You're right. I should have said "peak oil is going to occur", which is, obviously the real moment "oil runs out" in the economic sense. More and more people are saying that moment has already passed (the "swing producer" saudi arabia, is not swinging anymore since may 2005 apparently).
"minimal cost"... strange... I've heard that it's taking up a most significant part of the "research" budget. In fact I hear it's taking just about the ENTIRE energy research budget. Comparing it to the full energy budget is idiotic and misleading, nothing more.
1 billion dollar energy (plus another billion "in natura") research capital has better uses than ITER, I'm sorry to say. Even biofuels, being the disaster they are, are a better investment TODAY than ITER.
Do you even understand ITER ? To call iter a long-term project is beyond unreasonable. ITER MAY (may) be operational in 2025. At which point we MAY be able to begin construction on a first semi-functional power-plant, "DEMO", which hopefully will be operational in 2050. Sorry but that's just not good enough.
Even the most absolutely madly optimistic of projections say oil's going to run out before 2020. Which means we need a GLOBALLY INSTALLED power system BEFORE that time, and massive adaptations in our entire transport system, cars, boats and planes. If having that requires that funding to ITER must be cut, then there is no question - cut it. Now (especially since it's such a big amount of money)
ITER is a nice long-term scientific intrest project. Like LHC. But that's it. It may be useful some day, but it won't save our butts now. Therefore it is not critical. We can always do it tomorrow.
Designing a new energy infrastructure CANNOT wait until tomorrow. We need a project to do that now. And sorry to burst your bubble, ITER, even if it goes perfectly according to plan and God himself comes down to help shave half the years of the project, it's a futile attempt at fixing our current problem.
We have exactly one option : construct a fleet of nuclear power plants now, or get a definitive design on a gigawatt-scale "alternative energy" plant two years ago. ITER's not that design. Maybe (and I seriously doubt it) solar energy can be that solution now for countries close to the equator, and the battery technology required isn't there yet, and won't be there even if we wait another 2 years.
This need for much new infrastructure is also good news. If 2015 isn't a complete disaster, with the world economy at half the level it is today, it will be a very good year. But funding ITER at the cost of other projects is a guaranteed way to make it a disaster. If we can fund ITER without cutting alternative research, good, no, great. If we can't, then we can't afford to fund ITER.
Perhaps I should add something to this. There is this theory called "postmodernism" that states that mutually exclusive statements are merely different versions of the truth. In short if I believe you will get hurt if you fall of the stairs, and you believe you won't get hurt doing same, these are not mutually exclusive, they are both truths.
Some idiots even attempt to claim that quantum mechanics "schrodinger's cat" confirms this view of the world, which, obviously, is ridiculous beyond belief. But they claim it anyway.
Obviously postmodernists are neither muslims, nor christians. Christianity (and science) are dependant on there being a singular, objective truth, and obviously, while I may doubt some other principles of it, this is a truth beyond any reasonable argument. Islam is dependant on force changing the truth (needless to say, this doesn't work, another way to put this, islam puts the welfare of muslims directly in the hands of allah, with predictably disastrous results like the Iran-Iraq war)
That is not possible. Obviously it's possible to just use the fascist feeling that islam provides (ie. supremacy of muslims aka. "all infidels are worth less than animals" (quran 8:55) to elevate yourself, but not actually implement this. In fact I know quite a few who do this. But then your ideology isn't islam at all, it's just fascism, with a slightly different version of "aryan" breed (in most cases based on race, e.g. al-qaeda in iraq kills anyone looking european, because iranians look very european, and are mostly shi'a)
Either you believe that following sharia and forcing it on others like it commands, following islam (again, it is the same thing), is the only way, or you do not believe in the truth of the quran. There is no middle road. They are allowed to lie to infidels, in order to betray them (quran 5:51), but muslims are explicitly forbidden of disagreeing with the slightest bit of islam (33:36). Obviously this is the point of having the quran be the literal word of allah, as compared to (for example) the bible and the vedas, who are, except for a few words, not made by God, but by fallible humans who themselves put down an interpretation of the word of god. In short, the authorship of the bible, and of the torah is specifically so in order to theologically justify interpretation.
