We appear to have a major cognitive disconnect happening here. I'm telling you about poor mortals gambling all they have on the off chance it'll buy them their next meal. You think that's nothing. You compare that to some highly paid manager executive who gets caught and executed for being an egregiously bad guy. I don't get it. He asked for it, by being a dick. They were just trying to earn a living to feed their family.
What happens to the workers if they paint a toy in lead paint? "On 10 July 2007, China executed the former head of its state food and drug administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, for dereliction of duty" in relation to the lead paint incident. The rich risk their lives, the poor risk nothing.
What?!? They're probably unemployed now, and heading back to till rice paddies due to his crime.
They may have to shop crappy jobs, but they won't lose everything. As I said, the rich in the US risk nothing (Paris blows $1,000,000 on a bad investment and is suddenly only worth $999,000,000.00)
He could lose his life. Big thing for him, yes. His choice. They could end up destitute, not by choice, but damned near lifeless regardless. They were just trying to put food on the table.
How the hell you people can defend our crazy fiat money regimes escapes me.
Various forms of currency and non-currency intermediate forms of exchange such as formalized IOU arrangements all have their strengths and weaknesses.
Agreed.
It's not fair to call fiat money "crazy" without first showing why some other medium of exchange, such as a hypothetical mid-19th-century Aluminum coin or Aluminum-backed currency,...
Or Dutch tulip bulbs?
... is always going to be better or at the very least, that it's so heads-and-shoulders-more-useful than a fiat currency that no sane electorate would allow their government to issue fiat currency.
Oh, come on. Remember Archimedes and his Eureka moment? That related to debasing the money supply when it was based on precious metals. Basing it on paper that the Fed prints is damned near a joke in comparison.
FYI, I'm not a bitcoin miner and don't own any of it. I do think it's interesting, and it *could* (I'm a big fan of unbreakable crypto:-) be a solution to this age old problem if done right with all the bugs worked out, though it's certainly too early to say it can. I can say all the other forms of money have been proven easily manipulable, and that's not what anyone wants for a medium of exchange. And that's the real point. A manipulable form of exchange is the ultimate bad. And bottom line, that's why fiat money's crazy. It's manipulable, in the extreme, by design.
I'd be lucky to get a job working in a warehouse or flipping burgers.
Add to the above that I really, *really* suck at manual labour jobs. IT is all I can do well. I'd be very fortunate to even be able to hang onto shit jobs like that past the three month probationary period. I'd be very lucky to even scrounge up enough bus fare to make it to the job throughout the first month. I'd be very lucky to get a manager who had any clue as to how to manage employees, and was not intimidated by people like me who knew far more about how he ought to be doing his job than he did.
I'd be very lucky if my Mom/sister/brother/family had a spare room I could hole up in until I was back on my feet.
Warren Buffet's had a few bad years of investments. Where's he then? Rich.
I move my locked in retirement savings plan to some outfit, and the gov't decides to change the rules about which outfits can handle RSPs, and where am I? Wondering if I have *any* savings for retirement, waiting for the Grim Reaper to just get me the fuck out of here already.
Down here where I live, "The workers don't risk much" is one huge offensive slap in the face.
Now take all of the above (I'm single, never married) and apply it to a single mom with three kids that she's trying to raise after a failed marriage to a deadbeat dad who won't/can't help with child support. "The workers don't risk much." Uh huh. Some of you people have no idea what's really going on out here.
If the factory owner screws up big enough, they get executed. With risk comes chance of profit. The workers don't risk much.
No. If Paris Hilton risks a million investing in a high-tech startup that goes south, where is she then? Rich, still. Not just fabulously wealthy. Rich.
If I risk my skills and reputation working at a high-tech startup that goes south, where am I? Homeless, selling everything of value I own for food before it's no longer of any value, going further into debt every minute, terrified of the possibility of needing to see a dentist, my reputation and skills diminishing in worth due to my association with that op (the Pariah factor) that failed so miserably regardless of whether its failure had anything to do with my work for it or not.
Just fscking no.
Robert Downey Jr. gets busted for coke posession, then a short while later, again. Where's he? Ironman.
Where would I be in that situation? Fucked. Irrecoverably fucked. I'd be lucky to get a job working in a warehouse or flipping burgers.
Hey Zeus Christos, some of you guys have no idea how the "other 99%" live. "The workers don't risk much", my ass. Just everything they have, that's all.
... while it took quite a bit longer for the national cash to get screwed up yet again.
