If I have a problem with my company's policies, I voice them internally and carry on doing my job. I don't publish them on a blog or the company's internet page.
You (probably) don't work for a business that can channel impotent rage into page views & ad revenue. Letting a bunch of people vent on a forum somewhere won't change anything; it's just added profit to the whole venture.
I care about tailgating because if I have to stop suddenly (or the driverless car has to stop suddenly) then there's going to be an accident and I might get killed.
You most likely won't get killed. After all the person tailgating you has to have been going your speed before you hit the brakes, and the difference in speed will be relatively small. Remember that kinetic energy is the square of velocity. The slower you are going before the impact, the less damaging it will be.
I wouldn't trust that everyone is just going to do 55 because you and a few others are.
Voice of experience here. Not everyone does, but the average speed and top speed gets much closer to legal if the slowest people on the road are doing the speed limit instead of 10 over.
BTW, who is going to buy a car that will only do 55 when they can retain their regular car and do 80, and get to their destination much sooner?
People who have, with age, learned to manage their time better and not be so impatient to get everywhere. For most commutes, the most you save by speeding is a handful of minutes. It's just not worth the added risk. There's no excuse for speeding except in an emergency; if you have to speed otherwise, it's because you screwed up somewhere, e.g. dawdled getting out the door.
Besides, many people would give up the saved time in total trip time to have the ability to do other stuff while driving, not that that will be legal for quite a while.
No it isn't. You may have noticed how people have become less healthy as they removed saturated fats from their diet. You may however missed the vast body of evidence that has replaced the crappy epidemiological evidence that wrongly implicated saturated fats in the 70s.
"Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent."
Then, have any of you (the editorial staff) thought to voice a complaint to your parent about being associated with what is widely considered a shady practice?
That is a complete and total lie. Unsaturated fats are healthy for you (as long as you don't ignore that they are very calorie dense), saturated fat is still most likely a killer. While there is some minor controversy still within the medical community about the link between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease, the overwhelming consensus is that saturated fat is bad for you. The odd exception is coconut oil for reasons that still aren't fully clear yet.
My advice is to simply pick whatever option has the least of both, and the one that has the least trans fat if there isn't an option that's low in both.
You know what's interesting about a good story? It means different things to different people. Millions have looked at the Mona Lisa and every one of them came up with a different reason why she's smiling. Who's to say their interpretation is any less valid than another's?
As long as they all acknowledge that she's smiling, I don't see a problem with that, but if you're advocating that it has something to do with stance on gay marriage based on rumors of da Vinci's personal life, then you're really just working yourself up over phantasm of your own mind.
And interpretation is only valid if someone has actually viewed the work in question, which you clearly have not if you think sexuality or any stripe has anything to do with it. An interpretation born of ignorance and anger is well, once again, something you have more in common with Card than I.
My house is "visible from space": it's right there on Google Maps. This phrase is meaningless, because it's almost entirely a function of weather, the camera being used, and whether something is covered.
The phrase "visible from space" is generally considered short-hand for "visible from space with the naked eye." An unobstructed view is also assumed, because it would be pointless to consider the alternative, and normal vision can also be assumed for similar reasons. The only real variable that matters that isn't often explained is just how high up you are.
It seems that a 1000 mile long mass could qualify if it was wide enough. It's impossible to say just from the length, though, without the width of the mass and the height of the observer.
Obviously, the car does the speed limit, probably keeping to the right, since that avoids all sort of liability issues for the company making the car. When enough cars like this get on the road, the drivers doing 80 will be forced to slow down, much like they do in areas where the flow of traffic is naturally slower. I've experienced this personally when moving from a city where 10 MPH above the limit in the right lane and 20 MPH above in the left lane was the normal to one where everyone does the speed limit. You adjust within a few weeks and get over it.
Also, as someone who uses cruise control a lot to keep my own lead foot under control, I can tell you that there is a marked difference in just how much you give a flip about someone on your tail when their aggression has zero effect on what speed you go. I get tailgated a lot, now that I've moved back to the first city, but I care a lot less. A driverless car would be heaven when dealing with speeders as far as I'm concerned.
