Just imagining this is enough to make lose my appetite. Hey, maybe it works after all!
And if someone can't bring themselves to spend some time on an exercise bike, how are they going to make themselves pump out the contents of their stomach? It sure sounds a lot less pleasant than hitting the gym or just going for a walk. I can try to reduce my food intake, and try to make myself exercise. Sometime I'll succeed, sometimes I'll fail, but there's no way I could bring myself to use this device.
Just for the record, then: in your view, those being held as slaves in the US prior to emancipation were not having any rights violated? It was all just fine, because the laws at the time said so?
Too many fuckers running around thinking they have a right to tell everyone what they can do. Why are obsolete Christianity-based laws against
There are plenty of "fuckers" going around doing that based on all sorts of belief systems, be they religions, philosophies, ideologies, or what have you.
gay marriage
Of the countries around the world which recognize same-sex marriage, every single one of them is historically Christian. Note the map here.
You're probably confusing "Baptists" with "Christians" here. I'm not a theology major, but I don't recall anywhere in the Bible where gambling is forbidden. I do know that the official Catholic position is that gambling is fine as long as there's no cheating and as long as you don't do bad things because of the gambling, like letting your kids go hungry because you lost all your money and can't buy groceries. Did a quick search and the Evangelical Lutheran position is "...the Bible does not speak directly to gambling." As to the positions of other denominations, I don't know and I'll let someone else search if they care.
I know the "Christians are trying to spoil my fun!" vibe is strong, but you need to be a little less reflexive about it. Lots of people want to take away your fun. Consider this very secular guy's editorial advocating increased regulation of violent movies.
Also please note that I'm not suggesting my support for fun-restricting laws. A combined casino/brothel where the cocktail waitresses serve cocaine along with the drinks and the jackpot prize includes an AK-47 is just fine with me.
The constitution dictates what the government can and cannot do and the constitution says that the Supreme Court is given the job to interpret the constitution. And the Supreme Court says the government has the right to tax you. Get over it.
The Supreme Court has determined that it is legal for the government to tax me. Whether it has a right to is an entirely-separate question, and you don't seem to be able to grasp that distinction. Allow me to quote the relevant portion of the Declaration of Indendence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Rights do not emanate from government, nor are they subject to its approval or disapproval. Rights pre-exist government. It may pass laws or make court decisions denying the validity of those rights, but that doesn't get rid of them.
To illustrate this distinction with a historical example, consider slavery. Up until the US Civil War, it was legal to own slaves in parts of the United States. This was argued all the way up to the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case in favor of the slaveholders. Slavery was later made illegal by the 13th Amendment (plus some intermediate steps before that). But it was not the case that the slaves had no right to liberty prior to the 13th Amendment, and then suddenly received that right upon its passage. Prior to that their right to liberty was infringed, but still existed. The 13th switched the official government position from approving of and helping with that infringement to outlawing it. That change did not grant the right of liberty to the former slaves -- they had that right all along, simply by virtue of being human. And it did not take away a right from the slaveholders -- they never had the right to own other human beings in the first place, they merely had the government's legal sanction to use the force necessary to do so.
as opposed to "believed to be incorrect." If I comment "1 = 2, and it's true because I believe it to be so" they are materially incorrect. In my tiny opinion that's can be worse than flamebait because it's blatant, probably even willful ignorance presented as naivety - basically the MO of an attention-whore.
If they say "1 = 2" and provide a mathematical proof, that's an entirely different matter, they are not sparking needless debate.
But there's nothing in the post you were referring to (at least, I assume it's what prompted you to desire such an option) that was anywhere near "1=2". If you would have modded that post down as "materially incorrect", that just makes me feel even more strongly that such an option should never exist. "Troll" and "Flamebait" get abused far too much as it is. I've seen far too many posts -- including ones I disagree with -- receiving that. If it weren't for the occasional actual racist post, spam, or the threat of something like Goatse.cx returning, I'd just as soon get rid of negative modding entirely. About a third of the time I see "Flamebait", for instance, the moderator apparently thinks it means "I want to flame this person", not "this person is only saying this to generate flames rather than trying to make a point."
And no I don't want more ID/Creationism debates, but I doubt such an option would stop them.
That would be the "reply to the post and explain why you believe the information is incorrect" mod. Modding down a post makes it less-visible, and that should only happen when the poster is deliberately trying to ruin the discussion, not just because you happen to disagree with them. Otherwise, moderators are reducing the number of viewpoints rather than increasing the quality of debate.
It has the right to tax you, so therefore it does have rights. Consequently, the whole premise for you argument falls apart.
No, it has the ability to tax me. I let the government take taxes from my paycheck for the same reason I'd let a mugger take my wallet if he had a knife to my throat: I'm not in a position where I can safely say "no." But the government has no more right to take my money than the mugger does.
