I do agree that platitudes do not gain credibility from thier cuteness. I do submit Ben Franklin was fairly intelligent, and thus more likely to have studied the issue and come to a good answer, but on it's own that is not any better than the 'apeal to authority' fallacy so I'll try and more directly answer some of your criticisms.
"I've given up the freedom not to pay taxes, and in return I get the security of knowing that there's a police force out there who will take an interest if someone attacks me or breaks into my house. So far as I can tell I don't yet live in a police state, so your snappy little quote isn't holding up too well so far."
Unfortunately you get very little direct security from the police, it's all indirect in that they will try (budget,time,'hot news items',politics,etc. permiting) to solve it if you're murdered, but the odds aren't so good. They're not charged with protecting you, just the community at large. The only thing calling 9-11 and telling the operator you're being attacked guarantees is that you called 9-11. You can't even sue if no police show up till the following monday.
So your left with whatever fear of getting caught AFTERWARDS your would be killer has. If he's on drugs or thinks you slept with his wife or any number of other things he may not even care. The exact value of deterance is rather debated.
"On the contrary. It is much easier to kill someone with a gun than it is to kill them with a knife, much easier to defend oneself from a knife attack, and much easier to run away from a knife (that can only follow you as fast as its bearer can run) than from a gun (which can follow you as fast as a speeding bullet)."
Mostly true. However if you are elderly, or in poor shape, or phyically significantly less capable than your assailant your arguement is meaningless as dead is dead. However anyone with the physical strength to aim a gun and pull the trigger is on even footing with everyone else likewise capable. This puts my 90+ year old grandmother on an even playing field with some 18 year old gang-banger. Without the gun she's nearly helpless.
Criminals are people and fear getting shot as much as anyone else.
Ergo if citizens didn't have guns criminals would only fear the physically strong.
Ergo banning guns enables the strong to prey on the weak.
Ergo banning guns is stupid.
By the way, my argument was really that violence and gun ownership are unrelated. Violence is cultural. If you look at the gun-ownership levels and violence levels of many countries you start to notice a profound lack of correlation. That is why I said banning them is stupid, it doesn't solve the root problem, and if you solve that you really don't have much to worry about with gun ownership.
However within the US there is a tendency of gun ownership to REDUCE crime levels relative to areas that (unconstitionaly) ban guns or make it nearly impossible to own them through onerous regulations. Somthing about not knowing if the house your breaking into is defended by a.45 or not tends to scare off would be crooks. The same reasoning applies to carry laws.
The only thing I have to add is that you shouldn't expect to get said settlement if the cops do riddle your house with bullets. They're so protected ('special imunity' and all)that barring egregious circumstances you'd have trouble suing them, the city/state maybee, but don't count on it.
Try looking into the history of the French resistance in WWII.
They were shiped (airdroped?) many small arms, break action, single shot, pistols that required almost as much time to reload as a musket (break open,shove casing out with a wooden rod from the front, put in new bullet,close), and had next to zero accuracy beyond a few feet.
The instructions were basically to find an excuse to get near a lone german soldier, chat with him, whatever, then shoot him at point blank range and steal his much better rifle, then pass the el-cheapo on to a friend who could do the same.
So the theory that small arms are useless against a military force is pretty much false. This is just this one tactic to make use of somthing little better than a zip gun, think what is possible with the firearms we have today.
First Mr. Moore didn't obtain a gun as easily as he edited things to look like. He seems to have left out things like the waiting period, the various checks the bank did to make shure it was o.k. to sell to him, and so on.
second could you please cite where you got "Most of the time, a gun fired in defence doesn't hit its intended target, instead hitting innocents, including the wielder." The only study I've heard of supporting somthing linke that was the bs 'study' claiming a gun owner was 42 time more at risk than a would be burglar or somthing simular. It was discredited so long ago I don't even remember the details.
Self defence IS a good argument for gun ownership, and not just from criminals.
Taking them out of thier original packaging and playing them?
