Why would a direct election system produce more corruption than an indirect system? The latter trusts the state legislators more than the people; this was the explicit goal of the original system. In practice, the result was that many senators were those who had earned prominent positions in their party, and were rewarded with senatorial positions. Meanwhile, the state legislatures have no better a record on protecting the rights of the people than the federal government: segregation is a good example. The old system might have decreased the erosion in states' power versus the federal government, but I doubt that it would help guarantee citizens' rights.
Someone can purchase a CD, rip the MP3's, then sell the CD to one of these shady operations, who then resells it to someone else. What could be a clearer example of piracy than that?
Brin enjoys taking contrarian views . . .
on
David Brin On LOTR
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
And his articles in Salon about them are interesting. As he says in the article, "It's how you get practice not just being a passive consumer, or critic, but a creative storyteller in your own right." I agree in large part with some of his discussion of Star Wars: there are many interesting directions Lucas could have taken with the story, none of which he did. Thus, Episodes I and II are tepid.
Brin is spot-on about Tolkien's romantic longings. Tolkien wrote about a world in decline, where beauty was passing out of the world. That's the topic of the Silmarillion, and the Lord of the Rings just forms the last chapter in that saga. It's also hard to argue against the idea that the Lord of the Rings shows racist tendencies.
However, Brin misses some of the points. Sauron is evil because he chose to follow Melkor/Morgoth in the the beginning of the world. Melkor/Morgoth was evil because he aimed to corrupt Illuvatar's design. The parallel is to (certain forms of) Christian morality.
Evil is ugly because its exterior form mimics its interior darkness. Melkor was once the fairest of the Valar, but his evil ate away at that and he became menacing, not beautiful. Sauron wore a fair form before the fall of Numenor, but in its destruction he lost his ability to assume it.
Gandalf and Saruman are powerful, not because of some secret knowledge they have, but because they are Maiar. Their powers are limited, which is why they can't destroy Sauron outright (Sauron was also once a Maiar, note), but flow from their nature. This idea might be undemocratic. However, in Tolkien's world, it's a fact: neither the Maiar nor the humans can do anything to change it. Democracy can't alter inherent inequality.
As Brin notes, Tolkien's "heroes" aren't always heroic. The Elves, in particular, have a checkered past (e.g., the Kinslaying) and they show little willingness to fight in The War of the Ring. Many of the wizards, Maiar sent to help Middle-Earth against Sauron, either turn (Saruman) or forsake their duties; Gandalf alone holds steadfast. The Numenorean kings, from whose line Aragorn descends, ended up bringing destruction upon themselves. In Tolkien's world, everyone is subject to the forces of decay and corruption.
I agree in some respects with Brin's criticism of Star Wars. However, Tolkien's work has far greater internal consistency. Taken in itself, it works, but it is an expression of Romanticism, many of whose ideals don't apply to our real world. Thus, many of the lessons you might take from Tolkien's work don't apply either.
Plutonium's metallurgy is very strange. One of Richard Rhode's books (about the making of the fission and fusion bombs) mentions that it has something like five different states around STP. Its mechanical properties are, to my understanding, annoying. In other words, even aside from the radioactivity and toxicity, you still don't want to make anything about it.
Actually, you'd be surprised. Sometimes the incentives run the other way. It is not unheard for women in a failing relationship (for reasons that remain mysterious to me) to get pregnant and hope, that the pregnancy will hold the relationship together. Also, the law still requires (as far as I know) men to pay child support even if the woman lies about being on the pill and then becomes pregnant.
Another reason of course is that having two contraceptive pills will presumably decrease the chances of pregnancy even further than either one alone (the female version of the pill has a small but non-zero failure rate). Similarly, the chances of pregnancy with other contraceptive measures (condoms et al.) will be decreased.
A lot of its real utility depends on implementation details like cost (the female version will almost certainly be cheaper because its out of patent), dosing frequency, etc.
Does anyone actually know what a nuke would do?
on
Stopping Killer Asteroids
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Nuclear weapons in space act very differently from those in air. To my knowledge, there's never been a detonation in "deep" space: I believe there was a test in low Earth orbit once, but immediately after that the Outer Space treaty was signed (which banned nuclear detonations in space, among other things). The real difference is that a nuclear weapon in space discharges most of its energy in the form of radiation; because there's no air, there's no shockwave. While the radiation would wreak all sorts of havoc with electronic equipment, e.g. satellites, would it cause an asteroid to break up? I'm skeptical. Does anyone know if someone has thought about this question?