The authorship of the quran is made like it is in order to PREVENT interpretation. In order to concentrate any and all power into a single individual, as opposed to what the bible does with power (it throws it away, saying that governments are necessary, but have nothing to do with faith).
If you do not agree with this, obviously you do not believe the quran is the word of allah, and obviously you don't believe in the power of allah.
There is no choice in islam, like in christianity, there is no room, there is only islam, there is only sharia. Fight, kill and die (quran 9:111)
No it does not mean islamic legal system. You have two properties of words confused
Sharia : 1) meaning : "The (right) way" - it's the description of how
a) a muslim have to live
b) a muslims have to force others to live (amr bi alma 'ruf wa nahi 'an alnunkar) (and it's got a big emphasis on the b part) (btw islam means "opression" or "submission" in the military sense, there is no choice involved for anyone) So while "islam" is a name, a principle, "sharia" is the content, what the name means, the implementation of the principle 2) description "islamic legal system"
Shame on America for believing that people can change ? That they deserve the second chance that saddam/muslims weren't going to give them ?
Shame ! Shame ! Shame on America !
Also please don't refer to it as "sharia". Refer to it as "islam". There is NO POINT where islam stops and sharia begins. The two are one and the same.
In case anyone wants to know. Let's have some calculations, shall we ? IF we were to bring multicast (like people here want, random senders, random receivers) to the home, we'd need the following resources in the router's memory.
-> A place to put a multicast address (that'd be 4 bytes for ipv4, 16 bytes for ipv6) -> A place to put, associated with each multicast address, a series of interfaces to replicate the traffic to (that'd be a bit per interface in the router and per multicast address) (let's say we could do this in 4 bytes for a nice big router)
Now this may seem like nothing, however it doesn't scale for the central routers of the internet. In ipv4 the multicast space is 224.0.0.0/4, that's 268435454 addresses. We need 4 bytes per address (and no we can't use routes to optimize this like for normal hosts), so we're talking 2 GIGS of memory, and not just any memory but "fast" memory, memory that needs to be adressable in at best a few millisecs.
For ipv6 we have ff00::/8 as multicast addresses. `nuff said ? That's 2^120*8 = 2^123 bytes of address space required.
Multicast is... a bitch. It can't be aggregated, it can't be split, it can't be simplified,... it sucks. It'll never work.
One does not have to "believe" fully in one idea or another. Sometimes equality of outcome is important, sometimes equality of opportunity is important, sometimes *inequality* is important.
Fortunately there is also the truth, also called God, the world, the universe, the transcendent, whatever. And called massively different things by different people.
There is exactly 1 truth, which is a partial unknown.
If you doubt this why don't we try this experiment. You close your eyes and you jump of the stairs backwards. You make yourself believe this will have no effect on you (use alcohol if necessary), and we test the result, ok ?
Obviously there are differences, but if you truly want the difference you would see that there are (large) parts of your brain that see no difference between really blasting people and playing video games. In some people there truly isn't any part of the brain that sees a difference.
*if* there is a part of the brain that sees a difference, it will be the frontal cortex (yes you can physically cut that part out and make immoral people that way). So this is the situation : 99.9% of the brain does not see a difference between blasting people in GTA and in reality. Or, more exact, they can identify whether you are shooting in GTA or in real life, but they don't care about the information. In short, they will not attempt to stop you if it's real life, they will just pass the information on.
Please set aside all notions of "builtin" morality. There's no such thing. The frontal cortex is the one that is trained right after a certain phase that generally occurs in children just before their second birthday. If at that time you teach a kid to kill, it will not be possible to prevent them from murdering later in life using *any* means other than outright force (to physically prevent them), there is not a single deterrent that will stop them. A kid *will* try to kill around that time. They will try to target either siblings, pets or their parents. Generally they get hurt in the attempt, and learn that it is *not* okay to kill.
Comparing engineers with terrorists is just sensationalism, but noting the level of fundamentalism among engineers, at least on the surface, seems worth investigating.
But if you believe in equality of outcome (ie. you believe everybody should not have the same chances, but the same amount of money), then you can't believe in motive. So you *have* to believe in means.
