I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked,
/. seems even more borken today than usual, but I'll try responding to this anyway (I'm assuming the dino joke was a joke...)
It's been pretty clear for quite a while now that upright bipedalism was an early feature in human evolution, where "quite a while" means "at least 20 years". But as the persistence of Creationism after a century of obvious falsity suggests, humans are deeply wedded to myths about our origins, and within the paleoanthropological community as well as popular culture there has been a big effort to build myths around human evolution.
Perhaps the largest of those myths is "man made tools and tools made man": the idea that once tool-use, including fire, became part of proto-human life we were on a slippery evolutionary slope to big brains. Upright bipedalism in this myth is necessary to free our hands to work with and carry tools.
This myth is comforting to the weak-minded because it seems to suggest that evolution "toward" modern humans was a quasi-purposive process driven by the reproductive benefits of improved tool-making and tool-use [*].
Early bipedalism blows this myth out of the water. If proto-humans were upright bipedal creatures so early on, those traits clearly had nothing much to do with tool use, and the certain fact that the evolution of our large, opera-writing, space-ship-building brains is nothing but the consequence of a huge series of unrelated accidents.
We happened to have a body plan that resulted in us being able to do something more useful than tell dirty jokes after run-away sexual selection blew our brain out into its current magnificent proportions. Once that entirely accidental potential was realized, about 50,000 years ago, there has likely been some evolutionary pressure toward more effective tool use and whatnot, up until the last 200 years, anyway.
But the process that got us here wasn't some million-year ramp we climbed. It was a fun-house ride that dumped us out at the end with a brain that could reflect on itself, and eventually ask how it got here, and learn by carefully examining the world what the answers were... all while some insane nutjobs were screaming nonsense and threatening violence if we instead didn't listen to their fantasic gibberish.
Early upright bipedalism challenges all the myths, and people hate that.
[*] Yeah, there's a joke in there, and since your brain was evolved specifically to entertain and be entertained by members of the opposite sex, it's one that pretty much everyone here is aware of since our brains were all the result of the same process.
clients who are willing to pay for that kind of thing are rare.
This is what he was ranting about: for reasons that are totally unclear you have assumed without any basis whatsoever that anything and everything you do to make a home more thermally efficient is going to cost big bucks.
The reality is that significant savings can be made from intelligent use of simple tricks, from passive solar to cross-draught cooling, all without costing an arm and a leg. But that would require some actual knowledge of basic physics on the part of the designer, which is something that is clearly lacking.
I'm willing to bet that that majority of people here have lived in at least one house designed by an idiot who clearly didn't know the first thing about passive solar, internal air circulation or passive geothermal cooling.
dramatically improved batteries are probably the most wearyingly repetitive
My vote is solar cells, which have had so many breakthroughs that will double their efficiency in the past few years that they must be converting 500% of the light that strikes them by now...
We're already close to the limits and it can't really be improved.
Yeah, I remember hearing a talk way back when pointing out that we're going to run out of shrink Real Soon Now because 100 nm is the absolute limit that simply can't be bettered. The guy introducing the talk said he'd given a similar one on the 60's or early 70's saying that 1 micron was the absolute limit that simply couldn't be bettered...
This is not to say that there aren't limits, but that we are terrible at predicting them. Anyone who confidently pronounces a limit on something is just announcing their ignorance of technological history, which pretty much disqualifies them from pronouncing a limit on something. It's the only catch...
So the Pentagon has basically gathered up a bunch of old data, done some overflight surveys with no ground truth, and made up numbers. Anyone who knows anything about geology knows what a tricky business mineral exploration is, even without deliberate fraud, and yet the American media reacted with breathless excitment rather than honest and fully justified scepticism to this propaganda.
Glass lacks a crystal lattice, thus it is not a solid.
Glasses have short-range order, not long-range order, and the terms "solid" and "fluid" as used by physicists are based on mechanical properties, not structural properties.
By your proposed definition, which is not used by any physicist anywhere, liquid crystals would be solids, even though they flow easily.
So your proposed definition completely decouples the flow behaviour from the terms "solid" and "liquid". Given the ordinary meanings of these words, it is most epistemologically efficient to adopt new terms, like "amorphous solid" and "liquid crystal" in recognition that ordering and flow properties are only weakly related, rather than to redefine "liquid" and "solid" to be completely unrelated to the flow properties of a substance.
