Hmm. You offer an example of someone claiming 'natural property rights' when he arguably does not deserve them. This does provide an example which indicates that there are not always undisputed natural property rights. One counterexample does not, however, prove the non-existence of natural property rights.
Imagine the following variation. A group of sailors is shipwrecked. One is uninjured, the others are hurt. The uninjured fellow tends their wounds, and then collects and shares fruit. After they are well, the uninjured fellow returns to the forest to gather more fruit. However, the now-able-bodied recoverees do not also go and collect fruit. They wait for the first fellow to return, and then they eat the fruit that he has collected.
Property rights are natural in a stable situation.
Claiming territory can be an act of aggression against the common welfare.
Delineating agreed upon territory can provide a method whereby the common welfare can be protected against agression. The common welfare is also not a natural state. For welfare to truly be common, and not to impose unfairly on one member of society or another, a delicate balance must be maintained.
In any event, hackers (or more correctly crackers) often do damage. The damage is rarely (but occassionally) physical, but damage is done. In such cases, Mitnik being the most famous, they must be incarcerated. By the way, Mitnik did not just come up with clever hacks. He lied to people and manipulated them to get their passwords. Felons are prohibited from owning guns, despite the fact that arms rights are specifically protected by the Constitution. People who commit crimes due to alcohol abuse are routinely prohibited from drinking for the duration of their sentence. Putting hackers in jail, and telling them they can't use personal computers (meaning general purpose computers, not calculators and the like) is hardly cruel or unusual punishment.
IF the Jetta is big enough, go for the TDI. Its a turbo-diesel, which does have higher sulfur emissions in PPM, but since it gets more than 40 MPG, number of millions lower, so the number of parts is not as big a deal.
Its pretty suprising the gas mileage that the CRV & RAV-4 get, too. If you get the 2wd versions, they get high-20s, IIRC.
I've always wanted to start a business designing active-management for passive-solar type housing. Lots of sensors optimizing fan usage in crawl spaces, automatically extending shades over the windows to minimize solar heating in the summer, maximize insulation in the winter, and control passive heating/cooling much better in the spring/fall. It always pissed me off that the cars in the garage were dumping heat into the house in summer, and there wasn't a good way to vent it in my old house.
Re:If Ars Technica is so concerned about usability
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A Better Finder?
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Well... Not really. The guy might not be 100% right, but he's definitely not 100% false. The electron gun paints every single pixel on the screen. When a pixel is white, the electron gun (cathode ray, for the vocablularily strict) hits them at full power on all phosfors. For a black pixel, it hits it at minimum power on all phosfors. However, even a black screen emits light. If you have a computer room that's dark enough, you can cover up all the LEDs and so forth, set the screen to be totally black (how you do this on different OSes will vary). Even if your entire screen is 000000, you'll still be able to see it in a dark room. The reason? Its emitting light because the phosfors are getting hit by the electron gun at minimum power.
I know for TVs there are varying levels of black. Better TVs will allow for their black to be more black than cheap TVs (How much more black could it be? The answer is none... more black).
Anyway, my point is that the electron gun does paint every pixel at every screen pass, even the black ones. Its just at its minimum power setting for the black.
Personally, I like Brin's (or was it Pournelle's?) idea to increase the albedo of earth by painting all the rooves and roads white.
Actually, one of the big causes of the 'urban heat island' effect - which NASA or NOAA found was generating significant local variations in weather patterns - was caused by asphalt used in roads and roofs. Asphalt, being black, absorbs solar radiation effectively in the day, and re-radiates it effectively at night. One recomendation on reducing this effect was to pave roads with concrete, which has a much higher albedo, and which retains much less solar heat. I don't know if this is a national trend, but most road construction in the north Dallas/Richardson/Plano area is all concrete, which is also longer lasting. My guess is that they made that decision on economic grounds, not environmental, especially since this trend probably pre-dated the heat-island research by at least 15 years, but this does show that its workable, and that metro Atlanta (identified as the most effective heat-island studied) would probably benefit from cutting back on its use of asphalt.
As opposed to the current regime, which gives France and Russia cheap and easy access to its oil fields?
Most Gulf oil goes to Europe and Asia. It always has. Our oil mostly comes from other sources. And if we wanted to free up the oil supply, all we had to do was ease the embargo on Iraq.
Its important to remember that the first Gulf war started in August 1990, not January 1991. Iraq invaded and conquered Kuwait in order to take control over thier oil reserves. That's also why Iraq tried to invade Iran in the 1980s. Hussein wants to control oil. So yeah, the first Gulf war was about oil, because that's what Hussein intends to use to build an empire.
Another good way to learn math, math symbols, etc. is to take a couple of physics courses. Math can be kind of abstract, but since physics builds upon itself, and always has a physical analog for the little symbols, it can give you a good handle on basic calculus & other mathematical principles. I never got good grades in math classes till I got through two semesters of physics in college.
which stated that, the US tricked Iraq into attacking Kuwait in 1990, claiming "There are no defences in Kuwait".
Wow, that really is a stretch. Iraq, despite having a great deal of national income from oil revenue, ran up massive debts during the Iran-Iraq war. Their greatest source of extra funding during that time was loans from the other rich Arab countries (remember that Iran is not an Arab country, but instead a Persian country, so it was easy for the other Arabs to take Iraq's side). Chief among these creditors was Kuwait. Upon the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Kuwait began agitating for Iraq to begin repaying those debts. This pretty much soured relations between Iraq and Kuwait, and Saddam, being the model of restraint that he is, decided that it was simpler to take Kuwait and make it an Iraqi province than to pay back the loans. The fact that he could then control the single larges oil supply in the world (Iraqi reserves + Kuwaiti reserves > Saudi reserves) was just icing on that cake.
Its pretty easy to keep following a train of responsibility until you get to a villain that suits you. The US gets a lot of crap that way, although most of our current entanglements we could easily blame on France and Great Britain and their respective colonial influences (almost all of the Middle East, Pakistan/India, and Vietnam are all directly attributable to either France or Great Britain, and what wasn't associated with those two was touched by Russia and China during the Cold War).
