The same can be argued for all other basic services (Water, gas, electricity). The private sector will run a "wait until it breaks" maintenance scheme without really having to face the consequences of failure (discomfort or even death of customers). Ask some New Zealanders about the consequences of unregulated privatisation.
Or some Californians... One problem which appears to be an unintended consequence of "energy privatisation" is that the most profits are to be made as a middleman reselling gas/electricity/whatever. BR> The madness reached its peak/nadir in England when the privatised railway infrastructure monopoly (which had just come off of several years of issuing large dividends to its shareholders) went to the government begging for money because they didn't have enough to do the essential maintenance program that they were being forced to do after the latest fatal rail crash caused by poor track maintenance. Within two days of receiving the money from the government they announced another big dividend for their shareholders.
IIRC Railtrack was actually taking more public money than BR. Also the idea of having one company owning the track and different ones operating trains is one which looked good on paper, even though it was nothing like the way the railways had operated prior to being nationalised.
Monopolies can be good if a government administers them responsibly and the alternative (private ownership) is inevitably worse.
Privatisation of a badly run company will not (magically) make it well run. However much faith certain people have that it will do.
How does "I'm a big fan of both copyrights and patents" get interpreted as 'against' patents? All he says is that patents and copyrights are like Vitamin D - essential in the right quantities, deadly if you take too much.
One way in which the analogy holds is that having "too much" can be more destructive than "too little". Also summed up by the phrase "too much of a good thing is bad for you".
The major issue here is that the only reason patents and copyrights are ment to exist in the US is to further science and "the useful arts". If they are actually hindering rather than helping with this then the laws involved are badly broken.
Why are you stopping with religion? Why do so many systems of belief, that developed among people who had no contact with each other, share so many concepts in common about how society should be run?
Or at least peoples we assume have have had little contact with each other. Humans have certainly had the ability to travel anywhere on the planet since prehistoric times.
Contrast Lamarkianism:
1. Individuals aquire traits through events that happen to them.
2. Aquired traits are inherited.
This is also a falsifiable alternative to evolution. The first statement is obviously true, but the second statement, that individuals can pass aquired traits on to their offspring, has been demonstrated as false. If a mouse gets its tail cut off, this has no effect on the length of its offsprings' tails.
However when it comes to traits such as behaviour it can be shown that something akin to Lamarkism happens in some species. Typically also with peer-peer transmission as well as parent-child.
But I think a reasonable person could look at a new species evolve from a random process, without intelligent intervention, and conclude that ID had been proven false.
Whilst mutation is random selection is non-random. The selection is non-random regardless of if "nature", "God", "a farmer", "The Flying Sphagetti Monster" or whatever is responsible for controlling the environment in which an organism lives. It isn't necessary for any intelligence to be involved, even where an intelligence is involved the outcome can be completly unintentional e.g. antibiotic resistant bacteria were bred by the deliberate actions of intelligent beings...
This may be the best thing to happen for everyone else. Once Kansas becomes the victim of a self-imposed economic failure, even most religious fundamentalists will realize that factual science is a necessity.
You assume that these people are rational. More likely they will just blame the infidels.
By my count the manned soyuz spacecraft has flown about 94 manned attempts, of which 2 failed to reach orbit, and 2 more did reach orbit, but resulted in the loss of the entire crew.
The maximum Soyuz crew is three. Soyuz 1 had only one test pilot aboard. Whereas the shuttle has a maximum crew of 7. Soyuz has killed 4 crew members, both accidents in the infancy of the vehicle. Whereas the shuttle has killed 14.
There's that and it cannot really be proven via photo alone that she was drinking alcohol. It wouldn't be hard to make a liquid that looks like an alcoholic beverage.
There is no way to tell what a beverage in a photograph might be. Cameras dont tend to record the chemical composition of liquids.
However, the school, having set forth in its student handbook the rules of student conduct and the prescribed penalties, has the right to enforce the rules against the students who agreed to them upon admission to the school.