That's not to say that there aren't some things that the government does -- a very, very small subset those things it currently does -- that I'd voluntarily pay to have done. But that's a separate issue from whether it has any right to take things.
The analogy should follow that to wield a gun in public (ex. concealed carry), a license should be required (assuming one believes that all things are equal to a car and that the laws on cars are all spot on). That's also the norm in most places. If anything, this analogy supports concealed carry in more places with well defined and easy to use licensing facilities (ex. NYC).
So again, no, the government has no rights.... well, we can just stop right there:-)
Close, but it would actually be less restrictive than that. A driver's license is required to operate the vehicle on public roads, not to transport it. In the case of a car, that's a distinction without a difference most of the time, but with a gun, it's not. You operate a gun by firing it. Merely carrying it around wouldn't (by this analogy) require a license, just as you wouldn't need a driver's license to carry a car around if your pocket if that were physically possible.
What Krugman is missing, I think, is the distinction between progress in the technical items themselves, vs. finding out what can be done with them, especially finding out what can be done with them once they're ubiquitous. We can't really know until a generation has grown up with them. Those of us here on Slashdot, nerds though we be, aren't steeped in them the way the kids being born now will be, for the very reason that the stuff is special to us. That's not to minimize what we can accomplish with it, but the coming generation of kids will never know what it's like not to have network access, not to have ready access to processing power, not to be constantly in touch with everyone they know. They will be able to find things to do with it that don't occur to us, because the underlying technology will be mundane to them. We've got at least twenty years until this revolution is over.
Consider one example of the "what can be done once a technology is ubiquitous" thing: FedEx. It and its competitors have significantly changed the businesses in the developed world operate, but when it was founded, all the technology that it was based on was well-established -- small jet cargo aircraft and wide geographical coverage of airports that can operate them.
Completely agree about Space 1999 - and embarrassingly I did not realise GA was behind it. What was nice was a certain air of realism, sci-fi that didn't rely on tricks and alien tech to move the story forward. Good writing with the dues ex machina.
Well, except for the "moon blown out of orbit" underlying premise...
I loved the Eagle ships when I watched the show as a kid, but it wasn't until later that I could put my finger on why: they're believable, workable ships. In fact, they look like bigger, more-advanced versions of the actual lunar lander -- strictly functional. They manage to look cool by not looking like they were designed with the intent of looking cool.
I'm just glad I didn't see the Dragon's Domain episode during the initial run. It would given me nightmares for sure. Hell, I've heard people comment that for them, it still does.
If the Founding Fathers had meant "trained" they would have written "trained" instead of "regulated". But they didn't because it's not they they meant.
As someone else has mentioned, the meaning of the word has changed since then. Alexander Hamilton, from Federalist #69, emphasis mine:
"To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises
and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated
militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss."
Hamilton is discussing what he sees as the inadequacy of a militia to defend the country as compared to a professionally-trained standing army, but he indicates explicitly what "well-regulated" means. In his words, acquiring a certain degree of perfection in military exercises and evolutions (he means either "movements" or "development" -- this is pre-Darwin, remember) gives a militia the character of being well-regulated. A well-regulated militia is one whose members know how to march and can shoot straight. "Well-regulated" has everything to do with the militia's competence and absolutely nothing to do with who commands it or decides how it is run during peacetime.
So the meaning of the 2nd Amendment is:
"A militia which knows how to bear arms being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be enfringed."
Incidentally, speaking of incorrectly-used terms: the parent post is not "troll." He's wrong, but he's pretty clearly arguing his side in good faith, not deliberately attempting to degrade the level of discussion.
You look at it as "the real world sucks." I look at it as "college doesn't prepare you for the real world." It doesn't prepare you, because it doesn't expose you to it at all.
In college (at least, when I was there), the focus was entirely on showing you good code, not showing you bad code. This is like running a medical school where the doctors-in-training only see top-form athletes and never get a glimpse of sick people. Beyond lack of experience, a lot of the time the best way to understand why certain standards or principles are good is to see what happens when they're not followed, and you just don't see that in a classroom.
At the risk of drifting into "get off my lawn!" territory, allow me to give an example I experienced.
During my classes ("software engineering principles" or something like that), one of the things we went over was coupling, and why loose coupling was better than tight coupling. Passing parameters is better than using a global variable, which is better than reaching into another module's guts, etc. All very reasonable, and everyone agreed that it made sense. However, nobody, including myself, seemed to give it much weight. Most of us already coded that way, anyway, so it wasn't any big revelation.