Seriously though you've had pretty good luck, most people I know who've been playing cd/dvd based games have had at least one fail. My brother is something of a caution freak with his games and he still has one (about 3 years old) that won't load right about half the time.
And with some of the current 'copy protection' schemes out there playing games with the data layout and such they've become even more prone to failure in the pc market.
"To provide security you ALWAYS have to restrict freedoms"
Now I realise this is a UK ruling, but I honestly thing what an american once said aplies. Pardone me if I don't get the quote EXACTLY right
"Those who give up a few freedoms for security deserve neigther and loose both"
Oh and banning guns is just stupid, it does nothing to change the people who kill, nor limit thier ability to do so, but seriously limits the law abiding citizens ability to defend himself from said killer.
"Science is always wrong. We just think it's right until we discover something new. This goes for all science, but especially something as intangible as a black hole."
I think here he was pointing out that science aproaches the truth asymptoticaly.
Now that *IS* good news. It'd be better news if I was running a recent nvidia card.:/
Linux being a mainstream desktop os isn't likely to be an overnight thing, though it's possible it'll follow an s-curve.
It's little things like this, a game here, an app there, till we wake up one morning to find out the year of the linux desktop was last year and we never noticed. Eigther that or it'll suddenly start to snowball one year and leave us kinda dizzy from it the next, kinda like when the net went mainstream.
Still I think it's little things like this (or not so little depending on your point of view) that will be looked at as 'warning signs'.
Actually that's just the lie they would have you believe should you fail to believe the lie that one of them is actually the good guys.
There are more than two parties out there as well as totaly independant persons at all levels.
The third biggest party is the Libertarians, I tend to vote for them unless the candidate in question is a loser. But they are not the only alternative.
But they have no problem painting anyone not a (R) or a (D) as loner and likely a nutjob. They constantly feed the bad loop of you have to vote r or d or else your wasting your vote because almost no-one votes for anyone else.
This chicken-egg problem they love so much is like the problem linux has with games and some other software.
The ONLY way out is if people start actually voting FOR the candidates they want, rather than trying to figure out which of the two bought and paid for parties are owned by the least objectionable.
But it won't happen in one or even two election cycles, you have to vote consistantly for the best person out of ALL the choices constantly and urge your friends and familly to do likewise. It's the only way that doesn't involved a second american revolution or other scary-ness to get out of the current bought and paid for system where the people are just there to pay taxes and buy things.
Voting for the 'lesser of two evils' is still voting for evil.
The version number is higher, but is the stability and feature set actually better/greater than it's windows conterpart.
Version numbers really only reflect, err, the numbers they choose to use.
If it really is a better driver than the windows driver I'd be pleasantly suprised.
One of the reasons the ONLY difference between the high end and low end versions of somthing is it's cheaper for them to cover both markets that way. You only need one factory line to produce both units. As a plus you can wait till just before final packaging and shipping to burn in the firmware giving them some more flexibility to adjust the ratio's of the various 'levels' to fit changeing market demand. In theory the money they save this way can be partialy passed on to the consumer, and partialy used for increasing proffit.
You see this sort of thing all over the place were companies produce a product and sell it at various prices under different lables to maximize proffits and minimize costs. Many of the 'house' brands in your local grocery store or department store are actually just re-labled high-dollar brands.
I have no clue what the leagal situation is on this, especialy since I'm not a lawyer, much less a British one. But is thier any chance the chain in question had to order him to take it down to protect trademarks or some such situation where the law won't let them selectively protect themselves?
Though the fact that thier real website is so screwed up and apparently in violation of a law as it is shure doesn't help thier image.
To bad someone who sounds credible pointed out the structure itself doesn't make such good sense.
As a fan of fantasy the concept of high-tech chainmail like this is kinda fun to think about. Not that the links would be very visible if at all.
Interesting set of numbers, I would like to point out a few you've left out. Distance and time.
I'll give you starting point, how much would it take to nudge your everest size rock.001 degrees from course.