Except that the school does not have the power to supercede the "law of the land". Specifically they cannot require a student to do something illegal nor require a student to not do something a statute or court ruling says they have every right to do.
It seems to me this is the cause of the current problems with the US spaceprogram, not the solution. I think the astronauts are perfectly capable to understand the inherent risks of spaceflight and to decide whether to go or stay on the ground. Moreover, they could decide to use Russian spacecraft to keep the ISS running its scientific thingy but national pride seems to have won over logic again.
When it comes to crew safety Soyuz is a lot better than the NASA shuttle anyway.
Well, in today's present society the first step would be to automate voting, and get rid of the electorate delegates - that would ensure the majority actually does rule (assuming the techonology is implemented correctly).
What are the chances of it being impemented "correctly"? As opposed to handing over more power to a tiny minority. An important part of "correctly" is transparancy, the more machines you add to a voting process the less transparent it becomes.
Second step would be (this I'm sort of deriving from an article I read) - to send the senators and representatives home, and allow them to use video conferencing instead. I think this would allow more "real" people to eventually get elected - and be *willing* to get elected, since they wouldn't have to move out of their home towns - leaving friends, family, and a sense of what's going on locally in their state behind them.
You might also want to prevent people such as criminals or those who have worked as lawyers in the last 10 years, etc from standing in the first place.
Last but not least, it might be a good idea to make being a senator/representative a part time job, and let them keep their day jobs.
All of the hundred's of thousands of Americans who are going to be run through the meat grinder in Iraq came from the U.S. and they are going to come back to it, many with stress disorders, many maimed for life, many disillusioned with American government for sending them in to such an ugly, misguided war based on deception and exaggeration. World War II vets coped a lot better with it because everyone understood the reason for the war and supported it. At this point NO ONE can tell you what the real reason is for the war in Iraq or what will qualify as victory.
Thus they might have more in common with Vietnam veterans.
AND AGAIN, this is all using the previous Al Qaeda attacks in the US as a model for predicting future ones, and since there have only been 2, it's hard to say anything based on that.
With the "Al Qaeda" identification comming from a rather unreliable source. Even if you discount that the term "Al Qaeda" appears to refer to all sorts of groups. From "ordinary terrorists", terrorists who behave strangely and at least one set of "state sponsored terrorists".
The hijackers were by and large outlaws, bandits, in Saudi Arabia. Like bin Laden, they were either wanted, or exiled, or both.
Actually what we have is 19 identities. Which were alleged to be the hijackers very soon after the attacks. The origin of this list is obscure. Several of these men turned out to be alive, thus quite obviously cannot have been the hijackers. Either the hijackers used stolen identities or someone fed the FBI misinformation in order to misdirect them.
However, the key here, is that like Pakistan, they are a government which is amiable to the US.
Amiable to the US Government and probably a few large US based business interests. Which does not imply they are amiable to the average US citizen.
Again, by what bizarro definition do you think this is true? We have elections which is more than some countries have,
As if having elections equates to a democratic government. Make that claim anywhere in the former USSR and people are likely to laugh at you.
representative government, etc, etc. You might not like the pols that get elected, but that's tough. You don't always get who you want. Fortunately, the elections are regular enough that we have the chance to vote 'em out next time around if we don't like 'em.
The electoral process in the US has a great many problems. Including "Gerrymandering friendly" voter registers, lack of independence (from any candidate) in the conduction of elections and lack of transparancy in vote counting.
Well, I've been living in USA since 1999 and over the years I have realized that USA:
- Is not free
Yet often makes a big fuss about being the "land of the free".
- Has more criminals than any other country and put a larger percent of it's population behind bars than any other country. - Has a cruel and barbaric justice system
- Has a completly corrupt and criminal political system
Together these mean that the US's vast prison population may not actually reflect the US criminal population.
