Heaven forbid the onus is put on the consumer to determine what they should and should not purchase.
Heaven forbid indeed, because a whole lot of people died needlessly back when that sort of "caveat emptor" attitude ruled. Go read The Poisoner's Handbook, which is about the birth of forensic medicine in the U.S. -- and about the many different ways people were being poisoned a few decades ago, often by quite ordinary consumer products.
it's you nanny-state socialists...
Socialism has nothing to do with product safety regulation. It's about an economic system run by, and for the benefit of, the people who actually create value by their labor, rather than a system run by and for a parasitic investment class.
A libertarian idea: strip away all powers not enumerated in the constitution.
Regulating interstate and international commerce is right there in Article I, Section 8. The feds are well within their Constitutional powers to say "you can't import this into the country, or sell it across state lines, unless X, Y, and Z."
Is that how the Founders foresaw this power being used? Probably not. But not only is that legally irrelevant, I don't think it's practical or ethical to limit our solutions to what a bunch of slave-holding members of the landed gentry dreamed about 223 years ago when they thought about the small agrarian nation they had in mind.
Here's a truly libertarian idea, in the original sense: tear up all corporate charters, land deeds, patents, and copyrights, and eliminate rent, the private ownership of capital, and all forms of government-enforced privilege. And when you deliberately sell shoddy products that injure or kill people, I have the right to come over and shoot you in the face.
If the federal government had limited powers as it did at design, what would they be lobbying for (maybe excise taxes)? They would be forced to lobby to individual states who now hold more of the power
You can probably buy about 50 state legislators for what a Congressman goes for, no problem. Part of the reason that the original Progressives sought to expand federal power was because the state governments had been thoroughly corrupted. Again, this right-wing view that everything would be ok if we devolved regulatory authority back to the states is ahistorical, as well as impractical -- some large corporations turn profits (not reciepits, but profits) that are greater than the gross state product of smaller states.
At least with corporations there's a choice to trust them or not; what choice does federal coercion and many times, outright extortion leave you?
No, you don't get a meaningful "choice" when a handful of mega-corporations take over a market. "Gee, will I buy my Kraft food products grown from Monsanto seeds at Wal-Mart or at Target? So many choices!"
Corporations are creations of government -- they exist only because of government-issued charters. It's not only fair, it's essential the government leash the immortal sociopaths to which it gives birth.
Duck Tape is a name brand of duct tape that came long after people who didn't know what it actually was kept calling it duck tape.
The name "duck tape" came first, referring to "cotton duck" fabric, though whether that name was applied to the stuff we now called "duct tape" when "duct tape" first came out, is still open to debate.
Gaff (or gaffer's) tape is better than duct tape for many applications. For sticking stuff together, my three tape recommendations are gaff tape, 3M's relatively new transparent duct tape (more durable than the grey stuff), and the new style of blue masking tape, surprisingly strong without damaging a surface. Add transparent "scotch" tape for the occasional bit of book repair or gift wrapping, and electrical tape, and your taping needs are pretty much covered.
Someone who believes it sinful to use profanity (as described by webster) is incapable of having fun? You must have a very limited selection of things to occupy your time if you can't have fun without dropping f-bombs.
The issue is not whether or not one refrains from using the word "fuck", it's the reason for doing so. Someone who refrains from making certain mouth-noises on the belief that a omniscient and omnipotent King of the World is going to punish them (perhaps in some ghostly form after they die), is a person who quite likely has little idea of how to have fun, sure.
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
While international agreements puts legislative powers in unelected bureaucrats.
The Constitution also says "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in
Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land." Let's not pretend that the general idea of treaties is unconstitutional or un-American.
Congress's tendency to devolve its legislative power on to unelected regulatory bodies may or may not be a problem, but has little to do with whether those bodies are domestic or international.
The fact that this particular treaty sucks sweaty donkey balls is not an indictment of the general concept of treaties.
Plugging the wrong tube into the wrong device is user error, not a problem with the safety of the tubes. The nurse in question needs to be paying attention.
A design that allows such a user error to occur is indeed a safety issue with the equipment. Even skilled people in perfect environments have lapses, and nurses are rarely working in perfect environments. If you don't account for that, your human factors work is flawed -- in this case, quite literally fatally flawed.
I've done repairs on my manual wheelchair...And if you're talking about frame adjustments, that's not something the user should be doing by his/herself.
