So what you mean is that the taliban and their co-religionists were better behaved before the state department decided we shouldn't just let Stalin kill them all ?
You just gotta love the moral equivalence argument. By this logic you should blame your neighbor for slavery, not just in America, but blame him for the paedophilic prophet's selling of slaves' children for sex, or himself buying a child specifically for paedophilic sex. Or blame him for cannibalism. Or communism. After all some portion of humans once did that, they're human, so they're guilty, right ?
Just so you know, Christians believe first in the New Testament. You know, that little book that mentions Christ. You may have heard of it.
And while Judaism certainly has some bad rules, the basis of our law system is ~90% Judaic law (with a number of major corrections coming from Christianity). Do you honestly think it's worse or somehow equal to what the taliban are "proposing" ? Judaic law is far better than islamic law in that it's not racist, does not demand eternal war, does not have slavery (it does have 7-year unbreakable employment contracts, which come somewhat close, but nothing like islam's buy and sell women, then rape them or rent them out for others to rape them, or the paedophile prophet who demanded slaves work for camel urine, then when they refused tortured them to death).
Let's get some perspective here. Islam is a disgusting abomination, that's true. That does not mean that every religion is the same level.
What I truly wonder is how muslims justify believing that a paedophilic racist abomination and thief like the islamic prophet is somehow worth more than an execution and a huge apology to all his victims. I of course, sadly, know the justification given in islamic text. Because he won military battles and his tactics will supposedly give his followers military domination over everyone else. That does nothing but make islam even more disgusting in my eyes.
Not technically correct. The executive doesn't "usually" do that (exceptions usually relating to embassies, spying, military operations,...). Both other branches always operate under sovereign immunity, which is only lifted in extreme cases, and even then only "around" individuals, not around the organisation itself.
There are good reasons for this, of course.
As we're talking "new laws" here, you can probably safely assume we're talking about sovereign acts here.
Sadly anemia is a horrible symptom in itself. Best case is lightheadedness, extreme tiredness and complete inability to sustain even mild exercise ("look ma, the docter said I can't run and look !" <wham> patient lies unconscious on the floor, usually with a few bruises and a suspicious spreading discoloration in his/her face). Worst case it causes you to choke to death while your lungs are operating fine.
First you're not actually allowed to walk the streets when it's impossible to identify you. Walking around in masks is an offence just about everywhere in the world (yes, even in Saudi Arabia walking around in a full niqab is not technically allowed, and people have been arrested for it (why ? well, guy in niqab blows up bank, runs outside, and they just rounded up everyone in those clothes. They didn't even catch the guy). In normal states it's not allowed and the police will not tolerate real obscuring masks under normal circumstances for obvious reasons. Furthermore, if a crime is comitted and you're walking around with a mask, good luck explaining that). Due to the history of laws, there's an exception : it's allowed on carnival. But that's pretty much it.
And even masks and such won't work. When it becomes trivial to do this, it will make sense, and everybody will do this, without informing government or employees. Why not ? Who's going to stop them ?
Enforcing privacy is about to become the same sort of fight as enforcing copyright is for the MPAA. There's laws protecting the "victims", who suffer no damage and can't even know if their rights have been violated, but it's impossible to use those laws due to realities on the ground.
Even now one can read articles from hackers about how it's completely ludicrous to expect privacy in a place where you can expect cameras (what ? I can't run opencv on my own webcam ?). You can film people on/near your property, but you "can't" actually look at the film that's stored on your harddrive ? Why not ? Why can't an algorithm look at it ?
Get ready for a hopeless fight in 3... 2... 1.
Btw guy fawkes masks will only buy time until the resolution on these cameras is high enough. There's plenty of biometrically identifying information on a human body, some of which is near impossible to hide. The exact ratio of the distances between the circle joints in the human body is as unique as a fingerprint, and can be determined from a short movie. The algorithm has a hard part, which is identifying your limbs and head and how they move over a few seconds of video, and an easy part, which is basically drawing all the connections between the rotation points of those joins (ie. a 5-polygon and it's diagonals), then measure the ratios 2-by-2, you then sort them according to size so it doesn't even matter if the guy was upside down or hopping on a pogo stick, or managed to convince the camera his leg was really his head. As long as the camera can get decent hints about your limbs and head moving (the big ones) it can find this. Masks are a useless defense, in fact they make things easier by providing static reference points on your face. Not even long skirts work against it.