FTFY. How the hell you people can defend our crazy fiat money regimes escapes me. He who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it. "The Emperor has no clothes!" Yet you keep on falling for the same tired old joke everytime you hear it.
well, its more a case of "choose the right tool". COBOL is the right tool for data processing tasks...
You know, back in the day they recognized it wasn't the right tool, which is why they spent a boatload defining Ada to replace it. So, why are we still dragging COBOL around? Why hasn't Ada replaced development going forward? And don't just say "Ada sucks!", because I know exceptionally competent (ie. MSc CS) Ada programmers who love it and believe it to be every bit as powerful and versatile as things like C/C++, et al.
My money's on management inertia. Often, it's damned difficult to get them to stick to the gameplan instead of worrying about their control over their personal fiefdoms.
I think that about one of the nicest features of Hubble is that it's NOT in a stationary mount.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Both have their fine points.
The Shuttle was supposed to be used by the Air Force to launch and recover spy satellites to high-inclination orbits. THIS NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
Maybe not by the AF, but it certainly did send up spy satellites for some TLAs.
And I "get" the urgency of AGW.
I'll admit, I don't. But I'll be dead by then, so no prob.:-)
... but it wasn't going to really keep going the way we thought it was. It was never really meant to. And if you want to draw a parallel from Star Trek, just look at how humanity did get [its] start in space in that view. Cochrane didn't work for NASA.
Yes, it WAS meant to, by us mortals out here on the street. Why the hell do you think we were all cheering you on so loudly?!? Because THAT'S THE NEXT STEP! YES, GO! Take me with you!
Cochrane was a "Capitalist." He wanted to buy his way onto an island populated by half naked women. Oh well, he didn't get that dream because a better one turned up. Poor baby. "A statue?!?"
And he didn't work for SpaceX. That's really, in my opinion, a more accurate, and down-to-earth view of how it will happen, when it happens.
A lone tinkerer buys a Saturn 5 off EBay and bolts warp nacelles onto it? Who's the dreamer now? You're also ignoring the wars they barely survived to get to the point they could even try it. If Pakistan and India, or China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Uzbekistan, decide to go at it, THEN we'll be well and truly fscked! AGW, ptheh!
You don't think Hubble in a stationary mount on the back side of the moon would be cool? It could image the entire meteor belt between Mars and Jupiter from there!:-O
If I were modding, I'd go +1 interesting, but I'm not (I don't seem to get mod points these days; dunno why; whatever).
Why is it that so many people equate wealth with intelligence?
Why is it that so many people equate intelligence with smart? The cliche joke is Mensa. They may be intelligent, but the only smart (purported) Mensa sort I've known was Shepherd from Stargate:Atlantis (he took the tests, that's all). All my life, I've been hearing about "book smart" vs. "street smart." Mensa are not generally known for street smarts. Then there's the shit they teach in universities (how to pass tests). It doesn't necessarily prove you've learned anything useful (though I admit, many do).
Those two things aren't necessarily related.
Shouldn't that be correlated?
I think the GP's point stands: someone buys newspapers, then starts a campaign to try and promote those newspapers by telling people that "free news" doesn't work. There has always been "free" news, since long before the printing press.
I agree. It looks like a pretty dumb move, and looks a lot like Murdoch, Donald Trump, Conrad Black,... How the hell do those guys get to where they are pulling boners like this?!? Luck?
Australia sucks. Your women are welcome to venture over to the USA, though
The USA's media barons are the ones exporting this insanity to other countries. I'll be happy to spit in your face for allowing that to happen. Fix your government.
I think you mean "opinion before 2000, when the Western world was still sensible and not collapsing in on its own meaningless 'service' economy."
No, the era of the glass walled room populated by priests in labcoats started its long decline the day someone dragged a personal computer into a business's building to do an end run around them. That was long before 2000.
As for when the Western world was sensible, that's relative. I liked the Sixties, and I like Michelangelo and Galileo and Archimedes and the wheel and fire,...
The "cloud" is not innovation. It is regression and loss of control, all the way to IBM '60s mainframes. Although not intended, government measures which make the cloud less attractive and encourage us to decentralise and retain control of information are doing us a favour.
I'm no fan of cloud computing, for the same reasons you state, but you're stretching it with this. If you were consistent, you'd say nobody should be able to hire anyone to do anything for you. Make your own music, reno your own kitchen, do your own plumbing,...
That's just foolish. Infringing copies? It's over the air broadcast. How dare anyone stick their nose into how I deal with an over the air broadcast?!? If I can make a copy of it on a VCR, why can't I save it to a remote hard drive that I rent from someone?
