I am native of Japan, and where I grew up nobody but cops were allowed to carry guns.
Banning guns for anyone but authorities has two problems:
First, criminals tend to ignore the bans. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the USA, and even if all the law-abiding people decided to repeal the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and ban them, we'd never manage to confiscate them all. It would still be as easy to buy illegal guns as it is to buy illegal drugs today, and in an environment free of law-abiding gun carriers (like the VT campus was today) it would be even easier to do a lot of damage with them.
Second, sometimes the authorities are the ones who should be banned from carrying guns. Taking our two countries for an example: less than a century ago the authorities in Japan were raping and pillaging their neighboring nations, while the authorities in the USA were putting innocent Japanese into concentration camps. Historically, the danger of evil governments with guns has outweighed the danger of evil citizens with guns (with a death count in the millions instead of the thousands), and one belief of gun rights advocates (as well as the reasoning behind the Second Amendment) is that it is harder for a government to do evil to an armed population.
Also, many Americans possess a philosophy that considers individual liberty to be a good in it's own right, and not just a means toward an end. That's one reason why the USA doesn't ban swimming or private automobiles, for example, despite the thousands of deaths caused by the former and tens of thousands of deaths caused by the latter here each year. (The other reason is that we worry less about deaths which don't make headlines. We didn't see a Slashdot story on the dozens of Americans who died yesterday in car crashes, and we won't see one on the dozens dying today.)
The University was not acting as law enforcement, as an agent of law enforcement, or at the behest of law enforcement, and thus is expressly and explicitly not covered by, or even related to, the Fourth Amendment.
Will law enforcement now be prosecuting the University's system administrator for the crime he committed, or will law enforcment be giving him a free pass? In the latter case, I would certainly hope to see the Fourth Amendment involved.
Otherwise that would be a nice loophole in the Bill of Rights, wouldn't it? "We don't have a warrant for the police to search your house, but who cares? We can just promise that anyone else can get away with trespass or breaking and entering when they search your house. Vigilantes work cheaper than cops anyway."
The law is a good one, in general, it prevents networks sympathetic to a particular candidate to run their speeches 24/7 and deny access to all others. We have similar laws in the US
Exactly - in the US, networks have to be sympathetic to a particular *two* candidates, and are only allowed to have "third party" candidates arrested at presidential debates.
I suspect they'll really study software outside the machines, code which the manufacturer swears is the same as the software inside the machines, cross his heart. That's still an improvement over the current situation, but it's not good enough for democracy. If a computer is turning your ballot into a microscopic electromagnetic pattern rather than a human-readable printout, you simply can't be certain that your vote was counted. Software audits may make election hacking more difficult, but they'll never make it impossible.
Although I understand "i'm getting so sick and tired of hearing excuses and rationalizations.", I don't understand the amusing proposed solution of "just put the cd in the cupholder, install it and sell it. period. there's no need to analyze or certify."
Installation of any popular Linux distribution isn't hard, and hasn't been hard for many years. There are two reasons for wanting Dell to preinstall Linux, and for both of them, there is a need for Dell to go beyond hitting "Next" on a bunch of installation screens or cloning a partition image.
1. Tested hardware. I may not want to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but our last batch of new Dell servers had it preinstalled, which was nice to see. Linux hardware support is pretty solid lately, but it's reassuring to have a vendor stand behind Linux support for what they sell, even if I'm planning to switch to a different distribution than they chose.
2. Support for non-Linux-users. This is the big one. Seriously: if you already know that installing Linux isn't much harder than finding the "cupholder", you don't need Dell to install Linux for you, you just need them to give you a discount for the OEM Windows license you don't want to buy. Preinstallation isn't for the computer you're looking to buy, it's for the computer Mom & Dad are looking to buy. If Dell is going to sell Linux to new users, Dell is going to need to test what they sell, both so they can preconfigure things to reduce the amount of support calls they'll receive and so they can train phone operators to handle the support calls they get anyway. They'll have a hard enough time answering questions like "Why doesn't this Super Geneaology Plus CD install?" no matter what they do; they'd better at least try to nip "Why don't my Dell printer drivers install?" questions in the bud.
A) Build the satellite correctly the first time around
Good plan. If you just don't make any mistakes in the design or construction of every satellite you launch, you'll never have to fix any of them. Also, all the satellites should be manned by magic elves.
