Vote green? - I notice they were not invited to the televised environment "debate" even though they command, what? - 10-15% of the vote.
20yrs ago Garret would have won a debate on the environment against any politician. I watched him destroy a government "ID card" project in the 80's when he systematically ripped it to shreads on the top rating current affairs show of the time. The "card" was later introduced by stealth when they changed the legislation covering tax file numbers. To watch him struggling to gaurd his words is understandable but (given his past fame) makes him look pathetic and hypocritical.
Corporate funding: IMHO Garret has been deliberately nutered by the Labour party, exchanging loyalties now would be political suicide for him. To be blunt, I hope he is lying when he says the "it will all change" quip was "just a jockular remark". Lobbyists come in all sizes and colours ( a GoodThingTM ), campaing funding should come from individuals, records should be audited transparently and then destroyed.
Balance of power for the greens in the senate would be poetic justice considering their senators were barred from taking their seat when the Chinese came resource shopping a while back, not a hope in hell for the house of reps. Pity really since they seem to be the only ones willing to stand up for EVERY citizen regardless of their dickhead mentality, eg: AFP let the Bali9 fly out to a firing squad, Hicks by any definition is a political prisoner, couple of hundred citizens deported by 'mistake', the list is fucking endless and sickening...
...but like the US, this country and the overwhelming majority of people in it are easy to enjoy until the subject of politics meets a drunken BBQ.
"We need to push this to it's limit. Like mammals for example."
I worked on a dairy farm for a while that had ~100 cows. At milking time the farmer would swing open the gate and walk off into the milking shed, seeing the open gate the (old) dog would trot out and round up the cows by itself. Often there wasn't much for it to do other than stroll along behind the herd because the cows also knew the drill. Not sure how the cows knew what time it was since none of them were wearing watches but they would often gather near the gate just before 3:00 in the afternoon and wait patiently for it to be opened.
It's a neat trick with the robots but I can't see them replacing working dogs and cooperative herds of mammals any day soon, especially since 40% of the time the robots followed the roaches behaviour rather than the other way round.
"Windmills turned out to be bird-blenders are useless with still air."
10-15yrs ago there was some truth in that, current windmills are bigger and turn slower, they present less of a danger to birds than the windows of a large building.
Peak vs base: For a small country (or a backyard) this is a problem, however most countries are bigger than the Vatican and have a large enough land mass that the wind will always be blowing "somewhere".
Yes this means building "extra" windmills but the same is true for coal or nuclear fired power plants that are shut down regularly for maintenance. Here in Australia the CSIRO (national scientific institution) has been telling our government for over a decade that powering ALL of the "sunburnt country" from solar and/or wind is very "do-able", the problem (for Australia at least) is not technical it is political.
As an Aussie I second that. Diebold and others have tried to get Australia to use their election rigging systems, fortunately it seems that our electoral commission actually does know a thing or two about counting votes in a transparent and fully accountable manner. As for speed, elections are held on a Saturday and the public usually have a result that night or the next day.
As for TFA they are absolutely correct: A machine that prints your ballot is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts your ballot is at best a waste of money
You are obviously not an ass either. What you are asking and the way in which you are asking it is the act of a sane skeptic. It's a pity a real physicist didn't reply, I hope you find an acceptable answer.:)
Science is not in the bussiness of proof, that is for mathematicians working within a set of rules based on particular axioms (assumptions).
A good crackpot theory is difficult/impossible to disprove therefore we use a tool known as Occam's razor. Yes, yes, another poster pointed this out and you claimed OR was "philosophy not science". I am sorry to have to break this to you but science IS a (very successfull)philosophy based on the faith that there exists a "real world" independent of the observer and that others percieve this "real world" in the same manner as the holder of said philosophy.
The explosion could have been a lot of things, mini-black hole evaporating, alien sapceship, massive EMP blast set off by Telsa, secret project that developed ICBM's 50yrs earlier than history records, the list is endless.
Occams razor says it was a large dirt ball travelling fast enough to act like a "fuel-air" bomb. This explaination might be "wrong" but if you belive in the philosophy of science and the utility of the scientific method you must agree with the simplest explaination that covers the observations until someone comes up with something better (eg: by performing observations such as those in TFA and finding Telsa hat at the blast site).