You don't even need that much to miss the earth if you have enough warning.
Space is huge, mind-numbingly gargantuanly huge.
A rock out near the orbit of mars on a collision course with earth could probably be diverted by less than.001 degrees and miss by a decent safety factor.
Think of it this way. You have an 9mm bullet fired from the moon that is going to hit a specific person in Detriot. How far off course do you have to knock it to save the person from the bullet. If you are deflecting the bullet a foot from the guys head it's a lot. Now compare to when that bullet is passing through LEO, or just after being fired.
The real problem with stoping an asteriod collision isn't energy levels, it's detection.
Note I'm not taking sides here. Just pointing out the real issue with stoping another extinction level asteriod collision. It is a matter of when not if, not only are we talking a lot of empty space, we're talking a lot of rocks and time.
I aslo so a brief 'tech segment' on the local news about 6 weeks ago that covered some of the 'free alternatives to popular software' they covered mozilla/firfox/thunderbird and Open Office Org.
Thier assesment was that Mozilla and co were worthwile, but not entirely 'up to snuff' (they mentioned a few websites might not work then did a poor job of saying why) and that Open Office was every bit as good as MSOffice except that it looked kinda grey and bland.
The local station in question is in St. Louis and a major network affiliate so it hit about 2-3 million homes at a guess, possibly more in the fringes of it's area.
Now that is an amusing mental picture. I'd actualy like to see someone do somthing like this as a little short. If I had the skills I'd try it myself, but anything biological I try to do looks seriously mutated and twisted.
Relatively short, I suspect, is not relative to human lifespans.
This sounds likes a few hundreds years to me, though I'd welcome a more accurate estimate by someone who's studied this proposal.
I rather like the idea though, just wish we could have it done by about year after next maybee as late as 2010.
Or perhaps find a good way to extend my lifespan so I'm likely to have a chance to visit a terraformed mars. Well there is always cryonics I suppose.
Thanks for the suggestion, it really helped give me a deep insight into the concept. Just one question though.
How do I unwind all this fiber from around my waist without getting so dizzy I puke, or taking so long I can rest by playing Duke Nukem Forever?
"It can't happen like that. You are talking about a level of organization that only crystals exhibit."
And biological systems. In theory one might be able to engineer a nano-machine or bacteria to do the grunt work. But as someone else has pointed out the bend isn't a good idea anyway.
Considering it is the most desireable do to it's low resistance, would it not also transmit the current long before it hit the very high levels seen in a lightning bolt (except maybee at the leading edge of a fast moving storm).
I'm currious as to what all this would mean. I would think the lower levels being transfered might reduce any potential damage. But would you also have a large area around the line that was lightning free? Would this create issues as the ground level would be higher than at the power station some distance away?
Hmm very interesting thoughts indeed.
One of the interesting proposals for a recently hollowed out asteroid is to seal it (temporarily) up with a small amount of water inside. Then you spin it on it's longest axis while using many large mirrors to focus sun (and/or laser) light onto it till it heats up enough to soften. The small amount of water inside (small being a relative term here) turns to steam and supplies internal pressure that expands the asteroid. You also manage how you hollow it out and otherwise sculpt it before during and after the heating phase. This gives you a nice large area to colonize on the inside with some further work.
Add a large solar sail and perhaps ion drive and you could concievably build a generation ship out of it given a large enough start asteroid.
For a specific location on earth, yeah it might be a pain, but for finding earth it seems NASA thinks it'll work. They did send out a couple of probes that indicated where earth was by a pulsar diagram.
Slashdot Mirror
I do agree that platitudes do not gain credibility from thier cuteness. I do submit Ben Franklin was fairly intelligent, and thus more likely to have studied the issue and come to a good answer, but on it's own that is not any better than the 'apeal to authority' fallacy so I'll try and more directly answer some of your criticisms.
.45 or not tends to scare off would be crooks. The same reasoning applies to carry laws.