Quote from Carroll and Ostlie (a standard undergraduate astrophysics text):
"A very general argument involving the general theory of relativity shows that the maximum mass possible for a neutron star cannot exceed about 3 Msun. If a neutron star is to remain dynamically stable and resist collapsing, it must be able to respond to a small disturbance in its structure by rpaidly adjusting its pressure to compensate. However, there is a limit to how quickly such an adjustment can be made becasuet hese changes are conveyed by sound waves that must move more slowly than light. If a neutron star's mass exceeds 3 Msun, it cannot generate pressure quickly enough to avoid collapsing."
Neutron stars can't have have masses of 10 suns.
When I say antigravity, I don't mean lift. I also don't mean magnets, sound waves, lasers, electrical charge, tables, or any of the hundreds (thousands? millions) of ways that have been discovered to keep objects from falling down under gravity. I'm talking about antigravity, something which claims to negate or lessen the effect of gravity on material objects (I'd also include people who purport to have created "negative gravity" under this title).
The original post references one of the spurious forms of antigravity I'm talking about. Why would I bother claiming that planes don't stay up? Is there some logic to taking such an unreasonable position that I'm missing?
If I understand you correctly, what you're proposing is something distinctly different than any known physical system (which, I suppose, is not very surprising).
You're saying that raising an object over the shield actually destroys energy. In this process, the total energy of the shield+raised object system actually decreases. This balances the increase in energy when the object is allowed to fall again. To make this work right so that it actually balances correctly in all cases, the amount of energy required to power the shield (ignoring friction) will have to depend on the strength of the local gravitational field, the shielding coefficient, the mass of the object, and the distance it travels in the direction of the gravitational field. The shield does a sort of "negative work" on the object.
This patches up the global energy conservation problems. However, I'm still concerned because local energy conservation is violated. Specifically, the "negative work" is done at the shield, but the amount of "negative work" required is determined by the motion of the object, which can be very far away from the shield. While the distinction between local and global energy conservation is probably not as well-known as the general principle of energy conservation, in general all physical principles should be locally conservative (which implies global conservation).
That doesn't work. Where does energy dissipated into friction go? It turns into heat, which increases the temperature of the nearby environment. The net energy is still increasing, thus violating energy conservation, even if you can't get any useful work out of such a machine.
Are you trying to be modded redundant? This is an exact duplication of this post (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=43704&cid=456 0260) in the previous discussion. It was a troll then and it's still a troll.
You're right . . . Einstein will still be there. However, all of this anti-gravity stuff is bunk. First hint: if you can shield gravity, you can violate energy conservation. Simply build a machine which lets things fall down under normal gravity, extracts the energy, then moves them back up under your shield. Voila! Instant, infinite amounts of energy. I have yet to see anti-gravity that doesn't have these sorts of problems.
All the real refinements to physical theories usually involve cases where the experiments haven't been done before: Einstein's general relativity applies to speeds close to that of light and very strong gravitational fields. Occasionally you get lucky and something which has already been noticed but is not understood (e.g. the precession of Mercury's orbit), but largely new physical theories come from extension to previously under-investigated domains.
The reason why most of the stars we've detected so far are huge gas giants is observation bias: we can't see anything smaller with the graviational wobble method. That's why the dust cloud method used to find a much smaller planet is so exciting.
Also, note that Big Bang nucleosynthesis (basically, at some point after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough to form the first nuclei; the abundances of different elements can and have been calculated quite accurately) determines the relative abundances which went into making the first starts. I.e., this is how you get "hydrogen, helium, and little lithium [and even tinier amounts of everything else]" to form the first stars. Supernovae are responsible for enriching this stuff with metals.
Is the combinatorial explosion really caused by interactions only between hardware and software? While this is certainly significant, a lot of the explosion involves interactions between software and software. Historically, the software-software interactions have been particularly vicious on Windows platfoms because they are deliberately designed to be less modular than open source projects. Will.NET be different? Moreover, will having a virtual machine solve all the hardware-software interactions? I'm doubtful.
Java has been around for years now, and while its use has certainly grown, most applications are still written in C/C++. Can even MS change that much intertia? Why are the more obscure non-i386 architectures used? If it's more performance (at least for specialized applications) a virtual machine probably isn't going to cut it. If it's because of legacy apps, then those architectures will continue to persist regardless of what developers are currently writing for.