I am just speculating here, but I would not be surprised if some para-athletes are doing some pretty heavy adjustments on their chairs.
The most rational way to handle firmware upgrades would be the same way they handle bug fixes in cars: You send a letter issuing a recall, and upgrade the users in the shop where they bought the device.
Maybe so -- but it's not like everyone takes their car to the dealer, or even to an ASE certified mechanic. I wouldn't want to buy a exoskeleton that could only be dealer-serviced any more than I'd want to buy a car whose hood was locked and could only be opened by the dealer.
How would a company hiring engineers working at $15/hour hurt consumers?
When unemployment goes up, we all suffer.
It would give consumers cheaper products.
Externalizing costs is not making products cheaper. Every bit of cheap crap at you local big box store that was made in China ought to have "plus some fraction of an American manufacturing job" added to the price tag.
It's restricting the free market by not allowing labor that wants to participate in the labor market to come here.
You can talk about the "free market" in labor just as soon as you revoke all government-issued corporate charters; in a free market there is no IBM, Google, etc.
It is impossible for Google to see what sites you log in to.
Not at all. If site X includes a Google webbug, then when you visit site X your browser "phones home" to some Google URL, passing all your Google cookies plus whatever information site X passes in the webbug URL.
E.g., I could put an img tag on my (hypothetical) pr0n site like <img class="invisible" src="http://google.com/evil_script?page=pr0n17&user=you&interests=hot+asian+transsexual+tenticle+bukkake">. When your browser loads that, it passes your Google cookies, so Google can match it to your various Google services logins. Next time you log into Gmail, expect more interesting ads.
Not to say this is exactly how Google does things, just illustrating the process. It's already used for tracking ad "conversions"; when Google shows you an ad, it can set a cookie; then later when you buy something, a webbug on the merchant's page checks with Google to see if you were brought there by one of the ads Google showed you.
Believe me parents should be worried about porn sites, as some porn sites market to children. All is well if you don't mind your child visiting porn but some use deceptive practices to make kids click on porn links by putting in same safe cutesy image link and redirecting them to something other than what they think they are getting.
Citation needed. I can't see what the motivation would be to market porn to people too young to appreciate it...
How do you think American independence was won? What would you have done against Hitler's rise? Written him a sternly-worded letter?
Indian independence was won without war; some have argued that American independence could have been won similarly. I haven't analyzed the issue in depth, so I remain agnostic, but it should be noted that the Founding Fathers envisioned a nation without a standing army, defended by citizen militias. It is interesting that serving in an institution whose existence the Founders saw as anathema is considered a patriotic act these days.
Hitler would not have come to power without the stage being set by WWI. Against his rise I would have suggested 1) not having an age of colonialism and militarism that created a World War; 2) that failing, destroying the German economy and humiliating the German people at the end of the war; 3) that failing, not giving economic and political support to Hitler as he came to power, as in fact many Americans did; 4) that failing, boycotts, limited blockades, and a policy of isolating Germany as it became more militaristic; 5) that failing, as soon as German troops and tanks rolled into Poland, swift but restrained military response, surrounding Germany and the invaded territory, total and complete blockade.
When the time comes, how do you propose we secure our freedom (or the remnants of it) and our very survival?
I propose we cooperate with other human beings as much as we can, with an aim to make us all free and all survive. "Us vs. them" thinking is the root of the problem.
Yes, I know there are nutcases out there; I teach martial arts and self-defense classes, so not only do I believe there is a time to open up a can of whoop-ass, I teach people how to do it. But that option should be way down on the list, and most of our energy should be directed at finding ways to avoid having to open up that can.
Meanwhile, all U.N. programs equal less than 2% of world military spending. If we put half of our current military budget to work on finding ways to feed, clothe, house, cure, and educate people around the world, we could outspend the U.N. 11-to-1 in promoting peace, security, and human welfare, while still maintaining military might that no other nation could challenge -- certainly much more than adequate for defending the nation.
That we choose not do do this, but instead run a military-industrial complex for the benefit of the investment and political classes, occasionally makes me question our survival potential as a species.
it's just rejected out of hand by the Envirowhackos because it doesn't involve government running our lives, a reduction in the standard of living, and allows for more growth and prosperity: Nuclear power.