OTOH I know a lot of private companies that have banned huawei. I seriously doubt at this point that this is a coincidence.
Personally I think they've been caught red-handed in a high-profile network about 2 years ago and the big guys employ people who know the details about this.
I subscribe to the view that one of two things will happen. a) somebody invents a battery or other means of carrying around electricity that exceeds the efficiency of oil (ie. > 50 MJ/kg and > 35 MJ/L), preferably by a large factor. We actually have one such technology, but once you hear what it is, you'll understand why we're not using it : nuclear "batteries" (like the one powering voyager and other satellites. You can actually make "cheap" versions of this that can power robots or homes). This happens before the oil shock, and as a result we gain many abilities and stop caring about the middle east at all. E.g. we gain the ability to have mobile robots do most manual labor. We gain cars that are essentially silent. And if it's a battery, maybe we no longer even have the need for an electricity grid, replacing it by charging batteries in the desert and driving them to Los Angeles for sale becomes the replacement for middle eastern oil shipments. The middle east completely collapses into the worthless pile of shit it was before the oil boom in a matter of a few years. Oil halves in price, and the US domestic production is more than sufficient to satisfy the need for oil in the US. Same goes for China. It doesn't have much oil, but if it's only for plastic production what it has will comfortably suffice. Plus that portion can easily be agriculturally replaced. If this happens the carbon cycle will reverse. We will use electrical energy to produce food directly, with carbon from the ground or from the air. Machines will take over from plants, or at least as far as agriculture goes. Why ? Because this makes a huge amount of sense, and we're not that far removed from discovering how to do that.
b) such a device is not invented before the oil shock. What happens is really simple : WWIII.
China has just as much interest in cheaper gasoline as the U.S. does. I'm sure China would be among the first to cheer if Wall Street wasn't able to pump the cost of a barrel of oil up months before it's even sucked out of the earth.
Not at all. China has just as much interest as the US does in more gasoline, the price is merely a means to an end. If bullets would reliably get China it's oil, it would be using bullets. You're making the "dumb communist" mistake (I'm not saying communists are dumb I've just heard this mistake often referred to as such).
Here's the problem with regulating the spread of any commodity : money has no value. Money represents value, because we have laws that make it so. If you insert regulations on price, you're changing the link between money and value, regulations on how much you can buy and "why" (people will of course lie to get oil). You're taking away the link between money and value (the oil in this case). Needless to say, as a result oil becomes more expensive, measured in value you have to exchange for it, when you're doing this. Also, distribution will necessarily become less efficient as a result of those regulations (mostly due to bureaucrat mistakes), and again oil becomes more expensive.
How much oil is left is a function of a number of things, like the price. If the government were to mandate $2 prices, we're out of oil. At $4 we've pretty much got the oil we want, but as you say it's getting harder to find every day. Sadly, the prices rise by a factor as time goes on, so the oil price will increase exponentially, not linearly (although $4 may be the result of price perturbations like political tensions, so it's probably not quite at $4 yet...)
Eventually we'll hit the 1:1 on EROI (energy return on investment) and we'll really be out of oil, despite the fact that there's still more in the ground than the cumulative total ever extracted at that point. But pumping up oil wouldn't gain you energy anymore. Then oil will really be finished. Right now we're at 1:12 according to theoildrum, which sounds good until you realize we come from 1:200. This also means that just a little bit shy of 10% of oil production is today being used just to pump up oil, another one of those numbers that rises exponentially.
Oil will increase in price for a few years yet and remain available, but long before the wells are dry it will become useless. This will happen quite suddenly, in a few years.
Ok, now implement this in China. If you do it in the US alone it will have exactly zero effect.
Frankly, the link between oil prices and speculation is another thing that should be fact checked. Unless I'm missing something the only thing that adds significantly to the price of oil (aside from US sales and oil taxes, things that matter more than a few cents, however rich you think ExxonMobil is, their cut out of your $4 is 2-3 cents) is the money taxed out of it by the insanity that is the saudi government. And even that amount is dropping rapidly according to theoildrum.com.
So pretty much the only action that would have any chance of dropping oil prices more than $0.10 or so would be to invade a few countries in the middle east. And China wouldn't let the US do that. Do you really think that the massive inefficienciency that these regulations would impose would be less than the 2-3% that speculation + refining + transport +... is today ?
