Even if their cheaper version worked like the original, it was still the development cost that was a million bucks, not the production cost. Since they used the schematics that were generated out of the development, all they reproduced was the production, not the development.
Car analogy: its more like taking the owners manual of an old VW beetle and building one from that, as opposed to inventing the internal combustion engine and then building a car to use it.
Next ice age? Why not worry about the ice age we are currently in? What you should really worry about is the next glacial period of the current ice age/pedantic
I personally would like some global warming. Sure central Texas has had 50+ triple digit highs so far this year, but much of the flora shuts down for months at a time over a major percentage of the available land mass (and at least one continent with very little flora because it is just too cold for it to function well).
I am not going to worry about global warming, from ANY source until we are at least out of our current ice-age. All of these worries and concerns are just blips on the thermal history of the planet that are well inside the ranges that have supported life for millions of years.
If you want to worry about climate change, watch the skies for meteors, those are (currently believed to be) the causes of the largest extinction events in history.
It seems like we live a universe where the knowledge and secrets of reality are kept well hidden and very difficult to access, like it is trying to keep us as ignorant fools who dont know what anything is or why its here. We have a better grasp in recent years, but we are still a long way to knowing what this is all about on a scientific level (thought religions propose their own speculative/intuitive ideas about this).
Perhaps because much of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked. Such unimportant things as: F=(m1 * m2)/d^2 for example.
Then again, just because it could be discovered without hugely expensive equipment does not mean it was easy, just less expensive.
Oh, I see: the difference between a real person and a mass of useful cells depends on the available technology. So if I go to an undeveloped country I can experiment on premature babies because they do not have the technology to save them. Can I also experiment on people with (currently) untreatable cancer or AIDS?(if I can get parental permission of course, since that is the requirement we are using, no need to ask the patient)
As far as I know there is no reason an artificial womb could not be created eventually, we just have some problems to figure out first. As such, I see little difference between experimenting on a baby that is not savable by local technology and experimenting on a baby that is not savable by local technology when the local technology is some of the better stuff that is available(FDA testing ensures that by the time something is available for use it is no longer the best in the world because science is always advancing).
A few things:
A newborn is not "self-sustaining". Hell, I know a few 30-year olds that are not "self-sustaining". What about premature babies that require incubation? They are not "self-sustaining". Are they available for experimentation?
Also, embryos in a petri dish can survive outside the womb about as long as newborn.
I suspect that the GPP was saying "self-sustaining" as in "able to survive without being directly attached to the mother's life support". A newborn can obtain oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide and other metabolic waste without having to be connected via an umbilical to the mother. One's take on that kind of alters the scape of your other questions. A premature birth can survive, grow, and develop without being directly attached to the mother's life-support. An embryo in a petri dish cannot, as we do not (yet) have the technology or knowledge to artificially replicate a womb.
Stick with adult stem-cells, that is where all the successful treatments are and it is pretty easy to get permission from the donor at that point as well.
I guess Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law is easier to achieve for some than it is for others...
But more seriously, it has always been that way. It has always been a minority who apply the scientific method in their every day lives. Do you think that every cabbage farmer understood the why and wherefores of fertilizing their fields, or do you expect that many of them did it because 'That is the way we have always done it.'
On the plus side, we can reap the benefits of greater specialization because all of those people need not understand exactly how a CRT or LCD constructs the images for them to see, they only need to know enough to do their one job and do it well.
Just like most of the geeks here probably don't know how much and how often various breeds of wheat need to be watered in different climates to get the best yield, or how much of what types of feed to give a pregnant sow, or all the details of a beef butchering facility.(at least until you decide you need to Google it), but you can still enjoy the benefits of all of those activities.
To me when something is described as magic, I just take that to mean 'I don't know how it works, but it does,' and that is a sentiment that we can all express about something that we use in our daily lives if we look hard enough for it.
You don't have to "earn" the right to be treated like a human being and a member of society. It's a duty of everyone to help with that.
Not so much. You must do something to earn your daily bread, usually by doing something someone else finds of value so you can then 'buy' the food to stay alive for another day.
If you are not willing to put forth the effort to do this, then I do not want people with guns coming to my door if I don't feel like giving you the fruits of my labors.