A few months later, at a job that involved maintaining and extending a decent-sized (by early 90s standards) application, I had to work with code by a guy who declared a single variable, "s", as an 80-char string, and used that all over the place. Different functions read and wrote to "s" at their whim and without regard for what other code might be doing with it. It was used in place of function parameters, in place of function results, and sometimes just as a temporary variable. Naturally, this caused all sorts of difficult-to-predict bugs. It was when dealing with this crap that a light went on in my head and I realized, "Oh! This is what the prof meant when he said tight coupling was bad!"
Better put all in the hands of the military yes ?
Those same fuck ass holes that wanted to start world war 3 during the Cuban missile crisis ?
And your basis for this opinion is... what? Something other than movies, I hope?
Those same fucktards warmongers that wanted to invade Cuba ?
If you mean the Bay of Pigs, you do know that that was a CIA operation, and that the CIA is a civilian agency, not a military one, right? If you mean the JCS recommendation during the missile crisis, that was their assessment of what it would take to remove the Soviet missiles. When Kennedy asked for their opinions, should they have lied to him and not given him honest analysis about what they thought it would take to ensure no missiles remained in Cuba?
I trust the government much more than I trust even one military.
Then you know very little about how decisions are made, especially the high-level kind that you're referring to. Military personnel are often more cautious than their civilian bosses, because they have a better grasp of the actual capabilities and risks involved. When the generals urge a stronger response than what the civilians are suggesting (as in the Cuban Missile Crisis), it's usually because the civilians have an inflated perception of what the military can do -- in that case, the JCS recommended an invasion because airstrikes alone couldn't ensure the destruction of the missile sites. Do the thing properly, or don't attempt it at all. Go read pretty much any memoir by a US president, vice-president, or secretary of defense (regardless of party) who had a serious military crisis on their watch, and you'll see this when they discuss the decision-making process. Bob Woodward's The Commanders is also insightful on this. It's not quite the same dynamic as PHB vs. techie, but there are strong similarities at times.
Further, military personnel have a range of ideologies, just like civilians do. John Kerry, George McGovern, Jeremiah Wright, and Charles Rangel hardly match the caricature you're painting.
You'd be a fool to think that the Pentagon draws up contingencies just for the sake of it, w/o intentions of really doing it.
I'm not a fool, thank you very much, but that's exactly what they do. When country X does Y, and the president asks the generals what his options are, they're not supposed to respond with "Sorry, Mr. President, we never thought country X would do Y." Generals deal with "what can country X do, and what can we do to country X." Diplomats deal with "what will country X do, and what do we want to do to country X."
You are aware that the US has active invasion plans for The Netherlands?
The Pentagon draws up contingency plans for pretty much every conceivable situation. One of the categorizations when it comes to things military is capabilities vs. intentions. It's the job of the generals think about capabilities and to have a plan ready if a president ever orders them to do something. Whether a president is ever likely to order them to do so, or whether or not a given country is ever likely to become hostile to the US falls under "intentions" and isn't something they're supposed to consider. There were plans for wars against Germany, Japan, France, Britain, and others as early as 1904. There was a sub-plan for a US invasion of Canada, and the Canadians likewise had a plan for invading the US. I'm sure that, for example, the generals in both the British and French defense ministries have plans ready if, some day, the leader across the channel goes nuts -- yet France and Britain have been each others' allies for over a century. (Not counting the Vichy as French for these purposes).
On this specific instance, RMS does seem have a point. I don't see any good reason why a local search for something should trigger an Amazon search. And I do care about my privacy a bit more than the average person, just judging from the amount of personal information many of them voluntarily talk about on their Facebook pages or whatnot. But privacy is not infinitely valuable. Controlling the flow of information takes effort, and depending on the parties and information involved, this can be more effort than it's worth. As a meatspace experiment, next time you go grocery shopping, try to do so without any of the other customers seeing what items you're purchasing. Is it worth the bother?
Mind you, I'm talking about the subject in general. As I said, in this specific case, I think RMS is mostly right, albeit using over-the-top rhetoric. I don't want my local search for "spock.jpg" resulting in Amazon hawking more Star Trek DVDs to me.
You're thinking of the Mustang Ranch. It was seized in a tax fraud case, after which the government auctioned it off but did not run it. A pity that such a funny story isn't true, but maybe someday there'll be a movie based on the urban legend version of events.
It does make me wonder how taxation works in a place like that. I would think that any non-single "customers" would use cash so their wives don't find out, so how could the IRS determine earnings with any accuracy?
So what your saying essentially is.. ehhh, our kids will figure it out.
Yes. We know that they'll eventually be able to -- it's mostly an engineering problem rather than a theoretical science problem. Now, if we weren't using any that power for anything that would benefit them -- scientific and technological advancement, economic growth, building things, being alive and healthy so that said kids will be born in the first place -- I would agree that we were being selfish about it. But I think on balance, the inherited benefits that they will derive from the power being generated will outweigh the costs of disposing of the waste.