This is the same tactic being used by the MPAA/RIAA/BSA and the drug-war/abolition movements to blame all terrorism on counterfeiters and casual pot smokers. Its all bogus. I want to blame all terrorism on people who drive SUVs, and there are good arguments to support that theory. But to discount all the other myriad funding methods they have is just political opportunism. As of course, is asserting that 'All instability in the word is the US.'
The US government funded Taliban and Saddam a couple of decades ago
Err, we never funded the Taliban. (Nor, actually when you track down what info is available, did we directly fund or train bin Laden, I was suprised to find. He didn't really deal much with the CIA types, but was bankrolling his own operations). The guys that would form the Taliban were hanging out down in the 'Islamic schools' down in Pakistan while the Mujahedeen were doing all the fighting. The remnants of the Mujahedeen were then pushed back into the northern corner of Afghanistan by the Taliban, who were supported not by America, but by Pakistan. The Mujahedeen then started calling themselves the Northern Alliance (they'd also been fighting amongst themselves until the Taliban came to town) and after 9/11 we started supporting them.
Of course, it is true that the US supported Hussein in the early 1980s, although to a lesser extent than France and the USSR did. We then dropped Iraq like a hot potato once he started nerve gassing his own cities. This was the motivation behind the Iraqi attack on the USS Stark during the re-flagging operation in the late '80s. (For those who don't recall, Iraqi jets 'mistakenly' fired two French-made Exocet missiles at the American frigate USS Stark, which was only saved from sinking by one of the missiles failing to detonate.) The French and Russians did not end their support so quickly, probably because of their lucrative oil contracts with Iraq, which they maintain to this day.
The current article (P2P pirates funding networks) is an example of how effectively the people in power can mask their own agendas.
Not to defend the MPAA or Microsoft, but they are not actually claiming that P2P piracy is funding terrorism, but that DVD & CD counterfeiting is what's funding terrorism.
This is not such an indefensible position as trying to claim that using Kazaa funds terrorists, and this kind of for-profit counterfieting (I guess I'll just spell that every way, and figure that one will be right) is, in fact, theft. They're selling these DVDs and taking the money for themselves, rather than paying the folks who actually made the works in question. Counterfeiting != P2P. Now don't imagine for a minute that they're going to take the time to point this out to Senator Disney (D-SC) and company. If they can get it in Congress's collective head that piracy == terrorism, and P2P == piracy, they will, but they're letting the political types make that leap of fallacy themselves.
For the terrestrial planets (IE rocky ones like Earth, being Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury, and to some extent, the Moon) almost all the heat at the core is due to methods 1 and 2 above.
The core heated up through the release of gravitational potential. In layman's terms, all the meteors and gas that fell into the gravity well that formed the earth picked up a lot of energy falling that far. When they impacted, that energy was converted to heat, with the mechanism for that conversion being friction. This imparted most of the energy to the earth. At this point, the earth was largely molten, so the lighter materials floated to the surface, concentrating very light materials in the crust, denser rocks in the mantle, and the very dense iron and nickel sank to the center, forming the core. This also released energy.
method 3, contraction, would be minimal in a terrestrial planet such as Mars. This is much more of an issue for a gas giant.
method 4, radioactive decay, is thought to be fairly important in preserving the original heat of the earth. It is believed that most of the radiogenic isotopes in the earth were concentrated in the crust during differentiation. Although the atoms of radiogenic elements are themselves massive, most of their compounds are of similar density to other crustal material. This keeps the thermal gradient in the crust much higher than it would be due to conduction of heat from the mantle alone. However, since most of this heat is released within 25 to 50 miles of the earth's surface, this is not heating the core significantly, but it does slow down the release of energy.
There is one other source of heat in the core. The core was originally 100% liquid. Over time, however, the molten metal at the center has begun to freeze, becoming a solid mixture of iron and nickel. This solid core is denser than the surrounding liquid, meaning that more gravitational energy is released. Perhaps more importantly, for those of us who remember our high-school chemistry, there is a certain amount of heat released when a liquid freezes to form a solid, the 'latent heat of fusion'.
For the Earth/Moon system and the moons of the large gas giants, there is also heating from tidal stress. This is the engine driving the massive vulcanism on Jupiter's innermost large moon, Io. Since Mars' two natural satelites, Phobos and Deimos, are just moderately large asteroids, they are not nearly massive enough to create any significant tidal force on Mars.
Well, what I buy most from Amazon nowadays is DVDs. What they'll learn from me is that DVDs sell when they're 14.99 or lower. 14.99 for movies I really want, and 9.99 to 12.99 for movies I care less about. I've been jonesing for Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, Rushmore, and The Royal Tannenbaums for a while. Everytime I go there I check my wish list to see if they've dropped the price. So far they haven't, so I haven't bought 'em. If I get that random lower-priced DVD they may start noticing that I'm infinitely more likely to buy cheap DVDs than expensive DVDs.
If there are enough people shopping for good prices on DVDs then this will actually be a good force driving DVD prices down.
Wonder if in 12 years (when the probe is supposed to reach Pluto) the public will be as fascinated with the pictures coming back as much as with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft.
Well, the public was fascinated by Pioneer way back in the day, then they were fascinated by Voyager in the 80s and then in the '90s we were fascinated by Sojourner/Pathfinder, so yeah, we probably will be fascinated by PFF/PKE/whatever they're calling this thing right now. There's always a large portion of the populace that thinks space pictures are cool. Especially kids and nerds, and those will always be a large segment of the populace.
Yeah, there are a LOT of places around Los Alamos that you really don't want to break into. You gotta remember, they did a lot of things with dangerous materials between 1940 and 1960. That was before people really thought that just dumping stuff in a hole might not be enough. There are quite a few places where you want to wear gloves, plastic baggies over your shoes, and a filter mask. Admittedly, AFAIK they're all behind fences, but they may not all be guarded. Never jump a fence at LANL. You don't want alpha-emitters in your bloodstream.
That's as may be, but they're the point of all this. Your job as IT guy is not to create a computer system that you can use. It's to create a system for those morons to use. If you create a system that morons can't use, you've failed.
