I'm just curious which "sides" you're talking about. It sounds like you're saying there's some clear line where scientists disagree. My understanding is that disagreement exists on subtler points, but not on whether human activity contributes to global warming. (Unless there's some disagreement about the principle of cause-and-effect I'm unaware of...?)
In any case, I don't think any research has itself stated that humanity must or mustn't curtail their emissions of hydrocarbons, only that there are predictable consequences of action versus inaction.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. If you know all about which studies are worthless, and who's quoting them, it would help if you provided some examples.
And not to be too much of a grammar nazi, but the word is lose not loose. And I think you meant to say partisan and not non-partisan. No one complains about "non-partisan work by Congress."
It was the policy of the administration that the Iraqis would welcome us with roses, Democracy would flourish, and Iraq would become a shining example of hope in the Middle East.
Actually, for the record, that was simply the last in a long line of sales pitches that the administration put before the American People, and since it stuck they've continued to act as if it was the point all along.
It should be obvious by now (and frankly it was pretty obvious then) that they never really had any interest in this agenda. The war was about control of resources. And as a bonus the war was a clever way to funnel taxpayer money - "It's your money!" - into the pockets of defense contractors, and thence right back into the Republican party.
Exactly. Bush rushed the US into a useless war for fictitious reasons. Carter authorized the funding of a genocidal war against the people of East Timor. Neither of these actions had anything to do with their pronunciation of nuclear...
However, one wonders if their disregard for linguistic aesthetics implies a corollary disregard for truth and beauty.
Unless you can prove they ignore the suppression and misrepresentation of findings only in a very selective way, I think you'd have to say rather that they're trying to de-politicize science. They're a watchdog group whose only agenda is full disclosure and absolute rigor. I don't see how that would translate into any kind of political leaning.
(Of course it's common knowledge that the truth has a strong liberal bias.)
The Israelis and Palestinians hate one another -- what role does science play in that?
Science must do its part in designing efficient LSD / Psilocybin aerosol distribution drones for weekly fly-overs of the entire Middle East until everyone chills the fuck out. That's the role I envision.
Erm... Actually, no. In general scientists are far less prone to intellectual whoredom than regular people.
I think if you look into this issue more closely you'll find that the issue is not corruption of scientists, but misuse and misrepresentation of their findings.
No scientist who acts as you imply could long remain employed as a scientist. The moment he (or she) published his (or her) findings that would be pretty much the end of it. Every published scientific study of any wide interest is peer-reviewed, scrutinized, and confirmed or refuted by many other scientists. Whenever a scientist is found to be massaging data he gets peer-reviewed into oblivion and his reputation is forever screwed. These are known in the business as "flaps" and you can find many examples of them.
Just on the practical level, consider how scientists operate in the real world. Scientists rarely work alone, and rarely are they the only individual looking into a class of phenomena. So frankly, one lone scientist with an agenda in a research group couldn't have much of an effect. You'd have to get a whole team of rogue scientists -- not an easy thing to do since Doctor Evil recruited them all to his research team back in the 60's.
In science there are few, if any, Karl Rove's. However, in politics there are plenty of reptiles anxious to suppress, distort, downplay, and misrepresent scientific findings. So this is what you get: Lackeys inserted at NASA to curtail serious climate research; findings reports edited and suppressed by the corporations that fund the research.
I know of lots of games where "Arabian" countries are the bad guys. You can kill them then and its OK? Most RTS games use obvious characteristics of that easily assignable to regions of the world, either race based or religious but why no offense there?
Indeed. Did you see the NBC made-for-TV movie "Homeland Security" starring Tom Skerritt. What an unbelievably racist piece of shit.
Value is always subjective, and our facile attachment to human-shaped beings only obscures the deeper, broader value intrinsic to all life. If we are objective and deeply honest, we must admit that we as a species and we as a culture are utterly blind.
I was disheartened recently to hear Peter Singer (sometimes called "the father of the Animal Rights movement") quoted in an interview, saying that animal testing could be justified on the basis of the good it does for humanity. It struck me deeply, and still I'm caught up in contemplation of that word: "justified." That's a word we really need to take a close hard look at. Ideals, wishes, hopes, attachments, and feelings are no basis for "justification."