I don't know what an "Envirowhacko" is, but I don't know any environmentalists who want government running our lives or a reduction in the standard of living. In fact, in terms of big government, most want an end to the huge subsidies, in the form of loan guarantees, that make possible the construction of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is inherently centralized and requires strong government oversight for both safety (from accident and terrorism) and non-proliferation concerns; decentralized power production from millions of solar panels, wind turbines, and biofuel-run generators, goes well with the idea of decentralized government.
I'm all for prosperity, but "growth", in and of itself, is the ideology of the cancer cell. The planet is limited. The human species is just about wrapping up its adolescence, it's time for physical growth to stop -- and for those energies to go into mental, emotional, and dare I say, "spiritual" growth.
I think the possibilities of fusion and of energy-amplifier reactors using thorium are interesting, but they are not here yet. Solar and wind are here now, as are meaningful improvements in energy efficiency. Plus, the U.S. and Israel won't threaten to bomb countries that build solar arrays or wind farms.
Then comes everyone who thinks all reactors are built like Chernobyl.
Besides that, there's not a lot of DIY going on in wheelchair repair.
Actually, a friend of mine who uses an electric chair has turned to friends for repair a few times, because wait times for "authorized" repair were too long. Now, this was simple stuff like loose connections, but the idea of DIY firmware updates isn't completely out-of-bounds.
First word of advice they got was to buy some regular, non-steel toed boots. No point in losing the whole toe when you could just have a few broken toes.
Except that "steel toe amputation" is a myth. Except in some very odd-ball circumstances, you are safer to wear steel-toed boots.
We even had someone run over a steel toed boot with hot dogs in it once, sliced them pretty clean, considering the tool.
And what happened to the hot dogs when you put them in an ordinary boot and ran over them? Complete crush is more than "a few broken toes".
There are some countries who should not be allowed nuclear weapons because they will probably use them.
Determinations by the U.S. or other nuclear powers about who should be "allowed" to possess nuclear weapons are not only ethically laughable, but a ridiculous impossibility. "Ok, here's the rule: only we can have these. Honestly, we promise not to use them again. Shit, Russia's got 'em. Ok, only we and Russia can have these, seriously. Damn it, U.K.! Ok, only us, the Russkies, and the Brits. And the French. Fuck. And the Chinese. Ok. But no more, you hear me? Hey, India, put that down! Israel, I'm going to pretend I didn't see that! Pakistan, what the hell? Oh, India did it so you can too, huh? Let me tell you, mister -- Hey! North Korea! God DAMN it!"
It's not a question of what should be "allowed". As things stand now, we have neither moral authority nor the practical ability to stop other nations from developing nuclear weapons. To gain the moral authority, we have to give up our own; to gain the practical ability, we need to work together with all other nations to form a legal and social framework where any nation creating weapons of mass destruction is see as the enemy of all mankind.
The leaders of Iran apparently value only the afterlife and likely consider killing someone as advancing them along the path to their reward. We have seen much evidence of this...
Then surely you could present some?
If you don't care about this life, but only the afterlife, then national defense is not a concern. If, on the other hand, you are concerned about this life and defending your people, and one of the most aggressive nations in the world invades your neighbor, even if you hate that neighbor you have to start to wonder what you can do to prevent yourself from being similarly attacked
Ahmadinejad may be, in general, a nutcase, but Iran has very good and sane reasons to want to have a nuclear deterrent.
There are millions of engineers in this country that aren't going around blowing stuff up and killing people.
No, instead many of them work for the military-industrial complex, giving soldiers the tools to blow stuff and kill people for the greater profits of American businesses.
The Nuremberg defence cannot be used to excuse mass killing of Jews etc. It is, as far as I can tell, still considered perfectly acceptable by international legal standards for different countries to otherwise have different laws...
No one has mentioned or complained about different countries having different laws. The issue here is unethical laws.
If the Nuremberg defense is not valid for mass killings, why do you think it valid for other sorts of persecution and human rights violations?
If a law is unconstitutional, you are irrational (possibly out of smallmindedness, possibly out of fear) if you attack the guy with a blue uniform rather than the less visible but entirely more powerful branch responsible for passing legislation or the branch responsible for striking down unconstitutional legislation.
If the guy with the blue uniform is pointing a gun at you at the direction of a legislator, for an act that is none of the legislator nor the unformed thug's business, you are irrational -- probably out of fear -- if you do not hold the unformed thug responsible for his actions.