Unfortunately enough people with little awareness of economics have decided that yes, the men with big guns WILL come to my home and drag me away if I do not surrender the fruits of my labor for them to hand out as they see fit(after skimming most of it off).
But then again, once they have the men with big guns, and the fruits of my labor, they have what they want anyway, which is why you will not get much in the way of daily bread if you do not earn it for yourself.
Might this be the main post office with perhaps about 20,000 PO boxes?
Also, if there were a company that stopped all the junk mail and forwarded all of the legit mail, I might put them down as my address too.
Or, more seriously, if the location of the actual HQ of those companies did not have such high taxes, then it would probably not be worth the effort of setting up that dummy HQ.
That is one of the reasons both Regan and Bush were able to both cut taxes and increase tax revenue at the same time. If you reduce the incentive to avoid taxes, fewer people will go through the efforts of doing so. (Obviously cutting taxes will not always increase revenue, but the 'sweet spot' of maximum tax revenue does seem to be somewhat lower than the current tax rate, at least in the US)
Well, clearly the difference is that one can do no more than put you back the way you were, and the other can make you better than you were.
But which is which is all subjective. Back to the way you were could be: * Healthy again after the surgery * Back onto the nothingness form which you were born * Back into the reincarnation cycle to wait for your next life And 'better than you were' could be: * Healthy after surgery to fix a bad/damaged heart * Into a favored position in the after-life of some sort
As a modern American, I would probably prefer the surgery myself, but the Aztecs would compete for the opportunity to be sacrificed with more vigor than Brazilians chasing the world cup, in games more brutal than hockey(without any pads or penalties, including for murder).
I don't know about ID, but if you want a cleric and a scientist, try St. Albert the Great Before my last move I attended a Catholic church named after him. The quote up on the wall was 'Use all the wisdom of man to delve the mysteries of God'
I expect he would be really excited about the LHC if he was alive today.
How many technology workers have a land line in this day and age?
This suffers from the same problems as political telephone surveys: 1) Is the person home 2) Will the person answer the phone 3) Is the person willing to take the survey
Most of us have better things to do, those who don't are often just couch-potatoes or other unmotivated people.
To the best of my knowledge they don't call cell phones, so most of the tech-savvy people are not even candidates. They don't call business lines, so people who are working late are not candidates either(assuming they don't call during the day which would further eliminate those with day-jobs)
Think of all the people you know with a land line. Are those generally the smartest people you know? The most tech-savvy?
Sounds to me that it is almost more of a survey of jobless luddites than the average hard working American citizen...
I almost never play multi-player games, especially online. (last one was StarCraft in 2000, and it was a cooperative in-office network game)
When I play computer games, I am usually tired of dealing with people, and I surely don't want to deal with rude or crass people.
I also take advantage of the single-player nature of my computer gaming activities to alleviate any frustration I might be feeling from other activities, often do so in a very unsportsmanlike manner. Something that would be at best counter-productive in a multi-player situation.
Also, I often get tired of games quickly and only go back to them after an extended period of disuse.(Example:I re-installed System Shock 2 last night, and even if I wanted to, I doubt that I could compete in any way with any group that I found still playing that game online)
Put those all together, and I just don't have any interest in head-to-head online play. (including MMOs)
Perhaps we are just in favor of the climate recovering from the current ice age so that we can move away from a period where for a substantial portion of the planet, plant life largely shuts down for a significant part of the year.
Ask any geologist, we are in an ice age, and you can see this easily because we have ice-caps that do not completely melt every summer.
Perhaps we just want the planet to recover to what it has been for most of it's history: a warmer climate where the amount of energy harvested by the vegetative biomass is sufficient to support a far more abundant animal biomass than could ever get by in this energy-poor environment.
Question: if almost every niche environment is already filled with a specialized organism, where is there room for any significant increase in diversity?
On the other hand, if you have an extinction event, then you have an abundance of openings for the surviving species to move into.
Looking back, it seems to me that there is a lot of 'punctuated equilibrium' type activity going on, and the times where you have a lot of growth is right after the most specialized critters went extinct because they gave up their broader adaptability/survivability for an edge to let them survive in the immediate future.
