The sad thing is that I agree with you. The right solution is to scale the government back until it lives within the limits of its contractual authority, as Ron Paul would try to do. And then change it--or interpret the clause about the US defending itself against aggressors to mean that people who are waging chemical and biological warfare against our means of life support (ie. polluters) can be fought. Of course, most of those are on US soil, and the Constitution does not, I believe, authorise the federal government to wage war against Americans without a martial law decree. Oh, wait, thanks, Bush!
The problem is this: we are running out of time. Maybe we have already run out of time, but we have to assume we still have at least a little. If the choice is between life continuing under an eco-dictatorship or all-out war, I really hope that the dictatorship is one of the few benevolent ones. At least there have been some of those. Beats the corporate dictatorship we have now.
Yes, scaling down the scope (energy dependence) of all of humanity is indeed far-fetched. But if you think we can come up with market-based technological solutions that don't fuck us over in whole new ways we haven't thought of yet, you're a bit funny in the head. And by the way, do you really want the population density of everywhere on earth---yes, including your living room---to continue increasing? We've kind of painted ourselves into a corner here, and all potential solutions are quite far-fetched. We may as well be looking at the ones that are actually sustainable.
I'm so sorry that Jared Diamond comes off to you as too communist. What he says is well-supported. If you don't like the conclusions that he draws, perhaps you should stick your head in the sand and pretend that they didn't come from data and careful study. Incidentally, Open Source is exactly what communism preaches (and is its only notable success, AFAIK), so if you don't like communism I hope you fight Open Source tooth and nail.
Some of the data in Collapse has been refuted, actually--check the latest research on Easter Island. But that's not really terribly relevant to his message. Read it. You'll probably find it quite preachy, but if you can get past that you may find it considerably deepens your understanding of the issues we're discussing.
I am talking about water filters.
Yes, my response is valid against the fantasy that those solve any problems.
As for the pesticides, they make the volume of food production necessary to sustain the current level of population possible.
Yup. And you don't see a problem with the fact that just in order to feed all of humanity we must poison our life-support system?
Carbon is re-released as the roots from last year's crop rot, and especially in tilled land will be re-released fairly quickly.
But even if this could work as you claim, please name just one single instance in which a technological solution had no troublesome side-effects. What makes you so sure that this is foolproof?
Also, I find it quite odd that a slashdotter would so soon forget the economic and social problems that tend to be created when a for-profit corporation genetically engineers a crop.
So you're saying, if I understand correctly, that because one solution is very very far-fetched and opens all kinds of doors to disaster, that we should not seek better solutions?
Deployment--have you done the numbers? You're assuming that 25% of all the rooted plants in the world are (or should be) GMO corn. Care to provide a reference for that claim?
Air toxification from man-made sources rivalling natural sources? You've got to be kidding! We've evolved right along with natural sources for eons. "Car emissions kill 30,000 people [...] per year in the US" [http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.html], and that's just deaths from car emissions in one relatively clean country, let alone harm from all sources in the world. For more, check out Jared Diamond's "Collapse".
There's a market solution to water toxification? Um, am I missing something? You're not referring to bottled water, are you? Hardly a solution--just for a start, it doesn't answer to the fact that surface water in the USA is increasingly cramming toxins into the whole food chain, culminating in higher-order consumers like us. If bottled water is solving the problem of dangerous levels of pesticides accumulating in any human food source that's related to fresh water (or salt water, for that matter), I'm very pleased to know it. Or perhaps you had something else in mind.
I'm also very skeptical of the US government's ability to regulate this stuff. But if we don't solve it we're completely, totally, utterly fucked. I think that means that we should be doing everything in our power to attack it from multiple angles as quickly as possible. Because when the wars over scarce resources start affecting your country more deeply than just economically, you'll be wondering whether perhaps there wasn't just one more little thing you could have tried.
