I'm not against being sentimental either, but if the money doesn't exist to maintain two space observatories, I know I'd choose to get an all new one.
That really isn't the choice. There isn't a replacement waiting in the wings that we can choose to launch instead. According to the WP article on HST, there may be a newer telescope that would be ready to launch in 2010, but that project is currently unfunded and thus that launch date should be pushed back by the time it would take to get funding. The JWST won't be ready until after 2010, and isn't exactly a replacement for Hubble since it operates at different wavelengths.
Plus, budgets just don't work that way. There is no service Hubble/build replacement binary choice. This year, we decide on an HST service mission. Next year, they may talk about funding a replacement. These budgets aren't equivalent, either. An HST service mission would be much cheaper than the design of a replacement and it's launch mission. If we fund HST this year, and in five years we fund a replacement, we'd have two amazing space observatories.
It isn't about being sentimental. The HST is an incredible piece of equipment, we won't have a new space observatory that could replace it, and with a single servicing mission we could get another ten to fifteen years of scientific discovery from it. Without that servicing mission, we are going to be without any space telescope at all for at least three years, but more likely much more.
It's not that expensive. It's a fantastic piece of equipment, even if better technology exists. We would be missing out on a huge amount of science if we let it just fall because we're afraid or to cheap to launch. if we're too cheap to fix Hubble, we're too cheap to replace it, and then we're really losing out.
Yeah I know, the astronauts know the risks involved. Yet the risk is bigger to who manned space program should something go wrong, especially something going wrong on a mission that is "largely" optional.
The only space missions that are not entirely optional are the ones that involve recovering crew from a space station.
If we can't afford the risk to service Hubble, then we can't afford the risk to do anything else in space and should just mothball the entire manned space program right now.
The shuttle is not that big a risk. While it has flown less than expected, it has actually had better safety and reliability than was originally calculated. There have been two terrible disasters, but many flying successes. The safety of the space shuttle right now has never been higher. So if it was worth the risk to put the HST up in the first place, then it is worth the lesser risk that exists now to go up and service it.
I'm serious. Hubble is one of the space shuttle's greatest successes. If we can't risk servicing Hubble, then our entire manned space program is useless and should be scrapped. If we are going to even pretend that it isn't useless, then we should service Hubble.
If the NSA were a good example of an organization using security through obscurity well, you would have no idea how secure their systems actually were. No, something isn't right here...
In the context of my post, "well" does not mean "keeping things obscured well" it means "using the strategy of obscurity well", meaning that you don't rely on it. The NSA uses security through obscurity well in the sense that they focus on real security through design first, and obscurity second. They cannot and have not kept every detail of their systems secret, and it is from those learned details that we know their systems are designed secure first, and kept secret second. That is how you use security through obscurity well.
Ah yes, but we're talking the gravitational pull between stars in a star cluster here, where the stars are a few light years apart.
I'm not seeing your point. The mass of the exploded star is moving outward at 3% of the speed of light, so in an astronomically insignificant time frame that mass will be outside of the star cluster and thus not contributing to holding it together any more.
If a star goes nova, it still has the same center of mass and weighs the same (minus a small fraction of mass being converted into energy during the nova process).
A supernova is a star exploding, as in ejecting all or the majority of its mass outward in all directions.
The math that allows you to treat an object as though it were a point of the same mass at the object's center of mass does not work when you are inside the object (i.e. the expanding sphere of the exploding star's shockwave has passed you). If you are inside a ring or hollow sphere, then you have the mass on all sides of you resulting in no net gravitational pull. I think, I haven't done the integration but this makes intuitive sense (for the same reason being outside a sphere results in attraction towards the center of mass). Certainly when the sphere becomes extremely large and your distance to the center is relatively small there would be no significant net attraction.
If the sun turned into a black hole, nothing would happen to earth's orbit. If the sun became a supernova, once the blast wave passed the planets there would no longer be a strong attraction towards the center of the solar system, and the planets would all fly off their current orbits.
That's partly true*, but the reason that security through obscurity is derided is because it is typical of a mindset that has implications beyond just using obscurity as a security mechanism on top of other well-formed policies. Very often, obscurity is the only measure used, in large part because of a lack of substantive review of the other security policies that would reveal their endimic flaws. The belief is "what others don't know can't hurt us". Even worse is that "others" is often not "black hats" but "customers".
