Does it matter ? The GP's suggestion of changing the absorption spectra is ridiculously difficult, and there is no guarantee there even is a solution to the problem.
What determines the absorption spectra is the distance between different sections of a molecular electric field. So the only things you must do are : -> find a field that is usable for this process inside a protein (extremely, extremely intractible problem. Basically the only thing you can do is try out random proteins and hope you hit something) -> adapt this protein to pass energy around in the same cycle as Chlorophyll (this is a problem that is absurdly difficult and far beyond our current knowledge of chemistry) -> solve the reverse folding problem (normal folding is totally intractible even with huge amounts of processing power, reverse folding... let's just not go there. It is a similar problem to reversing a hash, only a few thousand orders of magnitude more difficult. It has one advantage to the previous problem : we actually have a clue how this can be done, we just don't have the equipment required) -> translate this code into DNA and change the photosynthesis routine to use the new molecule, not at all a trivial thing to do either -> actually build it into a cell, and prevent an outbreak (or, alternatively, we could cause an outbreak, turning all the green to black, and massively increasing speed of plant growth with unknown consequences) (this step requires very advanced equipment, but should not be all that difficult)
You might as well announce you're leaving for the andromeda galaxy, arriving tomorrow. That would probably be a much easier problem.
Exactly. However, nobody's a fan of the sane alternative : dumping the waste in the ocean, properly spread out. If diluted enough, nuclear waste is not dangerous (like the millions of tons of thorium that are dissolved into every ocean.
Nuclear waste is less dangerous than the ore that was initially put in the reactor. So nuclear reactors actually lessen the amount of nuclear waste, as compared to what is found in the ground and they give us control over where it's put (as opposed to wherever it happens to be found). Natural uranium contamination of drinkwater has actually occured, you know.
Technically "meltdown" simply means failure of the primary cooling system. And it most certainly failed, after standing up to catastrophic events far beyond their rated capacity.
So the reactors technically went into meltdown... and were brought out again before anything actually melted. A number of indirectly neutron-activated elements, secondary byproducts of the fission reaction, were released into the air, and are totally harmless by now. In fact, over 99% of the Iodine-131 is Xenon by now.
In reality, in Japan : -> Solar power killed dozens of people (people installing them during the quake, and a few people who got smashed by falling panels) -> Wind power likewise killed a few people, who were repairing a mast -> Oil based power killed hundreds of people, due to explosions in refineries and power plants -> Nuclear power actually got close at one point, to (indirectly) kill 1 person. That person is recovering, and will make a full recovery in less than a month's time Deaths per TWh energy (obviously discounting little details like the gulf wars, which only the absurdly naive claim have nothing to do with fossil fuels)
So... which is the safest energy source ? Nuclear power is FAR safer than solar power. More than 3x as many people have died from the consequences of using solar power than have died from nuclear power. This is taking into account that we have solar for 10 years, and nuclear for 60, and solar power is not contributing significant energy right now. In other words : the number for nuclear power is likely to not rise at all, and the number of deaths due to solar power is very likely to rise phenomenally.
In any sane society or media, Fukushima would be a very strong argument about how extremely safe nuclear power really is, and how it can stand up to disasters far bigger than what it was built for. In a sane media articles like this would be published, because any panic about nuclear effects will easily kill 10x as many people as the nuclear incidents themselves, just due to traffic accidents.
Additionally, without nuclear fission reactors, we would not be able to do half the medical scans that yearly save tens thousands of lives in the US and all over the world... Tracers in blood are dependant on nuclear power reactors, for example. In reality nuclear power saves FAR more people than it kills.
Any sane society would build more nuclear power reactors, and pour money into further research into things like nuclear fission, fusion, and whatever. Cheap, safety is far beyond any other power source, portable, absurdly small amounts of fuel needed, and, ironically, less toxic than solar panels, and far less mechanically dangerous than wind power, and let's just shut up about fossil fuels and their wars, or coal... what possible other thing could you ask for in a power source ?
And why the fuck are we focusing on this ? Some 10000 people died due to many different reasons, all of which basically boil down to direct effects of the force of nature. To all of the media their deaths are merely a tool to implement their preferred policy, which is, for reasons I cannot fathom, anti-nuclear.
It seems to me that there are 2 aspects of this : 1) economic theory says that everyone, except the politicians in power will lose out 2) this is exactly what happened in the Soviet union, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela,... and if you loosen the definition of communism slightly you can add nazi germany (before they lost the war of course), Turkey (before...), and in general most of the middle east to that list.
Do you truly have anything reasonable to add to this ? Can you seriously look at the history books, and read the descriptions of Russia before communism and not... frankly, hate communists for doing that ? Can you seriously read the history of the "revolution" in Iran, Zimbabwe or Venezuela and not be afraid of what might happen ? Do you ever think about what went wrong there ? Because, it's kind of important, especially to a communist.
And let's, you know for the sake of argument, assume that I am not part of some giant conspiracy against you. I actually waste time talking to you. What more proof do you need that I have absolutely nothing useful to do ?
Well since what Marx proscribed is evidently authoritarian, isn't calling a regime "authoritarian marxist" using a useless adjective. Like saying a "vehicular car".
Public ownership of content distribution would take away all incentives, except for a single one : propaganda. The only incentive there would be for film or tv makers would be to please their political overlords. Or, at least, that's the only thing that would be rewarded. Have you watched some Soviet films ? They're not "all bad" so to speak, but the influence of this (and of the censors) is clear and present. And this makes the films... a lot less exciting, to say the least.