Nobody here can refute the theory and I expect few would try (I certainly didn't), this does not in anyway imply the Telsa theroy is any stronger than it was the day somebody dreamt it up, on the contrary it suggest that it is weaker.
If you are still confused about this and think we are a bunch of closed minded old fogies I suggest that you take a deeper look into the nature and practice of scientific skeptcisim. An exellent place to start is with Carl Sagan's excellent book on the subject.
Yes, I didn't forget about the Bali 9 since there has been so much shit happening - for an added twist of cruelty the AFP was told about the drugs by the father of one of the boys, he was hoping to protect him from the Indonesian firing squad. Instead of arresting the boys as they got on the plane they let them travel to Indonesia and have now basically ENSURED the kid will be propped up against the wall and shot.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul is standard fare for politicians, but this sort of facisim (and the propoganda that goes with it) has got to stop!
The Glasshouse was a great show, putting the staff/journalist representatives back on to the board of the ABC would be a good start to rectifying the ethical rot in that institution. I also noticed a drop in the quality of SBS news around the same time, not sure if it's the reason for Mary Kostokitis quitting?
Unfortunately the vast majority of the Australian public do not see this shit happening in front of their own face, they rarely watch ABC and think that SBS is for Italians or something - it took five years for the public to "get" was the Hick's thing was all about and I still think many people are clueless about what exactly he plead guilty too ( a retrospective law enacted by a different nation! ).
At least the house of lords in the UK demanded (and got) their citizens back as soon as the SCOTUS decision came down against Bush & Gitmo. I have been a permenant resident for 45yrs and still have my UK passport and citizenship, I was contemplating getting naturalised until the Hicks thing, should I do something stupid I would rather my fate be dermined by the house of lords than by that evil slug Ruddock.
Yep Blair, Bush & Howard thought they could rule the world for a while, but the best way to fight that in our system is not with a gun but with humour, eg: the chasers stunt at APEC, or the way that Pauline Hanson's hatred and ignorance was practically laughed out of parliment.
OTOH: We could apply our shinny new sedition laws even-handedly, ie: forget about the Indian doctors who just happen to be related to failed terrorists and lock up Alan Jones for inciting the race riots in Cronulla.
But my biggest beef with Howard is the treatment of Hicks, Hicks for those of you who are not Australian is our only (known) political prisoner. I am not as government ministers like to put it "a Hicks supporter", Hicks actually strikes me as a bit of a dickhead, however I do support the rule of law and if Howard and Ruddock can ignore the law to enact a political vendetta against one citizen then they are free to do it to the rest of us.
I could show you that statistically you are dead wrong about the earning potential of people who drop out and that the anecdotes you point to are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately you would need an education to understand the math.
I am nearly 50 and while on the subject of anecdotes I dropped out of HS at age 16, worked, (real work, you know - "weak head and strong back" stuff), for a decade or so rarely managing to find a job that would pay near (let alone above) the national average, I changed 'career' by earning a degree at age 30 and have had well above average wages ever since.
When I decided to go back to school I was working rotating shift in a nylon spinning plant. I always remeber the answer I got from the manager when I tried to arrange part time work while studying - "How will a degree help you in your work here?". I quit the next month and drove taxi's while earning a degree that put my dayime wage above his rotating shiftwork wage in less than five years. I did this while putting food on the table for two kids and a lazy ex-wife.
"and if they didn't get stupid with their investments"
That statement simply indicates you have never been "poor", keep doing what your doing and you will get the chance to experience what is loving refered to as the school of hard knocks.
BTW: I get four weeks holiday a year, I am taking three days off in Europe at the end of the month - my employer is paying the airfare from Australia and back because I have an assignment over there. If I want more than 4 weeks a year I would dump the full time job and just go back to contract work but strangely enough I actually enjoy my job and I'm kinda fond of my "cube" with it's large panoramic window.
"to any citizen who believes in a free and open society, I'll be EXTRA worried when they outlaw encryption..."
Oddly enough until recently it was standard practice for western governments to "outlaw encryption". Before public key encryption came along some of the 'founding farthers' of computer science had worked out how to crack most types of encryption with relative ease and on the side they built computers with meccano sets that calculated trajectory tables.
