So, let me get this straight: Marshall is a liberal, and Sullivan is conservative? Unfortunately I couldn't connect to Sullivan's site, the address is wrong, but I suspect that it isn't a great loss.
What always surprises me is the extreme difference between Europe and America when it comes to the meaning of political words. When I read Marshall he struck me as a fairly decent, but clearly very conservative person, politically, and on the occasions that I have come in touch with Americans who are considered conservative, they have come across as extremely right wing, out there on the fringe with Joerg Haider in Austria and the BNP in UK.
It is little wonder that we in Europe feel more at home with the Chinese than with the Americans.
Come on, in a world where 'Big Brother' can draw an audience and things like 'Hello' magazine is actually bought by anybody, not to mention Fox News - how should it NOT be newsworthy? it obviously ranks high above trivialities like hunger catastrophes, genocides and floods.
This may be different in America, but I'm pretty sure that if I found somebody else's property, I would be breaking the law if I just kept it, no matter what it was. And of course there are privacy issues in somebody holiday pictures as well.
Yes this is absolutely true. Before that time the Chinese would eat by slamming their face down in the bowl and sucking rice and gravy through their nostrils.
Looking at the reactions so far on/. I get the sense that people are soiling their pants over this. Try to step back a bit and have a more realistic look at things.
1. N Korea is a small country and however much one may dislike them, they are not in a position to attack and take over the world - or even the region, nuke or not.
2. Its not realistic to imagine terrorists smuggling an atomic bomb anywhere. These things are big and 'noisy' in terms of radiation. While one might imagine that a very rich organisation - say, al Qaeda - could actually smuggle one into USA, why would they? It's too much effort for too little effect, when it is so much easier to slam an aircraft into a building or something like that.
No, even if N Korea make a nuclear bomb, it only makes sense for them to keep it as a threat. The very fact that they still exist against all odds demonstrates that they may have a very bad government, but they are probably not on a suicide mission.
The real danger (I have to say this, otherwise I'll get modded up) lies elsewhere: with people whose heads have grown too big and seem to tink they have a right to tell the world what to do.
Perhaps the explanation is not so much that the future is looking complicated, but simply that science fiction has itself become a tedious and bleak rattling around in repetitive platitudes?
I personally don't think it's because people in general don't like to read about real life where nobody is 100% good or evil. Well, maybe if you're a teenager, but even so - most teenagers I have talked to recently (friends of my children - I'm THAT old;) think a lot about good and evil and are not at all convinced that things can be painted in broad strokes of black and white.
No, I think the problem is more that there aren't any brilliant writers and/or subjects any more. Last I read SF I gave up halfway through; I believe it was one of Iain Banks, whom I normally like, but it just seemed like some dreary humdrum - like yet another replay of the same old theme, the same old political and religious prejudices and thin science. At least in phantasy there's a chance you might see a new idea, but I must say my recent experience leaves much to be desired.
The most exciting and inspired literature I read nowadays seems to be Chinese literature. Maybe this is a question for everyone: Do you also feel that Western literature as a whole has landed in the doldrums? Have you tried something else, like eg. East Asian or perhaps Middle Eastern literature?
Ah, how fast we humans learn except when it comes to learning to NOT do stupid things.
Think a little about this: in places far away from humans the nature is presumably in some sort of balance. It's also full of insects, far more than any other class of life. As a consequence insects are very important - without insects, or with reduced numbers of insects in the wild, most of the animal life we know wouldn't survive; and a lot of plants are pollinated by insects (not just bees!) - many would disappear.
Much as I respect Asimov, I must say that this sounds like an unbelievably stupid idea. Another thing is (according to an article in New Scientist) that maybe insects will soon come back on our menu like they used to be years ago (a lot of years ago). Insect protein is better for us, the fat is better, and they are much more efficient at producing proteins from the plants they eat than eg. pigs or cows.