Freeman is a very compelling speaker and definitely a genius, but he is still kind of a kook. His advocacy of space exploration in order to allow us to get off the planet we've destroyed might have been my first clue. As for this particular issue: I think you've hit the nail on the head: can you really come up with a deployment plan for getting those genes into plants quickly enough? Does that mean we should now clearcut all the 1000-year-old virgin forests to make way for more corn? Does it mean that we no longer have to try to reduce our greenhouse gas footprint? Does that mean we can continue to make war on oil-rich nations so we can support our absurd gluttony?
And that "solution" at best just speaks to global warming. What about air toxification? Groundwater toxification? Topsoil toxification and erosion? Deforestation? Overpopulation? Ecosystem destabilisation? Even on the terribly terribly unlikely off-chance that Freeman Dyson's solution doesn't have unplanned and terrible side-effects, can you swear that there are commercially short-term-profitable solutions to all of these that also have no terrible side effects?
He's a kook because he's an honest man trying to succeed as a politician.
I will still probably vote for Adama (oops, whatever his name is) before Paul, but Paul is the only candidate for any (=either, woe to us) side whose character I respect.
Don't be too caught up on which ticket he is running on. Read his website. See what he has to say. He is a libertarian, which is what Republicans used to be before they allied with the religious fundamentalist nutcases. He believes in small government. He believes in eliminating every part of the federal government that is not directly and blatantly supported by the constitution. The division between Republicans and Libertarians used to be very slim indeed, and many Republicans still consider themselves that not because they believe that the government should be reformed according to the Laws of Jesus Christ but because they're obsessed with the idea of small, non-interfering government, and haven't adjusted yet to the fact that that is the least of the issues in Neorepublican thought.
Now, if you believe that people will actually do the Right Thing without a government telling them what to do, then Ron Paul is your man. Of course, then History is not your subject, but (for different reasons) that's pretty much true of Neorepublican religious wackos as well.
Hell, the Constitution is supposed to be THE CONTRACT between the states and the federal government. So he is right on target legally, as far as I can tell. My quibble is that the Constitution is obsolete (for environmental reasons). But Paul is probably the very best candidate by a long shot for bringing the government back in check and forcing it to limit itself to what The Contract allows it to do.
It's a conspiracy funded by the American electricity cartels! One 52" screen brings in less profit for Big Oil than ten smaller screens. Such environmental consciousness is to be brutally repressed.
Of course, while good Christians will walk or bicycle to the party in order not to harm their fellow man with toxins and greenhouse gases, I suspect that most football fans are not good Christians. Bloody football fans.:P~
That'd be great! Honestly, car emissions are a whole lot more dangerous than a little bit of radiation. Just because we're used to them doesn't make them good.
The police are allowed to tap regular phone lines because the people with the guns say it's ok. Who enforces property rights? If the government enforces a set of rights, then it's the government that defines them. Of course, most good systems of government include systems of checks and balances so "the government" isn't just a single entity, but here in the USA that's quickly becoming a quaint notion.
The problem is that there are too many producers. If a few start giving things away for free, then those have differentiated themselves and tapped an enormous market. If everyone gives things away for free, then we're right back where we came from--marketing will once again be everything, but there will be no budget for it. Bodies like the RIAA will still need to pump certain artists and ignore others, and then profit by sales.
Maybe, just maybe, our ability to sample more material for free before deciding what to buy will help. But I don't expect this to be a widespread phenomenon.
Meanwhile an electronic device is an exact equivalent to paper.
Nonsense. PowerBook airplanes fly much better than any paper airplane I've been able to concoct. I haven't tried the new Apple Air yet, but signs are positive!
Whatever we can do to get cars off the roads is good. Period. There are things more important than the economy. That said, public transportation would be a huge and rapidly developing industry if people had more incentive to use it.
Having learned CS at a good school and taught CS at a crappy school, I'm struck by the difference in approaches. Princeton teaches "Here's a little bit of C to get you started; no complex syntax; and here's how to turn a thought into an algorithm." U of Colorado teaches "Let's make you memorise all of C++ syntax."
