You say "sorry, that's scientific information. we can't act on that until after the next election when the Will of the People will have been heard".
It's pretty easy to hold a plebicite in such a case on short notice, and the question certainly is important enough to do so. If the project entails risks for the country or can't be financed out of the approved budget, in fact that is what ought to happen. That's even more the case given that the impact of a "dinosaur killer asteroids" in three years is always far from certain.
Are you sure you've thought this through?
You certainly haven't, since even your absurdly literal interpretation of my statement, combined with your unrealistic straw man, still admits a simple democratic solution.
It's frustrating reading because this is a chance for users of Windows to get the best possible outcome by making their voices heard
So you are saying users should waste their time to send free feedback to Microsoft so that Microsoft can then ship them an OS and charge an arm and a leg for it and continue to have a stranglehold on the desktop, or possibly regain their previous monopoly position? Really?
which only increases the chances that genuine bugs and useful feedback will be lost in all that mess
Seems like I should submit some spurious bug reports myself.
That said, what we see here is the downside to open source. There is no real penalty for not listening to users and just doing what you want.
Why should there be? FOSS developers develop what they think is useful to themselves and they voluntarily and freely share it. What possible obligation would they have to listen to non-contributing users? They might like a large user base and voluntarily listen, but it's up to them.
But I think k hubris is easier with open source when you are less likely to lose a paycheque.
In my experience, hubris is a lot easier if you do have a big paycheck. Much of the design of Windows, for example, is driven by highly paid fancy systems engineers who packed the system full with useless features. Management, marketing, and engineers all like features.
Of course, if you consider Windows less hubristic than Gnome, feel free to use Windows, and pay for the lack of hubris.
Again, look who's talking: white upper middle class, university educated twit.
And the reason for your left wing positions is because you're too lazy and self-important to help other people yourself; so much easier to just take a superior political position and vote that other people's money take care of problems, real or imagined.
The world has moved on and realized that there are no acceptable excuses to execute anybody in a modern society, it is time to join it.
You know, the world has "moved on" time and again: to imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and socialism, all with wonderful philosophical and scientific justifications behind them. The idea that the US should do something because much of the rest of the world, or "civilized countries", or Europeans, or China, or whoever is doing it, isn't very convincing.
I don't really care much about the death penalty either way, but frankly, if Europeans don't like it, that's a point in its favor as far as I'm concerned.
So-called "civilized countries" like Norway instill a large set of common values, behaviors, and goals into their citizens from birth. That's in addition to being wealthy, ethnically and culturally homogeneous, and having low inequality as a result of government policy. Now, that may appeal to Norwegians, but Americans actually generally prefer not to live like that. I certainly wouldn't.
Most forms of mental illness do not diminish your capacity to understand that murder is wrong. So, most mental illness does not exculpate people. Furthermore, the choice in such cases usually comes down to death penalty, life imprisonment, or lifetime commitment to a specialized psychiatric institution. It's not obvious which fate would be preferable.
Adopting a policy because it makes us more like Germany, Italy, Japan, or France is hardly a convincing argument, given the current state and the history of those nations. You really need to free yourself from the misconception that Americans care, or should care, what Europeans or Asians do or believe.
It's a myth that drugs used for surgery work reliably. In fact, there is a wide range of responses. A significant fraction of people reach some level of consciousness during surgery.
I'm fairly neutral on the question of the death penalty itself, and I think it really doesn't matter much whether we keep it or abolish it. But I think if the state executes people, it should be clear and visible to all that violence is being committed. A firing squad makes that clear, while at the same time being quite effective.
"Spouting the current thought of the masses" is what politicians are supposed to do; saying that politician are doing that is a compliment. The tenor of your comment suggests that you believe that it is the job of politicians to substitute superior, scientifically informed judgment for what "the masses" want. You're right: people on the political right and on the political center reject that belief and find it quite offensive.
The only way science should ever influence policy in a democracy is by convincing a majority of voters. That's not only a matter of principle, it's something that has turned out to be important time and time again, because the political left (socialists, progressives) have time and again misused science and committed grave crimes against humanity in the process.
You're insane. This has been a problem in the USA long before ACA
Did I refer anywhere to the ACA? Of course it has been a problem long before the ACA: the old system also socialized costs. Long before the ACA, half of the US medical system was already socialized and public, and that's where a lot of the prescription drug costs occur.