But the real tragic cost of this program would be the resulting mercury-deficiency and lead-deficiency in our ecosystem. Let's face it: stupid people are hilarious. And although the USA has backup plans for creating new generations of stupid people, even "reality shows" on our televisions and "intelligent design" supporters on our schoolboards just can't compete with the degenerative effects of heavy-metal poisoning in our bloodstreams.
Why, if we ever run out of the national supply of stupid people, future Slashdot readers might never get to enjoy comments like these:
Creepy Crawler:That would mean that we can just leave them anywhere, right?
No, it would mean that you can just leave them at any recycling center, knowing that the cost of recycling them has already been paid for.
Overzeetop:If I pay the tax, then drop the stuff in the trahscan to get picked up by the muni wate trucks, does that money vanish?
No - like the "trahs" those "wate" trucks will be taking to the landfills, the money would be out of your hands but wouldn't have vanished entirely. Because no recycling center would be able to redeem your old electronics, the money would remain in government hands. Ironically, instead of keeping heavy metals out of US groundwater supplies it might just end up putting heavy metals into Middle Eastern groundwater instead.
Needs Food Badly:Of all the things that they can and do tax, now they want to put a tax on recycling?
No, they want to put a tax on buying things that will have to be recycled, then pay that tax back when the recycling actually happens. The goal here is to make it cheaper to reclaim toxic chemicals than to send them to landfills.
And this is what I get just browsing at Score: 3. I can only shudder to imagine what's getting modded *down*.
I'd like to know too, but for some reason many people don't answer my questions no matter how much I curse at them.
If only there were some sort of automatic system into which we could type terms like "photography fluorescent", "autistic fluorescent", or "Tourette treatment" and receive answers!
But seriously, I'm stunned by the hostile reaction "UbuntuDupe" is getting - and I've got CFL bulbs in every socket where they'll fit. Do people really think that the key to energy conservation is to badly micromanage every possible decision that people might make that involves energy use, rather than more simply charging for the externalties of energy production as they are incurred?
On the other hand, maybe I'm just on the wrong side of the "Let's force everyone to do what we like" bandwagon; why am I arguing when I should be trying to weasel my way into the inner circle? If you all like my decisions about what kind of lightbulbs to buy, just wait until you hear my thoughts about what kinds of entertainment you can enjoy, what levels of diet and exercise will become mandatory, and what kind of religious instruction we'll be giving your children.
What's next? "MSFT submits patent for punching babies, snapping bra straps of young mothers?!"?
Why, Microsoft is only seeking to patent a method for easily determining which babies' faces look the most fragile and which mothers have easily gripped bra straps! The actual phrases "punching the baby" and "snapping the bra strap" only appear once in the patent! How Slashdot could be so quick to snap to judgement against a patent which only briefly suggests baby punching, I just don't understand.
My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right... I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: "they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof."
I suppose this technically only applies to sects that Joseph Smith had encountered in the early 1800s, but there haven't been any updates since to let us know that "Methodism is an abomination, but the Bahai are okay" or "Presbyterian ministers are still all corrupt, but the Adventist preachers are good folks". Don't get me wrong - even if you were to apologize for calling their beliefs abominations, most evangelical types would still call you nasty names... but at least I hope you now see where some of the acrimony started in the first place.
It might have been more accurate for you to say that the claim that all Mormons reject other groups is false. Like most other Christians (and hopefully like most Muslims, from what I've seen of the Koran), the believers are often too good to accept their religions' most evil beliefs. Even in that case, however, you'd have to define "reject" carefully. The belief that people from other religions have a good shot a heaven is more inclusive than most fundamentalists, but the belief that they can't get into Heaven until a Mormon gets the paperwork right is more exclusive than most liberal theologies.
The usage of the system is equivalent to the system itself. If the usage of it is flawed, then the system, too, is flawed.
Is it never possible that the users are simply flawed? I seem to recall one study which discovered that a majority of computer users would give away their passwords in exchange for candy. Should we therefore conclude that no password-protection system is complete unless the IT department freely provides their users with sweet, rich chocolate to discourage this kind of social engineering?
The problem is that when there is real money involved, it destroys the game.
The sort of game you describe came pre-destroyed. As a potential new player, I don't care whether I can't get the "pink pantaloons" because they all went to people with much more disposable income than me, or whether I can't get them just because they all went to people with much more free time than me. If the people with tons of free time are starting to suffer at the hands of the people with tons of free cash, that's just not a problem I can muster up much sympathy for.
