Re:Space travel - no kidding
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why do you say that "no significant portion of the population will ever move off-world"?
Because there are no other habitable worlds in the Solar System. It will always be incredibly expensive to house and sustain human life off-planet compared to housing and sustaining human life on Earth. It makes no economic sense whatsoever to make an investment of this nature; the only people you'll ever want to move off-planet are the absolute minimum required to exploit the resources in specific places (e.g., the asteroid belt).
Max
Re:Space travel - no kidding
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That's a bit of a non-sequiter, isn't it? If the Earth is overpopulated, even a zero growth rate wouldn't change that fact.
What the alarmists fail to acknowledge is that they don't get to decide at what point the Earth is "overpopulated". I don't think the Earth is overpopulated at the moment, nor will it be if we reach eight billion. My opinion is just as valid (or invalid) as any alarmist figure.
You'd need a negative growth rate in order to shrink the population back to less than the maximum sustainable size.
Every single analysis of 'sustainability' by the folks preaching doom and gloom over the Earth's carrying capacity assumes that *technology will never advance beyond what we have now*. It's not only stupid to think such a thing, it's deliberately deceptive. Not that this is a new development among the population control advocates - they've been doing the exact same thing since the beginning of the 20th century! And they've been absolutely, one-hundred percent, dead wrong.
Based on their complete and utter failure to accurate predict anything when it comes to population and resource development, much less technological innovation, I see no reason to heed the alarmists now any more than I should if the year were 1900.
murder is perfectly acceptable, but population control is evil evil evil.
The only way you could achieve your version of "population control" is by enslaving every single human being who doesn't agree with you. Most people would find such an abominable attitude the very definition of "evil".
Max
Re:Space travel - no kidding
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 5, Interesting
If the population of the earth keeps growing we won't have enough resources to maintain our current level of living conditions.
While the Earth still has a positive growth rate, that rate has been in decline ever since a certain piece of trash called "The Population Bomb" hit the shelves. If the decline continues we'll hit an equilibrium population of around eight billion when all is said and done. Note that according to the doomsayers who first started whining about population we were supposed to have in excess of eight billion people by the year 2000; it never happened because they didn't bothered to check their facts, which even then indicated that the rate was in decline.
I find it rather interesting that people who still complain about Earth being "overpopulated" fail to mention the declining growth rate, nor the fact that every single prediction they made from the '60's right up to the present has been dead wrong.
As far as the resource argument goes, this only applies if you assume that technological advancement freezes at its current level and never, ever progresses again. Quite clearly that isn't going to happen.
So if you consider the earth as a closed system you have to either raise the standard of living around the world to a level where population growth ceases "naturally" or you have to commit the resources of the rich into forcing the poor not to breed.
The first may eventually happen through technological advancement; the second never will unless you manage to enslave the Earth to a dictatorial one-world government. And so long as folks like me are around, anyone who tries to enforce breeding limits on their fellow citizens will find themselves the subject of a post-natal abortion right quick.
Right, so if we're willing to agree that considering the earth as a closed system leads to the logical conclusion that the world population growth must be controlled by force
We aren't willing to agree. You'll never get a majority of Americans - or anything other than a tiny, tiny minority, I suspect - to agree with your assessment.
We must expand into space.
Settling space is a non-viable population control method. It may be useful for increasing the resource wealth of the Earth itself (your first option - make everyone rich) but no significant portion of the population will ever move off-world. In fact, it'd be a complete waste of resources to even try.
Max
Re:now before anyone gets started
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 3, Funny
Kozmo could only work in an arcology setting, and only then if the service charge were added in some fashion, e.g., as part of the rent. Although I can see this as being a very big incentive to move into an arcology, having everything from groceries to movie rentals delivered right to your door. The young forward-thinking geek could move into a much larger and more socially acceptable version of his parents basement while at the same time claiming that he's part of the 'wave of the future', rather than just being afraid of sunlight and face-to-face contact with other human beings.
There would be no greenhouse effect at all if the carbon dioxide froze.
