Einstein made huge contributions to physics, but Wikipedia is not the place for revolutionary or new knowledge. Hotly contested new theories and cutting edge research are excluded from Wikipedia precisely because they're impossible to judge. There's no reason why experts could not also observe the limitations of writing appropriately fpr an encyclopedia, especially considering they have a better sense of controversy than most.
You make an interesting point, but it's wrong. Profiling based on race in fact is detrimental to security, because security officials concentrate on skin color as opposed to the behavior that actually indicates likilihood of being a terrorist -- nerviousness, shifting eyes, standing around in a corner, I don't know -- stuff like that. (My source is a professor on an NPR program I heard last August. I recall when I was listening to it, too, so if you really care I could probably track down who it was.)
How many terrorist attacks on airplanes have we had since September 11? What, the shoe bomber? That's a sample size of 1. And all the time we hear about the increasing threat of "home grown terrorists." Slashdot readers should know not to extrapolate from small data sets.
"'Hypothesis' actually. Until someone gathers some data to back it up. Which they may have, I just haven't bothered to look into it lately."
You see, real hypotheses actually have theoretical grounding in actually science. As opposed to what you, someone who has no background or understanding of the way black holes and the universe are understood to function, pull out of your ass.
"I guess we should all just accept whichever most common theory is spoonfed to us and not use our own intellect at all."
Maybe you should actually understand what the scientists are saying before you try to apply your own intellect? Many thousands of man-years have already been spent tackling these issues before you considered them...
"They must be completely right, it's not like major scientific theories aren't re-written all the time or anything."
And exactly which major scientific theories have been "re-written" all the time? I think you're making a common mistake: relativity, for instance, was not a "re-writing" of classic mechanics, no more than "string theory" is an alleged re-writing of quantum mechanics. Theories are valid in different limits and different realms -- some greater than others. That doesn't make the previous work "wrong."
Imagine a game where you play a member of a white lynch squad in the postbellum south. Clearly, such a game would be gravely offensive and inappropriate.
What's the difference between these games? White Americans killed off the Native Americans far more thoroughly than they managed to do so to the African Americans? And that makes the horrible racism better or more acceptable?
3. If you download every minor and major version, alphas, betas and specially optimized builds of Firefox (as I have done in the past), you've what, "bought" FF 20 times for one computer? Download counts for Firefox are obvious overcounts not undercounts of its users.
(Note: Your point 2 applies to every other browser, as well.)
The point, I don't trust the administration to collect my private communications and only use it when it's necessary to prevent a terrorist attack. If we could trust the government to perfectly follow its own laws, we could trust the government to spy on us. But we already know the pentagon has been spying on quakers and other peace activists.
This is clearly not spying with purely benine intent. This is spying on terrorists, with random folks and liberal sympathizers tossed in for good measure.
I do not trust the government to only use such information for proper purposes. Maybe for what Bush and Co ascertain to be "proper" but they have a very wishy washy definition of what is constitutional -- anything that suits their interests and that strengths the executive branch. So I fear mere spying turning into actual, material violations.
"and of course in the days since Newton, we've discovered that most of this counts as complete rubbish, but I still expect you to know it for the test".
Please tell me you're joking. Newton's laws retain nearly just as much predictive and useful power as they did when they were first conceived. How do the mechanics of a car or bicycle work? How do you build a mile high skyscrapper? Or a giant bridge? How did man get to the moon? Hint: none of these involve calculations using relativity.
Even the dyanmics of stars and gallaxy rotation generally require few uses of relativistic corrections.
You don't just learn Newtonian dynamics for the test. You learn it because Newtonian mechanics are the way the everyday world works. And of course, if you fail to understand it, there is no way you could possibly come to understand the more complex relativistic analogues -- if these alternatives would even be useful to you at all (and they almost certainly would not).
There's no Adium for Windows, so what do you do if you're on that platform?
