because it's their product, and, therefore, their decision.
As long as they don't sell it. Once they sold their products to millions of user, they are also responsible for that what they are selling has no built-in secrets what so ever.
NVIDIA sells hardware. That's one market. NVIDIA distribute software. That's an other. Not releasing the information about their hardware creates a situation where NVIDIA (an the rest of the hardware market virtually) is abusing its market leading position on one market, to sniffle the other. All this because of contracts all around between Microsoft, the gaming industry and so on. For fuck sake, that's my fucking video card, I'd like to know how to use it. I didn't by with a computer, and I could use it in a completely different architecture. No, they narrow the market choices, to control not the product, but the customers, so they can get juicy extra money through anti-competition deals from software companies.
Just to let you know, there's no such thing as human nature, hence competing can't be a part of our nature. On the other hand, there's an natural pressure on every living being is to become more successful in adaptation and that is at the root cause of competing in nature, including humans. But as humans, we tend to be more subtle than this. We recognize that it is not only our genetic heritage that must survive, at least not only on personal level, but our groups, our nations, and our species as such for being successful. In fact, we know already, that unlike many other living being, we can consciously prepare to expand our access to natural resources, and we could even reach the state (though it can't be permanent) where we don't need to compete over natural resources because we can get past of scarcity and keep expanding with the rate of our biological expansion.
On this basis, we are able to cooperate, and we recognize that it is more efficient on the long run, than competing, because competing means too much destruction and too much redundancies. This forced liberal ideology of "economic competition is always good" goes against any rational sense.
Not sure why were you downmodded, coz you have definitely have a point. If the flight-time was that much of consideration, the Concorde wouldn't be only one on the market, and would have been replaced right away by some rival. I'm fairly sceptical with the price of a suborbital flight compared to a jet-engine powered aircraft, like Concorde was. It makes more sense to run aircrafts with hybrid jet propulsion than heavy boosters for human space flights if the goal is only terrestrial transport.
1. "Nasa is not a provider of real jobs" -> Flame bait. Presenting a highly debatable statement, like this needs argument. You know, extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence. Now, he did not provide a tiny bit of argument here, so he is clearly ideological troll. Since NASA do have products, somebody has to work there, thus NASA provides jobs where people do real work.
2. "Especially during times where many tax-payers are feeling the impact of the economic crisis". Well, there's already a false presumption when somebody talks about "tax-payers" in general. There's no general interest between citizens, tax-payers or whatever. Some tax-payers want to disarm the enormous offensive capacity of the USA, and some want to invest even more money in to it. The military budget is magnitude greater than the NASA budget all together, and remember that NASA isn't only works on space missions, but there are other aeronautical, technological projects running along with the space tech. NASA had its budgets slashed since the space race. The military spending however... you know the money that governments invest in order to spy on, and kill other people, and destroy their stuff. Any space agency could do miracles with even the half of that money. So much for the crisis. Not to mention the bailout of banks, and other stupid shit.
If you ask me, I don't refer to China as a communist place (note that being a communist country is a contradiction), but as a state-capitalist country, meaning that the state is the major owner of the national resources and therefore the biggest capitalist of them all. Never the less, you can see how the Chinese capitalism is compatible with the "Western" version of it, given that China is bailing out the EU, also developed private industry and so on.
Capital can be concentrated or highly distributed, but as long as the society runs on the principles of market available property (public or private does not matter, since if nobody else, Chinese government can sell national assets), on the internal mechanism of investment, exploitation and market valorization, than we're still talking about the roughly the same social organisation, that is, capitalism.
Monopolization is a natural process within capitalism, so even the so called free markets lasts only as long as the state power regulates the economy (anti-trust laws, anyone?). But as political and economical power always tend to merge because people with considerable wealth are commanding over larger amount of economy, hence they rule over larger proportion of people, directly or indirectly, the state is always central to the capitalist system, either in the framework of the western style indirect market manipulation, or with being in charge directly over the economy, like in China. These are different politico-economic management styles, not entirely opposite social organisations. Monopolization can take charge through economic power, or political. But the end-result is the same. As an anecdotal side note, I'm from a country, which was considered as socialist/communist for 40 years, until 22 years ago. I've seen both management styles, through the transition and now living in the west, and I have to tell you, that the ideological differences are just rather covering up the converging features of the two political and economical management, than actually creating differences on a social level.