Continued communism is, of course, mutually exclusive with democracy. Why ? Because communism destroys the incentive for economic activity, indirectly eradicating economic activity. The very best possible a communist society can do is keep the same GDP as it has, it can never improve. At some point the economic deterioration will push people back towards capitalism (legal or otherwise)
What defines communism is the taking of all resources from individuals. They will not let this happen without a fight, and communism takes everything from everyone. This will, obviously, not carry the public's approval beyond a certain point. Even Marx himself clearly pointed out that continued violence against everyone would be necessary, and has a much better explanation of why the violence is necessary than I could ever hope to give here.
So democracy and communism - doesn't work. It may work for a very, very short period, a period where the delusions of people (like you) drown out the real world's influence through stripping buffers built up during a capitalist past, but that's my opinion. Marx himself thought it could never happen, even for a second.
Communism is generally accepted as being Marxism, and the Soviet Union is generally accepted as "what happens when you implement Marxism". If you are anything else, perhaps you should look into renaming your ideology.
A different manifesto, preferably with explanations of why it would work, might be useful.
Cool way of putting it. Technically correct, yet an obvious lie. You're right of course. You would eliminate copyright. But communism (according to the manifesto) cannot allow the free flow of information. Only government whitelisted information is allowed to spread, and this is to be interpreted in the most restrictive manner imaginable (e.g. private letters fall under this).
So, more correct would be that you would replace copyright by a censorship agency that would be 100x as restrictive. More like the original copyright, I suppose. No licences, just mandatory permission for everything. Even for sending a fucking letter to your girlfriend (okay, granted, nobody writes letters anymore, but this is something that was historically controversial, as for today's version of same, I guess you'd have to have your facebook updates approved by a government agency)
Why not give up ? The EU was specifically designed to NOT be democratic (power is in the hands of appointed officials, not the parliament).
I find it requires a great leap of faith indeed to think this was coincidental, instead of by design. A leap of faith I'm just not prepared to make. The commission can force laws upon the parliament, the parliament can do nothing but propose something to the commission, which can accept, deny, or modify however they see fit (and they *do*.
On the plus side : this decision is indeed made by a part of the parliament. It has exactly zero legal power. It's totally worthless, just gets more publicity because these people sound important. The real decision will be made at the commission, which is lead by an ex-communist. So what do you think he'll prefer ? More control (ie. longer copyright term) or less... So the sad fact is that the term will be extended, regardless of what the parliament is going to decide.
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." - Winston Churchill
Personally I think this is true. Sure, there are heaps of problems with what we have. But in fairness, we have no knowledge of anything that is (FOR EVERYONE) significantly better...
How ? Anonymity (when properly used) is simply "justified" cowardice. Cowardice can be perfectly justified if the chances of successfully engaging the opponent in question are tiny.
And when is anonymity justified ? Simple : when the purpose agrees with our version of morality e.g. muslim women anonymously complaining about stoning, or islam's version of morality inherently seeing women as less worthy e.g. a chinese guy complaining about his government
And it's not justified when it disagrees with our version of morality e.g. an anonymous guy sending a ransom note to the couple whose son he kidnapped e.g. a corrupt senator refusing to identify bought and paid for earmarks
TFA is not all that useful in actually mentioning what this guy did. It only mentions Lovazs' local lemma (a way to create existential proofs, which is a proof that something exists that does not show the thing whose existence it proves).
And the guy has an Erdos number of 1, so he's probably a good mathematician.
Existential proofs are sometimes frustrating things as they do not answer the obvious question "well it exists, so what the bloody hell is it ?". Sometimes hundreds of year pass between the finding of an existential proof and a constructive one, meaning that constructive math is generally perceived to be more limited in scope than non-constructive mathematics. But this has not been proven, and over the years constructivist math has sometimes caught up, sometimes lost ground. An example is that there has been long disagreement between constructivist and non-constructivists about whether the square root of 2 existed. An existential proof of irrationality is easy to come by, in dozens of versions, and only much later it became known how to represent the actual number.
And both of those events were relatively minor eruptions (although I'm sure that the neighbors would disagree).
Pinatubo erupted, and put about 8 km3 of lava on the surface. Mount St. Helens barely managed 1 km3. Large eruptions (which do not have a linearly bigger effect, but an exponentially larger effect) routinely eject 100 km3 ("routinely" means about once two centuries. We have not had such an eruption since 1815). The 1815 eruption caused massive cooling for 50 years, heavy enough to cause famines in unrelated parts of the world. While I do not wish such an eruption on anyone, just looking at the historical eruption pattern, we've passed the 50% mark in 1999 (ie. in 50% of known history a > 50km3 eruption would have happened already).
And, why don't I turn the question around. Which theory, correctly applied, allows predicting climate even 1 year out ? What would it be based upon ? Note that average temperature is one of those variables that refuses to follow the law of large numbers, so ANY derivation of temperature (no matter the mathematical process used) is able to produce a valid prediction. So what are you going to do ? The prediction from "Madame future" is exactly as likely as what a million scientists produce. This is not a controversial part of mathematics, mind you.
And "testable" is somewhat nebulous concept. Does "only testable with a 100 billion dollars budget" count ? For that matter, what defines science ? (and if you're going to say peer-reviewed, please take into account that the "fact" that the earth is flat is millions of times more peer-reviewed than any scientific theory, after all, anyone can obviously see the earth is flat. Add to that the fact that most scientific development before the 20th century was never peer-reviewed, yet is accepted as gospel truth today)
So, really, you're just not going to be able to verify anything outside of classical physics on a reasonable budget. The total number of people world-wide that even have access to equipment that can be used to test even long-known aspects of quantum theory is a few hundred, a few thousand if you count their postdocs (which can't decide to test something by themselves). Qua institutions, there are 4 installations that can hope to verify parts of the standard model theory, 3 of which are controlled by the US government, and the last one by the Swiss government... Even relativity is notoriously hard to verify (have you ever verified gravity bends light ? Try it. Has anyone ever tested the idea that gravity bends time ? It probably does, but good luck testing that claim...).
