And yet, history tells us that the colonization of the now developing regions in the past and the economic devastation that many of these countries suffer even in the present time by financially control of the mostly corporations that are linked to our great, never better western society is a major catastrophe for all these countries.
I know that this is what you're looking for, but don't expect much of worship for these good deeds.
Planning is good, but there's two process here to accounted for: As the absolute well being of a population increases, in the first stage the population will grow explosively because while there's a sudden drop in child mortality, the reproduction habits do not change in the same time. But, as in the forth cycle of demographic stage kicks in, sexual habits are changing in the adult population due to the increasing education. This has multiple effects, such as clearing out religious, superstitious fear of using contraception, gender equality raising the women from their baby producer, and full time childcare status, consequently women consider their life more valuable than continuously churning out new babies.
The fact is, that we need to find the balance. Given the data that global fertility rate, we have already the desirable rate of population growth. The problem is rather the bad geographic distribution of the fertility rate. While the developing nations just about to stabilize their population growth, the developed nations seem to decline, which is in no way good thing, given the problems with the ageing population (cultural, political and economical).
You can make enourmous gains just throwing 2+ words that makes somehow sense to you (there must be a way to remember them after all), and a single generated word with random alpha-capital-sign-numeric but which doesn't have to be big. Like 4-6 character. That way, there's absolutely no use of dictionary attacks what so ever.
I understand your scepticism however we know that we are far away from hitting any hard physical limits. We know, that we don't exploit fraction of the energy we receive from the Sun. We know, that fusion is possible. We know, that space travel, hence, spreading in the solar system is possible. This is not a belief or optimism, we know for sure.
Take for example the drinking water problem. It is not that we don't have enough H2O on this planet, quite the opposite. To purify the sea water is not just possible, but we are doing it already. The drinking water problem hits those countries that haven't got the means to do so, which is due the distribution of wealth and has nothing to do with science or technology. If people are dying from the lack of water it is because their areas are excluded from the overall wealth of the human race.
Everywhere I look, food shortages, drinking water problems, even Earth-quakes, I see social problems, not technological or hitting the limit of some physical constrain. The density of population is governed by house prices, and not reasonable organisation of life. Why would people leave the rural areas with plenty of living space for a cramped little place? Lack of work and house prices. Why would people starve in countries where there's large scale agriculture? Because the the crops are sold for higher prices to people with higher earnings thousands of kilometres away only to produce enormous amount of food waste. I can go on...
The problem is that while our population grew in proportion of our technical advancement, our social organisation did not develop as much. We are still stuck with capitalism, ideologies of work ethic, while the automation of production is steadily growing. Our political establishment in the developed world is committed to keep things as they are with every means possible while it is clear that the organisation of the human race can not be tied to the timely structures of nations, ethnicity, while capitalism in the last 200 years acts as a global force already (that is, there's no "globalization" as such). Democracy, at least as it is today, does not serve the population better than any previous oppressing political establishment. Competition is idealized by many while it is nothing but wasting resources on pointless redundancies, all thanks for the bourgeois ideology of "free market" capitalism, which was never really true, and which can not be really true anyway.
My point is in short, that while there's no evidence of hitting our natural boundaries any time soon, we are pretty much like a zombie when it comes to our social system. And the social factor is already causing massive disasters on a never seen global scale.
Your argument about North Korea is flawed. All it takes to extract information from IT infrastructures and attack them, is some cheap equipment and a few skilled coder. It is easier to train a bunch of programmers than physicists, biologists, or soldiers in general (the bullets can be quite expensive for a nation with low industrial capacity and no access to legally acquirable American weaponry). We don't need big bad ass machinery for our studies, and most of the knowledge is available for free on the internet.
Don't take it wrong, I don't think of North Korea as a boogie man, and I am quite sceptical with the smearing propaganda generally about any "rouge" state because I know that there is no good or bad in the world of politics, only continuous struggle between opposing factions for power.
If somebody works as a janitor, there's no reason to base their salary over their negotiation skills, is there? I mean, a janitor with good negotiation skill does the same job as the other with less.
A janitors work is to clean up the floors. It's a binary: either done, or not. If a janitor doesn't clean up enough, there's every reason there to fire him/her. Employers hire people for do some specific thing. The pay is on the condition whether they do it, or not. There's a standard openly, which is needed to be kept the job. No messing about with the wages.