Earth has never been cold enough for carbon dioxide to freeze. We're too close to the sun. To say "if Earth had been a bit further from the sun" is about as sensible as saying "if the moon were made of green cheese". It doesn't matter because Earth ISN'T further from the sun. The "if" here isn't worth a damn any which way you look at it.
In the past 30 odd years that I'm running around on this globe, this planet has been threatened so often with destruction that I'm not remotely worried about it anymore.
The alarmists aren't happy unless they're running around screaming "the sky is falling!". They're only really satisfied if they can convince you to do the same. Of course, if you don't they can always take the consolation prize of claiming that you're morally bankrupt for not panicking in the manner in which they approve.
Thing is, it's so bloody common for little groups here and there to make a fuss about the sky falling that the rest of us - the calm, the sane, the rational, and the just plain tired-of-this-shit-and-don't-want-to-hear-it-anymo re folks - really can't get excited about it. And don't want to get excited about it, frankly. If we got up in arms about this crap half as often as all these chicken littles wanted us to be each and every one of us would've dropped from stress-induced heart failure years ago.
you would never beable to get out of the iceage again or something like that.
That conundrum was solved over 30 years ago. As glaciation reaches the equator and covers the oceans (not to mention all other forms of liquid water) precipitation drops to virtually zero - much like the conditions you see at Amundsen-Scott in Antarctica. That means that carbon dioxide, which is usually washed out of the atmosphere via rain, slowly accumulates over time. And I do mean slowly, since the primary form of input is through volcanic eruption.
In any event, there's eventually enough carbon dioxide in the air that sunlight reflecting from the ice gets trapped between the ice and the carbon dioxide layer in the atmosphere. This heats up the atmosphere, which starts to melt the ice, which means less sunlight is reflected from the ice and more is trapped in the atmosphere, which means things get hotter and more ice melts, etc. etc. Your snowball world begins to melt and things start swinging wildly towards the other end of the spectrum: a Venus-like hothouse.
What's to stop a runaway greenhouse effect? Well, with the ice melting and free water making a reappearance you once again get clouds. And that means rain. And that means that some of the carbon dioxide gets washed out of the atmosphere. The more ice that melts the more rain there is the more the carbon dioxide layer begins to fail.
Snowball Earths can't be sustained indefinitely, nor can greenhouse Earths, so long as there's active volcanism.
The problem with the nuclear engine isn't that it's too advanced to build (it isn't) but that the spacecraft essentially sits on top of a huge curved plate and rides a series of nuclear fireballs into orbit.
While this is highly efficient at getting a payload into space, it tends to be rather bad for anything within a few miles of the craft when it launches. If you're using a 'dirty' engine (e.g., spitting plutonium pellets out the back and igniting them with a laser) you'll also leave a nice poisonous trail of radioactive fallout on the way up.
Nuclear engines would only be of real value for interplanetary travel, or for lifting from a non-Earth world (no ecology or population to damage).
The rest of the world uses metric, it's time for the US to join the 20th century. After all, the rest of us are in the 21st century, don't you think it's about time?
The only people who get any say at all in this are Americans, and the vast majority have spoken in favor of keeping the current system.
Really, I don't know that all the spineless whining is about. Learn both systems and do the extremely simple conversions when necessary. Unlike the general topic, this isn't rocket science!
Having a wikipedia entry isn't indicative of anything other than having a wikipedia entry. For a good many of us that doesn't count for much of anything at all.
The irony of podcasting is that it was created to circumvent big media companies.
What the fuck do you think Apple is becoming? The company is doing it's very best to transform itself the whore of every media giant in the world, distributing the same ol' shit in a fashionable, new, hip way for the young and shallow. Ignorance and hypocrisy have never been more profitable, especially to Apple.
Apple doesn't give a shit about you, or "indies", or whatever the hell you think they were up to when they came up with the iPod. They care about making money, and the best way to do that is to spread their legs for established media - and get you to spread your legs in the process. And it works, because even the fucking fools who scream "the RIAA sux, dude!" couldn't wait to get their jism-covered paws on an iPod.