If nothing else, just send it off-planet. If two- or three-hundred years (much shorter than Yucca Mountain's planned safety time frame) go by without humans developing a space elevator, mass driver, or similar system for getting lots of stuff into space cheaply and reliably, then we're a hopeless, doomed species anyway, just waiting for a sufficiently-big rock to come calling.
I most certainly do not want an Internet controlled by "all nations." At the very least, I'd want voting restricted to democracies only -- unless the people of a country at least indirectly voted for the country's representative (via electing the government that appointed him/her) to such a body, why in the world should that representative get to vote?
Further, it had better be set up so that for any given aspect of online freedom, the highest common denominator among the member nations prevails, not the lowest. Rather than the body agreeing to a policy and having the member states enforce it, the restriction of any activity would be the least restrictive national law for any given member state. Different countries suck to different degrees on different aspects of speech freedom. I want everyone to be able to say what they damn well please, no matter whose business model that derails, no matter what person, religion, or ethnicity gets offended, no matter what politician's career gets derailed. I want (note that the countries mentioned are just what come to mind at the moment, not claiming objective study of who is worst or best) Sweden's copyright laws, the US's political speech and defamation laws, and Denmark's obscenity laws, not the US's copyright laws, the PRC's political speech laws, Australian defamation laws, France's hate speech laws, and Saudi Arabia's obscenity and blasphemy laws. Under UN auspices, I think we're far more likely to get the latter.
Umm no, you're describing of our friends in Saudi Arabia, not our enemies in Iran.
No, he's being quite accurate in the "pulled off the streets" part, as I believe he's referring to Iran's basiji militias, or at least the subset of them who go out on "morality" patrols to make sure that women are "properly" covered, aren't wearing makeup, aren't walking with unrelated men, etc. You're right in that the standards they enforce are a little less strict than those in Saudi Arabia (just a headscarf being required, rather than a full-body chador), but the basiji are much more likely than their Saudi counterparts (the mutaween) to use violence on the spot. It can be something merely humiliating, like shaving the woman's head if her scarf does not completely cover her hair, or a beating, all the way up to things like pulling out her fingernails with pliers (if she has on nail polish) or throwing acid in her face. I'm certainly not going to praise the mutaween or the Saudi religious laws, but at least there you're more likely to wind up in front of a judge and be able to plead your case.
As far as porn goes, "showing a little bit of nose" isn't porn in Iran, but they definitely do execute people for making porn (either acting in it or being part of the production process).
Incidentally, the only reason for the headscarves vs. chador type of differences are due to the Iranian leadership having to work at stuffing the secularization genie back into the bottle, whereas in Saudi Arabia it never got out -- Iran had an ongoing women's movement since early in the 20th century. It's not through any lack of desire on the mullah's part to have it that way. Even the strongest dictatorship can only roll things back so fast as long as people remember the freedoms that are being suppressed.
You totally ignore the fact that Iran had modern democratic republic before the Shah was installed by the US/British. Everything else since then has been blowback [wikipedia.org] to the detriment of both the Iranians and the west:
That's a common claim, and it may be true to some extent, but it's hardly the primary cause. The mullahs in Iran supported the coup at the time. What really got Khomeini and his ilk upset was the "White Revolution" in 1963, which among other things undercut the power of the clergy (via secularizing the judiciary) and reduced their income from rent-based tithes. This is when Khomeini first gained major prominence, especially the secularization part: "The Ministry of Justice has made clear its opposition to the ordinances of Islam by various measures like the abolition of the requirement that judges be Muslim and male; henceforth, Jews, Christians, and the enemies of Islam and the Muslims are to decide on affairs concerning the honor and person of the Muslims." Mossadeq would almost certainly, if anything, been more offensive to the mullahs in these areas.
The Religious folks thought of Khomeini much as you might think of Bishop Tutu in Africa, someone who happened to be religious who was fighting against injustice. What they didn't realize was that his solution was to make Iran a theocracy.
They found that out rather quickly. I have a family member who voted in the "should Iran be an Islamic Republic or not?" referendum in 1979. Voters were given a two-color ballot, half green (yes) and half red (no). You tore it in half and put the appropriate half in the ballot box -- in full view of pro-Khomeini guys holding rifles. Naturally, this tended to... sway the decisions of people who had intended to vote "no." Especially when the nightly news was regularly showing pictures of folks fresh from the firing squad.
Slashdot Mirror
Just imagining this is enough to make lose my appetite. Hey, maybe it works after all!
And if someone can't bring themselves to spend some time on an exercise bike, how are they going to make themselves pump out the contents of their stomach? It sure sounds a lot less pleasant than hitting the gym or just going for a walk. I can try to reduce my food intake, and try to make myself exercise. Sometime I'll succeed, sometimes I'll fail, but there's no way I could bring myself to use this device.