Gaim is designed for Linux. Trillian is doing it's own special thing with its skins and style. Miranda tries but has its own funky grey look. Why can't anyone just make a consistent IM multi-client that uses the standard windows look and feel?
I arrived at my local Walmart at around 10:30 last night ready to camp out until the store opened at 7am. I was the first one there. Other folks started showing up around 11:00-11:30 and we heard from multiple employees that there were only 14 Xboxes.
Some of my friends showed up around 11:30 and that was it for the 14 folks in line. We circulated our own list with our names in order and that was that. Or it should have been.
We bundled up, sat in cars pulled up to the curb in front of the store or under the overhang and waited it out until around 5:30 am or so. A number of people showed up in the night, but we told them there were only 14 Xboxes and they were too late, so they left.
At about 5:30 people started showing up convinced that they could barge their way through to get an Xbox. By 6am my friends and I had packed up our blankets, tossed our junk in the car, and everyone was standing up in a mob in front of the store doors.
At this point, we've got about 30 extra people who plan to rush in to get the Xbox even though they didn't wait all night in line. Somebody from the management of Walmart comes outside and says they're going to use the list of 14 people, and everyone else can just go home.
Nobody leaves, though. Some of newcomers are especially obnoxious, particularly one big guy who threatens to literally run me over in order to an Xbox in front of me and eventually starts complaining about how I "put my hands on him" since he bumped into my elbow, despite my hands remaining in my pockets the entire time. Nevermind this guy is about twice my size, and I have no desire whatsoever to fight him. Ue's being extremely loud and boisterous as he bangs on the glass doors and repeatedly states his intent bulldoze down anyone between him and the Xbox.
We're calling the Walmart from cellphones to make sure they'll use the list and keep order. They aren't very commital but certainly want to maintain order. We warn them that they may have an angry mob on their hands. Some police arrive half an hour or so before they open the doors.
At 7am, a Walmart employee opens not main double automatic doors my friends and I had been congregating around to insure we get it, but a sidedoor directly to the left of them. They just let people, holding us back so we go one at a time and once they get 14 or so of us they stop. I managed to squeeze in since I was on that side of the door and one of my friends gets let in by the assistant manager he had talked with last night before everyone showed up.
They've got us in the anteroom and then it's a mad rush back to the electronics section to get first in line to get the four premium versions in stock. The asshole from earlier in the story got let in with the first 14 people and then squeezes into the second place in line at the electronics desk with girlfriend after showing up after everyone else.
There is some justice in the world, though. The asshole managed to get in a fight over a wireless controller and got himself arrested after a number of people waiting outside volunteered to testify against him. He was led out in handcuffs (but he did get his premium edition... grr...).
At least I got an Xbox, but about half of those who had waited overnight (including a couple of my friends) did not. The manager did let in one 7 month pregnant woman when they opened the side door who had waited all night to buy an Xbox for her boyfriend. There's no way she could have ran for it. But still, it's pretty outrageous Walmart couldn't maintain order and keep a line.
The Direct Connect network at my small liberal arts college may only have 142 users logged and 6.08 TB of data being shared (small stuff compared to I2hub, I'm sure) but at download speeds of over 1MB/s it's worth it. (Sadly, we were never connected to internet two.)
All decisions like this force is networks to go further underground and localize tighter. Clearly 5000 users logged at once on dozens of campuses were far too many to keep their mouths shut. But smaller campus networks work nearly as well and are easy to setup. You don't need official websites or other big targets, just an no-ip.com server address shared through word of mouth.
I'm sure my school is not unique (I've heard another network like this exists for all the UC schools). It's pretty much impossible to stop students from utilizing nearly infinite network bandwidth. Commendable, perhaps, but hopeless.
100kg of aluminum costs around $200 at ~$2/kg. Looking at the graph on this page for Aluminum manufacturing costs, about 75% of the cost is raw materials and supplies (mostly the aluminum). So that's at least $50 net to fill up your "tank" assuming perfect effeciency in converting that aluminum.