Could someone explain why some Muslims believe that their rules need to apply to non-Muslims?
The problem isn't that Muslims are Islamic, but that they are people.
Most people, most of the time, believe that their rules should apply to everyone. I won't point any specific fingers as far too much of this dicussion has already been wasted yattering about what the Americans/Christians/Russians/Penguins do or have done by people too stupid to be able to think outside of a simple-minded binary comparative standard. What Chuck Norris or Marcus Aurelias did has no relevance to the issue of what these clowns in Pakistan are currently doing, except insofar as they are all human.
Reifying one group of humans and comparing its behaviour to another group is never very edifying or interesting, and is about the lamest rhetorical move going. But observing that the behaviour of some individuals can be seen as intances of relatively universal human impulses can be useful, because we're fairly good at dealing with things once we understand them to be relatively universal.
The impulse to murder, for example, is relatively universal, and we have no great issues dealing with it. No one says, "All people everywhere have had a tendency to murder other people, so it must be what nature intended!" Likewise, no one says, "Only English people commit murder, so our country doesn't need any laws against it!"
In the present case, the impulse to see ones own parochial social or ideological concerns as universally legitmate is, well, universal. It is something that helps bind humans together into groups.
Ridicule rather than outrage is probably the best way of responding, along with an acknowledgment that we were stupid that way once too (whoever "we" happen to be--the odds are pretty much 100% your ancestors engaged in this kind of projective universalism, so pointing out one group or another in this regard is like noting that some particular part of the ocean is wet: not the sort of thing anyone with a brain would waste time on.)
So maybe someone should start a Facebook page that makes fun of this silly law, and this clown in particular. And then we should all go draw Mohammed ~0:-{=
The basic message to Islamist nutjobs everywhere should be: we will keep on making fun of you until you stop killing people (although in fairness we'll probably keep on making fun of you then, too, just a bit more gently.)
Why have you used the inertial mass of m1 on the right hand side of this equation, as it has nothing at all to do with gravitational "charge" in the case where the equivalence principle is false?
It is not consistent to treat mg2 as a gravitational charge that couples to an interial mass (mi1) if the equivalence principle is violated. Charges only couple to other charges, which means the masses on the right hand side of your equations must both be gravitational, as they are in Newtonian gravity.
So, the Moon contains even more than one teaspoon of water in 5 tonnes of rock.
Yeah, the article makes it clear that 50 parts per million is the highest estimate they can come up with. Also, it isn't water: it's hydroxyl (OH) groups on molecules in rocks, which is what you get when rocks forming in a wet environment.
This is the way geologists talk about things, but still, the reporting is almost as misleading as the recent pack of lies from the people who brought you Iraqi WMD's claiming there is vast untapped mineral wealth in Afghanistan (which Stephen Peters, the head of the USGS’s Afghanistan Minerals Project, is strangely unaware of according to the linked article from the Times.)
The discovery of hydroxyl groups in rocks on the moon at the 50 PPM level is scientifically interesting because previously lunar minerals were believed to be absolutely anhydrous: the way I was taught geology back in the day we were told "lunar minerals are just like Terrestrial minerals, except they have no water". That has now been changed to, "except they have almost no water". Ford Prefect would be pleased.
Libertarians are against government getting into economics...
Which is to say, against governments passing anything resembling any of the many Companys Acts the world over, which are nothing but "government getting into economics".
But for some reason you completely ignored that part of my post, replying instead to my cheap shot about Somalia. I'm well aware the differences between various shades of libertarianism, but nothing that calls itself "libertarian" can ever be in favour of any kind of Companys Act.
Yet for some reason I never hear any libertarians talk about that, and most "mainstream" libertarians are pretty shy of the few consistent communitarian libertarians who seem to understand the implications of their beliefs.
Mainstream libertarians seem to believe you could have a world that is many respects very similar to the world we're living in, with all the great things corporations create, and yet restrict governments in a way that effectively prevents them from passing a Companys Act. That's magical thinking, pure an simple.
In my world no company would get any public funding at all.
In your world there would be no corporations, only cooperatives and partnerships. There is absolutely no basis in libertarian political theory for the existence of corporations, whose primary purpose is to allow groups of individuals acting under the rubric of "a corporation" to do something that no individual acting alone, in partnership, or as part of a cooperative can do: avoid legal liability for the consequences of their individual actions.