Just for the record, then: in your view, those being held as slaves in the US prior to emancipation were not having any rights violated? It was all just fine, because the laws at the time said so?
Yes, Microsoft is absent this year, but Apple hasn't been there for ages, so any complaints about Microsoft apply to Apple many times over.
Too many fuckers running around thinking they have a right to tell everyone what they can do. Why are obsolete Christianity-based laws against
There are plenty of "fuckers" going around doing that based on all sorts of belief systems, be they religions, philosophies, ideologies, or what have you.
gay marriage
Of the countries around the world which recognize same-sex marriage, every single one of them is historically Christian. Note the map here.
prostitution
Not quite as overwhelming in this case, but the majority of the places where prostitution is illegal are countries whose primary religion is not Christianity.
gambling
You're probably confusing "Baptists" with "Christians" here. I'm not a theology major, but I don't recall anywhere in the Bible where gambling is forbidden. I do know that the official Catholic position is that gambling is fine as long as there's no cheating and as long as you don't do bad things because of the gambling, like letting your kids go hungry because you lost all your money and can't buy groceries. Did a quick search and the Evangelical Lutheran position is "...the Bible does not speak directly to gambling." As to the positions of other denominations, I don't know and I'll let someone else search if they care.
I know the "Christians are trying to spoil my fun!" vibe is strong, but you need to be a little less reflexive about it. Lots of people want to take away your fun. Consider this very secular guy's editorial advocating increased regulation of violent movies.
Also please note that I'm not suggesting my support for fun-restricting laws. A combined casino/brothel where the cocktail waitresses serve cocaine along with the drinks and the jackpot prize includes an AK-47 is just fine with me.
The constitution dictates what the government can and cannot do and the constitution says that the Supreme Court is given the job to interpret the constitution. And the Supreme Court says the government has the right to tax you. Get over it.
The Supreme Court has determined that it is legal for the government to tax me. Whether it has a right to is an entirely-separate question, and you don't seem to be able to grasp that distinction. Allow me to quote the relevant portion of the Declaration of Indendence:
Rights do not emanate from government, nor are they subject to its approval or disapproval. Rights pre-exist government. It may pass laws or make court decisions denying the validity of those rights, but that doesn't get rid of them.
To illustrate this distinction with a historical example, consider slavery. Up until the US Civil War, it was legal to own slaves in parts of the United States. This was argued all the way up to the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case in favor of the slaveholders. Slavery was later made illegal by the 13th Amendment (plus some intermediate steps before that). But it was not the case that the slaves had no right to liberty prior to the 13th Amendment, and then suddenly received that right upon its passage. Prior to that their right to liberty was infringed, but still existed. The 13th switched the official government position from approving of and helping with that infringement to outlawing it. That change did not grant the right of liberty to the former slaves -- they had that right all along, simply by virtue of being human. And it did not take away a right from the slaveholders -- they never had the right to own other human beings in the first place, they merely had the government's legal sanction to use the force necessary to do so.
as opposed to "believed to be incorrect." If I comment "1 = 2, and it's true because I believe it to be so" they are materially incorrect. In my tiny opinion that's can be worse than flamebait because it's blatant, probably even willful ignorance presented as naivety - basically the MO of an attention-whore.
If they say "1 = 2" and provide a mathematical proof, that's an entirely different matter, they are not sparking needless debate.
But there's nothing in the post you were referring to (at least, I assume it's what prompted you to desire such an option) that was anywhere near "1=2". If you would have modded that post down as "materially incorrect", that just makes me feel even more strongly that such an option should never exist. "Troll" and "Flamebait" get abused far too much as it is. I've seen far too many posts -- including ones I disagree with -- receiving that. If it weren't for the occasional actual racist post, spam, or the threat of something like Goatse.cx returning, I'd just as soon get rid of negative modding entirely. About a third of the time I see "Flamebait", for instance, the moderator apparently thinks it means "I want to flame this person", not "this person is only saying this to generate flames rather than trying to make a point."
And no I don't want more ID/Creationism debates, but I doubt such an option would stop them.
That would be the "reply to the post and explain why you believe the information is incorrect" mod. Modding down a post makes it less-visible, and that should only happen when the poster is deliberately trying to ruin the discussion, not just because you happen to disagree with them. Otherwise, moderators are reducing the number of viewpoints rather than increasing the quality of debate.
It has the right to tax you, so therefore it does have rights. Consequently, the whole premise for you argument falls apart.
No, it has the ability to tax me. I let the government take taxes from my paycheck for the same reason I'd let a mugger take my wallet if he had a knife to my throat: I'm not in a position where I can safely say "no." But the government has no more right to take my money than the mugger does.