Market fluctuations do not justify the different measure between people. "Valid" market reasons has nothing to do with merit-based reasons. The market do not recognize talent, the market do not recognize anything given that it is nothing but the struggle between individuals over more shit to own.
And all the end is, that "valid market reasons" are used for breaking the free market ideal (well informed seller and buyer), so it means that the market ideology is self-contradictory, useless bragging about a platonic non-sense.
"lazy, entitlied, childish pain-in-the-ass"
I thought an employer would fire Alice for all these instead of not giving a salary. If you still stick with the employee, and they do the same job, they are ought to be paid the same. It's just this fucking simple.
There are other ways than money, to motivate people to do good work. At the moment I'm earning a salary that is comfortable enough, so I am more motivated with a more interesting job than pay rise. Most of my co-worker who I know their opinion, thinks the same. They are interested to have some time to pursue their own interest within the scope of their wider profession.
Of course, if not everything is about money, capitalism is threatened in its existence. Better be secretive, create unnecessary hierarchies and generate in-fights and envy, so the people are keep up with making money, instead of exciting and useful things. People who generally have their wage set by their job instead of having an individual agreement tend to be more friendly to each other, tend to be more open from my personal experience anyway.
That's true, but I for one feel terrible to think that all that intelligence, ingenuity and creativity that is involved in the tech industry isn't enough to overcome of these cheap salesmen practices like these booth babes.
I remember watching a video that my boss made at the E3 back then, and was wondering that all that work we dedicated to finish our game was advertised with dyed blondes with almost nothing on them, and the people flocking around (retailer managers really) do not care about our shit, they only care about to get one of those girls. I was genuinely upset. I appreciate women with good look, but it seems it doesn't matter what are we selling, it doesn't matter the quality of the products, it is just an other show of glamour models for businessmen. Why do we need these events then anyway? These dorks in suits can go any table dancer club of their choice and we should be able to carry on with the stuff that is called work.
I'm sometimes amazed how people are reducing the problem of the climate change to some single-dimension claims.
We already have everything needed to stop climate change except the will to do so.
This claim is already showing the arrogance of human kind. There's a scientific observation, such as a warming climate, with a note that we, humans did contribute to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and you suddenly jump to the conclusion that we are such a powerful race that with installing solar panels on the roof of every building will sort every problem out. This is why people are so tired of the "sustainable"-crowd and this is why people like me are so suspicious about the TEDy salesman-types in general.
As far as the science goes, to "stop the climate change" is a stupid political claim. The climate changes. The wind blows. The water is wet. The pope is Catholic. Get over with it, ffs! My grandmother is talking about winters I had never seen before, and what I will tell my children how the weather was in my childhood will be totally different from the one they will experience. Man made or not. The weather has changes for many reasons through since we pass these informations through generations. People who are in to history can have some hints that many ancient civilization roused in different climate to what we see on these territories today. Just having a look at what possible causes there are for changing the weather on the surface of this little planet is staggering. Yes, humans and our heavy industries, heck, even our farts did contribute to this situation. But it is quite annoying to see that people with otherwise critical thinking go down so deep on the path of this eco-conservative bullshit and think that solar energy is the power of God.
Newsbreak: Solar panels aren't ecologically harmless. They will change the climate too, for better or worse. Producing them is energy heavy, requires toxic chemicals, and mining. With the current technology, I would be definitely against to cover all houses in the industrialized world with solar panels. And even if that would viable, and we would be able to keep up with the growing energy consumption tendencies - which I doubt that we could cover with solar power alone -, that means to change the albedo of the planet significantly, so we will again contribute to the global climate change. Solar power is a political issue, as it is, a wet dream for some about the energy independence from the great networks, which has quite legitimate uses, but it is definitely not the issue of AGW.
Revolutions are terrible--they're bloody economic disasters that might not even do anything substantial when the dust finally settles.
This is bullshit, my friend. Revolutions are perhaps terrible (I don't agree), but revolutions are also necessary. Also, when a revolution turns to armed conflict, it is called a civil war. There's too many examples in history that a regime can not be taken down by the 99% simply because the majority of the population would FEARS their government/armed forces enough not to take action, and therefore no change could come until somebody takes the gun, so the power become contested to the level that people actually can believe that things can be changed and join to the popular uprising.