Neglecting the costs of taking the recycled aluminum oxide out of your car and turning it back into Al rods, the maintaince costs for the fuel station, infrastructure costs to build all this, and so forth. Shipping costs will of course astronomically climb since metal can only be transfered in by train, truck or ship unlike cheap pipelines and is also no longer an easily moveable liquid. Nevermind the cost of your aluminum powered car itself, or the engineering difficulties inherent in moving a 100kg metal coil into your engine, this "upgrade" is already going to break the bank.
I think I'll leave the hydrogen production outside of the vehicle, thank you. Nice try, but no dice.
3 year old news, 3 year old video
on
Deep in the Core
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
These citations include simple, unamibguous facts, as most encyclopedias have fact-checking and qualified authors. That's what Wikipedia lacks. Encyclopedias are generally poor sources, but for dates of the British Civil War, they should be good.
Yes, it would be outrageous if suddenly one of your phonelines stopped working because phone companies don't want interoperability, but your analogy is completely flawed. You pay for phone service, whereas if you use an alternative client such as Gaim or Trillian, you are free loading on the instant messenger network provider. The companies that provide the service have to pay for it and get back that money through showing you advertisements.
This is equivalent to being given phone service for free if you use the company's phone and then replacing the hardware with something of your own. Or getting one of those free PCs with the constant advertisements on the side of the screen and hacking it so you don't have to see the advertisements. I prefer alternative clients as well, but by no means do you have any "right" to use a different IM client. That's absurd.
Patents don't stop the progress of knowledge by third parties: according to patent law, universities can still do research using patented methods. They just can't sell it.
Also, I would suspect that most of these patents will thankfully expire long before anyone has any real use for them.
Find me a paper showing a non-c value for the speed of gravity. Good luck -- I don't think you'll find anything. The speed of gravity as c is essentially one of the key results of General Relativity.
Note that gravity having a speed absolutely would not simply account for dark matter. Astrophysicists have taken such facts into consideration for years, and that alone is certainly not enough. Galaxies are still only rotating at a tiny fraction of the speed of light (no doplar shift) and are cylindrically symmetric.
People are already writing AJAX applications... but they aren't up to snuff with real applications like Microsoft Office and Open Office. Rewriting an office suite to the amazingly advanced level found just in Word and OOo is an exceedingly expensive and difficult task, whatever language you choose.
Keep in mind that for anyone to use an office Google writes, it would still need to be at least as usable as Microsoft Office, and of course, have that perfect compatability (even OOo isn't quite close enough yet).
But worse yet, this is competing on Microsoft's home field. Google has prospered by working with Microsoft applications with tools like Google Desktop. That's because Google knows that some fields have already been won. Where Google makes money is by finding under-developed niches and writing that killer app. Webmail. Desktop search. Online maps. Office and Windows have had so many billions poured into them Google taking Microsoft directly on, no matter how much nerds wish it would happen, is the last them Google is going to do.
Knowledge is not democratic -- and expertise necessarily erodes equality. You cannot build a worthwhile encyclopedia based on the premise that everyone's contributions will be valuable.
Yes, but you can build a more or less accurate encyclopedia built on the premise that most people's contributions are valuable.
That's what Wikipedia is, and it has been spectacularly success because anyone can edit or create a Wikipedia article. I think you overestimate the contribution of members of the Wikipedia "community" as opposed to just general article readers. Still, I'll accept that Wikipedia has failings associated with the biased and midinformed nature of each of its contributers. But your alternative of a free encyclopedia created by experts is a hopeless dream.
In fact, if you read up on the History of Wikipedia you'll even notice that was tried before (by the creators of Wikipedia) -- and failed:
Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was seen as very slow.
Nupedia never had more than 25 articles completed. Maybe with publicity you could get more, but the academics who could have contributed to it already had jobs doing all the tedious work of fact checking and there weren't enough "qualified people" to make it easy.