And who gets to choose what is conducive to the welfare and security of the people?
Every individual human being must decide whether their behavior is conducive to the welfare and security of others. No one can buck that responsibility by looking to legislators, priests, superior officers in a chain of command, or what the neighbors think. Anything less is simply a variation of "I was only following orders".
And do you honestly expect the typical FB user to do that - set up and manage their own server?
No more than the typical e-mail user has to set up and manage their own server.
(On the other hand, the typical BitTorrent user sets up and manages their own server just fine, that being the nature of P2P. So it's not impossible.)
And if specialized service providers sprout up to host this data, wouldn't that be creating the same situation that this software is supposed to be trying to get away from: other having control of your data?
A good point, but competition should help. And if seting up a Diaspora seed is more like setting up a BT client than a Sendmail server, even it doesn't reach DIY levels you can hook up with a geek friend or a small service provider rather than Google.
Separation of powers has a purpose. If a law is unconstitutional or unethical, police have a duty not to enforce it.
There's a difference between selectively enforcing law X but not law Y, on the basis that law Y is not conducive to the welfare and security of the people, and enforcing law X against person A and not against person B, on the basis that person A is some random schmuck while person B is rich and powerful.
But seriously... Americans should go to Japan at least once in their life. Its an eye changing experience.
Seconded. I've been several times, a total time over there of about four months. Japan is certainly not perfect, but it's a prosperous industrialized nation with very different social and religious concepts. It helps you question your preconceptions.
Plus, if you spend enough time there, you'll both get to see the Ugly American in action, and experience racism directed at you; for a white American, these are very thought-provoking experiences. Not to say there's a tremendous amount of anti-gaijin sentiment -- in fact a lot of Nihonjin are quite interested in and friendly to foreigners -- but it's there and given enough time you'll trip across it.
The way Obam's White House acted in this case (and many other cases) reminds me of how Mussolini acted in his "white house".
Do you really think someone in the White House specifically directed this, as opposed to someone lower down the chain of command?
You don't think that maybe, there might be an old policy already in place that people who make threats against U.S. government officials are banned from entering the U.S.?
Let's be aware that the TFA linked to is from The Sun, which is a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece -- it's less reliable, and its target audience several IQ points lower, than Fox News.
He said that he had called President Obama a 'p***k' but when asked if the action taken to ban him from going to America 'forever' was extreme, Mr Angel said he had been more abusive than that.
The teenager added that he had been watching some conspiracy theory programmes such as the ones about 9/11 and had been researching the Illuminati - a lot of which he believed in.
If this doofus is a 9/11 "truther" and a conspiracy theory nut, I have no problem believing that there was much more threatening content than just calling Obama a prick.
Of course, if you really think Obama is comparable to Mussolini, you and Angel would probably be fast friends.
honestly I've been disappointed by the past forty years, at least so far as near-space development is concerned. I thought, well, I'd hoped we would be way further along than we are, and had we continued the pace of development after the end of the Apollo program we would have be. But we chickened out, let our leaders dilute the vision and throw away the many of the gains we made during the sixties.
The "vision" of our leaders during the 1960s was 1) let's beat those darn Russkies at the propaganda game, and 2) let's be able to deliver a nuclear warhead to any point on the surface of the earth.
That's it. We've got the ICBMs, and our big propaganda conflict these days is with guys living in caves.
There's just not much reason to go into space. Satellites and robot probes, sure, but we've had many of those over the past 40 years, so that not what you -- not what we SF fans -- want. We want Man In Space. But there's just nothing you can have them do up there in orbit that's worth the expense of putting them there, except maybe repair the satellites -- and even there robots will be able to do the job cheaper in a few years. And there's not a lot of romance in being a free-fall Maytag repairman.
(I am not sure if I am playing devil's advocate here or not.)
Try to tell them that the economic benefits from that investment outweigh the costs, and they laugh at you, and say we would be better off spending it on "social programs." Hell, what the world has gained from, say, advanced weather prediction alone would pay for the space program.
If you want economic benefits on earth, you put your money here. Spin-off is a lousy argument. If you want faster computers, it makes much more sense to fund computer research than to fund a trip to the moon so some test pilot can plant a flag and have a photo op, on the theory that we'll need faster computers to guide his trip.
