So your suggestion is ? The reality is simple : the rich are paid from the profit of companies, the "poor" and everyone else generally is paid as a cost center.
So why don't we compare actual profit margins of average companies ? 1-3% (granted, banks have more, but even there 10% is truly exceptional). So companies create value, and they pass 99% of that to raw materials, one of which is labour. Even the worst of the worst, companies like ExxonMobil have profit margins just above 1%. Most of the economy runs on those very low profit margins. Most companies are not Google or Apple.
So let's suppose we put in a 100% tax (and as most people already don't pay taxes, the tax is effectively mostly paid by very rich people (at least richer than me). But suppose we go all Soviet/Nat. Socialist on "the rich", kill them and take all their money. What have we just "conquered" from the "dishonest/polluting/evil" rich ? Just enough to give Americans a ~2% wage increase. After that, it's all gone. If you're one of the "let's have no borders" socialists, it's much worse than that.
And of course, this is assuming that such a thing is possible without destroying the economy. People invent, work and take risks to get rich. Take away the incentive, and you take away the product. So this will not happen without causing a huge disaster.
So can you please get some perspective ? I must say I don't really have an opinion on whether taking down "the rich" is just or not, but the always implied message of propagandists like yourself is flat-out wrong : there is no money to be had from the rich for the noble proletariat. You can't take their money and redivide it, because that would simply not work, it's too little money. And given the disadvantages of taking down "the rich", which boils down to the destruction of the companies they own, it will in reality be a serious, serious pay cut.
So can you please modify your tone ? I don't really care if it's just or wrong to redistribute money. But let's please stop the charade : if we do that, maybe there is some short term satisfaction there, but no money, and extremely likely a disaster will follow.
Well, first a positive note : America's not nearly as bad as most other nations that grace this planet. China, while currently better than America, isn't without debt problems. But America's better off than Europe when it comes to debt. Yet Europe is better behaved than Turkey & middle east, who are in worse shape despite massive influxes of money.
But still that would mean that on the average, Americans... did never even intend to repay their debts. Welfare states were created, knowing full well they were doomed. People trading their income now, in the form of taxes, for health care, study help for their kids and pensions that won't come, except for the first ones who enjoyed these benefits.
And yet lots of generations had the option of turning the tide, and didn't. Not just in America, but in Europe, the middle east, and Asia, lots of people had the option of stabilizing the system by choosing to take responsibility instead of shoving the bill to their kids, and all chose wrong.
The real question is, now that the cat's out of the bag, how long do we pretend we can put it back in ? The system has failed, and while this obvious truth can still be denied, it will reassert itself soon enough. Though I do hope we can pretend a while longer, I have a family to take care of, and despite the rosy pictures implied in leftist and progressive propaganda if we simply take the money from the bankers, we all know that their promises of wealth, brotherhood and justice for all will turn into the wars, concentration and slaughter camps they turned into last time.
I would simply suggest to take the lessons of history to heart : when public opinion does not just jabber about evil bankers, but actually attacks them in numbers, do what millions of people forgot to do before world war 2 : run ! Run to a place with sufficient food, home produced food, without multiculturalism (which will soon be nothing but a fancy word for ethnic wars), and preferably a nation without military alliances. Stay far away from any large American city, get the fuck out of Europe (the EU, not Switzerland), get the fuck out of the middle east, get the fuck out of Africa, or if you must, at least stay out of Northern Africa and the Saharan countries.
I don't know who will rise, it depends on many factors. I guess it will be whichever decent nation manages to not get destroyed, and I frankly seriously doubt it will be China.
The problem is what defaulting would mean of course. There's the popular way to "cut spending" (aside from just blaming the other guys*) : destroy the military. The problem is, that only buys us a couple of years at best.
The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to cut social spending. Stop unemployment benefits, repeal Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid. The problem with that, of course, is simple : those cuts will actually destroy lives. Aside from the unemployed, it will mean lots of older people (quite a few of them not at all that old) dieing very soon.
Now you can argue about party affiliation until the cows come home, but the fact is blatantly obvious : in 10 years, all those programs will be gone, or massively reduced. It doesn't matter whether Bush, Obama or Ron Paul does it, but it will happen. Obama can't save them, Bush can't save them, Sarah Palin can't save them, no-one can.
And what exactly do people hope to accomplish by blaming Obama, or Bush, Palin, Ron Paul or Clinton ? If it's someone else's fault, does that somehow solve the problem ? All these people are merely insulting eachother, with no benefit whatsoever. There is *no* way either rich people are going to pay for it, to destroy the democrat "dream", and there is no way "better economy through less taxes" is going to pay for it either. I suppose less taxes might lead to more people able to save up enough themselves if they're lucky, but that won't be all that many either.
Well at least the US has the decency to simply require access to the data on-demand. The government will store it, analyze it, separate it,... The US is perfectly happy even to pay for the colocation space for their monitoring equipment. I suppose the disadvantage is that they're actually relatively capable people (as compared to government isps in Europe, I mean).
Unlike the EU governments, and now Pakistan, who expect the isps to design and install these magical tracking systems, and of course the government's demands are extremely unreasonable (just think about how routing works and you'll see the problem : the whole point of networking once you hit a few 10G's is to avoid all traffic passing through any single location, so you won't need 1 monitoring system, you'll need thousands). But frankly is it any surprise ? Every muslim country does this, and worse. The real problem in Pakistan is not that the police and/or government may monitor traffic, it's what they'll do with the data. Pakistan is still religiously and ethnically cleansing it's own population. But you can't complain about this because it's apparently mandated by islam and you can't object to a religion.
Maybe I should start a religion with a god called la-haha to exterminate all brown haired people. I don't like them. What ? You disrespecting to my religion ?
You're making a bogus argument. You know perfectly well renewable energy is not being used by the private sector for power generation, and your question only makes sense if that were the case. So the answers are very simple:
If "it takes more energy to produce and ship wind turbines than they will produce in the first 10 years"
That's the really bad part : the 10 year figure is based on theoretically optimal performance (wind blowing at exactly the optimal speed for 10 years). It also completely ignores maintenance : these things contain lots and lots of mechanically rotating parts that need to be oiled, checked and cleaned regularly. Because otherwise (in this case, the brakes failed)
, why would anyone install them?
Here's the first reason. In reality most (> 60%) wind power is not bought by choice. Solar power is even worse. See how effective politics can be ? Right now one of the arguments being raised in Germany for renewable power subsidies is that not providing these subsidies would crash the market.
And as for private turbines, the few that exist. First most power companies are government monopolies, and thus buy what the government tells them to, without regard for cost and/or efficiency, so there's really only very, very few of them. Why do people buy yachts ? Why do women buy 10 different facial creams with identical ingredients, each one more expensive than the next ? Why do men (try to) buy ferrari's ? To become popular.
Have you been watching the news and read a few magazines in the last 10 years ? "Green power" gets more commercials than Verizon. Mostly paid for by the government.