Doesn't it strike anybody as odd that we keep getting more and more sophisticated technology for gaming, recording TV, etc etc, but there's nothing to use it for. I mean, look at TV: How many GOOD films are there? I know there's a huge lot of so-so things, like The Matrix, but I honestly can't think of more than, say, about 20 hours of films that I would want to watch more than once, and a lot of it I wouldn't even spend that much time on. The same goes for programs about nature, science etc - it's all about repeated sequences, cool fade-ins and background sounds and what I think of as 'generalised wanking'.
The same goes for games: there's a lot of fabulous technology, but it's still the same old games as always. Why should I want to buy HW as powerful as a Cray or a mainframe used to be, just to get bored by a 'cooler' class of drivel?
No, what I want to see is REAL innovation - not just a polished copy of something already known.
The worst nuclear disasters to date were, in no particular order:
1. Hiroshima 2. Nagasaki
- and probably a few others before Chernobyl. It makes no difference that those were intended - it was still a disaster to those harmed. The fact that it WAS intentional just adds guilt to the picture.
No, I don't like the look of things either. For me the main reasons to start using Linux were:
1. It wasn't Windows 2. It was free
- in that order. The only thing in Windows that was good was the fact that the printer interface was reasonably standardised, but fortunately CUPS is getting OK now. Everything else in Windows was bad, the dumbing down, the instability, the sleazy ways of Microsoft, the oh, so 'cool' style of hype etc etc.
So to see that GNOME is going that way really isn't any joy. But there may be hope:
http://www.goneme.org/
- these people are forking GNOME to get away from the current sucking up to Windows.
- the free world and all; you know that. Dog eat dog is what it's all about, the right of the strongest and all that. If you find something and like it, you take it, and if nobody is able to resist you, you get to keep it and call it 'your right'.
After all, its the land of 'democracy', 'opportunity' and 'freedom':
democracy: make up the rules as you go along. opportunity: steal and run if you get the chance freedom: if you aren't caught it wasn't wrong.
- if you don't like it, change it. You're the people.
- which I'm sure will get me modded down in the eyes of various goverments: Why not just drop all this protection of big and important politicians? Yeah, I know why, but just think about it - the average guy in power wuld have to put a bit more effort into not creating enemies, for one thing.
I remember a story about the Russian Czar visiting the king of Denmark; and they went to look at one of the famous landmarks in Copenhagen, the 'Round Tower', which is a church tower with a (at that time) advanced observatory at the top and no staircase inside (another story is that one king used to drive his carriage up there, but I'm not so sure about that). The story goes that the Czar wanted to demonstrate his absolute power over his soldiers as well as their courage, so he ordered a young lieutenant to climb over the balustrade and jump to his death (they were standing at the top of the tower), and the man started doing so, somewhat reluctantly I imagine, but none the less.
The King promptly got this stopped, of course - he didn't want to have that kind of spectacle in his city, but he admitted that he was impressed. 'But I have another kind of power', he said, 'I can go out into the countryside, unarmed, to any farmhouse, rich or poor and stay the night, and the farmer will be my personal guard. When hearing this, the Czar fell silent.
Come on guys, this is obviously a April's Fool hoax,.. wait a mo', just checking my calendar...
There are some observations one can make about this article, though - notic for example that one professor Nutt is involved; certainly inspires confidence, a name like that.
Apart from that - the ability to feel euphoria is a natural thing and part of the brain's reward system. I can't imagine any responsible person who knows what he doing would ever want to disable or impair a person's ability to feel rewarded - this would have extremely grave consequences, expecially for a the development of a child. Just imagine that you couldn't feel that it was good to have done something: you would probably either develop severe depression or perhaps psychopathy (if you don't feel good about empathic and doing nice things for other people, you'd avoid it, right?)
No, this kind of wanting to prevent a minor problem with something that is so profoundly insecure and potentially devastating is way out of this world. When I say minor I am of course thinking of the fact that only a small minority actually becomes addicted to anything - most people who try drugs will walk away from them after a while, simply because it doesn't appeal to them anymore.