"Guns kill people" "engineers are terrorists"
Same thing. People *can* handle a gun responsibly without victims (and much better than they can handle not having guns responsibly), engineers *can* be responsible. But there are a few who cannot. Since everybody must be equal we blame the gun, or the science. (e.g. the backlash against nuclear power plants is 80% because of the bomb and at best 20% because of the waste problem).
This is simply the "guns kill people" mindset taken to it's next logical step. Obviously an engineer can be used as a weapon. In fact if you want your weapon to have any effect you best hire a few engineers. Especially if you're improvising, or if you want to be the best at it.
My answer to this would be simple : "guns don't kill people, people kill people", in other word, it's the conviction of the guys that matters, not the knowledge. What mindset ? Well it's called "islamic" terrorism for a reason. Yes people who do not believe in separation of conviction and state (that would be all non-christians), and on top of that believe in using violence to advance their cause (like... all muslims, I'm sorry to say, search "sixth pillar of islam") will obviously infiltrate everything, and attempt to use that to their advantage, killing others in the process. Is this supposed to be a surprise ? Unless I'm seriously misreading my history books, 50 years ago, nobody doubted this, today, it's "hate speech" to even suggest this.
A well-equipped viral geneticist or even just a capable chemist (fortunately "capable" is a bit of a problem for that region of our little planet) would be many times more dangerous than any engineer can seriously hope to be. So will we preventively outlaw them too ? Perhaps all of science ?
The problem is that the rails need to be conductive, as the whole point is to create a conductive path from coil A -> bullet -> coil B. So not only must the rails themselves be of metal, the bullet itself needs to be a relatively large iron mass (because you have magnetic saturation ie, the maximum theoretical speed of the bullet is related to the weight of the bullet you want to fire)
They can't be ceramic, and they can't be tungsten either (you can't get that amount of tungsten anymore, for any price, it's just a bad idea, they say oil will run out soon, well they're right, but a few things, like tungsten have already run out).
I wonder how many times this thing can be fired. They need to get 32 megajoules of energy out of the gun, and without the metal that this power passes through melting. That's not an easy thing to do.
Railguns today tend to melt after each shot, leaving one to replace the rails (the biggest, conducting the part of the gun, the bit in contact with the "bullet").
I wonder what the efficiency is. 32 megajoules come in, how many leave in the bullet. (Generally they only get about 2%-5% efficiency).
An alternative, easier and safer, is a coil gun. Here's a nice index of coilguns : World's coilgun arsenal. But like their railgun brothers, they're not very efficient. The very best of them have the bullet speed of a mini handgun, but they're trivial to make, and rely only on batteries and metal.
All world religions except christianity satisfy your definition (yes even Judaism, certainly islam, hinduism and buddhism). Why ? Simply because separation between church and state is a Christian-only concept. Every single religion tries to infiltrate government, police forces,... except Christianity (at least in principle).
And yes most christian denominations have stepped over the line at some time in the past, but at least they find it a worthy principle to uphold in the present time (and in the earliest times of Christianity). Other religions, like islam, hinduism, buddhism,... were born in armies, and some of them in pillaging armies, like islam.
Worse than even that, a lot of, in essence, political ideologies, including communism, nazism, baathism,... also find themselves fitting your definition of cult.
And you know what ? I think you're right... except you haven't thought through just how many cult members there are on this planet. But let me help you with that. At LEAST 4.8 BILLION people are (mostly involuntary, born-into) cult members. Only in Europe and America do you find truly large numbers of people who aren't born members of cults.
This is slashdot ! You WILL submit to mob justice ! Otherwise we will kill little babies ! We will fly planes into the world trade center ! We will elect another Bush ! WE ARE THE VICTIMS HERE ! Oh wait...
In soviet russia... they... well, no, acting like this is EXACTLY what they do in soviet russia.
You DO realise that the alternative is that we ALL die, right ? We cannot keep the biosphere constant. I utterly wonder why some people (ie. "greens") claim that we should. Change brings opportuniy, change makes us better.
Say you have a contaminant in the environment that is currently dangerous to the way the system (ie the mouse) works. That means you want to change the system, in order to compensate for the changed environment. So you induce random changes in the sperm and see which baby survives.
In other words : the system works. Hoorray ! Perhaps it does the same in humans.