Let me tell you that the real deal here, that the only profit incentive for the private space industry, other than launching satellites to Earth orbit depends on government money. So, at the end of the day, this is a government founded market, if the govt pulls the plug on space exploration, the space industry with heavy launchers would disappear in a minute all together. Given the current attitudes to space exploration, there's no new profit incentive rising, and without any ground breaking new scientific or engineering discovery in space travel, I don't see how why would any govt finance a Mars expedition at all.
I find this astronaut, cosmonaut and taikonaut so embarrassing for fuck sake. It's the same fucking thing. A person is space (or anywhere for that matter) isn't defined by the nationality but what she/he does and in what quality.
Communism:
* No capital (private, or state) -> Russia has state, has private capital. -> Russia isn't communist.
* No market (state planned or unregulated) -> Russia has a partially regulated market as most of modern capitalist countries, including the USA. -> Russia isn't communist.
* Private property (under private or institutional control) -> Russia has all the protection for private property, the right to buy, the right to sell, with the obvious exception (as in market regulation). Russia isn't communist.
* Wage work -> Vast majority of people in Russia are working for wage, for a minority that owns all the means of production (capitalist). -> Russia is definitely capitalist.
* Government and the state exist: No capital and private property could exist without a central (national) enforcement. -> Russia has a strong, nationalistic, government which upholds a law for the rich, bash the poor. In Russia there's also a widespread, highly organized criminal secondary rule, for the same reason.
* Capitalists are making profit, while the working class is exploited. -> While this is true all over the world, in Russia, due to the corruption of the state, many health and safety regulation is circumvented, and unions are threatened by criminal organizations, resulting one of the most unregulated capitalism in the world. -> Russia isn't just capitalist, but the social consequences of barely regulated exploitation are devastating.
No, what I suggested that relying on an iPad is was foolish in the first place. While I absolutely agree with the great-grandparent post about the patent system, which I find disgusting, but there are other reasons why using an iPad was a bad decision. It's a fragile electronic device, which could perhaps fit just fine to an adult, but a 4 year old its too fragile. Too expensive if it needs replacement. The battery life is limiting and yes, there are situations when a person can not charge it, even in 2012. So I don't believe that these parents made the best choice for their child and it has nothing to do with Apple and the software patent bullshit.
On the other hand, the moral of the story, that don't trust in propriety software environments perfectly adds up what I said before. Even with the best intention from these parents (I doubt however, that the iPad bit was not influenced by the usual consumer craze for trendy gadgets, at least in part, but I don't blame the parents for that, it's a fact of life, that must be changed IMHO), they did not make a proper assessment of their choices before they introduced the iPad and the app to their child.
I don't know, if I was the parent of a kid with this condition, than it would not be an iPad app that I would use. Colourful buttons, cards, knocking, stuff like that. I don't think it is a story at all. Spend hundreds of dollars on such a device and an expensive software is completely out of my understanding. There are cheaper and apparently more sufficient methods for children with such a disabilities.
As for Apple, well, that's what you get from such a constrained software environment. If they would have the source code they could use an other device and make their own build. Or their friendly nerdy neighbour.
This is a non-story, just re-iterating the "think of the children" with some patent controversies.