But if they ask money, and say they're going to put that money to use oppressing others, then denying them your money isn't an act of ignorance, but an appeal to one's better nature.
That's fine. Noble even. Pretending his work means something it doesn't because you hate the man isn't.
It's the same sort of mental blinders that leads conservatives to go off the deep end and believe that Obama is some sort of Kenyan-born secret Muslim Communist. When you stop looking at someone says and map your own anger-born strawman projection over it, you commit a similar intellectual sin.
Look, I dislike Michael Crichton intensely for a similar reason. His book "State of Fear" and subsequent defense of its premise showed him to be in denial about the single greatest threat to modern civilization and the survival of the human race. He attacked the motives of scientists and painted people who wish to save humanity as out to kill us all off. His previous book "Prey" also showed a trend of increasing Luddism. I will never buy another of his books ever again as a result. (Well, that and he can't write an ending to save his life, but I usually enjoyed the ride up until that moment.)
However, does that mean that the same theme of "scientists can't be trusted" is present in "The Andromeda Strain?" Of course not. The book isn't "all about that" just because we learned what he turned into later in life. As I said elsewhere, a man can hold both admirable and terrible views at the same time or at different points in their life. A work expressing the positive aspects of an author should not be tarnished with the negative ones if they are not present in the work itself.
If they are, that's different, but "Ender's Game" does not feature the beliefs you attack it for in any form or fashion.
Why would a human pay to insure a car that they're not driving? Either I'm driving, and am accountable for my actions, or the computer is driving, and is accountable for it's actions.
Because you own the car, and someone has to be responsible for its damages if it causes any. You can either choose to pay at a monthly rate through personal insurance, or you can choose to pay a higher initial cost for the car to cover the manufacturer's insurance....Which you can pay at a monthly rate via your car loan.
The money's getting paid somewhere, and the cost is getting passed on to you.either way.
True, but we know that human drivers slaughter vast numbers of humans every year.
Aw man, you've put me in the position of having to argue against an argument in favor of autonomous cars thanks to your bad use of math in an argument.
It doesn't matter if humans kill a lot of people on the road if Google's cars are worse. Without accurately knowing the risks of both methods of driving a car, we can't make a fair comparison. With a small sample set only publicly spoken for by a biased party, we can't yet make that assessment. That's the GP's argument. It doesn't matter what we know about humans if we don't know anything about the alternative.
It was Republicans who fought for the rights of women and Democrats who blocked it (which is why Susan B Anthony was a Republican).
Republicans back then were social liberals, and the Democrats were the socially conservative party of white Southerners back then. The labels have swapped, but the lines are the same, and it's disingenuous to the point of self-delusion to think that there is a clear, straight intellectual line from Lincoln and T.R. to Cuccinelli and Cruz.
EVERY slave in the US was owned by a Democrat or an Independent (no slave in US history was owned by a Republican).
Well, that's purely an artifact of how the Republican Party came into existence in 1852. Before that point, Southern slaveowners and Northern abolitionists were joined in the uneasy coalition of the Whig party. The Democrats had their own mix of the same groups, and the election of 1848 drove a wedge in both parties that sharply realigned them over the slavery issue. The abolitionist Democrats became the short-lived Free Soil Party whose spoiler effect in 1848 led to the election of Zachary Taylor in 1848, a Whig who spent most of his presidency pandering to pro-slavery forces. This led the party to fracture between Northerners and Southerners, and the Northerners became the Republican party, while the Southern Whigs largely vanished as a political force. (Much like liberal Northern Republicans would in the 1980s & 1990s.)
The Republicans were effectively born on the issue of abolition. But once again, they were the party of Northern liberals, or more accurately, Northern libertarians (little "L"). Almost every single civil rights issue Republicans pat themselves on the back for was the work of the very people they decry as destroying America.
Oh, and Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King Jr were both Republicans.
Frederick Douglas was, but politics had shifted enough by MLK's day that he was an avowed independent who publicly refused to endorse either party but who tended to privately vote Democrat. As he once said:
"Actually, the Negro has been betrayed by both the Republican and the Democratic party. The Democrats have betrayed him by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed him by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of reactionary right wing northern Republicans. And this coalition of southern Dixiecrats and right wing reactionary northern Republicans defeats every bill and every move towards liberal legislation in the area of civil rights."