Additionally, by moving production to China, the real cost of producing these things is externalized, and moved to cheap China. China burns coal, dumping the waste in rivers, to end up in the Pacific ocean. Just to give you an idea : that waste is more radioactive than nuclear waste, and more toxic than sewage. And the miners are basically slaves.
Wind power is not actually cheap, even with the government subsidies applied, but having resources dug up by slave labor, burned in substandard equipment, the waste simply dumped into nature makes a Chinese 10-year energy supply for 5-10 homes just a little bit more expensive than regulated nuclear power in the states, isolated and secured, with the waste properly disposed of (again that's only a 10-year energy supply assuming theoretically optimal performance, disregarding maintenance, and once it becomes clear you get 20% performance at best, you understand why you will find most private wind generators abandoned).
It's a fake feel-good idea, with horrible consequences for invisible people, like most popular intellectual ideas. Like how Obama claims to "better the lives of people everywhere" while holding a blackberry, and surrounded by aides mostly carrying iphones, shouting about bettering the lives of the little guy, to deafening applause. Like how Al Gore, fresh out of his private jet, taking not one, but three limousines to a stage where he declares how "everybody needs to do their part to lower CO2 output" under lights powered by trucked in petroleum generators.
Why ? We all know why. Saying you're "green" is popular, and fantastic, extremely widely considered a good idea. Just like smoking filtered tobacco is considered a bad idea, and breathing in hand-rolled burning hemp leaves without filter, bringing actually burning fibers straight into your lungs is considered to do no harm, despite hundreds of studies claiming the opposite. Why ? You tell me why. It's popular. That excuses everything in our society.
Really, do you ever bother thinking before you post?
Yes. Do you ? Why do you think Google makes 2.5 billion per quarter for text-only commercials ? Bec
Why would the facts get in the way ? We're talking computer models here - they will say exactly what was programmed into them. Anyone who's worked at a university knows perfectly well. You program a model for some way-too-complex dataset. You can do it automatically these days. It's got hundreds or thousands of variables, you modify them until the outcome "seems reasonable".
Yes you test against past data, but anyone who knows the basics of statistics knows how past data and chaotic systems work : you can explain the past to any desired level of accuracy and still make the prediction say whatever you want it to say. The (statistical) proof of this is so obvious it's almost absurd to write it down, and boils down to this simple sentence : just take the past as a given, add any random future, there's your prediction function. Because the law of large numbers doesn't apply, this function can be trivially shown to be the best possible estimator of the system's behavior (but is obviously not unique, it is only the best estimator because every estimator has the same chance of success). Done/done.
But the most convincing argument is to simply check past predictions... IPCC AR1 : prediction failed. We're currently outside of their 95% interval (below it if you must know) IPCC AR2 : prediction failed. We're currently outside of their 95% interval (idem) IPCC AR3 : prediction failed... idem IPCC AR4 : prediction succeeded, as of August 2010. However we're at the very bottom of their 95% confidence interval and dropping. IPCC AR5 : doesn't actually make a temperature prediction anymore about temperature. It does however make a prediction about solar output that seemed very safe at the time... and turns out to be wrong (google "solar cycle 24").
Let's contrast that with this story. I know it's apples and oranges but still. The measurement data from LHC for the Higgs Boson was rejected for being inconclusive because the confidence was only 3 sigma, where 5 are required. For non statisticians 3 sigma means their confidence interval was "only" 99.73% (one mistake in 400).
So physicists reject a measurement because one out of every 400 experiments fails to produce the expected result... and climate warning hinge on theories that failed to predict the outcome of 4 out of 5 experiments are flat out wrong and the 5th is so very close to failing that it's not even funny anymore, and moving in the wrong direction. I mean astrology has a better track record.
Let's please accept the obvious here : these are VERY different sciences indeed.
And a realistic person looks, not at the "reasons" but at what is asked.
"climate change" - creation of a (more socialist, and censored politically-correct) world government-crowd (in my humble opinion nothing more than the old "let's perfect the human race, damn reality" parties) "climate skeptic" - leave me alone-crowd (agreed, could potentially also lead to disaster. However I'll be much happier knowing I screwed up my own country than knowing I helped vote in the next nazis - and make no mistake, the UN are worse, much worse)
Now there are people arguing about "reasons" - they're morons. As if the global warming fight has anything to do with any scientific theory. The political fight is about politics, as it always has and always will be. If you believe someone like Al Gore cares about the planet, you should have your head examined, just as much as people who think George Bush "loves America".
Even if climate change was completely unwarranted as a threat, fossil-fuel energy causes massive, verifiable harm right now and is probably the largest single public health-risk today. Clean energy means significant reductions in cases of asthma, some variants of TB and dozens of other respiratory illnesses. It also means that the world can end it's state of being economic hostages to a bunch of really evil dictators out in the middle-east. It means the end of the oil wars.
You mean, as it takes more energy to produce and ship wind turbines than they will produce the first 10 years. So it's more like "clean energy causes 10 times more harm than fossil fuels, but mostly in China".
Ending all wars ? Yeah right. Are you really moronic enough to think the middle east will stop fighting without oil ?
The problem is that you'll be disgusted by these robots, if not outright afraid of them. You see, actroids exist, they're not successful. Their movements are slow, forced, and not realistic. Nothing really clicks together. Their mouth moves all wrong for the words they make.
But they're good enough to pass for human initially if you pass them by (God forbid anyone ever gets the idea that you could probably place rather heavy bombs inside them and have them walk into buildings without attracting attention before detonating them. Or arm them, have them shoot, and know that the first dozen return shots will probably not disable the robot)
And if you're wondering why your brain has this response, look up a few camouflaged species living in the African savannah. If something isn't what it appears, there's good reason to run away. It's probably poisonous and hungry.
Btw : clicking through to other youtube actroid videos is a good way to see how amazing these robots are getting. They're actually getting past the uncanny valley. Seeing as what obvious uses these robots have, I fear for the consequences, but it is rather amazing.
as it is specifically an End User License Agreement - quite a number of companies have their own licensing agreements with Sun and now Oracle over Java as it is different in the enterprise.
And if the tooth fairy sprinkled pixie dust over the licence it would just fly away...
Are you seriously making this argument ? The whole point of the case is that Google created Android without *any* agreement with Sun (which is why they're grasping at such straws as the "but the CEO said he liked us in his blog and this constitutes an agreement" argument).
The license Sun provided requires you to run Java programs on desktop machines (and there's another one allowing the same for servers) and the license explicitly denies you the permission to create your own VM, core libraries, compiler,... (and you cannot really create one without creating the other) (this was done to "avoid the possibility of diluting the language" according to Sun)
The authors of Java made their position clear in the licence, the *one* legal document that could have given Google any rights to use Java for android, and Google violated those wishes. It's of course true that doesn't mean Google simply agreed to the licence, but if they didn't agree to the licence they should have deleted all materials pertaining to Java from all their machines. So Google obviously did not have any right to do what they did in creating Android, and so Google will probably have to pay damages. Oracle claims that to create android legally, they would have had to pay 6 billion dollars in a sort of weird revenue sharing agreement. Google claims they got "implicit endorsement" for free, and could have had a contract for 100 million dollars. So Google made billions by violating a contract, needless to say, this means damages. That's what's done if you violate a contract (and before you say it let's leave out the judicial requirements for damage and causal relationship or we'll never get out of this argument, it's plain to see both conditions are satisfied, the only real question, as the judge stated, is the amount they cover).
