Relativity was developed in part to explain the wierdnesses of particles accelerated to very high speeds (or high energies, as they call it, since at a certain point you just keep pumping energy into the particles and they don't gain any significant speed).
As particles are accelerated closer and closer to the speed of light, they become more and more massive along a curve that leads to infinity at the speed of light. This has been experimentally confirmed to a high degree (though obviously they haven't created an object of infinite mass going light speed). I don't know much about the experimental support for the relativistic time dilation effect (presumably particles with short half-lives survive for correspondingly longer amounts of time when accelerated near the speed of light), but time is also supposed to slow down and stop at the speed of light (i.e. time is divided by a curve which starts at 1 at full stop and approaches infinite values asymptotically to light speed). Both of these effects prevent any object from reaching light speed.
The idea that relativity breaks down at light speed is nonsensical, because no object can ever reach light speed (in a simple way).
When physicists talk about travelling "faster than light," they are talking about non-trivial, non-obvious tricks (like warping space to make the path shorter, or using quantum tunneling to "teleport" in billions of little jumps, or using wormholes to slip crossways along a hidden dimension to a place that only seems far away in 3D). It's pretty well experimentally supported that you can't just build a good enough rocket to go faster than light.
After all, there isn't a practical manmade nanotech device yet in existence.
The benefits of nanotech are so vast that it is a waste of time trying to ennumerate them. Medical benefits can be summed up with: full capability for artificial replacement, perfect repair, and perfect control of any and all of the body. The end of all disease, and infinite potential for enhancement (clue: cyborgs are not going to be clunky mechanical things).
IMHO, after nanotech is developed, population will explode to the point where the average individual can't afford the mass to own a solid body (at least not a biological one). This will be after we've eaten all the asteroids, all the comets, all the planets, and started mining the sun. People will just be brains with a miniscule support system and a whispy "cloud" for a body. Don't worry, it'll still look and feel like a human body, and will probably be stronger and a lot sturdier as well. Not that I think people will actually spend most of their time using their "eyes" and other physical senses; it would all be facades anyway, why not just go direct to simulation?
Given the obvious implications of nanotech, these unambitious speculations seem awfully silly, especially when we are so far from the first assembler.
"There is NO MORAL DIFFERENCE between murderring a bad man and murderring a good one."
What if he is executed? Do you really think it's moral for the state and not for the individual? Of course not, trials and government authority and other formalities have nothing to do with morality, they are just a practical system for everyone to agree on one course of action (and hopefully the moral one).
Since you seem to be using it as a narrow example to illustrate a broad point, I'll assume you mean that for every crime, not just murder.
How about imprisoning an evil man? Taking back stolen goods?
It is not immoral to punish the guilty. However, this is not about that.
If I could legally take any amount of money (from a dollar to a billion dollars) from Bill Gates I would. Did he earn the money? Of course not, no single individual can earn such a vast fortune, and it's debatable whether he's ever done a useful and productive thing for society (as opposed to hurting society for his own profit) in his work at Microsoft. His only claim to it over mine (or anyone else's claim) is legal; he has no moral claim to this unearned fortune. Therefor, taking his money would be, at worst, a morally neutral act. Morally neutral and personally beneficial, hmm... I wouldn't have to think about it for very long.
I wouldn't shoot Bill Gates, much as I dislike him. It's not like he's a real dictator who orders his enemies tortured and murdered. It would be morally wrong to shoot him for no reason.
I didn't miss his point, I just don't agree with it.
For the usual obvious reasons, I consider time travel impossible.
However, I don't believe unquestioningly that travel faster than light speed is impossible just because the current popular theory says it is. Whatever else we know about relativity, we know that it's not complete. It doesn't describe everything, and we may yet produce conditions under which the relativistic time distortions do not occur.
Of all the ideals of our modern culture, I think these are the dumbest: "don't stoop to their level" "if you respond in kind, you're no better than them" "even if you know, from the evidence of your own senses, that someone is guilty of a crime, and you are in a bad situation far from your society's enforced law and order, they must be given a 'fair trial' by some authority who doesn't have first-hand knowledge" etc.
What these have in common is that they seem to be about justice, but they're really about reserving the right to punish wrongdoers exclusively for the state. Direct action is no less moral, it just takes back power for the individual.
If someone legally, through consentual agreements, yet still against your will (for example, you neither wanted nor had any use for Windows or MS-DOS, but it's cost was unavoidably included in a computer you bought), takes your money, then you shouldn't feel bad about doing the same back to them.
It is just the same as if someone steals your car, and there are no police around to take it back (or car theft isn't illegal...); you would be fully morally justified in sneaking up and taking the car back, or in stealing other goods of equal value, or, for that matter, in beating the hell out of the prick and taking your car, and maybe whatever else he's got lying around, with a warning that next time you'll kill him (punishment has to be greater than the profit from the crime to be an effective deterrent).