Note who he is blaming in this picture: Southerners and right-wingers. Who makes up the Republican Party today? It's the conservatives who oppose equal rights, in MLK's day, in Lincoln's day, and in our day too.
You mean people will choose to save money while increasing their overall safety if statistically proven?
You seem to have missed the part in which most people were of the belief that they would be decreasing their overall safety in exchange for more money. That's what it means when 75% believe that they would be better drivers for their children than an autonomous car and yet 75% would still take the money.
At the most extreme disjoint of the two sets, that means that 50% of people believe that letting a car drive their children to school would put them at higher risk, and yet they'd do it anyway for money. At least 2/3 of all the people who said yes, and it's likely more because there have to be at least some people who think it would be safer and who wouldn't do it in spite of the money for other unknown reasons.
That's kind of horrifying, actually, regardless of what you think about auto-drive.
It's also a bit misleading to suggest that we should excuse Card's political leanings and activism while we're still here in the time when he's doing it because decades and centuries after the fact of other injustices, we no longer believe the specific political learnings of other authors who contributed to those things are relevant to their work.
You're putting false words in my mouth. I never said we should excuse his beliefs, and I never said that you should freely give your money to him. I, in fact, explicitly said that I understand the belief that we shouldn't.
What I said was that you can't pretend that his work was about something it was not about, because he has political leanings outside of the context of that work that disgust you.
If you want to boycott him over that, then fine, but don't step into the land of seeing him as a caricature like so many people in partisan politics do. A man can hold both admirable and terrible beliefs at the same time or at different times in his life. Works that reflect the former admirable beliefs should not be unfairly tarnished with the latter terrible beliefs that never appeared within them.
That is not excusable. Wagner was a Nazi and a terrible man, but he was still a great composer, and refusal to support his beliefs should not extend to pretending his music was rubbish. The same applies to Card here.
I don't think you really understand the scale of a national budget, much less one for a country as rich as the U.S. $400,000 is absolute chump change compared to the scale of the federal budget. (It's also not "millions," but that's a different lack of understanding of scale.)
The government spent $3.45 trillion dollars last year. Out of every tax dollar spent that year, this research comes out to 1/86250th of a cent. For comparison, it costs $1.2 million to field and support a single soldier in Afghanistan -- $200K-$350K just in fuel costs thanks to the horrible logistics issues there. The total NSF budget is $7.4 billion. (That's less than 2/9th of a cent for every tax dollar spent.) If you are single and make about $100,000 with no deductions, that comes out to under 40 cents for all the fundamental research our nation does -- or less than 0.2% of a penny to find out about the strange biology of ducks, if that's still a big deal to you.
So, I've got a question for you: If studying duck phalluses costs that much, who should pay for it? What role do you imagine private industry in in seeing that this research get done without a direct profit from it? Or are you just of the opinion that if knowledge doesn't turn a profit, then it isn't worth having?
Well it was, until we found out that the author of this scifi piece was a raging asshole. Now Ender's Game is about a homophobe who wrote a book about war against an alien species... and he's come face-first into a culture war that's been brewing for a long time.
No, it's not. I can understand the desire not to support the works of a still living author who spends his money on political views that are offensive to your own or, worse, in hostile opposition to your own life, but that does not excuse letting your dislike for an author's, an artist's, or an actor's personal views taint your understanding of their work.
"Ender's Game" has nothing to do with homosexuality or even any sexuality at all; all the characters are children. The closest it got to the current culture wars was portraying population control as an evil act from the perspective of a religion that opposes birth control. It is still an excellent book worth reading, and its quality is independent of the author's other views.
There are very few authors who wrote 50 years ago that would have supported gay rights. There are very few authors who wrote 100 years ago that would support interracial marriage. Does that make their works all about homophobia and racism? No. No more than it makes Card's works all about hatred of gays; if anything, Ender's role as the Speaker for the Dead is one that embraces tolerance and understanding of those different from you.