As a direct result of the German and Japaneese "enigma" machines that they reverse engineered the allies were able to manipulate submarines into surfacing where they wanted thus keeping the Atlantic open for the merchant navy, the icing on the cake came when they used the same methods to put the Japanese fleet in the desired position for the allied ambush at the battle of Midway.
The tragedy is that after the war href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing">Alan Turing was hounded by his own goverment because he was homosexual to the extent of being chemically castrated by order of the court, officially he suicided but it is also possible he was murdered or accidently poisioned himself (like any self respecting geek he kept chemicals in the kitchen fridge).
Encryption technology was (still is?) regarded as a "munition", you could (still can?) be charged with treason here in Australia and the US/UK had (have?) similar rules. Exporting encryption software from the US was a big deal in the early 90's, the guy who came up with PGP had plenty of hassles in this area and there was mass confusion by MS and others about the strength of the encryption that could be exported (IBM had been working with spooks for decades and did not seem to be as confused). First you were not allowed to export anything, then it was restiricted to 48bit, then it was 128bit, I lost track after 1028bit because the government basically gave up trying to control it in the mid nineties, it was simply too usefull to banks in particular and bussiness in general.
IMHO the PGP guy deserves some of the credit for bringing the issue to light but it was inevitable that governments would lose interest in "outlawing" encryption since with modern encryption methods, having access to the algorithm does not help you to decrypt the text without the private key, and the public key only allows you to encryt text - it's a whole other kind of "enigma" to the ones solved at Betchly Park and elsewhere. Once you have the algorithim you can make the bit strength anything you like and IIRC the algorithim has been public knowledge since the 70's. Probably the last vestige of these laws that is noticable today is reflected in the difficulty and often illeaglity of encrypting voice communications without some sort of government key escrow.
To sum up: Freedom is a state of mind, everything else is constrained by the shackles and barbs of society.
Trivia: It has been speculated that the apple logo is a tribute to Turing because he died from eating an apple contaminated with cyanide.
Of course murder is ok in fact it's institutionalised in the US, have you not heard of the death penalty?
Sounds to me this woman whacked her hubby, he may or may not have deserved it. Either way she escaped 35yrs ago and has proven she can refrain from whacking a different hubby long enough to produce grandkids. The authorities had long ago stopped searching for a dangerous felon, they caught her by 'accident' with a system H.G.Wells might have imagined. Giving this woman anything more than a slap on the wrist is not justice it's instiuional revenge, OTHOH 'the law is an ass' and since the US is so fond of the death penalty it would seem revenge is also OK.
"but it only will happen when the Chinese people perceive that the Communist regime has become a total liability. 800 million people in rural areas are close to this perception"
Didn't happen during Mao's cultural revolution when these same people were decimated via a government inspired famine, why would it happen now that 40yrs of successive goverments have dragged them back above the poverty line? China has lifted more people out of poverty over the last 30-40yrs than the rest of the planet combined, ironically Mao put many of them into poverty in the first place.
"the Chinese regime's hostility"
The most 'hostile' nations on the planet all hold vetos on the UNSC, they generally prefer proxy wars with each other and have avoided direct confrontation since the end of WW2.
BTW: Hu's recent speech to the party included a 'contraversial' call for the party to become more democratic as well as a to modernise China's military, including a call to enhance military & economic co-operation with Russia (ie: oil & wargames). Both are reasonable aims for a nation that governs one fifth of mankind in a world of 'hostile' nations, neither will make the current US administration (or any other cheap labour capitalist) 'happy'.
Let me guess - you have never been either poor OR wealthy have you?
Fact is, human nature is not proportional to the size of ones wallet, you could just as easily rant on about how the middle class lock themselves up in tiny castles keeping their children in the dungeon.
I don't want to get bogged down in an argument about Al Gore's (alleged) political hypocricy, nor do I care if you trust him, or for that matter me either. What I and am saying is that his movie was (at the time of release), a faithfull representation of the IPCC reports. I am not the only one who claims this, the IPCC scientists who wrote the reports reviewed the movie. follow the "original assesment" link in this otherwise interesting story.
"I interpreted "the problem" to be green house gases/CO2 not other environmental damage."