The bit about the align-center command is a good case in point. While some, perhaps most, people learn and understand based on graphical icons, there are people who do not learn that way. There's still a lot of work to be done on user interface design. One of my biggest beefs was with some one of the cheap graphics/presentation packages, probably just PowerPoint. With the 2000 upgrade, for no reason that I can figure out, they moved a good portion of the drawing tools down to the bottom of the window. Since I don't use that software too often, it took me a while to find it, because I was used to the paradigm of all tools on the top toolbars, and didn't look at the bottom of the window for anything but status info. These are the kind of things that IT people need to understand will cause problems. If a month goes by between the upgrade and the first use, people won't even remember that there's been a change, and so when they can't find what they're looking for where they expect it, they get confused.
I can handle that, but then again, I'm a geophysicist. I should have better spatial and technology awareness than the average secretary. I've used vi since first getting access to a Sun box in grad school. I've programed on everything from C-64 to VAX to Solaris to Wintel. I'm not intimidated by FDISK or bios updates. Nonetheless, I run into many of the same problems regular users do.
RTFM and STFW only works when TFM actually exists, or is in any way accurate. Many's the time that I've found out that what I'm looking for just isn't documented well.
One of the biggest problems with 'Category 3' upgrades is that software providers immediately drop all support for previous versions. This means that you can't avoid doing the upgrade. Even if you decide that the disruption of an upgrade to the newest version of a given software package isn't justified by its new features (especially since you've just gotten all the patches that made your current version stop crashing), you will eventually have to buy a new machine. You'll have to buy new software to run on it. Since M$ doesn't sell Office 2000 anymore, you have to get Office XP. If the person on that machine is going to be able to deal with everyone around him, they all have to be upgraded now.
I'd really like to see a slowdown of the version cycle, with the intervening time spent making the old version more stable, and a sales structure (assuming OSS doesn't take over) that makes it painless to get machines that will remain compatible with machines around it.
Interestingly, a lot of technical software is pretty good about maintaining integrity. I now work with a lot of GIS software and image processing software (raster GIS, not general photo processing), and version upgrades are almost always painless. New features are generally useful, and rarely do I find I miss an old feature. Would that M$ could learn that lesson.
The Consensus around the office is that the Beer Baron ep is the finest of the Simpsons. It features Bart and Homer working together, mayhem, and the best damn pet shop in town.
Issues for the Internet Society is an editorial bit associated with this survey, which also deals with the battle over copyright extension and also with piracy. Practical upshot. Unlimited file swapping bad. Copyright limitations (on copyright holders, not consumers, ie copyright expires after 14 years, renewable once) good.
There is an actual DNS/email equivalent of/dev/null. Its example.com. I always give email addresses that are something along the lines of 'huggybear@example.com'. Most marketroids aren't going to know that example.com is a reserved name in DNS that is used for - you guessed it - examples in text books, and that no real 'example.com' domain name will ever be issued. That way you never have to worry about accidentally entering some poor bastard's actual email address and signing him up for all manner of evil spam.
I'd always wondered why Brits had never heard of Nova. They'd be talking about what crap US television was, and I'd mention that NOVA was one of the most excellent science shows known to man (or at least Americans). I'd get a blank stare. They'd never heard of it. Of course, that makes sense if Horizon and Nova are sharing content. Nova has really done well when they've done joint ventures with PBS's other excellent documentary show, Frontline, which handles political and news topics in much the same manner as Nova. They did a joint piece on the science and politics of the global warming debate which really did an excellent job of presenting all the evidence for global warming, the limitations on that evidence, and who was active in the industry and NGO interest groups who were lobbying for different agendas.
I live in the boonies in Minnesota. Small town schools seem to do fine for the most part...
Unfortunately this is not universally true. I'm from a small town in South Carolina, and our rural schools are in pretty awful shape. I'd have a lot more use for the AFT and the NEA (American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO affiliated teachers' union, and the National Education Association) if they didn't support Bill Clinton's decision to put former SC governor Dick Riley in charge of the Dept. of Education. Riley's primary focus as governor was to improve education in SC. Unfortunately his policies left us ranked 51st in the nation, down from 49th. This is not the kind of results I want repeated nationwide.
Regarding the original thread comment, there have been numerous alternatives put forward by those interested in educational reform. I am less of a fan of vouchers than I am of relatively unrestricted charter schools. This addresses objections of some civil libertarians to providing government money to religious schools. However, the AFT and NEA have consistently opposed any charter system. Their chorus is 'it might be worse than public school education'. However, If you believe, as most Americans do, that American schools are not performing to expectations, there needs to be change, and if the AFT and NEA can't come up with their own proposals, then they need to stop shooting down ours.
Here in the Dallas metroplex there are people trying to illegally get into the rather terrible Dallas Independent School District because they're in school districts that are even worse. There's a clear demand for school choice, especially in failing districts. Yet apart from whinging that "people [are] bashing the education system without offering any constructive criticism," the AFT & NEA rarely offer real reform. If the teachers aren't the problem, then the current method of administering schools is the next likely candidate. So abolish the geographically isolated school district and make sure that any given location is served by at least two schools with totally separate administrative systems, so that everyone has the choice that the rich/upper middle class already have. Remember, school choice is a reality for those who can afford to move to better school districts or send their children to private schools.
One of the most damning indictments of the modern educational establishment is one of my coworkers' family. He has a much younger brother who's in 4th grade. His mother is a teacher. She is vehemently opposed to school choice/vouchers/charter schools. She feels they will destroy public education. She sends her fourth grade son to private schools because she has no confidence in her own school district's ability to teach her son. 'School choice for my son, but not for the plebes!' When a teacher, who uses private schools, says that the poor students in her school district shouldn't be allowed to leave the public school system and go to the same private school she uses for her family, I have trouble finding a rational explanation for that behavior. To my mind it smacks of a patronizing attitude at best, and racism at worst.
Admittedly I find Ben Stein pretty funny, and usually fairly well-spoken and intelligent, but this little screed was too whiny for my taste. This smacked way too much of the 'America is going to hell in a handbasket, and my political enemies are to blame' racket that has never held much sway with me. Saying all that with clear concise reasons why its going to hell in a handbasket (examples of initiatives that have been blocked by the teachers' unions and so forth) is OK.