- Has more poverty than any other 1st world country
Not just poverty of people, but also of government. As Katrina showed...
- Have their own world history which differs quite a bit from the history that the rest of the world knows.
Hardly unique to the US. Many countries have histories which are selective, even complete fiction.
The deaths, injuries, and other assorted damages commited by terrorists on the US pale in comparison to the damages the government has inflicted on the Constitution in a purported effort to protect us. Even were I to believe every word they said about the evidence and their purposes and intentions,
Of course if these people arn't to be trusted on passing these laws how much of a pinch of salt should you take with their identification of terrorists too.
I would still consider everyone who either votes for or enforces the "PATRIOT" act a felon who has comitted malfeasance.
A certain Mark Twain had something to say on this:)
My actual thoughts do not give quite as much credence to their proclaimed honesty and integrity. I think them much worse than merely those who violate their oath of office because it's convenient. I'm rather convinced that they conspired to violate their oaths. This is normally considered a separate felony.
Thus they'll probably want to catagorised as a "Tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy nut"(TM)...
I suspect that they collaborated with foreign countries to act against the constitution of the united states.
This isn't even especially secret. Quite a few members of the US Congress quite openly admit that they would place the interests of a small Asian country before those of the US.
If they weren't "elected" I would accuse them of attempting to overthrow the government, but since the same people have stayed in power, one probably can't claim that.
The US electoral system has been seen as a standing joke since GW Bush's "election" in most of the world...
I wonder if our policital leaders can be sued out of office based on violation of contract to represent the people. I mean, isn't that what it is, a contract, especially considering we live in such a litigious and capitalistic society?
It might be less trouble to identify those who actually are doing that job though:)
while with closed-source model you can lose both time and money when the company that provided you the product disappears as well as the product support to never re-surface again.
They don't even have to disappear to stop supporting a certain piece of software.
Parent's post is my main beef with Linux. Linux to this day is not a plug and play solution the way Windows or Mac OSX is.
Windows and OSX are only "plug and play" for simple (and/or trivial) systems. In many read world situations expecting a "plug and play" or "off the shelf" thing is an exercise for fools only.
It takes more manual labor to get things set up right, and it's too easy to break a program and not know how you broke it.
A situation non uncommon with proprietary software. There can also be a lot of work involved with proprietary software especially things such as where configuration data is kept being completly undocumented.
This provides the foundation from which the "support" part of the open-source movement comes from.
You miss that open source software can be supported in ways which are very difficult with proprietary software.
It's Irish as in the IRA and other Irish terrorist groups, and how the current British Government is saying they need all sorts of extraordinary powers to violate civil liberties because Muslim Terrorists are an extraordinary menace unlike anything they've ever had to fight before, powers far beyond what they needed to deal with IRA terrorists. After all, Muslim Terrorists believe in a Different Scary Religion, and are immigrants from countries which the British Government fscked over and they're Really Mad About It,
Like the British Government didn't "fsck over" Ireland. Anyway if it was simply a matter of being fscked over by the British Government the major terrorist threat would be coming from Chagos Islanders, Palestinans, Iraqis and possibly the odd Gibraltarian.
So the then-extraordinary powers they got for their war against the IRA are now just standard police procedure, and now they need brand-new extraordinary powers.
Because having extra powers was just so effective at dealing with the IRA...
It dosn't require any kind of machine either. It could be in a handwritten letter. With the most secure steganography there is no evidence of communication at all There's also the problem that whilst cyphers are algorithmic codes are not. With the restriction that codes can only be used to send predetermined messages whereas cyphers can send arbitrary messages.
Slashdot Mirror
The same can be argued for all other basic services (Water, gas, electricity). The private sector will run a "wait until it breaks" maintenance scheme without really having to face the consequences of failure (discomfort or even death of customers). Ask some New Zealanders about the consequences of unregulated privatisation.
Or some Californians...