That's not to say that there aren't some things that the government does -- a very, very small subset those things it currently does -- that I'd voluntarily pay to have done. But that's a separate issue from whether it has any right to take things.
The analogy should follow that to wield a gun in public (ex. concealed carry), a license should be required (assuming one believes that all things are equal to a car and that the laws on cars are all spot on). That's also the norm in most places. If anything, this analogy supports concealed carry in more places with well defined and easy to use licensing facilities (ex. NYC).
So again, no, the government has no rights.... well, we can just stop right there :-)
Close, but it would actually be less restrictive than that. A driver's license is required to operate the vehicle on public roads, not to transport it. In the case of a car, that's a distinction without a difference most of the time, but with a gun, it's not. You operate a gun by firing it. Merely carrying it around wouldn't (by this analogy) require a license, just as you wouldn't need a driver's license to carry a car around if your pocket if that were physically possible.
What Krugman is missing, I think, is the distinction between progress in the technical items themselves, vs. finding out what can be done with them, especially finding out what can be done with them once they're ubiquitous. We can't really know until a generation has grown up with them. Those of us here on Slashdot, nerds though we be, aren't steeped in them the way the kids being born now will be, for the very reason that the stuff is special to us. That's not to minimize what we can accomplish with it, but the coming generation of kids will never know what it's like not to have network access, not to have ready access to processing power, not to be constantly in touch with everyone they know. They will be able to find things to do with it that don't occur to us, because the underlying technology will be mundane to them. We've got at least twenty years until this revolution is over.
Consider one example of the "what can be done once a technology is ubiquitous" thing: FedEx. It and its competitors have significantly changed the businesses in the developed world operate, but when it was founded, all the technology that it was based on was well-established -- small jet cargo aircraft and wide geographical coverage of airports that can operate them.
Completely agree about Space 1999 - and embarrassingly I did not realise GA was behind it. What was nice was a certain air of realism, sci-fi that didn't rely on tricks and alien tech to move the story forward. Good writing with the dues ex machina.
Well, except for the "moon blown out of orbit" underlying premise...
I loved the Eagle ships when I watched the show as a kid, but it wasn't until later that I could put my finger on why: they're believable, workable ships. In fact, they look like bigger, more-advanced versions of the actual lunar lander -- strictly functional. They manage to look cool by not looking like they were designed with the intent of looking cool.
I'm just glad I didn't see the Dragon's Domain episode during the initial run. It would given me nightmares for sure. Hell, I've heard people comment that for them, it still does.
Regulated != Trained.
If the Founding Fathers had meant "trained" they would have written "trained" instead of "regulated". But they didn't because it's not they they meant.
As someone else has mentioned, the meaning of the word has changed since then. Alexander Hamilton, from Federalist #69, emphasis mine:
Hamilton is discussing what he sees as the inadequacy of a militia to defend the country as compared to a professionally-trained standing army, but he indicates explicitly what "well-regulated" means. In his words, acquiring a certain degree of perfection in military exercises and evolutions (he means either "movements" or "development" -- this is pre-Darwin, remember) gives a militia the character of being well-regulated. A well-regulated militia is one whose members know how to march and can shoot straight. "Well-regulated" has everything to do with the militia's competence and absolutely nothing to do with who commands it or decides how it is run during peacetime.
So the meaning of the 2nd Amendment is:
"A militia which knows how to bear arms being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be enfringed."
Incidentally, speaking of incorrectly-used terms: the parent post is not "troll." He's wrong, but he's pretty clearly arguing his side in good faith, not deliberately attempting to degrade the level of discussion.
You look at it as "the real world sucks." I look at it as "college doesn't prepare you for the real world." It doesn't prepare you, because it doesn't expose you to it at all.
In college (at least, when I was there), the focus was entirely on showing you good code, not showing you bad code. This is like running a medical school where the doctors-in-training only see top-form athletes and never get a glimpse of sick people. Beyond lack of experience, a lot of the time the best way to understand why certain standards or principles are good is to see what happens when they're not followed, and you just don't see that in a classroom.
At the risk of drifting into "get off my lawn!" territory, allow me to give an example I experienced.
During my classes ("software engineering principles" or something like that), one of the things we went over was coupling, and why loose coupling was better than tight coupling. Passing parameters is better than using a global variable, which is better than reaching into another module's guts, etc. All very reasonable, and everyone agreed that it made sense. However, nobody, including myself, seemed to give it much weight. Most of us already coded that way, anyway, so it wasn't any big revelation.
