It is funny, but it's precisely because of the reformation that Galileo was punished. Just like today, there are evangelicals and fundamentalists who are critical of Rome's opinion on creation and evolution—and it was a Catholic priest who came up with one of the major pieces of the scientific account—also in those days, protestants were critical of Rome's lack of concern about heliocentrism—and it was a Catholic priest who came up with one of the major pieces of the scientific account. But in those days, the Catholics had secular power, paid more attention to the opinions of protestant fundamentalists, and were basically fundamentalists too (albeit in a different way).
So it was for political reasons that they did evil things. Which remains to this day a good and popular reason to do evil things.
At this point in history, it is a bit difficult to advance science in the garage. Not impossible, but quite difficult.
(a) That's only true if you have a very narrow definition of science. A few thousand dollars buys an eyetracker which will give a cognitive science hours of trying to understand all these basic things we fundamentally don't know about how people think. And considering that almost everything we do involves how people think, this is a massive advance—most people, most scientists outside of the field even, have a level of knowledge of human cognition that's on a par with geocentrism. Of course, university campuses are great for having an easy supply of people who will rock up for credit or $10 for an hour; you can't replicate that in your garage.
(b) Even if that weren't true, do we need to advance science beyond the point where you can't do it on your own?
Why is it that Americans keep coming up with this? "Democracy" and "Republic" aren't in opposition. The United States is both a democracy and a republic; North Korea is a republic but not a democracy; Canada is a republic but not a democracy and Saudi Arabia is neither democracy nor republic.
Yes it is. You can tell, because the people who have enough power for that to make a difference, act like the constitution is a blacklist. You might think that the plain interpretation of the document sets itself up as a whitelist, but your interpretation isn't binding; the binding interpretation belongs to the powerful.
You're never going to get privacy protected by the constitution because it's the same people who are choosing to abuse it who would have to give it to you. That being said, if it were to happen, the people who wrote it would know what the Supreme Court have done with almost all the rest of the protections, and express it as clearly and precisely as they could.
So, unless it was just a bone for the dogs, to shut them up for a while, the protection would largely achieve what it's supposed to. But it'll never happen, because it would be people who are abusing you agreeing that not only are they abusing you, but it's also wrong for them to abuse you and that they should be stopped.
Plus, they can't even agree on a budget, which needs two 50%+1 majorities. How could they get two 2/3 majorities plus seventy-five 50%+1 majorities? It isn't going to happen.
(Incidentally, I know some people think that rights naturally exist and the government/constitution/congress/parliament/whatever doesn't give them to you; I'm not such a person, because the people who get to abuse them aren't such people either, and so we have to recognise reality for what it is.)
Why should someone without a family be able to with someone who hasn't? Why is it immoral to stop them? Families and future generations are very important for society, in particular to care for older people. It's certainly not prima facie evident that societies should subsidise single people who choose not to get married and have families, and your assertion doesn't change that.
Also, we need to make capitalists, use more comma, like William Shatner. Every comma you use, helps small children, get the food they need.
Mind you, I don't think, that I agree, with the principle of authority.
I think, that if someone wants to take what I have, and keep it for themself, that's their right, and I can't do anything about it, unless I'm willing to be as bad as them. "It's better to go into life with one hand than into the fire with two." But consequently, I don't think, I can have anything to do with politics and voting and taxing and stuff.
Also, even if I granted your principle of authority, I don't think, it would be a good idea to patch the problem with a tax, because then people would say, "well, to make this more perfect, let's get rid of the tax". Instead, if there's a problem with the system, you should change the system entirely for one that's less sucky. I don't advocate one, but I would prefer to hear an argument without a tax-patch. Maybe eliminating for-profit corporations, and restricting the ability to charge interest, would be a better idea. That way, our economic system would be, more like a mediaeval european one, sans serfs (if you'll pardon the pun). I don't know, if that would be, better, but at least it's not tacked on.
(Last night, after I wrote this—but I forgot to submit it—someone said something like "if you have to redistribute wealth to make sure everyone's got enough, something's wrong and you need to change the parameters of the initial distribution". That's nothing like a direct quote, it's my translation, but the point stands.)
"The rest of the world"? Your definition of the rest of the world is strangely narrow; I live in outer suburbs and I don't have a car (I ride or catch the bus to work and ride or walk home; occasionally, a co-worker offers me a lift home if it's pouring). In huge parts of the world you need to be considerably rich to afford a car.