However, going out and stealing someone else's car would really be stooping to their level...
"I'm afraid that however clever we may become we will never be able to travel faster than light. If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time."
I don't think physics has decided yet whether we can cheat our way past light speed. I agree that it seems unlikely, but we shouldn't give up hope.
"...Earth is by far the most favoured planet in the solar system. Mars is small, cold and without much atmosphere, and the other planets are quite unsuitable for human beings. We either have to learn to live in space stations or travel to the next star. We won't do that in the next century."
IMHO, people could have moved off the planet in vast numbers already, all it would take is some good PR and getting rid of NASA (which hasn't improved on it's launch methods since the sixties, and continues to convince everyone that space travel is so horribly complicated that only big government bureaucracies can handle it).
Mars may be small, but since it's not all covered with oceans, it has just as much land area as Earth. With the development of aerogels, we can pretty much just tent over as big an area as we like. If we send a few thousand people over, they'll get sick of living in cans and figure it out pretty quickly.
Space stations are pretty trivial. You mould a metallic asteroid into a big can, fill it with air, and spin it (you can make one miles thick with Earth gravity even out of aluminum and steel; as we get better at working with carbon we'll make whole hollow worlds). If you make it big enough, you don't even need to worry about micrometeors poking holes, because it would take months or years for all the air to escape. If we weren't such pansies about fission rockets and fission power stations, we could have done this stuff in the fifties.
Each time you click the button, you give about 4 or 5 cents. Sending $20/year directly to the UN World Food Program is more effective than visiting the Hunger Site every day (and lets face it, you'll miss days), and takes less effort.
However, the site itself says that 3/4 of the people starving are children under 5. Practically every mouthful goes directly into increasing overpopulation in areas where people can't feed themselves. Feed one starving child today, watch six children starve twenty years from now.
(BTW, I think the suggestion was that sending money to wash off penguins was not as good as sending money to feed starving children)
That's interesting. You don't seem to care about death somewhere else, because it helps curb population growth,
No, I don't care about death somewhere else because it is somewhere else and doesn't affect me... unless it does affect me, which is the degree to which I do care about it.
I do not value the individual lives of strangers, who are closer to enemies than friends, since we all compete for limited resources. I certainly wouldn't go out and attack them (or support their attackers) needlessly either, and make them true enemies; it's just common sense.
The morality of valuing and respecting all human life is only appropriate in conditions of severe underpopulation or within one's mutually supportive group (this group should not be extended to too large a scale or the natural processes of competitive survival are replaced with oppressive central control; think 1984: beyond a certain scale cooperation becomes slavery to an abstraction). All the most destructive groups, whether religion or political movement, urge us to treat every man as our brother, not to fight over resources but cooperate, even sacrificing yourself, until those resources become insufficient, and allow the greater group to decide who is to be sacrificed for the survival of the remainder.
but nuclear war is a problem, even though it's the ultimate population control solution. Why might that be? Might it be because nuclear war would kill you?
Of course that's part of it. I care about anything that might kill me and the people I care about. But nuclear war in particular must be avoided because it can destroy all of humanity. I value the long-term survival of a diverse humanity (and precious little else) above my own life and the lives of my friends and family.
I've come to accept over the years that our population problem is going to get worse and worse until something catastrophic takes care of about half of us or more.
I do not believe this. Easily something might destroy half or even all the life on Earth, but I like to hope that humanity will have spread about more than that. Humans don't need planets to live (IMHO, at some point we won't even need stars to live, once we can create microsingularity power plants), and when we're distributed among hundreds of thousands or millions of independent environments, nuclear war won't threaten the survival of humanity as a whole any more than chemical explosives did.
Let's face it, if we coordinated the worlds resources so there weren't thousands of children dying every day, in a couple of decades we'd reach the point that there were thousands of children dying every day again. And the world would be a lot more crowded.
Nobody likes pain, misery, and death, but they are always going to be there. You can shift them around to someone else, or save them up for the next generation, but you can never really reduce them. Everyone must die, and most will go kicking and screaming.
You might say that birth control is the answer, but it will only ever be a temporary solution. There will always be those who don't comply, and their exponential population growth will eventually displace the "responsible citizens." Natural selection favors the breeders. If they are kept in check by force, that is just more of the same misery and death.
You might say that space travel is the answer, but assuming that any human can travel for free at _any_ constant speed, exponential population growth will overtake the cubic growth of the volume humans have reached. Even if humanity achieves methods of instantaneous travel, few believe in an infinite universe; it will get filled up. Something has to keep it in check, and that something will always be death; given that people will almost always accept pain to avoid death, and very few humans have the cold style of mercy (if it is worthy of that name) that would kill people just because they would starve eventually, that means misery.