Sure, weather satellites are valuable; that doesn't justify manned moon shots.
If the justification for the manned space program is that it's inspirational, than it's just performance art -- put it under the NEA. If it's supposed to create jobs, it's just make-work, and we can instead have make-work projects that address pressing problems like renewable energy.
How much sense can you make out of a book written in Mandarin, if you don't read Mandarin?
But the question is whether I read Mandarin, not whether some device will let me access the text.
foreign-language DVDs with no subtitles are not an appropriate comparison - you can make out the story, because a lot of the story can be heard just in tone of voice, body language, and scenery.
Never seen a picture book? A graphic novel?
Language of publication is absolutely akin to a region code on a DVD, unless you consider staring at squiggles on a page that you don't comprehend to be a valuable "access" of the information.
How do you think you learn to read a foreign language? You stare at squiggles on a page that you don't comprehend, and use a second book to look them up, until the memories start to stick.
Language of publication is absolutely nothing like a region code on a DVD. The comparison continues to fail.
As far as scratches on a DVD, that is localized destruction of some data on the disc, rendering parts unreadable to the player. Depending on the severity of the scratch, the DVD may not load, scenes may not work, or you may just see weird artifacts displayed due to the corrupted data in the video. In much the same way, if you rip random pages out of a book...
DVDs get scratched in the normal course of operation. Books do not have random pages ripped out in the normal course of operation. The comparison continues to fail.
Which is nothing at all like region codes. I can always access the content of a book, even if I can't comprehend it. The DVD equivalent would be a film in a foreign language and no subtitles, not region keying. It might be gibberish to me, but I can still access it.
Tear a few random pages out, or scribble inside the book at random with a black permanent marker
Which has nothing to do with the scratch I mentioned. I never said "books are indestructible"; the point is that minor damage does not render them unusable, unlike DVDs. In fact I can tear a book in half, tape it together, and still use it; try that with a DVD.
DVDs are not like books, and the ridiculous mappings you suggest only demonstrate how different they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Heaven forbid indeed, because a whole lot of people died needlessly back when that sort of "caveat emptor" attitude ruled. Go read The Poisoner's Handbook, which is about the birth of forensic medicine in the U.S. -- and about the many different ways people were being poisoned a few decades ago, often by quite ordinary consumer products .
Socialism has nothing to do with product safety regulation. It's about an economic system run by, and for the benefit of, the people who actually create value by their labor, rather than a system run by and for a parasitic investment class.
Regulating interstate and international commerce is right there in Article I, Section 8. The feds are well within their Constitutional powers to say "you can't import this into the country, or sell it across state lines, unless X, Y, and Z."
Is that how the Founders foresaw this power being used? Probably not. But not only is that legally irrelevant, I don't think it's practical or ethical to limit our solutions to what a bunch of slave-holding members of the landed gentry dreamed about 223 years ago when they thought about the small agrarian nation they had in mind.
Here's a truly libertarian idea, in the original sense: tear up all corporate charters, land deeds, patents, and copyrights, and eliminate rent, the private ownership of capital, and all forms of government-enforced privilege. And when you deliberately sell shoddy products that injure or kill people, I have the right to come over and shoot you in the face.
You can probably buy about 50 state legislators for what a Congressman goes for, no problem. Part of the reason that the original Progressives sought to expand federal power was because the state governments had been thoroughly corrupted. Again, this right-wing view that everything would be ok if we devolved regulatory authority back to the states is ahistorical, as well as impractical -- some large corporations turn profits (not reciepits, but profits) that are greater than the gross state product of smaller states.
No, you don't get a meaningful "choice" when a handful of mega-corporations take over a market. "Gee, will I buy my Kraft food products grown from Monsanto seeds at Wal-Mart or at Target? So many choices!"
Corporations are creations of government -- they exist only because of government-issued charters. It's not only fair, it's essential the government leash the immortal sociopaths to which it gives birth.
Duct tape (as we usually understand the term) is not used for sealing HVAC ducts, at least not by knowledgeable persons.
The name "duck tape" came first, referring to "cotton duck" fabric, though whether that name was applied to the stuff we now called "duct tape" when "duct tape" first came out, is still open to debate.