The NSA is a good example of an organization that uses security through obscurity well. They employ the best cryptographers and system designers around, but they are also not about to tell anyone how those systems work. If you did know exactly what they were doing, though, you would still find them to be some of the most secure systems anywhere.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a history of using obscurity as a method of covering up embarassing security flaws. They do not have a history of having the best security. Do I think that Microsoft intends to hide the internals of their kernel as part of a comprehensive security regime in which obscurity is only the last layer thus making Vista an impregnable fortress, or is this an attempt by Microsoft to squelch competition from other AV vendors under the guise of fixing their tarnished security image? Well, it's obvious what I think. Which do you think it is?
* The fundamental problem with security through obscurity is that you can't count on it. Either a clever hacker will figure it out, or an insider will leak or exploit information about the system. Your system must be as secure as you know how to make it assuming that your enemy has full knowledge of the system. Only then does layering obscurity on top of that make sense as an additional mechanism. Otherwise it's a false sense of security.
And I was making a joke about CDE and KDE. Anyway, I've always loved that sketch, because in the Monty Python sub-genre of "people with silly disabilities", this is the only one I know of where a reasonable workaround to the silly disability was suggested and accepted.
Or it was something else. You can't just infer the scenario you describe was the one.
Yeah, or it was something else. There are about a billion things that could have prevented the star cluster from being stable. I was merely presenting the simplest and most obvious one, just as an example. Your post implied that it seemed implausible that a star cluster could fly apart, and that without this crucial piece of information you refused to believe the conclusion that there was in fact such a cluster -- "Theories fall apart because of a lack of gravity, star clusters not so much." Which isn't true. Star clusters fall apart all the time due to lack of gravity, so asking "why?" makes a poor fulcrum for doubting the findings described in the article.
BTW, while the energy of the nova may have contributed to pushing stars out of the cluster, it is doubtful to me that the gravity of the escaping mass did, since it would necessarily be a relatively small amount of mass near enough to effect any particular star. The mere fact of it no longer being concentrated within the cluster would have a much larger and immediate effect on the trajectories of the other stars.
Star clusters fall apart from lack of sufficient gravitational attraction all the time. This shouldn't be surprising. Just because some stars are rotating around each other for a while doesn't mean the orbits are stable.
The article doesn't say exactly, but there's some easy inferences. We were part of a star cluster. There was a large star in the cluster, providing a large amount of gravitational attraction. That star then went nova, shedding a large portion of its mass. Ta-da, there is no longer enough gravity to hold the cluster together, and it flies apart.
Why is it that people who can't comprehend second and third order differential equations can still catch a ball? Something even my dog can do.
Because approximations done over short periods involving large margins of error are easy for our brains to do?
If you could only catch a ball by placing the center of gravity of your hand at an exact point (or a millimiter-sized area) through which the center of gravity of the ball would pass, then nobody would be able to catch. The fact is that we have an intuitive (non-mathematical) understanding of how a ball drops, and we only need to get close enough for our fingers, glove, or maw in the case of your dog, to close around the ball.
Although I have never got all the 'planets' to go in the same directon on a planitary disk.
Well, that's just because you were modelling pre-existant 'stars', rather than modelling how 'planets' came to be. Planets only rotate in the same direction and in the same plane because the dust cloud they formed from was rotating in that direction, and formed a dust disk due to gravity before planets formed. Other gravitationally bound objects like comets can have any kind of strange orbit, like what you saw in your simulation.
Rather, the argument is, "if the govt disappears tomorrow, we will not be FORCED into these situations. We may still find ourselves in such positions, but it will only be due to our choice or misfortune."
You could just as easily argue that it is your choice to live in a state/country that has whatever laws you don't like -- or your misfortune to be born there. Practically, this is nonsense for many people who can't afford to leave. If in Libertarian-land, it is your choice or misfortune to live in a residential neighborhood separated from the commercial district (where you work) by a single road, the owner of that road can stipulate whatever he wants, and you are forced to comply (or hike through the wilderness to get to work, although then you'd be tresspassing on others' land).
He is forced only because of his actions that led him to this situation. So he has to agree to whatever price the restaurant wants. Contrast this with the situation where the govt forces you into situations like this (by holding a gun to your head).