I don't see how the choice of language much affects the decision of which approach to take, as long as the language lets you do something with minimal syntax. Incidentally, Princeton has since moved to Java.
There is a notion that when society has decided that something is wrong, then it should be codified as law and enforced by the government, which, as Eric Raymond says, tries to maintain a monopoly on violence. Vigilante justice is the antithesis of this: an individual who believes that something is wrong and punishes the offender can cause no end of trouble, since for any act at all, someone believes that it is wrong.
The Tyranny of the Majority is a terrible thing, and so there are supposedly checks and balances built into the system. Here in the USA there's something about inalienable rights (free speech, bearing arms (hmm), driving a fucking huge sociopathic SUV, etc). But people are supposed to be punished according to the Law, which reflects the rational consensus of the People.
But what happens when the consensus of the People and the Law have little in common? As has been said earlier in this thread, laws in the USA are bought and often written by corporations, and their motives have nothing to do with the good of society. So the law becomes farther and farther removed from right and wrong.
What's the answer? Well, really, if control can't be wrested from the hands of corporations, revolution will be necessary, but it will of course be very difficult to buy more guns than the US Army (yes, that's right, since Bush declared martial law, the Army is permitted to use deadly force on US soil against US citizens). I hate to use a term like cyber-warfare, but it is not unreasonable to expect that the revolution will initially take the form of crackers vandalising corporate faces. I'd be surprised if this did any good--it's more like a mob throwing rocks at tanks--but I'd be surprised if we didn't see more of it in the coming decades. Pirating music scarcely counts as warfare: it's nice to think that it's depriving the corporations of their lifeblood, but most/.ers know how much evidence there is that that actually works that way.
But yes, things are getting worse and not better, and we should be seriously wondering what can be done to make things better again.
Of course, the only political battle that matters a whit is whether we ward off global warming, deforestation, groundwater toxification, ozone depletion, topsoil degradation, overpopulation, air toxification, ecosystem destruction, and giant mutant carnivorous ducks. I'm not saying that wresting control from the corporations isn't important for that--it is vital and urgent. I'm just saying that where your music comes from doesn't matter worth a damn if we have a planet of perpetual war over diminishing resources. It's already begun, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.
All of the posters on the linked article seemed concerned with proving that there is in fact financial incentive to explore space. That's nice, but it's a bit repetitive.
The argument for getting off this planet because we're making it unfit for human habitation is just escapism. Better to stay here and either fix the problems or get what we deserve.
But an extension of the "kids are inspired by the space program" argument, in combination with Carl Sagan's, adds something to this conversation. To wit: getting off the Earth and seeing it as a planet, and bringing this perspective back to its inhabitants, might be a source of inspiration--and fear! I've been told that seeing the Earth from space, shrouded with the thin, ephemeral shred of atmosphere, surrounded by the huge, cold universe, gives a unique sense of how fragile our system it is, how alone we are, and how important it is to take care of our home. For me, even photos do that. If more space exploration can improve that situation, then I would think that we really can't afford not to pursue it with everything we have.
Whose resource, dear? Yours? Theirs? Or that of those "actual domain-specific" experts? Because I suspect, somehow, that you are talking about something either entirely or mostly theirs, and you better show some respect to the people, whose money you are "allocating".
In my experience, the problem with Libertarians is exactly this: they want to act as if every resource has an owner. They become strangely quiet when I ask about the Tragedy of the Commons. Especially as our capacity for resource exploitation--to the point of basically permanent destruction--expands locally and globally, managing community resources is the single most important job of any government. Libertarianism as I've seen it rarely speaks to this, and the Libertarian solutions I've seen tend to be along the lines of "Give it to the highest bidder and let them manage it." Unfortunately, short-term for-profit "management" usually leads to exactly the wholesale exploitative destruction that we see throughout Republican policy.
This does not precisely speak to funding of basic science, but I'll put up a sketch of an argument anyway: basic science claims terretory in an unexplored region of intellectual property. Privatisation of basic science is equivalent to allowing prospectors to claim chunks of this land for exploitation. There's some weird interplay of patent law with resource destruction/regeneration that I will only hint at here...
