I agree about the two-party system, but parliments aren't the only answer, and might not be the best, since its often too easy to change things in parlimentary systems.
We could use one of the several systems for fairly electing one person out of a field of multiple candidates, like approval voting.
With modern information systems, we could go to direct democracy, but let people give their votes to proxies, at least for the senate. Maybe we would only let the 100 people with the most proxies vote, but that would certainly allow for much easier diversity than our presant system.
I also voted for a third party candidate, mainly because I considered Gore and Bush to be equally bad.
You seem to have watched Eva a lot more than I have, and I was wondering if you could clear up something for me. Specifically, how do Seele's and Gendou's visions of the Third Impact differ?
I know that Gendou wants to see his wife again, and my take on Seele is that they want to imanentize the eschaton, but I don't see why there should be any conflict between those two goals.
Rei's neck breaking off represents the failure of the immanentization of the eschaton, as Shinji decides not to unite humanity into one soul.
Because he rejected this, he and "the german chick" (Asuka) are reborn into the strange world left over, with perhaps the rest ofhumanity too.
Genoud got to see his wife again for a while, but if he still exists he must feel pretty screwed over now if he still exists, since Yui is floating away in EVA 01.
I'm not sure exactly how Seele's and Genou's visions of the Imanentization of the Eschaton differ. Gendou seems to just want it so he can see his wife again, so its not suprising that they're desired implamentations differ.
I think that it would be a lot harder for a large company to get away with something like this than a large mob.
In the company, you have one person who gives an order to start, and then a lot of other poeple who are supposed to help, but not all of them will agree with a tactic like this. Its almost graranteed that someone will blab to the press, and then the damage to the attacker will probably suffer even more than their intended victim.
With a mob, on the other hand, nobody knows the identities of any substantial portion of the other people initiating the attack. Also, since nobody has ordered anyone else to do it, everybody is morally culpable to the same extent, and you can only rat out yourself and maybe a few friends.
In one snese that is true, but it also obsucres a lot of issues that shouldn't be obscured.
Most poeple would call anyone who uses violence against civilians to directly achieve their political objectives. Guerrillas might snipe at our soldiers form hiding, they might dress in civilian clothing, they might even blow themselves up next to our warships, but as long as they don't cross the line and go bombing civilians they can still be negitiated with, sympathized with, etc.
It really distrubs me to see the extent to which people are willing to call their enemies "terrorists" without proper justification. When someone in the Bush administration calls an Iraqi guerilla a terrorist, or someone on the Left accuses Nike of practicing "ecconomic terrorism" I can't help but feel that they are blurring a line that helps define what it mean to be civilized.
If we find evidence of past life on Mars it will mean that in one out of two known cases life on a planet has gone (pretty much, at least) extinct. I would hope that the Gaia hypothesis is right, and that a living planet's biosphere really is self-regulating and not succeptable to such catastophic failure.
It certainly woulnd't the end of the Gaia Hypothesis-it might be that loss of atmosphere on a low G world is one of the few things life can't prevent-but it would certainly be a point against it.
I sort of consider it a form of meditation. You might be stressed about things, but as you move into that space between instinct and rationality which minesweeper captures so well, you're mind is freed from distraction. Or it just be that I have a short attention span and need something else to do while I think.
Something moving from a low energy state to an even lower energy state without passing through the invervening states is quantom tunneling. All the air going from the bottom of Earth's gravity well (low PE) to the bottom of the Sun's (lower PE) without going through space (high PE) would be a classic example of tunneling, if it ever happened.
If the number of paying consumers decreases because some potential consumers are pirating, and the cost of providing the service remains constant, the provider will raise the price for the payers. Thus, you really are stealing from the people who are buying their cable.
If a group of people regularly siphon use bandwith from other people's accounts, the ISP will see that it's costs are going up without a corresponding increase in revenue, and will raise prices. The cost will be distributed over a large number of people, but it certainly isn't free.
I'm aware (that I can't adequetly imagine) how improbable that would be. I didn't mean to sound flippant, but if it did happen it would be a really great example of tunneling, I couldn't resist.
I would certainly admit that important things cannot be done without historical opportunity, and that if the opportunity exists someone will take advantage of it sooner or later, but the specific results may vary greatly deppending on who is in charge.
If WWII Germany had been led by a Napoleon instead of a Hitler, we might have had a cold war with them instead of the Russians, and if revolutionary France had had a Hitler come to power, they wouldn't have been nearly so succesful.
Likewise, just based on populations and geography you could probably deduce that Europe and the Middle East would be repeatedly invaded from the stepps. But the abberantly huge scope of the Mongol invasion woulnd't ahve been possible without someone like Ghengis or Chingiz or however you want to spell his name.