You can't spend your life hating the ignorant, and if you let your own anger over a person's beliefs cloud their works and other words, then you're no better than the very bigots you disdain.
I have to disagree with that quote. Ender's Game is an anti-war book.
Since when do you have to think war is awesome for something to be quintessential classic military science fiction? "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman is widely considered one of the greatest military science fiction books ever written and (outside of those who sneer reflexively as science fiction) one of the best antiwar novels ever written. If you haven't read it, then you really must. It well deserves its impressive list of awards.
(There's also the newer (and excellent) "Old Man's War" series by John Scalzi. As the series progresses, it can hardly be considered pro-war, but it is still excellent military science fiction.)
"Ender's Game" is very much about the hard choices that governments have to make in a time of existential crisis and how they frequently push off the responsibility for those choices on those executing them. It's about what kind person makes the best warrior when a society decides to clinically set out and create one from birth. It's about the cost of war. It's about diplomacy and the inevitability of conflict when two sides cannot understand the others. It's about the tension between necessity and morality.
If you don't think that's classically military fiction, then you must only have a shallow, spectator's mentality about war. War is hell, not a Sunday outing. I respect authors who show the costs along with the victories far more than the Teddy Roosevelt-esque rose-tinted take.
Slashdot Mirror
What do people expect when they hand over money to someone, especially when the money isn't regulated and is being held by an unregulated company.
Paypal?
If I have a problem with my company's policies, I voice them internally and carry on doing my job. I don't publish them on a blog or the company's internet page.
You (probably) don't work for a business that can channel impotent rage into page views & ad revenue. Letting a bunch of people vent on a forum somewhere won't change anything; it's just added profit to the whole venture.
I care about tailgating because if I have to stop suddenly (or the driverless car has to stop suddenly) then there's going to be an accident and I might get killed.
You most likely won't get killed. After all the person tailgating you has to have been going your speed before you hit the brakes, and the difference in speed will be relatively small. Remember that kinetic energy is the square of velocity. The slower you are going before the impact, the less damaging it will be.
I wouldn't trust that everyone is just going to do 55 because you and a few others are.
Voice of experience here. Not everyone does, but the average speed and top speed gets much closer to legal if the slowest people on the road are doing the speed limit instead of 10 over.
BTW, who is going to buy a car that will only do 55 when they can retain their regular car and do 80, and get to their destination much sooner?
People who have, with age, learned to manage their time better and not be so impatient to get everywhere. For most commutes, the most you save by speeding is a handful of minutes. It's just not worth the added risk. There's no excuse for speeding except in an emergency; if you have to speed otherwise, it's because you screwed up somewhere, e.g. dawdled getting out the door.
Besides, many people would give up the saved time in total trip time to have the ability to do other stuff while driving, not that that will be legal for quite a while.
No it isn't. You may have noticed how people have become less healthy as they removed saturated fats from their diet. You may however missed the vast body of evidence that has replaced the crappy epidemiological evidence that wrongly implicated saturated fats in the 70s.
Really. Let's see a few more recent studies, then.
No. This is the thoroughly debunked consensus. It is not longer consensus.
Well then, let's see what major medical and health associations say, then:
It's ketogenic. The metabolic pathways that make this true are fully understood.
Okay, cool beans. Feel free to explain the pathways and why more ketones is a good thing.
"Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent."
Then, have any of you (the editorial staff) thought to voice a complaint to your parent about being associated with what is widely considered a shady practice?
The placebo effect is not so strong when you tell a guy, "this small, inert floppy goop-sack will do the trick!"
So, then we should try touting increased bust size then?
Saturated fats are very, very healthy.
That is a complete and total lie. Unsaturated fats are healthy for you (as long as you don't ignore that they are very calorie dense), saturated fat is still most likely a killer. While there is some minor controversy still within the medical community about the link between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease, the overwhelming consensus is that saturated fat is bad for you. The odd exception is coconut oil for reasons that still aren't fully clear yet.
My advice is to simply pick whatever option has the least of both, and the one that has the least trans fat if there isn't an option that's low in both.
You still can, just like you can smoke a carton of cigarettes and drink yourself into a coma for the night.