Google did not write a java program. Google massively changed the VM, compiler, rewrote the jit, changed the base library and so on. None of that was allowed. Your argument hinges on the entire android java system being nothing more than just another java program, running within the confines of the jdk licence (in other words, on a desktop machine in a sun-approved jvm without any special libraries). I find it hard to believe you can even claim this with a straight face.
And try to formulate an argument that doesn't involve the existence of another set of magical legal documents which are stated in the article not to exist. There was *no* agreement of any kind made with Google. Java is *not* English. Android is quite a bit more than a few com.google... classes, and Java is (still) very much non-free software, except in the GPL sense (with the viral clause in full force).
You seem to be confused this is not a case of software patents (at least not primarily, like apple-htc for example). I mean google did not use "the principles behind java". It did not use a new version of the language, it does not use different opcodes, it does not... Google uses Java, verbatim, Google uses the binary format of java, verbatim (yes they package it *slightly* differently), Google uses the sun jvm (a secondary derivative, but that, too, is illegal),... You use the very same development tools for java enterprise as you use for android development, which is the big advantage android has above other systems.
Google is guilty of copyright infringement. Java is not public domain, and anything unique about java is protected just like the contents of a book. It is fully owned by Oracle. Google simply took something that didn't belong to them, maimed it against the wishes of the original author (who should have complained sooner), and used it's massive weight to outcompete the original author in a matter of months. I, for one, do NOT think what google did is okay. Imagine this happening to something *you* wrote. I like the result, android is great, but the ends do not justify the means here.
Java is not public domain (actually none of the big languages is), nor is Java freely licenced (like C++ is, for example).
In order to flip a gate you have to overcome the magnetic field holding the gate in it's position. That will take a huge amount of rads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening claims that a computer will react perfectly normal right up to 50-100 gray. That would mean the radiation level necessary to make your computer go haywire is not only more than enough to kill you, but enough to make your tissues boil in a matter of minutes. You would not find this level of radiation inside a uranium mine, or anywhere at all (even inside an active nuclear reactor such radiation level would be extremely local phenomena. In a deactivated nuclear reactor you will not bind these radiation levels anywhere).
The radiation levels inside fukushima never reached even 10 gray. Even substandard equipment would have operated perfectly normally for days or weeks, hell, even transmitters and receivers would operate perfectly normal.
So sorry, maybe the reason no robots were sent into the reaction was stupidity, or incompetence, or simply money (or the fact they had no power perhaps ?). But that reason was not that those robots would have failed in any reasonable timeframe. I'm not claiming it would have been good for those chips of course, but high humidity would be much worse for them than the inside of a nuclear reactor.
The only place where chips fail without warning is space. Not because the radiation level in space is so high, but because it's so very localized.
By that definition EVERY movement is political. Which is true to a certain extent, but that's not what we're discussing here. You forget that there is loads about anonymous that we haven't seen (yet ? Let's hope the fbi remembers that it's supposed to make their evidence public).
And you're incredibly naive to think that these "political" acts were anything more than concealment for attacks motivated by financial gain, or perhaps a way to advertise what they could do to some prospective employer with big bucks (spectacular hacks are often made "to prove yourself". Wait until you actually catch a halfway intelligent hacker on a server and see for yourself. I'm not saying I'm 100% certain that anon was the same as russian or chinese hackers (then again they're at least partly russian), I'm saying I'm 99.99% sure.
A company that was attacked in an illegal manner contacted and worked with the police straight after that fact. I am astonished. Baffled. Completely bamboozled.
Have you seen the controls of this thing ? Throwing is probably easier and more accurate. It has no camera and no sensors, so you'll need eyes on the target and eyes on the ball for the duration of the throw.
Good luck staying alive while you guide that thing in.
(besides, it's so big and slow that it makes an easy target for shooting. UAV's are so very good because of their stealth. You can't seriously hope to see a 1m plane 20 meters somewhere above your head so any action by that plane comes as a complete surprise)
1. decriminalized ones can be, or damn close to it. they're expensive because they're illegal.
No they can't. Again why are we seriously discussing this ? Drug users give up everything else, because they ARE learning networks, and the whole point of a drug is that it sabotages the reward function. Getting a person under constant influence of drugs to react normally is impossible. They WILL react randomly. It's like replacing the steering column of a car with a mouse and stating that the chance for that car to normally participate in traffic is non-zero. But how is the fact that one in a million kids manages to use drugs without screwing himself up entirely a reason to ignore those 999999 ones in the gutter ?
Drugs (the ones you're talking about) take the brain out of the decision making process. That's how they work, that is the very essence of their being. If they stopped doing this, they wouldn't be drugs, and we wouldn't be having this discussion because you wouldn't care for drugs at all.
2. sure you can. it's just that a lot of employers like enforcing psychological control mechanisms on employees, so they take advantage of the laws to squeeze more profit out of them. you could argue safety reasons for some jobs, but the majority do not. if the employee isn't doing his job because of drugs or anything else, warn, then fire him. no need for the police state.
Look we can't discuss with this moronic new baseline. If demanding that a worker actually works falls under "enforcing psychological control mechanisms on employees", then yes, you're right.
If work does not get done on a large scale, society collapses. If you think that's a good thing, please try to remember how many people would die in absurdly unpleasant circumstances if that were to happen.
3. because they're expensive. if they were cheap the crime goes away.
Really ? We've established 1) a drug user will not be able to hold down a constructive job, won't even be able to think about anything non-drug related at all, and so resources available to him/her will dwindle fast 2) a drug user will not be satisfied with ANY limit on drug availability and will do ANYTHING, including using any amount of violence on anyone, for even tiny amounts of drugs
You have failed to provide any compelling reason to believe either of these is false (no, your employer conspiracy theory doesn't count, sorry), so please explain to me, how does the price of drugs affect either of these points ? All it does is (slightly) prolonging their suffering.
And yes, you're entirely right that outlawing drug use is a societal control mechanism. It's also a necessary one, if you wish to have a society at all. I know it's popular to think that civilization is somehow a mistake, however do you really lack an imagination telling you what will happen to 6 billion people on this planet if the support mechanism we call society were to disappear ? It would look a lot like those inner-city rooms filled with formally-successful rich kids who thought a year ago "ah, hell, once doesn't matter".