Do not take this that I support speculation as an activity in itself. It's morally reprehensible when you think about the fact that a lot people need oil to avoid freezing to death. Then again, given that, speculation is not nearly as reprehensible as driving a Ferrari, or driving where you could walk or bike.
About proliferation hazards... the cat is out of the bag, isn't it ? Except (perhaps) for Obama deciding to invade North Korea and Iran, or outright nuking them, what possible hope is there to contain nuclear weapons today ?
The fact that the only thing separating a dozen states, including a whole lot of very undesirable ones, from working nuclear devices blueprints that a few dozen states possess has been known for 50 years. As long as this was limited to states that have shown restraint there was some hope of containing things, but that time is long gone.
Once a working heavy water reactor design is out there, it's over. If the reactor vessel is designed for breeding instead of for electricity production, those reactors have one single use : breeding plutonium (which is why a large scale tritium-producing heavy water reactor, like Iran built, is conclusive proof of the intention to build nuclear weapons).
The problem is not that there are reactors capable of producing weapons in the United states.Not at all. Adding a few more reactors will not change anything.
Don't worry, there does not exist a drone that can remain airborne for any reasonable length of time (as far as server uptime goes). As their server will have to return every 8 hours or so to a basis for refuelling, use a normal $0.2 bullet when it's on the ground.
Isn't that pretty much the exact thing you'd want. At least you get to vote on actual issues, as compared to "liberal" versus "conservative" like most of us. Where the liberals are about as liberal as the conservatives are conservative.
And so is the liberal party... Hell even communism has plenty of rich supporters (In my experience rich capitalists are much more likely to be communist than poor ones, like 1% versus 0.01%).
It would be hard for any present-day political movement to be different, really. This would probably have existed where sovereign states had manageable numbers and large participation, and very limited immigration or mobility. Like in ancient Athens where everybody who possibly could was at least 50% a politician. But I'm sure you see that a political party in a country of tens of millions of people needs powerful intrests, even to just announce it's existence to a significant fraction of the population. Add to that that most people, libertarian or liberal or conservative have zero knowledge of the actual ideas their party supposedly defends (supposedly because the liberals are about as liberal as conservatives are conservative), even just what they entail. When it comes to the history and probable effects of a political theory, heh. Good luck finding anyone who even knows.
It's actually worse than that : people will literally defend lies over documented history, an obvious case of this would be the fact that it is democrats/progressives that historically first were pro-slavery then spawned the ku-klux clan, and then became pro-segregation (an evolution that grudgingly and extremely slowly happened under extreme republican pressure. Al Gore started his career defending segregation), and that democrats have always been the party of the rich, not the poor. Although similar misconceptions exist of the republican party (e.g. anyone claiming they represent the intrests of the church urgenly needs to read a history book).
The tiny parties, like communists or (one of the many kinds of) anarchists, and to a much lesser degree the libertarians. At least they know what their party actually tries to accomplish. Good luck finding a democrat or republican voter that knows the meat of the party's position, even on well-known topics, beyond the soundbites on the news. Smaller parties have better informed members. That also seems to me the primary reason for their very limited numbers.
I for one fear what will happen when politicians realize the obvious : that facebook/google ads is a bigger political influence than any string of debates ever will be. Sadly the first person to really realize that is Silvio Berlusconi. Read up on him, cause he will be the inspiration for a large number of future American presidents.
There's plenty of women in the history of science, and in computer science. They're all... well they're not beauty queens. In fact there's very few beautiful women in science at all, and of course very few beautiful men (or so I hear from...).
And this is good. It means that they actually did something important, were actually capable of doing interesting things.
You see this everytime, and it's true. The US was the nation that has been pushing the world towards freedom in the last 50 years. Most other nations, including those in the EU, don't agree that there should be freedom of the press in the sense that Americans understand the word.
In America lots of nations are considered more free than America because in one specific detail they're slightly more
Of course that doesn't mean there isn't a world of difference between EU and something like muslims or china. There is, and sadly it varies from "free except x,y,z" (EU) and "print what we say, and crossword puzzles" (china) to "do what we say, and we'll still attack you" (muslims). Live for a month in a few different parts of the world and you'll see this in practice.