The US already spends more per capita in its public health care system than nations like the UK; the problem is that the US public health care system is so f*cking inefficient that it manages to cover less than 1/3 of the population with that massive spending.
Are you such an uninformed moron that you believe that medicine was capitalist and private in the US before the ACA and the ACA turned it into socialized medicine?
Insurance companies want pills because they're cheaper than long term care
Long term care isn't usually covered by medical insurance (it's covered by long term care insurance), so insurance companies would love to shove you into long term care if it reduced your drug costs. In addition, the need for long term care usually arises after people have left the private insurance system anyway. So the idea that long term care motivates private insurance companies is ludicrous.
but it's capitalism out of control
Idiocy is out of control in the US, and you're a prime example of the problem.
but apparently some countries need laws to stop people from discriminating against people with different colour skin so you can't leave everything to the marketplace
What is far more important than laws is awareness. Most countries other than the US are populated by such arrogant idiots whose heads have been filled with such b.s. that they seriously believe that discrimination and racism are less of a problem in their countries than in the US, that they ignore a long history of genocide and ethnic cleansing that produced their current societies, and that problems get solved by passing laws against them. You're a prime representative of those delusions.
... short term thinking. The mindset of our era is corporate heads wanting quick turn around for profit. This is what Harper did to canada, he re-oriented the science division towards the oil sands "supporting industry" any serious research that requires any length or depth gets cut.
I don't see how corporate heads are responsible for government misusing scientific results. In fact, corporations tend to be pretty conservative about new technologies or scientific results if their own money is at stake.
The primary group of people playing fast and loose with scientific results, and jumping on the latest hot-of-the-press theories, are politicians, for anything from nutritional regulations to shoving money in the hands of big oil. Politicians are incentivized for short term thinking because they just need to get people worried enough or angry enough to vote for them at the next election, and they are rarely if every held accountable for their failure to achieve what they promised.
The patent system rewards drug makers, hospitals push their drugs, and the American consumer gets the hard deep fucking they asked for.
The only problem with any of this is that the costs are socialized. If you personally faced the choice of paying $5000 for the latest patented vanity drug vs. $50 for the tried-and-true generic, you'd opt for the generic. Since "insurance" covers it, most people just go for the most expensive treatment. Even if hospitals and doctors aren't financially incentivized, they give you the more expensive drug because it doesn't cost them anything either, they assume that if it's new it must be better, and it makes their patients happy.
Well, that's not a good relative measure. After all, plenty of countries managed to avoid computer illiteracy without the BBC, television license fees, or subsidies. The question is: what did the BBC subsidy demonstrably accomplish relative to simply letting the market take care of computer literacy?
Is this grumpy pointless question time?
No, I simply do not understand your justification. Should the BBC send out free cooking spoons for its cooking shows? Free musical instruments for music shows? Why?
The BBC Micro was a phenomenal success in the 1980s. And I don't mean just in terms of sales, I mean in terms of priming the pumps for computer literacy.
Relative to what?
Why the BBC now? Because it'll combine with educational TV programmes.
Because they are a lot cheaper and a lot easier and faster to deploy.
And the long term future of humanity isn't solar cells on suburban roofs for the next billion years, as you seem to fantasize about, it is space-based power and space-based civilization, hopefully starting to take off within a few decades.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Why bother starting? Because nuclear fission can give us an order or two more energy than we're producing right now for centuries to come at least. That's enough to bootstrap an interplanetary civilization and start mining the asteroid belt and beyond. Once we have that, we have vast new energy sources available.
That's how human civilization has always worked. We have never lived sustainably. We have constantly used finite resources to bootstrap technology and growth that let us tap greater finite resources. There is no rational reason to stop that process now and limit ourselves to sustainable living on earth. In fact, if we tried, civilization would probably die within a few thousand years.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas.
Uranium would only last us a century with current nuclear power plants; that's because current nuclear power plants only extract about 1% of the energy and produce lots of high level waste. We already know how to do better: breeder reactors. They are politically unwanted; technically, there is no problem. In addition, Thorium is common and would last us a long time.
Furthermore, oil and gas are not scarce at all. Limited-growth-types have predicted that we're running out of oil (and food and what not) since Malthus, and have always turned out to be wrong. That's why the attack on oil and gas usage has now shifted to global warming. If oil and gas were scarce, global warming wouldn't be an issue.