I think that, like the Nature/Nurture debate, the Great People/Forces of History debate is best answered by "Yes, Both."
Ah, but Kennedy's space program didn't really make that much of a difference, did it? When was the last time we sent someone to the moon? I think that the main result of teh Apollo program was to convince the public that space exploration was just about empty gestures instead of practical results, and thus the benifits of the new technology developed were cancelled out. This isn't neccesarily to say that leaders can't have a large effect, but that Kennedy was a bad example.
Hmmm... It seems like what our brains really need is more cache. I mean, we have lots of RAM, but we can only store 7 or so things in cache at once (the "magic number"). We could do much better even if we just increased that to 10.
Unfortunatly, most people don't have the stomach to deal with the consequences of such research(ie. what to do with a failed GM human).
I bet the Chinese won't have any trouble with this. It sucks, but there it is.
What looks like a genetic mistake now, could be the key to our survival 100 years from now, contrastingly what looks good now may be harmful to us later.
But we can expect that there will be some sort of correlation between what we want now and what we will want in 100 years. At worst, it will be orthoginal, since I can't think of an argument for why they could correlate negitivly, even specific examples of good-now-bad-later might pop up randomly.
But every imporvment will probably have some sort of hidden cost. If there was an easy and pain free way to increase intelligence, evolution would have found it already. Of course, there are some things that are much less of a disadvantage in the modern world than they were in the environment we evolved in. Nearsightedness, needing more sodium, or needing more calories would all be much worse disadvantages for our ancestors than for us.
This is a dangerous assumption to make. There is a reason for conservatism in medicine; there is no "magic undo", yet.
If he has the ability to alter his genome, it would seem to follow logically that he would have the ability to alter his genome. If he finds that the genotype he's given himself isn't what he wants, he has already demonstrated that he can change it. In fact, he would probably make sure that the modifications were easy to undo, say by putting them on plasmids with some sort of self destruct, since he knows that he wants to be able to revert.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree about the two-party system, but parliments aren't the only answer, and might not be the best, since its often too easy to change things in parlimentary systems.
We could use one of the several systems for fairly electing one person out of a field of multiple candidates, like approval voting.
With modern information systems, we could go to direct democracy, but let people give their votes to proxies, at least for the senate. Maybe we would only let the 100 people with the most proxies vote, but that would certainly allow for much easier diversity than our presant system.
I also voted for a third party candidate, mainly because I considered Gore and Bush to be equally bad.
I believe the consensus is that both borrowed some code from BSD, hence the repeated comments. See here for a diagram.
Do you have any opinions on the reliablility of some of the more modern assault rifles, like the Styer AUG or the FAMAS?
Most european countries just purchase American or Russian military vehicles and weapons anyway.
Not at all. The French, Germans, and English all have their own assault rifles and tanks; and they are often better than the US equivalent.
You seem to have watched Eva a lot more than I have, and I was wondering if you could clear up something for me. Specifically, how do Seele's and Gendou's visions of the Third Impact differ?
I know that Gendou wants to see his wife again, and my take on Seele is that they want to imanentize the eschaton, but I don't see why there should be any conflict between those two goals.
As I understand it:
Rei's neck breaking off represents the failure of the immanentization of the eschaton, as Shinji decides not to unite humanity into one soul.
Because he rejected this, he and "the german chick" (Asuka) are reborn into the strange world left over, with perhaps the rest ofhumanity too.
Genoud got to see his wife again for a while, but if he still exists he must feel pretty screwed over now if he still exists, since Yui is floating away in EVA 01.
I'm not sure exactly how Seele's and Genou's visions of the Imanentization of the Eschaton differ. Gendou seems to just want it so he can see his wife again, so its not suprising that they're desired implamentations differ.
I hope that clears everything up.
It would also be in the economic interest of service providers to do this, since they are currently having their no-cost-per-email policy exploited.
I think that it would be a lot harder for a large company to get away with something like this than a large mob.
In the company, you have one person who gives an order to start, and then a lot of other poeple who are supposed to help, but not all of them will agree with a tactic like this. Its almost graranteed that someone will blab to the press, and then the damage to the attacker will probably suffer even more than their intended victim.
With a mob, on the other hand, nobody knows the identities of any substantial portion of the other people initiating the attack. Also, since nobody has ordered anyone else to do it, everybody is morally culpable to the same extent, and you can only rat out yourself and maybe a few friends.
The big company doesn't have to launch them on a whim, it just has to do so occasionaly, and with sufficient randomness to keep everybody intimidated.
In one snese that is true, but it also obsucres a lot of issues that shouldn't be obscured.
Most poeple would call anyone who uses violence against civilians to directly achieve their political objectives. Guerrillas might snipe at our soldiers form hiding, they might dress in civilian clothing, they might even blow themselves up next to our warships, but as long as they don't cross the line and go bombing civilians they can still be negitiated with, sympathized with, etc.