I still don't think V is the worst of the lot. It was bad, don't get me wrong. It was silly and stupid. But Insurrection was friggin insulting. Seriously. They were so worried we wouldn't know who was bad and who was good that they had to cover the villains in pustulous make-up. Add to that un-godly predictable plot elements, including a transporter save, a cave-in that traps some but hurts none, and a cute-kid's-cute-pet-escapes-at-the-wrong-time gag that's so tired even Boxey and Moffet would cringe to watch it (Battlestar Galactica reference for the younger readers).
Add to that the fact that in the climactic scene they save Picard from his fistfight with the bad-guy using the transporter as the ship they're on explodes around them. Picard is saved, the bad guy dies. This is the Federation, where there is no death penalty, etcetera, but they only bother to save Picard from the exploding ship, and the bad-guy can burn in hell. Let me reiterate that - they could have saved a sentient being's life by simply transporting two people rather than just one, and they chose to leave him to die. Talk about ceding the moral high-ground.
Admittedly, the Data wig-out scene was cool. But so was the bit where Kirk asks God what he needs with a starship.
All in all, I give StarTrek:Insurrection my most vehement one-finger ever
... look at Canada and Australia. We're still bastard colonies of Great Britain, aren't we ? Not everybody has to go through a bloody battle to become independent.
The behavior of Great Britain after the American Revolution is not evidence that the revolution was in some way redundant. Who's to say that just because Britain granted Canadian independence after losing a large group of colonies to revolution, that they would still have done so without the lessons learned after the American Revolution. Certainly change can be possible without resort to violence, but not every situation can be resolved peaceably.
Is there any legislation in the States that would prohibit people from using guns if they prove negligent in their care or irresponsible in their use?
Yes, there is. There are numerous gun control laws in the US, even states with relatively liberal laws (liberal with a little 'l', meaning they allow a great deal of gun freedom). Violation of most such laws are felonies. Convicted felons are typically barred from gun ownership, hence the 'instant background check'. Most cities have laws against unlawful discharge of a weapon.
That said, no you can't lose your license on a Federal level, becuase no such license exists. Typically rifles and shotguns, which are rarely used in homicides (relative to handguns), are totally unlicensed (although you still have to pass the background check to purchase them). As far as handgun licensing, each state typically handles that locally, and may indeed provide for revocation of the license upon proof of negligence, although there are hardly gun-storage police running about searching for unlocked gun-cabinets.
A further note on the wording of The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." It should be noted that the militia clause is explanatory, not active, in that sentence. However, if that clause is to be used as justification for limiting weapons not related to militia use, then it is clear that the weapon ownership which shall not be infringed are military weapons. Therefore, hunting rifles and handguns - having no real military value - may be regulated or banned, but assault rifles, which are the modern military infantry weapon, are sacrosanct. It doesn't say "The capability to blow intruders to Kingdom Come, being necessary to the security of a free state . .." All these arguments that a given gun 'doesn't have any legitimate sporting use' have to be assuming that the militia clause does not have any legal weight. If the militia clause means anything, it means that anything but military weaponry can be banned.
Yeah, Nirgal and Sax may have still been alive - I don't remember - but they weren't doing anything interesting.
Red and Green Mars should be read purely for their descriptions of terraforming, although you could get almost as much info from Robert Zubrin's non-fiction The Case for Mars which, despite being non-fiction, is as entertaining a read as the RGB Mars stuff, and don't have all the tedious character 'development' (which I agree didn't really give insight into the characters).
It's good to distinguish apples and oranges, and then point out some of the best apples and oranges around.
Off the top of my head, and having read a number of the other posts on this article (and boy-howdy did this one bring out the opinions from everybody), Here's my tentative list of major SF genre, and some classic examples that I have read from each (I'm more qualified in 'hard SF' than most of the other categories). I'm also going to try and keep my opinions to 'Universes' in which there are more than one work.
Major SF-related Categories:
TV/Movies (excluding adaptations from books) Babylon 5
FantasyMiddle Earth (Lord of the Rings, et al) J.R.R. Tolkien
Classic Hard SFRobots/Galactic Empire/Foundation by Azimov
Horror the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft
Contemporary Hard SF the 'Uplift Universe' (Startide Rising/The Uplift War/Brightness Reef) by David Brin
"Soft" SF/Space OperaDune Frank Herbert
My Favorite OverallHyperion/Endymion by Dan Simmons
These may not be universally regarded as 'The Best' but all are worthy of note.
'World-building' is one of the most important elements of Science Fiction. It is arguably more important than 'setting' in more standard literature, since experience can fill in more gaps in traditional literature - historical fiction being the exception. There are a couple of outstanding examples of world-building that I've run across in single novels which were never made into a 'franchise universe' where any number of novels are set. Two shining works along these lines are Way Station by Clifford Simak (who has the best aliens in SF, IMHO) and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, who's 'Esper Guild' inspired Babylon 5's Psi-Corps (Hence Walter Koenig's character being named "Alfred Bester" in an intentional homage).
I suppose I should have an honorable mention category (although I will leave out obvious movie/TV franchises). Larry Niven's 'Tales of Known Space', William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' are good examples with broad appeal.
A note on the 'My Personal Favorite' entry. This quartet, composed of Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion touches on most of the major elements of modern science fiction, from 'hard SF' and 'cyberpunk', to horror-fiction, a la Alien. This series is best described by Peter Falk's monologue from The Princess Bride with monsters, wars on a galactic scale, intrigue, some good dime-novel theology, and even environmentalist themes, while having some really excellent hard SF and being extremely well-written. The universe which spans three major cultures, one of which is a community of AIs, is very rich, with a history spanning centuries, and hundreds of unique worlds. I highly recomend it.
Unfortunately LeGuin takes the realism a bit to far sometimes. I read The Dispossessed as part of a SF Lit class at college. It's a story about two planets in the same planetary system (one might be a moon of the other or some such, I don't recall) where one is an American-style democro-capitolist society, and the other (where most of the story is set) is a hyper-collective society where the concept of ownership has been stamped out to such an extent that When a person touches a hot stove he'd exclaim, "The hand hurts!" rather than, "My hand hurts!" This is an excellent big of exploratory fiction, except that the story becomes dreadfully dull to read. A good universe (and this world is extremely well-thought-out) is an important element, but ultimately the story itself must be compelling.