So then what? We reached the peak-people? You suggest that we should not develop new technologies because they are more efficient ones and thus bring about the apocalypse? Wouldn't be the logical thing to find a territory to grow further? This argument that the "planet can't support it" drives me mad, because it lacks any backing (did you ask the fucking planet, or what? Calculations based on current technology is useless, because than you would just re-iterate what people said in the 19th century: the planet can not support 1 billion. now we're 7 billion and obviously the apocalypse isn't here. The population grow because we have the sufficient technology to be a successful race!!!), it is completely ideological (doom-gloom, bring about a new state of emergency) and offers no perspective of our future. Stop growing. Stop developing. Stop making children. Stop smoking. Stop eating animals. Stop eating plants. Stop breathing because you make greenhouse gases.
And who is that brain-dead who mods up an obvious troll, seriously?
That's true, but it takes a long time and a lot of money to build up an infrastructure like this on the Moon or on orbit. Building living compartments, science labs, factories, rail guns on the Moon probably will take decades up to a hundred years or so, given that we start right now with this goal in mind.
So far no nation can put enough resources in to space exploration let alone space colonization. Hopefully it will change soon...
I thought you can not rob a bank, with or without baclava and that is the point. The bank can demand, being on private property, that I should be identifiable. If I'm not, my entranced would be refused. Not to mention, that in some customs women cover their faces entirely, even when they go the bank.
So, covering our faces supposed to be a basic right. Now when they start with the baclava, it turns out that the "democratic" nature of some countries can be easily override by policing/security reasons, such as the ban on face covers on public demonstrations on public property. Your example is better than you originally thought, I guess. Now there's a tendency to deny any anonymity of citizens, in the name of security, moral. That way lies the complete dictatorship.
In this same way, even countries like China have freedom of speech. After all, people are only punished for the consequences of their speech.
Nope, you miss the point of free speech. The point is that each citizen has the right to express their opinion in any public forum. In China, people don't have that right. Don't mix up things with the consequences. While somebody can be persecuted for telling a lie, nobody is allowed to restrict people from speaking publicly just because they may lie. That's the freedom of speech.
You can make a porn movie about rape without actually commit a rape. A lot of people have fantasies about rape so jerking off on such a material make them happy. And no one get hurt. Would you arrest the people for watching it?
Same goes for any graphical depiction including child pornography. As long as nobody gets hurt, nobody approach any child sexually, or any other way abusively, there's no case for persecuting and harassing people about their fantasies.
If you do, you basically violate one of the most basic freedom: the freedom of thought, the freedom of imagination. Police people thoughts and you will soon find that you don't want to live in such a society.
Precisely. Or shall we start arrest people for torturing animals and people in books, comics and films, while during the production there were no dogs shot, neither people decapitated.
"Obscene" depictions of children, even if drawn, is wrong and has no place in a civilized country.
Bollocks. In a civilized country people should not interfere in other people business unless they actually did something that hurts other people freedom. In some countries, the obscene depiction of Muhammed is forbidden and yet we don't agree on persecution of caricaturist on this one. There are plenty of movies, books, paintings where children are abused, not just sexually, but eaten alive. Slippery slope my friend...
Criminal laws and penalties do not stop anything as we could learn from the drug business. They just simply create an off-the-grid infrastructure, and depending of the popularity of the products it will grow to a bunch of alternative grids by themselves. Trading marijuana is illegal in many countries, however it is sometimes easier to get pot than to send a postcard to anyone.
DRM is making license agreement about the direction of gravity. No matter, what kind of technique you use for protecting your content, your content will be exposed at the moment of use by one user, and hence it will be recorded and distributed. Cracking DRM schemes is banal: in case of books you can make just a simple screenshot or a camera shot if the device is locked. In case of games it's a bit trickier, but only bit, because the physical device is at hand thus can be messed with. But sooner or later customers will recognize at large that the price they have to pay for content has almost nothing to do with compensating the author of the content but about protecting the content from the customer. The more complicated the DRM scheme the more it costs.
And as it is already a growing trend to realise, that over all cost information tend to the limit of its distribution, and that is rapidly falling, more and more content makers will realise, that they have a bigger audience if they don't place their stuff under heavily restricted access (I mean, it's not underground, we are talking about Cory Doctorow and alikes). This is a fight which will eventually eliminate any commercial content provider. It's the tale of evolution really.