Despite spending a few months playing World of Warcraft and a short while on Everquest, I'm not a big fan of these open-ended MMORPGs. If you want to make an open-ended virtual world, that's fantastic - but try to make one so compelling that you don't need to tack on a "Skinner box" of levels and equipment to keep people playing. If you want to make a game instead, that's great too - but make a *game*: one of those things where people compete just by making different decisions and exercising their own skills, not by spending hundreds more hours grinding or hundreds of dollars paying "gold farmers".
As long as I'm living in a world of make-believe: what I'd like to try out is a game where each server was open only an hour or two each day, and the game play was designed to fit between triannual server resets. Hardcore players might still spend half their lives playing (spread among characters on multiple servers) starting from the game's release, but the rest of us would be able to join later, still hop into a level playing field on whatever server was next to reset, and then stay competitive without spending a dozen hours a week to do so.
The only new catch is that the new "user" is a software/hardware/media oligopoly, and this user account has more rights than yours, even though it's on a computer that you bought and you think you own.
In other words, while the DRM movie is playing, your spreadsheet won't.
Your spreadsheet will run just fine - the sort of software that won't run is the debugger you try to attach to your movie player.
we can safely predict that DRM restrictions will be lifted from music.
Since when have publishers stopped using a DRM scheme just because it was cracked? Any audio DRM scheme can be cracked just by unplugging your speakers and plugging in a recorder, but you don't see music DRM going away, do you? For that matter, do any big commercial DVDs come with CSS turned off yet?
There are two theses in your previous post which stood out to me for their inconsistency:
1. The developed world is developed due largely to the advantage we have gained over the 20th centry by burning fossil fuels.
2. By reducing the burning of fossil fuels, Kyoto would harm the fossil fuel market, not the whole economy.
Now, it's technically possible for both these statements to be false (fossil fuels might be a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic development) or for both to be true (perhaps fossil fuels were indispensible a hundred years ago but are due to be obsoleted by cheap solar panels any day now), but on first glance they're practically stating opposing sides of the same proposition: either economic development is hindered by not burning fossil fuels, or it isn't.
Take a close look at this "coventional" wisdom (well "conventional" to >3% of mankind) that Kyoto would "ruin the economy", what it really boils down to is: "it would ruining the fossil fuel market".
In that case, you probably should have said that fossil fuels are the reason the developed world has a good fossil fuel market, not that:
the developed world is "developed" due largely to the advantage we have gained over the 20th centry by burning FF's
Wisdom is especially convincing when even the people who don't believe it seem to believe it.
I'm a huge science fiction fan (just finished Stross' "Iron Sunrise" 5 minutes ago, in fact...), and if anything it's made me *more* indifferent towards NASA's current plans. On the one hand, most science fiction uses superadvanced technology (e.g. fusion rockets) or magic (e.g. "impulse engines") to hand-wave away the difficulties of space travel. That's fine for writing interesting stories set centuries in the future, but it's not going to give kids any real idea of the promises and problems involved with space travel today. On the other hand, there are some science fiction stories which do take a more realistic but optimistic near-term look at space travel (see Flynn's "Firestar"), but they make it pretty apparent that NASA's idea of space travel has little to do with the kind of R&D we need to begin industrializing and colonizing outer space. Building giant, throwaway, useful-for-one-mission-only rockets with armies of ground support staff might get a few astronauts back to the Moon and Mars (ooh, we'll have flags and footprints on *two* extraterrestrial bodies!), but it won't be cost-effective enough for private enterprise to be interested or for government settlements to be successful.
NASA lost my interest when they decided that their next-generation launch vehicles should be yet another series of low-flight-rate expendables (thus helping to stagnate space technology) and decided that their next-generation capsule should be too heavy for competing launchers to carry (thus helping to stagnate space industry). Theirs is not a program that's ever going to put a city on Mars or mines on the asteroids, and hardcore SF readers know it.
Normally when you drop something you expect it to fall, but when you're already moving so fast that you fall around planets instead of into them, whatever you drop will just continue falling in the same orbit right next to you. To get to the moon from lunar orbit, you still need to decelerate enough that your orbit impacts the surface, and then to land on the moon you still need to decelerate enough to make the aforementioned impact non-fatal.
Of course, the same applies to Earth orbit. The advantage of a base in Earth orbit isn't that it lets you just drop back to Earth, it's mostly that it lets you assemble your mission from small Earth launches before sending it out, rather than using a behemoth rocket to launch everything in one big chunk. If you want to go to the moon and back, most of what you need to put in orbit to get there is fuel, and so it makes practical sense to put fuel in orbit with the cheapest launchers possible.