This is really the main problem with Libertarian thinking: That because the government is the sole authorized user of force today, then if the government were gone, there would be no force. Let me make this clear: there will always be a gun held to your head. Even in the ideal hypothetical Libertarian utopia, there has to be somebody with guns in order to enforce contracts. Somebody will be holding the gun. Others will try to manipulate the gun-holder into assisting them in their agenda. This is what happens today (this is how insurance becomes mandatory), and it is what would happen if the government "went away".
The problem is that in Libertarian-land, the only possible source for the holder of guns is private enterprise, who would be beholden only to those who pay them, i.e. other corporations, and not at all to any of the citizens at whom the gun is pointed. Now there is at least a tenuous relationship between the government and the people subject to it, though it is corrupted greatly by money. Without the democratically elected government, then there would nothing but money dictating what the "authorized users of force" do to you. I fail to see how this is an improvement in any way.
Extreme libertarianism (i.e. the "get rid of the government entirely" kind) is anarcho-capitalism. Anarchy transforms into despotism as soon as the ones with power and wealth realize that there is nothing stopping them from aquiring more power and wealth, because the only police and army are the ones they hire. The only defense against the creation of a de-facto government that is most definitely not the choice of the people is to create a government that is.
List whatever faults with our government you want and I'll probably agree, but it's better than the government that would arise out of anarcho-capitalism, because it would posess every bad feature of our government without any of the safeguards that exist today.
In your own example (There are many industries in which insurance is not mandatory by law, but rather mandatory by practical necessity), it is still VOLUNTARY - you can choose to leave the industry and do some other work.
And for industries for which insurance is mandatory by law, you are still allowed to leave the industry and do some other work. Why is that not VOLUNTARY? You have the same choice -- stay and buy insurance, or change industries entirely.
If you define VOLUNTARY as meaning "it is possible to make a different choice even if the consequences are heinous" then basically everything is voluntary. You can leave the country if you don't like the laws. You can change industries if you don't like the insurance options. You can just starve if you're hungry. You can just plain break the law. Practically, real choices are limited, and these options are unrealistic.
I've heard the argument several times before and it is true.
It will be true when Anarchy becomes a viable form of government. Which is to say, never for any population larger than a hunter-gatherer band.
I don't think you should be held accountable for something that can be only accessed via third-party tools, or added to a game after release by third parties.
I agree, and the thing that I always found so freaking amusing about this was that the only way to unlock this material was to go on the internet, in the case of a child presumeably unsupervised, and download the patch to apply to the game.
Oh noes!!! You mean there is a way for a child to see nudity if he goes onto the internet without adult supervision! My god! Those Rockstar bastards have a lot of nerve acting all innocent when they are directly responsible for this situation. Before this, it would have been impossible for a kid to see pornography just by browsing around the internet! Erm...
It still makes me chuckle to think about it. So damn clueless, some people are...
In a capitalist economy, the insurance companies cannot 'dictate' what you should do if you do not enter into a VOLUNTARY contract with them asking for their services.
In your response to the other reply to this post, you indicate that you understand situations of a semi-consensual relationship, e.g. a hungry person looking for food isn't forced to buy from the only restaurant in town, but otherwise he starves, so in reality he is forced. Then don't go putting VOLUNTARY in caps like just because you aren't forced at gunpoint to have insurance that they don't get to dictate terms. The fact is that if you want insurance, they can dictate pretty much whatever they want in the insurance contract (a fundamental aspect of capitalism is a legally enforceable contract), and that many times you need insurance as a practical necessity almost as assuredly as you need food.
There are many industries in which insurance is not mandatory by law, but rather mandatory by practical necessity, and the behavior of people in these industries is dictated by the insurance companies. This is capitalism, love it or leave it. But implying that this can only occur in the presence of government regulation is the typical naive Libertarian argument against government that ignores any power relationship other than government-citizen. Not that you are one, I'm just saying I've heard the argument before and it still isn't true.
Do these people seriously expect stopping kids touching each other is going to stop them getting hurt?
Yes, they do. From TFS:
A parent was quoted as saying that her son feels safer now and that she'd witnessed enough "near collisions"."
Near collisions? So, your kid almost ran into someone and got a bonk on the head, and you're sighing in relief now that this terrifying hypothetical reality will not come to pass?
