty this time as well) and counter them instead of hoping they don't discover the truth. There are already many cases where, for example, the defendant does something that could appear to make them appear guilty (refuse to testify) where this needs to be explained to the jury as their right - not to be taken as a sign of guilt.
Jurors are not entitled to decide matters of law. They can only find a defendant guilty or not guilty based on the instructions they are given, which are based on the law as currently written.
That seems incorrect in the USA. While it is what you're told, juries can find someone guilty and refuse to convict.
But moreover, they'll lie to avoid finding someone guilty, or innocent, if they feel the trial (or previous trials) isn't reasonable. That's certainly against the instructions but all too common.
The "jurors' biases and ignorance," as the GP describes, play no part in any of the social issues you describe.
Bull. That's why so much time and effort is spent weeding out the most obvious biases.
The most obvious bias, and one very structure of the courts encourage, is that the defendant must be guilty because there's a policeman who says so.
To see the truth behind patents we need only look at who lobbies for them; companies that hold patents and make nothing.
If it were helpful for the rest of society (ie, advances the state of the art, enables more production, etc) we'd see clamoring for more patent protection on other people's ideas, to encourage more of these fruitful ideas. Instead, the only people who want patents are those who hope to claim a monopoly on an obvious application of the prior art. Notably absent are the droves of little companies saying things like "this patented technology was so helpful and we'd have never discovered it ourselves based on the academic literature - thanks".
In fact, developers are told not to look at patents for ideas. Patents should be a useful tool, instead they're a minefield we deliberately don't peek at to avoid treble-damages when we inevitably step on one blocking the only reasonable way through a problem.
If we really wanted to reward helpful inventors and developers we'd take all the money wasted on patents - the patent office, federal agents enforcing it, time writing/fixing the laws, the money spent on patent lawyers, etc- and grant it to the people who'd developed the most critical and unobvious (as judged in retrospect, the only real way to know) framework of today's technology. Without making them jump through legal hoops, or screwing them for trivial errors in legalese, either. This would encourage teaching - if your methods made things easier you'd be nominated by everyone who you'd helped. Simultaneous inventors wouldn't be rewarded in a one-or-the-other fashion, but each in direct proportion to how accessible they made their methods and (to some degree) were successful in spreading the word.
But the lobbyists don't want to reward inventors, or spur progress, they're rent seeking.
the issue is circletimessquare who does not respect the techies. instead of educating them, he laughs at them
Fixed it for you, you egotistical dork.
Many people, techies or otherwise, are hostile to learning.. If they come to you with a question they'll be upset it you give them a hint (ie, that they should look it up on their own, from here) instead of step-by-step directions. Similarly, if you can't convince someone of something with absolute proof they'll believe what they saw on TV, and they'll wield their disbelief like a weapon to avoid having to admit that they could look it up and learn something, instead getting pissed off and shouting about agreeing to disagree.
The "Common Man" is usually someone who has abrogated responsibility for their own life and actions anywhere taking responsibility would require reading any instructions. Tech or not, willful ignorance smells the same.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
How's that unjust war in Iraq that you're funding working out? Building civilization with it? Hmmm?
Oh grow up. You're inventing ridiculous extremes to justify not considering how things could, and must, change.
When keeping someone from the news meant stopping them from buying newspapers it might have been practical. Now that almost every electronic device is networkable it's less practical. Moreso, when everything is online it's less reasonable to sequester a jury member - at least for the pittance they receive.
We need to realize that it's not practical to keep people in the dark and start designing trials to counter this. As someone said, let the jurors ask questions and give the defense time to address this. Yes, it does totally change trials, but we need to realize it's a losing battle otherwise, to try to embargo ever-smaller and more-essential technology, from jurors.
Also, if someone would have watched FOX and been influenced by the scare tactics they peddle they'd have already watched FOX and this needs to be addressed You can't just pretend that because they're not being preached to right now that they're free from it. So once again, design a new form of trial where jurors' biases and ignorance (which are, of course, society's biases and ignorance) get addressed. If not we're just ensuring that the FOX watchers won't be happy with the results because they'll seem wrong.
Using the government to force revenue to those particular individuals is not a net gain for society
Exactly! Not financially, or creatively.
We could put those resources into actually rewarding inventors who help society.