That's the diffrence between reductionist science and engineering, right there in that sentance. The "environment" is the system thats stops us all from looking like the poor bastards in Sudan, "capitalisim" and "environmentalisim" are not seperate things...stay with me here... I assure you I am not a raving hippie and I do hold a BSc in computer science with a major in operations research. "Systems" have been my bread and butter for 20yrs and prior to that I had 15 years of low paid work on sawmills, fishing trawlers, farms, building sites, and several depressing factories.
The "problem" is that the industrial revolution is making our one and only biosphere unsuitable for civilization at such a rate that system will crash in a catastrophic manner rather than a "gracefull" degredation that can be adapted to with ease, humans (as opposed to life) can't reboot from a blue globe of death. Some of the major symptoms of this impending system crash are know by the following reductionist soundbites (in rough order of importance)...
Sixth great extinction.(#0 - The "problem" in a nutshell)
Climate change. (#1 - For it's observable impact on our agriculture)
Collapsed fisheries. (#2 - No grain OR seafood)
Peak oil. (#3 - The global economy fighting itself.)
Deforestation. (#4 - Way too fast for anything to adapt.)
Desertification. (#5 - A symptom of #1 & #4.)
Oil wars. (#6 - A symptom of #3)
I don't hold out a lot of hope for human nature either.
"I don't understand that at all."
That's why the tradgedy of the commons is...well... a tragedy. Exluding the noble nations, pollution and non-renewable depletion do not factor as costs of doing bussiness, google for texaco and bolivia, BHP and Papua, Shell and Nigeria and just about anything that happens in Asia. The tragedy of the commons is - the - major bug in our current version of capitalist system.
"In a democratic sense everybody has the same right to emit CO2....everybody should get a particular fraction thereof and if they choose to sell it great."
Still reading? - I agree with you and I think the majority of mankind are on our side.
That would lead to increased costs for everything as the "noble" class who purchased up tons and tons of indulgences resell them to actual businesses that create products.
So (in a capitialist sense) how is that different to any other service side industry, eg: a bank loan? The English civil war, the French revolution and the war of independece were all reactions to the excesses of nobility - on a modern global scale we are "the nobility". At the end of the day no amount of politics will change a physical limit of nature, politicians generally refuse to acknowledge any kind of limit that they themselves have not set. If they set that limit according to GDP then the "buying of indulgences" is meaningless because the indulgences are as limitless as GDP.
If our leaders suddenly started using logic, then the difficult part of a demoractic cap and trade scheme is how to credit everyones individual "C02 account" when a large chunk of the population have never seen a letter box. The pra
I'm not saying plants don't take carbon from the atmosphere, what I am saying is that it won't scale without doing incredible environmental damage (that has nothing to do with GHG). Not to mention that making fuel from food on a large scale is morally disturbing if you really are intrested in the poor.
The reason I don't agree with carbon credits for trees is that nations will claim plantations are trees, ero replacing native forrest with palm trees will garner even more profit than it does now. Also it is not simply a matter of calculating C02 extraction potential from the size of the plant, there are a miriad of other factors and in some circumstances plants can produce more C02 than they consume. All this uncertainty and potential profit will lead to people doing exactly what you accuse Gore of doing.
I think your wrong about Al Gore, he is not proposing a 'tax' rather he is promoting the IPCC's proposal of a 'rationing' scheme for emmisions, ie: auction the right to pollute by the ton and limit the amount of tons emitted globally to match what the biosphere can physically absorb (~2.5Gt/pa). The idea is commonly known as "cap and trade", unfortunately it looks like the powerfull polluters such as US, India, Russia & China want the "cap" based on GDP (as opposed to the actual physical limit that exists in nature).
BTW: Gore doesn't carry the same political baggage here as he does in the US and you are entitled to an opinion.
I notice they have a picture of the "morning glory", I haven't seen it myself but my younger brother runs a safari style camping/touring bussiness around where it occurs so I am hoping to see it on one of my visits.
Slashdot Mirror
"I've had the dog's job in a milking operation."
:)
I was hired to spend a month or so hacking down thistles[sic] in the pasture, I was at least two promotions away from the dog's job.
Vote green? - I notice they were not invited to the televised environment "debate" even though they command, what? - 10-15% of the vote.
...but like the US, this country and the overwhelming majority of people in it are easy to enjoy until the subject of politics meets a drunken BBQ.