I help my family, I help my friends, I obey agreements I have made for mutual benefit, but I do not give charity, nor do I agonize over how the money I spend on a snack could have fed some distant family for days (as I used to when my morality was based on the value of survival and happiness of conscious minds). Nor do I care when I hear that some distant people are killing each other, except so far as it may destabilize the world and possibly cause nuclear war.
You may consider this an evil morality, but pure altruism through charity is ultimately a lie, if you look at enough of the world and over a long enough period of time. There are many "positive sum games" out there to encourage cooperation (indeed, expansion into the universe is a worthy accomplishment that would be impossible if we all truly lived "every man for himself"), but remember that ultimately we are all competing for resources. If not in this generation, or the next, then five or fifty down the road.
The standard of living can be raised across the board only by improvement/preservation of the environment. Beauty is a consolation to the hopeless. Nothing is more universally beautiful than nature.
Saving the penguins preserves a beautiful part of the world that is no threat to anyone. As population pressures grow there may be no room for the planet's other inhabitants, but we should preserve what we can. I would rather live in a dangerous, beautiful, interesting world than a safe, boring, comfortable one. I would rather be born into a world of misery and have any slim chance to struggle for life than not be born at all.
There I was, minding my own business, eating some fluffy warm things as is my nature, when this idiot with steel trousers comes along and starts poking me with an unusually sharp stick. He was really quite annoying, I even chipped on tooth trying to bite off his head. I'd fly away, but everywhere I went this jerk came along, poking, poking.
Finally I got fed up and found a nice cave to curl up in. Every once in a while I wake up and give the folks upstairs a good shake to let them know I'm still here, but I've learned that they attribute it to some nonsense about the rocks moving themselves.
Most of the remarks hurled at lawyers should truly be redirected at the companies that they represent, because in reality they are calling the shots.
Actually, in reality they usually ask the lawyers: "What can we do in this situation?" If lawyers responded with things like "we don't have a case, that would be legal thuggery, completely unethical" and "let's be reasonable, a lawsuit is just going to cost everyone involved a lot of money", the world would be a better place (and people would swerve to avoid hitting a lawyer in the street).
Instead they say things like "well, we can sue; we won't win but it will probably bankrupt them to defend" and privately think "the more of a legal mess this becomes, the more I get paid."
Corporate lawyers do not, as a rule, act in the best interests of the client (criminal lawyers generally do; they have a lot less room to persuade people to take the more lucrative route). First priority: cover own ass. Second priority: rake in as many fees as possible. Third priority: client's best interest (actually, lawyer's reputation, but they work out about the same). Non-priority: benefit of (or damage to) society as a whole. Absolute non-consideration: damage done to the people at the other end of the legal troubles.
It's true that people hire lawyers that fit their intention, but that doesn't make the lawyers any closer to innocent.
I don't know about you, but I never could mesh the scenes of crowding in that film with the wonder the main characters show over a little chunk of beef.
If I lived under those conditions I'd be eating natural meat every day. They say it's a tender meat, and sweeter than pork.
The problem is not accidents of any sort, but that seed manufacturers ("growers" doesn't seem quite ) are not acting in the best interests of either the farmers, the final consumers, or the environment. For instance: not making crops that are naturally resistant to insects, but crops that are resistant to pesticides, then selling more pesticides to the farmers. In other words: acting like other industries in ways that seem insane except to the narrow view of one profit-seeking company. It's nothing new, just an old bad thing moving into a new area.
is that there are a lot of them, all making contradictory predictions. Some of them are inevitably right, which gives people the impression that it's just a matter of recognizing and listening to the right one.
What is his whole technical basis? The idea of using conducting inks and covering the "computer sheet" with an "interface sheet" that lets you wire the thing and touch some of the wires to use them as buttons; an absolutely trivial development.
He hasn't developed suitable batteries, a cheap and power-efficient display, an appropriately durable and cheap microprocessor, or even the conductive ink (some these things may or may not exist, but he didn't make any of them). There is no prototype which resembles the end product, and no meat to his technical plans. He has absolutely no way to support his claim that he can make it for that cheap.
This guy is just trying to cash in on an obvious idea which will probably become feasible in the next few years, when he doesn't have anything to contribute to the development, except some oddball ideas about what it should be used for.
I'm supposed to think it's tragic that big companies are turning this crackpot away?
I don't think many water/sewer systems are totally reliant on computers. This may mean overtime for infrastructure workers, but is not likely to be of interest to the average citizen.