If we are even braver, we can realize that all "justification" is based on our own convenient fictions. It is a social construct. If my reasoning is acceptable to my culture, I can feel "justified" in my actions. All any justification requires is emotional and rational sympathy from my respected peers. This allows me to feel absolved for the deeds I may worry over.
Justification has a certain psychological value, insofar as it keeps us feeling okay about ourselves. After all, in this world we have to act, and since there is no central agent responsible for our personal choices, justification is necessary to uphold the integrity of the rational mind. We need justification to preserve the perception that we are a force for good in the world. And we need it to feel that our will is wholly our own. In short, we need it to bolster the convenient fictions that keep us ensconced in our rational illusions.
To be frank, the only software that will ultimately protect you is another operating system. Windows is fundamentally broken. Switch to Linux - or better yet, Mac OS X - and you will not only have a better internet experience, you'll have a better desktop experience overall.
Every domain would be required to have a name according to the current limited scheme, as it is now. And then on top of that you add a capability to create domain aliases that use extended character sets. This is the only thing that makes sense. One should never be forced to type in a bunch of cryptic Kanji to reach a domain. It should be broadly accessible to people using older platforms and DNS standards.
The extension could eventually be wrapped up into DNS, but it would be best to develop it as a separate module for the time being, to absolutely ensure nothing breaks.
Single-user mode: Very easy, just hold down COMMAND-S at startup. With applejack installed repairs can be very quick. In a pinch archive-and-installing the system gets you back to where you were very quickly, preserving settings.
Context menus: Actually Mac uses them all over the place now, and they are comprehensive.
Mac Consistency: You're completely wrong about application behavior. For all applications, not just the Finder, only the clicked-on window comes to the front. An application that uses PALETTES (like Photoshop) shows them when one of its windows is active. The key-combination to hide apps is COMMAND-H for all apps that don't override it for legacy reasons. Adobe apps traditionally use Cmd-H for "Extras" so they change the hide key to COMMAND-CONTROL-H. In any case, you can always COMMAND-OPTION-CLICK any Dock icon to hide all other apps. Icons appearing under the Dock: It's so easy to avoid. Put the Dock on the side of the screen and make it smaller for the best experience.
Linux is getting better all the time though, I agree with that.
Take my quantum workbench. One minute my quantum spanner is there, then it's not there, then it's a superposition of there/not-there. And although my quantum computer has only 27 Qbits, all past and future quantum computers are already networking with it, and I get something like Aleph-One SPAM emails per day.
Just to remind everyone, our ever-increasing orgy of animal slaughter wastes land through feed production, pollutes air and water, and brings much untold suffering to our fellow beings, who themselves are given no political voice. Only when the barbaric practice of factory farming is finally eradicated may we ever call ourselves compassionate as a society.
If you as an individual can reduce your dependency even a little on the products of animal exploitation and slavery, please do. Your every meal will become a testament to life and love, and you will be helping your health, your environment, your animal friends, and your sense of humor.
Meanwhile, be aware of the many threats to health directly caused by the breeding and use of animals.
Oprah: Now see, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me just ask you this right now Howard. How do you know the cows are ground up and fed back to the other cows? Howard Lyman: Oh, I've seen it. These are U.S.D.A. statistics, they're not something we're making up. Oprah: Now doesn't that concern you all a little bit, right here, hearing that? Audience: Yeah! Oprah: It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger! Audience: (Claps loudly and shouts) yeah!...
Howard: Ask yourself the question. Today we could do exactly what the English did and cease feeding cows to cows. Why in the world are we not doing that? Why are we skating around this and continuing to do it when everybody sitting here knows that, that would be the safest thing to do, why is it, why is it? Because we have the greedy that are getting the ear of government instead of the needy and that's exactly why we're doing it. Audience: (applause) Oprah: We have a lot of questions about this Mad Cow Disease that we'd like to try to get resolved, because we don't want to just alarm you all, but I have to tell you, I'm thinking about the cattle being fed to the cattle and that's pretty upsetting to me...
Obi-Wan: I felt a great disturbance in The Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Seven of Nine: That was merely a spurious fluctuation in the tachyon matrix containment field. I have compensated.
Barris: "More than you think, and more every day. This is a world becoming progressively worse, can we not agree on that?