People just aren't free to pass it off as medically neutral calories.
The reason is right in the name. Corn is a major part of the US agriculture industry. Do you know how much lobbying power they have?
Soy is the primary source of oil for PHVO. Their lobby is no slouch either.
You know what's interesting about a good story? It means different things to different people. Millions have looked at the Mona Lisa and every one of them came up with a different reason why she's smiling. Who's to say their interpretation is any less valid than another's?
As long as they all acknowledge that she's smiling, I don't see a problem with that, but if you're advocating that it has something to do with stance on gay marriage based on rumors of da Vinci's personal life, then you're really just working yourself up over phantasm of your own mind.
And interpretation is only valid if someone has actually viewed the work in question, which you clearly have not if you think sexuality or any stripe has anything to do with it. An interpretation born of ignorance and anger is well, once again, something you have more in common with Card than I.
My house is "visible from space": it's right there on Google Maps. This phrase is meaningless, because it's almost entirely a function of weather, the camera being used, and whether something is covered.
The phrase "visible from space" is generally considered short-hand for "visible from space with the naked eye." An unobstructed view is also assumed, because it would be pointless to consider the alternative, and normal vision can also be assumed for similar reasons. The only real variable that matters that isn't often explained is just how high up you are.
It seems that a 1000 mile long mass could qualify if it was wide enough. It's impossible to say just from the length, though, without the width of the mass and the height of the observer.
Obviously, the car does the speed limit, probably keeping to the right, since that avoids all sort of liability issues for the company making the car. When enough cars like this get on the road, the drivers doing 80 will be forced to slow down, much like they do in areas where the flow of traffic is naturally slower. I've experienced this personally when moving from a city where 10 MPH above the limit in the right lane and 20 MPH above in the left lane was the normal to one where everyone does the speed limit. You adjust within a few weeks and get over it.
Also, as someone who uses cruise control a lot to keep my own lead foot under control, I can tell you that there is a marked difference in just how much you give a flip about someone on your tail when their aggression has zero effect on what speed you go. I get tailgated a lot, now that I've moved back to the first city, but I care a lot less. A driverless car would be heaven when dealing with speeders as far as I'm concerned.
Actually, it would be 400% as much. 400% higher implies 500% as much.
Which mathematically tracks as the inverse of paying 80% less (aka paying 20% or 1/5 the cost).
Few things have quite the same mix of funny and sad as watching pedantic people mess up correcting someone who was actually right.
But if they ask money, and say they're going to put that money to use oppressing others, then denying them your money isn't an act of ignorance, but an appeal to one's better nature.
That's fine. Noble even. Pretending his work means something it doesn't because you hate the man isn't.
It's the same sort of mental blinders that leads conservatives to go off the deep end and believe that Obama is some sort of Kenyan-born secret Muslim Communist. When you stop looking at someone says and map your own anger-born strawman projection over it, you commit a similar intellectual sin.
Look, I dislike Michael Crichton intensely for a similar reason. His book "State of Fear" and subsequent defense of its premise showed him to be in denial about the single greatest threat to modern civilization and the survival of the human race. He attacked the motives of scientists and painted people who wish to save humanity as out to kill us all off. His previous book "Prey" also showed a trend of increasing Luddism. I will never buy another of his books ever again as a result. (Well, that and he can't write an ending to save his life, but I usually enjoyed the ride up until that moment.)
However, does that mean that the same theme of "scientists can't be trusted" is present in "The Andromeda Strain?" Of course not. The book isn't "all about that" just because we learned what he turned into later in life. As I said elsewhere, a man can hold both admirable and terrible views at the same time or at different points in their life. A work expressing the positive aspects of an author should not be tarnished with the negative ones if they are not present in the work itself.
If they are, that's different, but "Ender's Game" does not feature the beliefs you attack it for in any form or fashion.
Ah, nuts. I got caught out reading the summary and not the article before posting.
When will I learn not to trust summaries...
Why would a human pay to insure a car that they're not driving? Either I'm driving, and am accountable for my actions, or the computer is driving, and is accountable for it's actions.