Corporate law is a pure product of the state's monopoly on force, which is being used to decree that certain types of organization (corporations) are to be priviledged over others (cooperatives, partnerships and individuals acting alone.) The only reason for this is pragmatic: corporations are huge engines of creation and productivity, and we owe a great deal of our wealth to the corporate form of organization. But that wealth is made possible only by the nanny-state sheltering individuals within corporations from the consequences of their actions.
So it is not clear why any libertarian keep talking about what "companies" can or cannot do, as in a libertarian system there would not and could not be any companies or corporations, only fully-liable individuals acting in partnership or cooperation.
If you think it's your responsibility to not pay taxes, you should also consider it your responsibility to not use official currency, use roads, the power grid, water, etc., etc
You left out the biggest one: don't deal with any corporation. Corporations are pure artifacts of the state's monopoly on force. They were brought into existence by and are sustained by a large body of laws that permit people acting in the guise of "a corporation" to do things they would not and could not otherwise do: notably avoiding personal liability for their actions.
It is ONLY the government's legal monopoly on force that allows this condition to persist. In libertarian utopias like Somalia there are no corporations. There are only clans and cooperatives, which are vastly more limited in their power and scope to shelter the individual from the consequences of their actions.
Anyone who calls themself a "libertarian" and deals with, buys from, or works for a corporation is nothing but a hypocrite or an ignoramus who doesn't understand the inevitable logical consequence of their own political position, which is: NO CORPORATIONS.
Of course, these burdens have other names, like "costs of doing business properly" and "helping to contain liability."
No, they are called "the costs of living with the least efficient and effective government on Earth."
I'm a Canadian who ran a successful softare and scientific consulting business for the better part of a decade, and did a fair bit of business in the US. Like any business-person, my accountant was the most important person in my life, and paying taxes was never something I enjoyed. But dealing with the Canadian government, which has (at least in my province of residence) excellent integration between the federal and provincial tax services was vastly easier than dealing with the American and various state governments.
In Canada we have an efficient, simple, business-friendly tax system (to say nothing of our health-care system, which allows higher worker mobility and much greater risk-taking for entrepreneurs with young families). In the US you have a mess.
Our tax system is a result of a combination of reforms introduced in the '80's by the Mulroney-era Progressive Conservatives, and continued in the '90's under the Cretien-led Liberals, notably when John Manely was Minister of Industry and Trade. So this has nothing to do with partisanship: it is simply good government, no matter which way you lean on the ideological spectrum.
The "costs of doing business properly" are relatively minor when you are dealing with a government that is not fundamentally broken, as the American government is, regardless of which wing of the Oligarchy happens to have its figurehead in the Oval Office.
Ok, I'll admit the automobile is a cool idea and cool tech. The thing about horses that always drove me nuts were those saddles the never fit well so this is a step up but I'm still left asking, 'Why?'
Automobiles were around for about 100 years before Ford's first assembly line, and were pretty much "cool tech, cool idea, but huh?" Then the bugs were ironed out and they became reliable and cheap enough to do some modestly useful things.
I can't see how 3D-TV is going to do anything comparable, but I'm not so arrogant to believe that my inability to see something means that it won't happen. Maybe it'll revolutionize design engineering, as we are still doing 3D CAD on 2D displays...
The really important thing about this technology is suumed up by the statement: "the idea isn't new, but the required CPU power is now affordable and small enough to pull it off on a large scale."
Welcome to the next industrial revolution: embedded intelligence. We are only just beginning to mine the possibilities inherent in cheap, really powerful, embedded processors. They've been thrown at automobiles, but there are a zillion other applications waiting to be born.
This is because electrostatic forces obey the third law of motion, and the unmatched gravitational sources do not obey.
Sure they do: if the principle of equivalence is false then gravitational mass is just another kind of "charge", unrelated to inertial mass.
mi1*a1 = q1*q2*K/r**2 mi2*a2 = q1*q2*K/r**2
where "K" is the force constant and the "q's" are the charges. Makes no differnece if q stands for "charge" or "gravitational mass".
In both cases, contra the OP's incorrect example, the force acting between the two bodies is a product of the charges. Momentum and energy are conserved.
Of course, in actuality, they haven't shown anything yet...