It definitely makes sense to leave part of a round-trip lunar mission in orbit rather than sending it down to the surface. Much of your weight will be fuel and heat shielding for the return trip, and it's almost certainly not worth it to waste more fuel landing that and then launching it again. But I don't see how a base permanently in orbit would be a major improvement over just leaving equipment in orbit temporarily like Apollo did. In fact, I'm not sure how "permanent" lunar orbits can be. I seem to remember that perturbations from Earth's gravity and from uneven density in lunar rock make low lunar orbits likely to intersect the moon eventually whether you intended them to or not.
They're trying to establish a lunar base, rightly recognizing that a lunar colony (or an orbital colony, for that matter) would currently be beyond their reach.
There are actually still a few advantages to stopping at an orbital base on the way to the moon, but all you need at the base is an insulated fuel depot and a robot arm, not a massive spinning habitat. Even once it's a good time to build massive spinning habitats for their own sake, we'll want to mine lunar resources or captured NEO asteroids to do it, and learning how to make a lunar base more self-sufficient is one small step on the way there.
'truth that comes from the gut, not books.' We've already got a word for that -- it's called instinct.
Instinct and truthiness are not quite the same. Instinct refers to general inborn behaviors and motivations; truthiness applies to specific propositions and can be learned. They're often related, though. "When in danger rally behind the alpha male" and "I should trust what my parents teach me" are instinct; "Bush did a great job after 9/11" and "I know the Church is true" are truthiness.
And it's often not related to genuine truth at all.
Are you sure? How could Stephen Colbert steer me wrong?! But now that I think about it, I once heard a rumor that Colbert wasn't even a right winger; could you check up on that one for me too?
Backwards compatibility, not monstrously large rackmounts for ten and twenty year old hardware. Seriously, we're just talking about running one computer's software on a different (but vastly faster) computer's hardware. That's not an intractable problem. There's no reason why playing old console games on a new console should have to be any harder than playing old computer games on new computers, and in fact it's kind of sad that often the best way to play old console games is *also* on new computers.
I find it rather fortunate, that we have this genius called Paris Hilton. She sure deserved her wealth with her superior intelligence and financial insight.
All of Paris Hilton's money comes from people dumb enough to give money to or be entertained by Paris Hilton.
So in her case wealth is still moving up the intelligence ladder, even if it has yet to rise above one of the lowest rungs.
Bullshit. Poverty is not a requirement for an economic system.
It's not technically a requirement of any economic system, but it is a consequence of limited resources and unlimited reproduction. The latter applies to every economic system except "totalitarianism", and the former applies to every economic system except "magic".
If you were to take money from the rich and give the poor basic social services (food, shelter, healthcare, education), you would have no poverty.
True, for the first generation. The second generation, however, would have an increased percentage of children of people who noticed that they no longer needed to worry about having fewer kids than they could afford. That wouldn't be a problem immediately, but with each successive generation the increase would grow exponentially. You'd better hope the population of "the rich" grows even faster... but if the whole population is growing without bound, then we're back to that whole "limited resources" problem again.
And the working people who actually make the economy function (the middle and lower non-poverty class) would still work just as hard.
Maybe, but before radically redesigning society you might want to double-check your assumptions during your next oil change. "Say, if you had free food, shelter, healthcare, and education for life, would you still be crawling into a grimy pit to make my car work?" A few of the answers may surprise you.
If you don't need an oil change soon, in the meantime you might head to your nearest high school, a building filled with people who aren't even required to perform physical labor, but who are guaranteed the essentials of life no matter how successful they are at the tasks they are given. If for some strange reason the Calculus II class isn't in session when you arrive, stroll on down to "Consumer Math" and you'll get a good look at how far uncoerced, unrewarded self-motivation takes many people.
Perhaps you're inherently hard working, and not nearly as lazy as the rest of us... but if so may I suggest that you're the exception, not the rule? Surely there's some part of you that can empathize with laziness. You're posting on Slashdot, after all.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I am native of Japan, and where I grew up nobody but cops were allowed to carry guns.
Banning guns for anyone but authorities has two problems:
First, criminals tend to ignore the bans. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the USA, and even if all the law-abiding people decided to repeal the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and ban them, we'd never manage to confiscate them all. It would still be as easy to buy illegal guns as it is to buy illegal drugs today, and in an environment free of law-abiding gun carriers (like the VT campus was today) it would be even easier to do a lot of damage with them.