Debian will never "embrace" Java unless Sun dramatically changes its licensing schemes. The current Sun licenses are completely incompatible with the goals of Free software. Those who believe in Free software, when confronted with the choice between two proprietary platforms, will choose neither. If you believe a cross-platform virtual machine is needed, then by all means take your case to the Free software community and get a project started!
I frankly don't see how MS is going to have any more success in using.NET to extinguish open source, much less Free, software, than Sun did in using Java to defeat MS's monopoly. In the proprietary/for-profit world, just because it's easier on developers does not mean there is a demand for the product. In the Free/open source world, the process of programmers writing software to solve their problems on their resources (including unusual architectures) will continue.
I disagree. There currently are no good ways to store large quantities of power without incurring huge losses to heat or using very expensive storage media. Electricity is generated and used largely on-demand.
The combination of the high-fixed-costs-low-marginal-costs and extreme perishability of bandwidth is certainly unusual. I can't think of any other commodity quite like it. It may well be that bandwidth will require a very unusual metering system to handle it. However, I think the basic idea of metering, in the sense that your bandwidth usage will be tied to the price of your pipe, will still have to be implemented. The incentives are just too perverse otherwise.
Why has metering been expensive? Is it particularly processor intensive to monitor usage, vs. simply throttling the users?
Bits are getting cheaper as technology improves, but so do most other commodities, though perhaps not as rapidly. However, I can't get away from the fact that no matter how cheap bandwidth becomes, it still has some marginal cost associated with it. I remember (possibly apocryphal) quotes about futurists early in the nuclear age claiming "Electricity will be too cheap to meter." Similar (possibly apocryphal) claims were made about water. Notice we still have meters for both.
Certainly, bandwidth is different than electricity, where a lot of the cost is in the generation, and most of the rest is in transmission losses. It's actually fairly close to water, where most of the cost is in the distribution system. In most places, water is acquired through precipitation, stored in dams, then shipped through pipes to users. The storage thing is different than bandwidth; I'll say more about that later. However, most of the costs for both water and bandwidth are fixed costs, in the distribution network. Once you have the pipes in place, you've spent most of the money. There are, however, low marginal costs associated with both: pumping for water, and router electricity bills for bandwidth. Someone who knows more about Internet infrastructure than I do could probably provide more detail, but pushing all those bits around does take energy, which costs money.
This article is long on rhetoric and short on evidence. I don't deny that its logic makes sense, but it hasn't provided any reason to make me believe it.
I'll express an unpopular opinion here: ultimately, bandwidth will have to be metered. Bandwidth is a commodity (I think it was the commoditization of bandwidth that is the part of the reason for the telecom collapse) like water or electricity: cheap, but not infinite. The problem, of course, is that if bandwidth is allowed to be monopolized like electricity and telephone service are, prices will be increased far above their levels in a competitive environment. I would like to think the FCC and other government agencies would follow such a policy, but I have no real confidence in it.
All NP-hard problems require that some of their components be able to go to arbitrarily large values, because if the problem is finite, it can always be solved in constant (much less polynomial) time.
I do believe this is a new record.
Moderation Totals:
Flamebait=1, Troll=5, Insightful=3, Interesting=2, Informative=1, Funny=3, Overrated=2, Underrated=2, Total=19
You certainly don't see a Score:5 (Troll) post every day.
"Since one can't generally can't make a correlation between an advertising campaign and increased sales. .."
Sentences like this (from a marketer, no less) make me think that the only real work in marketing was done about 70 years ago, in convincing companies that their product is worth something. Hats off to the great marketing job there!
Would you care to provide some analysis or evidence to back up that assertion? Mahan gave basically the same argument 100 years ago, and it is far from generally agreed upon today by military historians and analysts that he was (is) right. I would argue that it is oceanically isolated great powers who develop: i.e., if you are a great power without land access to your enemies/allies, it becomes of paramount importance to build a large navy. In other words, your logic is reversed: being a great power comes first, then normal logic leads to the creation of a large navy.
I agree that aliens probably won't want to enslave us or harvest the Earth's resources. However, they could view us as potential competition and decide that the best way to ensure their own continued supremacy is simply by preemptively eliminating all other intelligences they encounter. All of this speculation on their motives may hold very little actual water; their motivations may simply be so alien that we won't understand them at all (especially given the immense technology necessary for interstellar travel).