"What's on the dessert menu?"
[[ Welcome to Rome 2K. Welcome to the Brave New World. Welcome to the Animal Farm. Welcome to 1984. Blind, unrestrained capitalization naturally tends to squeeze every drop of humanity out of its core machinery to achieve its primary profit objective. Humans who seek to co-exist peacefully, cognizant of their environment, in order to achieve their ethical social aims in the course of their personal and professional lives, are free to expend energy and affect material gains and losses with impunity.
Defense spending makes no one wealthy except reptilian industrialists whose profits from war and disaster are used to effectively prop up a puppet government: Now they can effectively appoint the rulers, compose the rules, shape the debate with poison pills and straw men, and to write the official history. They have placed themselves in control of Government, and in getting away with so many overtly illegal actions have at last proved that their formula works.
And once in control, what's their vision for Humanity? Well, they haven't got one. Every ounce of energy goes into developing strategies, getting money, currying favor, and making deals in order to remain in power, ad nauseum. They have no plan for the general improvement of the body politic. These are cattlement and ranchers, intermingling with reptilian wealth.
Whereas a Human despot might take over the country and start instituting a mandatory educational program -- as Saddam Hussein was wont to do -- American despots would prefer a generation of mindless sycophants, kneeling to salute the American God Machine, drugged, diabetic, deceived, and dimly fleeing (in blessed petrol-powered vehicles) to state-mandated churches and recruiting stations.
Our lives go on, largely unmonitored as long as we comply. Every year over 45 thousand Americans die in automobile accidents. We die in vast numbers, ground up by a capitalist machine that doesn't even pay into the system that maintains the roads. And yet, instead of rationally fearing the drive home, they would have us fearing terrorists, dirty bombs, and Saddam Hussein.
If we want to end the cycle of power, surveillance, despotism, totalitarianism, the way is clear. Remove the influence of the corporate wing. Just as the constitution bans the marriage of Church and State due to its irrational tendencies, it must ban the marriage of Corporate and State to insulate government from usurpation by a machine of rampant, heartless exploitation. In other words, to insulate we the people, the body politic, from Fascism.
Do we already have Fascism in America? I think it is clear that we do. Right now in the United States hate-mongers who demonize intellectuals, spread lies and propaganda daily, parrot one another ceaselessly, and bury all meaningful discourse have become well-known -- even popular -- media figures. This Executive branch has been unprecedented in giving an air of validity to these figures, appearing on their programs (where they won't be challenged or questioned) while pretending that they are in a rational, impartial, and objective forum.
Meanwhile, everybody knows what's going on. We know the game they're playing. We know everything they say is on a propaganda track, and not a track of rational inquiry. We know they are going around the world, sending the people's military to foreign lands to act as human targets, to guard the bases and pipelines they're building for themselves. Everybody in the solar system knows George Bush has no real opinions, interests, or power, that he's just a good lackey who can do what he's told, that the real policy-makers are unknown and unaccountable.
Substance D. Deception.
When we finally care enough to do something about getting screwed-over by the powerful, what will we -- you and I, Joe Citizen -- be al
Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing as space in the way you imagine it. That would imply that space is finite. Rather, space is a collective property of energy that forms the impression of a continuum. So rather than say "this atom is a light-year away from that atom," say "this atom and that atom share the property of a light-year of space." Feels more sane already, doesn't it?
I heard of a couple of guys, they want to build something called an "airplane." You know, you'd get people to go in it and they'd fly around like birds. It's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier? Or rockets to the moon? Or atomic energy? Or a mission to Mars! Science fiction, right?
Look, all I'm asking is for you to have just the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to step back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history of history.
The fact that there are people running businesses with questionable ethics in no way reflects on the morality of the underlying economic philosophy.
I don't think the poster's point was that Capitalism is immoral, but that it is amoral, and therefore, if it is to be a beneficial force in the world, morality must be injected into it - or imposed upon it. The same goes for Communism or any other economic system. Whatever the system is, it requires limitations and regulations to keep it in line.
I think this is a confusion of terms between desire and means. In any case gravity, for example, doesn't appear to be information rich. DNA does. How was this information generated? Even with genetic algorithms, you can't get out more information than is originally put into the system.