Given the sort of nonsense groups of thousands up to billions of people have proclaimed, why exactly is it so very far-fetched to say most of non-classical physics is made up ? I mean, suppose you come from a society that believes a little green man secretly makes everything happen, a little green man that's obviously been sighted numerous times. He claims that physics is made up, would you really be able to give strong arguments (stronger than Occam I mean) to this guy ?
And this is exact sciences material. Even in exact sciences you're going to find diametrically opposite theories considered "proven" at different points in time, for various reasons. In "natural" sciences, or -God forbid- "social studies" people don't even bother giving anything more than anecdotal proof of theories, at their very best statistical "proof", mostly with horrible mistakes made by the researchers. (do you know what the law of large numbers is ? Name a few phenomena do not obey this principle, why they fail to obey it, and what the consequences for research into these phenomena are. Can you answer this ? Pretty essential knowledge for anyone who wishes to separate statistical fact from fiction)
Additionally, scientific frauds are discovered all the time. So much in fact, it's mostly just not mentioned. All sorts of justifications are given for producing fraudulent data or claims:
For political reasons (Soviet or Socialist genomics or similarly "colored" economic theories are perhaps best known, and -please forgive me- global warming, as both pro- and con- arguments are mainly made for political reasons, at least in the popular press (of course "your" side is really only using rational, proven science, of course, how could I doubt it ? Often in all three of these there's a whole range of opinions, where the extremes on both sides are generally horribly misguided*)).
For religious, anti-semitic, nationalistic or cultural reasons (just read a few middle eastern "scientific" papers, about how the Jews are really behind all forms of cancer in the world (a bit strange how the entire western world somehow missed this, no ? Probably a conspiracy), about the medical merits of camel-piss (strangely coincident with the marketing of a soda drink that actually contained animal urine, and the paper "strangely" contained quotes from some sort of islamic holy book... I mean this was a nice example how all motivations for fraud can all be combined in a single research paper), or wonder at all the marvelous Chinese research papers that no-one who isn't Chinese ever seems to grasp or reproduce. They have such marvelous, and strangely unreproducible miracles in China that I'm just dying to
We all know why the democrats didn't want to pass a budget before the election. First, it's not popular in the best of years, but that's not the real reason. If they had passed the budget before the election, it would stick.
So it would have had to have a realistic budget for Obamacare, not one to use in talkshows, but that actually pays the bills... Not an imaginary budget made by an organization they could force to lie (ie. CBO), but an actual budget to actually last the year. So it would have to be a huge allocation, with realistic assumptions. This would mean that every "medical care is really free" discussion we saw would have been impossible.
If your employer is not paying, what exactly is forcing you to do any work at all for him ?
This seems a classic case of ENAC (you're allowed to stop fulfilling your part of a contract without any consequences, and without destroying the contract, if the opposing party neglects their obligations to you). So why wouldn't government offices stay empty, with their employees 1) hanging on to their job, their position 2) actually working elsewhere until their next paycheck
I *believe* (but IANAL) this even means that if the government resumes, the employees that didn't turn up for work are owed a paycheck for the time they did not work. Why ? Because they didn't work through no fault of their own, they were forced in that position by their employer. They might even be owed an amount of money on top of their normal wages because it's the government that broke the contract, not the employee, at the very least intrest for the relevant period.
The problem, of course, lies in the "too much" in this sentence:
Net neutrality doesn't cover oversubscription at all. You can oversubscribe all you want as long as you don't break neutrality rules - do it too much and your service will just be shitty.
Have you given any thought at all to how much bandwidth this actually *is*, that you demand here ? Mathematically speaking I mean. Let me help you a little bit. You want to guarantee good service. "In the limit" that means that every upstream connection (and *every* interconnect) must have as much bandwidth as ALL downstream connections added together. So let's do this exercise for DSL. You have a million DSL customers, 4 megabit each. To satisfy your absurd requirements the ISP needs 4 TERABIT connections to each and every interconnection point (question : do ISP's get to refuse to connect their network with anyone who cannot delive the required net-neutral interconnect ? Because other than AT&T, Google and Comcast, I seriously doubt anyone could even do it, never mind economically).
Have you noticed the assumption I made in the previous paragraph ? The assumption is that there is NO peer to peer traffic. If you allow peer-to-peer traffic there is NO amount of bandwidth that will ensure smooth operation, since every endpoint would need to be able to serve the entire internet simultaneously. If this is not true, mathematically speaking, *somewhere* you will have congestion and horrible performance.
So let's introduce a few variables : T1 = bandwidth of some user, T2 = bandwidth of some other user, T3 = yet another user. So what do we need to provide internet service without congestion in this situation ?
T1 > T2 + T3, since it must be able to serve them at full speed T2 > T1 + T3, idem T3 > T2 + T3, idem and obviously T1 > 0, T2 > 0, T3 > 0
EVEN disregarding those arguments, that you can never have a congestion-free network that does not violate network neutrality... there are other problems.
Let's have you use a network *without* qos. Try it :
iptables -A INPUT -m statistic --mode random --probability 0.01 -j DROP
Tell me, this would be the normal tcp way of throttling (without QoS). There would be a consistent low-level of packet loss spread out over all connections, because that's just how tcp works, how it detects the required speed of the link (and with a lot of tcp connections, like every modem has since browser tabs were invented). This would occur mostly on the downlink from the ISP to you, so this would be a relatively accurate simulation.