Basic science has so little chance of yielding a profit that it's not likely to be explored by pure-capitalist corporations. This is related to the concept of a community claiming land for a park: unprofitable, but worthwhile for other reasons.
I disagree. Vote counting is always a "pretty close approximation." Not just from the fact that machines and humans both fail in different ways, but also because some voters will be unexpectedly sick on election day, or be killed in traffic accidents, etc. Some will not be voting based on correct, complete information (in fact, that describes us all). Worse, some will change their minds at the last minute for trivial or irrelevant reasons. These people are, literally, noise that makes the whole process stochastic anyway, and it would be hard to argue that precisely counting random votes really matters.
Furthermore, if there are two parties and the election results are close to half and half, then I suspect that at least one of the following must be true:
The parties are so similar that there is no obvious difference between them.
The parties represent interests that are split evenly enough that, in the opinions of the voters, either has equally much (or little) to be said for it as the other.
Or, as in the USA in 2000 and 2004, the country has allowed so much of its population to become moronic unthinking sheep that the country is completely fucked anyway.
A representative democracy will, almost by definition, get the president that it deserves.
This seems to be another technological solution to a societal problem. People shouldn't be rude to each other on a plane (noise, objectionable content (whatever I object to!), bringing young screaming children onboard...) or anywhere else. What about leaning over and saying "Sorry, but could you please stop pretending to have Tourette's? (oh, er, I thought you were just pretending...)"? Has anyone had a problem with the person in the next seat over watching porn (or reading a skin mag)? Or throwing food? Or...? Probably. Is a technological solution needed? Convince me.
Aaaahhhh. I always pictured it being led around on a leash or something. Forgot that spelling something correctly might be seen as intellectual elitism. D'ougx4h!
Ok, if you like. But the Bayesian approach quantifies exactly how powerful (or "scientific") a theory is. You don't need to make the special-case argument you made, since we can show a continuum of how much of the data a theory can explain vs. how many free parameters it has. So here's a quantitative measure for the predictive power of ID is (how "scientific" it is, if you like), and a well-justified answer.
No theory I know of makes predictions that exactly explain all data with no free parameters. At what threshold does something become "not science"? Here, though, we can prove that ID is just about the most useless and improbable theory ever proposed. I think that's more useful than just tossing it out, philosophically claiming it's not science:)
Slashdot Mirror
The sad thing is that I agree with you. The right solution is to scale the government back until it lives within the limits of its contractual authority, as Ron Paul would try to do. And then change it--or interpret the clause about the US defending itself against aggressors to mean that people who are waging chemical and biological warfare against our means of life support (ie. polluters) can be fought. Of course, most of those are on US soil, and the Constitution does not, I believe, authorise the federal government to wage war against Americans without a martial law decree. Oh, wait, thanks, Bush!
The problem is this: we are running out of time. Maybe we have already run out of time, but we have to assume we still have at least a little. If the choice is between life continuing under an eco-dictatorship or all-out war, I really hope that the dictatorship is one of the few benevolent ones. At least there have been some of those. Beats the corporate dictatorship we have now.
Yes, scaling down the scope (energy dependence) of all of humanity is indeed far-fetched. But if you think we can come up with market-based technological solutions that don't fuck us over in whole new ways we haven't thought of yet, you're a bit funny in the head. And by the way, do you really want the population density of everywhere on earth---yes, including your living room---to continue increasing? We've kind of painted ourselves into a corner here, and all potential solutions are quite far-fetched. We may as well be looking at the ones that are actually sustainable.
I'm so sorry that Jared Diamond comes off to you as too communist. What he says is well-supported. If you don't like the conclusions that he draws, perhaps you should stick your head in the sand and pretend that they didn't come from data and careful study. Incidentally, Open Source is exactly what communism preaches (and is its only notable success, AFAIK), so if you don't like communism I hope you fight Open Source tooth and nail.