Of course they have: they've shown that it's possible to bring quantum behavior and the equivalence principle into a setting where something unexpected happens. Depending on what that is, there are various interpetations.
If their equations describe the results of the experiment with m_i != m_g then it is natural and reasonable to refer to this as a violation of the principle of equivalence. If the equations describe the results with m_i == m_g then it is natural and reasonable to say they have placed new limits on the possible violation of the equivalence principle. If the results are not described by the equations at all it is natural and reasonable to say that the experimenters screwed up.
In the latter--highly unlikely--case more work would have to be done to figure out what was really going on. Until then, it is most natural and reasonable to talk about this experiment in terms of possible violation of the equivalence principle. There is simply no Bayesian justification for anything else unless your priors are based on wilful ignorance of the vast body of experiment with quantum oscilators that would have to be wrong to make this experiment anything other than a test of the equivalence principle.
That's interesting, can you give me a list of useful scientific accomplishments that rely on the Theory of Evolution?
Prevention protocols of the kind Finland uses to manage anti-biotic-resistant bacteria.
Various high-yield crop breeding programmes.
Vast swathes of research into variable genetic susceptibility to various diseases, and resistance to various diseases. Research and treatment of genetic diseases, particularly with regard to the way animal models differ from humans.
Tissue regeneration research, which is deeply involved in the differences between gene pathways that result in scarring and those that result in regrowth--it turns out that many similar pathways are used, and understanding the evolutionary process that converted them from one purpose to the other is an excellent way of understanding how to turn our latent regeneration capability back on.
But of course, anyone who bothered to inform themselves of anything about evolution would know all that already, as all of that is easily available to anyone who bothers to follow anything about science and technology news, so I really have to wonder why anyone would ask such a question on/.
Engaging in medical research without guidance provided by the Theory of Evolution would be like doing so without guidance from the Germ Theory of Disease.
There's nothing to um, grab onto in space, so I can't see how you can get any impulse in any direction other than directly away from the sun?
Gravity. Solar sails in orbit can use the sun's gravity in exactly the same way a sailboat uses a keel, and therefore can be made to move in any direction.
So as far as companies goes; better driving = less fuel consumption = more profit.
Right, and "more alert developers == fewer bugs == more profit", which is why tech companies are all about ensuring their employees don't work stupidly long hours...
If you add the cost of a "carbon fee" for the extra fuel you burn, for the energy required to bring that fuel to you, the damage to the environment to extract that fuel, you get quite a good deal...
Or not...
I mean, really, who knows? Without market pricing that reflects those other costs, you've just spun a just-so story about what you think might be reality.
This is why people who care about the environment and understand the role of markets as calculating devices are in favour of cap-and-trade as a means of capturing the costs of what are currently externalities. People who hate free markets are against cap-and-trade, despite it having worked wonders for SO2 emissions in the '90's.
Unfortunately, in modern America, it is clear that the people who hate free markets--mostly members of the Republican Party, as near as I can tell--have enough clout to stop the use of markets to calculate the actual costs to the environment of various choices.
It includes solid chapters on economic fundamentals, inflation (and how the kind of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe came to be) how it works, and how often it doesn't.
I find this frankly implausible. I've never seen any description of economic fundamentals in a fictional context that I'd consider "solid". Novelists are unfortunately, like economists, good at spinning plausible bullshit, but you shouldn't mistake "plausible" for "solid".
If you want an adequate introduction to some reasonably solid economic thinking for laypeople, try Joseph Heath's "Filthy Lucre: economics for people who hate capitalism." It's not without flaws, but it generally gives a clear analysis of the common economic errors seen on both the left and right.
I think it's natural for someone who hates DRM as much as Cory Doctorow not to give credit for quotes.
I think it's weird that you can't distinguish between broken tech like DRM and a perfectly legitimate desire for an artist to be recognized and compenstated for their work. The latter is expressed by a variety of intellectual property law, which Doctorow is not absolutely against.
Slashdot Mirror
Fascinating reading! Thanks!
I am not so sure why the scientists are arguing about how these creatures walked,
/. seems even more borken today than usual, but I'll try responding to this anyway (I'm assuming the dino joke was a joke...)