While Slashdot has a habit of repeating stories, this is the first time I think I've seen Slashdot link an article discussing an issue first raised in an Ask Slashdot.
How did this get modded up? I think "-1, Flamebait" is more appropriate. Cliff was the one who said that, not the poster, and besides, not all Libertarians are extreme anarchists. You can believe in less government regulation without having to believe in no government regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would a direct election system produce more corruption than an indirect system? The latter trusts the state legislators more than the people; this was the explicit goal of the original system. In practice, the result was that many senators were those who had earned prominent positions in their party, and were rewarded with senatorial positions. Meanwhile, the state legislatures have no better a record on protecting the rights of the people than the federal government: segregation is a good example. The old system might have decreased the erosion in states' power versus the federal government, but I doubt that it would help guarantee citizens' rights.
Someone can purchase a CD, rip the MP3's, then sell the CD to one of these shady operations, who then resells it to someone else. What could be a clearer example of piracy than that?
And his articles in Salon about them are interesting. As he says in the article, "It's how you get practice not just being a passive consumer, or critic, but a creative storyteller in your own right." I agree in large part with some of his discussion of Star Wars: there are many interesting directions Lucas could have taken with the story, none of which he did. Thus, Episodes I and II are tepid. Brin is spot-on about Tolkien's romantic longings. Tolkien wrote about a world in decline, where beauty was passing out of the world. That's the topic of the Silmarillion, and the Lord of the Rings just forms the last chapter in that saga. It's also hard to argue against the idea that the Lord of the Rings shows racist tendencies. However, Brin misses some of the points. Sauron is evil because he chose to follow Melkor/Morgoth in the the beginning of the world. Melkor/Morgoth was evil because he aimed to corrupt Illuvatar's design. The parallel is to (certain forms of) Christian morality. Evil is ugly because its exterior form mimics its interior darkness. Melkor was once the fairest of the Valar, but his evil ate away at that and he became menacing, not beautiful. Sauron wore a fair form before the fall of Numenor, but in its destruction he lost his ability to assume it. Gandalf and Saruman are powerful, not because of some secret knowledge they have, but because they are Maiar. Their powers are limited, which is why they can't destroy Sauron outright (Sauron was also once a Maiar, note), but flow from their nature. This idea might be undemocratic. However, in Tolkien's world, it's a fact: neither the Maiar nor the humans can do anything to change it. Democracy can't alter inherent inequality. As Brin notes, Tolkien's "heroes" aren't always heroic. The Elves, in particular, have a checkered past (e.g., the Kinslaying) and they show little willingness to fight in The War of the Ring. Many of the wizards, Maiar sent to help Middle-Earth against Sauron, either turn (Saruman) or forsake their duties; Gandalf alone holds steadfast. The Numenorean kings, from whose line Aragorn descends, ended up bringing destruction upon themselves. In Tolkien's world, everyone is subject to the forces of decay and corruption. I agree in some respects with Brin's criticism of Star Wars. However, Tolkien's work has far greater internal consistency. Taken in itself, it works, but it is an expression of Romanticism, many of whose ideals don't apply to our real world. Thus, many of the lessons you might take from Tolkien's work don't apply either.
Plutonium's metallurgy is very strange. One of Richard Rhode's books (about the making of the fission and fusion bombs) mentions that it has something like five different states around STP. Its mechanical properties are, to my understanding, annoying. In other words, even aside from the radioactivity and toxicity, you still don't want to make anything about it.
Actually, you'd be surprised. Sometimes the incentives run the other way. It is not unheard for women in a failing relationship (for reasons that remain mysterious to me) to get pregnant and hope, that the pregnancy will hold the relationship together. Also, the law still requires (as far as I know) men to pay child support even if the woman lies about being on the pill and then becomes pregnant. Another reason of course is that having two contraceptive pills will presumably decrease the chances of pregnancy even further than either one alone (the female version of the pill has a small but non-zero failure rate). Similarly, the chances of pregnancy with other contraceptive measures (condoms et al.) will be decreased. A lot of its real utility depends on implementation details like cost (the female version will almost certainly be cheaper because its out of patent), dosing frequency, etc.