Gravity is as rich in information as you could want. That's why it's still being studied. Trying to understand the nature of gravity is what led us to discover the curvature of spacetime, and it has led us to probe the deeper nature of quantum physics. Gravity is just one piece of a much larger puzzle, and can't just be taken in isolation as you imply.
In one sense you are correct, though. If modern gravity evolved from some earlier form of proto-gravity, the evidence for this is clearly too far in the past to discover easily.
But this is obviously not the case with genetics. DNA is littered with the vestiges of the past. So if you're looking for the dynamics and progression of evolution you don't have to look very far.
How does a tree-dwelling dinosaur evolve into a bird? Random mutation of sex cells, with disadvantageous mutations culled through natural selection, environmental pressure, competition and predation, etc. How does DNA get more complex? Again, by mutation, the incorporation of useful proteins into the genetic sequence, mitochondrial evolution, viral factors, all kinds of aspects which can be understood by studying genetics.
The fact is, you can get more information out of a genetic algorithm than you put in. Take for example, an electronic circuit that was developed via a genetic algorithm, which works better than circuits designed by any engineer who ever lived. It works better due to a side-loop that seems to have no bearing on the circuit - though clearly it does - but no one yet understands why.
(This circuit was described in a Scientific American article a few years ago.)
The fact is, DNA is not the end-all / be-all of genetics, and not all of evolution is accounted for in DNA. In fact, the environment itself imposes pressures, and therefore represents a whole realm of extra "information" that is part of the "system." It's altogether impossible to understand genetics or organisms if you imagine they exist in a vacuum. It is far more useful and complete to consider entire ecosystems, in which organisms constantly exert pressures on one-another, leading to mutual benefits for all involved.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just curious which "sides" you're talking about. It sounds like you're saying there's some clear line where scientists disagree. My understanding is that disagreement exists on subtler points, but not on whether human activity contributes to global warming. (Unless there's some disagreement about the principle of cause-and-effect I'm unaware of...?)
In any case, I don't think any research has itself stated that humanity must or mustn't curtail their emissions of hydrocarbons, only that there are predictable consequences of action versus inaction.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. If you know all about which studies are worthless, and who's quoting them, it would help if you provided some examples.
And not to be too much of a grammar nazi, but the word is lose not loose. And I think you meant to say partisan and not non-partisan. No one complains about "non-partisan work by Congress."
It was the policy of the administration that the Iraqis would welcome us with roses, Democracy would flourish, and Iraq would become a shining example of hope in the Middle East.
Actually, for the record, that was simply the last in a long line of sales pitches that the administration put before the American People, and since it stuck they've continued to act as if it was the point all along.
It should be obvious by now (and frankly it was pretty obvious then) that they never really had any interest in this agenda. The war was about control of resources. And as a bonus the war was a clever way to funnel taxpayer money - "It's your money!" - into the pockets of defense contractors, and thence right back into the Republican party.
Clever, but not admirably so.
Exactly. Bush rushed the US into a useless war for fictitious reasons. Carter authorized the funding of a genocidal war against the people of East Timor. Neither of these actions had anything to do with their pronunciation of nuclear ...
However, one wonders if their disregard for linguistic aesthetics implies a corollary disregard for truth and beauty.
Unless you can prove they ignore the suppression and misrepresentation of findings only in a very selective way, I think you'd have to say rather that they're trying to de-politicize science. They're a watchdog group whose only agenda is full disclosure and absolute rigor. I don't see how that would translate into any kind of political leaning.
(Of course it's common knowledge that the truth has a strong liberal bias.)
The Israelis and Palestinians hate one another -- what role does science play in that?
Science must do its part in designing efficient LSD / Psilocybin aerosol distribution drones for weekly fly-overs of the entire Middle East until everyone chills the fuck out. That's the role I envision.
Erm... Actually, no. In general scientists are far less prone to intellectual whoredom than regular people.
I think if you look into this issue more closely you'll find that the issue is not corruption of scientists, but misuse and misrepresentation of their findings.