It's been pretty clear for quite a while now that upright bipedalism was an early feature in human evolution, where "quite a while" means "at least 20 years". But as the persistence of Creationism after a century of obvious falsity suggests, humans are deeply wedded to myths about our origins, and within the paleoanthropological community as well as popular culture there has been a big effort to build myths around human evolution.
Perhaps the largest of those myths is "man made tools and tools made man": the idea that once tool-use, including fire, became part of proto-human life we were on a slippery evolutionary slope to big brains. Upright bipedalism in this myth is necessary to free our hands to work with and carry tools.
This myth is comforting to the weak-minded because it seems to suggest that evolution "toward" modern humans was a quasi-purposive process driven by the reproductive benefits of improved tool-making and tool-use [*].
Early bipedalism blows this myth out of the water. If proto-humans were upright bipedal creatures so early on, those traits clearly had nothing much to do with tool use, and the certain fact that the evolution of our large, opera-writing, space-ship-building brains is nothing but the consequence of a huge series of unrelated accidents.
We happened to have a body plan that resulted in us being able to do something more useful than tell dirty jokes after run-away sexual selection blew our brain out into its current magnificent proportions. Once that entirely accidental potential was realized, about 50,000 years ago, there has likely been some evolutionary pressure toward more effective tool use and whatnot, up until the last 200 years, anyway.
But the process that got us here wasn't some million-year ramp we climbed. It was a fun-house ride that dumped us out at the end with a brain that could reflect on itself, and eventually ask how it got here, and learn by carefully examining the world what the answers were... all while some insane nutjobs were screaming nonsense and threatening violence if we instead didn't listen to their fantasic gibberish.
Early upright bipedalism challenges all the myths, and people hate that.
[*] Yeah, there's a joke in there, and since your brain was evolved specifically to entertain and be entertained by members of the opposite sex, it's one that pretty much everyone here is aware of since our brains were all the result of the same process.
clients who are willing to pay for that kind of thing are rare.
This is what he was ranting about: for reasons that are totally unclear you have assumed without any basis whatsoever that anything and everything you do to make a home more thermally efficient is going to cost big bucks.
The reality is that significant savings can be made from intelligent use of simple tricks, from passive solar to cross-draught cooling, all without costing an arm and a leg. But that would require some actual knowledge of basic physics on the part of the designer, which is something that is clearly lacking.
I'm willing to bet that that majority of people here have lived in at least one house designed by an idiot who clearly didn't know the first thing about passive solar, internal air circulation or passive geothermal cooling.
dramatically improved batteries are probably the most wearyingly repetitive
My vote is solar cells, which have had so many breakthroughs that will double their efficiency in the past few years that they must be converting 500% of the light that strikes them by now...
We're already close to the limits and it can't really be improved.
Yeah, I remember hearing a talk way back when pointing out that we're going to run out of shrink Real Soon Now because 100 nm is the absolute limit that simply can't be bettered. The guy introducing the talk said he'd given a similar one on the 60's or early 70's saying that 1 micron was the absolute limit that simply couldn't be bettered...
This is not to say that there aren't limits, but that we are terrible at predicting them. Anyone who confidently pronounces a limit on something is just announcing their ignorance of technological history, which pretty much disqualifies them from pronouncing a limit on something. It's the only catch...
And he backed up all his claims with plenty of evidence that was readily available at the time.
But that "evidence" was just constant conjunction, so he rejected it.
What's up with that?
What's up is that the people who brought you Iraqi WMDs are lying again.
The numbers are fictitious and "Stephen Peters, the head of the USGS’s Afghanistan Minerals Project, said that he was unaware of USGS involvement in any new surveying for minerals in Afghanistan in the past two years. 'We are not aware of any discoveries of lithium,' he said."
So the Pentagon has basically gathered up a bunch of old data, done some overflight surveys with no ground truth, and made up numbers. Anyone who knows anything about geology knows what a tricky business mineral exploration is, even without deliberate fraud, and yet the American media reacted with breathless excitment rather than honest and fully justified scepticism to this propaganda.
What's up with that?
Glass lacks a crystal lattice, thus it is not a solid.
Glasses have short-range order, not long-range order, and the terms "solid" and "fluid" as used by physicists are based on mechanical properties, not structural properties.
By your proposed definition, which is not used by any physicist anywhere, liquid crystals would be solids, even though they flow easily.