Seems to me that the more extinction events we have, the more the adaptive creatures will be favored over the specialized, and the more generally adaptive creatures there will be around.
Adaptability is what allows species to thrive in the long run, and extinction events are just one of the more obvious ways that this is reinforced.
Even if I personally don't make over 250K/year, my employer does, and that means that I will be paying these higher taxes too. Either I will need to do the work of people that they cannot afford to hire, or they will not be able to give me the wage that they otherwise could.
Think about it, how many companies that provide reasonable jobs can exist with revenue of less than 250K?
Also, can you name a single company (that is not in the process of going out of business) on any of the major stock exchanges that makes less than 250K? What happens to their stock prices when they suddenly need to pay more taxes? How about all those pensions and retirement accounts that are invested in the stock market?
Do you really think that the CEOs will pull that money out of their pockets? It will come from all of us in the form of higher prices.
If you allow the government to mandate health care for any group, then they get to define what that health care entails. This will quickly be taken over by special interests, assuming they don't let the drug companies write the laws to begin with. Do you really want someone who is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies to write the health care plan for your children? Sounds like a way to mandate all children to take a bunch of high-margin pills that either don't do any good, or may even turn out to be harmful in the long run... (How about ground-breaking new medical advances, do you want to watch your child die while waiting for the bureaucracy to decide that it is an OK procedure for them to pay for?)
Considering that all of these programs will be either run or set up by politicians, I don't see anything in your list that I would want the government to do for me.
I figured you would have multiple sides and while a given group can protect a town or village from attack by a different group on another team, this is really just PVP with the outcome recorded by the state of the game world. Presumably conquering larger towns or towns farther in to enemy territory would harder because of more NPC defenders of greater power.
An alternative would be a series of generally similar quests for making a given town more or less friendly to one side or another. Team A can make the town favor their side, then team B can come around and do a similar quest to get the town to favor their side instead. (possibly giving the town more or fewer defenders for the next attack on that town by one side or another)
Just because the changes to the game world persist, does not mean that they can not be reversed by the actions of other players.
Also, if one side or another starts getting more and more powerful compared to the other sides, just give some nifty artifacts or other toys out to the sides being trounced to either encourage more players to play that side, or to beef up the players already there. (presumably these would need to be server and team specific)
Just set up a large map with three or more teams starting at opposite sides and having a lot of territory in the middle that can be conquered in small, medium, or large chunks as you work your way towards the strongholds of the other teams.
Even if you don't have any other sorts of quests, you automatically get 'resupply isolated outpost' type stuff by just having reasonable resource consumption, which also gives you supply trains to attack or defend in 'friendly' territory, etc. (every 100 citizens need 1 box of resources/week and produces X taxes/week to pay for them based on the tax rate, etc)
And if you are worried about one side winning everything, just change the scale. After all, what is that saying about a land war in Asia?
Even in Sci-fi, the value of the humanoid robot is cost-savings. If the brain of a general purpose robot is significantly more expensive than any body it will be put into, then you want that body to be able to handle as many tasks as possible, thus you make it to use all the tools that already exist for humans to use.
Until the brain is capable of handling all the tasks needed for operating as a semi-autonomous manual laborer, then a humanoid robot is just a nifty gadget with no real place in industry or other areas of production where we use specialized industrial robots today.
Was not the Marbury v. Madison decision the one where the Supreme court claimed that they, according to the constitution, did not have the authority to tell a member of the Executive branch to do his job?
Thereby claiming the authority to interpret the constitution?
If this decision is indeed ordering a member of the Executive branch to 'do their job' just like they were requested to do in that earlier case, does that not mean that they are now in violation of their own interpretation of the constitution?
What do we do with a Supreme court who is violating the constitution I wonder?
Slashdot Mirror
or the taxpayers get to keep more of their own money
Now THAT is funny!
Just because we work to earn it does not make it ours, at least not in the eyes of politicians.
Even if their cheaper version worked like the original, it was still the development cost that was a million bucks, not the production cost.
Since they used the schematics that were generated out of the development, all they reproduced was the production, not the development.
Car analogy: its more like taking the owners manual of an old VW beetle and building one from that, as opposed to inventing the internal combustion engine and then building a car to use it.