Some Western countries, mostly the English speaking ones, and some developing countries have made choices to make cars necessities, not luxury items. And, granted, a society that has chosen to do that now has to pay the price, which includes subsidies for the cars of the poor (although it would be better not to require poor people to live outside of walking distance of working places, and to let rich people have a choice, instead of forcing everyone to subsidise the choices of the rich and powerful).
But that doesn't change the fact the world doesn't begin in California and end in Maine. or that these were choices, and (I think) quite bad ones. Consequently we could make other choices, and other parts of the world definitely have.
I will grant your first paragraph, more or less. I don't have any reason to believe modern education will give much practical knowledge of farming without pesticides and modern fertilisers and pumps to move water around; but, equally, I suppose, I have no reason to suppose that they don't—just reason to be sceptical that having a lesson in history is enough.
But when you say:
"Today's graphic designers are better educated in absolute terms than 140-years ago farmers because anyone with a degree of any kind is supposed to understand things like chemistry 101, basic economics, and climate - aka how fertilizer works, why crops sell for what they do, etc. In some ways, a graphic designer today is more educated about AGRICULTURE than farmers of 140 years ago were. At least, the degree plan says they are. Tomorrow, I may ask a couple of graphic designers about how economic factors affect crop prices and see if they actually absorbed that education."
I think, (a) your degree plans look like nothing I've ever seen (b) I seriously think you're overestimating the effectiveness of a completely disused education. If you do follow up on that plan, I'd be interested to hear the results, but I'm not sure economic factors and crop prices in the hi-tech twenty-first century have much bearing on mid-tech nineteenth century food production.
otoh put a phd in a 140-year-old farm (with 140-year-old technology and no stores or cars to drive there with) and they'd quickly starve to death. it's probably better to say we're educated differently. more specialised, less useful if push happens to come to shove.
the world hasn't "become shallow"—it always was. it's always been shallow, and it's always going to be shallow, and it will be shallow for many years to come. just read what people in the past actually said, your complaint is timeless.
maybe it was the switch to agriculture or the beginning of civilisation or something, but our civilisation today is much much more like our civilisation was a hundred or two years ago, but neither the progressive nor the conservative media would like you to realise that; and they probably haven't even noticed it themselves!
if you read old writings, going back every couple of decades for a century or two, about the only thing that changes is the optimism (or pessimism) waxes and wanes. e.g. the victorians were optimistic—science and technology would save us all, religion and superstition were dying and irrelevant—but that was lost after the great war, but regained in post-WWII era, but lost in the seventies, regained, and relost.
or think of the amish—please, won't someone think of the amish? there's always been people complaining, and technology has always been about to save us—or about to exterminate us.
Um, most countries parliamentary systems have even stronger party control than America's. America's is weak; that's how come they can survive with only two parties.
It's also completely customary in parliamentary systems — if bills were regularly passing the House of Representatives in Australia or the Commons in Canada or the UK with support of the majority grouping, the government would have to call an early election. Which is, of course, the correct, democratic solution to your current impasse: if the people's representatives can't agree, ask the people what they want.
All the bad stuff you mentioned is bad. Except fortunately, even if your legislators are fuckwits, your government isn't and you won't default on your debt, because they have two options:
(1) break a law. there's a choice about which law to break, but you can bet it's going to be the debt ceiling, if it happens. you can bet equally well that the supreme court isn't going to hurry to decide it's illegal, although they might hurry to decide it's legal. (2) obey the law, and mint a trillion dollar platinum coin. sell it to the fed. when the debt ceiling is fixed, buy it back for a trillion dollars, paid for in cash and debt. the fed owns enough debt that it can sell some to soak up any extra money if they needed to in the interim.
so really, it'll just prove the republicans can't actually blackmail people with the debt ceiling, so you can guarantee they'll break as soon as the slightest offer is made by the dems.
Funny thing is, what's getting cut is precisely *not* "anti-terrorist" "security" sort-of-things. So government services are being shut down, but not government spying.
Do most other search engines just scrape Google? After reading the one you linked to and its follow up, I can conclude that Bing doesn't scrape Google (although they do use a combination of a search and a following page visit to raise the relevance of a pageâ"far from simple scraping and not particular to Google). But I have no idea about any other search engine, like Duck Duck Go for instance, because it didn't cover anything else.