And her son feels safer? Um, okay, if he didn't feel safe playing tag then he could just not play. I was picked on as much as anybody at school, but nobody ever forced me to play tag against my will. Sure you'll be called a wimp for not wanting to play and possibly get a boo-boo, because you would be a wimp. If this was really such a problem for the kid, is he really going to be safe just because they can't play tag (but can instead do any number of things that would have been officially against the rules before anyway). I doubt it. This sounds to me like the mother projecting her own feelings of safety onto the child. The child probably is going to miss being able to run around the playground. Though more scary is the thought that the kid really does feel safe now, that mom has convinced him that a rule against tag is all it takes for him to never be harmed.
Sad. I can tell right now that when I have kids I'm going to be a huge pain in the school board's ass, which probably will make me the same in their eyes as the jackholes who force them to come up with such regulations in the first place. No, wait, lesser, because I won't be suing them.
They'll lose, naturally, but democracy seems to involve letting insurance companies dictate the rules of acceptable behaviour.
Naw, naw, democracy is where you let politicians pandering for votes in the run up to an election dictate the rules of acceptable behavior.
Capitalism is where insurance companies get to dictate what you do. I know that capitalistic and democratic ideas are strongly tied together in the West, but anyone who follows capitalism and allows insurance companies to dictate terms will experience the same thing even if they aren't a democracy.
Of course, being both a democracy and capitalist economy, we get the joy of having both pandering politicians and insurance companies telling us what to do. Though I'll admit that at least the politicians have some connection to the desires of the electorate, no matter how skewed.
I fail to see the similarities between relying on a human owner and using "gadgets designed to meet our every needs".
That's because the relationship is actually the opposite of what he implied.
Humans have been using animals to do our work for us for millenia. Oxen to pull plows, dogs to track game, cats to kill mice, horses to carry us, and so on and so forth. Now we make machines to do our bidding. It's no different, machines will do things animals used to, and more things animals can't do.
Animals were domesticated to serve our needs and they rely on us for their survival. Now we make machines to serve our needs, and they exist only because we create them and maintain them.
What a crackpot. The only genetic penalty we will pay for relying on technology is the same one we paid for relying on groups of humans larger than the small band -- survival is now much more greatly determined by group dynamics than by genetics. Something that would be a genetic "flaw" and would prevent one from surviving on one's own turns out to not be much of a problem at all in a society. Technology of course plays a role in turning genetic "defects" into non-issues, eyeglasses being the first example that springs to mind.
It's easy to lock on and fire, but it's not so easy to lock on to exactly whom you want to shoot.
And it's impossible to lock on to what you want to shoot. If your quarry is in a car, you can't auto-aim at the car. Or aim at the tires, which they bothered to model allowing you to shoot out but gave you no easy way to target. The only times this is really even feasible is in the on-rails parts where you're riding in a vehicle someone else is driving and you can use the left analog stick to aim.
The whole control scheme for GTA is a mess. There are redundant functions, functions that either move to a different part of the controller or vanish entirely depending on what kind of vehicle you are using (can't move the camera up while driving a motorcycle or the 4wd truck). Worst is that the auto-fire, your only hope of hitting anything, is bad itself. I've died before because while my target had a green rectangle on him as I held down R1, CJ decided that he'd much rather fire bullets straight up.
That said, it does still just feel right with a game pad when just driving around causing mayhem from the comfort of your couch.
When Soul Calibur II came out with exclusive characters on each system, I responded by not buying the damn game.
Or you could have done what I did: Buy the game for the console of your choice, and not give a rats ass about the exclusive characters. Same with "exclusive content" for GTA. Who cares? If the main game + whetever content you get for your console is fun, then it's fun. Why would you need to go and beat another version of the game? Besides, much like the exclusive Soul Calibur character, the exclusive content is probably going to be relatively half-assed compared to that which defines the game for every console.
It's the Nintendo/Pokemon strategy applied to GTA! Coming soon: GTA Perl and Silver, each with their own exclusive populations of hookers. "Gotta beat 'em all!"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not against being sentimental either, but if the money doesn't exist to maintain two space observatories, I know I'd choose to get an all new one.
That really isn't the choice. There isn't a replacement waiting in the wings that we can choose to launch instead. According to the WP article on HST, there may be a newer telescope that would be ready to launch in 2010, but that project is currently unfunded and thus that launch date should be pushed back by the time it would take to get funding. The JWST won't be ready until after 2010, and isn't exactly a replacement for Hubble since it operates at different wavelengths.