You are right, but then it would make sense that Universities, instead of costing the price of a family house, would transform to a professional social network, where individuals with different skills could organize different study groups, and academic reference would be the list of workgroups with their freely available, freely usable published results, depending on the field.
It is insane to see that while the cost of distributing information is rapidly falling, the costs of education is steadily growing.
Sorry, but the population is currently between 2 and 10 (or 20) times what it should be for long term stability.
How did you come up with these numbers? I mean, there's the practical evidence of sustaining around 7 billion people out there, as that is the case right now. At the moment, the long term stability is threatened by many things, including the social distribution of wealth, the inadequate education, inadequate political system, but not the actual number of people on this planet. The current social distribution of wealth creates a huge gap between the different geological, social divisions of society, which ultimately ends up in political instability, devastation, wars. The educational gap within the human race causing religious fanaticism, political instability and wars, exclusion from social wealth. One can go on...
The "sustainable" size of population is greatly dependent on the methods we are sustaining ourselves. That means, as technology advances, and the technology is available for larger population, the capacity for more individuals increases. With a better distribution of education, wealth, technology, the more people there are, the better we advance: more thinking brain -> more advances -> more place to people. Now, there are limits within a closed eco-system, however humans are getting better and better to create new eco-systems which creates the strong possibility to spread further than this little planet. But there's plenty of space, water and energy on this planet, and we're just barely touching the surface of our planet. Even without any sci-fi level space colonization, there's a large volume of material with plenty of energy from the sun and within the core of the planet to incorporate in to our eco-system.
I already mentioned the problem with being on the course of dying out as a species, namely the ageing population problem which can be very much understood if one have a look at the last 40 years of the developed world. The tensions and problems with the decreasing number of active minds and hands can lead easily to a large scale social disaster too, talking about long term stability.
damaging the planet
The language means a lot in these matters. People don't damage the planet. We are of the planet. The very substance what you and I made of is the planet, just as much as the CO2, or the shit that we release. We perhaps damage our own chances of survival, but the good thing is, that people aren't just numbers, we are working and thinking beings, who can think better solutions.
And the resistance to them is not just because the people don't trust new things, it's because they don't trust the purveyors of the "new things", and with very good reason.
I happen to know the usual suspects of many similar protest movement as I'm an anarchist and we usually get pestered with "eco-anarchists", "deep-ecologist", "third-worldist" and other people who give the activist body behind such a movements. While I would agree about the "purveyors" of GMO and alike technologies, I also noticed that the eco-folks also tend to react without any consideration of the technology it self, just out of the perceived moral right. The campaigns are running under the banner of anti-GMO, not the actually technology that they are against. As with many political issues, the people who are pushing against the GMO are usually ignorant to the subject to the point, that it is antagonized completely. GMO is bad, organic is good. And this kind of attitude is worse than the profit seeking motive of particular corporations, because it gives carte blanche against anything under the sun, that has gene modification without any attempt of understanding the real possibilities.
The truth it, taxes aren't "passed on to" anyone. They are simply extracted from the economy. Both companies and physical persons are actors in that economy, so both pay.
Even better, they aren't extracted from the economy at all. It is spent within the economy, for the wages of public worker, who'll spend the money the economy, for equipment that is made in the economy. Taxation (at their best) just simply transfers the wealth. For better or worse.
We don't have manned missions at the moment, only a single lab on LEO. So there's nothing to stop either. You need robotic missions first and than crewed ones to the point of establishing an relatively autonomous outpost.
With 1/6th gravity of the Earth with no atmosphere makes the moon more ideal gravity well than the Earth for launching shit to space.
You can only work out how to support human life in space if you, with the preliminary checks and experiments on other living beings, send humans in to space and, even more importantly, to other celestial objects. The Moon is the closest of such an object, so it makes sense to start right their.
Slashdot Mirror
because it's their product, and, therefore, their decision.