20yrs ago Garret would have won a debate on the environment against any politician. I watched him destroy a government "ID card" project in the 80's when he systematically ripped it to shreads on the top rating current affairs show of the time. The "card" was later introduced by stealth when they changed the legislation covering tax file numbers. To watch him struggling to gaurd his words is understandable but (given his past fame) makes him look pathetic and hypocritical.
Corporate funding: IMHO Garret has been deliberately nutered by the Labour party, exchanging loyalties now would be political suicide for him. To be blunt, I hope he is lying when he says the "it will all change" quip was "just a jockular remark". Lobbyists come in all sizes and colours ( a GoodThingTM ), campaing funding should come from individuals, records should be audited transparently and then destroyed.
Balance of power for the greens in the senate would be poetic justice considering their senators were barred from taking their seat when the Chinese came resource shopping a while back, not a hope in hell for the house of reps. Pity really since they seem to be the only ones willing to stand up for EVERY citizen regardless of their dickhead mentality, eg: AFP let the Bali9 fly out to a firing squad, Hicks by any definition is a political prisoner, couple of hundred citizens deported by 'mistake', the list is fucking endless and sickening...
"We need to push this to it's limit. Like mammals for example."
I worked on a dairy farm for a while that had ~100 cows. At milking time the farmer would swing open the gate and walk off into the milking shed, seeing the open gate the (old) dog would trot out and round up the cows by itself. Often there wasn't much for it to do other than stroll along behind the herd because the cows also knew the drill. Not sure how the cows knew what time it was since none of them were wearing watches but they would often gather near the gate just before 3:00 in the afternoon and wait patiently for it to be opened.
It's a neat trick with the robots but I can't see them replacing working dogs and cooperative herds of mammals any day soon, especially since 40% of the time the robots followed the roaches behaviour rather than the other way round.
"Windmills turned out to be bird-blenders are useless with still air."
10-15yrs ago there was some truth in that, current windmills are bigger and turn slower, they present less of a danger to birds than the windows of a large building.
Peak vs base: For a small country (or a backyard) this is a problem, however most countries are bigger than the Vatican and have a large enough land mass that the wind will always be blowing "somewhere".
Yes this means building "extra" windmills but the same is true for coal or nuclear fired power plants that are shut down regularly for maintenance. Here in Australia the CSIRO (national scientific institution) has been telling our government for over a decade that powering ALL of the "sunburnt country" from solar and/or wind is very "do-able", the problem (for Australia at least) is not technical it is political.
As an Aussie I second that. Diebold and others have tried to get Australia to use their election rigging systems, fortunately it seems that our electoral commission actually does know a thing or two about counting votes in a transparent and fully accountable manner. As for speed, elections are held on a Saturday and the public usually have a result that night or the next day.
As for TFA they are absolutely correct: A machine that prints your ballot is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts your ballot is at best a waste of money
You are obviously not an ass either. What you are asking and the way in which you are asking it is the act of a sane skeptic. It's a pity a real physicist didn't reply, I hope you find an acceptable answer. :)
Mean while the dogs are thinking, "Heh, no way will that mobile fire hydrant will ever be able to lick peanut butter.".
Science is not in the bussiness of proof, that is for mathematicians working within a set of rules based on particular axioms (assumptions).
A good crackpot theory is difficult/impossible to disprove therefore we use a tool known as Occam's razor. Yes, yes, another poster pointed this out and you claimed OR was "philosophy not science". I am sorry to have to break this to you but science IS a (very successfull)philosophy based on the faith that there exists a "real world" independent of the observer and that others percieve this "real world" in the same manner as the holder of said philosophy.
The explosion could have been a lot of things, mini-black hole evaporating, alien sapceship, massive EMP blast set off by Telsa, secret project that developed ICBM's 50yrs earlier than history records, the list is endless.
Occams razor says it was a large dirt ball travelling fast enough to act like a "fuel-air" bomb. This explaination might be "wrong" but if you belive in the philosophy of science and the utility of the scientific method you must agree with the simplest explaination that covers the observations until someone comes up with something better (eg: by performing observations such as those in TFA and finding Telsa hat at the blast site).
Nobody here can refute the theory and I expect few would try (I certainly didn't), this does not in anyway imply the Telsa theroy is any stronger than it was the day somebody dreamt it up, on the contrary it suggest that it is weaker.