Plus, budgets just don't work that way. There is no service Hubble/build replacement binary choice. This year, we decide on an HST service mission. Next year, they may talk about funding a replacement. These budgets aren't equivalent, either. An HST service mission would be much cheaper than the design of a replacement and it's launch mission. If we fund HST this year, and in five years we fund a replacement, we'd have two amazing space observatories.
It isn't about being sentimental. The HST is an incredible piece of equipment, we won't have a new space observatory that could replace it, and with a single servicing mission we could get another ten to fifteen years of scientific discovery from it. Without that servicing mission, we are going to be without any space telescope at all for at least three years, but more likely much more.
It's not that expensive. It's a fantastic piece of equipment, even if better technology exists. We would be missing out on a huge amount of science if we let it just fall because we're afraid or to cheap to launch. if we're too cheap to fix Hubble, we're too cheap to replace it, and then we're really losing out.
Fix Hubble. It makes sense.
Yeah I know, the astronauts know the risks involved. Yet the risk is bigger to who manned space program should something go wrong, especially something going wrong on a mission that is "largely" optional.
The only space missions that are not entirely optional are the ones that involve recovering crew from a space station.
If we can't afford the risk to service Hubble, then we can't afford the risk to do anything else in space and should just mothball the entire manned space program right now.
The shuttle is not that big a risk. While it has flown less than expected, it has actually had better safety and reliability than was originally calculated. There have been two terrible disasters, but many flying successes. The safety of the space shuttle right now has never been higher. So if it was worth the risk to put the HST up in the first place, then it is worth the lesser risk that exists now to go up and service it.
I'm serious. Hubble is one of the space shuttle's greatest successes. If we can't risk servicing Hubble, then our entire manned space program is useless and should be scrapped. If we are going to even pretend that it isn't useless, then we should service Hubble.
If the NSA were a good example of an organization using security through obscurity well, you would have no idea how secure their systems actually were. No, something isn't right here...
In the context of my post, "well" does not mean "keeping things obscured well" it means "using the strategy of obscurity well", meaning that you don't rely on it. The NSA uses security through obscurity well in the sense that they focus on real security through design first, and obscurity second. They cannot and have not kept every detail of their systems secret, and it is from those learned details that we know their systems are designed secure first, and kept secret second. That is how you use security through obscurity well.
Ah yes, but we're talking the gravitational pull between stars in a star cluster here, where the stars are a few light years apart.
I'm not seeing your point. The mass of the exploded star is moving outward at 3% of the speed of light, so in an astronomically insignificant time frame that mass will be outside of the star cluster and thus not contributing to holding it together any more.
If a star goes nova, it still has the same center of mass and weighs the same (minus a small fraction of mass being converted into energy during the nova process).
A supernova is a star exploding, as in ejecting all or the majority of its mass outward in all directions.
The math that allows you to treat an object as though it were a point of the same mass at the object's center of mass does not work when you are inside the object (i.e. the expanding sphere of the exploding star's shockwave has passed you). If you are inside a ring or hollow sphere, then you have the mass on all sides of you resulting in no net gravitational pull. I think, I haven't done the integration but this makes intuitive sense (for the same reason being outside a sphere results in attraction towards the center of mass). Certainly when the sphere becomes extremely large and your distance to the center is relatively small there would be no significant net attraction.
If the sun turned into a black hole, nothing would happen to earth's orbit. If the sun became a supernova, once the blast wave passed the planets there would no longer be a strong attraction towards the center of the solar system, and the planets would all fly off their current orbits.
That's partly true*, but the reason that security through obscurity is derided is because it is typical of a mindset that has implications beyond just using obscurity as a security mechanism on top of other well-formed policies. Very often, obscurity is the only measure used, in large part because of a lack of substantive review of the other security policies that would reveal their endimic flaws. The belief is "what others don't know can't hurt us". Even worse is that "others" is often not "black hats" but "customers".