Next ice age? Why not worry about the ice age we are currently in? /pedantic
What you should really worry about is the next glacial period of the current ice age
I personally would like some global warming. Sure central Texas has had 50+ triple digit highs so far this year, but much of the flora shuts down for months at a time over a major percentage of the available land mass (and at least one continent with very little flora because it is just too cold for it to function well).
I am not going to worry about global warming, from ANY source until we are at least out of our current ice-age.
All of these worries and concerns are just blips on the thermal history of the planet that are well inside the ranges that have supported life for millions of years.
If you want to worry about climate change, watch the skies for meteors, those are (currently believed to be) the causes of the largest extinction events in history.
Don't forget the night time predators and the reduced energy needs of the sleep period.
If someone who needs less sleep goes out to get a midnight snack and gets eaten, they will not contribute much to the gene pool.
Sleeping is generally safer than foraging for food, especially if you are in a group.
It seems like we live a universe where the knowledge and secrets of reality are kept well hidden and very difficult to access, like it is trying to keep us as ignorant fools who dont know what anything is or why its here. We have a better grasp in recent years, but we are still a long way to knowing what this is all about on a scientific level (thought religions propose their own speculative/intuitive ideas about this).
Perhaps because much of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked.
Such unimportant things as: F=(m1 * m2)/d^2 for example.
Then again, just because it could be discovered without hugely expensive equipment does not mean it was easy, just less expensive.
Because my money is now printed with disappearing ink.
So THAT's the concession Obama made to the Chineese when they complained about all the new money he was printing!
Oh, I see: the difference between a real person and a mass of useful cells depends on the available technology. So if I go to an undeveloped country I can experiment on premature babies because they do not have the technology to save them. Can I also experiment on people with (currently) untreatable cancer or AIDS?(if I can get parental permission of course, since that is the requirement we are using, no need to ask the patient)
As far as I know there is no reason an artificial womb could not be created eventually, we just have some problems to figure out first. As such, I see little difference between experimenting on a baby that is not savable by local technology and experimenting on a baby that is not savable by local technology when the local technology is some of the better stuff that is available(FDA testing ensures that by the time something is available for use it is no longer the best in the world because science is always advancing).
A few things:
A newborn is not "self-sustaining". Hell, I know a few 30-year olds that are not "self-sustaining". What about premature babies that require incubation? They are not "self-sustaining". Are they available for experimentation?
Also, embryos in a petri dish can survive outside the womb about as long as newborn.
I suspect that the GPP was saying "self-sustaining" as in "able to survive without being directly attached to the mother's life support". A newborn can obtain oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide and other metabolic waste without having to be connected via an umbilical to the mother. One's take on that kind of alters the scape of your other questions. A premature birth can survive, grow, and develop without being directly attached to the mother's life-support. An embryo in a petri dish cannot, as we do not (yet) have the technology or knowledge to artificially replicate a womb.
Stick with adult stem-cells, that is where all the successful treatments are and it is pretty easy to get permission from the donor at that point as well.
I guess Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law is easier to achieve for some than it is for others...
But more seriously, it has always been that way. It has always been a minority who apply the scientific method in their every day lives.
Do you think that every cabbage farmer understood the why and wherefores of fertilizing their fields, or do you expect that many of them did it because 'That is the way we have always done it.'
On the plus side, we can reap the benefits of greater specialization because all of those people need not understand exactly how a CRT or LCD constructs the images for them to see, they only need to know enough to do their one job and do it well.
Just like most of the geeks here probably don't know how much and how often various breeds of wheat need to be watered in different climates to get the best yield, or how much of what types of feed to give a pregnant sow, or all the details of a beef butchering facility.(at least until you decide you need to Google it), but you can still enjoy the benefits of all of those activities.
To me when something is described as magic, I just take that to mean 'I don't know how it works, but it does,' and that is a sentiment that we can all express about something that we use in our daily lives if we look hard enough for it.
You don't have to "earn" the right to be treated like a human being and a member of society. It's a duty of everyone to help with that.
Not so much.
You must do something to earn your daily bread, usually by doing something someone else finds of value so you can then 'buy' the food to stay alive for another day.