Aggh! It drives me bonkers! You can't click on the little buttons beside each of the links! (I know they're not buttons, but they look like them and they should be part of the link anyway)
IMHO, the best way to avoid RSI injuries is to build up strong fingers and wrists.
I wrote an article on how to accomplish this for another story here.
BTW, for spine health I recommend bridging and proper posture (shoulders back, head back, chin tucked, back straight; many bad slouch-encouraging chairs become excellent chairs with the addition of a small cushion behind your hips and lower back, and of course your monitor should be at eye level). Also, deadlifts rule as a whole-body exercise for rapid and dramatic results.
The easiest beginners bridge is to lie on your back with your feet flat on the floor (obviously you have to bend your knees for that), and just raise your butt up off the floor. This works the buttocks, thighs, and lower back, but not very much. A more advanced and productive bridge is to start in the same position, and bridge up on alternate shoulders, striving to roll yourself over that shoulder (if you actually do roll yourself right over, stop that! ^_^' I mean hug something heavy across your abdomen, like a big sack of potatos or a duffle bag full of books).
Another extremely useful "bridge" is the dand, a staple exercise of Indian wrestlers. I recommend that it be done rather than any sit-up or crunch. You get down on all fours with legs and arms straight and your butt up in the air, then alternately push forward, arching your back and neck while lowering your butt, and pull backward, curling your abs and chin in while raising your butt. A useful advanced variant is the judo pushup (mostly for more emphasis on the shoulders and arms) which resembles a dand except that in the "arching" phase you bend your arms and knees to put your nose to the ground, rub it along the floor (well, actually you'd be 1/2 inch above it or so) for as far as you can reach, then straightening your arms and arching your spine before doing the normal dand curling-up phase. Just do as many dands as you can every second day and you'll have a spine like a teenage gymnast when you're in your eighties.
Neck bridges are incredibly useful, not just for your neck but for the length of your spine, but you must be very careful, especially when you are starting out. Remember to warm up carefully: bridge to the front first, putting your forehead on the mat and supporting most of your weight on your hands (and keep your knees off the floor). Gently and slowly rock back and forth, going a little further each time until you finish by stretching your neck with your nose to the mat, then your chin to your chest. Very gently stretch to the sides, too; this is the most dangerous part, take extra care to control the weight with your arms. Now get up and bridge to your back; use your arms to lift yourself into and out of position and also to control the weight on your neck (after a few weeks or months you may become strong enough not to use your arms at all, like a wrestler, but be very cautious at all times). Arch straight back as hard as you can (but with careful control), straightening your legs and turning your body into a wheel that can't quite roll over, then relax and bend your knees to return to the starting position. Once you are strong in this movement you will go so far that your nose touches the mat. Repeat this arch ten or twenty times, then arch once more and see how long you can hold it. After than, do another front bridge and rock back and forth again to finish off your neck, gradually using your arms for support more and more as your neck tires, finally finishing with one last four-way stretch like you started with.
Finish the exercise for your neck with some standing exercise: apply manual resistance as you tilt your head towards the shoulder, first one side then the other, then with no resistance turn your head alternately to the right and left as far as it will go. Having pre-exhausted the major muscles of the neck in its strongest movement, these exercises strengthen the neck in its other movements.
You can also do gymnastic bridges (back bridge on hands and feet with legs straight as possible), but these are more of an extreme stretch than anything, and I don't recommend them.
BTW, if you do many exercises for the front of your shoulders and chest, your shoulders will start to pull forward and ruin your posture because of muscle imbalances. Remember to stretch your shoulders and chest. You must also balance the muscle development out with upper back strength: lying on your back, grab hold of something above you (some chairs work, or a rope around a table, or a friend can stand over you and you can hold his arms) and pull yourself up, with your grip at shoulder width and your palms facing up.
ABTW, use a nice soft surface for head bridging (duh).
One more thing, make sure your spine is straight when you sleep. IMHO the best sleeping posture is flat on your back on a firm bed with your feet raised (supported behind the calves) and a very small pillow moulded around your neck (and, for some people, a very small thin cushion, such as a folded towel, under your lower back). Sleeping on your side is good in a fairly soft bed with two pillows and a third pillow between your knees (especially for women, the wider your hips, the more important that pillow is), but this can easily lead to shoulder problems, especially for men with broad shoulders.
Slashdot Mirror
Relativity was developed in part to explain the wierdnesses of particles accelerated to very high speeds (or high energies, as they call it, since at a certain point you just keep pumping energy into the particles and they don't gain any significant speed).