Gaff (or gaffer's) tape is better than duct tape for many applications. For sticking stuff together, my three tape recommendations are gaff tape, 3M's relatively new transparent duct tape (more durable than the grey stuff), and the new style of blue masking tape, surprisingly strong without damaging a surface. Add transparent "scotch" tape for the occasional bit of book repair or gift wrapping, and electrical tape, and your taping needs are pretty much covered.
The issue is not whether or not one refrains from using the word "fuck", it's the reason for doing so. Someone who refrains from making certain mouth-noises on the belief that a omniscient and omnipotent King of the World is going to punish them (perhaps in some ghostly form after they die), is a person who quite likely has little idea of how to have fun, sure.
The Constitution also says "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land." Let's not pretend that the general idea of treaties is unconstitutional or un-American.
Congress's tendency to devolve its legislative power on to unelected regulatory bodies may or may not be a problem, but has little to do with whether those bodies are domestic or international.
The fact that this particular treaty sucks sweaty donkey balls is not an indictment of the general concept of treaties.
A design that allows such a user error to occur is indeed a safety issue with the equipment. Even skilled people in perfect environments have lapses, and nurses are rarely working in perfect environments. If you don't account for that, your human factors work is flawed -- in this case, quite literally fatally flawed.
I am just speculating here, but I would not be surprised if some para-athletes are doing some pretty heavy adjustments on their chairs.
Maybe so -- but it's not like everyone takes their car to the dealer, or even to an ASE certified mechanic. I wouldn't want to buy a exoskeleton that could only be dealer-serviced any more than I'd want to buy a car whose hood was locked and could only be opened by the dealer.
When unemployment goes up, we all suffer.
Externalizing costs is not making products cheaper. Every bit of cheap crap at you local big box store that was made in China ought to have "plus some fraction of an American manufacturing job" added to the price tag.
You can talk about the "free market" in labor just as soon as you revoke all government-issued corporate charters; in a free market there is no IBM, Google, etc.
Nope. Nomadic mammoth-hunters created climate change too. Primitivism is no answer. Sustainability requires a high technology, but a very different sort than the ones we emphasize now.
Not at all. If site X includes a Google webbug, then when you visit site X your browser "phones home" to some Google URL, passing all your Google cookies plus whatever information site X passes in the webbug URL.
E.g., I could put an img tag on my (hypothetical) pr0n site like <img class="invisible" src="http://google.com/evil_script?page=pr0n17&user=you&interests=hot+asian+transsexual+tenticle+bukkake">. When your browser loads that, it passes your Google cookies, so Google can match it to your various Google services logins. Next time you log into Gmail, expect more interesting ads.
Not to say this is exactly how Google does things, just illustrating the process. It's already used for tracking ad "conversions"; when Google shows you an ad, it can set a cookie; then later when you buy something, a webbug on the merchant's page checks with Google to see if you were brought there by one of the ads Google showed you.
Citation needed. I can't see what the motivation would be to market porn to people too young to appreciate it...
Indian independence was won without war; some have argued that American independence could have been won similarly. I haven't analyzed the issue in depth, so I remain agnostic, but it should be noted that the Founding Fathers envisioned a nation without a standing army, defended by citizen militias. It is interesting that serving in an institution whose existence the Founders saw as anathema is considered a patriotic act these days.
Hitler would not have come to power without the stage being set by WWI. Against his rise I would have suggested 1) not having an age of colonialism and militarism that created a World War; 2) that failing, destroying the German economy and humiliating the German people at the end of the war; 3) that failing, not giving economic and political support to Hitler as he came to power, as in fact many Americans did; 4) that failing, boycotts, limited blockades, and a policy of isolating Germany as it became more militaristic; 5) that failing, as soon as German troops and tanks rolled into Poland, swift but restrained military response, surrounding Germany and the invaded territory, total and complete blockade.
I propose we cooperate with other human beings as much as we can, with an aim to make us all free and all survive. "Us vs. them" thinking is the root of the problem.
Yes, I know there are nutcases out there; I teach martial arts and self-defense classes, so not only do I believe there is a time to open up a can of whoop-ass, I teach people how to do it. But that option should be way down on the list, and most of our energy should be directed at finding ways to avoid having to open up that can.
The U.S. could cut is military budget in half and still outspend any other nation more than three-to-one. Our military spending is 46.5%, nearly half, of the world's total budget for destruction; China is in second place with 6.6%.