It really distrubs me to see the extent to which people are willing to call their enemies "terrorists" without proper justification. When someone in the Bush administration calls an Iraqi guerilla a terrorist, or someone on the Left accuses Nike of practicing "ecconomic terrorism" I can't help but feel that they are blurring a line that helps define what it mean to be civilized.
If we find evidence of past life on Mars it will mean that in one out of two known cases life on a planet has gone (pretty much, at least) extinct. I would hope that the Gaia hypothesis is right, and that a living planet's biosphere really is self-regulating and not succeptable to such catastophic failure.
It certainly woulnd't the end of the Gaia Hypothesis-it might be that loss of atmosphere on a low G world is one of the few things life can't prevent-but it would certainly be a point against it.
Probably because McCarthy is a last name, and it would be odd if old Joseph were the only one to have it.
I sort of consider it a form of meditation. You might be stressed about things, but as you move into that space between instinct and rationality which minesweeper captures so well, you're mind is freed from distraction. Or it just be that I have a short attention span and need something else to do while I think.
Something moving from a low energy state to an even lower energy state without passing through the invervening states is quantom tunneling. All the air going from the bottom of Earth's gravity well (low PE) to the bottom of the Sun's (lower PE) without going through space (high PE) would be a classic example of tunneling, if it ever happened.
TANSTAAFL
If the number of paying consumers decreases because some potential consumers are pirating, and the cost of providing the service remains constant, the provider will raise the price for the payers. Thus, you really are stealing from the people who are buying their cable.
TANSTAAFL
If a group of people regularly siphon use bandwith from other people's accounts, the ISP will see that it's costs are going up without a corresponding increase in revenue, and will raise prices. The cost will be distributed over a large number of people, but it certainly isn't free.
I'm aware (that I can't adequetly imagine) how improbable that would be. I didn't mean to sound flippant, but if it did happen it would be a really great example of tunneling, I couldn't resist.
Well, there is actually a reason why that could not happen. The weather system doesn't contain that much energy.
Two words: Quantum Tunneling.
I would certainly admit that important things cannot be done without historical opportunity, and that if the opportunity exists someone will take advantage of it sooner or later, but the specific results may vary greatly deppending on who is in charge.
If WWII Germany had been led by a Napoleon instead of a Hitler, we might have had a cold war with them instead of the Russians, and if revolutionary France had had a Hitler come to power, they wouldn't have been nearly so succesful.
Likewise, just based on populations and geography you could probably deduce that Europe and the Middle East would be repeatedly invaded from the stepps. But the abberantly huge scope of the Mongol invasion woulnd't ahve been possible without someone like Ghengis or Chingiz or however you want to spell his name.
I think that, like the Nature/Nurture debate, the Great People/Forces of History debate is best answered by "Yes, Both."
Ah, but Kennedy's space program didn't really make that much of a difference, did it? When was the last time we sent someone to the moon? I think that the main result of teh Apollo program was to convince the public that space exploration was just about empty gestures instead of practical results, and thus the benifits of the new technology developed were cancelled out. This isn't neccesarily to say that leaders can't have a large effect, but that Kennedy was a bad example.
Hmmm... It seems like what our brains really need is more cache. I mean, we have lots of RAM, but we can only store 7 or so things in cache at once (the "magic number"). We could do much better even if we just increased that to 10.
Unfortunatly, most people don't have the stomach to deal with the consequences of such research(ie. what to do with a failed GM human).
I bet the Chinese won't have any trouble with this. It sucks, but there it is.
What looks like a genetic mistake now, could be the key to our survival 100 years from now, contrastingly what looks good now may be harmful to us later.
But we can expect that there will be some sort of correlation between what we want now and what we will want in 100 years. At worst, it will be orthoginal, since I can't think of an argument for why they could correlate negitivly, even specific examples of good-now-bad-later might pop up randomly.
But every imporvment will probably have some sort of hidden cost. If there was an easy and pain free way to increase intelligence, evolution would have found it already. Of course, there are some things that are much less of a disadvantage in the modern world than they were in the environment we evolved in. Nearsightedness, needing more sodium, or needing more calories would all be much worse disadvantages for our ancestors than for us.
This is a dangerous assumption to make. There is a reason for conservatism in medicine; there is no "magic undo", yet.
If he has the ability to alter his genome, it would seem to follow logically that he would have the ability to alter his genome. If he finds that the genotype he's given himself isn't what he wants, he has already demonstrated that he can change it. In fact, he would probably make sure that the modifications were easy to undo, say by putting them on plasmids with some sort of self destruct, since he knows that he wants to be able to revert.
Which means we don't have to worry about GE turning humans into a monoculture.