This idea, that absolute freedom of opinion is even good is losing ground, for 2 reasons. Firstly, it's losing ground in America. Whether we're talking liberals (don't say anything about race) to republicans (don't say anything bad about capitalism). Second, America itself is losing ground, and not to nations that espouse freedom of opinion as a core value. Just compare the US to, oh the UN for example, and you'll see the horror that is the truth.
Size of jupiter (ie. collision shadow) : about (143.000)^2 kilometers, let's say there's 100000 jupiters out there, at 1 lightyear distance Total surface area of a globe with a 2 lightyear diameter.
That means the chance of hitting one of them with a ship that's significantly smaller than Jupiter : 5.1243985515843779e-15 (even if we were to travel on earth, the chance would not rise much
So the first "hit" should be expected on the 500.000 billionth expedition. Since chances are we will be sending drones, not humans, what's the problem, really ? Hell, it's probably far safer than flying on earth.
Why would anyone on an interstellar voyaga want to dive into a gravity well ? I may not be an expert, but given the fact that you're going to have to lift-off again, and you're unlikely to find resources on the planet, and everything will be far, far colder than interstellar space*... what's the point ?
Interstellar space may "be" 4 degrees kelvin, but due the extreme low pressure, temperature doesn't actually leak away. It is much more problematic to cool off than to heat up in interstellar space. Temperature leaks away due to distribution of collision speeds with gas molecules, which are absent in interstellar space. A human body would remain warm (> 0 degrees celcius) for years, unless it were caught in a hydrogen cloud.
Hydrogen clouds should also be quite common, and do not form a serious gravity well, and they do provide (fusion) fuel and other resources (they should have attracted small numbers of heavier atoms, which can be harvested)
Explain the existence of (numbered) waiting lists, then.
In order to buy you more time, they will implant organs doctors know will get rejected in a matter of weeks or months. Half of the time this kills the patient, which beats 100% with the old organ. It doesn't really help, except in the very short term, because few people are implanted twice. That means a large majority people who get a "temp" organ die in less than 1 year.
Truly sorry about your idol, but Steve Jobs wasn't exactly a role model for moral behavior. Given the amount of time he survived he has gotten lucky and survived a little over 5 years with a foreign organ. That must have been one of those perfect matches that did not require him to be on the waiting list though, as surviving 5 years on the first available organ is unheard of.
No, only people whose life has effectively ended. As in, brain dead, extremely unlikely to come alive again, and even in that very rare and unexpected case, "alive without actual human functionality, like a vegetable. In other words, a one in maybe ten thousand chance of being a vegetable, and "really" dead (but too dead to harvest organs) in all other cases. Obviously I would not want to take an organ from some healthy homeless person.
That seems like a very vague standard. Words like "effectively", "unlikely" and "unexpected" do not belong in a definition as important as that one. Worse, "effectively ended" applies to a lot of people, and it's not that big of a stretch to claim that about, say, a homeless person (e.g. one in alaska that's "very unlikely" to last the night outside). But you could make the same point about all those people mentioned.
Steve Jobs was one of those people who clamoured for moving this definition when he needed an organ. That pressure will continue.
You know what's funny ? Slashdot is showing me this quote today:
Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. -- George Bernard Shaw
I wonder if he would apply this argument to organ donation.
And for the record, if I was not sure about the circumstances in which said organ was taken, yes, I would refuse. For one thing, why would my life be worth more to the doctor than that of the guy they cut open for the organ in question ?
And what kind of proof would you need? Could you ever be certain? If not, better carry that document stating "does not accept donated organs"...
Oh right, so not having absolute certainty is a problem, is it ? Then how do you know you're not getting an organ from a person with "locked in syndrome" ? Presuming of course, you would find that a problem.
BTW: read the rest of the thread, as there's a story of a person who got extremely close to getting declared medically dead and, while half his brain tissue made no recovery at all, the person did make a full functional recovery. Had that person signed a donor card, what would have happened ? I think that case would be pretty certain, no ?
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So what you mean is that the taliban and their co-religionists were better behaved before the state department decided we shouldn't just let Stalin kill them all ?
That seems like an easily verifiable fact.
You just gotta love the moral equivalence argument. By this logic you should blame your neighbor for slavery, not just in America, but blame him for the paedophilic prophet's selling of slaves' children for sex, or himself buying a child specifically for paedophilic sex. Or blame him for cannibalism. Or communism. After all some portion of humans once did that, they're human, so they're guilty, right ?