Podcasting was never about "indies". It was, and always has been, about getting packaged content out to young users, especially those who might otherwise engage in acts of masturbatory self-congratulation over the fact that they don't buy in to the "popular culture". A whole demographic ripe for the plucking, in the end just as dumb and ignorant as all the other demographics they so often look down upon.
I don't got thru the day worrying about if the Gov't might know something about me they didn't know yesterday.
So the fuck what? The fact that it doesn't bother you means dick to me, and why should it?
The fact that the Patriot Act got pretty much unanimous reapproval in the House and Sentate says it not a bad deal on the whole.
Are you deliberately trolling? "Gubmint is your friend"???
The Patriot Act is nothing to fear unless you got something to hide.
A right to privacy, in case you missed it, means that I can hide any goddamned thing I please. It's up to the government to prove - before a judge - that some specific thing I'm hiding is criminal in nature, and therefore should be revealed.
I don't like Unkie Sam knowing things about me, I don't see why he needs to know, I don't fit the Terrorist Profile, but I really don't care as I'm not going to do something to bring himm down on me.
Great, you live your life the way you want, completely unconcerned about the activities of your big government daddy. But when it comes to my life, both you and your daddy can kiss my hairy ass.
Also feel guilty that although being in an SUV is slightly safer for you, you are SIX TIMES more likely to kill the occupants of the car you crash into than if you were driving an automobile.
young Americans should feel bad about the bombs on Japan
According to you, perhaps. According to me "young Americans" need not engage in foolish bouts of shame over the fact that their grandfathers (rightly) used nuclear weapons on Japan.
War is war. Despite the farce embodied by the articles of the Geneva Convention, the point is to win - by any means possible - while losing as few of your own people as you can. To arbitrarily class one method of killing the enemy as "okay" and another as "not okay" is just plain stupid; either way the other guy is dead, and dead is DEAD. The end result is exactly the same, and equally bad.
As for civilian casualties, there are no such thing as innocent civilians in an enemy country. All of the civilians are just as much your enemy as the soldiers are; they support the economy, build the bombs, ship the food and fuel, etc. And if they aren't working to actively overthrow the government prosecuting the war, they're tacity (or overtly) approving of both the government and the war. This makes them targets for death and destruction, and rightly so; whether death comes in the form of a bullet, an airstrike, or a nuclear missile is entirely irrelevent.
This isn't about 'right' or 'wrong', it's about 'winning' or 'losing'. Once the war starts you do whatever it takes to win, or at least not to lose too badly. Hypocritical bleeding-heart apologia (e.g., one kind of death is good, but another is bad) has no place in any rational discussion of war, anytime, anywhere.
And no one has any business demanding that Americans be ashamed about the bombs that were dropped on Japan, anymore than they have any business demanding that Americans be ashamed of the firebombing of Tokyo.
I raise my children, but I do not raise the children they go to school with.
Nor should you. Unless a law is being broken, how other parents raise their children isn't any of your concern.
If violent games did make people more violent
There has never been an empirical study published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal which has even tentatively linked violent games to violent behavior. It's a non-issue.
or just not able to tell the difference between reality and game
Anyone who can't do this has serious psychological problems, and games/TV/whatever the boogeyman of the day is the least of their worries.
then my child would not be safe.
Your child is never safe. Neither are you. Life is inherently dangerous. If a video game freaks you out, then you'll really be pissing your shorts over things like ladders, pools, and stairs.
In any event, video games don't make anyone *less* safe. If you think otherwise, please provide a link or cite to an appropriately scientific study disputing my assertion.
YOu can't add something to society without effecting the whole.
So what? I'm not obligated beyond the strictures provided by the Constitution of these United States - which, by the way, emphasize freedom of the individual over the transitory prejudices of society. If you don't care for this there are countries in Europe which emphasize the exact opposite in values, places you'd almost certainly feel more at home.
The conclusion is simple: I'm not responsible for your kid. Ever. If you don't want your kid around me, or around certain activities, then it's up to YOU - not me - to police your child. You have no right to police my activities "for the good of the children" simply because you can't be bothered to do the job yourself.