This is just control freaks run amok, and our legal systems are getting mangled in the process by special interest politics.
Saw that. FTFS: "... demonstrating how a tractor beam can be realized in the real world - albeit on a very small scale", and the ISS is still missing a hangar.
Yes, I do think it's a little spooky that was posted a day after we were discussing it.
But I guess when you are already a starving artist, its easier to try and extort money from people for your poor excuse for art than it is to get a real job that actually contributes to society, or at least try to produce genuine, original art that is not so ordinary looking as to create the impression that no one would care if it were used like it has been.
He found pages and pages of sites that were using it. I think that pretty much negates your opinion.
Someone else discovered that she stole the logo for her charity.
Good grief. The woman's standing in a (figurative) public library and pulling loaded bookshelves full of Internet Retribution down on her head, yet nobody's claimed it for The Schwager Effect yet?
At least Streisand just made herself look foolish. This woman appears to be trying to destroy herself.
Crap. I first heard of the SKA when it was still in the "wouldn't it be neat" stage, and I was sure it was supposed to be an optical setup. That makes me wonder why they're doing it. They've had planetwide radio interferometry for decades. Must be a resolution thing?
Pardon? How about we think of it as Earth falling into the Sun's gravity well far enough to be accelerated but not far enough to be captured. What happens next? I'd guess Earth gets flung off into the Oort cloud. That sounds like a two body slingshot effect to me.
If it were me, I would just use the tractor beam and pull it into the hangar.
We haven't invented tractor beams yet and they don't have a hangar. Any other bright ideas, captain? No, we can't even go to warp to get any, and the Vulcans are not watching.
As for SpaceX & Dragon && ISS, seriously cool. Keep it up.:-) I for one am cheering for you.
I don't understand what you guys are complaining about. There is at least one, and often several, well-funded free alternative for most of Microsoft's hit products.
To be fair, I don't know what you're complaining about. From what I read, most of the bitching about IP maximalists I see is wrt MPAA and Hollywood's offerings, not software.
And for the record, I just noticed I didn't have [*]office installed here, but as of 15 minutes ago, now I do.
[*]Open. LibreOffice appears to be broken in Debian squeeze, drat. It works fine on my testing box.
As the article says, there are now dedicated companies who chase copyright issues.
Yes, and doesn't that strike you as just plain sick?
It's interesting how many of these requests are received, but I couldn't easily find out how many of them were declined. Does anyone have a link to this information?
I did not RTFA, but I did read this, which seemed a good overall review of the features. It looks like a very nice thing for Google to put out.
Most scientists (actual scientists, like me) can't find an actual utilitarian reason to do what they're doing at the moment, apart from "Maybe something unexpectedly useful will turn up."
Define "actual scientist." Papers published in journals? Which ones? Which discipline? Particle physics, astronomy, biology? Do you consider Archimedes an actual scentist? What're his credentials? What's he published? I can go on and on listing "actual scientists" from history who were considered little more than charlatans by their contemporaries.
The chutzpah in here is deafening.
Back on topic, wouldn't it be nice to have a "Hubble" in a stationary mount on the other side of the moon? Wouldn't it be nice if we found tons of water at the bottom of a few craters up there? Wouldn't it be nice if it was a stepping stone to that vision Riker had in Startrek First Contact, when the whole moon was populated and cities up there shone down on us?
Overall i'd say the evidence points towards advertising having an effect.
I agree. It tends to make me not want to watch any ads. I think I've bought about five universal remotes in the past decade due to worn out mute buttons. Make advertising less obnoxious, and maybe people wouldn't mind watching it. Do shit like in this article, and watch your subscriber base tank.
No, there is no other solution. We're not stupid, and we can go elsewhere.
A thing is illegal when the government says it is, and illegal when the government says it is.
Is that hyperbole? Your legal system is supposed to define those. If it's not, then you've accepted that your government is utterly out of your control and the only moral and ethical action left to you is to lock and load. Vive la revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
The workers don't risk much.
We appear to have a major cognitive disconnect happening here. I'm telling you about poor mortals gambling all they have on the off chance it'll buy them their next meal. You think that's nothing. You compare that to some highly paid manager executive who gets caught and executed for being an egregiously bad guy. I don't get it. He asked for it, by being a dick. They were just trying to earn a living to feed their family.