Isn't this therefore perfectly normal ? Or are you all believers in intelligent design ? This is a good thing, and regardless, we can't stop it (and we shouldn't try).
Except academics have time and again said that violence does indeed increase (by a lot) if children are exposed to violent video games. They confirmed that games like "rocket defense" increased violence.
The research will say the same thing in the future. Worse : what do you think they're going to find when they include stuff like quake and gta ?
Human behavior is simple, and something like this : reaction = first_memory_that_seems_relevant * 0.5 + second_memory * 0.25 + third * 0.125 +... (obviously it cuts off somewhere). This is the way our brain works, and this is the only thing it does. It DOES NOT react "logically" unless it's imitating that behavior from somewhere else (meaning increased chances of capture don't make a difference unless the perpetrator is publicly punished). If a childs first memory when faced with an "I want a car" conundrum is GTA combined with the instant satisfaction that is preached everywhere (certainly in games)... well obviously it won't end well for a significant percentage of idiots.
Doesn't this bother you a little bit ? Violence makes people violent. Worse : virtual violence does too. Allowing kids to play these games hurts (and kills) others. Therefore, it is not acceptable.
You know I've read 5 articles on this site and I find it seriously lacking... well... reason.
Apparently celebrating christmas is equal to celebrating a communist dictator. I wonder what reason finds wrong with that as another article is celebrating one communist dictator.
So could you please get me another source for this ? One that is less insane.
actually just the opposite. You can see the beam because it is absorbed more than the red one... and then retransmitted, which has the effect of scattering the beam.
The sun shines white, that's true. It appears yellow because the blue is scattered. By contrast the entire remainder of the sky appears blue (because the blue rays, while coming from the sun, have been scattered by absorption and re-transmission).
What an electron absorbs in energy, it will retransmit some time later.
They've run out of oil and don't want to collapse entirely. Despite all their high towering, and despite their supposed "faith" they know very well their economies will collapse in months if the oil runs out.
Which is going to happen in no more than 15 years (probably less). (and their incomes from oil will drop exponentially during this period). They need fuel. 60 years worth of fuel and they need it in storage containers now. And they need money. Thousands of times more money than they have.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. I should have said "peak oil is going to occur", which is, obviously the real moment "oil runs out" in the economic sense. More and more people are saying that moment has already passed (the "swing producer" saudi arabia, is not swinging anymore since may 2005 apparently).
"minimal cost" ... strange ... I've heard that it's taking up a most significant part of the "research" budget. In fact I hear it's taking just about the ENTIRE energy research budget. Comparing it to the full energy budget is idiotic and misleading, nothing more.
1 billion dollar energy (plus another billion "in natura") research capital has better uses than ITER, I'm sorry to say. Even biofuels, being the disaster they are, are a better investment TODAY than ITER.
Do you even understand ITER ? To call iter a long-term project is beyond unreasonable. ITER MAY (may) be operational in 2025. At which point we MAY be able to begin construction on a first semi-functional power-plant, "DEMO", which hopefully will be operational in 2050. Sorry but that's just not good enough.
Even the most absolutely madly optimistic of projections say oil's going to run out before 2020. Which means we need a GLOBALLY INSTALLED power system BEFORE that time, and massive adaptations in our entire transport system, cars, boats and planes. If having that requires that funding to ITER must be cut, then there is no question - cut it. Now (especially since it's such a big amount of money)
ITER is a nice long-term scientific intrest project. Like LHC. But that's it. It may be useful some day, but it won't save our butts now. Therefore it is not critical. We can always do it tomorrow.
Designing a new energy infrastructure CANNOT wait until tomorrow. We need a project to do that now. And sorry to burst your bubble, ITER, even if it goes perfectly according to plan and God himself comes down to help shave half the years of the project, it's a futile attempt at fixing our current problem.
We have exactly one option : construct a fleet of nuclear power plants now, or get a definitive design on a gigawatt-scale "alternative energy" plant two years ago. ITER's not that design. Maybe (and I seriously doubt it) solar energy can be that solution now for countries close to the equator, and the battery technology required isn't there yet, and won't be there even if we wait another 2 years.