If you are still confused about this and think we are a bunch of closed minded old fogies I suggest that you take a deeper look into the nature and practice of scientific skeptcisim. An exellent place to start is with Carl Sagan's excellent book on the subject.
Yes, I didn't forget about the Bali 9 since there has been so much shit happening - for an added twist of cruelty the AFP was told about the drugs by the father of one of the boys, he was hoping to protect him from the Indonesian firing squad. Instead of arresting the boys as they got on the plane they let them travel to Indonesia and have now basically ENSURED the kid will be propped up against the wall and shot.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul is standard fare for politicians, but this sort of facisim (and the propoganda that goes with it) has got to stop!
The Glasshouse was a great show, putting the staff/journalist representatives back on to the board of the ABC would be a good start to rectifying the ethical rot in that institution. I also noticed a drop in the quality of SBS news around the same time, not sure if it's the reason for Mary Kostokitis quitting?
Unfortunately the vast majority of the Australian public do not see this shit happening in front of their own face, they rarely watch ABC and think that SBS is for Italians or something - it took five years for the public to "get" was the Hick's thing was all about and I still think many people are clueless about what exactly he plead guilty too ( a retrospective law enacted by a different nation! ).
At least the house of lords in the UK demanded (and got) their citizens back as soon as the SCOTUS decision came down against Bush & Gitmo. I have been a permenant resident for 45yrs and still have my UK passport and citizenship, I was contemplating getting naturalised until the Hicks thing, should I do something stupid I would rather my fate be dermined by the house of lords than by that evil slug Ruddock.
"I didn't drop out of school, and I regret it somewhat."
:)
So go ahead and burn your suit, but don't forget to move somewhere warm first.
Yep Blair, Bush & Howard thought they could rule the world for a while, but the best way to fight that in our system is not with a gun but with humour, eg: the chasers stunt at APEC, or the way that Pauline Hanson's hatred and ignorance was practically laughed out of parliment.
OTOH: We could apply our shinny new sedition laws even-handedly, ie: forget about the Indian doctors who just happen to be related to failed terrorists and lock up Alan Jones for inciting the race riots in Cronulla.
But my biggest beef with Howard is the treatment of Hicks, Hicks for those of you who are not Australian is our only (known) political prisoner. I am not as government ministers like to put it "a Hicks supporter", Hicks actually strikes me as a bit of a dickhead, however I do support the rule of law and if Howard and Ruddock can ignore the law to enact a political vendetta against one citizen then they are free to do it to the rest of us.
I could show you that statistically you are dead wrong about the earning potential of people who drop out and that the anecdotes you point to are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately you would need an education to understand the math.
I am nearly 50 and while on the subject of anecdotes I dropped out of HS at age 16, worked, (real work, you know - "weak head and strong back" stuff), for a decade or so rarely managing to find a job that would pay near (let alone above) the national average, I changed 'career' by earning a degree at age 30 and have had well above average wages ever since.
When I decided to go back to school I was working rotating shift in a nylon spinning plant. I always remeber the answer I got from the manager when I tried to arrange part time work while studying - "How will a degree help you in your work here?". I quit the next month and drove taxi's while earning a degree that put my dayime wage above his rotating shiftwork wage in less than five years. I did this while putting food on the table for two kids and a lazy ex-wife.
"and if they didn't get stupid with their investments"
That statement simply indicates you have never been "poor", keep doing what your doing and you will get the chance to experience what is loving refered to as the school of hard knocks.
BTW: I get four weeks holiday a year, I am taking three days off in Europe at the end of the month - my employer is paying the airfare from Australia and back because I have an assignment over there. If I want more than 4 weeks a year I would dump the full time job and just go back to contract work but strangely enough I actually enjoy my job and I'm kinda fond of my "cube" with it's large panoramic window.
...crackle...the BAG has landed...crackle...
..."Opps, pardon me!"
"to any citizen who believes in a free and open society, I'll be EXTRA worried when they outlaw encryption..."
Oddly enough until recently it was standard practice for western governments to "outlaw encryption". Before public key encryption came along some of the 'founding farthers' of computer science had worked out how to crack most types of encryption with relative ease and on the side they built computers with meccano sets that calculated trajectory tables.