Another system akin to the/. moderation system would to give editors who do a good job at wikipedia more control over what they can change and how much they can change it.
That's actually a good idea. An editor with a high rating could roll back an entry to erase vandalism, then lock that entry for, say, a week. Most trolls don't have much of an attention span, so after a week (or several weeks of the same thing running) they'd probably wander off to find new people to make miserable.
Others who wanted to modify the page could be informed that editor X locked it until date Y due to vandalism. The rational among us would approve of the lock and come back in a week to try again; no harm done.
Congress was another battle ground but congress was vehemently against the civil rights movement until public opinion finally crushed them.
Riiight. Public opinion, in case you didn't live through that era and have no fucking clue what you're talking about, didn't really give a shit about the issue one way or another. If anything, the number of people *for* racial segregation far outstripped the number of people *against* racial segregation.
The FBI was knowingly used to try and crush civil rights leaders(especially members of the black panthers).
The FBI crushed anyone who wouldn't support the status quo. It wasn't anything new, and it certainly wasn't limited to the black panthers or a bunch of pothead morons in tie-dyes.
Civil rights might have been finally won in the courts and in congress, but that was only made possibly by the daily work of millions of blacks(and tens of thousands of whites) in the trenches.
It was made possible via a friendly court system that reinterpretated the Constitution along with the elimination of things like the Poll Tax. Combine this with a few demagogues willing to play the power game with the vote and you get change...because that's how deals are made.
The willingness to stare down a fire hose or gun for something as simple as going to the same restroom helped open the eyes of millions of americans.
Who generally called the lot of you a bunch of fucking commies. Your point?
and without that, nothing would have changed.
You're deluded if you think that's the case. Most Americans despised "hippy protestors" and "uppity blacks", and though that violence was a perfectly acceptable way to handle the situation.
or do you think that congress would have gotten around to enacting the civil rights act without the civil rights movement
Yep, because effective game-players came along and worked the system to the advantage of blacks, hispanics, and other non-white groups. That's how it's always been and how it'll always be. Protestors are nothing more than window-dressing for the show.
Yet another example of the failure of the school system to actually educate. Try something simple, like dropping in on Wikipedia and typing in the search term "Thor". Then ask yourself this question: which came first, the myth or the comic book?
But smoking anything deposits nasty tarred up hydrocarbons in your lungs, just for starters.
I'm not sure what the problem is here. It's up to the person in question whether or not they want deposits of nasty tars in their lungs, not their neighbor. Or at least it would be, in a truly free country.
Hell, the only reason I took chemistry in high school was to make explosives and learn how to properly construct a still. Fortunately one of my chemistry teachers was actually pretty cool and walked us through the construction of a still that would produce something other than instantly fatal poison.
Because of him (O'Donnell, I still remember the name) - and, incidentally, the practical joke possibilities inherent in NI3 - I went on to take all the chemistry, physics and biology offered in school. A movie sure as hell wouldn't have convinced me to do this; only the useful and fun *application* of the sciences did, under the guidance of someone who made sure I didn't poison myself or blow up the lab.
Good luck on getting anything of the sort in the modern school system. These days O'Donnell would be arrested and sent to jail for "corrupting kidlets", or some such nonsense.
Apart from the accurate comments concerning hygiene and social skills, the reason that women usually don't go for geeks is because most geeks seem to think that all women fall into two or three easily-identifiable stereotypes, all of which are highly inaccurate and inherently mysogynistic.
Newsflash! They're just people, pretty much like anyone else; they *don't* come in models, like RealDolls. Once y'all start to wrap your brains around this idea it becomes much easier to get the ladies to take you seriously. Assuming, of course, that you couple that with regular bathing and some rudimentary mastery of personal interaction that doesn't revolve around shiny-cool tech-toys....
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Why do you say that "no significant portion of the population will ever move off-world"?