Because you own the car, and someone has to be responsible for its damages if it causes any. You can either choose to pay at a monthly rate through personal insurance, or you can choose to pay a higher initial cost for the car to cover the manufacturer's insurance. ...Which you can pay at a monthly rate via your car loan.
The money's getting paid somewhere, and the cost is getting passed on to you.either way.
True, but we know that human drivers slaughter vast numbers of humans every year.
Aw man, you've put me in the position of having to argue against an argument in favor of autonomous cars thanks to your bad use of math in an argument.
It doesn't matter if humans kill a lot of people on the road if Google's cars are worse. Without accurately knowing the risks of both methods of driving a car, we can't make a fair comparison. With a small sample set only publicly spoken for by a biased party, we can't yet make that assessment. That's the GP's argument. It doesn't matter what we know about humans if we don't know anything about the alternative.
It was Republicans who fought for the rights of women and Democrats who blocked it (which is why Susan B Anthony was a Republican).
Republicans back then were social liberals, and the Democrats were the socially conservative party of white Southerners back then. The labels have swapped, but the lines are the same, and it's disingenuous to the point of self-delusion to think that there is a clear, straight intellectual line from Lincoln and T.R. to Cuccinelli and Cruz.
EVERY slave in the US was owned by a Democrat or an Independent (no slave in US history was owned by a Republican).
Well, that's purely an artifact of how the Republican Party came into existence in 1852. Before that point, Southern slaveowners and Northern abolitionists were joined in the uneasy coalition of the Whig party. The Democrats had their own mix of the same groups, and the election of 1848 drove a wedge in both parties that sharply realigned them over the slavery issue. The abolitionist Democrats became the short-lived Free Soil Party whose spoiler effect in 1848 led to the election of Zachary Taylor in 1848, a Whig who spent most of his presidency pandering to pro-slavery forces. This led the party to fracture between Northerners and Southerners, and the Northerners became the Republican party, while the Southern Whigs largely vanished as a political force. (Much like liberal Northern Republicans would in the 1980s & 1990s.)
The Republicans were effectively born on the issue of abolition. But once again, they were the party of Northern liberals, or more accurately, Northern libertarians (little "L"). Almost every single civil rights issue Republicans pat themselves on the back for was the work of the very people they decry as destroying America.
Oh, and Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King Jr were both Republicans.
Frederick Douglas was, but politics had shifted enough by MLK's day that he was an avowed independent who publicly refused to endorse either party but who tended to privately vote Democrat. As he once said:
"Actually, the Negro has been betrayed by both the Republican and the Democratic party. The Democrats have betrayed him by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed him by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of reactionary right wing northern Republicans. And this coalition of southern Dixiecrats and right wing reactionary northern Republicans defeats every bill and every move towards liberal legislation in the area of civil rights."
Note who he is blaming in this picture: Southerners and right-wingers. Who makes up the Republican Party today? It's the conservatives who oppose equal rights, in MLK's day, in Lincoln's day, and in our day too.
You mean people will choose to save money while increasing their overall safety if statistically proven?
You seem to have missed the part in which most people were of the belief that they would be decreasing their overall safety in exchange for more money. That's what it means when 75% believe that they would be better drivers for their children than an autonomous car and yet 75% would still take the money.
At the most extreme disjoint of the two sets, that means that 50% of people believe that letting a car drive their children to school would put them at higher risk, and yet they'd do it anyway for money. At least 2/3 of all the people who said yes, and it's likely more because there have to be at least some people who think it would be safer and who wouldn't do it in spite of the money for other unknown reasons.
That's kind of horrifying, actually, regardless of what you think about auto-drive.
It's also a bit misleading to suggest that we should excuse Card's political leanings and activism while we're still here in the time when he's doing it because decades and centuries after the fact of other injustices, we no longer believe the specific political learnings of other authors who contributed to those things are relevant to their work.
You're putting false words in my mouth. I never said we should excuse his beliefs, and I never said that you should freely give your money to him. I, in fact, explicitly said that I understand the belief that we shouldn't.
What I said was that you can't pretend that his work was about something it was not about, because he has political leanings outside of the context of that work that disgust you.