So your proposed definition completely decouples the flow behaviour from the terms "solid" and "liquid". Given the ordinary meanings of these words, it is most epistemologically efficient to adopt new terms, like "amorphous solid" and "liquid crystal" in recognition that ordering and flow properties are only weakly related, rather than to redefine "liquid" and "solid" to be completely unrelated to the flow properties of a substance.
Could someone explain why some Muslims believe that their rules need to apply to non-Muslims?
The problem isn't that Muslims are Islamic, but that they are people.
Most people, most of the time, believe that their rules should apply to everyone. I won't point any specific fingers as far too much of this dicussion has already been wasted yattering about what the Americans/Christians/Russians/Penguins do or have done by people too stupid to be able to think outside of a simple-minded binary comparative standard. What Chuck Norris or Marcus Aurelias did has no relevance to the issue of what these clowns in Pakistan are currently doing, except insofar as they are all human.
Reifying one group of humans and comparing its behaviour to another group is never very edifying or interesting, and is about the lamest rhetorical move going. But observing that the behaviour of some individuals can be seen as intances of relatively universal human impulses can be useful, because we're fairly good at dealing with things once we understand them to be relatively universal.
The impulse to murder, for example, is relatively universal, and we have no great issues dealing with it. No one says, "All people everywhere have had a tendency to murder other people, so it must be what nature intended!" Likewise, no one says, "Only English people commit murder, so our country doesn't need any laws against it!"
In the present case, the impulse to see ones own parochial social or ideological concerns as universally legitmate is, well, universal. It is something that helps bind humans together into groups.
Ridicule rather than outrage is probably the best way of responding, along with an acknowledgment that we were stupid that way once too (whoever "we" happen to be--the odds are pretty much 100% your ancestors engaged in this kind of projective universalism, so pointing out one group or another in this regard is like noting that some particular part of the ocean is wet: not the sort of thing anyone with a brain would waste time on.)
So maybe someone should start a Facebook page that makes fun of this silly law, and this clown in particular. And then we should all go draw Mohammed ~0:-{=
The basic message to Islamist nutjobs everywhere should be: we will keep on making fun of you until you stop killing people (although in fairness we'll probably keep on making fun of you then, too, just a bit more gently.)
mi1*a1 = mi1*mg2*G/r**2
Why have you used the inertial mass of m1 on the right hand side of this equation, as it has nothing at all to do with gravitational "charge" in the case where the equivalence principle is false?
It is not consistent to treat mg2 as a gravitational charge that couples to an interial mass (mi1) if the equivalence principle is violated. Charges only couple to other charges, which means the masses on the right hand side of your equations must both be gravitational, as they are in Newtonian gravity.
So, the Moon contains even more than one teaspoon of water in 5 tonnes of rock.
Yeah, the article makes it clear that 50 parts per million is the highest estimate they can come up with. Also, it isn't water: it's hydroxyl (OH) groups on molecules in rocks, which is what you get when rocks forming in a wet environment.
This is the way geologists talk about things, but still, the reporting is almost as misleading as the recent pack of lies from the people who brought you Iraqi WMD's claiming there is vast untapped mineral wealth in Afghanistan (which Stephen Peters, the head of the USGS’s Afghanistan Minerals Project, is strangely unaware of according to the linked article from the Times.)
The discovery of hydroxyl groups in rocks on the moon at the 50 PPM level is scientifically interesting because previously lunar minerals were believed to be absolutely anhydrous: the way I was taught geology back in the day we were told "lunar minerals are just like Terrestrial minerals, except they have no water". That has now been changed to, "except they have almost no water". Ford Prefect would be pleased.
Libertarians are against government getting into economics...
Which is to say, against governments passing anything resembling any of the many Companys Acts the world over, which are nothing but "government getting into economics".
But for some reason you completely ignored that part of my post, replying instead to my cheap shot about Somalia. I'm well aware the differences between various shades of libertarianism, but nothing that calls itself "libertarian" can ever be in favour of any kind of Companys Act.
Yet for some reason I never hear any libertarians talk about that, and most "mainstream" libertarians are pretty shy of the few consistent communitarian libertarians who seem to understand the implications of their beliefs.
Mainstream libertarians seem to believe you could have a world that is many respects very similar to the world we're living in, with all the great things corporations create, and yet restrict governments in a way that effectively prevents them from passing a Companys Act. That's magical thinking, pure an simple.