Why can't the nuclear industry take care of their own stuff ?
Because they are so heavily regulated that they can't do anything on their own. It takes decades to get permits for a new nuclear power plant, all the efficient nuclear reactions are illegal (supposedly because of "proliferation concerns"), and the reactions that are legal produce so much waste that they are effectively undeployable.
No, it wasn't, at least not copyright infringement. Copyright is supposed to protect uncreative reproduction, not artistic creations that are similar to others.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty easy to hold a plebicite in such a case on short notice, and the question certainly is important enough to do so. If the project entails risks for the country or can't be financed out of the approved budget, in fact that is what ought to happen. That's even more the case given that the impact of a "dinosaur killer asteroids" in three years is always far from certain.
You certainly haven't, since even your absurdly literal interpretation of my statement, combined with your unrealistic straw man, still admits a simple democratic solution.
So you are saying users should waste their time to send free feedback to Microsoft so that Microsoft can then ship them an OS and charge an arm and a leg for it and continue to have a stranglehold on the desktop, or possibly regain their previous monopoly position? Really?
Seems like I should submit some spurious bug reports myself.
Why should there be? FOSS developers develop what they think is useful to themselves and they voluntarily and freely share it. What possible obligation would they have to listen to non-contributing users? They might like a large user base and voluntarily listen, but it's up to them.
In my experience, hubris is a lot easier if you do have a big paycheck. Much of the design of Windows, for example, is driven by highly paid fancy systems engineers who packed the system full with useless features. Management, marketing, and engineers all like features.
Of course, if you consider Windows less hubristic than Gnome, feel free to use Windows, and pay for the lack of hubris.
Again, look who's talking: white upper middle class, university educated twit.
And the reason for your left wing positions is because you're too lazy and self-important to help other people yourself; so much easier to just take a superior political position and vote that other people's money take care of problems, real or imagined.
You know, the world has "moved on" time and again: to imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and socialism, all with wonderful philosophical and scientific justifications behind them. The idea that the US should do something because much of the rest of the world, or "civilized countries", or Europeans, or China, or whoever is doing it, isn't very convincing.
I don't really care much about the death penalty either way, but frankly, if Europeans don't like it, that's a point in its favor as far as I'm concerned.
So-called "civilized countries" like Norway instill a large set of common values, behaviors, and goals into their citizens from birth. That's in addition to being wealthy, ethnically and culturally homogeneous, and having low inequality as a result of government policy. Now, that may appeal to Norwegians, but Americans actually generally prefer not to live like that. I certainly wouldn't.
Most forms of mental illness do not diminish your capacity to understand that murder is wrong. So, most mental illness does not exculpate people. Furthermore, the choice in such cases usually comes down to death penalty, life imprisonment, or lifetime commitment to a specialized psychiatric institution. It's not obvious which fate would be preferable.
Adopting a policy because it makes us more like Germany, Italy, Japan, or France is hardly a convincing argument, given the current state and the history of those nations. You really need to free yourself from the misconception that Americans care, or should care, what Europeans or Asians do or believe.
It's a myth that drugs used for surgery work reliably. In fact, there is a wide range of responses. A significant fraction of people reach some level of consciousness during surgery.
I'm fairly neutral on the question of the death penalty itself, and I think it really doesn't matter much whether we keep it or abolish it. But I think if the state executes people, it should be clear and visible to all that violence is being committed. A firing squad makes that clear, while at the same time being quite effective.
"Spouting the current thought of the masses" is what politicians are supposed to do; saying that politician are doing that is a compliment. The tenor of your comment suggests that you believe that it is the job of politicians to substitute superior, scientifically informed judgment for what "the masses" want. You're right: people on the political right and on the political center reject that belief and find it quite offensive.
The only way science should ever influence policy in a democracy is by convincing a majority of voters. That's not only a matter of principle, it's something that has turned out to be important time and time again, because the political left (socialists, progressives) have time and again misused science and committed grave crimes against humanity in the process.
Ah, privilege justifying itself and its tax subsidies
Did I refer anywhere to the ACA? Of course it has been a problem long before the ACA: the old system also socialized costs. Long before the ACA, half of the US medical system was already socialized and public, and that's where a lot of the prescription drug costs occur.