As particles are accelerated closer and closer to the speed of light, they become more and more massive along a curve that leads to infinity at the speed of light. This has been experimentally confirmed to a high degree (though obviously they haven't created an object of infinite mass going light speed). I don't know much about the experimental support for the relativistic time dilation effect (presumably particles with short half-lives survive for correspondingly longer amounts of time when accelerated near the speed of light), but time is also supposed to slow down and stop at the speed of light (i.e. time is divided by a curve which starts at 1 at full stop and approaches infinite values asymptotically to light speed). Both of these effects prevent any object from reaching light speed.
The idea that relativity breaks down at light speed is nonsensical, because no object can ever reach light speed (in a simple way).
When physicists talk about travelling "faster than light," they are talking about non-trivial, non-obvious tricks (like warping space to make the path shorter, or using quantum tunneling to "teleport" in billions of little jumps, or using wormholes to slip crossways along a hidden dimension to a place that only seems far away in 3D). It's pretty well experimentally supported that you can't just build a good enough rocket to go faster than light.
After all, there isn't a practical manmade nanotech device yet in existence.
The benefits of nanotech are so vast that it is a waste of time trying to ennumerate them. Medical benefits can be summed up with: full capability for artificial replacement, perfect repair, and perfect control of any and all of the body. The end of all disease, and infinite potential for enhancement (clue: cyborgs are not going to be clunky mechanical things).
IMHO, after nanotech is developed, population will explode to the point where the average individual can't afford the mass to own a solid body (at least not a biological one). This will be after we've eaten all the asteroids, all the comets, all the planets, and started mining the sun. People will just be brains with a miniscule support system and a whispy "cloud" for a body. Don't worry, it'll still look and feel like a human body, and will probably be stronger and a lot sturdier as well. Not that I think people will actually spend most of their time using their "eyes" and other physical senses; it would all be facades anyway, why not just go direct to simulation?
Given the obvious implications of nanotech, these unambitious speculations seem awfully silly, especially when we are so far from the first assembler.
"There is NO MORAL DIFFERENCE between murderring a bad man and murderring a good one."
What if he is executed? Do you really think it's moral for the state and not for the individual? Of course not, trials and government authority and other formalities have nothing to do with morality, they are just a practical system for everyone to agree on one course of action (and hopefully the moral one).
Since you seem to be using it as a narrow example to illustrate a broad point, I'll assume you mean that for every crime, not just murder.
How about imprisoning an evil man? Taking back stolen goods?
It is not immoral to punish the guilty. However, this is not about that.
If I could legally take any amount of money (from a dollar to a billion dollars) from Bill Gates I would. Did he earn the money? Of course not, no single individual can earn such a vast fortune, and it's debatable whether he's ever done a useful and productive thing for society (as opposed to hurting society for his own profit) in his work at Microsoft. His only claim to it over mine (or anyone else's claim) is legal; he has no moral claim to this unearned fortune. Therefor, taking his money would be, at worst, a morally neutral act. Morally neutral and personally beneficial, hmm... I wouldn't have to think about it for very long.
I wouldn't shoot Bill Gates, much as I dislike him. It's not like he's a real dictator who orders his enemies tortured and murdered. It would be morally wrong to shoot him for no reason.
We have already (probably) achieved faster-than-light transmission, through quantum tunneling.
(I don't remember who did the experiment, or whether it's been independently confirmed; could anyone help me out here?)
Well, maybe it does, but that's not established.
I didn't miss his point, I just don't agree with it.
For the usual obvious reasons, I consider time travel impossible.
However, I don't believe unquestioningly that travel faster than light speed is impossible just because the current popular theory says it is. Whatever else we know about relativity, we know that it's not complete. It doesn't describe everything, and we may yet produce conditions under which the relativistic time distortions do not occur.
Of all the ideals of our modern culture, I think these are the dumbest:
"don't stoop to their level"
"if you respond in kind, you're no better than them"
"even if you know, from the evidence of your own senses, that someone is guilty of a crime, and you are in a bad situation far from your society's enforced law and order, they must be given a 'fair trial' by some authority who doesn't have first-hand knowledge"
etc.
What these have in common is that they seem to be about justice, but they're really about reserving the right to punish wrongdoers exclusively for the state. Direct action is no less moral, it just takes back power for the individual.
If someone legally, through consentual agreements, yet still against your will (for example, you neither wanted nor had any use for Windows or MS-DOS, but it's cost was unavoidably included in a computer you bought), takes your money, then you shouldn't feel bad about doing the same back to them.
It is just the same as if someone steals your car, and there are no police around to take it back (or car theft isn't illegal...); you would be fully morally justified in sneaking up and taking the car back, or in stealing other goods of equal value, or, for that matter, in beating the hell out of the prick and taking your car, and maybe whatever else he's got lying around, with a warning that next time you'll kill him (punishment has to be greater than the profit from the crime to be an effective deterrent).