Nuclear weapons in space act very differently from those in air. To my knowledge, there's never been a detonation in "deep" space: I believe there was a test in low Earth orbit once, but immediately after that the Outer Space treaty was signed (which banned nuclear detonations in space, among other things). The real difference is that a nuclear weapon in space discharges most of its energy in the form of radiation; because there's no air, there's no shockwave. While the radiation would wreak all sorts of havoc with electronic equipment, e.g. satellites, would it cause an asteroid to break up? I'm skeptical. Does anyone know if someone has thought about this question?
Quote from Carroll and Ostlie (a standard undergraduate astrophysics text): "A very general argument involving the general theory of relativity shows that the maximum mass possible for a neutron star cannot exceed about 3 Msun. If a neutron star is to remain dynamically stable and resist collapsing, it must be able to respond to a small disturbance in its structure by rpaidly adjusting its pressure to compensate. However, there is a limit to how quickly such an adjustment can be made becasuet hese changes are conveyed by sound waves that must move more slowly than light. If a neutron star's mass exceeds 3 Msun, it cannot generate pressure quickly enough to avoid collapsing." Neutron stars can't have have masses of 10 suns.
The original post references one of the spurious forms of antigravity I'm talking about. Why would I bother claiming that planes don't stay up? Is there some logic to taking such an unreasonable position that I'm missing?
If I understand you correctly, what you're proposing is something distinctly different than any known physical system (which, I suppose, is not very surprising).
You're saying that raising an object over the shield actually destroys energy. In this process, the total energy of the shield+raised object system actually decreases. This balances the increase in energy when the object is allowed to fall again. To make this work right so that it actually balances correctly in all cases, the amount of energy required to power the shield (ignoring friction) will have to depend on the strength of the local gravitational field, the shielding coefficient, the mass of the object, and the distance it travels in the direction of the gravitational field. The shield does a sort of "negative work" on the object.
This patches up the global energy conservation problems. However, I'm still concerned because local energy conservation is violated. Specifically, the "negative work" is done at the shield, but the amount of "negative work" required is determined by the motion of the object, which can be very far away from the shield. While the distinction between local and global energy conservation is probably not as well-known as the general principle of energy conservation, in general all physical principles should be locally conservative (which implies global conservation).
That doesn't work. Where does energy dissipated into friction go? It turns into heat, which increases the temperature of the nearby environment. The net energy is still increasing, thus violating energy conservation, even if you can't get any useful work out of such a machine.
Are you trying to be modded redundant? This is an exact duplication of this post (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=43704&cid=456 0260) in the previous discussion. It was a troll then and it's still a troll.
You're right . . . Einstein will still be there. However, all of this anti-gravity stuff is bunk. First hint: if you can shield gravity, you can violate energy conservation. Simply build a machine which lets things fall down under normal gravity, extracts the energy, then moves them back up under your shield. Voila! Instant, infinite amounts of energy. I have yet to see anti-gravity that doesn't have these sorts of problems.
All the real refinements to physical theories usually involve cases where the experiments haven't been done before: Einstein's general relativity applies to speeds close to that of light and very strong gravitational fields. Occasionally you get lucky and something which has already been noticed but is not understood (e.g. the precession of Mercury's orbit), but largely new physical theories come from extension to previously under-investigated domains.
The reason why most of the stars we've detected so far are huge gas giants is observation bias: we can't see anything smaller with the graviational wobble method. That's why the dust cloud method used to find a much smaller planet is so exciting. Also, note that Big Bang nucleosynthesis (basically, at some point after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough to form the first nuclei; the abundances of different elements can and have been calculated quite accurately) determines the relative abundances which went into making the first starts. I.e., this is how you get "hydrogen, helium, and little lithium [and even tinier amounts of everything else]" to form the first stars. Supernovae are responsible for enriching this stuff with metals.
Is the combinatorial explosion really caused by interactions only between hardware and software? While this is certainly significant, a lot of the explosion involves interactions between software and software. Historically, the software-software interactions have been particularly vicious on Windows platfoms because they are deliberately designed to be less modular than open source projects. Will .NET be different? Moreover, will having a virtual machine solve all the hardware-software interactions? I'm doubtful.
Java has been around for years now, and while its use has certainly grown, most applications are still written in C/C++. Can even MS change that much intertia? Why are the more obscure non-i386 architectures used? If it's more performance (at least for specialized applications) a virtual machine probably isn't going to cut it. If it's because of legacy apps, then those architectures will continue to persist regardless of what developers are currently writing for.