Incidentally, this discussion could be persuasively ended if you actually went down to a drug shelter ONCE and talked to people there about your plans. I guarantee there's one close to you. Why not try that ? Make sure there's nothing in your wallet you can't afford to lose (although the inside of these shelters is quite safe, the neighborhood usually is not)
What you don't understand is what a good thing this reaction would be. Suppose we profile all "brown-skinned" "ill-sounding" names. This will do 2 things :
1) terrorists will have to stop recruiting from their "core constituency" and they will have to dampen their demands on people. There's just no way to avoid it : put simply, to grow the market you have to make compromises. Which would be a VERY VERY VERY good thing. 2) profiling will fail. Terrorism rates will drop and yes, they will rise again. But they won't rise the same way that they've dropped. They will rise again in that a more varied "constituency" will execute the attacks, which will of course lead to terrorists attacking one another on the compromisses they've made (you say allah is blue to recruit blue-loving cannon fodder ! Infidels ! Boom !). Again, this is a good thing 3) it will force religious nuts who wish to actually survive in the modern world to show outward disavowing of the religion. This is something they think they can do because "it won't affect me" and then they find they can't give it up again. In other words, the obvious way to adapt to this profiling will make extremists inherently moderate 4) a very varied people will have to execute the attacks once they try to push them up again, to have any hope of success. So profiling will fail, and it won't fail because some touchy-feely housewives club thinks it isn't cool. It will fail because it won't work anymore. It will fail because using profiling will cause screwups and cause people to lose their jobs.
Profiling is like a long term investment, the way I see it. It won't increase racism, it will do the reverse. But protecting this group of people, that will do the exact opposite in the long term. Pampering muslims will cause terror increases without bound, eventually any political or social group will imitate them, which is what went wrong last time muslims tried this : once terror is really shown to be a very effective strategy (and the huge problem is, of course, terror works), everybody will do it. Terror tactics are not the exclusive domain of muslims, except for the last 30 years. But socialists, absolutely no strangers to terror. Dictators, hell, even previous western political systems, or limited-vote democracies. Companies. Once that happens, the only question is which group will succeed in killing all others)
Besides, if Darwin and Hitchens' variation on him is right, there are only 2 possible outcomes for any ideological system : either it conquers the world, or it dies. I presume you don't want to be stoning women, and given the options available, what is wrong with directly attacking the system that causes this behavior ? You cannot actually have a mixed memes society, if our best theories are right. It simply won't happen, just like you cannot have a mixed genes species, those are short-lived situations which occur when the complexity of organisms is expanding, or they are somehow physically isolated. The only two ways "the west" can coexist with any other system are to cut the cord entirely, or to destroy it. (look up what happens when compatible genes come into contact with one another, ie. what happens to island birds once a bridge is built to the mainland)
I can't understand why we're seriously discussing this.
I'm not following you here. Cheap drugs promote free will because it's the only thing that stands between you taking drugs or staying away from them.
Cute. Here's reality : 1. Drugs (and life in general : appartment, clothes, food,...) are not free 2. You cannot hold a decent job with drugs (which is why you don't see kids need to support themselves don't do drugs : it kills them. You only see rich morons doing drugs) 3. Any addict will do anything, right down to shooting his own mother, to prolong his drugs supply for an hour (no, you cannot control this. Even people who were FORCIBLY injected with heroin ONCE exhibit this behavior)
You can put 2-and-2 together, can't you ? Why don't you tell me what will happen, and what happened before, when drugs are cheap.
As I said : why is this even under discussion ? Denying what drugs do to a person, and what they will do to loads of people if this legalization happens, is beyond moronic.
What you don't seem to get is just how much chances and security improve with profiling. Let's take your "searching muslims stop terror" example and look at it mathematically.
> 99.99% of terrorists are muslims (in the last 30 years or so, although that's probably not due to less terrorist activities by muslims, but rather due to less contact with the west. In other words, 50 years ago muslim terrorists were killing mostly black africans and chinese, who did not see the need to fill history books with said attacks)
0.01% of terrorists are non-muslims.
1% of travelers are muslims
And let's say in total 1/1000000 people are terrorists.
Then let's look at resources needed so that we prevent 50% of terrorist attacks. This would be considered sufficient. How many resources do you need ?
a) suppose you "don't" profile : you need to check 50% of all travelers
b) you "do" profile : you need to check 0.005% of all travelers
Are you starting to see the problem ? Whatever you wish to prevent, if you "don't profile" you need 1000 times as many searches (and thus it's 1000 times more expensive). And this is for ONE factor. If you could find a few other divisions (like 90% of terrorists are male, 55% have black hair, 72% have curls, 90% are rich kids born and raised in a big city...) you could easily get that resource saving factor up to 10000 or even 50000.
Besides, you don't seem to see the obviousness of what's going to happen : our contact with the muslim world is going to increase, as is the incidence of terrorism. The choice of whether to profile or not is going to disappear due to resource constraints : unless terrorism drops by orders of magnitude, we will have no choice other than attacking all muslims as a group (just like they're doing to us). The only reason we have the luxuries we currently have is that we can throw near-infinite resources at the problem (and to we can to the 10000 times more checks just because the 9999 moronic ones make us feel better).
And frankly, muslims could easily solve the problem by convincing muslims allah doesn't demand blood (as opposed to saying he doesn't in English and screaming he does in arabic (just use google translate on a few arabic forums), and frankly, one only needs to read a bit about the religion and the "right path" (ie. the life of the paedophile prophet, or 'sharia') to know perfectly well that the terrorists are right, at least religiously speaking. Or to put it more bluntly : the paedophile prophet attacked innocents just to steal their money, and sometimes, to sell their children as sex slaves, or just to kill them. In their own holy texts they don't claim there is a good reason for doing this. So the definition of a non-terrorist muslim has to be "one that doesn't want anything to do with the prophet" or something. Just ask one how popular that idea is)
Okay, this was a really dumb thing to say. I mean to say "even if caused by other factors". I do NOT claim race has inherently to do with things like crime rate, however for the moment race is a good predictor of those other factors.
The point is that if the police starts using that race predictor, then it's effectiveness will decline, because the need for criminals to hide from the police will force them to become evenly distributed across all races. And in the meantime, profiling does not just help by destroying the difference in backgrounds between races, but also lowers crime.
Sure, you're right of course, but as you say today there's still difference (whether or not caused by other factors).
So why not profile ? Profiling will actually counteract the events you described (massive crime rise due to population shift). And after a while, everybody will be exactly as criminal and profiling will stop, because it's useless.
The problem with cheap drugs is that they take away free will (and sanity). Read a bit of medical history, since we did actually have this situation not that long ago.
Cheap drugs lead to mass fatalities. Think DUI is a problem ? Wait until you've seen "Controlling a crane with heroin" (well given that cameras weren't actually in wide use back then, you'll probably be restricted to reading about it, but you might want to read about it a few times. Just go to your library, it's bound to have a few books on the subject. Yes, paper books, this was *loooong* before the internet)
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So your suggestion is ? The reality is simple : the rich are paid from the profit of companies, the "poor" and everyone else generally is paid as a cost center.