One problem which appears to be an unintended consequence of "energy privatisation" is that the most profits are to be made as a middleman reselling gas/electricity/whatever.
BR> The madness reached its peak/nadir in England when the privatised railway infrastructure monopoly (which had just come off of several years of issuing large dividends to its shareholders) went to the government begging for money because they didn't have enough to do the essential maintenance program that they were being forced to do after the latest fatal rail crash caused by poor track maintenance. Within two days of receiving the money from the government they announced another big dividend for their shareholders.
IIRC Railtrack was actually taking more public money than BR. Also the idea of having one company owning the track and different ones operating trains is one which looked good on paper, even though it was nothing like the way the railways had operated prior to being nationalised.
Monopolies can be good if a government administers them responsibly and the alternative (private ownership) is inevitably worse.
Privatisation of a badly run company will not (magically) make it well run. However much faith certain people have that it will do.
How does "I'm a big fan of both copyrights and patents" get interpreted as 'against' patents? All he says is that patents and copyrights are like Vitamin D - essential in the right quantities, deadly if you take too much.
One way in which the analogy holds is that having "too much" can be more destructive than "too little". Also summed up by the phrase "too much of a good thing is bad for you".
The major issue here is that the only reason patents and copyrights are ment to exist in the US is to further science and "the useful arts". If they are actually hindering rather than helping with this then the laws involved are badly broken.
Why are you stopping with religion? Why do so many systems of belief, that developed among people who had no contact with each other, share so many concepts in common about how society should be run?
Or at least peoples we assume have have had little contact with each other. Humans have certainly had the ability to travel anywhere on the planet since prehistoric times.
Contrast Lamarkianism:
1. Individuals aquire traits through events that happen to them.
2. Aquired traits are inherited.
This is also a falsifiable alternative to evolution. The first statement is obviously true, but the second statement, that individuals can pass aquired traits on to their offspring, has been demonstrated as false. If a mouse gets its tail cut off, this has no effect on the length of its offsprings' tails.
However when it comes to traits such as behaviour it can be shown that something akin to Lamarkism happens in some species. Typically also with peer-peer transmission as well as parent-child.
But I think a reasonable person could look at a new species evolve from a random process, without intelligent intervention, and conclude that ID had been proven false.
Whilst mutation is random selection is non-random. The selection is non-random regardless of if "nature", "God", "a farmer", "The Flying Sphagetti Monster" or whatever is responsible for controlling the environment in which an organism lives. It isn't necessary for any intelligence to be involved, even where an intelligence is involved the outcome can be completly unintentional e.g. antibiotic resistant bacteria were bred by the deliberate actions of intelligent beings...
This may be the best thing to happen for everyone else. Once Kansas becomes the victim of a self-imposed economic failure, even most religious fundamentalists will realize that factual science is a necessity.
You assume that these people are rational. More likely they will just blame the infidels.
By my count the manned soyuz spacecraft has flown about 94 manned attempts, of which 2 failed to reach orbit, and 2 more did reach orbit, but resulted in the loss of the entire crew.
The maximum Soyuz crew is three. Soyuz 1 had only one test pilot aboard. Whereas the shuttle has a maximum crew of 7. Soyuz has killed 4 crew members, both accidents in the infancy of the vehicle. Whereas the shuttle has killed 14.
Personally, I don't think it's any of the university's business what crimes you commit off campus, but that's the way things are.
If you are commiting crimes on campus that is a good reason for their being concerned you might commit crimes on campus.
There's that and it cannot really be proven via photo alone that she was drinking alcohol. It wouldn't be hard to make a liquid that looks like an alcoholic beverage.
There is no way to tell what a beverage in a photograph might be. Cameras dont tend to record the chemical composition of liquids.
However, the school, having set forth in its student handbook the rules of student conduct and the prescribed penalties, has the right to enforce the rules against the students who agreed to them upon admission to the school.