Because there are no other habitable worlds in the Solar System. It will always be incredibly expensive to house and sustain human life off-planet compared to housing and sustaining human life on Earth. It makes no economic sense whatsoever to make an investment of this nature; the only people you'll ever want to move off-planet are the absolute minimum required to exploit the resources in specific places (e.g., the asteroid belt).
Max
That's a bit of a non-sequiter, isn't it? If the Earth is overpopulated, even a zero growth rate wouldn't change that fact.
What the alarmists fail to acknowledge is that they don't get to decide at what point the Earth is "overpopulated". I don't think the Earth is overpopulated at the moment, nor will it be if we reach eight billion. My opinion is just as valid (or invalid) as any alarmist figure.
You'd need a negative growth rate in order to shrink the population back to less than the maximum sustainable size.
Every single analysis of 'sustainability' by the folks preaching doom and gloom over the Earth's carrying capacity assumes that *technology will never advance beyond what we have now*. It's not only stupid to think such a thing, it's deliberately deceptive. Not that this is a new development among the population control advocates - they've been doing the exact same thing since the beginning of the 20th century! And they've been absolutely, one-hundred percent, dead wrong.
Based on their complete and utter failure to accurate predict anything when it comes to population and resource development, much less technological innovation, I see no reason to heed the alarmists now any more than I should if the year were 1900.
Max
murder is perfectly acceptable, but population control is evil evil evil.
The only way you could achieve your version of "population control" is by enslaving every single human being who doesn't agree with you. Most people would find such an abominable attitude the very definition of "evil".
Max
If the population of the earth keeps growing we won't have enough resources to maintain our current level of living conditions.
While the Earth still has a positive growth rate, that rate has been in decline ever since a certain piece of trash called "The Population Bomb" hit the shelves. If the decline continues we'll hit an equilibrium population of around eight billion when all is said and done. Note that according to the doomsayers who first started whining about population we were supposed to have in excess of eight billion people by the year 2000; it never happened because they didn't bothered to check their facts, which even then indicated that the rate was in decline.
I find it rather interesting that people who still complain about Earth being "overpopulated" fail to mention the declining growth rate, nor the fact that every single prediction they made from the '60's right up to the present has been dead wrong.
As far as the resource argument goes, this only applies if you assume that technological advancement freezes at its current level and never, ever progresses again. Quite clearly that isn't going to happen.
So if you consider the earth as a closed system you have to either raise the standard of living around the world to a level where population growth ceases "naturally" or you have to commit the resources of the rich into forcing the poor not to breed.
The first may eventually happen through technological advancement; the second never will unless you manage to enslave the Earth to a dictatorial one-world government. And so long as folks like me are around, anyone who tries to enforce breeding limits on their fellow citizens will find themselves the subject of a post-natal abortion right quick.
Right, so if we're willing to agree that considering the earth as a closed system leads to the logical conclusion that the world population growth must be controlled by force
We aren't willing to agree. You'll never get a majority of Americans - or anything other than a tiny, tiny minority, I suspect - to agree with your assessment.
We must expand into space.
Settling space is a non-viable population control method. It may be useful for increasing the resource wealth of the Earth itself (your first option - make everyone rich) but no significant portion of the population will ever move off-world. In fact, it'd be a complete waste of resources to even try.
Max
Kozmo could only work in an arcology setting, and only then if the service charge were added in some fashion, e.g., as part of the rent. Although I can see this as being a very big incentive to move into an arcology, having everything from groceries to movie rentals delivered right to your door. The young forward-thinking geek could move into a much larger and more socially acceptable version of his parents basement while at the same time claiming that he's part of the 'wave of the future', rather than just being afraid of sunlight and face-to-face contact with other human beings.
Max
There would be no greenhouse effect at all if the carbon dioxide froze.
Earth has never been cold enough for carbon dioxide to freeze. We're too close to the sun. To say "if Earth had been a bit further from the sun" is about as sensible as saying "if the moon were made of green cheese". It doesn't matter because Earth ISN'T further from the sun. The "if" here isn't worth a damn any which way you look at it.