People keep talking about 'intuitive' as if they knew what it was; and most of the time it turns out that it is just another word for 'cool'. A lot of things would be a lot better if application designers would concentrate a little less on making the 'perfect' Fisher-Price look or implementing their own, private 'vision' of how the world ought to function. We have enough primadonnas as it is.
To achieve usability, I find that it is much better to focus on a few things:
1. Simplicity. It helps a lot if the application simply does what it says on the packet. Please note that simple is not the same as 'not advanced' - it just means that it does what you expect it to do. An electric drill is simple, even though it is a complex piece of mechanics - a Swiss Army knife with toothpicks, saw blades, compass and that pointy thing you can't figure out what is, is not simple, even though it is just some bits of metal stuck together.
2. Extensibility. When you have learned the basics it should be possible to add things in one way or another. Again, the function of an electric drill can be extended little by little as the owner gets more competent and/or wants to do more.
3. Discoverability. It shouldn't be necessary to learn-by-guessing a new ideographic script in the form of icons. This means there has to be documentation and a help system - and preferably one that isn't limited to some moronic context sensitive help. It's amazing so often you need to do something out of the immediate context.
4. Configurability. Quite contrary to common belief, people actually want to be able to customize and configure far more than developers want to let them. Yes, in the first few hours too many options may be intimidating, but very soon people get over this and want to make changes. Some applications manage this by providing more than one configuration interface - one simple, where the system sets a lot of defaults, and another where you have full access.
Some might think that these things conflict with each other. Like, how can it be simple, if the user can configure a million parameters? Well, provide sensible defaults, of course, so people are not forced to learn everything at once - but another thing to remember is, that a simple tool is also one that is adequate for the task - if you have to configure something that by nature is complicated, then the tool has to give you access to that complexity. As Windows so abundantly illustrates, it can get very complicated if the configuration tool is inadequate; and in Windows you often come across the sort of tool that is too simple, but at the same time cumbersome to use, where it would have been so much easier if only the configuration has been kept in a simple text file, and you could use a simple editor.
By the same token you could say that Americans deserve the hatred that comes their way. And many would agree - the impression that is prevalent in most countries outside America seems to be that you guys are terminally superficial, heavyhanded beyond any anything merited by the situation, infinitely selfish, wasteful and equipped with the narrowest tunnel vision know to mankind.
But would it be reasonable to say that 'this is the way Americans are' just because your government and military are like that?
Remember - you guys started on the nonsense with 'freedom fries', 'surrender monkeys' and 'France's mini-me'. You never heard any French officials blurt out that kind of drivel. Probably too arrogant to stoop that low.
I think it is a good idea for broadcasters to tape all broadcasts; not because I think they should be scanned for 'indecencies', but because it may have historical value. Even a load of crap like Big Brother might one day be of some interest to some researcher, you never know.
As for indecencies - with more channels than tv sets in the US, I should think it would be possible to find another channel, if you don't like the language, subject or whatever. And the real indecencies - the blatant lies from politicians, the very existence of reality tv etc, that is a whole other ballgame.
Apart from that, I think your arguments are over the top. I don't think keeping records ought to be a major problem for broadcasters; it's probably more of a problem getting around to destroying old clutter. The examples you mention are not realistic either, I think - for one thing, which judge or other authority would take complaints of that nature serious? Of course there will be people who would bee paranoid enough to look for this kind of thing, but they are already doing so - like finding 'hidden messages' in rock albums or the number 666 in random places.
Before we can take on a project of this nature we really need too solve a large number of more pressing problems. As I suspect you Americans may be beginning to realize, a big thing like a space elevator is likely to be vulnerable, and to be quite honest: the answer to all security problems isn't bigger guns, more surveillance and less personal freedom.