Except that the school does not have the power to supercede the "law of the land". Specifically they cannot require a student to do something illegal nor require a student to not do something a statute or court ruling says they have every right to do.
It seems to me this is the cause of the current problems with the US spaceprogram, not the solution. I think the astronauts are perfectly capable to understand the inherent risks of spaceflight and to decide whether to go or stay on the ground. Moreover, they could decide to use Russian spacecraft to keep the ISS running its scientific thingy but national pride seems to have won over logic again.
When it comes to crew safety Soyuz is a lot better than the NASA shuttle anyway.
Well, in today's present society the first step would be to automate voting, and get rid of the electorate delegates - that would ensure the majority actually does rule (assuming the techonology is implemented correctly).
What are the chances of it being impemented "correctly"? As opposed to handing over more power to a tiny minority. An important part of "correctly" is transparancy, the more machines you add to a voting process the less transparent it becomes.
Second step would be (this I'm sort of deriving from an article I read) - to send the senators and representatives home, and allow them to use video conferencing instead. I think this would allow more "real" people to eventually get elected - and be *willing* to get elected, since they wouldn't have to move out of their home towns - leaving friends, family, and a sense of what's going on locally in their state behind them.
You might also want to prevent people such as criminals or those who have worked as lawyers in the last 10 years, etc from standing in the first place.
Last but not least, it might be a good idea to make being a senator/representative a part time job, and let them keep their day jobs.
Maybe this should be first...
All of the hundred's of thousands of Americans who are going to be run through the meat grinder in Iraq came from the U.S. and they are going to come back to it, many with stress disorders, many maimed for life, many disillusioned with American government for sending them in to such an ugly, misguided war based on deception and exaggeration. World War II vets coped a lot better with it because everyone understood the reason for the war and supported it. At this point NO ONE can tell you what the real reason is for the war in Iraq or what will qualify as victory.
Thus they might have more in common with Vietnam veterans.
AND AGAIN, this is all using the previous Al Qaeda attacks in the US as a model for predicting future ones, and since there have only been 2, it's hard to say anything based on that.
With the "Al Qaeda" identification comming from a rather unreliable source. Even if you discount that the term "Al Qaeda" appears to refer to all sorts of groups. From "ordinary terrorists", terrorists who behave strangely and at least one set of "state sponsored terrorists".
Yet you post on an American website that runs off and american developed internet
:)
Which uses a protocol developed by a Brit...
WWII and your debt to america from real tyranny.
Don't forget Prescott Bush
The hijackers were by and large outlaws, bandits, in Saudi Arabia. Like bin Laden, they were either wanted, or exiled, or both.
Actually what we have is 19 identities. Which were alleged to be the hijackers very soon after the attacks. The origin of this list is obscure. Several of these men turned out to be alive, thus quite obviously cannot have been the hijackers. Either the hijackers used stolen identities or someone fed the FBI misinformation in order to misdirect them.
However, the key here, is that like Pakistan, they are a government which is amiable to the US.
Amiable to the US Government and probably a few large US based business interests. Which does not imply they are amiable to the average US citizen.
Again, by what bizarro definition do you think this is true? We have elections which is more than some countries have,
As if having elections equates to a democratic government. Make that claim anywhere in the former USSR and people are likely to laugh at you.
representative government, etc, etc. You might not like the pols that get elected, but that's tough. You don't always get who you want. Fortunately, the elections are regular enough that we have the chance to vote 'em out next time around if we don't like 'em.
The electoral process in the US has a great many problems. Including "Gerrymandering friendly" voter registers, lack of independence (from any candidate) in the conduction of elections and lack of transparancy in vote counting.
You can love your country and hate the current administration. There is no conflict between those positions.
Similarly "A patriot is always loyal to their country. But only loyal to their government when they deserve it."
Well, I've been living in USA since 1999 and over the years I have realized that USA:
- Is not free
Yet often makes a big fuss about being the "land of the free".