Max
In the past 30 odd years that I'm running around on this globe, this planet has been threatened so often with destruction that I'm not remotely worried about it anymore.
o re folks - really can't get excited about it. And don't want to get excited about it, frankly. If we got up in arms about this crap half as often as all these chicken littles wanted us to be each and every one of us would've dropped from stress-induced heart failure years ago.
The alarmists aren't happy unless they're running around screaming "the sky is falling!". They're only really satisfied if they can convince you to do the same. Of course, if you don't they can always take the consolation prize of claiming that you're morally bankrupt for not panicking in the manner in which they approve.
Thing is, it's so bloody common for little groups here and there to make a fuss about the sky falling that the rest of us - the calm, the sane, the rational, and the just plain tired-of-this-shit-and-don't-want-to-hear-it-anym
Max
you would never beable to get out of the iceage again or something like that.
That conundrum was solved over 30 years ago. As glaciation reaches the equator and covers the oceans (not to mention all other forms of liquid water) precipitation drops to virtually zero - much like the conditions you see at Amundsen-Scott in Antarctica. That means that carbon dioxide, which is usually washed out of the atmosphere via rain, slowly accumulates over time. And I do mean slowly, since the primary form of input is through volcanic eruption.
In any event, there's eventually enough carbon dioxide in the air that sunlight reflecting from the ice gets trapped between the ice and the carbon dioxide layer in the atmosphere. This heats up the atmosphere, which starts to melt the ice, which means less sunlight is reflected from the ice and more is trapped in the atmosphere, which means things get hotter and more ice melts, etc. etc. Your snowball world begins to melt and things start swinging wildly towards the other end of the spectrum: a Venus-like hothouse.
What's to stop a runaway greenhouse effect? Well, with the ice melting and free water making a reappearance you once again get clouds. And that means rain. And that means that some of the carbon dioxide gets washed out of the atmosphere. The more ice that melts the more rain there is the more the carbon dioxide layer begins to fail.
Snowball Earths can't be sustained indefinitely, nor can greenhouse Earths, so long as there's active volcanism.
Max
The problem with the nuclear engine isn't that it's too advanced to build (it isn't) but that the spacecraft essentially sits on top of a huge curved plate and rides a series of nuclear fireballs into orbit.
While this is highly efficient at getting a payload into space, it tends to be rather bad for anything within a few miles of the craft when it launches. If you're using a 'dirty' engine (e.g., spitting plutonium pellets out the back and igniting them with a laser) you'll also leave a nice poisonous trail of radioactive fallout on the way up.
Nuclear engines would only be of real value for interplanetary travel, or for lifting from a non-Earth world (no ecology or population to damage).
Max
The rest of the world uses metric, it's time for the US to join the 20th century. After all, the rest of us are in the 21st century, don't you think it's about time?
The only people who get any say at all in this are Americans, and the vast majority have spoken in favor of keeping the current system.
Really, I don't know that all the spineless whining is about. Learn both systems and do the extremely simple conversions when necessary. Unlike the general topic, this isn't rocket science!
Max
Having a wikipedia entry isn't indicative of anything other than having a wikipedia entry. For a good many of us that doesn't count for much of anything at all.
Max
The irony of podcasting is that it was created to circumvent big media companies.
What the fuck do you think Apple is becoming? The company is doing it's very best to transform itself the whore of every media giant in the world, distributing the same ol' shit in a fashionable, new, hip way for the young and shallow. Ignorance and hypocrisy have never been more profitable, especially to Apple.
Apple doesn't give a shit about you, or "indies", or whatever the hell you think they were up to when they came up with the iPod. They care about making money, and the best way to do that is to spread their legs for established media - and get you to spread your legs in the process. And it works, because even the fucking fools who scream "the RIAA sux, dude!" couldn't wait to get their jism-covered paws on an iPod.
Podcasting was never about "indies". It was, and always has been, about getting packaged content out to young users, especially those who might otherwise engage in acts of masturbatory self-congratulation over the fact that they don't buy in to the "popular culture". A whole demographic ripe for the plucking, in the end just as dumb and ignorant as all the other demographics they so often look down upon.