Just so you know, Christians believe first in the New Testament. You know, that little book that mentions Christ. You may have heard of it.
And while Judaism certainly has some bad rules, the basis of our law system is ~90% Judaic law (with a number of major corrections coming from Christianity). Do you honestly think it's worse or somehow equal to what the taliban are "proposing" ? Judaic law is far better than islamic law in that it's not racist, does not demand eternal war, does not have slavery (it does have 7-year unbreakable employment contracts, which come somewhat close, but nothing like islam's buy and sell women, then rape them or rent them out for others to rape them, or the paedophile prophet who demanded slaves work for camel urine, then when they refused tortured them to death).
Let's get some perspective here. Islam is a disgusting abomination, that's true. That does not mean that every religion is the same level.
What I truly wonder is how muslims justify believing that a paedophilic racist abomination and thief like the islamic prophet is somehow worth more than an execution and a huge apology to all his victims. I of course, sadly, know the justification given in islamic text. Because he won military battles and his tactics will supposedly give his followers military domination over everyone else. That does nothing but make islam even more disgusting in my eyes.
Not technically correct. The executive doesn't "usually" do that (exceptions usually relating to embassies, spying, military operations, ...). Both other branches always operate under sovereign immunity, which is only lifted in extreme cases, and even then only "around" individuals, not around the organisation itself.
There are good reasons for this, of course.
As we're talking "new laws" here, you can probably safely assume we're talking about sovereign acts here.
No wave-particle duality. Just lots of bangs.
I was quite thorough : kept trying until mom heard him.
Look up "sovereign". UK govt is sovereign. Google is not.
Google is screwed.
Sadly anemia is a horrible symptom in itself. Best case is lightheadedness, extreme tiredness and complete inability to sustain even mild exercise ("look ma, the docter said I can't run and look !" <wham> patient lies unconscious on the floor, usually with a few bruises and a suspicious spreading discoloration in his/her face). Worst case it causes you to choke to death while your lungs are operating fine.
First you're not actually allowed to walk the streets when it's impossible to identify you. Walking around in masks is an offence just about everywhere in the world (yes, even in Saudi Arabia walking around in a full niqab is not technically allowed, and people have been arrested for it (why ? well, guy in niqab blows up bank, runs outside, and they just rounded up everyone in those clothes. They didn't even catch the guy). In normal states it's not allowed and the police will not tolerate real obscuring masks under normal circumstances for obvious reasons. Furthermore, if a crime is comitted and you're walking around with a mask, good luck explaining that). Due to the history of laws, there's an exception : it's allowed on carnival. But that's pretty much it.
And even masks and such won't work. When it becomes trivial to do this, it will make sense, and everybody will do this, without informing government or employees. Why not ? Who's going to stop them ?
Enforcing privacy is about to become the same sort of fight as enforcing copyright is for the MPAA. There's laws protecting the "victims", who suffer no damage and can't even know if their rights have been violated, but it's impossible to use those laws due to realities on the ground.
Even now one can read articles from hackers about how it's completely ludicrous to expect privacy in a place where you can expect cameras (what ? I can't run opencv on my own webcam ?). You can film people on/near your property, but you "can't" actually look at the film that's stored on your harddrive ? Why not ? Why can't an algorithm look at it ?
Get ready for a hopeless fight in 3 ... 2 ... 1.
Btw guy fawkes masks will only buy time until the resolution on these cameras is high enough. There's plenty of biometrically identifying information on a human body, some of which is near impossible to hide. The exact ratio of the distances between the circle joints in the human body is as unique as a fingerprint, and can be determined from a short movie. The algorithm has a hard part, which is identifying your limbs and head and how they move over a few seconds of video, and an easy part, which is basically drawing all the connections between the rotation points of those joins (ie. a 5-polygon and it's diagonals), then measure the ratios 2-by-2, you then sort them according to size so it doesn't even matter if the guy was upside down or hopping on a pogo stick, or managed to convince the camera his leg was really his head. As long as the camera can get decent hints about your limbs and head moving (the big ones) it can find this. Masks are a useless defense, in fact they make things easier by providing static reference points on your face. Not even long skirts work against it.
OTOH I know a lot of private companies that have banned huawei. I seriously doubt at this point that this is a coincidence.
Personally I think they've been caught red-handed in a high-profile network about 2 years ago and the big guys employ people who know the details about this.