A few months later, at a job that involved maintaining and extending a decent-sized (by early 90s standards) application, I had to work with code by a guy who declared a single variable, "s", as an 80-char string, and used that all over the place. Different functions read and wrote to "s" at their whim and without regard for what other code might be doing with it. It was used in place of function parameters, in place of function results, and sometimes just as a temporary variable. Naturally, this caused all sorts of difficult-to-predict bugs. It was when dealing with this crap that a light went on in my head and I realized, "Oh! This is what the prof meant when he said tight coupling was bad!"
Better put all in the hands of the military yes ? Those same fuck ass holes that wanted to start world war 3 during the Cuban missile crisis ?
And your basis for this opinion is... what? Something other than movies, I hope?
Those same fucktards warmongers that wanted to invade Cuba ?
If you mean the Bay of Pigs, you do know that that was a CIA operation, and that the CIA is a civilian agency, not a military one, right? If you mean the JCS recommendation during the missile crisis, that was their assessment of what it would take to remove the Soviet missiles. When Kennedy asked for their opinions, should they have lied to him and not given him honest analysis about what they thought it would take to ensure no missiles remained in Cuba?
I trust the government much more than I trust even one military.
Then you know very little about how decisions are made, especially the high-level kind that you're referring to. Military personnel are often more cautious than their civilian bosses, because they have a better grasp of the actual capabilities and risks involved. When the generals urge a stronger response than what the civilians are suggesting (as in the Cuban Missile Crisis), it's usually because the civilians have an inflated perception of what the military can do -- in that case, the JCS recommended an invasion because airstrikes alone couldn't ensure the destruction of the missile sites. Do the thing properly, or don't attempt it at all. Go read pretty much any memoir by a US president, vice-president, or secretary of defense (regardless of party) who had a serious military crisis on their watch, and you'll see this when they discuss the decision-making process. Bob Woodward's The Commanders is also insightful on this. It's not quite the same dynamic as PHB vs. techie, but there are strong similarities at times.
Further, military personnel have a range of ideologies, just like civilians do. John Kerry, George McGovern, Jeremiah Wright, and Charles Rangel hardly match the caricature you're painting.
You'd be a fool to think that the Pentagon draws up contingencies just for the sake of it, w/o intentions of really doing it.
I'm not a fool, thank you very much, but that's exactly what they do. When country X does Y, and the president asks the generals what his options are, they're not supposed to respond with "Sorry, Mr. President, we never thought country X would do Y." Generals deal with "what can country X do, and what can we do to country X." Diplomats deal with "what will country X do, and what do we want to do to country X."
You are aware that the US has active invasion plans for The Netherlands?
The Pentagon draws up contingency plans for pretty much every conceivable situation. One of the categorizations when it comes to things military is capabilities vs. intentions. It's the job of the generals think about capabilities and to have a plan ready if a president ever orders them to do something. Whether a president is ever likely to order them to do so, or whether or not a given country is ever likely to become hostile to the US falls under "intentions" and isn't something they're supposed to consider. There were plans for wars against Germany, Japan, France, Britain, and others as early as 1904. There was a sub-plan for a US invasion of Canada, and the Canadians likewise had a plan for invading the US. I'm sure that, for example, the generals in both the British and French defense ministries have plans ready if, some day, the leader across the channel goes nuts -- yet France and Britain have been each others' allies for over a century. (Not counting the Vichy as French for these purposes).
On this specific instance, RMS does seem have a point. I don't see any good reason why a local search for something should trigger an Amazon search. And I do care about my privacy a bit more than the average person, just judging from the amount of personal information many of them voluntarily talk about on their Facebook pages or whatnot. But privacy is not infinitely valuable. Controlling the flow of information takes effort, and depending on the parties and information involved, this can be more effort than it's worth. As a meatspace experiment, next time you go grocery shopping, try to do so without any of the other customers seeing what items you're purchasing. Is it worth the bother?
Mind you, I'm talking about the subject in general. As I said, in this specific case, I think RMS is mostly right, albeit using over-the-top rhetoric. I don't want my local search for "spock.jpg" resulting in Amazon hawking more Star Trek DVDs to me.
You're thinking of the Mustang Ranch. It was seized in a tax fraud case, after which the government auctioned it off but did not run it. A pity that such a funny story isn't true, but maybe someday there'll be a movie based on the urban legend version of events.
It does make me wonder how taxation works in a place like that. I would think that any non-single "customers" would use cash so their wives don't find out, so how could the IRS determine earnings with any accuracy?
So what your saying essentially is.. ehhh, our kids will figure it out.
Yes. We know that they'll eventually be able to -- it's mostly an engineering problem rather than a theoretical science problem. Now, if we weren't using any that power for anything that would benefit them -- scientific and technological advancement, economic growth, building things, being alive and healthy so that said kids will be born in the first place -- I would agree that we were being selfish about it. But I think on balance, the inherited benefits that they will derive from the power being generated will outweigh the costs of disposing of the waste.