As long as they don't sell it. Once they sold their products to millions of user, they are also responsible for that what they are selling has no built-in secrets what so ever.
NVIDIA sells hardware. That's one market. NVIDIA distribute software. That's an other. Not releasing the information about their hardware creates a situation where NVIDIA (an the rest of the hardware market virtually) is abusing its market leading position on one market, to sniffle the other. All this because of contracts all around between Microsoft, the gaming industry and so on. For fuck sake, that's my fucking video card, I'd like to know how to use it. I didn't by with a computer, and I could use it in a completely different architecture. No, they narrow the market choices, to control not the product, but the customers, so they can get juicy extra money through anti-competition deals from software companies.
Just to let you know, there's no such thing as human nature, hence competing can't be a part of our nature. On the other hand, there's an natural pressure on every living being is to become more successful in adaptation and that is at the root cause of competing in nature, including humans. But as humans, we tend to be more subtle than this. We recognize that it is not only our genetic heritage that must survive, at least not only on personal level, but our groups, our nations, and our species as such for being successful. In fact, we know already, that unlike many other living being, we can consciously prepare to expand our access to natural resources, and we could even reach the state (though it can't be permanent) where we don't need to compete over natural resources because we can get past of scarcity and keep expanding with the rate of our biological expansion.
On this basis, we are able to cooperate, and we recognize that it is more efficient on the long run, than competing, because competing means too much destruction and too much redundancies. This forced liberal ideology of "economic competition is always good" goes against any rational sense.
Not sure why were you downmodded, coz you have definitely have a point. If the flight-time was that much of consideration, the Concorde wouldn't be only one on the market, and would have been replaced right away by some rival. I'm fairly sceptical with the price of a suborbital flight compared to a jet-engine powered aircraft, like Concorde was. It makes more sense to run aircrafts with hybrid jet propulsion than heavy boosters for human space flights if the goal is only terrestrial transport.
1. "Nasa is not a provider of real jobs" -> Flame bait. Presenting a highly debatable statement, like this needs argument. You know, extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence. Now, he did not provide a tiny bit of argument here, so he is clearly ideological troll. Since NASA do have products, somebody has to work there, thus NASA provides jobs where people do real work.
2. "Especially during times where many tax-payers are feeling the impact of the economic crisis". Well, there's already a false presumption when somebody talks about "tax-payers" in general. There's no general interest between citizens, tax-payers or whatever. Some tax-payers want to disarm the enormous offensive capacity of the USA, and some want to invest even more money in to it. The military budget is magnitude greater than the NASA budget all together, and remember that NASA isn't only works on space missions, but there are other aeronautical, technological projects running along with the space tech. NASA had its budgets slashed since the space race. The military spending however... you know the money that governments invest in order to spy on, and kill other people, and destroy their stuff. Any space agency could do miracles with even the half of that money. So much for the crisis. Not to mention the bailout of banks, and other stupid shit.
If you ask me, I don't refer to China as a communist place (note that being a communist country is a contradiction), but as a state-capitalist country, meaning that the state is the major owner of the national resources and therefore the biggest capitalist of them all. Never the less, you can see how the Chinese capitalism is compatible with the "Western" version of it, given that China is bailing out the EU, also developed private industry and so on.
Capital can be concentrated or highly distributed, but as long as the society runs on the principles of market available property (public or private does not matter, since if nobody else, Chinese government can sell national assets), on the internal mechanism of investment, exploitation and market valorization, than we're still talking about the roughly the same social organisation, that is, capitalism.
Monopolization is a natural process within capitalism, so even the so called free markets lasts only as long as the state power regulates the economy (anti-trust laws, anyone?). But as political and economical power always tend to merge because people with considerable wealth are commanding over larger amount of economy, hence they rule over larger proportion of people, directly or indirectly, the state is always central to the capitalist system, either in the framework of the western style indirect market manipulation, or with being in charge directly over the economy, like in China. These are different politico-economic management styles, not entirely opposite social organisations. Monopolization can take charge through economic power, or political. But the end-result is the same. As an anecdotal side note, I'm from a country, which was considered as socialist/communist for 40 years, until 22 years ago. I've seen both management styles, through the transition and now living in the west, and I have to tell you, that the ideological differences are just rather covering up the converging features of the two political and economical management, than actually creating differences on a social level.