I subscribe to the view that one of two things will happen.
a) somebody invents a battery or other means of carrying around electricity that exceeds the efficiency of oil (ie. > 50 MJ/kg and > 35 MJ/L), preferably by a large factor. We actually have one such technology, but once you hear what it is, you'll understand why we're not using it : nuclear "batteries" (like the one powering voyager and other satellites. You can actually make "cheap" versions of this that can power robots or homes).
This happens before the oil shock, and as a result we gain many abilities and stop caring about the middle east at all. E.g. we gain the ability to have mobile robots do most manual labor. We gain cars that are essentially silent. And if it's a battery, maybe we no longer even have the need for an electricity grid, replacing it by charging batteries in the desert and driving them to Los Angeles for sale becomes the replacement for middle eastern oil shipments. The middle east completely collapses into the worthless pile of shit it was before the oil boom in a matter of a few years. Oil halves in price, and the US domestic production is more than sufficient to satisfy the need for oil in the US. Same goes for China. It doesn't have much oil, but if it's only for plastic production what it has will comfortably suffice. Plus that portion can easily be agriculturally replaced.
If this happens the carbon cycle will reverse. We will use electrical energy to produce food directly, with carbon from the ground or from the air. Machines will take over from plants, or at least as far as agriculture goes. Why ? Because this makes a huge amount of sense, and we're not that far removed from discovering how to do that.
b) such a device is not invented before the oil shock. What happens is really simple : WWIII.
China has just as much interest in cheaper gasoline as the U.S. does. I'm sure China would be among the first to cheer if Wall Street wasn't able to pump the cost of a barrel of oil up months before it's even sucked out of the earth.
Not at all. China has just as much interest as the US does in more gasoline, the price is merely a means to an end. If bullets would reliably get China it's oil, it would be using bullets. You're making the "dumb communist" mistake (I'm not saying communists are dumb I've just heard this mistake often referred to as such).
Here's the problem with regulating the spread of any commodity : money has no value. Money represents value, because we have laws that make it so. If you insert regulations on price, you're changing the link between money and value, regulations on how much you can buy and "why" (people will of course lie to get oil). You're taking away the link between money and value (the oil in this case). Needless to say, as a result oil becomes more expensive, measured in value you have to exchange for it, when you're doing this. Also, distribution will necessarily become less efficient as a result of those regulations (mostly due to bureaucrat mistakes), and again oil becomes more expensive.
So either prices rise - and can buy less oil ... ... so prices drop ... yet we can buy less oil ...
Or we have price controls
Is it perhaps the case that there is less oil being pumped up ?
How much oil is left is a function of a number of things, like the price. If the government were to mandate $2 prices, we're out of oil. At $4 we've pretty much got the oil we want, but as you say it's getting harder to find every day. Sadly, the prices rise by a factor as time goes on, so the oil price will increase exponentially, not linearly (although $4 may be the result of price perturbations like political tensions, so it's probably not quite at $4 yet ...)
Eventually we'll hit the 1:1 on EROI (energy return on investment) and we'll really be out of oil, despite the fact that there's still more in the ground than the cumulative total ever extracted at that point. But pumping up oil wouldn't gain you energy anymore. Then oil will really be finished. Right now we're at 1:12 according to theoildrum, which sounds good until you realize we come from 1:200. This also means that just a little bit shy of 10% of oil production is today being used just to pump up oil, another one of those numbers that rises exponentially.
Oil will increase in price for a few years yet and remain available, but long before the wells are dry it will become useless. This will happen quite suddenly, in a few years.
Ok, now implement this in China. If you do it in the US alone it will have exactly zero effect.
Frankly, the link between oil prices and speculation is another thing that should be fact checked. Unless I'm missing something the only thing that adds significantly to the price of oil (aside from US sales and oil taxes, things that matter more than a few cents, however rich you think ExxonMobil is, their cut out of your $4 is 2-3 cents) is the money taxed out of it by the insanity that is the saudi government. And even that amount is dropping rapidly according to theoildrum.com.
So pretty much the only action that would have any chance of dropping oil prices more than $0.10 or so would be to invade a few countries in the middle east. And China wouldn't let the US do that. Do you really think that the massive inefficienciency that these regulations would impose would be less than the 2-3% that speculation + refining + transport + ... is today ?