Some of the data in Collapse has been refuted, actually--check the latest research on Easter Island. But that's not really terribly relevant to his message. Read it. You'll probably find it quite preachy, but if you can get past that you may find it considerably deepens your understanding of the issues we're discussing.
Yes, my response is valid against the fantasy that those solve any problems. Yup. And you don't see a problem with the fact that just in order to feed all of humanity we must poison our life-support system?Carbon is re-released as the roots from last year's crop rot, and especially in tilled land will be re-released fairly quickly.
But even if this could work as you claim, please name just one single instance in which a technological solution had no troublesome side-effects. What makes you so sure that this is foolproof?
Also, I find it quite odd that a slashdotter would so soon forget the economic and social problems that tend to be created when a for-profit corporation genetically engineers a crop.
So you're saying, if I understand correctly, that because one solution is very very far-fetched and opens all kinds of doors to disaster, that we should not seek better solutions?
Deployment--have you done the numbers? You're assuming that 25% of all the rooted plants in the world are (or should be) GMO corn. Care to provide a reference for that claim?
Air toxification from man-made sources rivalling natural sources? You've got to be kidding! We've evolved right along with natural sources for eons. "Car emissions kill 30,000 people [...] per year in the US" [http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.html], and that's just deaths from car emissions in one relatively clean country, let alone harm from all sources in the world. For more, check out Jared Diamond's "Collapse".
There's a market solution to water toxification? Um, am I missing something? You're not referring to bottled water, are you? Hardly a solution--just for a start, it doesn't answer to the fact that surface water in the USA is increasingly cramming toxins into the whole food chain, culminating in higher-order consumers like us. If bottled water is solving the problem of dangerous levels of pesticides accumulating in any human food source that's related to fresh water (or salt water, for that matter), I'm very pleased to know it. Or perhaps you had something else in mind.
I'm also very skeptical of the US government's ability to regulate this stuff. But if we don't solve it we're completely, totally, utterly fucked. I think that means that we should be doing everything in our power to attack it from multiple angles as quickly as possible. Because when the wars over scarce resources start affecting your country more deeply than just economically, you'll be wondering whether perhaps there wasn't just one more little thing you could have tried.
Freeman is a very compelling speaker and definitely a genius, but he is still kind of a kook. His advocacy of space exploration in order to allow us to get off the planet we've destroyed might have been my first clue. As for this particular issue: I think you've hit the nail on the head: can you really come up with a deployment plan for getting those genes into plants quickly enough? Does that mean we should now clearcut all the 1000-year-old virgin forests to make way for more corn? Does it mean that we no longer have to try to reduce our greenhouse gas footprint? Does that mean we can continue to make war on oil-rich nations so we can support our absurd gluttony?
:)
And that "solution" at best just speaks to global warming. What about air toxification? Groundwater toxification? Topsoil toxification and erosion? Deforestation? Overpopulation? Ecosystem destabilisation? Even on the terribly terribly unlikely off-chance that Freeman Dyson's solution doesn't have unplanned and terrible side-effects, can you swear that there are commercially short-term-profitable solutions to all of these that also have no terrible side effects?
Try talking to Freeman's son George
He's a kook because he's an honest man trying to succeed as a politician.
I will still probably vote for Adama (oops, whatever his name is) before Paul, but Paul is the only candidate for any (=either, woe to us) side whose character I respect.
Someone please moderate the parent up a bit more.
Don't be too caught up on which ticket he is running on. Read his website. See what he has to say. He is a libertarian, which is what Republicans used to be before they allied with the religious fundamentalist nutcases. He believes in small government. He believes in eliminating every part of the federal government that is not directly and blatantly supported by the constitution. The division between Republicans and Libertarians used to be very slim indeed, and many Republicans still consider themselves that not because they believe that the government should be reformed according to the Laws of Jesus Christ but because they're obsessed with the idea of small, non-interfering government, and haven't adjusted yet to the fact that that is the least of the issues in Neorepublican thought.