Think about it - as long as there are people out there that are willing to fly a passenger plane into a tall building, we shouldn't create an even bigger target. It was bad when the twin towers fell, both in terms of human life and longer term consequences, like pollution etc. If we suddenly have 100 miles of superstrong material slamming down at hypersonic speed, it's going to be extremely bad - somebody ought to calculate how many Teratons of TNT that corresponds to.
You're exaggerating. First of all, a lot of people have been vaccinated - I have, just to mention one (and it wasn't bad, really). Secondly, yes smallpox is bad, but not THAT bad - many patients die, as far as I remember about 10%; assuming they are infected and develop the disease.
Smallpox can't wipe out all life on the planet - if that was possible don't you think it would have happened already? Smallpox has been around at least as long as the cow has been domesticated (it's a mutant of cow pox). The reason viruses can be used as weapons isn't that they 'kill everything', but that they create enough patients to overwhelm a country's infra structure; just look at the effect of SARS, a virus that was a lot less dangerous than smallpox - it wasn't that a lot of people died, but a lot of effort went into containing it.
I don't think it is realistic to imagine that American society would suddenly collapse - maybe in a Hollywood film, but not in reality. But American economy is not longer invulnerable, for many reasons. You have right now a huge debt, both due to Bush's mismanagement of the economy and due to private debt. If fuel prices start going up without ever coming down again, you won't be able to earn enough to make ends meet - and fuel prices are very likely to start climbing from now on, even assuming that China and India don't begin to increase their demands.
'Are fuel economy issues just FUD from [insert lobby group of choice]?'
With the end of the oil reserves within clear sight, I'd say no, it isn't FUD. And apart from that we have a couple of potential disasters right in our faces:
1. Iraq seems to be a long way away from stability and success in any sense of the word 'success' as we presently know it.
2. Saudi Arabia is beginning to destabilize as a consequence of the increased terrorism that is a consequence of we-all-know-who attacking Iraq without thinking.
All we need now is Sharon and the ultra-extremists in Israel inflaming even more hostility in the region, so that situation gets out of control, and Israel starts throwing their non-existent nuclear weapons around.
I'd say, all in all, there is a very real risk that we can have a massive oil crisis in less than 1 year from now because of these things. Maybe it won't happen, maybe sense will prevail, but certainly not if people in general just turn up the volume on their favorite 'reality' TV show and sit on their hands. I believe that to avoid having it come crashing down, we need to get rid of the Bushes, Blairs and Sharons, and we - you and I - need to think seriously about a more frugal lifestyle.
Yeah, I know, most people won't take this seriously. You will eventually, though.
Well, actually I don't, but that's another matter.
However, it seems that every time somebody mentions something about 'quantum' people around here go into Batman and Star Trek Mode.
1. This whole thing is still very much in the early days of fundamental research. Think Babbage or Archimedes or something similar. I suspect that much of the hype about 'quantum computing' is simply a magical mantra that produces funding.
2. There still is no such thing as teleportation, not even theoretically. Entaglement only means that you can get two objects to behave 'in step' even at a distance, but so far it has always involved that they start out together, ie. physically close to each other. Teleportation on the other hand is normally thought of as transporting mass from one point of space to another, sort of magically, without passing through the space and time that seperate the two points. There really isn't much chance of that ever making even theoretical sense.
QOTD: Said one juror: 'The part that surprised me was when I read the First Amendment instructions. I was surprised to learn that people could say whatever they want... providing it would not cause imminent action.'"
Sweet fscking Jesus! This is seriously scary stuff. You Americans are always on about Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights. But it seems to me that what this illustrates more than anything is that the average American simply doesn't know and/or care, when it can come as a surprise, that your constitution gives you these rights. No wonder that the GWB can get away with anything!
Now, to look at this from another angle. You know, when people are starving, all they think about is food, and when they are thirsty, nothing seems more attractive than water. So why are subjects like 'freedom', 'democracy' and 'human rights' so important to Americans?
Slashdot Mirror
So, let me get this straight: Marshall is a liberal, and Sullivan is conservative? Unfortunately I couldn't connect to Sullivan's site, the address is wrong, but I suspect that it isn't a great loss.