However, going out and stealing someone else's car would really be stooping to their level...
I meant that he didn't spend his childhood in a chair.
"I'm afraid that however clever we may become we will never be able to travel faster than light. If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time."
I don't think physics has decided yet whether we can cheat our way past light speed. I agree that it seems unlikely, but we shouldn't give up hope.
"...Earth is by far the most favoured planet in the solar system. Mars is small, cold and without much atmosphere, and the other planets are quite unsuitable for human beings. We either have to learn to live in space stations or travel to the next star. We won't do that in the next century."
IMHO, people could have moved off the planet in vast numbers already, all it would take is some good PR and getting rid of NASA (which hasn't improved on it's launch methods since the sixties, and continues to convince everyone that space travel is so horribly complicated that only big government bureaucracies can handle it).
Mars may be small, but since it's not all covered with oceans, it has just as much land area as Earth. With the development of aerogels, we can pretty much just tent over as big an area as we like. If we send a few thousand people over, they'll get sick of living in cans and figure it out pretty quickly.
Space stations are pretty trivial. You mould a metallic asteroid into a big can, fill it with air, and spin it (you can make one miles thick with Earth gravity even out of aluminum and steel; as we get better at working with carbon we'll make whole hollow worlds). If you make it big enough, you don't even need to worry about micrometeors poking holes, because it would take months or years for all the air to escape. If we weren't such pansies about fission rockets and fission power stations, we could have done this stuff in the fifties.
He was more or less healthy in his youth, so I doubt this has had a major formative affect on him.
Each time you click the button, you give about 4 or 5 cents. Sending $20/year directly to the UN World Food Program is more effective than visiting the Hunger Site every day (and lets face it, you'll miss days), and takes less effort.
However, the site itself says that 3/4 of the people starving are children under 5. Practically every mouthful goes directly into increasing overpopulation in areas where people can't feed themselves. Feed one starving child today, watch six children starve twenty years from now.
(BTW, I think the suggestion was that sending money to wash off penguins was not as good as sending money to feed starving children)
Charity, too, is oppression.
That's interesting. You don't seem to care about death somewhere else, because it helps curb population growth,
No, I don't care about death somewhere else because it is somewhere else and doesn't affect me... unless it does affect me, which is the degree to which I do care about it.
I do not value the individual lives of strangers, who are closer to enemies than friends, since we all compete for limited resources. I certainly wouldn't go out and attack them (or support their attackers) needlessly either, and make them true enemies; it's just common sense.
The morality of valuing and respecting all human life is only appropriate in conditions of severe underpopulation or within one's mutually supportive group (this group should not be extended to too large a scale or the natural processes of competitive survival are replaced with oppressive central control; think 1984: beyond a certain scale cooperation becomes slavery to an abstraction). All the most destructive groups, whether religion or political movement, urge us to treat every man as our brother, not to fight over resources but cooperate, even sacrificing yourself, until those resources become insufficient, and allow the greater group to decide who is to be sacrificed for the survival of the remainder.
but nuclear war is a problem, even though it's the ultimate population control solution. Why might that be? Might it be because nuclear war would kill you?
Of course that's part of it. I care about anything that might kill me and the people I care about. But nuclear war in particular must be avoided because it can destroy all of humanity. I value the long-term survival of a diverse humanity (and precious little else) above my own life and the lives of my friends and family.
I've come to accept over the years that our population problem is going to get worse and worse until something catastrophic takes care of about half of us or more.
I do not believe this. Easily something might destroy half or even all the life on Earth, but I like to hope that humanity will have spread about more than that. Humans don't need planets to live (IMHO, at some point we won't even need stars to live, once we can create microsingularity power plants), and when we're distributed among hundreds of thousands or millions of independent environments, nuclear war won't threaten the survival of humanity as a whole any more than chemical explosives did.
Let's face it, if we coordinated the worlds resources so there weren't thousands of children dying every day, in a couple of decades we'd reach the point that there were thousands of children dying every day again. And the world would be a lot more crowded.
Nobody likes pain, misery, and death, but they are always going to be there. You can shift them around to someone else, or save them up for the next generation, but you can never really reduce them. Everyone must die, and most will go kicking and screaming.
You might say that birth control is the answer, but it will only ever be a temporary solution. There will always be those who don't comply, and their exponential population growth will eventually displace the "responsible citizens." Natural selection favors the breeders. If they are kept in check by force, that is just more of the same misery and death.
You might say that space travel is the answer, but assuming that any human can travel for free at _any_ constant speed, exponential population growth will overtake the cubic growth of the volume humans have reached. Even if humanity achieves methods of instantaneous travel, few believe in an infinite universe; it will get filled up. Something has to keep it in check, and that something will always be death; given that people will almost always accept pain to avoid death, and very few humans have the cold style of mercy (if it is worthy of that name) that would kill people just because they would starve eventually, that means misery.