"I've given up the freedom not to pay taxes, and in return I get the security of knowing that there's a police force out there who will take an interest if someone attacks me or breaks into my house. So far as I can tell I don't yet live in a police state, so your snappy little quote isn't holding up too well so far."
Unfortunately you get very little direct security from the police, it's all indirect in that they will try (budget,time,'hot news items',politics,etc. permiting) to solve it if you're murdered, but the odds aren't so good. They're not charged with protecting you, just the community at large. The only thing calling 9-11 and telling the operator you're being attacked guarantees is that you called 9-11. You can't even sue if no police show up till the following monday.
So your left with whatever fear of getting caught AFTERWARDS your would be killer has. If he's on drugs or thinks you slept with his wife or any number of other things he may not even care. The exact value of deterance is rather debated.
"On the contrary. It is much easier to kill someone with a gun than it is to kill them with a knife, much easier to defend oneself from a knife attack, and much easier to run away from a knife (that can only follow you as fast as its bearer can run) than from a gun (which can follow you as fast as a speeding bullet)."
Mostly true. However if you are elderly, or in poor shape, or phyically significantly less capable than your assailant your arguement is meaningless as dead is dead. However anyone with the physical strength to aim a gun and pull the trigger is on even footing with everyone else likewise capable. This puts my 90+ year old grandmother on an even playing field with some 18 year old gang-banger. Without the gun she's nearly helpless.
Criminals are people and fear getting shot as much as anyone else.
Ergo if citizens didn't have guns criminals would only fear the physically strong.
Ergo banning guns enables the strong to prey on the weak.
Ergo banning guns is stupid.
By the way, my argument was really that violence and gun ownership are unrelated. Violence is cultural. If you look at the gun-ownership levels and violence levels of many countries you start to notice a profound lack of correlation. That is why I said banning them is stupid, it doesn't solve the root problem, and if you solve that you really don't have much to worry about with gun ownership.
However within the US there is a tendency of gun ownership to REDUCE crime levels relative to areas that (unconstitionaly) ban guns or make it nearly impossible to own them through onerous regulations. Somthing about not knowing if the house your breaking into is defended by a
Mycroft
The only thing I have to add is that you shouldn't expect to get said settlement if the cops do riddle your house with bullets. They're so protected ('special imunity' and all)that barring egregious circumstances you'd have trouble suing them, the city/state maybee, but don't count on it.
Mycroft
Try looking into the history of the French resistance in WWII.
They were shiped (airdroped?) many small arms, break action, single shot, pistols that required almost as much time to reload as a musket (break open,shove casing out with a wooden rod from the front, put in new bullet,close), and had next to zero accuracy beyond a few feet.
The instructions were basically to find an excuse to get near a lone german soldier, chat with him, whatever, then shoot him at point blank range and steal his much better rifle, then pass the el-cheapo on to a friend who could do the same.
So the theory that small arms are useless against a military force is pretty much false. This is just this one tactic to make use of somthing little better than a zip gun, think what is possible with the firearms we have today.
Mycroft
First Mr. Moore didn't obtain a gun as easily as he edited things to look like. He seems to have left out things like the waiting period, the various checks the bank did to make shure it was o.k. to sell to him, and so on.
second could you please cite where you got "Most of the time, a gun fired in defence doesn't hit its intended target, instead hitting innocents, including the wielder." The only study I've heard of supporting somthing linke that was the bs 'study' claiming a gun owner was 42 time more at risk than a would be burglar or somthing simular. It was discredited so long ago I don't even remember the details.
Self defence IS a good argument for gun ownership, and not just from criminals.
Mycroft
Taking them out of thier original packaging and playing them?
Seriously though you've had pretty good luck, most people I know who've been playing cd/dvd based games have had at least one fail. My brother is something of a caution freak with his games and he still has one (about 3 years old) that won't load right about half the time.
And with some of the current 'copy protection' schemes out there playing games with the data layout and such they've become even more prone to failure in the pc market.