If you want to boycott him over that, then fine, but don't step into the land of seeing him as a caricature like so many people in partisan politics do. A man can hold both admirable and terrible beliefs at the same time or at different times in his life. Works that reflect the former admirable beliefs should not be unfairly tarnished with the latter terrible beliefs that never appeared within them.
That is not excusable. Wagner was a Nazi and a terrible man, but he was still a great composer, and refusal to support his beliefs should not extend to pretending his music was rubbish. The same applies to Card here.
I don't think you really understand the scale of a national budget, much less one for a country as rich as the U.S. $400,000 is absolute chump change compared to the scale of the federal budget. (It's also not "millions," but that's a different lack of understanding of scale.)
The government spent $3.45 trillion dollars last year. Out of every tax dollar spent that year, this research comes out to 1/86250th of a cent. For comparison, it costs $1.2 million to field and support a single soldier in Afghanistan -- $200K-$350K just in fuel costs thanks to the horrible logistics issues there. The total NSF budget is $7.4 billion. (That's less than 2/9th of a cent for every tax dollar spent.) If you are single and make about $100,000 with no deductions, that comes out to under 40 cents for all the fundamental research our nation does -- or less than 0.2% of a penny to find out about the strange biology of ducks, if that's still a big deal to you.
So, I've got a question for you: If studying duck phalluses costs that much, who should pay for it? What role do you imagine private industry in in seeing that this research get done without a direct profit from it? Or are you just of the opinion that if knowledge doesn't turn a profit, then it isn't worth having?
Well it was, until we found out that the author of this scifi piece was a raging asshole. Now Ender's Game is about a homophobe who wrote a book about war against an alien species... and he's come face-first into a culture war that's been brewing for a long time.
No, it's not. I can understand the desire not to support the works of a still living author who spends his money on political views that are offensive to your own or, worse, in hostile opposition to your own life, but that does not excuse letting your dislike for an author's, an artist's, or an actor's personal views taint your understanding of their work.
"Ender's Game" has nothing to do with homosexuality or even any sexuality at all; all the characters are children. The closest it got to the current culture wars was portraying population control as an evil act from the perspective of a religion that opposes birth control. It is still an excellent book worth reading, and its quality is independent of the author's other views.
There are very few authors who wrote 50 years ago that would have supported gay rights. There are very few authors who wrote 100 years ago that would support interracial marriage. Does that make their works all about homophobia and racism? No. No more than it makes Card's works all about hatred of gays; if anything, Ender's role as the Speaker for the Dead is one that embraces tolerance and understanding of those different from you.
You can't spend your life hating the ignorant, and if you let your own anger over a person's beliefs cloud their works and other words, then you're no better than the very bigots you disdain.
Taxpayers paid millions of dollars to study them.
Not to go all Wikipedia on you, but [citation needed].
You're probably one of those people who think that NASA and food stamps are 20% of the federal budget each.
I have to disagree with that quote. Ender's Game is an anti-war book.
Since when do you have to think war is awesome for something to be quintessential classic military science fiction? "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman is widely considered one of the greatest military science fiction books ever written and (outside of those who sneer reflexively as science fiction) one of the best antiwar novels ever written. If you haven't read it, then you really must. It well deserves its impressive list of awards.
(There's also the newer (and excellent) "Old Man's War" series by John Scalzi. As the series progresses, it can hardly be considered pro-war, but it is still excellent military science fiction.)
"Ender's Game" is very much about the hard choices that governments have to make in a time of existential crisis and how they frequently push off the responsibility for those choices on those executing them. It's about what kind person makes the best warrior when a society decides to clinically set out and create one from birth. It's about the cost of war. It's about diplomacy and the inevitability of conflict when two sides cannot understand the others. It's about the tension between necessity and morality.
If you don't think that's classically military fiction, then you must only have a shallow, spectator's mentality about war. War is hell, not a Sunday outing. I respect authors who show the costs along with the victories far more than the Teddy Roosevelt-esque rose-tinted take.
What do you use as a wallet? Not a rigid box made of metal and glass, I'll wager.
I've never understood how people can sit comfortably with even a normal wallet in their back pocket. I wouldn't keep my phone in a back pocket either.