I help my family, I help my friends, I obey agreements I have made for mutual benefit, but I do not give charity, nor do I agonize over how the money I spend on a snack could have fed some distant family for days (as I used to when my morality was based on the value of survival and happiness of conscious minds). Nor do I care when I hear that some distant people are killing each other, except so far as it may destabilize the world and possibly cause nuclear war.
You may consider this an evil morality, but pure altruism through charity is ultimately a lie, if you look at enough of the world and over a long enough period of time. There are many "positive sum games" out there to encourage cooperation (indeed, expansion into the universe is a worthy accomplishment that would be impossible if we all truly lived "every man for himself"), but remember that ultimately we are all competing for resources. If not in this generation, or the next, then five or fifty down the road.
The standard of living can be raised across the board only by improvement/preservation of the environment. Beauty is a consolation to the hopeless. Nothing is more universally beautiful than nature.
Saving the penguins preserves a beautiful part of the world that is no threat to anyone. As population pressures grow there may be no room for the planet's other inhabitants, but we should preserve what we can. I would rather live in a dangerous, beautiful, interesting world than a safe, boring, comfortable one. I would rather be born into a world of misery and have any slim chance to struggle for life than not be born at all.
Sorry folks, didn't mean to double post, and it's a bad enough joke that I didn't want my name on it.
I even missed the last line: "I'm going back to sleep."
I hang my head in shame.
(BTW, no offense intended to the other allegedly mythical creature who posted)
There I was, minding my own business, eating some fluffy warm things as is my nature, when this idiot with steel trousers comes along and starts poking me with an unusually sharp stick. He was really quite annoying, I even chipped on tooth trying to bite off his head. I'd fly away, but everywhere I went this jerk came along, poking, poking.
Finally I got fed up and found a nice cave to curl up in. Every once in a while I wake up and give the folks upstairs a good shake to let them know I'm still here, but I've learned that they attribute it to some nonsense about the rocks moving themselves.
Most of the remarks hurled at lawyers should truly be redirected at the companies that they represent, because in reality they are calling the shots.
Actually, in reality they usually ask the lawyers: "What can we do in this situation?" If lawyers responded with things like "we don't have a case, that would be legal thuggery, completely unethical" and "let's be reasonable, a lawsuit is just going to cost everyone involved a lot of money", the world would be a better place (and people would swerve to avoid hitting a lawyer in the street).
Instead they say things like "well, we can sue; we won't win but it will probably bankrupt them to defend" and privately think "the more of a legal mess this becomes, the more I get paid."
Corporate lawyers do not, as a rule, act in the best interests of the client (criminal lawyers generally do; they have a lot less room to persuade people to take the more lucrative route). First priority: cover own ass. Second priority: rake in as many fees as possible. Third priority: client's best interest (actually, lawyer's reputation, but they work out about the same). Non-priority: benefit of (or damage to) society as a whole. Absolute non-consideration: damage done to the people at the other end of the legal troubles.
It's true that people hire lawyers that fit their intention, but that doesn't make the lawyers any closer to innocent.
If he's using it as a toilet too, lack of content won't be a problem for long.
(Ba-dum-dum-psh!)
Really have to skim these things before sending.
I don't know about you, but I never could mesh the scenes of crowding in that film with the wonder the main characters show over a little chunk of beef.
If I lived under those conditions I'd be eating natural meat every day. They say it's a tender meat, and sweeter than pork.
Little green crackers... what a horrible waste.
The problem is not accidents of any sort, but that seed manufacturers ("growers" doesn't seem quite ) are not acting in the best interests of either the farmers, the final consumers, or the environment. For instance: not making crops that are naturally resistant to insects, but crops that are resistant to pesticides, then selling more pesticides to the farmers. In other words: acting like other industries in ways that seem insane except to the narrow view of one profit-seeking company. It's nothing new, just an old bad thing moving into a new area.
is that there are a lot of them, all making contradictory predictions. Some of them are inevitably right, which gives people the impression that it's just a matter of recognizing and listening to the right one.
The italics were supposed to go around one word: he. Must've missed a key...
What is his whole technical basis? The idea of using conducting inks and covering the "computer sheet" with an "interface sheet" that lets you wire the thing and touch some of the wires to use them as buttons; an absolutely trivial development.
He hasn't developed suitable batteries, a cheap and power-efficient display, an appropriately durable and cheap microprocessor, or even the conductive ink (some these things may or may not exist, but he didn't make any of them). There is no prototype which resembles the end product, and no meat to his technical plans. He has absolutely no way to support his claim that he can make it for that cheap.