Requiring authors and editors to be certified as knowledgable in their field would be the biggest mistake Wikipedia ever made. Not only would it reduce the number of authors instantly by a factor of a thousand or more, it would require a massively higher commitment from those still able to contribute. Wikipedia would stagnate into oblivion.
You can replace (many) assembly line workers with machines, but machines are still quite poor at doing remarkably simple and easy human tasks, such as cooking burgers or dealing with people. There is absolutely an important role for the "working class" in the service industry -- and will be for the forseable future (i.e. before this singularity business).
The interesting fact about how automation works is that when it makes processes more effecient, it increases overall wealth and correspondingly the demand for jobs in the service industry. These sort of very direct, personal jobs may in theory be replaceable with machines and computers, but humans certainly make better salesmen, so by the time we replace most of these jobs, we'll already have true AI.
Intelligent application of mechanical power can be far more complicated (e.g. outside of the factory) than you may realize.
Don't be silly -- it's legal to try to pass a law because we aren't in the USSR or Communist China. The policy of "Democratic Centralism" you alude to (making decisions once and requiring everyone to stick by them) is extremely dangerous in that it fails to be able to account for shifts of political opinion. It's why we can overturn laws or amend our constitution.
1. Mass is too low to allow for thermonuclear reactions. 2. Large enough that they are formed into a spherircal shape by the force of gravity. 3. Rotates a star.
Other than that, though, the definition of a planet tends to lose meaning. Is size a relevant criterion? Maybe, but there are dozens of Kepler belt objects that meet the definition. Bigger than Pluto? Okay, but it's still rather arbitrary.
You also get funky objects like Triton (one of Neptune's moons) that was once a Kepler belt object around the size of Pluto, but was captured by Neptune's orbit.
Sounds like plenty of good reasons to just abandon the term "planet" in scientific discussion altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
Einstein made huge contributions to physics, but Wikipedia is not the place for revolutionary or new knowledge. Hotly contested new theories and cutting edge research are excluded from Wikipedia precisely because they're impossible to judge. There's no reason why experts could not also observe the limitations of writing appropriately fpr an encyclopedia, especially considering they have a better sense of controversy than most.
You make an interesting point, but it's wrong. Profiling based on race in fact is detrimental to security, because security officials concentrate on skin color as opposed to the behavior that actually indicates likilihood of being a terrorist -- nerviousness, shifting eyes, standing around in a corner, I don't know -- stuff like that. (My source is a professor on an NPR program I heard last August. I recall when I was listening to it, too, so if you really care I could probably track down who it was.)
How many terrorist attacks on airplanes have we had since September 11? What, the shoe bomber? That's a sample size of 1. And all the time we hear about the increasing threat of "home grown terrorists." Slashdot readers should know not to extrapolate from small data sets.
You may think that is cool, but I play RPS 25!
"'Hypothesis' actually. Until someone gathers some data to back it up. Which they may have, I just haven't bothered to look into it lately."
You see, real hypotheses actually have theoretical grounding in actually science. As opposed to what you, someone who has no background or understanding of the way black holes and the universe are understood to function, pull out of your ass.
"I guess we should all just accept whichever most common theory is spoonfed to us and not use our own intellect at all."
Maybe you should actually understand what the scientists are saying before you try to apply your own intellect? Many thousands of man-years have already been spent tackling these issues before you considered them...
"They must be completely right, it's not like major scientific theories aren't re-written all the time or anything."
And exactly which major scientific theories have been "re-written" all the time? I think you're making a common mistake: relativity, for instance, was not a "re-writing" of classic mechanics, no more than "string theory" is an alleged re-writing of quantum mechanics. Theories are valid in different limits and different realms -- some greater than others. That doesn't make the previous work "wrong."
Imagine a game where you play a member of a white lynch squad in the postbellum south. Clearly, such a game would be gravely offensive and inappropriate.