What happens to the workers if they paint a toy in lead paint? "On 10 July 2007, China executed the former head of its state food and drug administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, for dereliction of duty" in relation to the lead paint incident. The rich risk their lives, the poor risk nothing.
What?!? They're probably unemployed now, and heading back to till rice paddies due to his crime.
They may have to shop crappy jobs, but they won't lose everything. As I said, the rich in the US risk nothing (Paris blows $1,000,000 on a bad investment and is suddenly only worth $999,000,000.00)
He could lose his life. Big thing for him, yes. His choice. They could end up destitute, not by choice, but damned near lifeless regardless. They were just trying to put food on the table.
What am I missing here?
How the hell you people can defend our crazy fiat money regimes escapes me.
Various forms of currency and non-currency intermediate forms of exchange such as formalized IOU arrangements all have their strengths and weaknesses.
Agreed.
It's not fair to call fiat money "crazy" without first showing why some other medium of exchange, such as a hypothetical mid-19th-century Aluminum coin or Aluminum-backed currency, ...
Or Dutch tulip bulbs?
... is always going to be better or at the very least, that it's so heads-and-shoulders-more-useful than a fiat currency that no sane electorate would allow their government to issue fiat currency.
Oh, come on. Remember Archimedes and his Eureka moment? That related to debasing the money supply when it was based on precious metals. Basing it on paper that the Fed prints is damned near a joke in comparison.
FYI, I'm not a bitcoin miner and don't own any of it. I do think it's interesting, and it *could* (I'm a big fan of unbreakable crypto :-) be a solution to this age old problem if done right with all the bugs worked out, though it's certainly too early to say it can. I can say all the other forms of money have been proven easily manipulable, and that's not what anyone wants for a medium of exchange. And that's the real point. A manipulable form of exchange is the ultimate bad. And bottom line, that's why fiat money's crazy. It's manipulable, in the extreme, by design.
The workers don't risk much.
Damn, that's offensive. That really pees me off.
I'd be lucky to get a job working in a warehouse or flipping burgers.
Add to the above that I really, *really* suck at manual labour jobs. IT is all I can do well. I'd be very fortunate to even be able to hang onto shit jobs like that past the three month probationary period. I'd be very lucky to even scrounge up enough bus fare to make it to the job throughout the first month. I'd be very lucky to get a manager who had any clue as to how to manage employees, and was not intimidated by people like me who knew far more about how he ought to be doing his job than he did.
I'd be very lucky if my Mom/sister/brother/family had a spare room I could hole up in until I was back on my feet.
Warren Buffet's had a few bad years of investments. Where's he then? Rich.
I move my locked in retirement savings plan to some outfit, and the gov't decides to change the rules about which outfits can handle RSPs, and where am I? Wondering if I have *any* savings for retirement, waiting for the Grim Reaper to just get me the fuck out of here already.
Down here where I live, "The workers don't risk much" is one huge offensive slap in the face.
Now take all of the above (I'm single, never married) and apply it to a single mom with three kids that she's trying to raise after a failed marriage to a deadbeat dad who won't/can't help with child support. "The workers don't risk much." Uh huh. Some of you people have no idea what's really going on out here.
If the factory owner screws up big enough, they get executed. With risk comes chance of profit. The workers don't risk much.
No. If Paris Hilton risks a million investing in a high-tech startup that goes south, where is she then? Rich, still. Not just fabulously wealthy. Rich.
If I risk my skills and reputation working at a high-tech startup that goes south, where am I? Homeless, selling everything of value I own for food before it's no longer of any value, going further into debt every minute, terrified of the possibility of needing to see a dentist, my reputation and skills diminishing in worth due to my association with that op (the Pariah factor) that failed so miserably regardless of whether its failure had anything to do with my work for it or not.
Just fscking no.
Robert Downey Jr. gets busted for coke posession, then a short while later, again. Where's he? Ironman.
Where would I be in that situation? Fucked. Irrecoverably fucked. I'd be lucky to get a job working in a warehouse or flipping burgers.
Hey Zeus Christos, some of you guys have no idea how the "other 99%" live. "The workers don't risk much", my ass. Just everything they have, that's all.
... while it took quite a bit longer for the national cash to get screwed up yet again.
FTFY. How the hell you people can defend our crazy fiat money regimes escapes me. He who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it. "The Emperor has no clothes!" Yet you keep on falling for the same tired old joke everytime you hear it.
well, its more a case of "choose the right tool". COBOL is the right tool for data processing tasks ...