What's the point of providing a link if it only says in one case your statement is false and makes no statement about any other case? It was much more trouble than it's worth, unless you're going for FUD.
G'day. Many of the webpages I use make requests to Google servers without my knowledge. In fact, unless I was using wget and basically manually downloading everything it's almost impossible to visit any contemporary web site and not let Google, or some other datamining third party, know. Even if you've got an adblocker turned on (because of things like jQuery hosting).
It's extremely difficult to say that I consented. Rather, at most, you can say I failed to opt out; but opting out cuts you out of a huge part of life.
Tsunamis aren't a risk to everyone just because they live nearish the sea. For instance, you can be protected by a bay, or in an area with minimal earthquake risk.
Of course, you can point out that tsunamis didn't happen in the Indian Ocean until the Boxing Day tsunami of a few years back, but then I could say that wherever you live, there's always some risk. Should I call you imprudent for not considering the risk of some event that hasn't happened in your area in a hundred years?
Indeed; despite the impression everyone has of the Labor and Liberal parties, it needs to remembered that a large part of Labor's base are the teachers and nurses unions, and these are people who want roads (for their jobs). The Liberals have neither ideological nor practical reason to oppose public transport, only to oppose publicly-owned public transport, but seeing as Melbourne's PT is already privatised under their model, the only risk from the Liberals is that once they leave it'll look the same as it did before. Which (modulo a handful of "better late than never" extensions and a disfunctional billion dollar plus "smart" card system) is what Labor's legacy looks like.
(I admit, I do Labor a disservice, but they other improvements they've made have entirely been reactive. They have put money into maintenance and other such features only after the system begins to break down. If Labor cared about having a functional PT system--desparately needed in Melbourne for our economy to work--they would be ordering trains that worked in Australian weather conditions...)
Or in less individual and more social terms: Religion starts by postulating a few facts, and then killing everyone who disagrees. Science starts by postulating a few axioms, and then trying as hard as possible to show that they're wrong
This is not true at all. Science starts by looking at evidence, coming up with an explanation for it, and then trying to disprove all other contemporary explanations. When some brand new PhD comes around with evidence that (apparently) disproves your explanation, you reformulate your explanation so that it keeps the main essence of your idea, but money and young people go to the shiny new idea and you retire or die, taking your ideas with you. Wish, rinse, repeat. On occasion, people do accept a radically different theory but this is less common than you might think and I'm a cynical person.
Science approximates an accurate description of the physical world over enough time, using money and egotism as its motivations. It doesn't at all work by having scientist try to prove themselves wrong; they're always trying to prove someone else wrong.
And you know, that's the crucial thing, because religion works in exactly the same way. In religion, people looked at evidence (e.g. we are here, society works better when we follow these rules[1]), came up with an explanation for it (e.g. God exists), and then try to disprove all other explanations (e.g. subjective experience can't exist without god[2]). When some brand new evidence comes up that (apparently) disproves your explanation, you reformulate your explanation so that it keeps the main essence of your idea. Because there will always be aspects to human experience that defy accessible scientific explanations, and because exactly the same procedures are operative in religion and science, just with different time frames, science will never completely oust religion, not even in the most advanced societies.
The really interesting bit, is that religion and science operate in the same way, precisely because science is an offshoot of western Christianity. That doesn't make Western Christianity true any more than it makes any scientific theory true, but it does mean that religion doesn't work by "postulating a few facts, and then killing everyone who disagrees". Otherwise, why aren't you dead?
Instead of regurigating uneducated bigotry, I suggest you learn a thing or two about the history and philosophy of science and religion.
[1]: The "society" and "we" in question here aren't our own except inasmuch as the contemporary mainstream liberal "live-and-let-live" philosophy can be described as a "religion". I'm not saying society works better when we kill all gay people or censor dissenters or whatever other criticism of contemporary or historical religious practices you want to name. [2]: I am not putting forth this argument as my own or judging it in any way. Feel free to critque or complement it, but beware that it in doing so you are not engaging me or my point.
In some places, such as megacities, yes but most places aren't that densely populated. There are still places a couple of hundred miles from large population centers.
I assumed that if you were being serious, you were referring to as far as you can travel in a reasonable day using a day-to-day transport method (e.g. a car, not a plane, and say eight hours, not twenty-four). And even plenty of places would or should still be smaller than 5 million, like Western Australia (over a million sq miles) which can't really be subdivided into bite-sized chunks, nor sensibly joined up to reach 5 million.