I read exactly the same argument over the IAF thread, but the whole suggestion, especially in this context, to discourage oppressed people not to make revolution just make me sick. You can see what is happening when people don't rise up: genocide, several decade of terror and dictatorship, either economical or political. Sure, people end up dying if there's a revolt, but in most of these countries is bloody already.
The thing is, that people with these excessive sense of self-importance think that the enlightened West should teach the world about how to reduce the population so the Western way of life could continue. That's the real problem here not the idea of birth-control.
First of all, look at the Western countries. It's not all that fun, if we put our demographics in perspective. An ageing population with decreasing number of active hands and hence, falling productivity. You can catch the tendencies of the problem around funding the healthcare, the education, and other stuff not because of immigration, but quite the opposite. We have a declining number of productive, healthy, young, fresh people, hence their political position is declining too, and the politics now in the western countries is characterized by the "politics of pension". The younger generation gets bleaker and bleaker prospects of life compared to the more numerous successive older generations. Gonna be great!
The western countries, this lifestyle certainly produces less children than the poverty stricken, poorly educated masses in places like in India. However, you should know that the rate of population growth around the globe has declined, and now barely up a little to the sustaining level 3 kid-model (World average between 2005-2010 was 2.52). Given that the wealth distribution is ridiculously uneven in the world, and the advance of technology, there's absolutely no reason why the world population should decrease. Enforcing one-child policies need social engineering and state power that contradicts with the very thing we would like to achieve: wide-spread growth in the general quality of life. In fact, such a social engineering also threatens with an other problems, such as gender parity issues (like the one in China, which could turn out quite nasty on the long term).
If we manage to sustain the population on the current level or only a slightly higher the future of human race is tied up with the quality of life we can spread around the planet. The more people get healthy, proper nutritious food, good education, stable circumstances, learning to cooperate with the rest of the world, the faster we get to a blooming human race, that can evolve in all sense to reach further than this lovely, but limited gravity well.
No matter how people like simplify things, the demographic issues are more complex than they think. It's all about social-political-economic-cultural system that you want to redesign or even revolutionize to get to finally flourish the human race and the rest of the planet.
I never really considered this scenario, but there could be something in it. As a fixing note: the Sun is going to be a red giant first before it blows off the outer layers.
The E=mc^2 means of course that only tiny fraction of the stars mass is transformed to energy due to the fusion. However, you have to still account for the mass that has been blown off by this energy. Most of this energy is turned to heat, light and radiation. While the heat/light accounts for no serious mass losses, I can easily imagine that the constant radiation over its roughly 10 billion year life time means quite a number of protons, electrons and neutrons leaving the Sun. Not to mention the coronal mass ejection where the solar wind is pushing out billions of tons of matter out of the Sun and hurtling toward the periphery of the Solar System. AFAIK, CME's can easily throw a magnitude of 10^12 kg of matter out. Over the period of 10 billion years, there are plenty of CME event. Just to stick to the wikipedia.
An CME causing a loss in the average 1.6*10^12kg matter.
The solar minimum rate of CME's is around once in 5 days, to the solar maximum's 3 times a day. I go with an arbitrary in-between value: 1 a day because it's easy to use:). (I don't have the time to go through the numerical integral of the solar cycles over its lifetime:)). 1 CME/day means around 3.65*10^12 eruptions over ten billion years, but let's go from our point of time (5.5 billion years remaining until the sun runs out of hydrogen): ~2.01*10^12 eruptions.
This means in mass: 2*10^12 * 1.6*10^12 kg matter over the remaining days of the sun, 3.2*10^24kg.
The Sun's mass is: 1.9891×10^30 kg
So even if I calculate the overall mass loss of CME's, the sun would only lose: 1 / 621593.75 of her mass. To be honest, when I started to look up the facts and calculate, I thought I ended up with a new Nobel prize, but it seems nothing significantly will change in the orbit of Earth. Throw the eggs!
What do you mean by this: "hate-speech (the only true enemy to free speech in my opinion...)"? I was under the impression that the freedom of speech means that every speech should free, including "hate speech". Unless you mean that labelling certain topics and antagonism "hate speech", and ban it is against the principle of free speech. Once you introduce penalties for loudly expressed opinion, no matter how outraging it is, you have no freedom of speech.
"Hate speech" is therefore politically convenient way to cut the liberty to express opinions publicly.