If you are not willing to put forth the effort to do this, then I do not want people with guns coming to my door if I don't feel like giving you the fruits of my labors.
Unfortunately enough people with little awareness of economics have decided that yes, the men with big guns WILL come to my home and drag me away if I do not surrender the fruits of my labor for them to hand out as they see fit(after skimming most of it off).
But then again, once they have the men with big guns, and the fruits of my labor, they have what they want anyway, which is why you will not get much in the way of daily bread if you do not earn it for yourself.
Might this be the main post office with perhaps about 20,000 PO boxes?
Also, if there were a company that stopped all the junk mail and forwarded all of the legit mail, I might put them down as my address too.
Or, more seriously, if the location of the actual HQ of those companies did not have such high taxes, then it would probably not be worth the effort of setting up that dummy HQ.
That is one of the reasons both Regan and Bush were able to both cut taxes and increase tax revenue at the same time.
If you reduce the incentive to avoid taxes, fewer people will go through the efforts of doing so.
(Obviously cutting taxes will not always increase revenue, but the 'sweet spot' of maximum tax revenue does seem to be somewhat lower than the current tax rate, at least in the US)
Well, clearly the difference is that one can do no more than put you back the way you were, and the other can make you better than you were.
But which is which is all subjective.
Back to the way you were could be:
* Healthy again after the surgery
* Back onto the nothingness form which you were born
* Back into the reincarnation cycle to wait for your next life
And 'better than you were' could be:
* Healthy after surgery to fix a bad/damaged heart
* Into a favored position in the after-life of some sort
As a modern American, I would probably prefer the surgery myself, but the Aztecs would compete for the opportunity to be sacrificed with more vigor than Brazilians chasing the world cup, in games more brutal than hockey(without any pads or penalties, including for murder).
I don't know about ID, but if you want a cleric and a scientist, try St. Albert the Great
Before my last move I attended a Catholic church named after him. The quote up on the wall was 'Use all the wisdom of man to delve the mysteries of God'
I expect he would be really excited about the LHC if he was alive today.
How many technology workers have a land line in this day and age?
This suffers from the same problems as political telephone surveys:
1) Is the person home
2) Will the person answer the phone
3) Is the person willing to take the survey
Most of us have better things to do, those who don't are often just couch-potatoes or other unmotivated people.
To the best of my knowledge they don't call cell phones, so most of the tech-savvy people are not even candidates. They don't call business lines, so people who are working late are not candidates either(assuming they don't call during the day which would further eliminate those with day-jobs)
Think of all the people you know with a land line. Are those generally the smartest people you know? The most tech-savvy?
Sounds to me that it is almost more of a survey of jobless luddites than the average hard working American citizen...
Advertisers do their best to be visible(read: annoying) and users have a means to stop them.
And people wonder why online Ad revenue is going down.
I almost never play multi-player games, especially online.
(last one was StarCraft in 2000, and it was a cooperative in-office network game)
When I play computer games, I am usually tired of dealing with people, and I surely don't want to deal with rude or crass people.
I also take advantage of the single-player nature of my computer gaming activities to alleviate any frustration I might be feeling from other activities, often do so in a very unsportsmanlike manner. Something that would be at best counter-productive in a multi-player situation.
Also, I often get tired of games quickly and only go back to them after an extended period of disuse.(Example:I re-installed System Shock 2 last night, and even if I wanted to, I doubt that I could compete in any way with any group that I found still playing that game online)
Put those all together, and I just don't have any interest in head-to-head online play.
(including MMOs)
Perhaps we are just in favor of the climate recovering from the current ice age so that we can move away from a period where for a substantial portion of the planet, plant life largely shuts down for a significant part of the year.
Ask any geologist, we are in an ice age, and you can see this easily because we have ice-caps that do not completely melt every summer.
Perhaps we just want the planet to recover to what it has been for most of it's history: a warmer climate where the amount of energy harvested by the vegetative biomass is sufficient to support a far more abundant animal biomass than could ever get by in this energy-poor environment.
Question: if almost every niche environment is already filled with a specialized organism, where is there room for any significant increase in diversity?
On the other hand, if you have an extinction event, then you have an abundance of openings for the surviving species to move into.