Mycroft
"To provide security you ALWAYS have to restrict freedoms"
Now I realise this is a UK ruling, but I honestly thing what an american once said aplies. Pardone me if I don't get the quote EXACTLY right
"Those who give up a few freedoms for security deserve neigther and loose both"
Oh and banning guns is just stupid, it does nothing to change the people who kill, nor limit thier ability to do so, but seriously limits the law abiding citizens ability to defend himself from said killer.
Mycroft
"Science is always wrong. We just think it's right until we discover something new. This goes for all science, but especially something as intangible as a black hole."
I think here he was pointing out that science aproaches the truth asymptoticaly.
Mycroft
Now that *IS* good news. It'd be better news if I was running a recent nvidia card. :/
Linux being a mainstream desktop os isn't likely to be an overnight thing, though it's possible it'll follow an s-curve.
It's little things like this, a game here, an app there, till we wake up one morning to find out the year of the linux desktop was last year and we never noticed. Eigther that or it'll suddenly start to snowball one year and leave us kinda dizzy from it the next, kinda like when the net went mainstream.
Still I think it's little things like this (or not so little depending on your point of view) that will be looked at as 'warning signs'.
Mycroft
Yeah, I've got a tendancy to mangle those, and that's not the only place my spelling bloes. :)
Mycroft
Actually that's just the lie they would have you believe should you fail to believe the lie that one of them is actually the good guys.
There are more than two parties out there as well as totaly independant persons at all levels.
The third biggest party is the Libertarians, I tend to vote for them unless the candidate in question is a loser. But they are not the only alternative.
But they have no problem painting anyone not a (R) or a (D) as loner and likely a nutjob. They constantly feed the bad loop of you have to vote r or d or else your wasting your vote because almost no-one votes for anyone else.
This chicken-egg problem they love so much is like the problem linux has with games and some other software.
The ONLY way out is if people start actually voting FOR the candidates they want, rather than trying to figure out which of the two bought and paid for parties are owned by the least objectionable.
But it won't happen in one or even two election cycles, you have to vote consistantly for the best person out of ALL the choices constantly and urge your friends and familly to do likewise. It's the only way that doesn't involved a second american revolution or other scary-ness to get out of the current bought and paid for system where the people are just there to pay taxes and buy things.
Voting for the 'lesser of two evils' is still voting for evil.
Mycroft
The version number is higher, but is the stability and feature set actually better/greater than it's windows conterpart.
Version numbers really only reflect, err, the numbers they choose to use.
If it really is a better driver than the windows driver I'd be pleasantly suprised.
Mycroft
One of the reasons the ONLY difference between the high end and low end versions of somthing is it's cheaper for them to cover both markets that way. You only need one factory line to produce both units. As a plus you can wait till just before final packaging and shipping to burn in the firmware giving them some more flexibility to adjust the ratio's of the various 'levels' to fit changeing market demand. In theory the money they save this way can be partialy passed on to the consumer, and partialy used for increasing proffit.
You see this sort of thing all over the place were companies produce a product and sell it at various prices under different lables to maximize proffits and minimize costs. Many of the 'house' brands in your local grocery store or department store are actually just re-labled high-dollar brands.
Mycroft
I have no clue what the leagal situation is on this, especialy since I'm not a lawyer, much less a British one. But is thier any chance the chain in question had to order him to take it down to protect trademarks or some such situation where the law won't let them selectively protect themselves?
Though the fact that thier real website is so screwed up and apparently in violation of a law as it is shure doesn't help thier image.
Mycroft
To bad someone who sounds credible pointed out the structure itself doesn't make such good sense.
As a fan of fantasy the concept of high-tech chainmail like this is kinda fun to think about. Not that the links would be very visible if at all.
Mycroft
Interesting set of numbers, I would like to point out a few you've left out. Distance and time. .001 degrees from course. .001 degrees and miss by a decent safety factor.
I'll give you starting point, how much would it take to nudge your everest size rock
You don't even need that much to miss the earth if you have enough warning.