Go on, enter that rule, and tell me if you like the result. But odds are you're not a fan of hanging web browsers, sites that respond perfectly well one time then refuse to answer for 2 minutes the next, without any fault on the part of either you, the site, or the ISP (but, of course, you're going to blame the ISP, hell I've seen customers complain to high heaven for 0.01% packet loss due to bursty traffic).
So can you please wake up to the technical reality, the necessity of traffic prioritization (including, obviously, prioritizing the ISP's own traffic, prioritizing business and voice users*,...)
* obviously any isp can only prioritize it's OWN voice users. Because it can make sure no customer disguises bittorrent traffic as voice traffic. It is impossible to do the same for voip traffic of other providers in a secure manner. No QoS (bittorrent throttling, kazaa throttling,...) means it is impossible for anyone to deliver reliable voice service.
So what are you net neutrality advocates suggesting ? Destroying all internet telephony just because the scorched earth of a nuclear blast is the only truly level playing field ? No QoS means no (reliable) voice service. QoS policies mean no net neutrality. It is that simple.
It was in testing up until the last year or two, worked fine for me. Did you have any problems?
Are you claiming QoS is only 2 years old ? Or oversubscription ? The whole point of packet switched networks is that QoS is possible at all (specifically that you can "steal" unused capacity from customers).
Exactly. Plus add the little tiny "detail" that ISP networks will appear to not work at all* without QoS (and any reasonable form of QoS will give e.g. short, bursty http traffic priority over, say, netflix. Or p2p for that matter. Any algorithm that doesn't do that is broken).
If you're a linux user, try this : iptables -A INPUT -m statistic --mode random --probability 0.01 -j DROP
(this would simulate a connection with actual competition for the http requests. For people running a bittorrent client with 1000 connections, drop frequency, especially if there are multiple pc's behind one modem, can easily increase to 10%)
So please, people, TRY the "neutral" internet, before you mandate it for everyone else. Are you afraid you'll find out you wouldn't want to live with this yourself ?
* Why ? HTTP will experience extreme slowdowns with even tiny packet loss. So any ISP that counts on tcp's natural throttling is going to get fucked badly. Add to that the fact that most p2p clients are abusive, and send prioritized packets (instead of de-prioritized packets like any sane individual would do).
Mod parent up. The difference is in the feedback :
What is violence ? Violence is simply using the real world to accomplish some goal as opposed to using reasoned argument, or other means. Intellectuals hate it, but of course, but eventually achieving any goal that involves the real world involves the use of violence (even if that violence is limited to threats, like threats of police action, or threats of not getting paid). As such violence is a constant part of every human action and cannot be avoided, nor should it be avoided. What should be avoided, at nearly any cost, is systematically escalating violence.
So sports, with their rules-based violence, and of course, immediate cessation if anybody gets hurt : good ! Someone gets hurt, and immediate feedback will be forthcoming. Additionally, you get to be on the receiving end of that violence as well, so you will know what can happen, also : you will have somewhat realistic views of what happens when what kinds of violence are applied. You might even find out that there is a whole spectrum of violence, and a whole spectrum of balanced morality. You may even find out that morality can sometimes dictate the use of violence, against someone who's lost control for example. In other words : sports is real. It is a -slightly- simplified version of the real world that contains all the important elements relating to violence.
Video games simply say either any violence = good (ie: translates to progress) (or, worse, no feedback at all)
No feedback at all is worse because it encourages people to try out random things. And if someone starts trying out random things like in video games, ie. with guns... sooner or later...
And video games are worse than tv because a tv doesn't really interact with the brain. It just puts it to sleep. Nevertheless, it is more than established that tv does increase violent tendencies. Video games engage, they try to keep as much of the brain as possible to busy itself with the game. Meaning video games literally teach parts of your brain to use violence that wouldn't have anything to do with behavior normally.
And yes, rational people wouldn't be influenced like this. Of course, it's long since proven that people aren't rational at all, they mainly imitate whatever they interact with (mostly other humans, but also video games), and so counting on rational thought to prevent these sorts of outcomes is a bit like counting on the flying spaghetti monster to do it.
What makes you think he wasn't talking about christianity?
Common sense.
Muslims are currently engaged in multiple genocides, in Africa, Asia, and even in Europe (the continent, not the "country"). Additionally, the quran is the only holy book in existence that contains direct orders to commit genocide (most holy books contain stories about genocides, like the bible, the vedas,.... But of course, they only tell the story. The difference between the bible and the quran is like the difference between a WW2 history book and the SS-letters containing the orders to start the holocaust)
Also the fact is that there are many children born outside of families, everywhere in the world. Obviously, we need to deal with these people regardless of how virtuous we think their parents are/were.
Unless you're suggesting we just stone them to death. They do that in many countries and it doesn't help anything.
Many large organisations seem to make their priority to simply give their staff work to do. The value of the tasks assigned is less important than simply keeping people busy.
You might have missed this, but as it doesn't strike me as entirely coincidental : you're giving a government department as an example of your theory, not a corporation.
As I said : I don't think that's entirely coincidental.
Public companies + unions => huge masses of mindnumbingly boring jobs where office politics are played out with machetes, which refuse to die
1.0 - yes 2.6.38 - not quite, in fact he's not even in the top 20
Linux is written, mostly, by Redhat, Intel, Novell and IBM (each of these companies is at least double as productive as the most productive single developer). It is, in other words, clear proof that individuals can write free software without evil corporations. Oh wait...
Slashdot Mirror
Does it matter ? The GP's suggestion of changing the absorption spectra is ridiculously difficult, and there is no guarantee there even is a solution to the problem.