You know, back in the day they recognized it wasn't the right tool, which is why they spent a boatload defining Ada to replace it. So, why are we still dragging COBOL around? Why hasn't Ada replaced development going forward? And don't just say "Ada sucks!", because I know exceptionally competent (ie. MSc CS) Ada programmers who love it and believe it to be every bit as powerful and versatile as things like C/C++, et al.
My money's on management inertia. Often, it's damned difficult to get them to stick to the gameplan instead of worrying about their control over their personal fiefdoms.
I think that about one of the nicest features of Hubble is that it's NOT in a stationary mount.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Both have their fine points.
The Shuttle was supposed to be used by the Air Force to launch and recover spy satellites to high-inclination orbits. THIS NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
Maybe not by the AF, but it certainly did send up spy satellites for some TLAs.
And I "get" the urgency of AGW.
I'll admit, I don't. But I'll be dead by then, so no prob. :-)
... but it wasn't going to really keep going the way we thought it was. It was never really meant to. And if you want to draw a parallel from Star Trek, just look at how humanity did get [its] start in space in that view. Cochrane didn't work for NASA.
Yes, it WAS meant to, by us mortals out here on the street. Why the hell do you think we were all cheering you on so loudly?!? Because THAT'S THE NEXT STEP! YES, GO! Take me with you!
Cochrane was a "Capitalist." He wanted to buy his way onto an island populated by half naked women. Oh well, he didn't get that dream because a better one turned up. Poor baby. "A statue?!?"
And he didn't work for SpaceX. That's really, in my opinion, a more accurate, and down-to-earth view of how it will happen, when it happens.
A lone tinkerer buys a Saturn 5 off EBay and bolts warp nacelles onto it? Who's the dreamer now? You're also ignoring the wars they barely survived to get to the point they could even try it. If Pakistan and India, or China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Uzbekistan, decide to go at it, THEN we'll be well and truly fscked! AGW, ptheh!
You don't think Hubble in a stationary mount on the back side of the moon would be cool? It could image the entire meteor belt between Mars and Jupiter from there! :-O
Luddite. :-)
If I were modding, I'd go +1 interesting, but I'm not (I don't seem to get mod points these days; dunno why; whatever).
Why is it that so many people equate wealth with intelligence?
Why is it that so many people equate intelligence with smart? The cliche joke is Mensa. They may be intelligent, but the only smart (purported) Mensa sort I've known was Shepherd from Stargate:Atlantis (he took the tests, that's all). All my life, I've been hearing about "book smart" vs. "street smart." Mensa are not generally known for street smarts. Then there's the shit they teach in universities (how to pass tests). It doesn't necessarily prove you've learned anything useful (though I admit, many do).
Those two things aren't necessarily related.
Shouldn't that be correlated?
I think the GP's point stands: someone buys newspapers, then starts a campaign to try and promote those newspapers by telling people that "free news" doesn't work. There has always been "free" news, since long before the printing press.
I agree. It looks like a pretty dumb move, and looks a lot like Murdoch, Donald Trump, Conrad Black, ... How the hell do those guys get to where they are pulling boners like this?!? Luck?
Curious. I wonder why this stuff happens.
Australia sucks. Your women are welcome to venture over to the USA, though
The USA's media barons are the ones exporting this insanity to other countries. I'll be happy to spit in your face for allowing that to happen. Fix your government.
I think you mean "opinion before 2000, when the Western world was still sensible and not collapsing in on its own meaningless 'service' economy."
No, the era of the glass walled room populated by priests in labcoats started its long decline the day someone dragged a personal computer into a business's building to do an end run around them. That was long before 2000.
As for when the Western world was sensible, that's relative. I liked the Sixties, and I like Michelangelo and Galileo and Archimedes and the wheel and fire, ...
The "cloud" is not innovation. It is regression and loss of control, all the way to IBM '60s mainframes. Although not intended, government measures which make the cloud less attractive and encourage us to decentralise and retain control of information are doing us a favour.
I'm no fan of cloud computing, for the same reasons you state, but you're stretching it with this. If you were consistent, you'd say nobody should be able to hire anyone to do anything for you. Make your own music, reno your own kitchen, do your own plumbing, ...
That's just foolish. Infringing copies? It's over the air broadcast. How dare anyone stick their nose into how I deal with an over the air broadcast?!? If I can make a copy of it on a VCR, why can't I save it to a remote hard drive that I rent from someone?
This is just control freaks run amok, and our legal systems are getting mangled in the process by special interest politics.