Now, if you believe that people will actually do the Right Thing without a government telling them what to do, then Ron Paul is your man. Of course, then History is not your subject, but (for different reasons) that's pretty much true of Neorepublican religious wackos as well.
Hell, the Constitution is supposed to be THE CONTRACT between the states and the federal government. So he is right on target legally, as far as I can tell. My quibble is that the Constitution is obsolete (for environmental reasons). But Paul is probably the very best candidate by a long shot for bringing the government back in check and forcing it to limit itself to what The Contract allows it to do.
It's a conspiracy funded by the American electricity cartels! One 52" screen brings in less profit for Big Oil than ten smaller screens. Such environmental consciousness is to be brutally repressed.
:P~
Of course, while good Christians will walk or bicycle to the party in order not to harm their fellow man with toxins and greenhouse gases, I suspect that most football fans are not good Christians. Bloody football fans.
That'd be great! Honestly, car emissions are a whole lot more dangerous than a little bit of radiation. Just because we're used to them doesn't make them good.
The police are allowed to tap regular phone lines because the people with the guns say it's ok. Who enforces property rights? If the government enforces a set of rights, then it's the government that defines them. Of course, most good systems of government include systems of checks and balances so "the government" isn't just a single entity, but here in the USA that's quickly becoming a quaint notion.
They're also known as "Republicans" here in the USA, where people without this gene are said to "flip-flop".
I wonder how much progress could be made if we banned all people with this gene from politics (including voting).
Papa George Orwell would be so proud of me. *sob*
This doesn't work.
The problem is that there are too many producers. If a few start giving things away for free, then those have differentiated themselves and tapped an enormous market. If everyone gives things away for free, then we're right back where we came from--marketing will once again be everything, but there will be no budget for it. Bodies like the RIAA will still need to pump certain artists and ignore others, and then profit by sales.
Maybe, just maybe, our ability to sample more material for free before deciding what to buy will help. But I don't expect this to be a widespread phenomenon.
Baaaaaaaaaah.
Whatever we can do to get cars off the roads is good. Period. There are things more important than the economy. That said, public transportation would be a huge and rapidly developing industry if people had more incentive to use it.
Having learned CS at a good school and taught CS at a crappy school, I'm struck by the difference in approaches. Princeton teaches "Here's a little bit of C to get you started; no complex syntax; and here's how to turn a thought into an algorithm." U of Colorado teaches "Let's make you memorise all of C++ syntax."
I don't see how the choice of language much affects the decision of which approach to take, as long as the language lets you do something with minimal syntax. Incidentally, Princeton has since moved to Java.
There is a notion that when society has decided that something is wrong, then it should be codified as law and enforced by the government, which, as Eric Raymond says, tries to maintain a monopoly on violence. Vigilante justice is the antithesis of this: an individual who believes that something is wrong and punishes the offender can cause no end of trouble, since for any act at all, someone believes that it is wrong.
/.ers know how much evidence there is that that actually works that way.
The Tyranny of the Majority is a terrible thing, and so there are supposedly checks and balances built into the system. Here in the USA there's something about inalienable rights (free speech, bearing arms (hmm), driving a fucking huge sociopathic SUV, etc). But people are supposed to be punished according to the Law, which reflects the rational consensus of the People.
But what happens when the consensus of the People and the Law have little in common? As has been said earlier in this thread, laws in the USA are bought and often written by corporations, and their motives have nothing to do with the good of society. So the law becomes farther and farther removed from right and wrong.
What's the answer? Well, really, if control can't be wrested from the hands of corporations, revolution will be necessary, but it will of course be very difficult to buy more guns than the US Army (yes, that's right, since Bush declared martial law, the Army is permitted to use deadly force on US soil against US citizens). I hate to use a term like cyber-warfare, but it is not unreasonable to expect that the revolution will initially take the form of crackers vandalising corporate faces. I'd be surprised if this did any good--it's more like a mob throwing rocks at tanks--but I'd be surprised if we didn't see more of it in the coming decades. Pirating music scarcely counts as warfare: it's nice to think that it's depriving the corporations of their lifeblood, but most
But yes, things are getting worse and not better, and we should be seriously wondering what can be done to make things better again.