What determines the absorption spectra is the distance between different sections of a molecular electric field. So the only things you must do are : ... let's just not go there. It is a similar problem to reversing a hash, only a few thousand orders of magnitude more difficult. It has one advantage to the previous problem : we actually have a clue how this can be done, we just don't have the equipment required)
-> find a field that is usable for this process inside a protein (extremely, extremely intractible problem. Basically the only thing you can do is try out random proteins and hope you hit something)
-> adapt this protein to pass energy around in the same cycle as Chlorophyll (this is a problem that is absurdly difficult and far beyond our current knowledge of chemistry)
-> solve the reverse folding problem (normal folding is totally intractible even with huge amounts of processing power, reverse folding
-> translate this code into DNA and change the photosynthesis routine to use the new molecule, not at all a trivial thing to do either
-> actually build it into a cell, and prevent an outbreak (or, alternatively, we could cause an outbreak, turning all the green to black, and massively increasing speed of plant growth with unknown consequences) (this step requires very advanced equipment, but should not be all that difficult)
You might as well announce you're leaving for the andromeda galaxy, arriving tomorrow. That would probably be a much easier problem.
Exactly. However, nobody's a fan of the sane alternative : dumping the waste in the ocean, properly spread out. If diluted enough, nuclear waste is not dangerous (like the millions of tons of thorium that are dissolved into every ocean.
Nuclear waste is less dangerous than the ore that was initially put in the reactor. So nuclear reactors actually lessen the amount of nuclear waste, as compared to what is found in the ground and they give us control over where it's put (as opposed to wherever it happens to be found). Natural uranium contamination of drinkwater has actually occured, you know.
Technically "meltdown" simply means failure of the primary cooling system. And it most certainly failed, after standing up to catastrophic events far beyond their rated capacity.
So the reactors technically went into meltdown ... and were brought out again before anything actually melted. A number of indirectly neutron-activated elements, secondary byproducts of the fission reaction, were released into the air, and are totally harmless by now. In fact, over 99% of the Iodine-131 is Xenon by now.
In reality, in Japan :
-> Solar power killed dozens of people (people installing them during the quake, and a few people who got smashed by falling panels)
-> Wind power likewise killed a few people, who were repairing a mast
-> Oil based power killed hundreds of people, due to explosions in refineries and power plants
-> Nuclear power actually got close at one point, to (indirectly) kill 1 person. That person is recovering, and will make a full recovery in less than a month's time
Deaths per TWh energy (obviously discounting little details like the gulf wars, which only the absurdly naive claim have nothing to do with fossil fuels)
So ... which is the safest energy source ? Nuclear power is FAR safer than solar power. More than 3x as many people have died from the consequences of using solar power than have died from nuclear power. This is taking into account that we have solar for 10 years, and nuclear for 60, and solar power is not contributing significant energy right now. In other words : the number for nuclear power is likely to not rise at all, and the number of deaths due to solar power is very likely to rise phenomenally.
In any sane society or media, Fukushima would be a very strong argument about how extremely safe nuclear power really is, and how it can stand up to disasters far bigger than what it was built for. In a sane media articles like this would be published, because any panic about nuclear effects will easily kill 10x as many people as the nuclear incidents themselves, just due to traffic accidents.
Additionally, without nuclear fission reactors, we would not be able to do half the medical scans that yearly save tens thousands of lives in the US and all over the world ... Tracers in blood are dependant on nuclear power reactors, for example. In reality nuclear power saves FAR more people than it kills.
Any sane society would build more nuclear power reactors, and pour money into further research into things like nuclear fission, fusion, and whatever. Cheap, safety is far beyond any other power source, portable, absurdly small amounts of fuel needed, and, ironically, less toxic than solar panels, and far less mechanically dangerous than wind power, and let's just shut up about fossil fuels and their wars, or coal ... what possible other thing could you ask for in a power source ?
And why the fuck are we focusing on this ? Some 10000 people died due to many different reasons, all of which basically boil down to direct effects of the force of nature. To all of the media their deaths are merely a tool to implement their preferred policy, which is, for reasons I cannot fathom, anti-nuclear.
It seems to me that there are 2 aspects of this : ... and if you loosen the definition of communism slightly you can add nazi germany (before they lost the war of course), Turkey (before ...), and in general most of the middle east to that list.
1) economic theory says that everyone, except the politicians in power will lose out
2) this is exactly what happened in the Soviet union, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela,
Do you truly have anything reasonable to add to this ? Can you seriously look at the history books, and read the descriptions of Russia before communism and not ... frankly, hate communists for doing that ? Can you seriously read the history of the "revolution" in Iran, Zimbabwe or Venezuela and not be afraid of what might happen ? Do you ever think about what went wrong there ? Because, it's kind of important, especially to a communist.
And let's, you know for the sake of argument, assume that I am not part of some giant conspiracy against you. I actually waste time talking to you. What more proof do you need that I have absolutely nothing useful to do ?
Well since what Marx proscribed is evidently authoritarian, isn't calling a regime "authoritarian marxist" using a useless adjective. Like saying a "vehicular car".
Public ownership of content distribution would take away all incentives, except for a single one : propaganda. The only incentive there would be for film or tv makers would be to please their political overlords. Or, at least, that's the only thing that would be rewarded. Have you watched some Soviet films ? They're not "all bad" so to speak, but the influence of this (and of the censors) is clear and present. And this makes the films ... a lot less exciting, to say the least.
Continued communism is, of course, mutually exclusive with democracy. Why ? Because communism destroys the incentive for economic activity, indirectly eradicating economic activity. The very best possible a communist society can do is keep the same GDP as it has, it can never improve. At some point the economic deterioration will push people back towards capitalism (legal or otherwise)
What defines communism is the taking of all resources from individuals. They will not let this happen without a fight, and communism takes everything from everyone. This will, obviously, not carry the public's approval beyond a certain point. Even Marx himself clearly pointed out that continued violence against everyone would be necessary, and has a much better explanation of why the violence is necessary than I could ever hope to give here.