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Hmm. You offer an example of someone claiming 'natural property rights' when he arguably does not deserve them. This does provide an example which indicates that there are not always undisputed natural property rights. One counterexample does not, however, prove the non-existence of natural property rights.
Imagine the following variation. A group of sailors is shipwrecked. One is uninjured, the others are hurt. The uninjured fellow tends their wounds, and then collects and shares fruit. After they are well, the uninjured fellow returns to the forest to gather more fruit. However, the now-able-bodied recoverees do not also go and collect fruit. They wait for the first fellow to return, and then they eat the fruit that he has collected.
Property rights are natural in a stable situation.
Claiming territory can be an act of aggression against the common welfare.
Delineating agreed upon territory can provide a method whereby the common welfare can be protected against agression. The common welfare is also not a natural state. For welfare to truly be common, and not to impose unfairly on one member of society or another, a delicate balance must be maintained.
In any event, hackers (or more correctly crackers) often do damage. The damage is rarely (but occassionally) physical, but damage is done. In such cases, Mitnik being the most famous, they must be incarcerated. By the way, Mitnik did not just come up with clever hacks. He lied to people and manipulated them to get their passwords. Felons are prohibited from owning guns, despite the fact that arms rights are specifically protected by the Constitution. People who commit crimes due to alcohol abuse are routinely prohibited from drinking for the duration of their sentence. Putting hackers in jail, and telling them they can't use personal computers (meaning general purpose computers, not calculators and the like) is hardly cruel or unusual punishment.
IF the Jetta is big enough, go for the TDI. Its a turbo-diesel, which does have higher sulfur emissions in PPM, but since it gets more than 40 MPG, number of millions lower, so the number of parts is not as big a deal.
Its pretty suprising the gas mileage that the CRV & RAV-4 get, too. If you get the 2wd versions, they get high-20s, IIRC.
I've always wanted to start a business designing active-management for passive-solar type housing. Lots of sensors optimizing fan usage in crawl spaces, automatically extending shades over the windows to minimize solar heating in the summer, maximize insulation in the winter, and control passive heating/cooling much better in the spring/fall. It always pissed me off that the cars in the garage were dumping heat into the house in summer, and there wasn't a good way to vent it in my old house.
Well... Not really. The guy might not be 100% right, but he's definitely not 100% false. The electron gun paints every single pixel on the screen. When a pixel is white, the electron gun (cathode ray, for the vocablularily strict) hits them at full power on all phosfors. For a black pixel, it hits it at minimum power on all phosfors. However, even a black screen emits light. If you have a computer room that's dark enough, you can cover up all the LEDs and so forth, set the screen to be totally black (how you do this on different OSes will vary). Even if your entire screen is 000000, you'll still be able to see it in a dark room. The reason? Its emitting light because the phosfors are getting hit by the electron gun at minimum power.
I know for TVs there are varying levels of black. Better TVs will allow for their black to be more black than cheap TVs (How much more black could it be? The answer is none... more black).
Anyway, my point is that the electron gun does paint every pixel at every screen pass, even the black ones. Its just at its minimum power setting for the black.
Charging people to see Men In Black II was a serious crime. Talk about WMD. The shaking didn't go away for months!
Personally, I like Brin's (or was it Pournelle's?) idea to increase the albedo of earth by painting all the rooves and roads white.
Actually, one of the big causes of the 'urban heat island' effect - which NASA or NOAA found was generating significant local variations in weather patterns - was caused by asphalt used in roads and roofs. Asphalt, being black, absorbs solar radiation effectively in the day, and re-radiates it effectively at night. One recomendation on reducing this effect was to pave roads with concrete, which has a much higher albedo, and which retains much less solar heat. I don't know if this is a national trend, but most road construction in the north Dallas/Richardson/Plano area is all concrete, which is also longer lasting. My guess is that they made that decision on economic grounds, not environmental, especially since this trend probably pre-dated the heat-island research by at least 15 years, but this does show that its workable, and that metro Atlanta (identified as the most effective heat-island studied) would probably benefit from cutting back on its use of asphalt.
As opposed to the current regime, which gives France and Russia cheap and easy access to its oil fields?
Most Gulf oil goes to Europe and Asia. It always has. Our oil mostly comes from other sources. And if we wanted to free up the oil supply, all we had to do was ease the embargo on Iraq.
Its important to remember that the first Gulf war started in August 1990, not January 1991. Iraq invaded and conquered Kuwait in order to take control over thier oil reserves. That's also why Iraq tried to invade Iran in the 1980s. Hussein wants to control oil. So yeah, the first Gulf war was about oil, because that's what Hussein intends to use to build an empire.
Another good way to learn math, math symbols, etc. is to take a couple of physics courses. Math can be kind of abstract, but since physics builds upon itself, and always has a physical analog for the little symbols, it can give you a good handle on basic calculus & other mathematical principles. I never got good grades in math classes till I got through two semesters of physics in college.
which stated that, the US tricked Iraq into attacking Kuwait in 1990, claiming "There are no defences in Kuwait".
Wow, that really is a stretch. Iraq, despite having a great deal of national income from oil revenue, ran up massive debts during the Iran-Iraq war. Their greatest source of extra funding during that time was loans from the other rich Arab countries (remember that Iran is not an Arab country, but instead a Persian country, so it was easy for the other Arabs to take Iraq's side). Chief among these creditors was Kuwait. Upon the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Kuwait began agitating for Iraq to begin repaying those debts. This pretty much soured relations between Iraq and Kuwait, and Saddam, being the model of restraint that he is, decided that it was simpler to take Kuwait and make it an Iraqi province than to pay back the loans. The fact that he could then control the single larges oil supply in the world (Iraqi reserves + Kuwaiti reserves > Saudi reserves) was just icing on that cake.