This need for much new infrastructure is also good news. If 2015 isn't a complete disaster, with the world economy at half the level it is today, it will be a very good year. But funding ITER at the cost of other projects is a guaranteed way to make it a disaster. If we can fund ITER without cutting alternative research, good, no, great. If we can't, then we can't afford to fund ITER.
Perhaps I should add something to this. There is this theory called "postmodernism" that states that mutually exclusive statements are merely different versions of the truth. In short if I believe you will get hurt if you fall of the stairs, and you believe you won't get hurt doing same, these are not mutually exclusive, they are both truths.
Some idiots even attempt to claim that quantum mechanics "schrodinger's cat" confirms this view of the world, which, obviously, is ridiculous beyond belief. But they claim it anyway.
Obviously postmodernists are neither muslims, nor christians. Christianity (and science) are dependant on there being a singular, objective truth, and obviously, while I may doubt some other principles of it, this is a truth beyond any reasonable argument. Islam is dependant on force changing the truth (needless to say, this doesn't work, another way to put this, islam puts the welfare of muslims directly in the hands of allah, with predictably disastrous results like the Iran-Iraq war)
That is not possible. Obviously it's possible to just use the fascist feeling that islam provides (ie. supremacy of muslims aka. "all infidels are worth less than animals" (quran 8:55) to elevate yourself, but not actually implement this. In fact I know quite a few who do this. But then your ideology isn't islam at all, it's just fascism, with a slightly different version of "aryan" breed (in most cases based on race, e.g. al-qaeda in iraq kills anyone looking european, because iranians look very european, and are mostly shi'a)
Either you believe that following sharia and forcing it on others like it commands, following islam (again, it is the same thing), is the only way, or you do not believe in the truth of the quran. There is no middle road. They are allowed to lie to infidels, in order to betray them (quran 5:51), but muslims are explicitly forbidden of disagreeing with the slightest bit of islam (33:36). Obviously this is the point of having the quran be the literal word of allah, as compared to (for example) the bible and the vedas, who are, except for a few words, not made by God, but by fallible humans who themselves put down an interpretation of the word of god. In short, the authorship of the bible, and of the torah is specifically so in order to theologically justify interpretation.
The authorship of the quran is made like it is in order to PREVENT interpretation. In order to concentrate any and all power into a single individual, as opposed to what the bible does with power (it throws it away, saying that governments are necessary, but have nothing to do with faith).
If you do not agree with this, obviously you do not believe the quran is the word of allah, and obviously you don't believe in the power of allah.
There is no choice in islam, like in christianity, there is no room, there is only islam, there is only sharia. Fight, kill and die (quran 9:111)
No it does not mean islamic legal system. You have two properties of words confused
Sharia :
1) meaning :
"The (right) way" - it's the description of how
a) a muslim have to live
b) a muslims have to force others to live (amr bi alma 'ruf wa nahi 'an alnunkar)
(and it's got a big emphasis on the b part) (btw islam means "opression" or "submission" in the military sense, there is no choice involved for anyone)
So while "islam" is a name, a principle, "sharia" is the content, what the name means, the implementation of the principle
2) description
"islamic legal system"
Shame on America for believing that people can change ? That they deserve the second chance that saddam/muslims weren't going to give them ?
Shame ! Shame ! Shame on America !
Also please don't refer to it as "sharia". Refer to it as "islam". There is NO POINT where islam stops and sharia begins. The two are one and the same.
In case anyone wants to know. Let's have some calculations, shall we ? IF we were to bring multicast (like people here want, random senders, random receivers) to the home, we'd need the following resources in the router's memory.
... a bitch. It can't be aggregated, it can't be split, it can't be simplified, ... it sucks. It'll never work.
-> A place to put a multicast address (that'd be 4 bytes for ipv4, 16 bytes for ipv6)
-> A place to put, associated with each multicast address, a series of interfaces to replicate the traffic to (that'd be a bit per interface in the router and per multicast address) (let's say we could do this in 4 bytes for a nice big router)
Now this may seem like nothing, however it doesn't scale for the central routers of the internet. In ipv4 the multicast space is 224.0.0.0/4, that's 268435454 addresses. We need 4 bytes per address (and no we can't use routes to optimize this like for normal hosts), so we're talking 2 GIGS of memory, and not just any memory but "fast" memory, memory that needs to be adressable in at best a few millisecs.