So democracy and communism - doesn't work. It may work for a very, very short period, a period where the delusions of people (like you) drown out the real world's influence through stripping buffers built up during a capitalist past, but that's my opinion. Marx himself thought it could never happen, even for a second.
Communism is generally accepted as being Marxism, and the Soviet Union is generally accepted as "what happens when you implement Marxism". If you are anything else, perhaps you should look into renaming your ideology.
A different manifesto, preferably with explanations of why it would work, might be useful.
Cool way of putting it. Technically correct, yet an obvious lie. You're right of course. You would eliminate copyright. But communism (according to the manifesto) cannot allow the free flow of information. Only government whitelisted information is allowed to spread, and this is to be interpreted in the most restrictive manner imaginable (e.g. private letters fall under this).
So, more correct would be that you would replace copyright by a censorship agency that would be 100x as restrictive. More like the original copyright, I suppose. No licences, just mandatory permission for everything. Even for sending a fucking letter to your girlfriend (okay, granted, nobody writes letters anymore, but this is something that was historically controversial, as for today's version of same, I guess you'd have to have your facebook updates approved by a government agency)
Why not give up ? The EU was specifically designed to NOT be democratic (power is in the hands of appointed officials, not the parliament).
I find it requires a great leap of faith indeed to think this was coincidental, instead of by design. A leap of faith I'm just not prepared to make. The commission can force laws upon the parliament, the parliament can do nothing but propose something to the commission, which can accept, deny, or modify however they see fit (and they *do*.
On the plus side : this decision is indeed made by a part of the parliament. It has exactly zero legal power. It's totally worthless, just gets more publicity because these people sound important. The real decision will be made at the commission, which is lead by an ex-communist. So what do you think he'll prefer ? More control (ie. longer copyright term) or less ... So the sad fact is that the term will be extended, regardless of what the parliament is going to decide.
Not for the Chinese people themselves.
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." - Winston Churchill
Personally I think this is true. Sure, there are heaps of problems with what we have. But in fairness, we have no knowledge of anything that is (FOR EVERYONE) significantly better ...
How ? Anonymity (when properly used) is simply "justified" cowardice. Cowardice can be perfectly justified if the chances of successfully engaging the opponent in question are tiny.
And when is anonymity justified ? Simple : when the purpose agrees with our version of morality
e.g. muslim women anonymously complaining about stoning, or islam's version of morality inherently seeing women as less worthy
e.g. a chinese guy complaining about his government
And it's not justified when it disagrees with our version of morality
e.g. an anonymous guy sending a ransom note to the couple whose son he kidnapped
e.g. a corrupt senator refusing to identify bought and paid for earmarks
TFA is not all that useful in actually mentioning what this guy did. It only mentions Lovazs' local lemma (a way to create existential proofs, which is a proof that something exists that does not show the thing whose existence it proves).
Lovasz on wikipedia
And the guy has an Erdos number of 1, so he's probably a good mathematician.
Existential proofs are sometimes frustrating things as they do not answer the obvious question "well it exists, so what the bloody hell is it ?". Sometimes hundreds of year pass between the finding of an existential proof and a constructive one, meaning that constructive math is generally perceived to be more limited in scope than non-constructive mathematics. But this has not been proven, and over the years constructivist math has sometimes caught up, sometimes lost ground. An example is that there has been long disagreement between constructivist and non-constructivists about whether the square root of 2 existed. An existential proof of irrationality is easy to come by, in dozens of versions, and only much later it became known how to represent the actual number.
What does it really matter ? This device is 500 euros. How many teenagers will seriously be able to afford that ?
And both of those events were relatively minor eruptions (although I'm sure that the neighbors would disagree).
Pinatubo erupted, and put about 8 km3 of lava on the surface. Mount St. Helens barely managed 1 km3. Large eruptions (which do not have a linearly bigger effect, but an exponentially larger effect) routinely eject 100 km3 ("routinely" means about once two centuries. We have not had such an eruption since 1815). The 1815 eruption caused massive cooling for 50 years, heavy enough to cause famines in unrelated parts of the world. While I do not wish such an eruption on anyone, just looking at the historical eruption pattern, we've passed the 50% mark in 1999 (ie. in 50% of known history a > 50km3 eruption would have happened already).
And, why don't I turn the question around. Which theory, correctly applied, allows predicting climate even 1 year out ? What would it be based upon ? Note that average temperature is one of those variables that refuses to follow the law of large numbers, so ANY derivation of temperature (no matter the mathematical process used) is able to produce a valid prediction. So what are you going to do ? The prediction from "Madame future" is exactly as likely as what a million scientists produce. This is not a controversial part of mathematics, mind you.
And "testable" is somewhat nebulous concept. Does "only testable with a 100 billion dollars budget" count ? For that matter, what defines science ? (and if you're going to say peer-reviewed, please take into account that the "fact" that the earth is flat is millions of times more peer-reviewed than any scientific theory, after all, anyone can obviously see the earth is flat. Add to that the fact that most scientific development before the 20th century was never peer-reviewed, yet is accepted as gospel truth today)
So, really, you're just not going to be able to verify anything outside of classical physics on a reasonable budget. The total number of people world-wide that even have access to equipment that can be used to test even long-known aspects of quantum theory is a few hundred, a few thousand if you count their postdocs (which can't decide to test something by themselves). Qua institutions, there are 4 installations that can hope to verify parts of the standard model theory, 3 of which are controlled by the US government, and the last one by the Swiss government ... Even relativity is notoriously hard to verify (have you ever verified gravity bends light ? Try it. Has anyone ever tested the idea that gravity bends time ? It probably does, but good luck testing that claim ...).