Let me tell you that the real deal here, that the only profit incentive for the private space industry, other than launching satellites to Earth orbit depends on government money. So, at the end of the day, this is a government founded market, if the govt pulls the plug on space exploration, the space industry with heavy launchers would disappear in a minute all together. Given the current attitudes to space exploration, there's no new profit incentive rising, and without any ground breaking new scientific or engineering discovery in space travel, I don't see how why would any govt finance a Mars expedition at all.
I find this astronaut, cosmonaut and taikonaut so embarrassing for fuck sake. It's the same fucking thing. A person is space (or anywhere for that matter) isn't defined by the nationality but what she/he does and in what quality.
Communism: * No capital (private, or state) -> Russia has state, has private capital. -> Russia isn't communist.
* No market (state planned or unregulated) -> Russia has a partially regulated market as most of modern capitalist countries, including the USA. -> Russia isn't communist.
* Private property (under private or institutional control) -> Russia has all the protection for private property, the right to buy, the right to sell, with the obvious exception (as in market regulation). Russia isn't communist.
* Wage work -> Vast majority of people in Russia are working for wage, for a minority that owns all the means of production (capitalist). -> Russia is definitely capitalist.
* Government and the state exist: No capital and private property could exist without a central (national) enforcement. -> Russia has a strong, nationalistic, government which upholds a law for the rich, bash the poor. In Russia there's also a widespread, highly organized criminal secondary rule, for the same reason.
* Capitalists are making profit, while the working class is exploited. -> While this is true all over the world, in Russia, due to the corruption of the state, many health and safety regulation is circumvented, and unions are threatened by criminal organizations, resulting one of the most unregulated capitalism in the world. -> Russia isn't just capitalist, but the social consequences of barely regulated exploitation are devastating.
Any question to elaborate further?
No need for inventing new words: crewed.
No, what I suggested that relying on an iPad is was foolish in the first place. While I absolutely agree with the great-grandparent post about the patent system, which I find disgusting, but there are other reasons why using an iPad was a bad decision. It's a fragile electronic device, which could perhaps fit just fine to an adult, but a 4 year old its too fragile. Too expensive if it needs replacement. The battery life is limiting and yes, there are situations when a person can not charge it, even in 2012. So I don't believe that these parents made the best choice for their child and it has nothing to do with Apple and the software patent bullshit. On the other hand, the moral of the story, that don't trust in propriety software environments perfectly adds up what I said before. Even with the best intention from these parents (I doubt however, that the iPad bit was not influenced by the usual consumer craze for trendy gadgets, at least in part, but I don't blame the parents for that, it's a fact of life, that must be changed IMHO), they did not make a proper assessment of their choices before they introduced the iPad and the app to their child.
I don't know, if I was the parent of a kid with this condition, than it would not be an iPad app that I would use. Colourful buttons, cards, knocking, stuff like that. I don't think it is a story at all. Spend hundreds of dollars on such a device and an expensive software is completely out of my understanding. There are cheaper and apparently more sufficient methods for children with such a disabilities.
As for Apple, well, that's what you get from such a constrained software environment. If they would have the source code they could use an other device and make their own build. Or their friendly nerdy neighbour.
This is a non-story, just re-iterating the "think of the children" with some patent controversies.
So then what? We reached the peak-people? You suggest that we should not develop new technologies because they are more efficient ones and thus bring about the apocalypse? Wouldn't be the logical thing to find a territory to grow further? This argument that the "planet can't support it" drives me mad, because it lacks any backing (did you ask the fucking planet, or what? Calculations based on current technology is useless, because than you would just re-iterate what people said in the 19th century: the planet can not support 1 billion. now we're 7 billion and obviously the apocalypse isn't here. The population grow because we have the sufficient technology to be a successful race!!!), it is completely ideological (doom-gloom, bring about a new state of emergency) and offers no perspective of our future. Stop growing. Stop developing. Stop making children. Stop smoking. Stop eating animals. Stop eating plants. Stop breathing because you make greenhouse gases.