Meanwhile, all U.N. programs equal less than 2% of world military spending. If we put half of our current military budget to work on finding ways to feed, clothe, house, cure, and educate people around the world, we could outspend the U.N. 11-to-1 in promoting peace, security, and human welfare, while still maintaining military might that no other nation could challenge -- certainly much more than adequate for defending the nation.
That we choose not do do this, but instead run a military-industrial complex for the benefit of the investment and political classes, occasionally makes me question our survival potential as a species.
I don't know what an "Envirowhacko" is, but I don't know any environmentalists who want government running our lives or a reduction in the standard of living. In fact, in terms of big government, most want an end to the huge subsidies, in the form of loan guarantees, that make possible the construction of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is inherently centralized and requires strong government oversight for both safety (from accident and terrorism) and non-proliferation concerns; decentralized power production from millions of solar panels, wind turbines, and biofuel-run generators, goes well with the idea of decentralized government.
I'm all for prosperity, but "growth", in and of itself, is the ideology of the cancer cell. The planet is limited. The human species is just about wrapping up its adolescence, it's time for physical growth to stop -- and for those energies to go into mental, emotional, and dare I say, "spiritual" growth.
I think the possibilities of fusion and of energy-amplifier reactors using thorium are interesting, but they are not here yet. Solar and wind are here now, as are meaningful improvements in energy efficiency. Plus, the U.S. and Israel won't threaten to bomb countries that build solar arrays or wind farms.
All reactors? No, but if you want a solution to the world's energy needs, you need to think about reactors being built by the same sort of companies that paint kids toys with lead pain and put melamine in pet food.
So, in short: nuclear power is not a "plain and simple" solution -- and most likely there is no single "plain and simple" solution.
Which, as the mess regarding medical tubes shows, does not mean that it is subject to meaningful safety regulations.
Actually, a friend of mine who uses an electric chair has turned to friends for repair a few times, because wait times for "authorized" repair were too long. Now, this was simple stuff like loose connections, but the idea of DIY firmware updates isn't completely out-of-bounds.
Except that "steel toe amputation" is a myth. Except in some very odd-ball circumstances, you are safer to wear steel-toed boots.
And what happened to the hot dogs when you put them in an ordinary boot and ran over them? Complete crush is more than "a few broken toes".
Determinations by the U.S. or other nuclear powers about who should be "allowed" to possess nuclear weapons are not only ethically laughable, but a ridiculous impossibility. "Ok, here's the rule: only we can have these. Honestly, we promise not to use them again. Shit, Russia's got 'em. Ok, only we and Russia can have these, seriously. Damn it, U.K.! Ok, only us, the Russkies, and the Brits. And the French. Fuck. And the Chinese. Ok. But no more, you hear me? Hey, India, put that down! Israel, I'm going to pretend I didn't see that! Pakistan, what the hell? Oh, India did it so you can too, huh? Let me tell you, mister -- Hey! North Korea! God DAMN it!"
It's not a question of what should be "allowed". As things stand now, we have neither moral authority nor the practical ability to stop other nations from developing nuclear weapons. To gain the moral authority, we have to give up our own; to gain the practical ability, we need to work together with all other nations to form a legal and social framework where any nation creating weapons of mass destruction is see as the enemy of all mankind.
Then surely you could present some?
If you don't care about this life, but only the afterlife, then national defense is not a concern. If, on the other hand, you are concerned about this life and defending your people, and one of the most aggressive nations in the world invades your neighbor, even if you hate that neighbor you have to start to wonder what you can do to prevent yourself from being similarly attacked
Ahmadinejad may be, in general, a nutcase, but Iran has very good and sane reasons to want to have a nuclear deterrent.
I hereby nominate this for meme of the month. "grep doesn't get bored." Nice.
No, instead many of them work for the military-industrial complex, giving soldiers the tools to blow stuff and kill people for the greater profits of American businesses.
No one has mentioned or complained about different countries having different laws. The issue here is unethical laws.
If the Nuremberg defense is not valid for mass killings, why do you think it valid for other sorts of persecution and human rights violations?
If the guy with the blue uniform is pointing a gun at you at the direction of a legislator, for an act that is none of the legislator nor the unformed thug's business, you are irrational -- probably out of fear -- if you do not hold the unformed thug responsible for his actions.