Max
You mean like this?
Max
I don't got thru the day worrying about if the Gov't might know something about me they didn't know yesterday.
So the fuck what? The fact that it doesn't bother you means dick to me, and why should it?
The fact that the Patriot Act got pretty much unanimous reapproval in the House and Sentate says it not a bad deal on the whole.
Are you deliberately trolling? "Gubmint is your friend"???
The Patriot Act is nothing to fear unless you got something to hide.
A right to privacy, in case you missed it, means that I can hide any goddamned thing I please. It's up to the government to prove - before a judge - that some specific thing I'm hiding is criminal in nature, and therefore should be revealed.
I don't like Unkie Sam knowing things about me, I don't see why he needs to know, I don't fit the Terrorist Profile, but I really don't care as I'm not going to do something to bring himm down on me.
Great, you live your life the way you want, completely unconcerned about the activities of your big government daddy. But when it comes to my life, both you and your daddy can kiss my hairy ass.
Max
Also feel guilty that although being in an SUV is slightly safer for you, you are SIX TIMES more likely to kill the occupants of the car you crash into than if you were driving an automobile.
Better them than me.
Max
It took the world 10 years to stop tyrany in WWII. It would take 35 minutes to stop tyrany today.
Which I'm sure has the 80-odd dictatorships across the world shaking in their boots. Tyranny, it seems, is alive and well.
Max
young Americans should feel bad about the bombs on Japan
According to you, perhaps. According to me "young Americans" need not engage in foolish bouts of shame over the fact that their grandfathers (rightly) used nuclear weapons on Japan.
War is war. Despite the farce embodied by the articles of the Geneva Convention, the point is to win - by any means possible - while losing as few of your own people as you can. To arbitrarily class one method of killing the enemy as "okay" and another as "not okay" is just plain stupid; either way the other guy is dead, and dead is DEAD. The end result is exactly the same, and equally bad.
As for civilian casualties, there are no such thing as innocent civilians in an enemy country. All of the civilians are just as much your enemy as the soldiers are; they support the economy, build the bombs, ship the food and fuel, etc. And if they aren't working to actively overthrow the government prosecuting the war, they're tacity (or overtly) approving of both the government and the war. This makes them targets for death and destruction, and rightly so; whether death comes in the form of a bullet, an airstrike, or a nuclear missile is entirely irrelevent.
This isn't about 'right' or 'wrong', it's about 'winning' or 'losing'. Once the war starts you do whatever it takes to win, or at least not to lose too badly. Hypocritical bleeding-heart apologia (e.g., one kind of death is good, but another is bad) has no place in any rational discussion of war, anytime, anywhere.
And no one has any business demanding that Americans be ashamed about the bombs that were dropped on Japan, anymore than they have any business demanding that Americans be ashamed of the firebombing of Tokyo.
Max
I raise my children, but I do not raise the children they go to school with.
Nor should you. Unless a law is being broken, how other parents raise their children isn't any of your concern.
If violent games did make people more violent
There has never been an empirical study published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal which has even tentatively linked violent games to violent behavior. It's a non-issue.
or just not able to tell the difference between reality and game
Anyone who can't do this has serious psychological problems, and games/TV/whatever the boogeyman of the day is the least of their worries.
then my child would not be safe.
Your child is never safe. Neither are you. Life is inherently dangerous. If a video game freaks you out, then you'll really be pissing your shorts over things like ladders, pools, and stairs.
In any event, video games don't make anyone *less* safe. If you think otherwise, please provide a link or cite to an appropriately scientific study disputing my assertion.
YOu can't add something to society without effecting the whole.
So what? I'm not obligated beyond the strictures provided by the Constitution of these United States - which, by the way, emphasize freedom of the individual over the transitory prejudices of society. If you don't care for this there are countries in Europe which emphasize the exact opposite in values, places you'd almost certainly feel more at home.
The conclusion is simple: I'm not responsible for your kid. Ever. If you don't want your kid around me, or around certain activities, then it's up to YOU - not me - to police your child. You have no right to police my activities "for the good of the children" simply because you can't be bothered to do the job yourself.