Concerning part-time pollies, I have two problems with that. Firstly, it means they have half as long to actually consider the policies they're trying to get through, so they're more likely to look to others for advice. And the groups who can afford to pay people to talk to politians are the ones who will be heard first and loudest. Secondly, you're only going to get rich, well-connected people if they have to find a new job every other year (or have the power to take even unpaid leave whenever they need to sit).
Personally, I'd rather pay our politicians a lot of money. Enough that firstly, we can attract the best, and more importantly, that they don't need to be tempted by anyone else's money. Even after they retire/leave politics. This is far more important than shrinking countries.
That's practically what five to ten million people is. But I assume you were trying to be ironic. I still want to be able to understand the country I live in, and have the government do that too. If the country is too big, they have to outsource just about all their policies to the highest bidder.
If it makes you feel any better, it's probably the US's fault on both sides. Which at least means that the US did do something good in Europe, even if they did a whole lot of crap in the US. Now let's just hope that the EU can keep to its senses in the long run. (Personally, I don't think there's much hope for any meganation, like the US or the EU. Once you get too big it's too easy to lose touch. I would prefer countries of five to ten million people, allied and with free trade and travel agreements, but not federated or confederated.)
What recently happened to MySQL? Last I heard, Oracle bought Sun and (in December 2009) pledged to continue supporting MySQL, which didn't/doesn't compete with their main products (as I understand it, in a similar way to how Wordpad doesn't compete with Word, except scaled up a billion times on both sides). Has something else happened since then? Google News and Wikipedia aren't telling me anything interesting.
Depends on your job, doesn't it? If you're an academic/writer, you still have to output pages of text in a short period.
Now, I don't read your comment on "leet txt sms speek" as being necessarily deprecative, but others will think it, so... I'd be very surprised if the restriction of lots of formal text to a small group we increasingly see today is any different from how it used to be: In fact, now we have additional styles and genres being used by people who never wrote much before; its what happens when you bring literacy up to record levels. "Leet txt sms speek" is just an adaptation of speech to written language, and it substitutes not for writing but for speech. (In reality, you have probably very rarely made 160-characters equivalent of communication before you got some feedback in your life, unless you're a professional writer or a loner. We simply aren't designed for monologues.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is funny, but it's precisely because of the reformation that Galileo was punished. Just like today, there are evangelicals and fundamentalists who are critical of Rome's opinion on creation and evolution—and it was a Catholic priest who came up with one of the major pieces of the scientific account—also in those days, protestants were critical of Rome's lack of concern about heliocentrism—and it was a Catholic priest who came up with one of the major pieces of the scientific account. But in those days, the Catholics had secular power, paid more attention to the opinions of protestant fundamentalists, and were basically fundamentalists too (albeit in a different way).
So it was for political reasons that they did evil things. Which remains to this day a good and popular reason to do evil things.
At this point in history, it is a bit difficult to advance science in the garage. Not impossible, but quite difficult.
(a) That's only true if you have a very narrow definition of science. A few thousand dollars buys an eyetracker which will give a cognitive science hours of trying to understand all these basic things we fundamentally don't know about how people think. And considering that almost everything we do involves how people think, this is a massive advance—most people, most scientists outside of the field even, have a level of knowledge of human cognition that's on a par with geocentrism. Of course, university campuses are great for having an easy supply of people who will rock up for credit or $10 for an hour; you can't replicate that in your garage.
(b) Even if that weren't true, do we need to advance science beyond the point where you can't do it on your own?
Why is it that Americans keep coming up with this? "Democracy" and "Republic" aren't in opposition. The United States is both a democracy and a republic; North Korea is a republic but not a democracy; Canada is a republic but not a democracy and Saudi Arabia is neither democracy nor republic.
Yes it is. You can tell, because the people who have enough power for that to make a difference, act like the constitution is a blacklist. You might think that the plain interpretation of the document sets itself up as a whitelist, but your interpretation isn't binding; the binding interpretation belongs to the powerful.
You're never going to get privacy protected by the constitution because it's the same people who are choosing to abuse it who would have to give it to you. That being said, if it were to happen, the people who wrote it would know what the Supreme Court have done with almost all the rest of the protections, and express it as clearly and precisely as they could.