What's the difference between these games? White Americans killed off the Native Americans far more thoroughly than they managed to do so to the African Americans? And that makes the horrible racism better or more acceptable?
I will be boycotting Activision as well.
3. If you download every minor and major version, alphas, betas and specially optimized builds of Firefox (as I have done in the past), you've what, "bought" FF 20 times for one computer? Download counts for Firefox are obvious overcounts not undercounts of its users.
(Note: Your point 2 applies to every other browser, as well.)
The point, I don't trust the administration to collect my private communications and only use it when it's necessary to prevent a terrorist attack. If we could trust the government to perfectly follow its own laws, we could trust the government to spy on us. But we already know the pentagon has been spying on quakers and other peace activists.
This is clearly not spying with purely benine intent. This is spying on terrorists, with random folks and liberal sympathizers tossed in for good measure.
I do not trust the government to only use such information for proper purposes. Maybe for what Bush and Co ascertain to be "proper" but they have a very wishy washy definition of what is constitutional -- anything that suits their interests and that strengths the executive branch. So I fear mere spying turning into actual, material violations.
"and of course in the days since Newton, we've discovered that most of this counts as complete rubbish, but I still expect you to know it for the test".
Please tell me you're joking. Newton's laws retain nearly just as much predictive and useful power as they did when they were first conceived. How do the mechanics of a car or bicycle work? How do you build a mile high skyscrapper? Or a giant bridge? How did man get to the moon? Hint: none of these involve calculations using relativity.
Even the dyanmics of stars and gallaxy rotation generally require few uses of relativistic corrections.
You don't just learn Newtonian dynamics for the test. You learn it because Newtonian mechanics are the way the everyday world works. And of course, if you fail to understand it, there is no way you could possibly come to understand the more complex relativistic analogues -- if these alternatives would even be useful to you at all (and they almost certainly would not).
Any links to those videos?
There's no Adium for Windows, so what do you do if you're on that platform?
Gaim is designed for Linux. Trillian is doing it's own special thing with its skins and style. Miranda tries but has its own funky grey look. Why can't anyone just make a consistent IM multi-client that uses the standard windows look and feel?
I arrived at my local Walmart at around 10:30 last night ready to camp out until the store opened at 7am. I was the first one there. Other folks started showing up around 11:00-11:30 and we heard from multiple employees that there were only 14 Xboxes.
Some of my friends showed up around 11:30 and that was it for the 14 folks in line. We circulated our own list with our names in order and that was that. Or it should have been.
We bundled up, sat in cars pulled up to the curb in front of the store or under the overhang and waited it out until around 5:30 am or so. A number of people showed up in the night, but we told them there were only 14 Xboxes and they were too late, so they left.
At about 5:30 people started showing up convinced that they could barge their way through to get an Xbox. By 6am my friends and I had packed up our blankets, tossed our junk in the car, and everyone was standing up in a mob in front of the store doors.
At this point, we've got about 30 extra people who plan to rush in to get the Xbox even though they didn't wait all night in line. Somebody from the management of Walmart comes outside and says they're going to use the list of 14 people, and everyone else can just go home.
Nobody leaves, though. Some of newcomers are especially obnoxious, particularly one big guy who threatens to literally run me over in order to an Xbox in front of me and eventually starts complaining about how I "put my hands on him" since he bumped into my elbow, despite my hands remaining in my pockets the entire time. Nevermind this guy is about twice my size, and I have no desire whatsoever to fight him. Ue's being extremely loud and boisterous as he bangs on the glass doors and repeatedly states his intent bulldoze down anyone between him and the Xbox.
We're calling the Walmart from cellphones to make sure they'll use the list and keep order. They aren't very commital but certainly want to maintain order. We warn them that they may have an angry mob on their hands. Some police arrive half an hour or so before they open the doors.