Given the sort of nonsense groups of thousands up to billions of people have proclaimed, why exactly is it so very far-fetched to say most of non-classical physics is made up ? I mean, suppose you come from a society that believes a little green man secretly makes everything happen, a little green man that's obviously been sighted numerous times. He claims that physics is made up, would you really be able to give strong arguments (stronger than Occam I mean) to this guy ?
And this is exact sciences material. Even in exact sciences you're going to find diametrically opposite theories considered "proven" at different points in time, for various reasons. In "natural" sciences, or -God forbid- "social studies" people don't even bother giving anything more than anecdotal proof of theories, at their very best statistical "proof", mostly with horrible mistakes made by the researchers. (do you know what the law of large numbers is ? Name a few phenomena do not obey this principle, why they fail to obey it, and what the consequences for research into these phenomena are. Can you answer this ? Pretty essential knowledge for anyone who wishes to separate statistical fact from fiction)
Additionally, scientific frauds are discovered all the time. So much in fact, it's mostly just not mentioned. All sorts of justifications are given for producing fraudulent data or claims :
For political reasons (Soviet or Socialist genomics or similarly "colored" economic theories are perhaps best known, and -please forgive me- global warming, as both pro- and con- arguments are mainly made for political reasons, at least in the popular press (of course "your" side is really only using rational, proven science, of course, how could I doubt it ? Often in all three of these there's a whole range of opinions, where the extremes on both sides are generally horribly misguided*)).
For religious, anti-semitic, nationalistic or cultural reasons (just read a few middle eastern "scientific" papers, about how the Jews are really behind all forms of cancer in the world (a bit strange how the entire western world somehow missed this, no ? Probably a conspiracy), about the medical merits of camel-piss (strangely coincident with the marketing of a soda drink that actually contained animal urine, and the paper "strangely" contained quotes from some sort of islamic holy book ... I mean this was a nice example how all motivations for fraud can all be combined in a single research paper), or wonder at all the marvelous Chinese research papers that no-one who isn't Chinese ever seems to grasp or reproduce. They have such marvelous, and strangely unreproducible miracles in China that I'm just dying to
We all know why the democrats didn't want to pass a budget before the election. First, it's not popular in the best of years, but that's not the real reason. If they had passed the budget before the election, it would stick.
So it would have had to have a realistic budget for Obamacare, not one to use in talkshows, but that actually pays the bills ... Not an imaginary budget made by an organization they could force to lie (ie. CBO), but an actual budget to actually last the year. So it would have to be a huge allocation, with realistic assumptions. This would mean that every "medical care is really free" discussion we saw would have been impossible.
If your employer is not paying, what exactly is forcing you to do any work at all for him ?
This seems a classic case of ENAC (you're allowed to stop fulfilling your part of a contract without any consequences, and without destroying the contract, if the opposing party neglects their obligations to you). So why wouldn't government offices stay empty, with their employees
1) hanging on to their job, their position
2) actually working elsewhere until their next paycheck
I *believe* (but IANAL) this even means that if the government resumes, the employees that didn't turn up for work are owed a paycheck for the time they did not work. Why ? Because they didn't work through no fault of their own, they were forced in that position by their employer. They might even be owed an amount of money on top of their normal wages because it's the government that broke the contract, not the employee, at the very least intrest for the relevant period.
The problem, of course, lies in the "too much" in this sentence :
Net neutrality doesn't cover oversubscription at all. You can oversubscribe all you want as long as you don't break neutrality rules - do it too much and your service will just be shitty.
Have you given any thought at all to how much bandwidth this actually *is*, that you demand here ? Mathematically speaking I mean. Let me help you a little bit. You want to guarantee good service. "In the limit" that means that every upstream connection (and *every* interconnect) must have as much bandwidth as ALL downstream connections added together. So let's do this exercise for DSL. You have a million DSL customers, 4 megabit each. To satisfy your absurd requirements the ISP needs 4 TERABIT connections to each and every interconnection point (question : do ISP's get to refuse to connect their network with anyone who cannot delive the required net-neutral interconnect ? Because other than AT&T, Google and Comcast, I seriously doubt anyone could even do it, never mind economically).
Have you noticed the assumption I made in the previous paragraph ? The assumption is that there is NO peer to peer traffic. If you allow peer-to-peer traffic there is NO amount of bandwidth that will ensure smooth operation, since every endpoint would need to be able to serve the entire internet simultaneously. If this is not true, mathematically speaking, *somewhere* you will have congestion and horrible performance.
So let's introduce a few variables : T1 = bandwidth of some user, T2 = bandwidth of some other user, T3 = yet another user. So what do we need to provide internet service without congestion in this situation ?
T1 > T2 + T3, since it must be able to serve them at full speed
T2 > T1 + T3, idem
T3 > T2 + T3, idem
and obviously T1 > 0, T2 > 0, T3 > 0
Why don't we ask wolframalpha what the solution is ?. This is for 3 users, in reality there's a few hundred million internet users.
EVEN disregarding those arguments, that you can never have a congestion-free network that does not violate network neutrality ... there are other problems.
Let's have you use a network *without* qos. Try it :
iptables -A INPUT -m statistic --mode random --probability 0.01 -j DROP
Tell me, this would be the normal tcp way of throttling (without QoS). There would be a consistent low-level of packet loss spread out over all connections, because that's just how tcp works, how it detects the required speed of the link (and with a lot of tcp connections, like every modem has since browser tabs were invented). This would occur mostly on the downlink from the ISP to you, so this would be a relatively accurate simulation.