So, unless it was just a bone for the dogs, to shut them up for a while, the protection would largely achieve what it's supposed to. But it'll never happen, because it would be people who are abusing you agreeing that not only are they abusing you, but it's also wrong for them to abuse you and that they should be stopped.
Plus, they can't even agree on a budget, which needs two 50%+1 majorities. How could they get two 2/3 majorities plus seventy-five 50%+1 majorities? It isn't going to happen.
(Incidentally, I know some people think that rights naturally exist and the government/constitution/congress/parliament/whatever doesn't give them to you; I'm not such a person, because the people who get to abuse them aren't such people either, and so we have to recognise reality for what it is.)
Why should someone without a family be able to with someone who hasn't? Why is it immoral to stop them? Families and future generations are very important for society, in particular to care for older people. It's certainly not prima facie evident that societies should subsidise single people who choose not to get married and have families, and your assertion doesn't change that.
Also, we need to make capitalists, use more comma, like William Shatner. Every comma you use, helps small children, get the food they need.
Mind you, I don't think, that I agree, with the principle of authority.
I think, that if someone wants to take what I have, and keep it for themself, that's their right, and I can't do anything about it, unless I'm willing to be as bad as them. "It's better to go into life with one hand than into the fire with two." But consequently, I don't think, I can have anything to do with politics and voting and taxing and stuff.
Also, even if I granted your principle of authority, I don't think, it would be a good idea to patch the problem with a tax, because then people would say, "well, to make this more perfect, let's get rid of the tax". Instead, if there's a problem with the system, you should change the system entirely for one that's less sucky. I don't advocate one, but I would prefer to hear an argument without a tax-patch. Maybe eliminating for-profit corporations, and restricting the ability to charge interest, would be a better idea. That way, our economic system would be, more like a mediaeval european one, sans serfs (if you'll pardon the pun). I don't know, if that would be, better, but at least it's not tacked on.
(Last night, after I wrote this—but I forgot to submit it—someone said something like "if you have to redistribute wealth to make sure everyone's got enough, something's wrong and you need to change the parameters of the initial distribution". That's nothing like a direct quote, it's my translation, but the point stands.)
"The rest of the world"? Your definition of the rest of the world is strangely narrow; I live in outer suburbs and I don't have a car (I ride or catch the bus to work and ride or walk home; occasionally, a co-worker offers me a lift home if it's pouring). In huge parts of the world you need to be considerably rich to afford a car.
Some Western countries, mostly the English speaking ones, and some developing countries have made choices to make cars necessities, not luxury items. And, granted, a society that has chosen to do that now has to pay the price, which includes subsidies for the cars of the poor (although it would be better not to require poor people to live outside of walking distance of working places, and to let rich people have a choice, instead of forcing everyone to subsidise the choices of the rich and powerful).
But that doesn't change the fact the world doesn't begin in California and end in Maine. or that these were choices, and (I think) quite bad ones. Consequently we could make other choices, and other parts of the world definitely have.
I will grant your first paragraph, more or less. I don't have any reason to believe modern education will give much practical knowledge of farming without pesticides and modern fertilisers and pumps to move water around; but, equally, I suppose, I have no reason to suppose that they don't—just reason to be sceptical that having a lesson in history is enough.
But when you say:
"Today's graphic designers are better educated in absolute terms than 140-years ago farmers because anyone with a degree of any kind is supposed to understand things like chemistry 101, basic economics, and climate - aka how fertilizer works, why crops sell for what they do, etc. In some ways, a graphic designer today is more educated about AGRICULTURE than farmers of 140 years ago were. At least, the degree plan says they are. Tomorrow, I may ask a couple of graphic designers about how economic factors affect crop prices and see if they actually absorbed that education."
I think, (a) your degree plans look like nothing I've ever seen (b) I seriously think you're overestimating the effectiveness of a completely disused education. If you do follow up on that plan, I'd be interested to hear the results, but I'm not sure economic factors and crop prices in the hi-tech twenty-first century have much bearing on mid-tech nineteenth century food production.
otoh put a phd in a 140-year-old farm (with 140-year-old technology and no stores or cars to drive there with) and they'd quickly starve to death. it's probably better to say we're educated differently. more specialised, less useful if push happens to come to shove.
the world hasn't "become shallow"—it always was. it's always been shallow, and it's always going to be shallow, and it will be shallow for many years to come. just read what people in the past actually said, your complaint is timeless.
maybe it was the switch to agriculture or the beginning of civilisation or something, but our civilisation today is much much more like our civilisation was a hundred or two years ago, but neither the progressive nor the conservative media would like you to realise that; and they probably haven't even noticed it themselves!
if you read old writings, going back every couple of decades for a century or two, about the only thing that changes is the optimism (or pessimism) waxes and wanes. e.g. the victorians were optimistic—science and technology would save us all, religion and superstition were dying and irrelevant—but that was lost after the great war, but regained in post-WWII era, but lost in the seventies, regained, and relost.
or think of the amish—please, won't someone think of the amish? there's always been people complaining, and technology has always been about to save us—or about to exterminate us.