Every individual human being must decide whether their behavior is conducive to the welfare and security of others. No one can buck that responsibility by looking to legislators, priests, superior officers in a chain of command, or what the neighbors think. Anything less is simply a variation of "I was only following orders".
No more than the typical e-mail user has to set up and manage their own server.
(On the other hand, the typical BitTorrent user sets up and manages their own server just fine, that being the nature of P2P. So it's not impossible.)
A good point, but competition should help. And if seting up a Diaspora seed is more like setting up a BT client than a Sendmail server, even it doesn't reach DIY levels you can hook up with a geek friend or a small service provider rather than Google.
So, they should just follow orders, then?
Separation of powers has a purpose. If a law is unconstitutional or unethical, police have a duty not to enforce it.
There's a difference between selectively enforcing law X but not law Y, on the basis that law Y is not conducive to the welfare and security of the people, and enforcing law X against person A and not against person B, on the basis that person A is some random schmuck while person B is rich and powerful.
Seconded. I've been several times, a total time over there of about four months. Japan is certainly not perfect, but it's a prosperous industrialized nation with very different social and religious concepts. It helps you question your preconceptions.
Plus, if you spend enough time there, you'll both get to see the Ugly American in action, and experience racism directed at you; for a white American, these are very thought-provoking experiences. Not to say there's a tremendous amount of anti-gaijin sentiment -- in fact a lot of Nihonjin are quite interested in and friendly to foreigners -- but it's there and given enough time you'll trip across it.
Do you really think someone in the White House specifically directed this, as opposed to someone lower down the chain of command?
You don't think that maybe, there might be an old policy already in place that people who make threats against U.S. government officials are banned from entering the U.S.?
Let's be aware that the TFA linked to is from The Sun, which is a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece -- it's less reliable, and its target audience several IQ points lower, than Fox News.
There was, by Angel's admission, more to the note than calling Obama a prick:
If this doofus is a 9/11 "truther" and a conspiracy theory nut, I have no problem believing that there was much more threatening content than just calling Obama a prick.
Of course, if you really think Obama is comparable to Mussolini, you and Angel would probably be fast friends.
The "vision" of our leaders during the 1960s was 1) let's beat those darn Russkies at the propaganda game, and 2) let's be able to deliver a nuclear warhead to any point on the surface of the earth.
That's it. We've got the ICBMs, and our big propaganda conflict these days is with guys living in caves.
There's just not much reason to go into space. Satellites and robot probes, sure, but we've had many of those over the past 40 years, so that not what you -- not what we SF fans -- want. We want Man In Space. But there's just nothing you can have them do up there in orbit that's worth the expense of putting them there, except maybe repair the satellites -- and even there robots will be able to do the job cheaper in a few years. And there's not a lot of romance in being a free-fall Maytag repairman.
(I am not sure if I am playing devil's advocate here or not.)
If you want economic benefits on earth, you put your money here. Spin-off is a lousy argument. If you want faster computers, it makes much more sense to fund computer research than to fund a trip to the moon so some test pilot can plant a flag and have a photo op, on the theory that we'll need faster computers to guide his trip.
Sure, weather satellites are valuable; that doesn't justify manned moon shots.
If the justification for the manned space program is that it's inspirational, than it's just performance art -- put it under the NEA. If it's supposed to create jobs, it's just make-work, and we can instead have make-work projects that address pressing problems like renewable energy.
But the question is whether I read Mandarin, not whether some device will let me access the text.
Never seen a picture book? A graphic novel?
How do you think you learn to read a foreign language? You stare at squiggles on a page that you don't comprehend, and use a second book to look them up, until the memories start to stick.
Language of publication is absolutely nothing like a region code on a DVD. The comparison continues to fail.
DVDs get scratched in the normal course of operation. Books do not have random pages ripped out in the normal course of operation. The comparison continues to fail.
Which is nothing at all like region codes. I can always access the content of a book, even if I can't comprehend it. The DVD equivalent would be a film in a foreign language and no subtitles, not region keying. It might be gibberish to me, but I can still access it.
Which has nothing to do with the scratch I mentioned. I never said "books are indestructible"; the point is that minor damage does not render them unusable, unlike DVDs. In fact I can tear a book in half, tape it together, and still use it; try that with a DVD.
DVDs are not like books, and the ridiculous mappings you suggest only demonstrate how different they are.