Second, sometimes the authorities are the ones who should be banned from carrying guns. Taking our two countries for an example: less than a century ago the authorities in Japan were raping and pillaging their neighboring nations, while the authorities in the USA were putting innocent Japanese into concentration camps. Historically, the danger of evil governments with guns has outweighed the danger of evil citizens with guns (with a death count in the millions instead of the thousands), and one belief of gun rights advocates (as well as the reasoning behind the Second Amendment) is that it is harder for a government to do evil to an armed population.
Also, many Americans possess a philosophy that considers individual liberty to be a good in it's own right, and not just a means toward an end. That's one reason why the USA doesn't ban swimming or private automobiles, for example, despite the thousands of deaths caused by the former and tens of thousands of deaths caused by the latter here each year. (The other reason is that we worry less about deaths which don't make headlines. We didn't see a Slashdot story on the dozens of Americans who died yesterday in car crashes, and we won't see one on the dozens dying today.)
I only hope that Google will clean them up instead of Doubleclick dirtying Google.
I do too, but this initial strategy of "rewarding their owners with billions of dollars" isn't a good sign.
The University was not acting as law enforcement, as an agent of law enforcement, or at the behest of law enforcement, and thus is expressly and explicitly not covered by, or even related to, the Fourth Amendment.
Will law enforcement now be prosecuting the University's system administrator for the crime he committed, or will law enforcment be giving him a free pass? In the latter case, I would certainly hope to see the Fourth Amendment involved.
Otherwise that would be a nice loophole in the Bill of Rights, wouldn't it? "We don't have a warrant for the police to search your house, but who cares? We can just promise that anyone else can get away with trespass or breaking and entering when they search your house. Vigilantes work cheaper than cops anyway."
The law is a good one, in general, it prevents networks sympathetic to a particular candidate to run their speeches 24/7 and deny access to all others. We have similar laws in the US
Exactly - in the US, networks have to be sympathetic to a particular *two* candidates, and are only allowed to have "third party" candidates arrested at presidential debates.
I suspect they'll really study software outside the machines, code which the manufacturer swears is the same as the software inside the machines, cross his heart. That's still an improvement over the current situation, but it's not good enough for democracy. If a computer is turning your ballot into a microscopic electromagnetic pattern rather than a human-readable printout, you simply can't be certain that your vote was counted. Software audits may make election hacking more difficult, but they'll never make it impossible.
Although I understand "i'm getting so sick and tired of hearing excuses and rationalizations.", I don't understand the amusing proposed solution of "just put the cd in the cupholder, install it and sell it. period. there's no need to analyze or certify."
Installation of any popular Linux distribution isn't hard, and hasn't been hard for many years. There are two reasons for wanting Dell to preinstall Linux, and for both of them, there is a need for Dell to go beyond hitting "Next" on a bunch of installation screens or cloning a partition image.
1. Tested hardware. I may not want to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but our last batch of new Dell servers had it preinstalled, which was nice to see. Linux hardware support is pretty solid lately, but it's reassuring to have a vendor stand behind Linux support for what they sell, even if I'm planning to switch to a different distribution than they chose.
2. Support for non-Linux-users. This is the big one. Seriously: if you already know that installing Linux isn't much harder than finding the "cupholder", you don't need Dell to install Linux for you, you just need them to give you a discount for the OEM Windows license you don't want to buy. Preinstallation isn't for the computer you're looking to buy, it's for the computer Mom & Dad are looking to buy. If Dell is going to sell Linux to new users, Dell is going to need to test what they sell, both so they can preconfigure things to reduce the amount of support calls they'll receive and so they can train phone operators to handle the support calls they get anyway. They'll have a hard enough time answering questions like "Why doesn't this Super Geneaology Plus CD install?" no matter what they do; they'd better at least try to nip "Why don't my Dell printer drivers install?" questions in the bud.
A) Build the satellite correctly the first time around
Good plan. If you just don't make any mistakes in the design or construction of every satellite you launch, you'll never have to fix any of them. Also, all the satellites should be manned by magic elves.
No kidding. The admin posting this article is like a broken traffic light which just lets everyone into the intersection at once.