At 7am, a Walmart employee opens not main double automatic doors my friends and I had been congregating around to insure we get it, but a sidedoor directly to the left of them. They just let people, holding us back so we go one at a time and once they get 14 or so of us they stop. I managed to squeeze in since I was on that side of the door and one of my friends gets let in by the assistant manager he had talked with last night before everyone showed up.
They've got us in the anteroom and then it's a mad rush back to the electronics section to get first in line to get the four premium versions in stock. The asshole from earlier in the story got let in with the first 14 people and then squeezes into the second place in line at the electronics desk with girlfriend after showing up after everyone else.
There is some justice in the world, though. The asshole managed to get in a fight over a wireless controller and got himself arrested after a number of people waiting outside volunteered to testify against him. He was led out in handcuffs (but he did get his premium edition... grr...).
At least I got an Xbox, but about half of those who had waited overnight (including a couple of my friends) did not. The manager did let in one 7 month pregnant woman when they opened the side door who had waited all night to buy an Xbox for her boyfriend. There's no way she could have ran for it. But still, it's pretty outrageous Walmart couldn't maintain order and keep a line.
The Direct Connect network at my small liberal arts college may only have 142 users logged and 6.08 TB of data being shared (small stuff compared to I2hub, I'm sure) but at download speeds of over 1MB/s it's worth it. (Sadly, we were never connected to internet two.)
All decisions like this force is networks to go further underground and localize tighter. Clearly 5000 users logged at once on dozens of campuses were far too many to keep their mouths shut. But smaller campus networks work nearly as well and are easy to setup. You don't need official websites or other big targets, just an no-ip.com server address shared through word of mouth.
I'm sure my school is not unique (I've heard another network like this exists for all the UC schools). It's pretty much impossible to stop students from utilizing nearly infinite network bandwidth. Commendable, perhaps, but hopeless.
100kg of aluminum costs around $200 at ~$2/kg. Looking at the graph on this page for Aluminum manufacturing costs, about 75% of the cost is raw materials and supplies (mostly the aluminum). So that's at least $50 net to fill up your "tank" assuming perfect effeciency in converting that aluminum.
Neglecting the costs of taking the recycled aluminum oxide out of your car and turning it back into Al rods, the maintaince costs for the fuel station, infrastructure costs to build all this, and so forth. Shipping costs will of course astronomically climb since metal can only be transfered in by train, truck or ship unlike cheap pipelines and is also no longer an easily moveable liquid. Nevermind the cost of your aluminum powered car itself, or the engineering difficulties inherent in moving a 100kg metal coil into your engine, this "upgrade" is already going to break the bank.
I think I'll leave the hydrogen production outside of the vehicle, thank you. Nice try, but no dice.
Take a look at the original press release, dated 16 October 2002.
The article was published in Nature at the same time, and the video isn't new either.
Remind me why this is going up on Slashdot today?
These citations include simple, unamibguous facts, as most encyclopedias have fact-checking and qualified authors. That's what Wikipedia lacks. Encyclopedias are generally poor sources, but for dates of the British Civil War, they should be good.
Coughing up hairballs?
Yes, it would be outrageous if suddenly one of your phonelines stopped working because phone companies don't want interoperability, but your analogy is completely flawed. You pay for phone service, whereas if you use an alternative client such as Gaim or Trillian, you are free loading on the instant messenger network provider. The companies that provide the service have to pay for it and get back that money through showing you advertisements.
This is equivalent to being given phone service for free if you use the company's phone and then replacing the hardware with something of your own. Or getting one of those free PCs with the constant advertisements on the side of the screen and hacking it so you don't have to see the advertisements. I prefer alternative clients as well, but by no means do you have any "right" to use a different IM client. That's absurd.
Patents don't stop the progress of knowledge by third parties: according to patent law, universities can still do research using patented methods. They just can't sell it.
Also, I would suspect that most of these patents will thankfully expire long before anyone has any real use for them.
Find me a paper showing a non-c value for the speed of gravity. Good luck -- I don't think you'll find anything. The speed of gravity as c is essentially one of the key results of General Relativity.