Saw that. FTFS: "... demonstrating how a tractor beam can be realized in the real world - albeit on a very small scale", and the ISS is still missing a hangar.
Yes, I do think it's a little spooky that was posted a day after we were discussing it.
But I guess when you are already a starving artist, its easier to try and extort money from people for your poor excuse for art than it is to get a real job that actually contributes to society, or at least try to produce genuine, original art that is not so ordinary looking as to create the impression that no one would care if it were used like it has been.
He found pages and pages of sites that were using it. I think that pretty much negates your opinion.
s/Schwager/Schwagger/
Someone else discovered that she stole the logo for her charity.
Good grief. The woman's standing in a (figurative) public library and pulling loaded bookshelves full of Internet Retribution down on her head, yet nobody's claimed it for The Schwager Effect yet?
At least Streisand just made herself look foolish. This woman appears to be trying to destroy herself.
Thankyou GoDaddy. "Footgun" is right.
Or would be, if it were an optical telescope...
Crap. I first heard of the SKA when it was still in the "wouldn't it be neat" stage, and I was sure it was supposed to be an optical setup. That makes me wonder why they're doing it. They've had planetwide radio interferometry for decades. Must be a resolution thing?
You can't slingshot unless you have three bodies.
Pardon? How about we think of it as Earth falling into the Sun's gravity well far enough to be accelerated but not far enough to be captured. What happens next? I'd guess Earth gets flung off into the Oort cloud. That sounds like a two body slingshot effect to me.
Each country gets a one-half square kilometer array, obviously.
... Which makes it an optical interferometer the size of half the planet. Cool.
If it were me, I would just use the tractor beam and pull it into the hangar.
We haven't invented tractor beams yet and they don't have a hangar. Any other bright ideas, captain? No, we can't even go to warp to get any, and the Vulcans are not watching.
As for SpaceX & Dragon && ISS, seriously cool. Keep it up. :-) I for one am cheering for you.
I don't understand what you guys are complaining about. There is at least one, and often several, well-funded free alternative for most of Microsoft's hit products.
To be fair, I don't know what you're complaining about. From what I read, most of the bitching about IP maximalists I see is wrt MPAA and Hollywood's offerings, not software.
And for the record, I just noticed I didn't have [*]office installed here, but as of 15 minutes ago, now I do.
[*]Open. LibreOffice appears to be broken in Debian squeeze, drat. It works fine on my testing box.
Slashdot seems full of anti-Slashdot shills who believe everyone there has an agenda, and believe no one there has any sense of objectivity.
FTFY.
Gahd, I despise knee-jerk prophets and shallow as a pane of glass philosophizers. If you have to think, think deeper.
As the article says, there are now dedicated companies who chase copyright issues.
Yes, and doesn't that strike you as just plain sick?
It's interesting how many of these requests are received, but I couldn't easily find out how many of them were declined. Does anyone have a link to this information?
I did not RTFA, but I did read this, which seemed a good overall review of the features. It looks like a very nice thing for Google to put out.
That said, I'll stick with Ixquick, thanks.
Most scientists (actual scientists, like me) can't find an actual utilitarian reason to do what they're doing at the moment, apart from "Maybe something unexpectedly useful will turn up."
Define "actual scientist." Papers published in journals? Which ones? Which discipline? Particle physics, astronomy, biology? Do you consider Archimedes an actual scentist? What're his credentials? What's he published? I can go on and on listing "actual scientists" from history who were considered little more than charlatans by their contemporaries.
The chutzpah in here is deafening.
Back on topic, wouldn't it be nice to have a "Hubble" in a stationary mount on the other side of the moon? Wouldn't it be nice if we found tons of water at the bottom of a few craters up there? Wouldn't it be nice if it was a stepping stone to that vision Riker had in Startrek First Contact, when the whole moon was populated and cities up there shone down on us?
Perhaps you're lacking vision. Just a thought.
Overall i'd say the evidence points towards advertising having an effect.
I agree. It tends to make me not want to watch any ads. I think I've bought about five universal remotes in the past decade due to worn out mute buttons. Make advertising less obnoxious, and maybe people wouldn't mind watching it. Do shit like in this article, and watch your subscriber base tank.
No, there is no other solution. We're not stupid, and we can go elsewhere.
A thing is illegal when the government says it is, and illegal when the government says it is.
Is that hyperbole? Your legal system is supposed to define those. If it's not, then you've accepted that your government is utterly out of your control and the only moral and ethical action left to you is to lock and load. Vive la revolution.
I hope you can limit it to D.C.