- Has more criminals than any other country and put a larger percent of it's population behind bars than any other country.
- Has a cruel and barbaric justice system
- Has a completly corrupt and criminal political system
Together these mean that the US's vast prison population may not actually reflect the US criminal population.
- Has more poverty than any other 1st world country
Not just poverty of people, but also of government. As Katrina showed...
- Have their own world history which differs quite a bit from the history that the rest of the world knows.
Hardly unique to the US. Many countries have histories which are selective, even complete fiction.
The deaths, injuries, and other assorted damages commited by terrorists on the US pale in comparison to the damages the government has inflicted on the Constitution in a purported effort to protect us. Even were I to believe every word they said about the evidence and their purposes and intentions,
:)
Of course if these people arn't to be trusted on passing these laws how much of a pinch of salt should you take with their identification of terrorists too.
I would still consider everyone who either votes for or enforces the "PATRIOT" act a felon who has comitted malfeasance.
A certain Mark Twain had something to say on this
My actual thoughts do not give quite as much credence to their proclaimed honesty and integrity. I think them much worse than merely those who violate their oath of office because it's convenient. I'm rather convinced that they conspired to violate their oaths. This is normally considered a separate felony.
Thus they'll probably want to catagorised as a "Tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy nut"(TM)...
I suspect that they collaborated with foreign countries to act against the constitution of the united states.
This isn't even especially secret. Quite a few members of the US Congress quite openly admit that they would place the interests of a small Asian country before those of the US.
If they weren't "elected" I would accuse them of attempting to overthrow the government, but since the same people have stayed in power, one probably can't claim that.
The US electoral system has been seen as a standing joke since GW Bush's "election" in most of the world...
I wonder if our policital leaders can be sued out of office based on violation of contract to represent the people. I mean, isn't that what it is, a contract, especially considering we live in such a litigious and capitalistic society?
:)
It might be less trouble to identify those who actually are doing that job though
while with closed-source model you can lose both time and money when the company that provided you the product disappears as well as the product support to never re-surface again.
They don't even have to disappear to stop supporting a certain piece of software.
Parent's post is my main beef with Linux. Linux to this day is not a plug and play solution the way Windows or Mac OSX is.
Windows and OSX are only "plug and play" for simple (and/or trivial) systems. In many read world situations expecting a "plug and play" or "off the shelf" thing is an exercise for fools only.
It takes more manual labor to get things set up right, and it's too easy to break a program and not know how you broke it.
A situation non uncommon with proprietary software. There can also be a lot of work involved with proprietary software especially things such as where configuration data is kept being completly undocumented.
This provides the foundation from which the "support" part of the open-source movement comes from.
You miss that open source software can be supported in ways which are very difficult with proprietary software.
It's Irish as in the IRA and other Irish terrorist groups, and how the current British Government is saying they need all sorts of extraordinary powers to violate civil liberties because Muslim Terrorists are an extraordinary menace unlike anything they've ever had to fight before, powers far beyond what they needed to deal with IRA terrorists. After all, Muslim Terrorists believe in a Different Scary Religion, and are immigrants from countries which the British Government fscked over and they're Really Mad About It,
Like the British Government didn't "fsck over" Ireland. Anyway if it was simply a matter of being fscked over by the British Government the major terrorist threat would be coming from Chagos Islanders, Palestinans, Iraqis and possibly the odd Gibraltarian.
So the then-extraordinary powers they got for their war against the IRA are now just standard police procedure, and now they need brand-new extraordinary powers.
Because having extra powers was just so effective at dealing with the IRA...
Secure stegangraphy is truly undetectable.
It dosn't require any kind of machine either. It could be in a handwritten letter. With the most secure steganography there is no evidence of communication at all
There's also the problem that whilst cyphers are algorithmic codes are not. With the restriction that codes can only be used to send predetermined messages whereas cyphers can send arbitrary messages.