So why don't we compare actual profit margins of average companies ? 1-3% (granted, banks have more, but even there 10% is truly exceptional). So companies create value, and they pass 99% of that to raw materials, one of which is labour. Even the worst of the worst, companies like ExxonMobil have profit margins just above 1%. Most of the economy runs on those very low profit margins. Most companies are not Google or Apple.
So let's suppose we put in a 100% tax (and as most people already don't pay taxes, the tax is effectively mostly paid by very rich people (at least richer than me). But suppose we go all Soviet/Nat. Socialist on "the rich", kill them and take all their money. What have we just "conquered" from the "dishonest/polluting/evil" rich ? Just enough to give Americans a ~2% wage increase. After that, it's all gone. If you're one of the "let's have no borders" socialists, it's much worse than that.
And of course, this is assuming that such a thing is possible without destroying the economy. People invent, work and take risks to get rich. Take away the incentive, and you take away the product. So this will not happen without causing a huge disaster.
So can you please get some perspective ? I must say I don't really have an opinion on whether taking down "the rich" is just or not, but the always implied message of propagandists like yourself is flat-out wrong : there is no money to be had from the rich for the noble proletariat. You can't take their money and redivide it, because that would simply not work, it's too little money. And given the disadvantages of taking down "the rich", which boils down to the destruction of the companies they own, it will in reality be a serious, serious pay cut.
So can you please modify your tone ? I don't really care if it's just or wrong to redistribute money. But let's please stop the charade : if we do that, maybe there is some short term satisfaction there, but no money, and extremely likely a disaster will follow.
Well, first a positive note : America's not nearly as bad as most other nations that grace this planet. China, while currently better than America, isn't without debt problems. But America's better off than Europe when it comes to debt. Yet Europe is better behaved than Turkey & middle east, who are in worse shape despite massive influxes of money.
But still that would mean that on the average, Americans ... did never even intend to repay their debts. Welfare states were created, knowing full well they were doomed. People trading their income now, in the form of taxes, for health care, study help for their kids and pensions that won't come, except for the first ones who enjoyed these benefits.
And yet lots of generations had the option of turning the tide, and didn't. Not just in America, but in Europe, the middle east, and Asia, lots of people had the option of stabilizing the system by choosing to take responsibility instead of shoving the bill to their kids, and all chose wrong.
The real question is, now that the cat's out of the bag, how long do we pretend we can put it back in ? The system has failed, and while this obvious truth can still be denied, it will reassert itself soon enough. Though I do hope we can pretend a while longer, I have a family to take care of, and despite the rosy pictures implied in leftist and progressive propaganda if we simply take the money from the bankers, we all know that their promises of wealth, brotherhood and justice for all will turn into the wars, concentration and slaughter camps they turned into last time.
I would simply suggest to take the lessons of history to heart : when public opinion does not just jabber about evil bankers, but actually attacks them in numbers, do what millions of people forgot to do before world war 2 : run ! Run to a place with sufficient food, home produced food, without multiculturalism (which will soon be nothing but a fancy word for ethnic wars), and preferably a nation without military alliances. Stay far away from any large American city, get the fuck out of Europe (the EU, not Switzerland), get the fuck out of the middle east, get the fuck out of Africa, or if you must, at least stay out of Northern Africa and the Saharan countries.
I don't know who will rise, it depends on many factors. I guess it will be whichever decent nation manages to not get destroyed, and I frankly seriously doubt it will be China.
The problem is what defaulting would mean of course. There's the popular way to "cut spending" (aside from just blaming the other guys*) : destroy the military. The problem is, that only buys us a couple of years at best.
The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to cut social spending. Stop unemployment benefits, repeal Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid. The problem with that, of course, is simple : those cuts will actually destroy lives. Aside from the unemployed, it will mean lots of older people (quite a few of them not at all that old) dieing very soon.
Now you can argue about party affiliation until the cows come home, but the fact is blatantly obvious : in 10 years, all those programs will be gone, or massively reduced. It doesn't matter whether Bush, Obama or Ron Paul does it, but it will happen. Obama can't save them, Bush can't save them, Sarah Palin can't save them, no-one can.
And what exactly do people hope to accomplish by blaming Obama, or Bush, Palin, Ron Paul or Clinton ? If it's someone else's fault, does that somehow solve the problem ? All these people are merely insulting eachother, with no benefit whatsoever. There is *no* way either rich people are going to pay for it, to destroy the democrat "dream", and there is no way "better economy through less taxes" is going to pay for it either. I suppose less taxes might lead to more people able to save up enough themselves if they're lucky, but that won't be all that many either.
Well at least the US has the decency to simply require access to the data on-demand. The government will store it, analyze it, separate it, ... The US is perfectly happy even to pay for the colocation space for their monitoring equipment. I suppose the disadvantage is that they're actually relatively capable people (as compared to government isps in Europe, I mean).
Unlike the EU governments, and now Pakistan, who expect the isps to design and install these magical tracking systems, and of course the government's demands are extremely unreasonable (just think about how routing works and you'll see the problem : the whole point of networking once you hit a few 10G's is to avoid all traffic passing through any single location, so you won't need 1 monitoring system, you'll need thousands). But frankly is it any surprise ? Every muslim country does this, and worse. The real problem in Pakistan is not that the police and/or government may monitor traffic, it's what they'll do with the data. Pakistan is still religiously and ethnically cleansing it's own population. But you can't complain about this because it's apparently mandated by islam and you can't object to a religion.
Maybe I should start a religion with a god called la-haha to exterminate all brown haired people. I don't like them. What ? You disrespecting to my religion ?
You're making a bogus argument. You know perfectly well renewable energy is not being used by the private sector for power generation, and your question only makes sense if that were the case. So the answers are very simple :
If "it takes more energy to produce and ship wind turbines than they will produce in the first 10 years"
That's the really bad part : the 10 year figure is based on theoretically optimal performance (wind blowing at exactly the optimal speed for 10 years). It also completely ignores maintenance : these things contain lots and lots of mechanically rotating parts that need to be oiled, checked and cleaned regularly. Because otherwise (in this case, the brakes failed)
, why would anyone install them?
Here's the first reason. In reality most (> 60%) wind power is not bought by choice. Solar power is even worse. See how effective politics can be ? Right now one of the arguments being raised in Germany for renewable power subsidies is that not providing these subsidies would crash the market.
And as for private turbines, the few that exist. First most power companies are government monopolies, and thus buy what the government tells them to, without regard for cost and/or efficiency, so there's really only very, very few of them. Why do people buy yachts ? Why do women buy 10 different facial creams with identical ingredients, each one more expensive than the next ? Why do men (try to) buy ferrari's ? To become popular.
Have you been watching the news and read a few magazines in the last 10 years ? "Green power" gets more commercials than Verizon. Mostly paid for by the government.
Additionally, by moving production to China, the real cost of producing these things is externalized, and moved to cheap China. China burns coal, dumping the waste in rivers, to end up in the Pacific ocean. Just to give you an idea : that waste is more radioactive than nuclear waste, and more toxic than sewage. And the miners are basically slaves.