Um, most countries parliamentary systems have even stronger party control than America's. America's is weak; that's how come they can survive with only two parties.
It's also completely customary in parliamentary systems — if bills were regularly passing the House of Representatives in Australia or the Commons in Canada or the UK with support of the majority grouping, the government would have to call an early election. Which is, of course, the correct, democratic solution to your current impasse: if the people's representatives can't agree, ask the people what they want.
All the bad stuff you mentioned is bad. Except fortunately, even if your legislators are fuckwits, your government isn't and you won't default on your debt, because they have two options:
(1) break a law. there's a choice about which law to break, but you can bet it's going to be the debt ceiling, if it happens. you can bet equally well that the supreme court isn't going to hurry to decide it's illegal, although they might hurry to decide it's legal.
(2) obey the law, and mint a trillion dollar platinum coin. sell it to the fed. when the debt ceiling is fixed, buy it back for a trillion dollars, paid for in cash and debt. the fed owns enough debt that it can sell some to soak up any extra money if they needed to in the interim.
so really, it'll just prove the republicans can't actually blackmail people with the debt ceiling, so you can guarantee they'll break as soon as the slightest offer is made by the dems.
Funny thing is, what's getting cut is precisely *not* "anti-terrorist" "security" sort-of-things. So government services are being shut down, but not government spying.
Do most other search engines just scrape Google? After reading the one you linked to and its follow up, I can conclude that Bing doesn't scrape Google (although they do use a combination of a search and a following page visit to raise the relevance of a pageâ"far from simple scraping and not particular to Google). But I have no idea about any other search engine, like Duck Duck Go for instance, because it didn't cover anything else.
What's the point of providing a link if it only says in one case your statement is false and makes no statement about any other case? It was much more trouble than it's worth, unless you're going for FUD.
G'day. Many of the webpages I use make requests to Google servers without my knowledge. In fact, unless I was using wget and basically manually downloading everything it's almost impossible to visit any contemporary web site and not let Google, or some other datamining third party, know. Even if you've got an adblocker turned on (because of things like jQuery hosting).
It's extremely difficult to say that I consented. Rather, at most, you can say I failed to opt out; but opting out cuts you out of a huge part of life.
Tsunamis aren't a risk to everyone just because they live nearish the sea. For instance, you can be protected by a bay, or in an area with minimal earthquake risk.
Of course, you can point out that tsunamis didn't happen in the Indian Ocean until the Boxing Day tsunami of a few years back, but then I could say that wherever you live, there's always some risk. Should I call you imprudent for not considering the risk of some event that hasn't happened in your area in a hundred years?
Indeed; despite the impression everyone has of the Labor and Liberal parties, it needs to remembered that a large part of Labor's base are the teachers and nurses unions, and these are people who want roads (for their jobs). The Liberals have neither ideological nor practical reason to oppose public transport, only to oppose publicly-owned public transport, but seeing as Melbourne's PT is already privatised under their model, the only risk from the Liberals is that once they leave it'll look the same as it did before. Which (modulo a handful of "better late than never" extensions and a disfunctional billion dollar plus "smart" card system) is what Labor's legacy looks like.
(I admit, I do Labor a disservice, but they other improvements they've made have entirely been reactive. They have put money into maintenance and other such features only after the system begins to break down. If Labor cared about having a functional PT system--desparately needed in Melbourne for our economy to work--they would be ordering trains that worked in Australian weather conditions...)
This is not true at all. Science starts by looking at evidence, coming up with an explanation for it, and then trying to disprove all other contemporary explanations. When some brand new PhD comes around with evidence that (apparently) disproves your explanation, you reformulate your explanation so that it keeps the main essence of your idea, but money and young people go to the shiny new idea and you retire or die, taking your ideas with you. Wish, rinse, repeat. On occasion, people do accept a radically different theory but this is less common than you might think and I'm a cynical person.