No scientist who acts as you imply could long remain employed as a scientist. The moment he (or she) published his (or her) findings that would be pretty much the end of it. Every published scientific study of any wide interest is peer-reviewed, scrutinized, and confirmed or refuted by many other scientists. Whenever a scientist is found to be massaging data he gets peer-reviewed into oblivion and his reputation is forever screwed. These are known in the business as "flaps" and you can find many examples of them.
Just on the practical level, consider how scientists operate in the real world. Scientists rarely work alone, and rarely are they the only individual looking into a class of phenomena. So frankly, one lone scientist with an agenda in a research group couldn't have much of an effect. You'd have to get a whole team of rogue scientists -- not an easy thing to do since Doctor Evil recruited them all to his research team back in the 60's.
In science there are few, if any, Karl Rove's. However, in politics there are plenty of reptiles anxious to suppress, distort, downplay, and misrepresent scientific findings. So this is what you get: Lackeys inserted at NASA to curtail serious climate research; findings reports edited and suppressed by the corporations that fund the research.
I know of lots of games where "Arabian" countries are the bad guys. You can kill them then and its OK? Most RTS games use obvious characteristics of that easily assignable to regions of the world, either race based or religious but why no offense there?
Indeed. Did you see the NBC made-for-TV movie "Homeland Security" starring Tom Skerritt. What an unbelievably racist piece of shit.
Bravo. You have made an important point.
Value is always subjective, and our facile attachment to human-shaped beings only obscures the deeper, broader value intrinsic to all life. If we are objective and deeply honest, we must admit that we as a species and we as a culture are utterly blind.
I was disheartened recently to hear Peter Singer (sometimes called "the father of the Animal Rights movement") quoted in an interview, saying that animal testing could be justified on the basis of the good it does for humanity. It struck me deeply, and still I'm caught up in contemplation of that word: "justified." That's a word we really need to take a close hard look at. Ideals, wishes, hopes, attachments, and feelings are no basis for "justification."
If we are even braver, we can realize that all "justification" is based on our own convenient fictions. It is a social construct. If my reasoning is acceptable to my culture, I can feel "justified" in my actions. All any justification requires is emotional and rational sympathy from my respected peers. This allows me to feel absolved for the deeds I may worry over.
Justification has a certain psychological value, insofar as it keeps us feeling okay about ourselves. After all, in this world we have to act, and since there is no central agent responsible for our personal choices, justification is necessary to uphold the integrity of the rational mind. We need justification to preserve the perception that we are a force for good in the world. And we need it to feel that our will is wholly our own. In short, we need it to bolster the convenient fictions that keep us ensconced in our rational illusions.
Well, that's the general idea anyways.
To be frank, the only software that will ultimately protect you is another operating system. Windows is fundamentally broken. Switch to Linux - or better yet, Mac OS X - and you will not only have a better internet experience, you'll have a better desktop experience overall.
Wow, the beginning of the end already??
Whatever happened to the iBrator??
Would the people that determine the known list of terrorists be the same ones who were certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
I know you know this Phil, but just to enlighten the deluded masses...
1. No one close to the intelligence ever believed this was the case.
2. No ordinary citizen with an ounce of sense ever believed this was the case.
3. Public officials merely pretended to believe it - you could see the dollar signs in their eyes.
4. Iraq was primarily a means to funnel billions to American defense contractors and shore up Republican power.
5. George Bush does what he's told by his industrial base. He is a soulless figurehead, dumb as a stone.
Every domain would be required to have a name according to the current limited scheme, as it is now. And then on top of that you add a capability to create domain aliases that use extended character sets. This is the only thing that makes sense. One should never be forced to type in a bunch of cryptic Kanji to reach a domain. It should be broadly accessible to people using older platforms and DNS standards.
The extension could eventually be wrapped up into DNS, but it would be best to develop it as a separate module for the time being, to absolutely ensure nothing breaks.
You are factually wrong on several points:
Single-user mode: Very easy, just hold down COMMAND-S at startup. With applejack installed repairs can be very quick. In a pinch archive-and-installing the system gets you back to where you were very quickly, preserving settings.
Context menus: Actually Mac uses them all over the place now, and they are comprehensive.