Wind power is not actually cheap, even with the government subsidies applied, but having resources dug up by slave labor, burned in substandard equipment, the waste simply dumped into nature makes a Chinese 10-year energy supply for 5-10 homes just a little bit more expensive than regulated nuclear power in the states, isolated and secured, with the waste properly disposed of (again that's only a 10-year energy supply assuming theoretically optimal performance, disregarding maintenance, and once it becomes clear you get 20% performance at best, you understand why you will find most private wind generators abandoned).
It's a fake feel-good idea, with horrible consequences for invisible people, like most popular intellectual ideas. Like how Obama claims to "better the lives of people everywhere" while holding a blackberry, and surrounded by aides mostly carrying iphones, shouting about bettering the lives of the little guy, to deafening applause. Like how Al Gore, fresh out of his private jet, taking not one, but three limousines to a stage where he declares how "everybody needs to do their part to lower CO2 output" under lights powered by trucked in petroleum generators.
Why ? We all know why. Saying you're "green" is popular, and fantastic, extremely widely considered a good idea. Just like smoking filtered tobacco is considered a bad idea, and breathing in hand-rolled burning hemp leaves without filter, bringing actually burning fibers straight into your lungs is considered to do no harm, despite hundreds of studies claiming the opposite. Why ? You tell me why. It's popular. That excuses everything in our society.
Really, do you ever bother thinking before you post?
Yes. Do you ? Why do you think Google makes 2.5 billion per quarter for text-only commercials ? Bec
Why would the facts get in the way ? We're talking computer models here - they will say exactly what was programmed into them. Anyone who's worked at a university knows perfectly well. You program a model for some way-too-complex dataset. You can do it automatically these days. It's got hundreds or thousands of variables, you modify them until the outcome "seems reasonable".
Yes you test against past data, but anyone who knows the basics of statistics knows how past data and chaotic systems work : you can explain the past to any desired level of accuracy and still make the prediction say whatever you want it to say. The (statistical) proof of this is so obvious it's almost absurd to write it down, and boils down to this simple sentence : just take the past as a given, add any random future, there's your prediction function. Because the law of large numbers doesn't apply, this function can be trivially shown to be the best possible estimator of the system's behavior (but is obviously not unique, it is only the best estimator because every estimator has the same chance of success). Done/done.
But the most convincing argument is to simply check past predictions ... ... idem ... and turns out to be wrong (google "solar cycle 24").
IPCC AR1 : prediction failed. We're currently outside of their 95% interval (below it if you must know)
IPCC AR2 : prediction failed. We're currently outside of their 95% interval (idem)
IPCC AR3 : prediction failed
IPCC AR4 : prediction succeeded, as of August 2010. However we're at the very bottom of their 95% confidence interval and dropping.
IPCC AR5 : doesn't actually make a temperature prediction anymore about temperature. It does however make a prediction about solar output that seemed very safe at the time
Let's contrast that with this story. I know it's apples and oranges but still. The measurement data from LHC for the Higgs Boson was rejected for being inconclusive because the confidence was only 3 sigma, where 5 are required. For non statisticians 3 sigma means their confidence interval was "only" 99.73% (one mistake in 400).
So physicists reject a measurement because one out of every 400 experiments fails to produce the expected result ... and climate warning hinge on theories that failed to predict the outcome of 4 out of 5 experiments are flat out wrong and the 5th is so very close to failing that it's not even funny anymore, and moving in the wrong direction. I mean astrology has a better track record.
Let's please accept the obvious here : these are VERY different sciences indeed.
And a realistic person looks, not at the "reasons" but at what is asked.
"climate change" - creation of a (more socialist, and censored politically-correct) world government-crowd
(in my humble opinion nothing more than the old "let's perfect the human race, damn reality" parties)
"climate skeptic" - leave me alone-crowd
(agreed, could potentially also lead to disaster. However I'll be much happier knowing I screwed up my own country than knowing I helped vote in the next nazis - and make no mistake, the UN are worse, much worse)
Now there are people arguing about "reasons" - they're morons. As if the global warming fight has anything to do with any scientific theory. The political fight is about politics, as it always has and always will be. If you believe someone like Al Gore cares about the planet, you should have your head examined, just as much as people who think George Bush "loves America".
Really.
Even if climate change was completely unwarranted as a threat, fossil-fuel energy causes massive, verifiable harm right now and is probably the largest single public health-risk today. Clean energy means significant reductions in cases of asthma, some variants of TB and dozens of other respiratory illnesses. It also means that the world can end it's state of being economic hostages to a bunch of really evil dictators out in the middle-east. It means the end of the oil wars.
You mean, as it takes more energy to produce and ship wind turbines than they will produce the first 10 years. So it's more like "clean energy causes 10 times more harm than fossil fuels, but mostly in China".
Ending all wars ? Yeah right. Are you really moronic enough to think the middle east will stop fighting without oil ?
The problem is that you'll be disgusted by these robots, if not outright afraid of them. You see, actroids exist, they're not successful. Their movements are slow, forced, and not realistic. Nothing really clicks together. Their mouth moves all wrong for the words they make.
But they're good enough to pass for human initially if you pass them by (God forbid anyone ever gets the idea that you could probably place rather heavy bombs inside them and have them walk into buildings without attracting attention before detonating them. Or arm them, have them shoot, and know that the first dozen return shots will probably not disable the robot)
And if you're wondering why your brain has this response, look up a few camouflaged species living in the African savannah. If something isn't what it appears, there's good reason to run away. It's probably poisonous and hungry.
Btw : clicking through to other youtube actroid videos is a good way to see how amazing these robots are getting. They're actually getting past the uncanny valley. Seeing as what obvious uses these robots have, I fear for the consequences, but it is rather amazing.
as it is specifically an End User License Agreement - quite a number of companies have their own licensing agreements with Sun and now Oracle over Java as it is different in the enterprise.
And if the tooth fairy sprinkled pixie dust over the licence it would just fly away ...
Are you seriously making this argument ? The whole point of the case is that Google created Android without *any* agreement with Sun (which is why they're grasping at such straws as the "but the CEO said he liked us in his blog and this constitutes an agreement" argument).
The license Sun provided requires you to run Java programs on desktop machines (and there's another one allowing the same for servers) and the license explicitly denies you the permission to create your own VM, core libraries, compiler, ... (and you cannot really create one without creating the other) (this was done to "avoid the possibility of diluting the language" according to Sun)
The authors of Java made their position clear in the licence, the *one* legal document that could have given Google any rights to use Java for android, and Google violated those wishes. It's of course true that doesn't mean Google simply agreed to the licence, but if they didn't agree to the licence they should have deleted all materials pertaining to Java from all their machines. So Google obviously did not have any right to do what they did in creating Android, and so Google will probably have to pay damages. Oracle claims that to create android legally, they would have had to pay 6 billion dollars in a sort of weird revenue sharing agreement. Google claims they got "implicit endorsement" for free, and could have had a contract for 100 million dollars. So Google made billions by violating a contract, needless to say, this means damages. That's what's done if you violate a contract (and before you say it let's leave out the judicial requirements for damage and causal relationship or we'll never get out of this argument, it's plain to see both conditions are satisfied, the only real question, as the judge stated, is the amount they cover).