For ipv6 we have ff00::/8 as multicast addresses. `nuff said ? That's 2^120*8 = 2^123 bytes of address space required.
Multicast is
Fortunately there is also the truth, also called God, the world, the universe, the transcendent, whatever. And called massively different things by different people.
There is exactly 1 truth, which is a partial unknown.
If you doubt this why don't we try this experiment. You close your eyes and you jump of the stairs backwards. You make yourself believe this will have no effect on you (use alcohol if necessary), and we test the result, ok ?
Welcome to the real world.
Obviously there are differences, but if you truly want the difference you would see that there are (large) parts of your brain that see no difference between really blasting people and playing video games. In some people there truly isn't any part of the brain that sees a difference.
*if* there is a part of the brain that sees a difference, it will be the frontal cortex (yes you can physically cut that part out and make immoral people that way). So this is the situation : 99.9% of the brain does not see a difference between blasting people in GTA and in reality. Or, more exact, they can identify whether you are shooting in GTA or in real life, but they don't care about the information. In short, they will not attempt to stop you if it's real life, they will just pass the information on.
Please set aside all notions of "builtin" morality. There's no such thing. The frontal cortex is the one that is trained right after a certain phase that generally occurs in children just before their second birthday. If at that time you teach a kid to kill, it will not be possible to prevent them from murdering later in life using *any* means other than outright force (to physically prevent them), there is not a single deterrent that will stop them. A kid *will* try to kill around that time. They will try to target either siblings, pets or their parents. Generally they get hurt in the attempt, and learn that it is *not* okay to kill.
But if you believe in equality of outcome (ie. you believe everybody should not have the same chances, but the same amount of money), then you can't believe in motive. So you *have* to believe in means.
"Guns kill people"
"engineers are terrorists"
Same thing. People *can* handle a gun responsibly without victims (and much better than they can handle not having guns responsibly), engineers *can* be responsible. But there are a few who cannot. Since everybody must be equal we blame the gun, or the science. (e.g. the backlash against nuclear power plants is 80% because of the bomb and at best 20% because of the waste problem).
This is simply the "guns kill people" mindset taken to it's next logical step. Obviously an engineer can be used as a weapon. In fact if you want your weapon to have any effect you best hire a few engineers. Especially if you're improvising, or if you want to be the best at it.
... all muslims, I'm sorry to say, search "sixth pillar of islam") will obviously infiltrate everything, and attempt to use that to their advantage, killing others in the process. Is this supposed to be a surprise ? Unless I'm seriously misreading my history books, 50 years ago, nobody doubted this, today, it's "hate speech" to even suggest this.
My answer to this would be simple : "guns don't kill people, people kill people", in other word, it's the conviction of the guys that matters, not the knowledge. What mindset ? Well it's called "islamic" terrorism for a reason. Yes people who do not believe in separation of conviction and state (that would be all non-christians), and on top of that believe in using violence to advance their cause (like
A well-equipped viral geneticist or even just a capable chemist (fortunately "capable" is a bit of a problem for that region of our little planet) would be many times more dangerous than any engineer can seriously hope to be. So will we preventively outlaw them too ? Perhaps all of science ?
The problem is that the rails need to be conductive, as the whole point is to create a conductive path from coil A -> bullet -> coil B. So not only must the rails themselves be of metal, the bullet itself needs to be a relatively large iron mass (because you have magnetic saturation ie, the maximum theoretical speed of the bullet is related to the weight of the bullet you want to fire)
They can't be ceramic, and they can't be tungsten either (you can't get that amount of tungsten anymore, for any price, it's just a bad idea, they say oil will run out soon, well they're right, but a few things, like tungsten have already run out).
I wonder how many times this thing can be fired. They need to get 32 megajoules of energy out of the gun, and without the metal that this power passes through melting. That's not an easy thing to do.
Railguns today tend to melt after each shot, leaving one to replace the rails (the biggest, conducting the part of the gun, the bit in contact with the "bullet").
I wonder what the efficiency is. 32 megajoules come in, how many leave in the bullet. (Generally they only get about 2%-5% efficiency).