If nothing else, just send it off-planet. If two- or three-hundred years (much shorter than Yucca Mountain's planned safety time frame) go by without humans developing a space elevator, mass driver, or similar system for getting lots of stuff into space cheaply and reliably, then we're a hopeless, doomed species anyway, just waiting for a sufficiently-big rock to come calling.
You forgot Reno and prostitution.
He wants to get rid of that, too. Well, prostitution, anyway. I don't think he wants to get rid of Reno.
I most certainly do not want an Internet controlled by "all nations." At the very least, I'd want voting restricted to democracies only -- unless the people of a country at least indirectly voted for the country's representative (via electing the government that appointed him/her) to such a body, why in the world should that representative get to vote?
Further, it had better be set up so that for any given aspect of online freedom, the highest common denominator among the member nations prevails, not the lowest. Rather than the body agreeing to a policy and having the member states enforce it, the restriction of any activity would be the least restrictive national law for any given member state. Different countries suck to different degrees on different aspects of speech freedom. I want everyone to be able to say what they damn well please, no matter whose business model that derails, no matter what person, religion, or ethnicity gets offended, no matter what politician's career gets derailed. I want (note that the countries mentioned are just what come to mind at the moment, not claiming objective study of who is worst or best) Sweden's copyright laws, the US's political speech and defamation laws, and Denmark's obscenity laws, not the US's copyright laws, the PRC's political speech laws, Australian defamation laws, France's hate speech laws, and Saudi Arabia's obscenity and blasphemy laws. Under UN auspices, I think we're far more likely to get the latter.
Umm no, you're describing of our friends in Saudi Arabia, not our enemies in Iran.
No, he's being quite accurate in the "pulled off the streets" part, as I believe he's referring to Iran's basiji militias, or at least the subset of them who go out on "morality" patrols to make sure that women are "properly" covered, aren't wearing makeup, aren't walking with unrelated men, etc. You're right in that the standards they enforce are a little less strict than those in Saudi Arabia (just a headscarf being required, rather than a full-body chador), but the basiji are much more likely than their Saudi counterparts (the mutaween) to use violence on the spot. It can be something merely humiliating, like shaving the woman's head if her scarf does not completely cover her hair, or a beating, all the way up to things like pulling out her fingernails with pliers (if she has on nail polish) or throwing acid in her face. I'm certainly not going to praise the mutaween or the Saudi religious laws, but at least there you're more likely to wind up in front of a judge and be able to plead your case.
As far as porn goes, "showing a little bit of nose" isn't porn in Iran, but they definitely do execute people for making porn (either acting in it or being part of the production process).
Incidentally, the only reason for the headscarves vs. chador type of differences are due to the Iranian leadership having to work at stuffing the secularization genie back into the bottle, whereas in Saudi Arabia it never got out -- Iran had an ongoing women's movement since early in the 20th century. It's not through any lack of desire on the mullah's part to have it that way. Even the strongest dictatorship can only roll things back so fast as long as people remember the freedoms that are being suppressed.
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"They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards. 'The Irish of Asia.'" -- P. J. O'Rourke
Mind you, P. J. is of Irish extraction, so he meant that as a mix of compliment and self-deprecation.
You totally ignore the fact that Iran had modern democratic republic before the Shah was installed by the US/British. Everything else since then has been blowback [wikipedia.org] to the detriment of both the Iranians and the west:
That's a common claim, and it may be true to some extent, but it's hardly the primary cause. The mullahs in Iran supported the coup at the time. What really got Khomeini and his ilk upset was the "White Revolution" in 1963, which among other things undercut the power of the clergy (via secularizing the judiciary) and reduced their income from rent-based tithes. This is when Khomeini first gained major prominence, especially the secularization part: "The Ministry of Justice has made clear its opposition to the ordinances of Islam by various measures like the abolition of the requirement that judges be Muslim and male; henceforth, Jews, Christians, and the enemies of Islam and the Muslims are to decide on affairs concerning the honor and person of the Muslims." Mossadeq would almost certainly, if anything, been more offensive to the mullahs in these areas.
The Religious folks thought of Khomeini much as you might think of Bishop Tutu in Africa, someone who happened to be religious who was fighting against injustice. What they didn't realize was that his solution was to make Iran a theocracy.
They found that out rather quickly. I have a family member who voted in the "should Iran be an Islamic Republic or not?" referendum in 1979. Voters were given a two-color ballot, half green (yes) and half red (no). You tore it in half and put the appropriate half in the ballot box -- in full view of pro-Khomeini guys holding rifles. Naturally, this tended to... sway the decisions of people who had intended to vote "no." Especially when the nightly news was regularly showing pictures of folks fresh from the firing squad.