Google did not write a java program. Google massively changed the VM, compiler, rewrote the jit, changed the base library and so on. None of that was allowed. Your argument hinges on the entire android java system being nothing more than just another java program, running within the confines of the jdk licence (in other words, on a desktop machine in a sun-approved jvm without any special libraries). I find it hard to believe you can even claim this with a straight face.
And try to formulate an argument that doesn't involve the existence of another set of magical legal documents which are stated in the article not to exist. There was *no* agreement of any kind made with Google. Java is *not* English. Android is quite a bit more than a few com.google... classes, and Java is (still) very much non-free software, except in the GPL sense (with the viral clause in full force).
You seem to be confused this is not a case of software patents (at least not primarily, like apple-htc for example). I mean google did not use "the principles behind java". It did not use a new version of the language, it does not use different opcodes, it does not ... Google uses Java, verbatim, Google uses the binary format of java, verbatim (yes they package it *slightly* differently), Google uses the sun jvm (a secondary derivative, but that, too, is illegal), ... You use the very same development tools for java enterprise as you use for android development, which is the big advantage android has above other systems.
Google is guilty of copyright infringement. Java is not public domain, and anything unique about java is protected just like the contents of a book. It is fully owned by Oracle. Google simply took something that didn't belong to them, maimed it against the wishes of the original author (who should have complained sooner), and used it's massive weight to outcompete the original author in a matter of months. I, for one, do NOT think what google did is okay. Imagine this happening to something *you* wrote. I like the result, android is great, but the ends do not justify the means here.
Java is not public domain (actually none of the big languages is), nor is Java freely licenced (like C++ is, for example).
+1 :-D
In order to flip a gate you have to overcome the magnetic field holding the gate in it's position. That will take a huge amount of rads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening claims that a computer will react perfectly normal right up to 50-100 gray. That would mean the radiation level necessary to make your computer go haywire is not only more than enough to kill you, but enough to make your tissues boil in a matter of minutes. You would not find this level of radiation inside a uranium mine, or anywhere at all (even inside an active nuclear reactor such radiation level would be extremely local phenomena. In a deactivated nuclear reactor you will not bind these radiation levels anywhere).
The radiation levels inside fukushima never reached even 10 gray. Even substandard equipment would have operated perfectly normally for days or weeks, hell, even transmitters and receivers would operate perfectly normal.
So sorry, maybe the reason no robots were sent into the reaction was stupidity, or incompetence, or simply money (or the fact they had no power perhaps ?). But that reason was not that those robots would have failed in any reasonable timeframe. I'm not claiming it would have been good for those chips of course, but high humidity would be much worse for them than the inside of a nuclear reactor.
The only place where chips fail without warning is space. Not because the radiation level in space is so high, but because it's so very localized.
By that definition EVERY movement is political. Which is true to a certain extent, but that's not what we're discussing here. You forget that there is loads about anonymous that we haven't seen (yet ? Let's hope the fbi remembers that it's supposed to make their evidence public).
And you're incredibly naive to think that these "political" acts were anything more than concealment for attacks motivated by financial gain, or perhaps a way to advertise what they could do to some prospective employer with big bucks (spectacular hacks are often made "to prove yourself". Wait until you actually catch a halfway intelligent hacker on a server and see for yourself. I'm not saying I'm 100% certain that anon was the same as russian or chinese hackers (then again they're at least partly russian), I'm saying I'm 99.99% sure.
A company that was attacked in an illegal manner contacted and worked with the police straight after that fact. I am astonished. Baffled. Completely bamboozled.
The rat bastards !
Why would electronics fail in a high-rad environment ? Humans, sure, but electronics ? Why ?
At the very worst you'd need some extra cooling, and parts of the electronics that shouldn't heat up will heat up, but other than that ?
Have you seen the controls of this thing ? Throwing is probably easier and more accurate. It has no camera and no sensors, so you'll need eyes on the target and eyes on the ball for the duration of the throw.
Good luck staying alive while you guide that thing in.
(besides, it's so big and slow that it makes an easy target for shooting. UAV's are so very good because of their stealth. You can't seriously hope to see a 1m plane 20 meters somewhere above your head so any action by that plane comes as a complete surprise)
1. decriminalized ones can be, or damn close to it. they're expensive because they're illegal.
No they can't. Again why are we seriously discussing this ? Drug users give up everything else, because they ARE learning networks, and the whole point of a drug is that it sabotages the reward function. Getting a person under constant influence of drugs to react normally is impossible. They WILL react randomly. It's like replacing the steering column of a car with a mouse and stating that the chance for that car to normally participate in traffic is non-zero. But how is the fact that one in a million kids manages to use drugs without screwing himself up entirely a reason to ignore those 999999 ones in the gutter ?
Drugs (the ones you're talking about) take the brain out of the decision making process. That's how they work, that is the very essence of their being. If they stopped doing this, they wouldn't be drugs, and we wouldn't be having this discussion because you wouldn't care for drugs at all.
2. sure you can. it's just that a lot of employers like enforcing psychological control mechanisms on employees, so they take advantage of the laws to squeeze more profit out of them. you could argue safety reasons for some jobs, but the majority do not. if the employee isn't doing his job because of drugs or anything else, warn, then fire him. no need for the police state.
Look we can't discuss with this moronic new baseline. If demanding that a worker actually works falls under "enforcing psychological control mechanisms on employees", then yes, you're right.
If work does not get done on a large scale, society collapses. If you think that's a good thing, please try to remember how many people would die in absurdly unpleasant circumstances if that were to happen.
3. because they're expensive. if they were cheap the crime goes away.
Really ? We've established
1) a drug user will not be able to hold down a constructive job, won't even be able to think about anything non-drug related at all, and so resources available to him/her will dwindle fast
2) a drug user will not be satisfied with ANY limit on drug availability and will do ANYTHING, including using any amount of violence on anyone, for even tiny amounts of drugs
You have failed to provide any compelling reason to believe either of these is false (no, your employer conspiracy theory doesn't count, sorry), so please explain to me, how does the price of drugs affect either of these points ? All it does is (slightly) prolonging their suffering.
And yes, you're entirely right that outlawing drug use is a societal control mechanism. It's also a necessary one, if you wish to have a society at all. I know it's popular to think that civilization is somehow a mistake, however do you really lack an imagination telling you what will happen to 6 billion people on this planet if the support mechanism we call society were to disappear ? It would look a lot like those inner-city rooms filled with formally-successful rich kids who thought a year ago "ah, hell, once doesn't matter".