Mac Consistency: You're completely wrong about application behavior. For all applications, not just the Finder, only the clicked-on window comes to the front. An application that uses PALETTES (like Photoshop) shows them when one of its windows is active. The key-combination to hide apps is COMMAND-H for all apps that don't override it for legacy reasons. Adobe apps traditionally use Cmd-H for "Extras" so they change the hide key to COMMAND-CONTROL-H. In any case, you can always COMMAND-OPTION-CLICK any Dock icon to hide all other apps. Icons appearing under the Dock: It's so easy to avoid. Put the Dock on the side of the screen and make it smaller for the best experience.
Linux is getting better all the time though, I agree with that.
Take my quantum workbench. One minute my quantum spanner is there, then it's not there, then it's a superposition of there/not-there. And although my quantum computer has only 27 Qbits, all past and future quantum computers are already networking with it, and I get something like Aleph-One SPAM emails per day.
Are Humans Natural Carnivores? by Dan Piraro.
[ vegan police bulletin ]
...
Just to remind everyone, our ever-increasing orgy of animal slaughter wastes land through feed production, pollutes air and water, and brings much untold suffering to our fellow beings, who themselves are given no political voice. Only when the barbaric practice of factory farming is finally eradicated may we ever call ourselves compassionate as a society.
If you as an individual can reduce your dependency even a little on the products of animal exploitation and slavery, please do. Your every meal will become a testament to life and love, and you will be helping your health, your environment, your animal friends, and your sense of humor.
Meanwhile, be aware of the many threats to health directly caused by the breeding and use of animals.
Oprah: Now see, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me just ask you this right now Howard. How do you know the cows are ground up and fed back to the other cows?
Howard Lyman: Oh, I've seen it. These are U.S.D.A. statistics, they're not something we're making up.
Oprah: Now doesn't that concern you all a little bit, right here, hearing that?
Audience: Yeah!
Oprah: It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!
Audience: (Claps loudly and shouts) yeah!
Howard: Ask yourself the question. Today we could do exactly what the English did and cease feeding cows to cows. Why in the world are we not doing that? Why are we skating around this and continuing to do it when everybody sitting here knows that, that would be the safest thing to do, why is it, why is it? Because we have the greedy that are getting the ear of government instead of the needy and that's exactly why we're doing it.
Audience: (applause)
Oprah: We have a lot of questions about this Mad Cow Disease that we'd like to try to get resolved, because we don't want to just alarm you all, but I have to tell you, I'm thinking about the cattle being fed to the cattle and that's pretty upsetting to me...
[ kill no more ]
Obi-Wan: I felt a great disturbance in The Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Seven of Nine: That was merely a spurious fluctuation in the tachyon matrix containment field. I have compensated.
Freck: "I got a lot of problems no one else has."
Barris: "More than you think, and more every day. This is a world becoming progressively worse, can we not agree on that?
"What's on the dessert menu?"
[[ Welcome to Rome 2K. Welcome to the Brave New World. Welcome to the Animal Farm. Welcome to 1984. Blind, unrestrained capitalization naturally tends to squeeze every drop of humanity out of its core machinery to achieve its primary profit objective. Humans who seek to co-exist peacefully, cognizant of their environment, in order to achieve their ethical social aims in the course of their personal and professional lives, are free to expend energy and affect material gains and losses with impunity.
Defense spending makes no one wealthy except reptilian industrialists whose profits from war and disaster are used to effectively prop up a puppet government: Now they can effectively appoint the rulers, compose the rules, shape the debate with poison pills and straw men, and to write the official history. They have placed themselves in control of Government, and in getting away with so many overtly illegal actions have at last proved that their formula works.
And once in control, what's their vision for Humanity? Well, they haven't got one. Every ounce of energy goes into developing strategies, getting money, currying favor, and making deals in order to remain in power, ad nauseum. They have no plan for the general improvement of the body politic. These are cattlement and ranchers, intermingling with reptilian wealth.
Whereas a Human despot might take over the country and start instituting a mandatory educational program -- as Saddam Hussein was wont to do -- American despots would prefer a generation of mindless sycophants, kneeling to salute the American God Machine, drugged, diabetic, deceived, and dimly fleeing (in blessed petrol-powered vehicles) to state-mandated churches and recruiting stations.
Our lives go on, largely unmonitored as long as we comply. Every year over 45 thousand Americans die in automobile accidents. We die in vast numbers, ground up by a capitalist machine that doesn't even pay into the system that maintains the roads. And yet, instead of rationally fearing the drive home, they would have us fearing terrorists, dirty bombs, and Saddam Hussein.