In my world no company would get any public funding at all.
In your world there would be no corporations, only cooperatives and partnerships. There is absolutely no basis in libertarian political theory for the existence of corporations, whose primary purpose is to allow groups of individuals acting under the rubric of "a corporation" to do something that no individual acting alone, in partnership, or as part of a cooperative can do: avoid legal liability for the consequences of their individual actions.
Corporate law is a pure product of the state's monopoly on force, which is being used to decree that certain types of organization (corporations) are to be priviledged over others (cooperatives, partnerships and individuals acting alone.) The only reason for this is pragmatic: corporations are huge engines of creation and productivity, and we owe a great deal of our wealth to the corporate form of organization. But that wealth is made possible only by the nanny-state sheltering individuals within corporations from the consequences of their actions.
So it is not clear why any libertarian keep talking about what "companies" can or cannot do, as in a libertarian system there would not and could not be any companies or corporations, only fully-liable individuals acting in partnership or cooperation.
If you think it's your responsibility to not pay taxes, you should also consider it your responsibility to not use official currency, use roads, the power grid, water, etc., etc
You left out the biggest one: don't deal with any corporation. Corporations are pure artifacts of the state's monopoly on force. They were brought into existence by and are sustained by a large body of laws that permit people acting in the guise of "a corporation" to do things they would not and could not otherwise do: notably avoiding personal liability for their actions.
It is ONLY the government's legal monopoly on force that allows this condition to persist. In libertarian utopias like Somalia there are no corporations. There are only clans and cooperatives, which are vastly more limited in their power and scope to shelter the individual from the consequences of their actions.
Anyone who calls themself a "libertarian" and deals with, buys from, or works for a corporation is nothing but a hypocrite or an ignoramus who doesn't understand the inevitable logical consequence of their own political position, which is: NO CORPORATIONS.
Of course, these burdens have other names, like "costs of doing business properly" and "helping to contain liability."
No, they are called "the costs of living with the least efficient and effective government on Earth."
I'm a Canadian who ran a successful softare and scientific consulting business for the better part of a decade, and did a fair bit of business in the US. Like any business-person, my accountant was the most important person in my life, and paying taxes was never something I enjoyed. But dealing with the Canadian government, which has (at least in my province of residence) excellent integration between the federal and provincial tax services was vastly easier than dealing with the American and various state governments.
In Canada we have an efficient, simple, business-friendly tax system (to say nothing of our health-care system, which allows higher worker mobility and much greater risk-taking for entrepreneurs with young families). In the US you have a mess.
Our tax system is a result of a combination of reforms introduced in the '80's by the Mulroney-era Progressive Conservatives, and continued in the '90's under the Cretien-led Liberals, notably when John Manely was Minister of Industry and Trade. So this has nothing to do with partisanship: it is simply good government, no matter which way you lean on the ideological spectrum.
The "costs of doing business properly" are relatively minor when you are dealing with a government that is not fundamentally broken, as the American government is, regardless of which wing of the Oligarchy happens to have its figurehead in the Oval Office.
Ok, I'll admit the automobile is a cool idea and cool tech. The thing about horses that always drove me nuts were those saddles the never fit well so this is a step up but I'm still left asking, 'Why?'
Automobiles were around for about 100 years before Ford's first assembly line, and were pretty much "cool tech, cool idea, but huh?" Then the bugs were ironed out and they became reliable and cheap enough to do some modestly useful things.
I can't see how 3D-TV is going to do anything comparable, but I'm not so arrogant to believe that my inability to see something means that it won't happen. Maybe it'll revolutionize design engineering, as we are still doing 3D CAD on 2D displays...
The really important thing about this technology is suumed up by the statement: "the idea isn't new, but the required CPU power is now affordable and small enough to pull it off on a large scale."
Welcome to the next industrial revolution: embedded intelligence. We are only just beginning to mine the possibilities inherent in cheap, really powerful, embedded processors. They've been thrown at automobiles, but there are a zillion other applications waiting to be born.
This is because electrostatic forces obey the third law of motion, and the unmatched gravitational sources do not obey.
Sure they do: if the principle of equivalence is false then gravitational mass is just another kind of "charge", unrelated to inertial mass.
mi1*a1 = q1*q2*K/r**2
mi2*a2 = q1*q2*K/r**2
where "K" is the force constant and the "q's" are the charges. Makes no differnece if q stands for "charge" or "gravitational mass".