What always surprises me is the extreme difference between Europe and America when it comes to the meaning of political words. When I read Marshall he struck me as a fairly decent, but clearly very conservative person, politically, and on the occasions that I have come in touch with Americans who are considered conservative, they have come across as extremely right wing, out there on the fringe with Joerg Haider in Austria and the BNP in UK.
It is little wonder that we in Europe feel more at home with the Chinese than with the Americans.
Come on, in a world where 'Big Brother' can draw an audience and things like 'Hello' magazine is actually bought by anybody, not to mention Fox News - how should it NOT be newsworthy? it obviously ranks high above trivialities like hunger catastrophes, genocides and floods.
This may be different in America, but I'm pretty sure that if I found somebody else's property, I would be breaking the law if I just kept it, no matter what it was. And of course there are privacy issues in somebody holiday pictures as well.
Yes this is absolutely true. Before that time the Chinese would eat by slamming their face down in the bowl and sucking rice and gravy through their nostrils.
Sorry, it should have read 'The performance is no hit'
Looking at the reactions so far on /. I get the sense that people are soiling their pants over this. Try to step back a bit and have a more realistic look at things.
1. N Korea is a small country and however much one may dislike them, they are not in a position to attack and take over the world - or even the region, nuke or not.
2. Its not realistic to imagine terrorists smuggling an atomic bomb anywhere. These things are big and 'noisy' in terms of radiation. While one might imagine that a very rich organisation - say, al Qaeda - could actually smuggle one into USA, why would they? It's too much effort for too little effect, when it is so much easier to slam an aircraft into a building or something like that.
No, even if N Korea make a nuclear bomb, it only makes sense for them to keep it as a threat. The very fact that they still exist against all odds demonstrates that they may have a very bad government, but they are probably not on a suicide mission.
The real danger (I have to say this, otherwise I'll get modded up) lies elsewhere: with people whose heads have grown too big and seem to tink they have a right to tell the world what to do.
Perhaps the explanation is not so much that the future is looking complicated, but simply that science fiction has itself become a tedious and bleak rattling around in repetitive platitudes?
I personally don't think it's because people in general don't like to read about real life where nobody is 100% good or evil. Well, maybe if you're a teenager, but even so - most teenagers I have talked to recently (friends of my children - I'm THAT old;) think a lot about good and evil and are not at all convinced that things can be painted in broad strokes of black and white.
No, I think the problem is more that there aren't any brilliant writers and/or subjects any more. Last I read SF I gave up halfway through; I believe it was one of Iain Banks, whom I normally like, but it just seemed like some dreary humdrum - like yet another replay of the same old theme, the same old political and religious prejudices and thin science. At least in phantasy there's a chance you might see a new idea, but I must say my recent experience leaves much to be desired.
The most exciting and inspired literature I read nowadays seems to be Chinese literature. Maybe this is a question for everyone: Do you also feel that Western literature as a whole has landed in the doldrums? Have you tried something else, like eg. East Asian or perhaps Middle Eastern literature?
Ah, how fast we humans learn except when it comes to learning to NOT do stupid things.
Think a little about this: in places far away from humans the nature is presumably in some sort of balance. It's also full of insects, far more than any other class of life. As a consequence insects are very important - without insects, or with reduced numbers of insects in the wild, most of the animal life we know wouldn't survive; and a lot of plants are pollinated by insects (not just bees!) - many would disappear.
Much as I respect Asimov, I must say that this sounds like an unbelievably stupid idea. Another thing is (according to an article in New Scientist) that maybe insects will soon come back on our menu like they used to be years ago (a lot of years ago). Insect protein is better for us, the fat is better, and they are much more efficient at producing proteins from the plants they eat than eg. pigs or cows.
'Imagine a lake covered in shitsmelling robots, what a sight!'
- and that's not all...