But the real tragic cost of this program would be the resulting mercury-deficiency and lead-deficiency in our ecosystem. Let's face it: stupid people are hilarious. And although the USA has backup plans for creating new generations of stupid people, even "reality shows" on our televisions and "intelligent design" supporters on our schoolboards just can't compete with the degenerative effects of heavy-metal poisoning in our bloodstreams.
Why, if we ever run out of the national supply of stupid people, future Slashdot readers might never get to enjoy comments like these:
Creepy Crawler: That would mean that we can just leave them anywhere, right?
No, it would mean that you can just leave them at any recycling center, knowing that the cost of recycling them has already been paid for.
Overzeetop: If I pay the tax, then drop the stuff in the trahscan to get picked up by the muni wate trucks, does that money vanish?
No - like the "trahs" those "wate" trucks will be taking to the landfills, the money would be out of your hands but wouldn't have vanished entirely. Because no recycling center would be able to redeem your old electronics, the money would remain in government hands. Ironically, instead of keeping heavy metals out of US groundwater supplies it might just end up putting heavy metals into Middle Eastern groundwater instead.
Needs Food Badly: Of all the things that they can and do tax, now they want to put a tax on recycling?
No, they want to put a tax on buying things that will have to be recycled, then pay that tax back when the recycling actually happens. The goal here is to make it cheaper to reclaim toxic chemicals than to send them to landfills.
And this is what I get just browsing at Score: 3. I can only shudder to imagine what's getting modded *down*.
I'd like to know too, but for some reason many people don't answer my questions no matter how much I curse at them.
If only there were some sort of automatic system into which we could type terms like "photography fluorescent", "autistic fluorescent", or "Tourette treatment" and receive answers!
But seriously, I'm stunned by the hostile reaction "UbuntuDupe" is getting - and I've got CFL bulbs in every socket where they'll fit. Do people really think that the key to energy conservation is to badly micromanage every possible decision that people might make that involves energy use, rather than more simply charging for the externalties of energy production as they are incurred?
On the other hand, maybe I'm just on the wrong side of the "Let's force everyone to do what we like" bandwagon; why am I arguing when I should be trying to weasel my way into the inner circle? If you all like my decisions about what kind of lightbulbs to buy, just wait until you hear my thoughts about what kinds of entertainment you can enjoy, what levels of diet and exercise will become mandatory, and what kind of religious instruction we'll be giving your children.
John Hammond would not have been able to patent all of that dinosaur DNA, and we would have had even more dinosaur-inhabited islands out there.
That's too horrific to imagine! There could be a series of Jurassic Park after Jurassic Park, each one worse than the last...
What's next? "MSFT submits patent for punching babies, snapping bra straps of young mothers?!"?
Why, Microsoft is only seeking to patent a method for easily determining which babies' faces look the most fragile and which mothers have easily gripped bra straps! The actual phrases "punching the baby" and "snapping the bra strap" only appear once in the patent! How Slashdot could be so quick to snap to judgement against a patent which only briefly suggests baby punching, I just don't understand.
The claim that Mormonism rejects other groups is false.
... I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: "they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof."
From the version of Joseph Smith's "First Vision" in Mormon scriptures at LDS.org:
My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right
I suppose this technically only applies to sects that Joseph Smith had encountered in the early 1800s, but there haven't been any updates since to let us know that "Methodism is an abomination, but the Bahai are okay" or "Presbyterian ministers are still all corrupt, but the Adventist preachers are good folks". Don't get me wrong - even if you were to apologize for calling their beliefs abominations, most evangelical types would still call you nasty names... but at least I hope you now see where some of the acrimony started in the first place.
It might have been more accurate for you to say that the claim that all Mormons reject other groups is false. Like most other Christians (and hopefully like most Muslims, from what I've seen of the Koran), the believers are often too good to accept their religions' most evil beliefs. Even in that case, however, you'd have to define "reject" carefully. The belief that people from other religions have a good shot a heaven is more inclusive than most fundamentalists, but the belief that they can't get into Heaven until a Mormon gets the paperwork right is more exclusive than most liberal theologies.
The usage of the system is equivalent to the system itself. If the usage of it is flawed, then the system, too, is flawed.
Is it never possible that the users are simply flawed? I seem to recall one study which discovered that a majority of computer users would give away their passwords in exchange for candy. Should we therefore conclude that no password-protection system is complete unless the IT department freely provides their users with sweet, rich chocolate to discourage this kind of social engineering?
The problem is that when there is real money involved, it destroys the game.