Debian will never "embrace" Java unless Sun dramatically changes its licensing schemes. The current Sun licenses are completely incompatible with the goals of Free software. Those who believe in Free software, when confronted with the choice between two proprietary platforms, will choose neither. If you believe a cross-platform virtual machine is needed, then by all means take your case to the Free software community and get a project started!
I frankly don't see how MS is going to have any more success in using .NET to extinguish open source, much less Free, software, than Sun did in using Java to defeat MS's monopoly. In the proprietary/for-profit world, just because it's easier on developers does not mean there is a demand for the product. In the Free/open source world, the process of programmers writing software to solve their problems on their resources (including unusual architectures) will continue.
The combination of the high-fixed-costs-low-marginal-costs and extreme perishability of bandwidth is certainly unusual. I can't think of any other commodity quite like it. It may well be that bandwidth will require a very unusual metering system to handle it. However, I think the basic idea of metering, in the sense that your bandwidth usage will be tied to the price of your pipe, will still have to be implemented. The incentives are just too perverse otherwise.
Bits are getting cheaper as technology improves, but so do most other commodities, though perhaps not as rapidly. However, I can't get away from the fact that no matter how cheap bandwidth becomes, it still has some marginal cost associated with it. I remember (possibly apocryphal) quotes about futurists early in the nuclear age claiming "Electricity will be too cheap to meter." Similar (possibly apocryphal) claims were made about water. Notice we still have meters for both.
Certainly, bandwidth is different than electricity, where a lot of the cost is in the generation, and most of the rest is in transmission losses. It's actually fairly close to water, where most of the cost is in the distribution system. In most places, water is acquired through precipitation, stored in dams, then shipped through pipes to users. The storage thing is different than bandwidth; I'll say more about that later. However, most of the costs for both water and bandwidth are fixed costs, in the distribution network. Once you have the pipes in place, you've spent most of the money. There are, however, low marginal costs associated with both: pumping for water, and router electricity bills for bandwidth. Someone who knows more about Internet infrastructure than I do could probably provide more detail, but pushing all those bits around does take energy, which costs money.
This article is long on rhetoric and short on evidence. I don't deny that its logic makes sense, but it hasn't provided any reason to make me believe it.
I'll express an unpopular opinion here: ultimately, bandwidth will have to be metered. Bandwidth is a commodity (I think it was the commoditization of bandwidth that is the part of the reason for the telecom collapse) like water or electricity: cheap, but not infinite. The problem, of course, is that if bandwidth is allowed to be monopolized like electricity and telephone service are, prices will be increased far above their levels in a competitive environment. I would like to think the FCC and other government agencies would follow such a policy, but I have no real confidence in it.
All NP-hard problems require that some of their components be able to go to arbitrarily large values, because if the problem is finite, it can always be solved in constant (much less polynomial) time.
I do believe this is a new record. Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Troll=5, Insightful=3, Interesting=2, Informative=1, Funny=3, Overrated=2, Underrated=2, Total=19 You certainly don't see a Score:5 (Troll) post every day.
"Since one can't generally can't make a correlation between an advertising campaign and increased sales. . ."
Sentences like this (from a marketer, no less) make me think that the only real work in marketing was done about 70 years ago, in convincing companies that their product is worth something. Hats off to the great marketing job there!
Would you care to provide some analysis or evidence to back up that assertion? Mahan gave basically the same argument 100 years ago, and it is far from generally agreed upon today by military historians and analysts that he was (is) right. I would argue that it is oceanically isolated great powers who develop: i.e., if you are a great power without land access to your enemies/allies, it becomes of paramount importance to build a large navy. In other words, your logic is reversed: being a great power comes first, then normal logic leads to the creation of a large navy.
I agree that aliens probably won't want to enslave us or harvest the Earth's resources. However, they could view us as potential competition and decide that the best way to ensure their own continued supremacy is simply by preemptively eliminating all other intelligences they encounter. All of this speculation on their motives may hold very little actual water; their motivations may simply be so alien that we won't understand them at all (especially given the immense technology necessary for interstellar travel).
While Slashdot has a habit of repeating stories, this is the first time I think I've seen Slashdot link an article discussing an issue first raised in an Ask Slashdot.
How did this get modded up? I think "-1, Flamebait" is more appropriate. Cliff was the one who said that, not the poster, and besides, not all Libertarians are extreme anarchists. You can believe in less government regulation without having to believe in no government regulation.