Go on, enter that rule, and tell me if you like the result. But odds are you're not a fan of hanging web browsers, sites that respond perfectly well one time then refuse to answer for 2 minutes the next, without any fault on the part of either you, the site, or the ISP (but, of course, you're going to blame the ISP, hell I've seen customers complain to high heaven for 0.01% packet loss due to bursty traffic).
So can you please wake up to the technical reality, the necessity of traffic prioritization (including, obviously, prioritizing the ISP's own traffic, prioritizing business and voice users*, ...)
* obviously any isp can only prioritize it's OWN voice users. Because it can make sure no customer disguises bittorrent traffic as voice traffic. It is impossible to do the same for voip traffic of other providers in a secure manner. No QoS (bittorrent throttling, kazaa throttling, ...) means it is impossible for anyone to deliver reliable voice service.
So what are you net neutrality advocates suggesting ? Destroying all internet telephony just because the scorched earth of a nuclear blast is the only truly level playing field ? No QoS means no (reliable) voice service. QoS policies mean no net neutrality. It is that simple.
It was in testing up until the last year or two, worked fine for me. Did you have any problems?
Are you claiming QoS is only 2 years old ? Or oversubscription ? The whole point of packet switched networks is that QoS is possible at all (specifically that you can "steal" unused capacity from customers).
Exactly. Plus add the little tiny "detail" that ISP networks will appear to not work at all* without QoS (and any reasonable form of QoS will give e.g. short, bursty http traffic priority over, say, netflix. Or p2p for that matter. Any algorithm that doesn't do that is broken).
If you're a linux user, try this :
iptables -A INPUT -m statistic --mode random --probability 0.01 -j DROP
(this would simulate a connection with actual competition for the http requests. For people running a bittorrent client with 1000 connections, drop frequency, especially if there are multiple pc's behind one modem, can easily increase to 10%)
So please, people, TRY the "neutral" internet, before you mandate it for everyone else. Are you afraid you'll find out you wouldn't want to live with this yourself ?
* Why ? HTTP will experience extreme slowdowns with even tiny packet loss. So any ISP that counts on tcp's natural throttling is going to get fucked badly. Add to that the fact that most p2p clients are abusive, and send prioritized packets (instead of de-prioritized packets like any sane individual would do).
Mod parent up. The difference is in the feedback :
What is violence ? Violence is simply using the real world to accomplish some goal as opposed to using reasoned argument, or other means. Intellectuals hate it, but of course, but eventually achieving any goal that involves the real world involves the use of violence (even if that violence is limited to threats, like threats of police action, or threats of not getting paid). As such violence is a constant part of every human action and cannot be avoided, nor should it be avoided. What should be avoided, at nearly any cost, is systematically escalating violence.
So sports, with their rules-based violence, and of course, immediate cessation if anybody gets hurt : good ! Someone gets hurt, and immediate feedback will be forthcoming. Additionally, you get to be on the receiving end of that violence as well, so you will know what can happen, also : you will have somewhat realistic views of what happens when what kinds of violence are applied. You might even find out that there is a whole spectrum of violence, and a whole spectrum of balanced morality. You may even find out that morality can sometimes dictate the use of violence, against someone who's lost control for example. In other words : sports is real. It is a -slightly- simplified version of the real world that contains all the important elements relating to violence.
Video games simply say either any violence = good (ie: translates to progress) (or, worse, no feedback at all)
No feedback at all is worse because it encourages people to try out random things. And if someone starts trying out random things like in video games, ie. with guns ... sooner or later ...
And video games are worse than tv because a tv doesn't really interact with the brain. It just puts it to sleep. Nevertheless, it is more than established that tv does increase violent tendencies. Video games engage, they try to keep as much of the brain as possible to busy itself with the game. Meaning video games literally teach parts of your brain to use violence that wouldn't have anything to do with behavior normally.
And yes, rational people wouldn't be influenced like this. Of course, it's long since proven that people aren't rational at all, they mainly imitate whatever they interact with (mostly other humans, but also video games), and so counting on rational thought to prevent these sorts of outcomes is a bit like counting on the flying spaghetti monster to do it.
What makes you think he wasn't talking about christianity?
Common sense.
Muslims are currently engaged in multiple genocides, in Africa, Asia, and even in Europe (the continent, not the "country"). Additionally, the quran is the only holy book in existence that contains direct orders to commit genocide (most holy books contain stories about genocides, like the bible, the vedas, .... But of course, they only tell the story. The difference between the bible and the quran is like the difference between a WW2 history book and the SS-letters containing the orders to start the holocaust)
Also the fact is that there are many children born outside of families, everywhere in the world. Obviously, we need to deal with these people regardless of how virtuous we think their parents are/were.
Unless you're suggesting we just stone them to death. They do that in many countries and it doesn't help anything.
You really think that they can't unknowingly issue fraudulent certs? What rock have you been living under?
Of course, but 2 issuers of fraudulent certs is better than 200.
Many large organisations seem to make their priority to simply give their staff work to do. The value of the tasks assigned is less important than simply keeping people busy.
You might have missed this, but as it doesn't strike me as entirely coincidental : you're giving a government department as an example of your theory, not a corporation.
As I said : I don't think that's entirely coincidental.
Public companies + unions => huge masses of mindnumbingly boring jobs where office politics are played out with machetes, which refuse to die
1.0 - yes
2.6.38 - not quite, in fact he's not even in the top 20
Linux is written, mostly, by Redhat, Intel, Novell and IBM (each of these companies is at least double as productive as the most productive single developer). It is, in other words, clear proof that individuals can write free software without evil corporations. Oh wait ...