Note that I'm not a liberal/conservative type, I don't trust democracy. Being an anarchist (which has nothing to do with libertarianism) bring people the understanding that free speech is an illusion, a safety valve at best. Opinion can lead to action, and that is the fearful thing for all in power. You can shout bullshit all bloody day without anybody noticing it, until what you're saying implies some political action. Democracy or dictatorship, the reaction is the same: moderate, ban, or kill.
Contradiction in nature simply means that the two or more process acts against each other, and it is up to us to predict what is going to happen at the end. If I push you from the one side and somebody else pushes you from the other you can measure easily who is actually pushing you harder by checking which direction do you move. If the sea level is rising, and we can't account for the extra volume of the water that means we don't know every factor yet so we need to look further.
Depends. If you have a buffer in a system, and you're investigating the amount of information processed by the end-point, you'll always find that you're missing a full buffer data between input and the output since the buffer has been set up. Of course, after the dam is full, the rate of water flow will be restored to the original state (sort of), so the global water re-cycling rate will be restored too. However, when you release the buffer, you need to release it with a higher rate than the water-flow is originally (otherwise the dam would not release extra volume by definition), and if we assume that the water re-cycling rate is around 100% in its natural cycle (let's say, annually) than the additional volume released during the period of flushing the dams, the water-level should rise provided that the re-cycling rate do not change.
I don't know whether did you noticed but the software that you seem to be so addicted to is not part of the Windows as such. It is a third-party software and you know, applications can be developed on Linux too! If this company would have the balls they would release their software for other platforms too, such as OSX and Gnome/KDE. If you love that software, you should email them to send over the source code so you can make a version for Linux. Predictably, they won't send you the source code to use it on the system of your choice.
So you're saying that you're confined to Windows because of this piece of software. It's really sad because gnome and nautilus can be enhanced to whatever you would like to do with them. Also, there are other file managers like this Laziness isn't a good excuse, especially when you are already using a third-party software.
Finally with the vast majority of the software that people want its as simple as 'download and run" on Windows but most of the software people want simply doesn't exist on Linux or you get some ersatz that just isn't nearly as good, Gimp for Photoshop, Calc for Excel, Gnucash for Quickbooks, etc. They just aren't up to the level of the software they are emulating, sorry.
Perhaps the problem really that these software suck because enough people are using them on a regular basis. I mean, if gimp was being used by millions of computer artists and photographer, it would evolve much faster, and would go even beyond Photoshop in quality as in features. Gimp needs some pirating...:)
Couldn't be just the fact that with the proliferation of the computers/internet/software usage and with the people got a bit more understanding how software can be acquired, the number of people using cracked propriety software should naturally go up. Add the fact that most of the user ask his friendly nerd to install teh Micro$oft Word instead of just asking for a word-processor. Not to mention computer games on PC (a market traditionally the most reluctant to go FLOSS).
Software cracking (who came up with the word, piracy?) will only drop seriously after the FLOSS would replace the propriety model. And this won't happen as long as sysadmins of all companies do not push forward for a free solution for their user, as long as governments are still ambivalent over what standards and what software do they use and contribute to, and as long as there's no serious FLOSS gaming.
But this is not a belief it is a factual thing. What people believe is one thing, but what they do en masse that's the real deal. Now in this case, if more than 50 percent of the people do something and what they do is harmless (there's no such thing as right to profit making from old and bad business practices - though recently it seems that the banks and the publisher companies are entitled to it). The law must recognize the reality: if it fails to do that, it will be by and large ignored. You see, there were not so long ago (or perhaps there still are) laws against oral and gay sex in some states. Such a backward an irrelevant laws must be overturned. A lobby group should not get bigger powers than the majority of the involved population.
Hmm... I don't see what's the point in that case either. If the internet habits are a concern, cut the cable all together. Monitoring communication is only good for one thing: abuse position.
If dad want to monitor his kids, the best way to do that is to ask them. That is, what a father supposed to do. Sneaking for "bad stuff" means there's no confidence in the children. In that case, the family is already in-secure no matter what are you doing with the network. Don't try to sell family problems as a reason for monitoring. It just doesn't figure.
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And yet, history tells us that the colonization of the now developing regions in the past and the economic devastation that many of these countries suffer even in the present time by financially control of the mostly corporations that are linked to our great, never better western society is a major catastrophe for all these countries.