Its pretty easy to keep following a train of responsibility until you get to a villain that suits you. The US gets a lot of crap that way, although most of our current entanglements we could easily blame on France and Great Britain and their respective colonial influences (almost all of the Middle East, Pakistan/India, and Vietnam are all directly attributable to either France or Great Britain, and what wasn't associated with those two was touched by Russia and China during the Cold War).
This is the same tactic being used by the MPAA/RIAA/BSA and the drug-war/abolition movements to blame all terrorism on counterfeiters and casual pot smokers. Its all bogus. I want to blame all terrorism on people who drive SUVs, and there are good arguments to support that theory. But to discount all the other myriad funding methods they have is just political opportunism. As of course, is asserting that 'All instability in the word is the US.'
The US government funded Taliban and Saddam a couple of decades ago
Err, we never funded the Taliban. (Nor, actually when you track down what info is available, did we directly fund or train bin Laden, I was suprised to find. He didn't really deal much with the CIA types, but was bankrolling his own operations). The guys that would form the Taliban were hanging out down in the 'Islamic schools' down in Pakistan while the Mujahedeen were doing all the fighting. The remnants of the Mujahedeen were then pushed back into the northern corner of Afghanistan by the Taliban, who were supported not by America, but by Pakistan. The Mujahedeen then started calling themselves the Northern Alliance (they'd also been fighting amongst themselves until the Taliban came to town) and after 9/11 we started supporting them.
Of course, it is true that the US supported Hussein in the early 1980s, although to a lesser extent than France and the USSR did. We then dropped Iraq like a hot potato once he started nerve gassing his own cities. This was the motivation behind the Iraqi attack on the USS Stark during the re-flagging operation in the late '80s. (For those who don't recall, Iraqi jets 'mistakenly' fired two French-made Exocet missiles at the American frigate USS Stark, which was only saved from sinking by one of the missiles failing to detonate.) The French and Russians did not end their support so quickly, probably because of their lucrative oil contracts with Iraq, which they maintain to this day.
The current article (P2P pirates funding networks) is an example of how effectively the people in power can mask their own agendas.
Not to defend the MPAA or Microsoft, but they are not actually claiming that P2P piracy is funding terrorism, but that DVD & CD counterfeiting is what's funding terrorism.
This is not such an indefensible position as trying to claim that using Kazaa funds terrorists, and this kind of for-profit counterfieting (I guess I'll just spell that every way, and figure that one will be right) is, in fact, theft. They're selling these DVDs and taking the money for themselves, rather than paying the folks who actually made the works in question. Counterfeiting != P2P. Now don't imagine for a minute that they're going to take the time to point this out to Senator Disney (D-SC) and company. If they can get it in Congress's collective head that piracy == terrorism, and P2P == piracy, they will, but they're letting the political types make that leap of fallacy themselves.
For the terrestrial planets (IE rocky ones like Earth, being Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury, and to some extent, the Moon) almost all the heat at the core is due to methods 1 and 2 above.
The core heated up through the release of gravitational potential. In layman's terms, all the meteors and gas that fell into the gravity well that formed the earth picked up a lot of energy falling that far. When they impacted, that energy was converted to heat, with the mechanism for that conversion being friction. This imparted most of the energy to the earth. At this point, the earth was largely molten, so the lighter materials floated to the surface, concentrating very light materials in the crust, denser rocks in the mantle, and the very dense iron and nickel sank to the center, forming the core. This also released energy.
method 3, contraction, would be minimal in a terrestrial planet such as Mars. This is much more of an issue for a gas giant.
method 4, radioactive decay, is thought to be fairly important in preserving the original heat of the earth. It is believed that most of the radiogenic isotopes in the earth were concentrated in the crust during differentiation. Although the atoms of radiogenic elements are themselves massive, most of their compounds are of similar density to other crustal material. This keeps the thermal gradient in the crust much higher than it would be due to conduction of heat from the mantle alone. However, since most of this heat is released within 25 to 50 miles of the earth's surface, this is not heating the core significantly, but it does slow down the release of energy.
There is one other source of heat in the core. The core was originally 100% liquid. Over time, however, the molten metal at the center has begun to freeze, becoming a solid mixture of iron and nickel. This solid core is denser than the surrounding liquid, meaning that more gravitational energy is released. Perhaps more importantly, for those of us who remember our high-school chemistry, there is a certain amount of heat released when a liquid freezes to form a solid, the 'latent heat of fusion'.
For the Earth/Moon system and the moons of the large gas giants, there is also heating from tidal stress. This is the engine driving the massive vulcanism on Jupiter's innermost large moon, Io. Since Mars' two natural satelites, Phobos and Deimos, are just moderately large asteroids, they are not nearly massive enough to create any significant tidal force on Mars.
Well, what I buy most from Amazon nowadays is DVDs. What they'll learn from me is that DVDs sell when they're 14.99 or lower. 14.99 for movies I really want, and 9.99 to 12.99 for movies I care less about. I've been jonesing for Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, Rushmore, and The Royal Tannenbaums for a while. Everytime I go there I check my wish list to see if they've dropped the price. So far they haven't, so I haven't bought 'em. If I get that random lower-priced DVD they may start noticing that I'm infinitely more likely to buy cheap DVDs than expensive DVDs.
If there are enough people shopping for good prices on DVDs then this will actually be a good force driving DVD prices down.
Wonder if in 12 years (when the probe is supposed to reach Pluto) the public will be as fascinated with the pictures coming back as much as with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft.
Well, the public was fascinated by Pioneer way back in the day, then they were fascinated by Voyager in the 80s and then in the '90s we were fascinated by Sojourner/Pathfinder, so yeah, we probably will be fascinated by PFF/PKE/whatever they're calling this thing right now. There's always a large portion of the populace that thinks space pictures are cool. Especially kids and nerds, and those will always be a large segment of the populace.
Yeah, there are a LOT of places around Los Alamos that you really don't want to break into. You gotta remember, they did a lot of things with dangerous materials between 1940 and 1960. That was before people really thought that just dumping stuff in a hole might not be enough. There are quite a few places where you want to wear gloves, plastic baggies over your shoes, and a filter mask. Admittedly, AFAIK they're all behind fences, but they may not all be guarded. Never jump a fence at LANL. You don't want alpha-emitters in your bloodstream.
To put it simply, USERS ARE MORONS.