Science approximates an accurate description of the physical world over enough time, using money and egotism as its motivations. It doesn't at all work by having scientist try to prove themselves wrong; they're always trying to prove someone else wrong.
And you know, that's the crucial thing, because religion works in exactly the same way. In religion, people looked at evidence (e.g. we are here, society works better when we follow these rules[1]), came up with an explanation for it (e.g. God exists), and then try to disprove all other explanations (e.g. subjective experience can't exist without god[2]). When some brand new evidence comes up that (apparently) disproves your explanation, you reformulate your explanation so that it keeps the main essence of your idea. Because there will always be aspects to human experience that defy accessible scientific explanations, and because exactly the same procedures are operative in religion and science, just with different time frames, science will never completely oust religion, not even in the most advanced societies.
The really interesting bit, is that religion and science operate in the same way, precisely because science is an offshoot of western Christianity. That doesn't make Western Christianity true any more than it makes any scientific theory true, but it does mean that religion doesn't work by "postulating a few facts, and then killing everyone who disagrees". Otherwise, why aren't you dead?
Instead of regurigating uneducated bigotry, I suggest you learn a thing or two about the history and philosophy of science and religion.
[1]: The "society" and "we" in question here aren't our own except inasmuch as the contemporary mainstream liberal "live-and-let-live" philosophy can be described as a "religion". I'm not saying society works better when we kill all gay people or censor dissenters or whatever other criticism of contemporary or historical religious practices you want to name.
[2]: I am not putting forth this argument as my own or judging it in any way. Feel free to critque or complement it, but beware that it in doing so you are not engaging me or my point.
In some places, such as megacities, yes but most places aren't that densely populated. There are still places a couple of hundred miles from large population centers.
I assumed that if you were being serious, you were referring to as far as you can travel in a reasonable day using a day-to-day transport method (e.g. a car, not a plane, and say eight hours, not twenty-four). And even plenty of places would or should still be smaller than 5 million, like Western Australia (over a million sq miles) which can't really be subdivided into bite-sized chunks, nor sensibly joined up to reach 5 million.
Concerning part-time pollies, I have two problems with that. Firstly, it means they have half as long to actually consider the policies they're trying to get through, so they're more likely to look to others for advice. And the groups who can afford to pay people to talk to politians are the ones who will be heard first and loudest. Secondly, you're only going to get rich, well-connected people if they have to find a new job every other year (or have the power to take even unpaid leave whenever they need to sit).
Personally, I'd rather pay our politicians a lot of money. Enough that firstly, we can attract the best, and more importantly, that they don't need to be tempted by anyone else's money. Even after they retire/leave politics. This is far more important than shrinking countries.
That's practically what five to ten million people is. But I assume you were trying to be ironic. I still want to be able to understand the country I live in, and have the government do that too. If the country is too big, they have to outsource just about all their policies to the highest bidder.
If it makes you feel any better, it's probably the US's fault on both sides. Which at least means that the US did do something good in Europe, even if they did a whole lot of crap in the US. Now let's just hope that the EU can keep to its senses in the long run. (Personally, I don't think there's much hope for any meganation, like the US or the EU. Once you get too big it's too easy to lose touch. I would prefer countries of five to ten million people, allied and with free trade and travel agreements, but not federated or confederated.)
What recently happened to MySQL? Last I heard, Oracle bought Sun and (in December 2009) pledged to continue supporting MySQL, which didn't/doesn't compete with their main products (as I understand it, in a similar way to how Wordpad doesn't compete with Word, except scaled up a billion times on both sides). Has something else happened since then? Google News and Wikipedia aren't telling me anything interesting.
Depends on your job, doesn't it? If you're an academic/writer, you still have to output pages of text in a short period.
Now, I don't read your comment on "leet txt sms speek" as being necessarily deprecative, but others will think it, so... I'd be very surprised if the restriction of lots of formal text to a small group we increasingly see today is any different from how it used to be: In fact, now we have additional styles and genres being used by people who never wrote much before; its what happens when you bring literacy up to record levels. "Leet txt sms speek" is just an adaptation of speech to written language, and it substitutes not for writing but for speech. (In reality, you have probably very rarely made 160-characters equivalent of communication before you got some feedback in your life, unless you're a professional writer or a loner. We simply aren't designed for monologues.)