The NSA is a good example of an organization that uses security through obscurity well. They employ the best cryptographers and system designers around, but they are also not about to tell anyone how those systems work. If you did know exactly what they were doing, though, you would still find them to be some of the most secure systems anywhere.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a history of using obscurity as a method of covering up embarassing security flaws. They do not have a history of having the best security. Do I think that Microsoft intends to hide the internals of their kernel as part of a comprehensive security regime in which obscurity is only the last layer thus making Vista an impregnable fortress, or is this an attempt by Microsoft to squelch competition from other AV vendors under the guise of fixing their tarnished security image? Well, it's obvious what I think. Which do you think it is?
* The fundamental problem with security through obscurity is that you can't count on it. Either a clever hacker will figure it out, or an insider will leak or exploit information about the system. Your system must be as secure as you know how to make it assuming that your enemy has full knowledge of the system. Only then does layering obscurity on top of that make sense as an additional mechanism. Otherwise it's a false sense of security.
And I was making a joke about CDE and KDE. Anyway, I've always loved that sketch, because in the Monty Python sub-genre of "people with silly disabilities", this is the only one I know of where a reasonable workaround to the silly disability was suggested and accepted.
Wait, you're saying KDE is just CDE for people who can't pronounce the letter "c"?
Or it was something else. You can't just infer the scenario you describe was the one.
Yeah, or it was something else. There are about a billion things that could have prevented the star cluster from being stable. I was merely presenting the simplest and most obvious one, just as an example. Your post implied that it seemed implausible that a star cluster could fly apart, and that without this crucial piece of information you refused to believe the conclusion that there was in fact such a cluster -- "Theories fall apart because of a lack of gravity, star clusters not so much." Which isn't true. Star clusters fall apart all the time due to lack of gravity, so asking "why?" makes a poor fulcrum for doubting the findings described in the article.
BTW, while the energy of the nova may have contributed to pushing stars out of the cluster, it is doubtful to me that the gravity of the escaping mass did, since it would necessarily be a relatively small amount of mass near enough to effect any particular star. The mere fact of it no longer being concentrated within the cluster would have a much larger and immediate effect on the trajectories of the other stars.
We may as well be worrying about where to buy reliable crossbows once the atomic wars destroy civilization.
:(
I agree, but my "Ask Slashdot" article on the subject was rejected.
Star clusters fall apart from lack of sufficient gravitational attraction all the time. This shouldn't be surprising. Just because some stars are rotating around each other for a while doesn't mean the orbits are stable.
The article doesn't say exactly, but there's some easy inferences. We were part of a star cluster. There was a large star in the cluster, providing a large amount of gravitational attraction. That star then went nova, shedding a large portion of its mass. Ta-da, there is no longer enough gravity to hold the cluster together, and it flies apart.
Why is it that people who can't comprehend second and third order differential equations can still catch a ball? Something even my dog can do.
Because approximations done over short periods involving large margins of error are easy for our brains to do?
If you could only catch a ball by placing the center of gravity of your hand at an exact point (or a millimiter-sized area) through which the center of gravity of the ball would pass, then nobody would be able to catch. The fact is that we have an intuitive (non-mathematical) understanding of how a ball drops, and we only need to get close enough for our fingers, glove, or maw in the case of your dog, to close around the ball.
Although I have never got all the 'planets' to go in the same directon on a planitary disk.
Well, that's just because you were modelling pre-existant 'stars', rather than modelling how 'planets' came to be. Planets only rotate in the same direction and in the same plane because the dust cloud they formed from was rotating in that direction, and formed a dust disk due to gravity before planets formed. Other gravitationally bound objects like comets can have any kind of strange orbit, like what you saw in your simulation.
Rather, the argument is, "if the govt disappears tomorrow, we will not be FORCED into these situations. We may still find ourselves in such positions, but it will only be due to our choice or misfortune."
You could just as easily argue that it is your choice to live in a state/country that has whatever laws you don't like -- or your misfortune to be born there. Practically, this is nonsense for many people who can't afford to leave. If in Libertarian-land, it is your choice or misfortune to live in a residential neighborhood separated from the commercial district (where you work) by a single road, the owner of that road can stipulate whatever he wants, and you are forced to comply (or hike through the wilderness to get to work, although then you'd be tresspassing on others' land).
He is forced only because of his actions that led him to this situation. So he has to agree to whatever price the restaurant wants.
Contrast this with the situation where the govt forces you into situations like this (by holding a gun to your head).