That's as may be, but they're the point of all this. Your job as IT guy is not to create a computer system that you can use. It's to create a system for those morons to use. If you create a system that morons can't use, you've failed.
The bit about the align-center command is a good case in point. While some, perhaps most, people learn and understand based on graphical icons, there are people who do not learn that way. There's still a lot of work to be done on user interface design. One of my biggest beefs was with some one of the cheap graphics/presentation packages, probably just PowerPoint. With the 2000 upgrade, for no reason that I can figure out, they moved a good portion of the drawing tools down to the bottom of the window. Since I don't use that software too often, it took me a while to find it, because I was used to the paradigm of all tools on the top toolbars, and didn't look at the bottom of the window for anything but status info. These are the kind of things that IT people need to understand will cause problems. If a month goes by between the upgrade and the first use, people won't even remember that there's been a change, and so when they can't find what they're looking for where they expect it, they get confused.
I can handle that, but then again, I'm a geophysicist. I should have better spatial and technology awareness than the average secretary. I've used vi since first getting access to a Sun box in grad school. I've programed on everything from C-64 to VAX to Solaris to Wintel. I'm not intimidated by FDISK or bios updates. Nonetheless, I run into many of the same problems regular users do.
RTFM and STFW only works when TFM actually exists, or is in any way accurate. Many's the time that I've found out that what I'm looking for just isn't documented well.
One of the biggest problems with 'Category 3' upgrades is that software providers immediately drop all support for previous versions. This means that you can't avoid doing the upgrade. Even if you decide that the disruption of an upgrade to the newest version of a given software package isn't justified by its new features (especially since you've just gotten all the patches that made your current version stop crashing), you will eventually have to buy a new machine. You'll have to buy new software to run on it. Since M$ doesn't sell Office 2000 anymore, you have to get Office XP. If the person on that machine is going to be able to deal with everyone around him, they all have to be upgraded now.
I'd really like to see a slowdown of the version cycle, with the intervening time spent making the old version more stable, and a sales structure (assuming OSS doesn't take over) that makes it painless to get machines that will remain compatible with machines around it.
Interestingly, a lot of technical software is pretty good about maintaining integrity. I now work with a lot of GIS software and image processing software (raster GIS, not general photo processing), and version upgrades are almost always painless. New features are generally useful, and rarely do I find I miss an old feature. Would that M$ could learn that lesson.
The Consensus around the office is that the Beer Baron ep is the finest of the Simpsons. It features Bart and Homer working together, mayhem, and the best damn pet shop in town.
Hmm, So am I retro-hip for using OpenWindows? or just a dork? :-P
Issues for the Internet Society is an editorial bit associated with this survey, which also deals with the battle over copyright extension and also with piracy. Practical upshot. Unlimited file swapping bad. Copyright limitations (on copyright holders, not consumers, ie copyright expires after 14 years, renewable once) good.
There is an actual DNS/email equivalent of /dev/null. Its example.com. I always give email addresses that are something along the lines of 'huggybear@example.com'. Most marketroids aren't going to know that example.com is a reserved name in DNS that is used for - you guessed it - examples in text books, and that no real 'example.com' domain name will ever be issued. That way you never have to worry about accidentally entering some poor bastard's actual email address and signing him up for all manner of evil spam.
I'd always wondered why Brits had never heard of Nova. They'd be talking about what crap US television was, and I'd mention that NOVA was one of the most excellent science shows known to man (or at least Americans). I'd get a blank stare. They'd never heard of it. Of course, that makes sense if Horizon and Nova are sharing content. Nova has really done well when they've done joint ventures with PBS's other excellent documentary show, Frontline, which handles political and news topics in much the same manner as Nova. They did a joint piece on the science and politics of the global warming debate which really did an excellent job of presenting all the evidence for global warming, the limitations on that evidence, and who was active in the industry and NGO interest groups who were lobbying for different agendas.
I live in the boonies in Minnesota. Small town schools seem to do fine for the most part...
Unfortunately this is not universally true. I'm from a small town in South Carolina, and our rural schools are in pretty awful shape. I'd have a lot more use for the AFT and the NEA (American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO affiliated teachers' union, and the National Education Association) if they didn't support Bill Clinton's decision to put former SC governor Dick Riley in charge of the Dept. of Education. Riley's primary focus as governor was to improve education in SC. Unfortunately his policies left us ranked 51st in the nation, down from 49th. This is not the kind of results I want repeated nationwide.
Regarding the original thread comment, there have been numerous alternatives put forward by those interested in educational reform. I am less of a fan of vouchers than I am of relatively unrestricted charter schools. This addresses objections of some civil libertarians to providing government money to religious schools. However, the AFT and NEA have consistently opposed any charter system. Their chorus is 'it might be worse than public school education'. However, If you believe, as most Americans do, that American schools are not performing to expectations, there needs to be change, and if the AFT and NEA can't come up with their own proposals, then they need to stop shooting down ours.
Here in the Dallas metroplex there are people trying to illegally get into the rather terrible Dallas Independent School District because they're in school districts that are even worse. There's a clear demand for school choice, especially in failing districts. Yet apart from whinging that "people [are] bashing the education system without offering any constructive criticism," the AFT & NEA rarely offer real reform. If the teachers aren't the problem, then the current method of administering schools is the next likely candidate. So abolish the geographically isolated school district and make sure that any given location is served by at least two schools with totally separate administrative systems, so that everyone has the choice that the rich/upper middle class already have. Remember, school choice is a reality for those who can afford to move to better school districts or send their children to private schools.
One of the most damning indictments of the modern educational establishment is one of my coworkers' family. He has a much younger brother who's in 4th grade. His mother is a teacher. She is vehemently opposed to school choice/vouchers/charter schools. She feels they will destroy public education. She sends her fourth grade son to private schools because she has no confidence in her own school district's ability to teach her son. 'School choice for my son, but not for the plebes!' When a teacher, who uses private schools, says that the poor students in her school district shouldn't be allowed to leave the public school system and go to the same private school she uses for her family, I have trouble finding a rational explanation for that behavior. To my mind it smacks of a patronizing attitude at best, and racism at worst.