An alternative, easier and safer, is a coil gun. Here's a nice index of coilguns : World's coilgun arsenal. But like their railgun brothers, they're not very efficient. The very best of them have the bullet speed of a mini handgun, but they're trivial to make, and rely only on batteries and metal.
No even within Israel's border they are problematic. And stop the accusations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7212394.stm
All world religions except christianity satisfy your definition (yes even Judaism, certainly islam, hinduism and buddhism). Why ? Simply because separation between church and state is a Christian-only concept. Every single religion tries to infiltrate government, police forces, ... except Christianity (at least in principle).
... were born in armies, and some of them in pillaging armies, like islam.
... also find themselves fitting your definition of cult.
... except you haven't thought through just how many cult members there are on this planet. But let me help you with that. At LEAST 4.8 BILLION people are (mostly involuntary, born-into) cult members. Only in Europe and America do you find truly large numbers of people who aren't born members of cults.
And yes most christian denominations have stepped over the line at some time in the past, but at least they find it a worthy principle to uphold in the present time (and in the earliest times of Christianity). Other religions, like islam, hinduism, buddhism,
Worse than even that, a lot of, in essence, political ideologies, including communism, nazism, baathism,
And you know what ? I think you're right
This is slashdot ! You WILL submit to mob justice ! Otherwise we will kill little babies ! We will fly planes into the world trade center ! We will elect another Bush ! WE ARE THE VICTIMS HERE ! Oh wait ...
... they ... well, no, acting like this is EXACTLY what they do in soviet russia.
In soviet russia
You DO realise that the alternative is that we ALL die, right ? We cannot keep the biosphere constant. I utterly wonder why some people (ie. "greens") claim that we should. Change brings opportuniy, change makes us better.
It just won't work.
Say you have a contaminant in the environment that is currently dangerous to the way the system (ie the mouse) works. That means you want to change the system, in order to compensate for the changed environment. So you induce random changes in the sperm and see which baby survives.
In other words : the system works. Hoorray ! Perhaps it does the same in humans.
Isn't this therefore perfectly normal ? Or are you all believers in intelligent design ? This is a good thing, and regardless, we can't stop it (and we shouldn't try).
Except academics have time and again said that violence does indeed increase (by a lot) if children are exposed to violent video games. They confirmed that games like "rocket defense" increased violence.
... (obviously it cuts off somewhere). This is the way our brain works, and this is the only thing it does. It DOES NOT react "logically" unless it's imitating that behavior from somewhere else (meaning increased chances of capture don't make a difference unless the perpetrator is publicly punished). If a childs first memory when faced with an "I want a car" conundrum is GTA combined with the instant satisfaction that is preached everywhere (certainly in games) ... well obviously it won't end well for a significant percentage of idiots.
The research will say the same thing in the future. Worse : what do you think they're going to find when they include stuff like quake and gta ?
Human behavior is simple, and something like this : reaction = first_memory_that_seems_relevant * 0.5 + second_memory * 0.25 + third * 0.125 +
Doesn't this bother you a little bit ? Violence makes people violent. Worse : virtual violence does too. Allowing kids to play these games hurts (and kills) others. Therefore, it is not acceptable.
The article you point to actually predicted 35 dollars per barrel today ... it seems to be somewhat ... eh ... wrong
You know I've read 5 articles on this site and I find it seriously lacking ... well ... reason.
Apparently celebrating christmas is equal to celebrating a communist dictator. I wonder what reason finds wrong with that as another article is celebrating one communist dictator.
So could you please get me another source for this ? One that is less insane.
actually just the opposite. You can see the beam because it is absorbed more than the red one ... and then retransmitted, which has the effect of scattering the beam.
The sun shines white, that's true. It appears yellow because the blue is scattered. By contrast the entire remainder of the sky appears blue (because the blue rays, while coming from the sun, have been scattered by absorption and re-transmission).
What an electron absorbs in energy, it will retransmit some time later.
Option number 3 :
They've run out of oil and don't want to collapse entirely. Despite all their high towering, and despite their supposed "faith" they know very well their economies will collapse in months if the oil runs out.
Which is going to happen in no more than 15 years (probably less). (and their incomes from oil will drop exponentially during this period). They need fuel. 60 years worth of fuel and they need it in storage containers now. And they need money. Thousands of times more money than they have.