Space is huge, mind-numbingly gargantuanly huge.
A rock out near the orbit of mars on a collision course with earth could probably be diverted by less than
Think of it this way. You have an 9mm bullet fired from the moon that is going to hit a specific person in Detriot. How far off course do you have to knock it to save the person from the bullet. If you are deflecting the bullet a foot from the guys head it's a lot. Now compare to when that bullet is passing through LEO, or just after being fired.
The real problem with stoping an asteriod collision isn't energy levels, it's detection.
Note I'm not taking sides here. Just pointing out the real issue with stoping another extinction level asteriod collision. It is a matter of when not if, not only are we talking a lot of empty space, we're talking a lot of rocks and time.
Mycroft
"someone@somewhere.com VS none@none.com
4090 to 6660
Round 1 goes to None@None.com "
Well considering EVIL incarnate seems to be a factor for none@none.com I'm not to suprised.
Mycroft
I aslo so a brief 'tech segment' on the local news about 6 weeks ago that covered some of the 'free alternatives to popular software' they covered mozilla/firfox/thunderbird and Open Office Org.
Thier assesment was that Mozilla and co were worthwile, but not entirely 'up to snuff' (they mentioned a few websites might not work then did a poor job of saying why) and that Open Office was every bit as good as MSOffice except that it looked kinda grey and bland.
The local station in question is in St. Louis and a major network affiliate so it hit about 2-3 million homes at a guess, possibly more in the fringes of it's area.
Mycroft
Now that is an amusing mental picture. I'd actualy like to see someone do somthing like this as a little short. If I had the skills I'd try it myself, but anything biological I try to do looks seriously mutated and twisted.
Mycroft
Relatively short, I suspect, is not relative to human lifespans.
This sounds likes a few hundreds years to me, though I'd welcome a more accurate estimate by someone who's studied this proposal.
I rather like the idea though, just wish we could have it done by about year after next maybee as late as 2010.
Or perhaps find a good way to extend my lifespan so I'm likely to have a chance to visit a terraformed mars. Well there is always cryonics I suppose.
Mycroft
Thanks for the suggestion, it really helped give me a deep insight into the concept. Just one question though.
How do I unwind all this fiber from around my waist without getting so dizzy I puke, or taking so long I can rest by playing Duke Nukem Forever?
Mycroft
"It can't happen like that. You are talking about a level of organization that only crystals exhibit."
And biological systems. In theory one might be able to engineer a nano-machine or bacteria to do the grunt work. But as someone else has pointed out the bend isn't a good idea anyway.
Mycroft
Considering it is the most desireable do to it's low resistance, would it not also transmit the current long before it hit the very high levels seen in a lightning bolt (except maybee at the leading edge of a fast moving storm).
I'm currious as to what all this would mean. I would think the lower levels being transfered might reduce any potential damage. But would you also have a large area around the line that was lightning free? Would this create issues as the ground level would be higher than at the power station some distance away?
Hmm very interesting thoughts indeed.
Mycroft
One of the interesting proposals for a recently hollowed out asteroid is to seal it (temporarily) up with a small amount of water inside. Then you spin it on it's longest axis while using many large mirrors to focus sun (and/or laser) light onto it till it heats up enough to soften. The small amount of water inside (small being a relative term here) turns to steam and supplies internal pressure that expands the asteroid. You also manage how you hollow it out and otherwise sculpt it before during and after the heating phase. This gives you a nice large area to colonize on the inside with some further work.
Add a large solar sail and perhaps ion drive and you could concievably build a generation ship out of it given a large enough start asteroid.
Mycroft
For a specific location on earth, yeah it might be a pain, but for finding earth it seems NASA thinks it'll work. They did send out a couple of probes that indicated where earth was by a pulsar diagram.
Mycroft
"...drunk as hell and having a ton of sex, for pretty cheap and you two will be talking about it for years. Trust me..."
I'm just guessing here, but would that be about 18 years (possibly plus college) of talking about it?
Mycroft