Max
Another system akin to the /. moderation system would to give editors who do a good job at wikipedia more control over what they can change and how much they can change it.
That's actually a good idea. An editor with a high rating could roll back an entry to erase vandalism, then lock that entry for, say, a week. Most trolls don't have much of an attention span, so after a week (or several weeks of the same thing running) they'd probably wander off to find new people to make miserable.
Others who wanted to modify the page could be informed that editor X locked it until date Y due to vandalism. The rational among us would approve of the lock and come back in a week to try again; no harm done.
Max
Congress was another battle ground but congress was vehemently against the civil rights movement until public opinion finally crushed them.
Riiight. Public opinion, in case you didn't live through that era and have no fucking clue what you're talking about, didn't really give a shit about the issue one way or another. If anything, the number of people *for* racial segregation far outstripped the number of people *against* racial segregation.
The FBI was knowingly used to try and crush civil rights leaders(especially members of the black panthers).
The FBI crushed anyone who wouldn't support the status quo. It wasn't anything new, and it certainly wasn't limited to the black panthers or a bunch of pothead morons in tie-dyes.
Civil rights might have been finally won in the courts and in congress, but that was only made possibly by the daily work of millions of blacks(and tens of thousands of whites) in the trenches.
It was made possible via a friendly court system that reinterpretated the Constitution along with the elimination of things like the Poll Tax. Combine this with a few demagogues willing to play the power game with the vote and you get change...because that's how deals are made.
The willingness to stare down a fire hose or gun for something as simple as going to the same restroom helped open the eyes of millions of americans.
Who generally called the lot of you a bunch of fucking commies. Your point?
and without that, nothing would have changed.
You're deluded if you think that's the case. Most Americans despised "hippy protestors" and "uppity blacks", and though that violence was a perfectly acceptable way to handle the situation.
or do you think that congress would have gotten around to enacting the civil rights act without the civil rights movement
Yep, because effective game-players came along and worked the system to the advantage of blacks, hispanics, and other non-white groups. That's how it's always been and how it'll always be. Protestors are nothing more than window-dressing for the show.
Max
Your God is the star of a comic book
Yet another example of the failure of the school system to actually educate. Try something simple, like dropping in on Wikipedia and typing in the search term "Thor". Then ask yourself this question: which came first, the myth or the comic book?
Max
Yes, it's a parent problem, but the line has to be drawn somewhere.
Yeah, at home - where the line belongs.
Max
But smoking anything deposits nasty tarred up hydrocarbons in your lungs, just for starters.
I'm not sure what the problem is here. It's up to the person in question whether or not they want deposits of nasty tars in their lungs, not their neighbor. Or at least it would be, in a truly free country.
Max
Hell, the only reason I took chemistry in high school was to make explosives and learn how to properly construct a still. Fortunately one of my chemistry teachers was actually pretty cool and walked us through the construction of a still that would produce something other than instantly fatal poison.
Because of him (O'Donnell, I still remember the name) - and, incidentally, the practical joke possibilities inherent in NI3 - I went on to take all the chemistry, physics and biology offered in school. A movie sure as hell wouldn't have convinced me to do this; only the useful and fun *application* of the sciences did, under the guidance of someone who made sure I didn't poison myself or blow up the lab.
Good luck on getting anything of the sort in the modern school system. These days O'Donnell would be arrested and sent to jail for "corrupting kidlets", or some such nonsense.
Max
Apart from the accurate comments concerning hygiene and social skills, the reason that women usually don't go for geeks is because most geeks seem to think that all women fall into two or three easily-identifiable stereotypes, all of which are highly inaccurate and inherently mysogynistic.
Newsflash! They're just people, pretty much like anyone else; they *don't* come in models, like RealDolls. Once y'all start to wrap your brains around this idea it becomes much easier to get the ladies to take you seriously. Assuming, of course, that you couple that with regular bathing and some rudimentary mastery of personal interaction that doesn't revolve around shiny-cool tech-toys....
Max