The sort of game you describe came pre-destroyed. As a potential new player, I don't care whether I can't get the "pink pantaloons" because they all went to people with much more disposable income than me, or whether I can't get them just because they all went to people with much more free time than me. If the people with tons of free time are starting to suffer at the hands of the people with tons of free cash, that's just not a problem I can muster up much sympathy for.
Despite spending a few months playing World of Warcraft and a short while on Everquest, I'm not a big fan of these open-ended MMORPGs. If you want to make an open-ended virtual world, that's fantastic - but try to make one so compelling that you don't need to tack on a "Skinner box" of levels and equipment to keep people playing. If you want to make a game instead, that's great too - but make a *game*: one of those things where people compete just by making different decisions and exercising their own skills, not by spending hundreds more hours grinding or hundreds of dollars paying "gold farmers".
As long as I'm living in a world of make-believe: what I'd like to try out is a game where each server was open only an hour or two each day, and the game play was designed to fit between triannual server resets. Hardcore players might still spend half their lives playing (spread among characters on multiple servers) starting from the game's release, but the rest of us would be able to join later, still hop into a level playing field on whatever server was next to reset, and then stay competitive without spending a dozen hours a week to do so.
The only new catch is that the new "user" is a software/hardware/media oligopoly, and this user account has more rights than yours, even though it's on a computer that you bought and you think you own.
In other words, while the DRM movie is playing, your spreadsheet won't.
Your spreadsheet will run just fine - the sort of software that won't run is the debugger you try to attach to your movie player.
we can safely predict that DRM restrictions will be lifted from music.
Since when have publishers stopped using a DRM scheme just because it was cracked? Any audio DRM scheme can be cracked just by unplugging your speakers and plugging in a recorder, but you don't see music DRM going away, do you? For that matter, do any big commercial DVDs come with CSS turned off yet?
There are two theses in your previous post which stood out to me for their inconsistency:
1. The developed world is developed due largely to the advantage we have gained over the 20th centry by burning fossil fuels.
2. By reducing the burning of fossil fuels, Kyoto would harm the fossil fuel market, not the whole economy.
Now, it's technically possible for both these statements to be false (fossil fuels might be a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic development) or for both to be true (perhaps fossil fuels were indispensible a hundred years ago but are due to be obsoleted by cheap solar panels any day now), but on first glance they're practically stating opposing sides of the same proposition: either economic development is hindered by not burning fossil fuels, or it isn't.
Take a close look at this "coventional" wisdom (well "conventional" to >3% of mankind) that Kyoto would "ruin the economy", what it really boils down to is: "it would ruining the fossil fuel market".
In that case, you probably should have said that fossil fuels are the reason the developed world has a good fossil fuel market, not that:
the developed world is "developed" due largely to the advantage we have gained over the 20th centry by burning FF's
Wisdom is especially convincing when even the people who don't believe it seem to believe it.
I'm a huge science fiction fan (just finished Stross' "Iron Sunrise" 5 minutes ago, in fact...), and if anything it's made me *more* indifferent towards NASA's current plans. On the one hand, most science fiction uses superadvanced technology (e.g. fusion rockets) or magic (e.g. "impulse engines") to hand-wave away the difficulties of space travel. That's fine for writing interesting stories set centuries in the future, but it's not going to give kids any real idea of the promises and problems involved with space travel today. On the other hand, there are some science fiction stories which do take a more realistic but optimistic near-term look at space travel (see Flynn's "Firestar"), but they make it pretty apparent that NASA's idea of space travel has little to do with the kind of R&D we need to begin industrializing and colonizing outer space. Building giant, throwaway, useful-for-one-mission-only rockets with armies of ground support staff might get a few astronauts back to the Moon and Mars (ooh, we'll have flags and footprints on *two* extraterrestrial bodies!), but it won't be cost-effective enough for private enterprise to be interested or for government settlements to be successful.
NASA lost my interest when they decided that their next-generation launch vehicles should be yet another series of low-flight-rate expendables (thus helping to stagnate space technology) and decided that their next-generation capsule should be too heavy for competing launchers to carry (thus helping to stagnate space industry). Theirs is not a program that's ever going to put a city on Mars or mines on the asteroids, and hardcore SF readers know it.
Normally when you drop something you expect it to fall, but when you're already moving so fast that you fall around planets instead of into them, whatever you drop will just continue falling in the same orbit right next to you. To get to the moon from lunar orbit, you still need to decelerate enough that your orbit impacts the surface, and then to land on the moon you still need to decelerate enough to make the aforementioned impact non-fatal.