This is really the main problem with Libertarian thinking: That because the government is the sole authorized user of force today, then if the government were gone, there would be no force. Let me make this clear: there will always be a gun held to your head. Even in the ideal hypothetical Libertarian utopia, there has to be somebody with guns in order to enforce contracts. Somebody will be holding the gun. Others will try to manipulate the gun-holder into assisting them in their agenda. This is what happens today (this is how insurance becomes mandatory), and it is what would happen if the government "went away".
The problem is that in Libertarian-land, the only possible source for the holder of guns is private enterprise, who would be beholden only to those who pay them, i.e. other corporations, and not at all to any of the citizens at whom the gun is pointed. Now there is at least a tenuous relationship between the government and the people subject to it, though it is corrupted greatly by money. Without the democratically elected government, then there would nothing but money dictating what the "authorized users of force" do to you. I fail to see how this is an improvement in any way.
Extreme libertarianism (i.e. the "get rid of the government entirely" kind) is anarcho-capitalism. Anarchy transforms into despotism as soon as the ones with power and wealth realize that there is nothing stopping them from aquiring more power and wealth, because the only police and army are the ones they hire. The only defense against the creation of a de-facto government that is most definitely not the choice of the people is to create a government that is.
List whatever faults with our government you want and I'll probably agree, but it's better than the government that would arise out of anarcho-capitalism, because it would posess every bad feature of our government without any of the safeguards that exist today.
In your own example (There are many industries in which insurance is not mandatory by law, but rather mandatory by practical necessity), it is still VOLUNTARY - you can choose to leave the industry and do some other work.
And for industries for which insurance is mandatory by law, you are still allowed to leave the industry and do some other work. Why is that not VOLUNTARY? You have the same choice -- stay and buy insurance, or change industries entirely.
If you define VOLUNTARY as meaning "it is possible to make a different choice even if the consequences are heinous" then basically everything is voluntary. You can leave the country if you don't like the laws. You can change industries if you don't like the insurance options. You can just starve if you're hungry. You can just plain break the law. Practically, real choices are limited, and these options are unrealistic.
I've heard the argument several times before and it is true.
It will be true when Anarchy becomes a viable form of government. Which is to say, never for any population larger than a hunter-gatherer band.
I don't think you should be held accountable for something that can be only accessed via third-party tools, or added to a game after release by third parties.
I agree, and the thing that I always found so freaking amusing about this was that the only way to unlock this material was to go on the internet, in the case of a child presumeably unsupervised, and download the patch to apply to the game.
Oh noes!!! You mean there is a way for a child to see nudity if he goes onto the internet without adult supervision! My god! Those Rockstar bastards have a lot of nerve acting all innocent when they are directly responsible for this situation. Before this, it would have been impossible for a kid to see pornography just by browsing around the internet! Erm...
It still makes me chuckle to think about it. So damn clueless, some people are...
Just because he's from the inner city, don't assume he's as well versed in armed combat tactics as your average CS player. Jeeze.
ObSimpsons: "You went to public school, so I assume that you're proficient in small arms..."
In a capitalist economy, the insurance companies cannot 'dictate' what you should do if you do not enter into a VOLUNTARY contract with them asking for their services.
In your response to the other reply to this post, you indicate that you understand situations of a semi-consensual relationship, e.g. a hungry person looking for food isn't forced to buy from the only restaurant in town, but otherwise he starves, so in reality he is forced. Then don't go putting VOLUNTARY in caps like just because you aren't forced at gunpoint to have insurance that they don't get to dictate terms. The fact is that if you want insurance, they can dictate pretty much whatever they want in the insurance contract (a fundamental aspect of capitalism is a legally enforceable contract), and that many times you need insurance as a practical necessity almost as assuredly as you need food.
There are many industries in which insurance is not mandatory by law, but rather mandatory by practical necessity, and the behavior of people in these industries is dictated by the insurance companies. This is capitalism, love it or leave it. But implying that this can only occur in the presence of government regulation is the typical naive Libertarian argument against government that ignores any power relationship other than government-citizen. Not that you are one, I'm just saying I've heard the argument before and it still isn't true.
Everyone knows that Western Influences require at least 1Mbps.
A foolproof plan.
Do these people seriously expect stopping kids touching each other is going to stop them getting hurt?
Yes, they do. From TFS:
A parent was quoted as saying that her son feels safer now and that she'd witnessed enough "near collisions"."