In both cases, contra the OP's incorrect example, the force acting between the two bodies is a product of the charges. Momentum and energy are conserved.
Of course, in actuality, they haven't shown anything yet...
Of course they have: they've shown that it's possible to bring quantum behavior and the equivalence principle into a setting where something unexpected happens. Depending on what that is, there are various interpetations.
If their equations describe the results of the experiment with m_i != m_g then it is natural and reasonable to refer to this as a violation of the principle of equivalence. If the equations describe the results with m_i == m_g then it is natural and reasonable to say they have placed new limits on the possible violation of the equivalence principle. If the results are not described by the equations at all it is natural and reasonable to say that the experimenters screwed up.
In the latter--highly unlikely--case more work would have to be done to figure out what was really going on. Until then, it is most natural and reasonable to talk about this experiment in terms of possible violation of the equivalence principle. There is simply no Bayesian justification for anything else unless your priors are based on wilful ignorance of the vast body of experiment with quantum oscilators that would have to be wrong to make this experiment anything other than a test of the equivalence principle.
That's interesting, can you give me a list of useful scientific accomplishments that rely on the Theory of Evolution?
Prevention protocols of the kind Finland uses to manage anti-biotic-resistant bacteria.
Various high-yield crop breeding programmes.
Vast swathes of research into variable genetic susceptibility to various diseases, and resistance to various diseases. Research and treatment of genetic diseases, particularly with regard to the way animal models differ from humans.
Tissue regeneration research, which is deeply involved in the differences between gene pathways that result in scarring and those that result in regrowth--it turns out that many similar pathways are used, and understanding the evolutionary process that converted them from one purpose to the other is an excellent way of understanding how to turn our latent regeneration capability back on.
But of course, anyone who bothered to inform themselves of anything about evolution would know all that already, as all of that is easily available to anyone who bothers to follow anything about science and technology news, so I really have to wonder why anyone would ask such a question on /.
Engaging in medical research without guidance provided by the Theory of Evolution would be like doing so without guidance from the Germ Theory of Disease.
There's nothing to um, grab onto in space, so I can't see how you can get any impulse in any direction other than directly away from the sun?
Gravity. Solar sails in orbit can use the sun's gravity in exactly the same way a sailboat uses a keel, and therefore can be made to move in any direction.
So as far as companies goes; better driving = less fuel consumption = more profit.
Right, and "more alert developers == fewer bugs == more profit", which is why tech companies are all about ensuring their employees don't work stupidly long hours...
If you add the cost of a "carbon fee" for the extra fuel you burn, for the energy required to bring that fuel to you, the damage to the environment to extract that fuel, you get quite a good deal...
Or not...
I mean, really, who knows? Without market pricing that reflects those other costs, you've just spun a just-so story about what you think might be reality.
This is why people who care about the environment and understand the role of markets as calculating devices are in favour of cap-and-trade as a means of capturing the costs of what are currently externalities. People who hate free markets are against cap-and-trade, despite it having worked wonders for SO2 emissions in the '90's.
Unfortunately, in modern America, it is clear that the people who hate free markets--mostly members of the Republican Party, as near as I can tell--have enough clout to stop the use of markets to calculate the actual costs to the environment of various choices.
It includes solid chapters on economic fundamentals, inflation (and how the kind of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe came to be) how it works, and how often it doesn't.
I find this frankly implausible. I've never seen any description of economic fundamentals in a fictional context that I'd consider "solid". Novelists are unfortunately, like economists, good at spinning plausible bullshit, but you shouldn't mistake "plausible" for "solid".
If you want an adequate introduction to some reasonably solid economic thinking for laypeople, try Joseph Heath's "Filthy Lucre: economics for people who hate capitalism." It's not without flaws, but it generally gives a clear analysis of the common economic errors seen on both the left and right.
And Heinlein in the '50's (Door Into Summer).
I think it's natural for someone who hates DRM as much as Cory Doctorow not to give credit for quotes.
I think it's weird that you can't distinguish between broken tech like DRM and a perfectly legitimate desire for an artist to be recognized and compenstated for their work. The latter is expressed by a variety of intellectual property law, which Doctorow is not absolutely against.