Incidentally, this discussion could be persuasively ended if you actually went down to a drug shelter ONCE and talked to people there about your plans. I guarantee there's one close to you. Why not try that ? Make sure there's nothing in your wallet you can't afford to lose (although the inside of these shelters is quite safe, the neighborhood usually is not)
What you don't understand is what a good thing this reaction would be. Suppose we profile all "brown-skinned" "ill-sounding" names. This will do 2 things :
1) terrorists will have to stop recruiting from their "core constituency" and they will have to dampen their demands on people. There's just no way to avoid it : put simply, to grow the market you have to make compromises. Which would be a VERY VERY VERY good thing.
2) profiling will fail. Terrorism rates will drop and yes, they will rise again. But they won't rise the same way that they've dropped. They will rise again in that a more varied "constituency" will execute the attacks, which will of course lead to terrorists attacking one another on the compromisses they've made (you say allah is blue to recruit blue-loving cannon fodder ! Infidels ! Boom !). Again, this is a good thing
3) it will force religious nuts who wish to actually survive in the modern world to show outward disavowing of the religion. This is something they think they can do because "it won't affect me" and then they find they can't give it up again. In other words, the obvious way to adapt to this profiling will make extremists inherently moderate
4) a very varied people will have to execute the attacks once they try to push them up again, to have any hope of success. So profiling will fail, and it won't fail because some touchy-feely housewives club thinks it isn't cool. It will fail because it won't work anymore. It will fail because using profiling will cause screwups and cause people to lose their jobs.
Profiling is like a long term investment, the way I see it. It won't increase racism, it will do the reverse. But protecting this group of people, that will do the exact opposite in the long term. Pampering muslims will cause terror increases without bound, eventually any political or social group will imitate them, which is what went wrong last time muslims tried this : once terror is really shown to be a very effective strategy (and the huge problem is, of course, terror works), everybody will do it. Terror tactics are not the exclusive domain of muslims, except for the last 30 years. But socialists, absolutely no strangers to terror. Dictators, hell, even previous western political systems, or limited-vote democracies. Companies. Once that happens, the only question is which group will succeed in killing all others)
Besides, if Darwin and Hitchens' variation on him is right, there are only 2 possible outcomes for any ideological system : either it conquers the world, or it dies. I presume you don't want to be stoning women, and given the options available, what is wrong with directly attacking the system that causes this behavior ? You cannot actually have a mixed memes society, if our best theories are right. It simply won't happen, just like you cannot have a mixed genes species, those are short-lived situations which occur when the complexity of organisms is expanding, or they are somehow physically isolated. The only two ways "the west" can coexist with any other system are to cut the cord entirely, or to destroy it. (look up what happens when compatible genes come into contact with one another, ie. what happens to island birds once a bridge is built to the mainland)
I can't understand why we're seriously discussing this.
I'm not following you here. Cheap drugs promote free will because it's the only thing that stands between you taking drugs or staying away from them.
Cute. Here's reality : ...) are not free
1. Drugs (and life in general : appartment, clothes, food,
2. You cannot hold a decent job with drugs (which is why you don't see kids need to support themselves don't do drugs : it kills them. You only see rich morons doing drugs)
3. Any addict will do anything, right down to shooting his own mother, to prolong his drugs supply for an hour (no, you cannot control this. Even people who were FORCIBLY injected with heroin ONCE exhibit this behavior)
You can put 2-and-2 together, can't you ? Why don't you tell me what will happen, and what happened before, when drugs are cheap.
As I said : why is this even under discussion ? Denying what drugs do to a person, and what they will do to loads of people if this legalization happens, is beyond moronic.
What you don't seem to get is just how much chances and security improve with profiling. Let's take your "searching muslims stop terror" example and look at it mathematically.
> 99.99% of terrorists are muslims (in the last 30 years or so, although that's probably not due to less terrorist activities by muslims, but rather due to less contact with the west. In other words, 50 years ago muslim terrorists were killing mostly black africans and chinese, who did not see the need to fill history books with said attacks)
0.01% of terrorists are non-muslims.
1% of travelers are muslims
And let's say in total 1/1000000 people are terrorists.
Then let's look at resources needed so that we prevent 50% of terrorist attacks. This would be considered sufficient. How many resources do you need ?
a) suppose you "don't" profile : you need to check 50% of all travelers
b) you "do" profile : you need to check 0.005% of all travelers
Are you starting to see the problem ? Whatever you wish to prevent, if you "don't profile" you need 1000 times as many searches (and thus it's 1000 times more expensive). And this is for ONE factor. If you could find a few other divisions (like 90% of terrorists are male, 55% have black hair, 72% have curls, 90% are rich kids born and raised in a big city ...) you could easily get that resource saving factor up to 10000 or even 50000.
Besides, you don't seem to see the obviousness of what's going to happen : our contact with the muslim world is going to increase, as is the incidence of terrorism. The choice of whether to profile or not is going to disappear due to resource constraints : unless terrorism drops by orders of magnitude, we will have no choice other than attacking all muslims as a group (just like they're doing to us). The only reason we have the luxuries we currently have is that we can throw near-infinite resources at the problem (and to we can to the 10000 times more checks just because the 9999 moronic ones make us feel better).
And frankly, muslims could easily solve the problem by convincing muslims allah doesn't demand blood (as opposed to saying he doesn't in English and screaming he does in arabic (just use google translate on a few arabic forums), and frankly, one only needs to read a bit about the religion and the "right path" (ie. the life of the paedophile prophet, or 'sharia') to know perfectly well that the terrorists are right, at least religiously speaking. Or to put it more bluntly : the paedophile prophet attacked innocents just to steal their money, and sometimes, to sell their children as sex slaves, or just to kill them. In their own holy texts they don't claim there is a good reason for doing this. So the definition of a non-terrorist muslim has to be "one that doesn't want anything to do with the prophet" or something. Just ask one how popular that idea is)
Okay, this was a really dumb thing to say. I mean to say "even if caused by other factors". I do NOT claim race has inherently to do with things like crime rate, however for the moment race is a good predictor of those other factors.
The point is that if the police starts using that race predictor, then it's effectiveness will decline, because the need for criminals to hide from the police will force them to become evenly distributed across all races. And in the meantime, profiling does not just help by destroying the difference in backgrounds between races, but also lowers crime.
It seems to me, this is what we should be doing.
Sure, you're right of course, but as you say today there's still difference (whether or not caused by other factors).
So why not profile ? Profiling will actually counteract the events you described (massive crime rise due to population shift). And after a while, everybody will be exactly as criminal and profiling will stop, because it's useless.
The problem with cheap drugs is that they take away free will (and sanity). Read a bit of medical history, since we did actually have this situation not that long ago.
Cheap drugs lead to mass fatalities. Think DUI is a problem ? Wait until you've seen "Controlling a crane with heroin" (well given that cameras weren't actually in wide use back then, you'll probably be restricted to reading about it, but you might want to read about it a few times. Just go to your library, it's bound to have a few books on the subject. Yes, paper books, this was *loooong* before the internet)
Science can explain religion; not vice versa.
Of course it can, you're just showing how ignorant you are.