Near collisions? So, your kid almost ran into someone and got a bonk on the head, and you're sighing in relief now that this terrifying hypothetical reality will not come to pass?
And her son feels safer? Um, okay, if he didn't feel safe playing tag then he could just not play. I was picked on as much as anybody at school, but nobody ever forced me to play tag against my will. Sure you'll be called a wimp for not wanting to play and possibly get a boo-boo, because you would be a wimp. If this was really such a problem for the kid, is he really going to be safe just because they can't play tag (but can instead do any number of things that would have been officially against the rules before anyway). I doubt it. This sounds to me like the mother projecting her own feelings of safety onto the child. The child probably is going to miss being able to run around the playground. Though more scary is the thought that the kid really does feel safe now, that mom has convinced him that a rule against tag is all it takes for him to never be harmed.
Sad. I can tell right now that when I have kids I'm going to be a huge pain in the school board's ass, which probably will make me the same in their eyes as the jackholes who force them to come up with such regulations in the first place. No, wait, lesser, because I won't be suing them.
They'll lose, naturally, but democracy seems to involve letting insurance companies dictate the rules of acceptable behaviour.
Naw, naw, democracy is where you let politicians pandering for votes in the run up to an election dictate the rules of acceptable behavior.
Capitalism is where insurance companies get to dictate what you do. I know that capitalistic and democratic ideas are strongly tied together in the West, but anyone who follows capitalism and allows insurance companies to dictate terms will experience the same thing even if they aren't a democracy.
Of course, being both a democracy and capitalist economy, we get the joy of having both pandering politicians and insurance companies telling us what to do. Though I'll admit that at least the politicians have some connection to the desires of the electorate, no matter how skewed.
I fail to see the similarities between relying on a human owner and using "gadgets designed to meet our every needs".
That's because the relationship is actually the opposite of what he implied.
Humans have been using animals to do our work for us for millenia. Oxen to pull plows, dogs to track game, cats to kill mice, horses to carry us, and so on and so forth. Now we make machines to do our bidding. It's no different, machines will do things animals used to, and more things animals can't do.
Animals were domesticated to serve our needs and they rely on us for their survival. Now we make machines to serve our needs, and they exist only because we create them and maintain them.
What a crackpot. The only genetic penalty we will pay for relying on technology is the same one we paid for relying on groups of humans larger than the small band -- survival is now much more greatly determined by group dynamics than by genetics. Something that would be a genetic "flaw" and would prevent one from surviving on one's own turns out to not be much of a problem at all in a society. Technology of course plays a role in turning genetic "defects" into non-issues, eyeglasses being the first example that springs to mind.
It's easy to lock on and fire, but it's not so easy to lock on to exactly whom you want to shoot.
And it's impossible to lock on to what you want to shoot. If your quarry is in a car, you can't auto-aim at the car. Or aim at the tires, which they bothered to model allowing you to shoot out but gave you no easy way to target. The only times this is really even feasible is in the on-rails parts where you're riding in a vehicle someone else is driving and you can use the left analog stick to aim.
The whole control scheme for GTA is a mess. There are redundant functions, functions that either move to a different part of the controller or vanish entirely depending on what kind of vehicle you are using (can't move the camera up while driving a motorcycle or the 4wd truck). Worst is that the auto-fire, your only hope of hitting anything, is bad itself. I've died before because while my target had a green rectangle on him as I held down R1, CJ decided that he'd much rather fire bullets straight up.
That said, it does still just feel right with a game pad when just driving around causing mayhem from the comfort of your couch.
Seth McFarlane --> Family Guy
Todd McFarlane --> Spawn and awesome action figures.
Ever seen them in a room together?
When Soul Calibur II came out with exclusive characters on each system, I responded by not buying the damn game.
Or you could have done what I did: Buy the game for the console of your choice, and not give a rats ass about the exclusive characters. Same with "exclusive content" for GTA. Who cares? If the main game + whetever content you get for your console is fun, then it's fun. Why would you need to go and beat another version of the game? Besides, much like the exclusive Soul Calibur character, the exclusive content is probably going to be relatively half-assed compared to that which defines the game for every console.
Still, I'll throw you an "amen".
It's the Nintendo/Pokemon strategy applied to GTA! Coming soon: GTA Perl and Silver, each with their own exclusive populations of hookers. "Gotta beat 'em all!"