Of course, the same applies to Earth orbit. The advantage of a base in Earth orbit isn't that it lets you just drop back to Earth, it's mostly that it lets you assemble your mission from small Earth launches before sending it out, rather than using a behemoth rocket to launch everything in one big chunk. If you want to go to the moon and back, most of what you need to put in orbit to get there is fuel, and so it makes practical sense to put fuel in orbit with the cheapest launchers possible.
It definitely makes sense to leave part of a round-trip lunar mission in orbit rather than sending it down to the surface. Much of your weight will be fuel and heat shielding for the return trip, and it's almost certainly not worth it to waste more fuel landing that and then launching it again. But I don't see how a base permanently in orbit would be a major improvement over just leaving equipment in orbit temporarily like Apollo did. In fact, I'm not sure how "permanent" lunar orbits can be. I seem to remember that perturbations from Earth's gravity and from uneven density in lunar rock make low lunar orbits likely to intersect the moon eventually whether you intended them to or not.
They're trying to establish a lunar base, rightly recognizing that a lunar colony (or an orbital colony, for that matter) would currently be beyond their reach.
There are actually still a few advantages to stopping at an orbital base on the way to the moon, but all you need at the base is an insulated fuel depot and a robot arm, not a massive spinning habitat. Even once it's a good time to build massive spinning habitats for their own sake, we'll want to mine lunar resources or captured NEO asteroids to do it, and learning how to make a lunar base more self-sufficient is one small step on the way there.
'truth that comes from the gut, not books.' We've already got a word for that -- it's called instinct.
Instinct and truthiness are not quite the same. Instinct refers to general inborn behaviors and motivations; truthiness applies to specific propositions and can be learned. They're often related, though. "When in danger rally behind the alpha male" and "I should trust what my parents teach me" are instinct; "Bush did a great job after 9/11" and "I know the Church is true" are truthiness.
And it's often not related to genuine truth at all.
Are you sure? How could Stephen Colbert steer me wrong?! But now that I think about it, I once heard a rumor that Colbert wasn't even a right winger; could you check up on that one for me too?
Backwards compatibility, not monstrously large rackmounts for ten and twenty year old hardware. Seriously, we're just talking about running one computer's software on a different (but vastly faster) computer's hardware. That's not an intractable problem. There's no reason why playing old console games on a new console should have to be any harder than playing old computer games on new computers, and in fact it's kind of sad that often the best way to play old console games is *also* on new computers.
I find it rather fortunate, that we have this genius called Paris Hilton. She sure deserved her wealth with her superior intelligence and financial insight.
All of Paris Hilton's money comes from people dumb enough to give money to or be entertained by Paris Hilton.
So in her case wealth is still moving up the intelligence ladder, even if it has yet to rise above one of the lowest rungs.
Bullshit. Poverty is not a requirement for an economic system.
;-)
It's not technically a requirement of any economic system, but it is a consequence of limited resources and unlimited reproduction. The latter applies to every economic system except "totalitarianism", and the former applies to every economic system except "magic".
If you were to take money from the rich and give the poor basic social services (food, shelter, healthcare, education), you would have no poverty.
True, for the first generation. The second generation, however, would have an increased percentage of children of people who noticed that they no longer needed to worry about having fewer kids than they could afford. That wouldn't be a problem immediately, but with each successive generation the increase would grow exponentially. You'd better hope the population of "the rich" grows even faster... but if the whole population is growing without bound, then we're back to that whole "limited resources" problem again.
And the working people who actually make the economy function (the middle and lower non-poverty class) would still work just as hard.
Maybe, but before radically redesigning society you might want to double-check your assumptions during your next oil change. "Say, if you had free food, shelter, healthcare, and education for life, would you still be crawling into a grimy pit to make my car work?" A few of the answers may surprise you.
If you don't need an oil change soon, in the meantime you might head to your nearest high school, a building filled with people who aren't even required to perform physical labor, but who are guaranteed the essentials of life no matter how successful they are at the tasks they are given. If for some strange reason the Calculus II class isn't in session when you arrive, stroll on down to "Consumer Math" and you'll get a good look at how far uncoerced, unrewarded self-motivation takes many people.
Perhaps you're inherently hard working, and not nearly as lazy as the rest of us... but if so may I suggest that you're the exception, not the rule? Surely there's some part of you that can empathize with laziness. You're posting on Slashdot, after all.