I know that this is what you're looking for, but don't expect much of worship for these good deeds.
The global fertility rate is steadily decreasing. This makes your post based on false premise.
Planning is good, but there's two process here to accounted for: As the absolute well being of a population increases, in the first stage the population will grow explosively because while there's a sudden drop in child mortality, the reproduction habits do not change in the same time. But, as in the forth cycle of demographic stage kicks in, sexual habits are changing in the adult population due to the increasing education. This has multiple effects, such as clearing out religious, superstitious fear of using contraception, gender equality raising the women from their baby producer, and full time childcare status, consequently women consider their life more valuable than continuously churning out new babies.
The fact is, that we need to find the balance. Given the data that global fertility rate, we have already the desirable rate of population growth. The problem is rather the bad geographic distribution of the fertility rate. While the developing nations just about to stabilize their population growth, the developed nations seem to decline, which is in no way good thing, given the problems with the ageing population (cultural, political and economical).
You can make enourmous gains just throwing 2+ words that makes somehow sense to you (there must be a way to remember them after all), and a single generated word with random alpha-capital-sign-numeric but which doesn't have to be big. Like 4-6 character. That way, there's absolutely no use of dictionary attacks what so ever.
I understand your scepticism however we know that we are far away from hitting any hard physical limits. We know, that we don't exploit fraction of the energy we receive from the Sun. We know, that fusion is possible. We know, that space travel, hence, spreading in the solar system is possible. This is not a belief or optimism, we know for sure.
Take for example the drinking water problem. It is not that we don't have enough H2O on this planet, quite the opposite. To purify the sea water is not just possible, but we are doing it already. The drinking water problem hits those countries that haven't got the means to do so, which is due the distribution of wealth and has nothing to do with science or technology. If people are dying from the lack of water it is because their areas are excluded from the overall wealth of the human race.
Everywhere I look, food shortages, drinking water problems, even Earth-quakes, I see social problems, not technological or hitting the limit of some physical constrain. The density of population is governed by house prices, and not reasonable organisation of life. Why would people leave the rural areas with plenty of living space for a cramped little place? Lack of work and house prices. Why would people starve in countries where there's large scale agriculture? Because the the crops are sold for higher prices to people with higher earnings thousands of kilometres away only to produce enormous amount of food waste. I can go on...
The problem is that while our population grew in proportion of our technical advancement, our social organisation did not develop as much. We are still stuck with capitalism, ideologies of work ethic, while the automation of production is steadily growing. Our political establishment in the developed world is committed to keep things as they are with every means possible while it is clear that the organisation of the human race can not be tied to the timely structures of nations, ethnicity, while capitalism in the last 200 years acts as a global force already (that is, there's no "globalization" as such). Democracy, at least as it is today, does not serve the population better than any previous oppressing political establishment. Competition is idealized by many while it is nothing but wasting resources on pointless redundancies, all thanks for the bourgeois ideology of "free market" capitalism, which was never really true, and which can not be really true anyway.
My point is in short, that while there's no evidence of hitting our natural boundaries any time soon, we are pretty much like a zombie when it comes to our social system. And the social factor is already causing massive disasters on a never seen global scale.
Your argument about North Korea is flawed. All it takes to extract information from IT infrastructures and attack them, is some cheap equipment and a few skilled coder. It is easier to train a bunch of programmers than physicists, biologists, or soldiers in general (the bullets can be quite expensive for a nation with low industrial capacity and no access to legally acquirable American weaponry). We don't need big bad ass machinery for our studies, and most of the knowledge is available for free on the internet. Don't take it wrong, I don't think of North Korea as a boogie man, and I am quite sceptical with the smearing propaganda generally about any "rouge" state because I know that there is no good or bad in the world of politics, only continuous struggle between opposing factions for power.
If somebody works as a janitor, there's no reason to base their salary over their negotiation skills, is there? I mean, a janitor with good negotiation skill does the same job as the other with less. A janitors work is to clean up the floors. It's a binary: either done, or not. If a janitor doesn't clean up enough, there's every reason there to fire him/her. Employers hire people for do some specific thing. The pay is on the condition whether they do it, or not. There's a standard openly, which is needed to be kept the job. No messing about with the wages. Market fluctuations do not justify the different measure between people. "Valid" market reasons has nothing to do with merit-based reasons. The market do not recognize talent, the market do not recognize anything given that it is nothing but the struggle between individuals over more shit to own. And all the end is, that "valid market reasons" are used for breaking the free market ideal (well informed seller and buyer), so it means that the market ideology is self-contradictory, useless bragging about a platonic non-sense.