Looking back, it seems to me that there is a lot of 'punctuated equilibrium' type activity going on, and the times where you have a lot of growth is right after the most specialized critters went extinct because they gave up their broader adaptability/survivability for an edge to let them survive in the immediate future.
Seems to me that the more extinction events we have, the more the adaptive creatures will be favored over the specialized, and the more generally adaptive creatures there will be around.
Adaptability is what allows species to thrive in the long run, and extinction events are just one of the more obvious ways that this is reinforced.
Even if I personally don't make over 250K/year, my employer does, and that means that I will be paying these higher taxes too.
Either I will need to do the work of people that they cannot afford to hire, or they will not be able to give me the wage that they otherwise could.
Think about it, how many companies that provide reasonable jobs can exist with revenue of less than 250K?
Also, can you name a single company (that is not in the process of going out of business) on any of the major stock exchanges that makes less than 250K? What happens to their stock prices when they suddenly need to pay more taxes? How about all those pensions and retirement accounts that are invested in the stock market?
Do you really think that the CEOs will pull that money out of their pockets?
It will come from all of us in the form of higher prices.
If you allow the government to mandate health care for any group, then they get to define what that health care entails. This will quickly be taken over by special interests, assuming they don't let the drug companies write the laws to begin with. Do you really want someone who is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies to write the health care plan for your children? Sounds like a way to mandate all children to take a bunch of high-margin pills that either don't do any good, or may even turn out to be harmful in the long run... (How about ground-breaking new medical advances, do you want to watch your child die while waiting for the bureaucracy to decide that it is an OK procedure for them to pay for?)
Considering that all of these programs will be either run or set up by politicians, I don't see anything in your list that I would want the government to do for me.
I figured you would have multiple sides and while a given group can protect a town or village from attack by a different group on another team, this is really just PVP with the outcome recorded by the state of the game world. Presumably conquering larger towns or towns farther in to enemy territory would harder because of more NPC defenders of greater power.
An alternative would be a series of generally similar quests for making a given town more or less friendly to one side or another. Team A can make the town favor their side, then team B can come around and do a similar quest to get the town to favor their side instead. (possibly giving the town more or fewer defenders for the next attack on that town by one side or another)
Just because the changes to the game world persist, does not mean that they can not be reversed by the actions of other players.
Also, if one side or another starts getting more and more powerful compared to the other sides, just give some nifty artifacts or other toys out to the sides being trounced to either encourage more players to play that side, or to beef up the players already there. (presumably these would need to be server and team specific)
Just set up a large map with three or more teams starting at opposite sides and having a lot of territory in the middle that can be conquered in small, medium, or large chunks as you work your way towards the strongholds of the other teams.
Even if you don't have any other sorts of quests, you automatically get 'resupply isolated outpost' type stuff by just having reasonable resource consumption, which also gives you supply trains to attack or defend in 'friendly' territory, etc.
(every 100 citizens need 1 box of resources/week and produces X taxes/week to pay for them based on the tax rate, etc)
And if you are worried about one side winning everything, just change the scale. After all, what is that saying about a land war in Asia?
Even in Sci-fi, the value of the humanoid robot is cost-savings.
If the brain of a general purpose robot is significantly more expensive than any body it will be put into, then you want that body to be able to handle as many tasks as possible, thus you make it to use all the tools that already exist for humans to use.
Until the brain is capable of handling all the tasks needed for operating as a semi-autonomous manual laborer, then a humanoid robot is just a nifty gadget with no real place in industry or other areas of production where we use specialized industrial robots today.
Was not the Marbury v. Madison decision the one where the Supreme court claimed that they, according to the constitution, did not have the authority to tell a member of the Executive branch to do his job?
Thereby claiming the authority to interpret the constitution?
If this decision is indeed ordering a member of the Executive branch to 'do their job' just like they were requested to do in that earlier case, does that not mean that they are now in violation of their own interpretation of the constitution?
What do we do with a Supreme court who is violating the constitution I wonder?
So many illegal eletrons are trying to cross our southern border that they have actually managed to push it back!
We need better enforcement to ensure that those illegal electrons do not take our jobs and leave us beaten and in a ditch!
Send those electrons back where they came from, support research to make our sun go nova today!