Doesn't it strike anybody as odd that we keep getting more and more sophisticated technology for gaming, recording TV, etc etc, but there's nothing to use it for. I mean, look at TV: How many GOOD films are there? I know there's a huge lot of so-so things, like The Matrix, but I honestly can't think of more than, say, about 20 hours of films that I would want to watch more than once, and a lot of it I wouldn't even spend that much time on. The same goes for programs about nature, science etc - it's all about repeated sequences, cool fade-ins and background sounds and what I think of as 'generalised wanking'.
The same goes for games: there's a lot of fabulous technology, but it's still the same old games as always. Why should I want to buy HW as powerful as a Cray or a mainframe used to be, just to get bored by a 'cooler' class of drivel?
No, what I want to see is REAL innovation - not just a polished copy of something already known.
The worst nuclear disasters to date were, in no particular order:
1. Hiroshima
2. Nagasaki
- and probably a few others before Chernobyl. It makes no difference that those were intended - it was still a disaster to those harmed. The fact that it WAS intentional just adds guilt to the picture.
Cooperative? Non-profit!!? Say, are you some sort of communist!!? ;-)
No, I don't like the look of things either. For me the main reasons to start using Linux were:
1. It wasn't Windows
2. It was free
- in that order. The only thing in Windows that was good was the fact that the printer interface was reasonably standardised, but fortunately CUPS is getting OK now. Everything else in Windows was bad, the dumbing down, the instability, the sleazy ways of Microsoft, the oh, so 'cool' style of hype etc etc.
So to see that GNOME is going that way really isn't any joy. But there may be hope:
http://www.goneme.org/
- these people are forking GNOME to get away from the current sucking up to Windows.
- the free world and all; you know that. Dog eat dog is what it's all about, the right of the strongest and all that. If you find something and like it, you take it, and if nobody is able to resist you, you get to keep it and call it 'your right'.
After all, its the land of 'democracy', 'opportunity' and 'freedom':
democracy: make up the rules as you go along.
opportunity: steal and run if you get the chance
freedom: if you aren't caught it wasn't wrong.
- if you don't like it, change it. You're the people.
- which I'm sure will get me modded down in the eyes of various goverments: Why not just drop all this protection of big and important politicians? Yeah, I know why, but just think about it - the average guy in power wuld have to put a bit more effort into not creating enemies, for one thing.
I remember a story about the Russian Czar visiting the king of Denmark; and they went to look at one of the famous landmarks in Copenhagen, the 'Round Tower', which is a church tower with a (at that time) advanced observatory at the top and no staircase inside (another story is that one king used to drive his carriage up there, but I'm not so sure about that). The story goes that the Czar wanted to demonstrate his absolute power over his soldiers as well as their courage, so he ordered a young lieutenant to climb over the balustrade and jump to his death (they were standing at the top of the tower), and the man started doing so, somewhat reluctantly I imagine, but none the less.
The King promptly got this stopped, of course - he didn't want to have that kind of spectacle in his city, but he admitted that he was impressed. 'But I have another kind of power', he said, 'I can go out into the countryside, unarmed, to any farmhouse, rich or poor and stay the night, and the farmer will be my personal guard. When hearing this, the Czar fell silent.
Come on guys, this is obviously a April's Fool hoax,.. wait a mo', just checking my calendar...
There are some observations one can make about this article, though - notic for example that one professor Nutt is involved; certainly inspires confidence, a name like that.
Apart from that - the ability to feel euphoria is a natural thing and part of the brain's reward system. I can't imagine any responsible person who knows what he doing would ever want to disable or impair a person's ability to feel rewarded - this would have extremely grave consequences, expecially for a the development of a child. Just imagine that you couldn't feel that it was good to have done something: you would probably either develop severe depression or perhaps psychopathy (if you don't feel good about empathic and doing nice things for other people, you'd avoid it, right?)