This guy is just trying to cash in on an obvious idea which will probably become feasible in the next few years, when he doesn't have anything to contribute to the development, except some oddball ideas about what it should be used for.
I'm supposed to think it's tragic that big companies are turning this crackpot away?
I don't think many water/sewer systems are totally reliant on computers. This may mean overtime for infrastructure workers, but is not likely to be of interest to the average citizen.
Aggh! It drives me bonkers! You can't click on the little buttons beside each of the links! (I know they're not buttons, but they look like them and they should be part of the link anyway)
IMHO, the best way to avoid RSI injuries is to build up strong fingers and wrists.
I wrote an article on how to accomplish this for another story here.
BTW, for spine health I recommend bridging and proper posture (shoulders back, head back, chin tucked, back straight; many bad slouch-encouraging chairs become excellent chairs with the addition of a small cushion behind your hips and lower back, and of course your monitor should be at eye level). Also, deadlifts rule as a whole-body exercise for rapid and dramatic results.
The easiest beginners bridge is to lie on your back with your feet flat on the floor (obviously you have to bend your knees for that), and just raise your butt up off the floor. This works the buttocks, thighs, and lower back, but not very much. A more advanced and productive bridge is to start in the same position, and bridge up on alternate shoulders, striving to roll yourself over that shoulder (if you actually do roll yourself right over, stop that! ^_^' I mean hug something heavy across your abdomen, like a big sack of potatos or a duffle bag full of books).
Another extremely useful "bridge" is the dand, a staple exercise of Indian wrestlers. I recommend that it be done rather than any sit-up or crunch. You get down on all fours with legs and arms straight and your butt up in the air, then alternately push forward, arching your back and neck while lowering your butt, and pull backward, curling your abs and chin in while raising your butt. A useful advanced variant is the judo pushup (mostly for more emphasis on the shoulders and arms) which resembles a dand except that in the "arching" phase you bend your arms and knees to put your nose to the ground, rub it along the floor (well, actually you'd be 1/2 inch above it or so) for as far as you can reach, then straightening your arms and arching your spine before doing the normal dand curling-up phase. Just do as many dands as you can every second day and you'll have a spine like a teenage gymnast when you're in your eighties.
Neck bridges are incredibly useful, not just for your neck but for the length of your spine, but you must be very careful, especially when you are starting out. Remember to warm up carefully: bridge to the front first, putting your forehead on the mat and supporting most of your weight on your hands (and keep your knees off the floor). Gently and slowly rock back and forth, going a little further each time until you finish by stretching your neck with your nose to the mat, then your chin to your chest. Very gently stretch to the sides, too; this is the most dangerous part, take extra care to control the weight with your arms. Now get up and bridge to your back; use your arms to lift yourself into and out of position and also to control the weight on your neck (after a few weeks or months you may become strong enough not to use your arms at all, like a wrestler, but be very cautious at all times). Arch straight back as hard as you can (but with careful control), straightening your legs and turning your body into a wheel that can't quite roll over, then relax and bend your knees to return to the starting position. Once you are strong in this movement you will go so far that your nose touches the mat. Repeat this arch ten or twenty times, then arch once more and see how long you can hold it. After than, do another front bridge and rock back and forth again to finish off your neck, gradually using your arms for support more and more as your neck tires, finally finishing with one last four-way stretch like you started with.
Finish the exercise for your neck with some standing exercise: apply manual resistance as you tilt your head towards the shoulder, first one side then the other, then with no resistance turn your head alternately to the right and left as far as it will go. Having pre-exhausted the major muscles of the neck in its strongest movement, these exercises strengthen the neck in its other movements.
You can also do gymnastic bridges (back bridge on hands and feet with legs straight as possible), but these are more of an extreme stretch than anything, and I don't recommend them.
BTW, if you do many exercises for the front of your shoulders and chest, your shoulders will start to pull forward and ruin your posture because of muscle imbalances. Remember to stretch your shoulders and chest. You must also balance the muscle development out with upper back strength: lying on your back, grab hold of something above you (some chairs work, or a rope around a table, or a friend can stand over you and you can hold his arms) and pull yourself up, with your grip at shoulder width and your palms facing up.
ABTW, use a nice soft surface for head bridging (duh).
One more thing, make sure your spine is straight when you sleep. IMHO the best sleeping posture is flat on your back on a firm bed with your feet raised (supported behind the calves) and a very small pillow moulded around your neck (and, for some people, a very small thin cushion, such as a folded towel, under your lower back). Sleeping on your side is good in a fairly soft bed with two pillows and a third pillow between your knees (especially for women, the wider your hips, the more important that pillow is), but this can easily lead to shoulder problems, especially for men with broad shoulders.