Of course, the only political battle that matters a whit is whether we ward off global warming, deforestation, groundwater toxification, ozone depletion, topsoil degradation, overpopulation, air toxification, ecosystem destruction, and giant mutant carnivorous ducks. I'm not saying that wresting control from the corporations isn't important for that--it is vital and urgent. I'm just saying that where your music comes from doesn't matter worth a damn if we have a planet of perpetual war over diminishing resources. It's already begun, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.
And by "higher rationality" we mean wishful thinking.
All of the posters on the linked article seemed concerned with proving that there is in fact financial incentive to explore space. That's nice, but it's a bit repetitive.
The argument for getting off this planet because we're making it unfit for human habitation is just escapism. Better to stay here and either fix the problems or get what we deserve.
But an extension of the "kids are inspired by the space program" argument, in combination with Carl Sagan's, adds something to this conversation. To wit: getting off the Earth and seeing it as a planet, and bringing this perspective back to its inhabitants, might be a source of inspiration--and fear! I've been told that seeing the Earth from space, shrouded with the thin, ephemeral shred of atmosphere, surrounded by the huge, cold universe, gives a unique sense of how fragile our system it is, how alone we are, and how important it is to take care of our home. For me, even photos do that. If more space exploration can improve that situation, then I would think that we really can't afford not to pursue it with everything we have.
This does not precisely speak to funding of basic science, but I'll put up a sketch of an argument anyway: basic science claims terretory in an unexplored region of intellectual property. Privatisation of basic science is equivalent to allowing prospectors to claim chunks of this land for exploitation. There's some weird interplay of patent law with resource destruction/regeneration that I will only hint at here...
Basic science has so little chance of yielding a profit that it's not likely to be explored by pure-capitalist corporations. This is related to the concept of a community claiming land for a park: unprofitable, but worthwhile for other reasons.
So, um, what do Libertarians think of parks?
I disagree. Vote counting is always a "pretty close approximation." Not just from the fact that machines and humans both fail in different ways, but also because some voters will be unexpectedly sick on election day, or be killed in traffic accidents, etc. Some will not be voting based on correct, complete information (in fact, that describes us all). Worse, some will change their minds at the last minute for trivial or irrelevant reasons. These people are, literally, noise that makes the whole process stochastic anyway, and it would be hard to argue that precisely counting random votes really matters.
Furthermore, if there are two parties and the election results are close to half and half, then I suspect that at least one of the following must be true:
A representative democracy will, almost by definition, get the president that it deserves.
This seems to be another technological solution to a societal problem. People shouldn't be rude to each other on a plane (noise, objectionable content (whatever I object to!), bringing young screaming children onboard...) or anywhere else. What about leaning over and saying "Sorry, but could you please stop pretending to have Tourette's? (oh, er, I thought you were just pretending...)"? Has anyone had a problem with the person in the next seat over watching porn (or reading a skin mag)? Or throwing food? Or ...? Probably. Is a technological solution needed? Convince me.
Aaaahhhh. I always pictured it being led around on a leash or something. Forgot that spelling something correctly might be seen as intellectual elitism. D'ougx4h!
...or vice versa...
Yes! Your word processor should re-implement Subversion (or at least CVS) because it should be a standalone operating system.
Ok, if you like. But the Bayesian approach quantifies exactly how powerful (or "scientific") a theory is. You don't need to make the special-case argument you made, since we can show a continuum of how much of the data a theory can explain vs. how many free parameters it has. So here's a quantitative measure for the predictive power of ID is (how "scientific" it is, if you like), and a well-justified answer.
No theory I know of makes predictions that exactly explain all data with no free parameters. At what threshold does something become "not science"? Here, though, we can prove that ID is just about the most useless and improbable theory ever proposed. I think that's more useful than just tossing it out, philosophically claiming it's not science :)