No, this kind of wanting to prevent a minor problem with something that is so profoundly insecure and potentially devastating is way out of this world. When I say minor I am of course thinking of the fact that only a small minority actually becomes addicted to anything - most people who try drugs will walk away from them after a while, simply because it doesn't appeal to them anymore.
People keep talking about 'intuitive' as if they knew what it was; and most of the time it turns out that it is just another word for 'cool'. A lot of things would be a lot better if application designers would concentrate a little less on making the 'perfect' Fisher-Price look or implementing their own, private 'vision' of how the world ought to function. We have enough primadonnas as it is.
To achieve usability, I find that it is much better to focus on a few things:
1. Simplicity. It helps a lot if the application simply does what it says on the packet. Please note that simple is not the same as 'not advanced' - it just means that it does what you expect it to do. An electric drill is simple, even though it is a complex piece of mechanics - a Swiss Army knife with toothpicks, saw blades, compass and that pointy thing you can't figure out what is, is not simple, even though it is just some bits of metal stuck together.
2. Extensibility. When you have learned the basics it should be possible to add things in one way or another. Again, the function of an electric drill can be extended little by little as the owner gets more competent and/or wants to do more.
3. Discoverability. It shouldn't be necessary to learn-by-guessing a new ideographic script in the form of icons. This means there has to be documentation and a help system - and preferably one that isn't limited to some moronic context sensitive help. It's amazing so often you need to do something out of the immediate context.
4. Configurability. Quite contrary to common belief, people actually want to be able to customize and configure far more than developers want to let them. Yes, in the first few hours too many options may be intimidating, but very soon people get over this and want to make changes. Some applications manage this by providing more than one configuration interface - one simple, where the system sets a lot of defaults, and another where you have full access.
Some might think that these things conflict with each other. Like, how can it be simple, if the user can configure a million parameters? Well, provide sensible defaults, of course, so people are not forced to learn everything at once - but another thing to remember is, that a simple tool is also one that is adequate for the task - if you have to configure something that by nature is complicated, then the tool has to give you access to that complexity. As Windows so abundantly illustrates, it can get very complicated if the configuration tool is inadequate; and in Windows you often come across the sort of tool that is too simple, but at the same time cumbersome to use, where it would have been so much easier if only the configuration has been kept in a simple text file, and you could use a simple editor.
By the same token you could say that Americans deserve the hatred that comes their way. And many would agree - the impression that is prevalent in most countries outside America seems to be that you guys are terminally superficial, heavyhanded beyond any anything merited by the situation, infinitely selfish, wasteful and equipped with the narrowest tunnel vision know to mankind.
But would it be reasonable to say that 'this is the way Americans are' just because your government and military are like that?
Remember - you guys started on the nonsense with 'freedom fries', 'surrender monkeys' and 'France's mini-me'. You never heard any French officials blurt out that kind of drivel. Probably too arrogant to stoop that low.
I think it is a good idea for broadcasters to tape all broadcasts; not because I think they should be scanned for 'indecencies', but because it may have historical value. Even a load of crap like Big Brother might one day be of some interest to some researcher, you never know.
As for indecencies - with more channels than tv sets in the US, I should think it would be possible to find another channel, if you don't like the language, subject or whatever. And the real indecencies - the blatant lies from politicians, the very existence of reality tv etc, that is a whole other ballgame.
Apart from that, I think your arguments are over the top. I don't think keeping records ought to be a major problem for broadcasters; it's probably more of a problem getting around to destroying old clutter. The examples you mention are not realistic either, I think - for one thing, which judge or other authority would take complaints of that nature serious? Of course there will be people who would bee paranoid enough to look for this kind of thing, but they are already doing so - like finding 'hidden messages' in rock albums or the number 666 in random places.
Before we can take on a project of this nature we really need too solve a large number of more pressing problems. As I suspect you Americans may be beginning to realize, a big thing like a space elevator is likely to be vulnerable, and to be quite honest: the answer to all security problems isn't bigger guns, more surveillance and less personal freedom.