The US already spends more per capita in its public health care system than nations like the UK; the problem is that the US public health care system is so f*cking inefficient that it manages to cover less than 1/3 of the population with that massive spending.
Are you such an uninformed moron that you believe that medicine was capitalist and private in the US before the ACA and the ACA turned it into socialized medicine?
Long term care isn't usually covered by medical insurance (it's covered by long term care insurance), so insurance companies would love to shove you into long term care if it reduced your drug costs. In addition, the need for long term care usually arises after people have left the private insurance system anyway. So the idea that long term care motivates private insurance companies is ludicrous.
Idiocy is out of control in the US, and you're a prime example of the problem.
Did I say anything was "wrong" with it?
What is far more important than laws is awareness. Most countries other than the US are populated by such arrogant idiots whose heads have been filled with such b.s. that they seriously believe that discrimination and racism are less of a problem in their countries than in the US, that they ignore a long history of genocide and ethnic cleansing that produced their current societies, and that problems get solved by passing laws against them. You're a prime representative of those delusions.
I don't see how corporate heads are responsible for government misusing scientific results. In fact, corporations tend to be pretty conservative about new technologies or scientific results if their own money is at stake.
The primary group of people playing fast and loose with scientific results, and jumping on the latest hot-of-the-press theories, are politicians, for anything from nutritional regulations to shoving money in the hands of big oil. Politicians are incentivized for short term thinking because they just need to get people worried enough or angry enough to vote for them at the next election, and they are rarely if every held accountable for their failure to achieve what they promised.
The only problem with any of this is that the costs are socialized. If you personally faced the choice of paying $5000 for the latest patented vanity drug vs. $50 for the tried-and-true generic, you'd opt for the generic. Since "insurance" covers it, most people just go for the most expensive treatment. Even if hospitals and doctors aren't financially incentivized, they give you the more expensive drug because it doesn't cost them anything either, they assume that if it's new it must be better, and it makes their patients happy.
Well, that's not a good relative measure. After all, plenty of countries managed to avoid computer illiteracy without the BBC, television license fees, or subsidies. The question is: what did the BBC subsidy demonstrably accomplish relative to simply letting the market take care of computer literacy?
No, I simply do not understand your justification. Should the BBC send out free cooking spoons for its cooking shows? Free musical instruments for music shows? Why?
Relative to what?
So what?
Because they are a lot cheaper and a lot easier and faster to deploy.
And the long term future of humanity isn't solar cells on suburban roofs for the next billion years, as you seem to fantasize about, it is space-based power and space-based civilization, hopefully starting to take off within a few decades.
Why bother starting? Because nuclear fission can give us an order or two more energy than we're producing right now for centuries to come at least. That's enough to bootstrap an interplanetary civilization and start mining the asteroid belt and beyond. Once we have that, we have vast new energy sources available.
That's how human civilization has always worked. We have never lived sustainably. We have constantly used finite resources to bootstrap technology and growth that let us tap greater finite resources. There is no rational reason to stop that process now and limit ourselves to sustainable living on earth. In fact, if we tried, civilization would probably die within a few thousand years.
Uranium would only last us a century with current nuclear power plants; that's because current nuclear power plants only extract about 1% of the energy and produce lots of high level waste. We already know how to do better: breeder reactors. They are politically unwanted; technically, there is no problem. In addition, Thorium is common and would last us a long time.
Furthermore, oil and gas are not scarce at all. Limited-growth-types have predicted that we're running out of oil (and food and what not) since Malthus, and have always turned out to be wrong. That's why the attack on oil and gas usage has now shifted to global warming. If oil and gas were scarce, global warming wouldn't be an issue.
Because they are so heavily regulated that they can't do anything on their own. It takes decades to get permits for a new nuclear power plant, all the efficient nuclear reactions are illegal (supposedly because of "proliferation concerns"), and the reactions that are legal produce so much waste that they are effectively undeployable.
Not even close. The only way it's becoming "competitive" is through massive subsidies.
What's there to "solve"?
Well, you certainly are a representative of the scientifically illiterate subset.
Sure they do, the same reason they had to go after Williams and Thicke: greed.
No, it wasn't, at least not copyright infringement. Copyright is supposed to protect uncreative reproduction, not artistic creations that are similar to others.