And who is that brain-dead who mods up an obvious troll, seriously?
That's true, but it takes a long time and a lot of money to build up an infrastructure like this on the Moon or on orbit. Building living compartments, science labs, factories, rail guns on the Moon probably will take decades up to a hundred years or so, given that we start right now with this goal in mind.
So far no nation can put enough resources in to space exploration let alone space colonization. Hopefully it will change soon...
You forgot:
Activists were arrested for advocating anonymity networks after the law passes. No more talks.
I thought you can not rob a bank, with or without baclava and that is the point. The bank can demand, being on private property, that I should be identifiable. If I'm not, my entranced would be refused. Not to mention, that in some customs women cover their faces entirely, even when they go the bank.
So, covering our faces supposed to be a basic right. Now when they start with the baclava, it turns out that the "democratic" nature of some countries can be easily override by policing/security reasons, such as the ban on face covers on public demonstrations on public property. Your example is better than you originally thought, I guess. Now there's a tendency to deny any anonymity of citizens, in the name of security, moral. That way lies the complete dictatorship.
In this same way, even countries like China have freedom of speech. After all, people are only punished for the consequences of their speech.
Nope, you miss the point of free speech. The point is that each citizen has the right to express their opinion in any public forum. In China, people don't have that right. Don't mix up things with the consequences. While somebody can be persecuted for telling a lie, nobody is allowed to restrict people from speaking publicly just because they may lie. That's the freedom of speech.
You can make a porn movie about rape without actually commit a rape. A lot of people have fantasies about rape so jerking off on such a material make them happy. And no one get hurt. Would you arrest the people for watching it?
Same goes for any graphical depiction including child pornography. As long as nobody gets hurt, nobody approach any child sexually, or any other way abusively, there's no case for persecuting and harassing people about their fantasies.
If you do, you basically violate one of the most basic freedom: the freedom of thought, the freedom of imagination. Police people thoughts and you will soon find that you don't want to live in such a society.
Precisely. Or shall we start arrest people for torturing animals and people in books, comics and films, while during the production there were no dogs shot, neither people decapitated.
"Obscene" depictions of children, even if drawn, is wrong and has no place in a civilized country.
Bollocks. In a civilized country people should not interfere in other people business unless they actually did something that hurts other people freedom. In some countries, the obscene depiction of Muhammed is forbidden and yet we don't agree on persecution of caricaturist on this one. There are plenty of movies, books, paintings where children are abused, not just sexually, but eaten alive. Slippery slope my friend...
Criminal laws and penalties do not stop anything as we could learn from the drug business. They just simply create an off-the-grid infrastructure, and depending of the popularity of the products it will grow to a bunch of alternative grids by themselves. Trading marijuana is illegal in many countries, however it is sometimes easier to get pot than to send a postcard to anyone.
DRM is making license agreement about the direction of gravity. No matter, what kind of technique you use for protecting your content, your content will be exposed at the moment of use by one user, and hence it will be recorded and distributed. Cracking DRM schemes is banal: in case of books you can make just a simple screenshot or a camera shot if the device is locked. In case of games it's a bit trickier, but only bit, because the physical device is at hand thus can be messed with. But sooner or later customers will recognize at large that the price they have to pay for content has almost nothing to do with compensating the author of the content but about protecting the content from the customer. The more complicated the DRM scheme the more it costs.
And as it is already a growing trend to realise, that over all cost information tend to the limit of its distribution, and that is rapidly falling, more and more content makers will realise, that they have a bigger audience if they don't place their stuff under heavily restricted access (I mean, it's not underground, we are talking about Cory Doctorow and alikes). This is a fight which will eventually eliminate any commercial content provider. It's the tale of evolution really.