Think about it - as long as there are people out there that are willing to fly a passenger plane into a tall building, we shouldn't create an even bigger target. It was bad when the twin towers fell, both in terms of human life and longer term consequences, like pollution etc. If we suddenly have 100 miles of superstrong material slamming down at hypersonic speed, it's going to be extremely bad - somebody ought to calculate how many Teratons of TNT that corresponds to.
You're exaggerating. First of all, a lot of people have been vaccinated - I have, just to mention one (and it wasn't bad, really). Secondly, yes smallpox is bad, but not THAT bad - many patients die, as far as I remember about 10%; assuming they are infected and develop the disease.
Smallpox can't wipe out all life on the planet - if that was possible don't you think it would have happened already? Smallpox has been around at least as long as the cow has been domesticated (it's a mutant of cow pox). The reason viruses can be used as weapons isn't that they 'kill everything', but that they create enough patients to overwhelm a country's infra structure; just look at the effect of SARS, a virus that was a lot less dangerous than smallpox - it wasn't that a lot of people died, but a lot of effort went into containing it.
Ah, so it's alright then?
I don't think it is realistic to imagine that American society would suddenly collapse - maybe in a Hollywood film, but not in reality. But American economy is not longer invulnerable, for many reasons. You have right now a huge debt, both due to Bush's mismanagement of the economy and due to private debt. If fuel prices start going up without ever coming down again, you won't be able to earn enough to make ends meet - and fuel prices are very likely to start climbing from now on, even assuming that China and India don't begin to increase their demands.
'Are fuel economy issues just FUD from [insert lobby group of choice]?'
With the end of the oil reserves within clear sight, I'd say no, it isn't FUD. And apart from that we have a couple of potential disasters right in our faces:
1. Iraq seems to be a long way away from stability and success in any sense of the word 'success' as we presently know it.
2. Saudi Arabia is beginning to destabilize as a consequence of the increased terrorism that is a consequence of we-all-know-who attacking Iraq without thinking.
All we need now is Sharon and the ultra-extremists in Israel inflaming even more hostility in the region, so that situation gets out of control, and Israel starts throwing their non-existent nuclear weapons around.
I'd say, all in all, there is a very real risk that we can have a massive oil crisis in less than 1 year from now because of these things. Maybe it won't happen, maybe sense will prevail, but certainly not if people in general just turn up the volume on their favorite 'reality' TV show and sit on their hands. I believe that to avoid having it come crashing down, we need to get rid of the Bushes, Blairs and Sharons, and we - you and I - need to think seriously about a more frugal lifestyle.
Yeah, I know, most people won't take this seriously. You will eventually, though.
Well, actually I don't, but that's another matter.
However, it seems that every time somebody mentions something about 'quantum' people around here go into Batman and Star Trek Mode.
1. This whole thing is still very much in the early days of fundamental research. Think Babbage or Archimedes or something similar. I suspect that much of the hype about 'quantum computing' is simply a magical mantra that produces funding.
2. There still is no such thing as teleportation, not even theoretically. Entaglement only means that you can get two objects to behave 'in step' even at a distance, but so far it has always involved that they start out together, ie. physically close to each other. Teleportation on the other hand is normally thought of as transporting mass from one point of space to another, sort of magically, without passing through the space and time that seperate the two points. There really isn't much chance of that ever making even theoretical sense.
QOTD: Said one juror: 'The part that surprised me was when I read the First Amendment instructions. I was surprised to learn that people could say whatever they want... providing it would not cause imminent action.'"
Sweet fscking Jesus! This is seriously scary stuff. You Americans are always on about Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights. But it seems to me that what this illustrates more than anything is that the average American simply doesn't know and/or care, when it can come as a surprise, that your constitution gives you these rights. No wonder that the GWB can get away with anything!
Now, to look at this from another angle. You know, when people are starving, all they think about is food, and when they are thirsty, nothing seems more attractive than water. So why are subjects like 'freedom', 'democracy' and 'human rights' so important to Americans?