"lazy, entitlied, childish pain-in-the-ass" I thought an employer would fire Alice for all these instead of not giving a salary. If you still stick with the employee, and they do the same job, they are ought to be paid the same. It's just this fucking simple.
There are other ways than money, to motivate people to do good work. At the moment I'm earning a salary that is comfortable enough, so I am more motivated with a more interesting job than pay rise. Most of my co-worker who I know their opinion, thinks the same. They are interested to have some time to pursue their own interest within the scope of their wider profession. Of course, if not everything is about money, capitalism is threatened in its existence. Better be secretive, create unnecessary hierarchies and generate in-fights and envy, so the people are keep up with making money, instead of exciting and useful things. People who generally have their wage set by their job instead of having an individual agreement tend to be more friendly to each other, tend to be more open from my personal experience anyway.
That's true, but I for one feel terrible to think that all that intelligence, ingenuity and creativity that is involved in the tech industry isn't enough to overcome of these cheap salesmen practices like these booth babes. I remember watching a video that my boss made at the E3 back then, and was wondering that all that work we dedicated to finish our game was advertised with dyed blondes with almost nothing on them, and the people flocking around (retailer managers really) do not care about our shit, they only care about to get one of those girls. I was genuinely upset. I appreciate women with good look, but it seems it doesn't matter what are we selling, it doesn't matter the quality of the products, it is just an other show of glamour models for businessmen. Why do we need these events then anyway? These dorks in suits can go any table dancer club of their choice and we should be able to carry on with the stuff that is called work.
I'm sometimes amazed how people are reducing the problem of the climate change to some single-dimension claims.
We already have everything needed to stop climate change except the will to do so.
This claim is already showing the arrogance of human kind. There's a scientific observation, such as a warming climate, with a note that we, humans did contribute to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and you suddenly jump to the conclusion that we are such a powerful race that with installing solar panels on the roof of every building will sort every problem out. This is why people are so tired of the "sustainable"-crowd and this is why people like me are so suspicious about the TEDy salesman-types in general.
As far as the science goes, to "stop the climate change" is a stupid political claim. The climate changes. The wind blows. The water is wet. The pope is Catholic. Get over with it, ffs! My grandmother is talking about winters I had never seen before, and what I will tell my children how the weather was in my childhood will be totally different from the one they will experience. Man made or not. The weather has changes for many reasons through since we pass these informations through generations. People who are in to history can have some hints that many ancient civilization roused in different climate to what we see on these territories today. Just having a look at what possible causes there are for changing the weather on the surface of this little planet is staggering. Yes, humans and our heavy industries, heck, even our farts did contribute to this situation. But it is quite annoying to see that people with otherwise critical thinking go down so deep on the path of this eco-conservative bullshit and think that solar energy is the power of God.
Newsbreak: Solar panels aren't ecologically harmless. They will change the climate too, for better or worse. Producing them is energy heavy, requires toxic chemicals, and mining. With the current technology, I would be definitely against to cover all houses in the industrialized world with solar panels. And even if that would viable, and we would be able to keep up with the growing energy consumption tendencies - which I doubt that we could cover with solar power alone -, that means to change the albedo of the planet significantly, so we will again contribute to the global climate change. Solar power is a political issue, as it is, a wet dream for some about the energy independence from the great networks, which has quite legitimate uses, but it is definitely not the issue of AGW.
Revolutions are terrible--they're bloody economic disasters that might not even do anything substantial when the dust finally settles.
This is bullshit, my friend. Revolutions are perhaps terrible (I don't agree), but revolutions are also necessary. Also, when a revolution turns to armed conflict, it is called a civil war. There's too many examples in history that a regime can not be taken down by the 99% simply because the majority of the population would FEARS their government/armed forces enough not to take action, and therefore no change could come until somebody takes the gun, so the power become contested to the level that people actually can believe that things can be changed and join to the popular uprising.