If we want to end the cycle of power, surveillance, despotism, totalitarianism, the way is clear. Remove the influence of the corporate wing. Just as the constitution bans the marriage of Church and State due to its irrational tendencies, it must ban the marriage of Corporate and State to insulate government from usurpation by a machine of rampant, heartless exploitation. In other words, to insulate we the people, the body politic, from Fascism.
Do we already have Fascism in America? I think it is clear that we do. Right now in the United States hate-mongers who demonize intellectuals, spread lies and propaganda daily, parrot one another ceaselessly, and bury all meaningful discourse have become well-known -- even popular -- media figures. This Executive branch has been unprecedented in giving an air of validity to these figures, appearing on their programs (where they won't be challenged or questioned) while pretending that they are in a rational, impartial, and objective forum.
Meanwhile, everybody knows what's going on. We know the game they're playing. We know everything they say is on a propaganda track, and not a track of rational inquiry. We know they are going around the world, sending the people's military to foreign lands to act as human targets, to guard the bases and pipelines they're building for themselves. Everybody in the solar system knows George Bush has no real opinions, interests, or power, that he's just a good lackey who can do what he's told, that the real policy-makers are unknown and unaccountable.
Substance D. Deception.
When we finally care enough to do something about getting screwed-over by the powerful, what will we -- you and I, Joe Citizen -- be al
And of course, Junior Mints should come with RFIDs just to be safe.
Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing as space in the way you imagine it. That would imply that space is finite. Rather, space is a collective property of energy that forms the impression of a continuum. So rather than say "this atom is a light-year away from that atom," say "this atom and that atom share the property of a light-year of space." Feels more sane already, doesn't it?
I heard of a couple of guys, they want to build something called an "airplane." You know, you'd get people to go in it and they'd fly around like birds. It's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier? Or rockets to the moon? Or atomic energy? Or a mission to Mars! Science fiction, right?
Look, all I'm asking is for you to have just the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to step back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history of history.
Please give all your spare cycles to SETI.
I don't think the poster's point was that Capitalism is immoral, but that it is amoral, and therefore, if it is to be a beneficial force in the world, morality must be injected into it - or imposed upon it. The same goes for Communism or any other economic system. Whatever the system is, it requires limitations and regulations to keep it in line.
Gravity is as rich in information as you could want. That's why it's still being studied. Trying to understand the nature of gravity is what led us to discover the curvature of spacetime, and it has led us to probe the deeper nature of quantum physics. Gravity is just one piece of a much larger puzzle, and can't just be taken in isolation as you imply.
In one sense you are correct, though. If modern gravity evolved from some earlier form of proto-gravity, the evidence for this is clearly too far in the past to discover easily.
But this is obviously not the case with genetics. DNA is littered with the vestiges of the past. So if you're looking for the dynamics and progression of evolution you don't have to look very far.
How does a tree-dwelling dinosaur evolve into a bird? Random mutation of sex cells, with disadvantageous mutations culled through natural selection, environmental pressure, competition and predation, etc. How does DNA get more complex? Again, by mutation, the incorporation of useful proteins into the genetic sequence, mitochondrial evolution, viral factors, all kinds of aspects which can be understood by studying genetics.
The fact is, you can get more information out of a genetic algorithm than you put in. Take for example, an electronic circuit that was developed via a genetic algorithm, which works better than circuits designed by any engineer who ever lived. It works better due to a side-loop that seems to have no bearing on the circuit - though clearly it does - but no one yet understands why.
(This circuit was described in a Scientific American article a few years ago.)
The fact is, DNA is not the end-all / be-all of genetics, and not all of evolution is accounted for in DNA. In fact, the environment itself imposes pressures, and therefore represents a whole realm of extra "information" that is part of the "system." It's altogether impossible to understand genetics or organisms if you imagine they exist in a vacuum. It is far more useful and complete to consider entire ecosystems, in which organisms constantly exert pressures on one-another, leading to mutual benefits for all involved.
So, as soon as Science detects a phenomenon which is constant and unchanging, it will have discovered God. Now that's cool!