Note that gravity having a speed absolutely would not simply account for dark matter. Astrophysicists have taken such facts into consideration for years, and that alone is certainly not enough. Galaxies are still only rotating at a tiny fraction of the speed of light (no doplar shift) and are cylindrically symmetric.
People are already writing AJAX applications... but they aren't up to snuff with real applications like Microsoft Office and Open Office. Rewriting an office suite to the amazingly advanced level found just in Word and OOo is an exceedingly expensive and difficult task, whatever language you choose.
Keep in mind that for anyone to use an office Google writes, it would still need to be at least as usable as Microsoft Office, and of course, have that perfect compatability (even OOo isn't quite close enough yet).
But worse yet, this is competing on Microsoft's home field. Google has prospered by working with Microsoft applications with tools like Google Desktop. That's because Google knows that some fields have already been won. Where Google makes money is by finding under-developed niches and writing that killer app. Webmail. Desktop search. Online maps. Office and Windows have had so many billions poured into them Google taking Microsoft directly on, no matter how much nerds wish it would happen, is the last them Google is going to do.
Yes, but you can build a more or less accurate encyclopedia built on the premise that most people's contributions are valuable.
That's what Wikipedia is, and it has been spectacularly success because anyone can edit or create a Wikipedia article. I think you overestimate the contribution of members of the Wikipedia "community" as opposed to just general article readers. Still, I'll accept that Wikipedia has failings associated with the biased and midinformed nature of each of its contributers. But your alternative of a free encyclopedia created by experts is a hopeless dream.
In fact, if you read up on the History of Wikipedia you'll even notice that was tried before (by the creators of Wikipedia) -- and failed:
Nupedia never had more than 25 articles completed. Maybe with publicity you could get more, but the academics who could have contributed to it already had jobs doing all the tedious work of fact checking and there weren't enough "qualified people" to make it easy.
Requiring authors and editors to be certified as knowledgable in their field would be the biggest mistake Wikipedia ever made. Not only would it reduce the number of authors instantly by a factor of a thousand or more, it would require a massively higher commitment from those still able to contribute. Wikipedia would stagnate into oblivion.
Come on now, what sort of self-respecting Slashdot user are you?
Corrected:
ReadOnce = PlayOnce;
RipOnce = ReadOnce;
PlayForever = RipOnce;
You can replace (many) assembly line workers with machines, but machines are still quite poor at doing remarkably simple and easy human tasks, such as cooking burgers or dealing with people. There is absolutely an important role for the "working class" in the service industry -- and will be for the forseable future (i.e. before this singularity business).
The interesting fact about how automation works is that when it makes processes more effecient, it increases overall wealth and correspondingly the demand for jobs in the service industry. These sort of very direct, personal jobs may in theory be replaceable with machines and computers, but humans certainly make better salesmen, so by the time we replace most of these jobs, we'll already have true AI.
Intelligent application of mechanical power can be far more complicated (e.g. outside of the factory) than you may realize.
Don't be silly -- it's legal to try to pass a law because we aren't in the USSR or Communist China. The policy of "Democratic Centralism" you alude to (making decisions once and requiring everyone to stick by them) is extremely dangerous in that it fails to be able to account for shifts of political opinion. It's why we can overturn laws or amend our constitution.
At the very least, a planet meets these criteria:
1. Mass is too low to allow for thermonuclear reactions.
2. Large enough that they are formed into a spherircal shape by the force of gravity.
3. Rotates a star.
Other than that, though, the definition of a planet tends to lose meaning. Is size a relevant criterion? Maybe, but there are dozens of Kepler belt objects that meet the definition. Bigger than Pluto? Okay, but it's still rather arbitrary.
You also get funky objects like Triton (one of Neptune's moons) that was once a Kepler belt object around the size of Pluto, but was captured by Neptune's orbit.
Sounds like plenty of good reasons to just abandon the term "planet" in scientific discussion altogether.