I read exactly the same argument over the IAF thread, but the whole suggestion, especially in this context, to discourage oppressed people not to make revolution just make me sick. You can see what is happening when people don't rise up: genocide, several decade of terror and dictatorship, either economical or political. Sure, people end up dying if there's a revolt, but in most of these countries is bloody already.
The thing is, that people with these excessive sense of self-importance think that the enlightened West should teach the world about how to reduce the population so the Western way of life could continue. That's the real problem here not the idea of birth-control.
First of all, look at the Western countries. It's not all that fun, if we put our demographics in perspective. An ageing population with decreasing number of active hands and hence, falling productivity. You can catch the tendencies of the problem around funding the healthcare, the education, and other stuff not because of immigration, but quite the opposite. We have a declining number of productive, healthy, young, fresh people, hence their political position is declining too, and the politics now in the western countries is characterized by the "politics of pension". The younger generation gets bleaker and bleaker prospects of life compared to the more numerous successive older generations. Gonna be great!
The western countries, this lifestyle certainly produces less children than the poverty stricken, poorly educated masses in places like in India. However, you should know that the rate of population growth around the globe has declined, and now barely up a little to the sustaining level 3 kid-model (World average between 2005-2010 was 2.52). Given that the wealth distribution is ridiculously uneven in the world, and the advance of technology, there's absolutely no reason why the world population should decrease. Enforcing one-child policies need social engineering and state power that contradicts with the very thing we would like to achieve: wide-spread growth in the general quality of life. In fact, such a social engineering also threatens with an other problems, such as gender parity issues (like the one in China, which could turn out quite nasty on the long term).
If we manage to sustain the population on the current level or only a slightly higher the future of human race is tied up with the quality of life we can spread around the planet. The more people get healthy, proper nutritious food, good education, stable circumstances, learning to cooperate with the rest of the world, the faster we get to a blooming human race, that can evolve in all sense to reach further than this lovely, but limited gravity well.
No matter how people like simplify things, the demographic issues are more complex than they think. It's all about social-political-economic-cultural system that you want to redesign or even revolutionize to get to finally flourish the human race and the rest of the planet.
I never really considered this scenario, but there could be something in it. As a fixing note: the Sun is going to be a red giant first before it blows off the outer layers. The E=mc^2 means of course that only tiny fraction of the stars mass is transformed to energy due to the fusion. However, you have to still account for the mass that has been blown off by this energy. Most of this energy is turned to heat, light and radiation. While the heat/light accounts for no serious mass losses, I can easily imagine that the constant radiation over its roughly 10 billion year life time means quite a number of protons, electrons and neutrons leaving the Sun. Not to mention the coronal mass ejection where the solar wind is pushing out billions of tons of matter out of the Sun and hurtling toward the periphery of the Solar System. AFAIK, CME's can easily throw a magnitude of 10^12 kg of matter out. Over the period of 10 billion years, there are plenty of CME event. Just to stick to the wikipedia. An CME causing a loss in the average 1.6*10^12kg matter. The solar minimum rate of CME's is around once in 5 days, to the solar maximum's 3 times a day. I go with an arbitrary in-between value: 1 a day because it's easy to use :). (I don't have the time to go through the numerical integral of the solar cycles over its lifetime :)). 1 CME/day means around 3.65*10^12 eruptions over ten billion years, but let's go from our point of time (5.5 billion years remaining until the sun runs out of hydrogen): ~2.01*10^12 eruptions.
This means in mass: 2*10^12 * 1.6*10^12 kg matter over the remaining days of the sun, 3.2*10^24kg.
The Sun's mass is: 1.9891×10^30 kg
So even if I calculate the overall mass loss of CME's, the sun would only lose: 1 / 621593.75 of her mass. To be honest, when I started to look up the facts and calculate, I thought I ended up with a new Nobel prize, but it seems nothing significantly will change in the orbit of Earth. Throw the eggs!
What do you mean by this: "hate-speech (the only true enemy to free speech in my opinion...)"? I was under the impression that the freedom of speech means that every speech should free, including "hate speech". Unless you mean that labelling certain topics and antagonism "hate speech", and ban it is against the principle of free speech. Once you introduce penalties for loudly expressed opinion, no matter how outraging it is, you have no freedom of speech. "Hate speech" is therefore politically convenient way to cut the liberty to express opinions publicly. Note that I'm not a liberal/conservative type, I don't trust democracy. Being an anarchist (which has nothing to do with libertarianism) bring people the understanding that free speech is an illusion, a safety valve at best. Opinion can lead to action, and that is the fearful thing for all in power. You can shout bullshit all bloody day without anybody noticing it, until what you're saying implies some political action. Democracy or dictatorship, the reaction is the same: moderate, ban, or kill.