Admittedly I find Ben Stein pretty funny, and usually fairly well-spoken and intelligent, but this little screed was too whiny for my taste. This smacked way too much of the 'America is going to hell in a handbasket, and my political enemies are to blame' racket that has never held much sway with me. Saying all that with clear concise reasons why its going to hell in a handbasket (examples of initiatives that have been blocked by the teachers' unions and so forth) is OK.
I still don't think V is the worst of the lot. It was bad, don't get me wrong. It was silly and stupid. But Insurrection was friggin insulting. Seriously. They were so worried we wouldn't know who was bad and who was good that they had to cover the villains in pustulous make-up. Add to that un-godly predictable plot elements, including a transporter save, a cave-in that traps some but hurts none, and a cute-kid's-cute-pet-escapes-at-the-wrong-time gag that's so tired even Boxey and Moffet would cringe to watch it (Battlestar Galactica reference for the younger readers).
Add to that the fact that in the climactic scene they save Picard from his fistfight with the bad-guy using the transporter as the ship they're on explodes around them. Picard is saved, the bad guy dies. This is the Federation, where there is no death penalty, etcetera, but they only bother to save Picard from the exploding ship, and the bad-guy can burn in hell. Let me reiterate that - they could have saved a sentient being's life by simply transporting two people rather than just one, and they chose to leave him to die. Talk about ceding the moral high-ground.
Admittedly, the Data wig-out scene was cool. But so was the bit where Kirk asks God what he needs with a starship.
All in all, I give StarTrek:Insurrection my most vehement one-finger ever
... look at Canada and Australia. We're still bastard colonies of Great Britain, aren't we ? Not everybody has to go through a bloody battle to become independent.
." All these arguments that a given gun 'doesn't have any legitimate sporting use' have to be assuming that the militia clause does not have any legal weight. If the militia clause means anything, it means that anything but military weaponry can be banned.
The behavior of Great Britain after the American Revolution is not evidence that the revolution was in some way redundant. Who's to say that just because Britain granted Canadian independence after losing a large group of colonies to revolution, that they would still have done so without the lessons learned after the American Revolution. Certainly change can be possible without resort to violence, but not every situation can be resolved peaceably.
Is there any legislation in the States that would prohibit people from using guns if they prove negligent in their care or irresponsible in their use?
Yes, there is. There are numerous gun control laws in the US, even states with relatively liberal laws (liberal with a little 'l', meaning they allow a great deal of gun freedom). Violation of most such laws are felonies. Convicted felons are typically barred from gun ownership, hence the 'instant background check'. Most cities have laws against unlawful discharge of a weapon.
That said, no you can't lose your license on a Federal level, becuase no such license exists. Typically rifles and shotguns, which are rarely used in homicides (relative to handguns), are totally unlicensed (although you still have to pass the background check to purchase them). As far as handgun licensing, each state typically handles that locally, and may indeed provide for revocation of the license upon proof of negligence, although there are hardly gun-storage police running about searching for unlocked gun-cabinets.
A further note on the wording of The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." It should be noted that the militia clause is explanatory, not active, in that sentence. However, if that clause is to be used as justification for limiting weapons not related to militia use, then it is clear that the weapon ownership which shall not be infringed are military weapons. Therefore, hunting rifles and handguns - having no real military value - may be regulated or banned, but assault rifles, which are the modern military infantry weapon, are sacrosanct. It doesn't say "The capability to blow intruders to Kingdom Come, being necessary to the security of a free state . .
Yeah, Nirgal and Sax may have still been alive - I don't remember - but they weren't doing anything interesting.
Red and Green Mars should be read purely for their descriptions of terraforming, although you could get almost as much info from Robert Zubrin's non-fiction The Case for Mars which, despite being non-fiction, is as entertaining a read as the RGB Mars stuff, and don't have all the tedious character 'development' (which I agree didn't really give insight into the characters).
Off the top of my head, and having read a number of the other posts on this article (and boy-howdy did this one bring out the opinions from everybody), Here's my tentative list of major SF genre, and some classic examples that I have read from each (I'm more qualified in 'hard SF' than most of the other categories). I'm also going to try and keep my opinions to 'Universes' in which there are more than one work.
Major SF-related Categories:
These may not be universally regarded as 'The Best' but all are worthy of note.
'World-building' is one of the most important elements of Science Fiction. It is arguably more important than 'setting' in more standard literature, since experience can fill in more gaps in traditional literature - historical fiction being the exception. There are a couple of outstanding examples of world-building that I've run across in single novels which were never made into a 'franchise universe' where any number of novels are set. Two shining works along these lines are Way Station by Clifford Simak (who has the best aliens in SF, IMHO) and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, who's 'Esper Guild' inspired Babylon 5's Psi-Corps (Hence Walter Koenig's character being named "Alfred Bester" in an intentional homage).
I suppose I should have an honorable mention category (although I will leave out obvious movie/TV franchises). Larry Niven's 'Tales of Known Space', William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' are good examples with broad appeal.
A note on the 'My Personal Favorite' entry. This quartet, composed of Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion touches on most of the major elements of modern science fiction, from 'hard SF' and 'cyberpunk', to horror-fiction, a la Alien. This series is best described by Peter Falk's monologue from The Princess Bride with monsters, wars on a galactic scale, intrigue, some good dime-novel theology, and even environmentalist themes, while having some really excellent hard SF and being extremely well-written. The universe which spans three major cultures, one of which is a community of AIs, is very rich, with a history spanning centuries, and hundreds of unique worlds. I highly recomend it.
Unfortunately LeGuin takes the realism a bit to far sometimes. I read The Dispossessed as part of a SF Lit class at college. It's a story about two planets in the same planetary system (one might be a moon of the other or some such, I don't recall) where one is an American-style democro-capitolist society, and the other (where most of the story is set) is a hyper-collective society where the concept of ownership has been stamped out to such an extent that When a person touches a hot stove he'd exclaim, "The hand hurts!" rather than, "My hand hurts!" This is an excellent big of exploratory fiction, except that the story becomes dreadfully dull to read. A good universe (and this world is extremely well-thought-out) is an important element, but ultimately the story itself must be compelling.