Do not take this that I support speculation as an activity in itself. It's morally reprehensible when you think about the fact that a lot people need oil to avoid freezing to death. Then again, given that, speculation is not nearly as reprehensible as driving a Ferrari, or driving where you could walk or bike.
About proliferation hazards ... the cat is out of the bag, isn't it ? Except (perhaps) for Obama deciding to invade North Korea and Iran, or outright nuking them, what possible hope is there to contain nuclear weapons today ?
The fact that the only thing separating a dozen states, including a whole lot of very undesirable ones, from working nuclear devices blueprints that a few dozen states possess has been known for 50 years. As long as this was limited to states that have shown restraint there was some hope of containing things, but that time is long gone.
Once a working heavy water reactor design is out there, it's over. If the reactor vessel is designed for breeding instead of for electricity production, those reactors have one single use : breeding plutonium (which is why a large scale tritium-producing heavy water reactor, like Iran built, is conclusive proof of the intention to build nuclear weapons).
The problem is not that there are reactors capable of producing weapons in the United states.Not at all. Adding a few more reactors will not change anything.
That brings up a good question. Why don't we fill up all unused space in every plane with helium ? Surely that would improve fuel efficiency ?
Don't worry, there does not exist a drone that can remain airborne for any reasonable length of time (as far as server uptime goes). As their server will have to return every 8 hours or so to a basis for refuelling, use a normal $0.2 bullet when it's on the ground.
Or just confiscate it.
Isn't that pretty much the exact thing you'd want. At least you get to vote on actual issues, as compared to "liberal" versus "conservative" like most of us. Where the liberals are about as liberal as the conservatives are conservative.
And so is the liberal party ... Hell even communism has plenty of rich supporters (In my experience rich capitalists are much more likely to be communist than poor ones, like 1% versus 0.01%).
It would be hard for any present-day political movement to be different, really. This would probably have existed where sovereign states had manageable numbers and large participation, and very limited immigration or mobility. Like in ancient Athens where everybody who possibly could was at least 50% a politician. But I'm sure you see that a political party in a country of tens of millions of people needs powerful intrests, even to just announce it's existence to a significant fraction of the population. Add to that that most people, libertarian or liberal or conservative have zero knowledge of the actual ideas their party supposedly defends (supposedly because the liberals are about as liberal as conservatives are conservative), even just what they entail. When it comes to the history and probable effects of a political theory, heh. Good luck finding anyone who even knows.
It's actually worse than that : people will literally defend lies over documented history, an obvious case of this would be the fact that it is democrats/progressives that historically first were pro-slavery then spawned the ku-klux clan, and then became pro-segregation (an evolution that grudgingly and extremely slowly happened under extreme republican pressure. Al Gore started his career defending segregation), and that democrats have always been the party of the rich, not the poor. Although similar misconceptions exist of the republican party (e.g. anyone claiming they represent the intrests of the church urgenly needs to read a history book).
The tiny parties, like communists or (one of the many kinds of) anarchists, and to a much lesser degree the libertarians. At least they know what their party actually tries to accomplish. Good luck finding a democrat or republican voter that knows the meat of the party's position, even on well-known topics, beyond the soundbites on the news. Smaller parties have better informed members. That also seems to me the primary reason for their very limited numbers.
I for one fear what will happen when politicians realize the obvious : that facebook/google ads is a bigger political influence than any string of debates ever will be. Sadly the first person to really realize that is Silvio Berlusconi. Read up on him, cause he will be the inspiration for a large number of future American presidents.
Your point ?
There's plenty of women in the history of science, and in computer science. They're all ... well they're not beauty queens. In fact there's very few beautiful women in science at all, and of course very few beautiful men (or so I hear from ...).
And this is good. It means that they actually did something important, were actually capable of doing interesting things.
You see this everytime, and it's true. The US was the nation that has been pushing the world towards freedom in the last 50 years. Most other nations, including those in the EU, don't agree that there should be freedom of the press in the sense that Americans understand the word.
In America lots of nations are considered more free than America because in one specific detail they're slightly more
Of course that doesn't mean there isn't a world of difference between EU and something like muslims or china. There is, and sadly it varies from "free except x,y,z" (EU) and "print what we say, and crossword puzzles" (china) to "do what we say, and we'll still attack you" (muslims). Live for a month in a few different parts of the world and you'll see this in practice.