Contradiction in nature simply means that the two or more process acts against each other, and it is up to us to predict what is going to happen at the end. If I push you from the one side and somebody else pushes you from the other you can measure easily who is actually pushing you harder by checking which direction do you move. If the sea level is rising, and we can't account for the extra volume of the water that means we don't know every factor yet so we need to look further.
Depends. If you have a buffer in a system, and you're investigating the amount of information processed by the end-point, you'll always find that you're missing a full buffer data between input and the output since the buffer has been set up. Of course, after the dam is full, the rate of water flow will be restored to the original state (sort of), so the global water re-cycling rate will be restored too. However, when you release the buffer, you need to release it with a higher rate than the water-flow is originally (otherwise the dam would not release extra volume by definition), and if we assume that the water re-cycling rate is around 100% in its natural cycle (let's say, annually) than the additional volume released during the period of flushing the dams, the water-level should rise provided that the re-cycling rate do not change.
Wait a minute... I see what you did there!
I don't know whether did you noticed but the software that you seem to be so addicted to is not part of the Windows as such. It is a third-party software and you know, applications can be developed on Linux too! If this company would have the balls they would release their software for other platforms too, such as OSX and Gnome/KDE. If you love that software, you should email them to send over the source code so you can make a version for Linux. Predictably, they won't send you the source code to use it on the system of your choice.
So you're saying that you're confined to Windows because of this piece of software. It's really sad because gnome and nautilus can be enhanced to whatever you would like to do with them. Also, there are other file managers like this Laziness isn't a good excuse, especially when you are already using a third-party software.
Finally with the vast majority of the software that people want its as simple as 'download and run" on Windows but most of the software people want simply doesn't exist on Linux or you get some ersatz that just isn't nearly as good, Gimp for Photoshop, Calc for Excel, Gnucash for Quickbooks, etc. They just aren't up to the level of the software they are emulating, sorry.
Perhaps the problem really that these software suck because enough people are using them on a regular basis. I mean, if gimp was being used by millions of computer artists and photographer, it would evolve much faster, and would go even beyond Photoshop in quality as in features. Gimp needs some pirating... :)
Couldn't be just the fact that with the proliferation of the computers/internet/software usage and with the people got a bit more understanding how software can be acquired, the number of people using cracked propriety software should naturally go up. Add the fact that most of the user ask his friendly nerd to install teh Micro$oft Word instead of just asking for a word-processor. Not to mention computer games on PC (a market traditionally the most reluctant to go FLOSS).
Software cracking (who came up with the word, piracy?) will only drop seriously after the FLOSS would replace the propriety model. And this won't happen as long as sysadmins of all companies do not push forward for a free solution for their user, as long as governments are still ambivalent over what standards and what software do they use and contribute to, and as long as there's no serious FLOSS gaming.
Can we drop this "automagically" word? It freaks me out...
But this is not a belief it is a factual thing. What people believe is one thing, but what they do en masse that's the real deal. Now in this case, if more than 50 percent of the people do something and what they do is harmless (there's no such thing as right to profit making from old and bad business practices - though recently it seems that the banks and the publisher companies are entitled to it). The law must recognize the reality: if it fails to do that, it will be by and large ignored. You see, there were not so long ago (or perhaps there still are) laws against oral and gay sex in some states. Such a backward an irrelevant laws must be overturned. A lobby group should not get bigger powers than the majority of the involved population.
Isn't his a version of the "think of the children"?
Related reading: Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal
Hmm... I don't see what's the point in that case either. If the internet habits are a concern, cut the cable all together. Monitoring communication is only good for one thing: abuse position.
If dad want to monitor his kids, the best way to do that is to ask them. That is, what a father supposed to do. Sneaking for "bad stuff" means there's no confidence in the children. In that case, the family is already in-secure no matter what are you doing with the network. Don't try to sell family problems as a reason for monitoring. It just doesn't figure.
Yep, this our shiny new consumer based education system. Isn't it wonderful? They say, this is the user-friendly way...