You are right, but then it would make sense that Universities, instead of costing the price of a family house, would transform to a professional social network, where individuals with different skills could organize different study groups, and academic reference would be the list of workgroups with their freely available, freely usable published results, depending on the field.
It is insane to see that while the cost of distributing information is rapidly falling, the costs of education is steadily growing.
not the actually technology that they are against
That would be: "not the actual use of technology that they are against"
Sorry, but the population is currently between 2 and 10 (or 20) times what it should be for long term stability.
How did you come up with these numbers? I mean, there's the practical evidence of sustaining around 7 billion people out there, as that is the case right now. At the moment, the long term stability is threatened by many things, including the social distribution of wealth, the inadequate education, inadequate political system, but not the actual number of people on this planet. The current social distribution of wealth creates a huge gap between the different geological, social divisions of society, which ultimately ends up in political instability, devastation, wars. The educational gap within the human race causing religious fanaticism, political instability and wars, exclusion from social wealth. One can go on...
The "sustainable" size of population is greatly dependent on the methods we are sustaining ourselves. That means, as technology advances, and the technology is available for larger population, the capacity for more individuals increases. With a better distribution of education, wealth, technology, the more people there are, the better we advance: more thinking brain -> more advances -> more place to people. Now, there are limits within a closed eco-system, however humans are getting better and better to create new eco-systems which creates the strong possibility to spread further than this little planet. But there's plenty of space, water and energy on this planet, and we're just barely touching the surface of our planet. Even without any sci-fi level space colonization, there's a large volume of material with plenty of energy from the sun and within the core of the planet to incorporate in to our eco-system.
I already mentioned the problem with being on the course of dying out as a species, namely the ageing population problem which can be very much understood if one have a look at the last 40 years of the developed world. The tensions and problems with the decreasing number of active minds and hands can lead easily to a large scale social disaster too, talking about long term stability.
damaging the planet
The language means a lot in these matters. People don't damage the planet. We are of the planet. The very substance what you and I made of is the planet, just as much as the CO2, or the shit that we release. We perhaps damage our own chances of survival, but the good thing is, that people aren't just numbers, we are working and thinking beings, who can think better solutions.
And the resistance to them is not just because the people don't trust new things, it's because they don't trust the purveyors of the "new things", and with very good reason.
I happen to know the usual suspects of many similar protest movement as I'm an anarchist and we usually get pestered with "eco-anarchists", "deep-ecologist", "third-worldist" and other people who give the activist body behind such a movements. While I would agree about the "purveyors" of GMO and alike technologies, I also noticed that the eco-folks also tend to react without any consideration of the technology it self, just out of the perceived moral right. The campaigns are running under the banner of anti-GMO, not the actually technology that they are against. As with many political issues, the people who are pushing against the GMO are usually ignorant to the subject to the point, that it is antagonized completely. GMO is bad, organic is good. And this kind of attitude is worse than the profit seeking motive of particular corporations, because it gives carte blanche against anything under the sun, that has gene modification without any attempt of understanding the real possibilities.
The truth it, taxes aren't "passed on to" anyone. They are simply extracted from the economy. Both companies and physical persons are actors in that economy, so both pay.
Even better, they aren't extracted from the economy at all. It is spent within the economy, for the wages of public worker, who'll spend the money the economy, for equipment that is made in the economy. Taxation (at their best) just simply transfers the wealth. For better or worse.
We don't have manned missions at the moment, only a single lab on LEO. So there's nothing to stop either. You need robotic missions first and than crewed ones to the point of establishing an relatively autonomous outpost.
With 1/6th gravity of the Earth with no atmosphere makes the moon more ideal gravity well than the Earth for launching shit to space.
You can only work out how to support human life in space if you, with the preliminary checks and experiments on other living beings, send humans in to space and, even more importantly, to other celestial objects. The Moon is the closest of such an object, so it makes sense to start right their.