This idea, that absolute freedom of opinion is even good is losing ground, for 2 reasons. Firstly, it's losing ground in America. Whether we're talking liberals (don't say anything about race) to republicans (don't say anything bad about capitalism). Second, America itself is losing ground, and not to nations that espouse freedom of opinion as a core value. Just compare the US to, oh the UN for example, and you'll see the horror that is the truth.
Well I mostly agree to your other points, but not this. You can't herd a nation indefinitely.
Cute general theoretical principle. Please get me a side of fluffy pink unicors with that.
You not only can, but if you don't, war will follow.
True, but you're going to make aiming mistakes due to angular resolution limits anyway. So you'll have to make small course corrections constantly.
I doubt these planets will provide more than a tiny amount of noice on the course.
(ii) Not really
Size of jupiter (ie. collision shadow) : about (143.000)^2 kilometers, let's say there's 100000 jupiters out there, at 1 lightyear distance
Total surface area of a globe with a 2 lightyear diameter.
That means the chance of hitting one of them with a ship that's significantly smaller than Jupiter : 5.1243985515843779e-15 (even if we were to travel on earth, the chance would not rise much
So the first "hit" should be expected on the 500.000 billionth expedition. Since chances are we will be sending drones, not humans, what's the problem, really ? Hell, it's probably far safer than flying on earth.
Why would anyone on an interstellar voyaga want to dive into a gravity well ? I may not be an expert, but given the fact that you're going to have to lift-off again, and you're unlikely to find resources on the planet, and everything will be far, far colder than interstellar space* ... what's the point ?
Interstellar space may "be" 4 degrees kelvin, but due the extreme low pressure, temperature doesn't actually leak away. It is much more problematic to cool off than to heat up in interstellar space. Temperature leaks away due to distribution of collision speeds with gas molecules, which are absent in interstellar space. A human body would remain warm (> 0 degrees celcius) for years, unless it were caught in a hydrogen cloud.
Hydrogen clouds should also be quite common, and do not form a serious gravity well, and they do provide (fusion) fuel and other resources (they should have attracted small numbers of heavier atoms, which can be harvested)
Explain the existence of (numbered) waiting lists, then.
In order to buy you more time, they will implant organs doctors know will get rejected in a matter of weeks or months. Half of the time this kills the patient, which beats 100% with the old organ. It doesn't really help, except in the very short term, because few people are implanted twice. That means a large majority people who get a "temp" organ die in less than 1 year.
Truly sorry about your idol, but Steve Jobs wasn't exactly a role model for moral behavior. Given the amount of time he survived he has gotten lucky and survived a little over 5 years with a foreign organ. That must have been one of those perfect matches that did not require him to be on the waiting list though, as surviving 5 years on the first available organ is unheard of.
No, only people whose life has effectively ended. As in, brain dead, extremely unlikely to come alive again, and even in that very rare and unexpected case, "alive without actual human functionality, like a vegetable. In other words, a one in maybe ten thousand chance of being a vegetable, and "really" dead (but too dead to harvest organs) in all other cases. Obviously I would not want to take an organ from some healthy homeless person.
That seems like a very vague standard. Words like "effectively", "unlikely" and "unexpected" do not belong in a definition as important as that one. Worse, "effectively ended" applies to a lot of people, and it's not that big of a stretch to claim that about, say, a homeless person (e.g. one in alaska that's "very unlikely" to last the night outside). But you could make the same point about all those people mentioned.
Steve Jobs was one of those people who clamoured for moving this definition when he needed an organ. That pressure will continue.
You know what's funny ? Slashdot is showing me this quote today :
Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. -- George Bernard Shaw
I wonder if he would apply this argument to organ donation.
And for the record, if I was not sure about the circumstances in which said organ was taken, yes, I would refuse. For one thing, why would my life be worth more to the doctor than that of the guy they cut open for the organ in question ?
And what kind of proof would you need? Could you ever be certain? If not, better carry that document stating "does not accept donated organs"...
Oh right, so not having absolute certainty is a problem, is it ? Then how do you know you're not getting an organ from a person with "locked in syndrome" ? Presuming of course, you would find that a problem.
BTW: read the rest of the thread, as there's a story of a person who got extremely close to getting declared medically dead and, while half his brain tissue made no recovery at all, the person did make a full functional recovery. Had that person signed a donor card, what would have happened ? I think that case would be pretty certain, no ?