As a direct result of the German and Japaneese "enigma" machines that they reverse engineered the allies were able to manipulate submarines into surfacing where they wanted thus keeping the Atlantic open for the merchant navy, the icing on the cake came when they used the same methods to put the Japanese fleet in the desired position for the allied ambush at the battle of Midway.
The tragedy is that after the war href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing">Alan Turing was hounded by his own goverment because he was homosexual to the extent of being chemically castrated by order of the court, officially he suicided but it is also possible he was murdered or accidently poisioned himself (like any self respecting geek he kept chemicals in the kitchen fridge).
Encryption technology was (still is?) regarded as a "munition", you could (still can?) be charged with treason here in Australia and the US/UK had (have?) similar rules. Exporting encryption software from the US was a big deal in the early 90's, the guy who came up with PGP had plenty of hassles in this area and there was mass confusion by MS and others about the strength of the encryption that could be exported (IBM had been working with spooks for decades and did not seem to be as confused). First you were not allowed to export anything, then it was restiricted to 48bit, then it was 128bit, I lost track after 1028bit because the government basically gave up trying to control it in the mid nineties, it was simply too usefull to banks in particular and bussiness in general.
IMHO the PGP guy deserves some of the credit for bringing the issue to light but it was inevitable that governments would lose interest in "outlawing" encryption since with modern encryption methods, having access to the algorithm does not help you to decrypt the text without the private key, and the public key only allows you to encryt text - it's a whole other kind of "enigma" to the ones solved at Betchly Park and elsewhere. Once you have the algorithim you can make the bit strength anything you like and IIRC the algorithim has been public knowledge since the 70's. Probably the last vestige of these laws that is noticable today is reflected in the difficulty and often illeaglity of encrypting voice communications without some sort of government key escrow.
To sum up: Freedom is a state of mind, everything else is constrained by the shackles and barbs of society.
Trivia: It has been speculated that the apple logo is a tribute to Turing because he died from eating an apple contaminated with cyanide.
"So basically you are saying murder is OK."
Of course murder is ok in fact it's institutionalised in the US, have you not heard of the death penalty?
Sounds to me this woman whacked her hubby, he may or may not have deserved it. Either way she escaped 35yrs ago and has proven she can refrain from whacking a different hubby long enough to produce grandkids. The authorities had long ago stopped searching for a dangerous felon, they caught her by 'accident' with a system H.G.Wells might have imagined. Giving this woman anything more than a slap on the wrist is not justice it's instiuional revenge, OTHOH 'the law is an ass' and since the US is so fond of the death penalty it would seem revenge is also OK.
"but it only will happen when the Chinese people perceive that the Communist regime has become a total liability. 800 million people in rural areas are close to this perception"
Didn't happen during Mao's cultural revolution when these same people were decimated via a government inspired famine, why would it happen now that 40yrs of successive goverments have dragged them back above the poverty line? China has lifted more people out of poverty over the last 30-40yrs than the rest of the planet combined, ironically Mao put many of them into poverty in the first place.
"the Chinese regime's hostility"
The most 'hostile' nations on the planet all hold vetos on the UNSC, they generally prefer proxy wars with each other and have avoided direct confrontation since the end of WW2.
BTW: Hu's recent speech to the party included a 'contraversial' call for the party to become more democratic as well as a to modernise China's military, including a call to enhance military & economic co-operation with Russia (ie: oil & wargames). Both are reasonable aims for a nation that governs one fifth of mankind in a world of 'hostile' nations, neither will make the current US administration (or any other cheap labour capitalist) 'happy'.
"No, I have not been either poor or wealthy..."
That was sufficient, you don't have to keep proving it.
Let me guess - you have never been either poor OR wealthy have you?
Fact is, human nature is not proportional to the size of ones wallet, you could just as easily rant on about how the middle class lock themselves up in tiny castles keeping their children in the dungeon.
should read ... The review by the IPCC scientists
I don't want to get bogged down in an argument about Al Gore's (alleged) political hypocricy, nor do I care if you trust him, or for that matter me either. What I and am saying is that his movie was (at the time of release), a faithfull representation of the IPCC reports. I am not the only one who claims this, the IPCC scientists who wrote the reports reviewed the movie. follow the "original assesment" link in this otherwise interesting story.
... I assure you I am not a raving hippie and I do hold a BSc in computer science with a major in operations research. "Systems" have been my bread and butter for 20yrs and prior to that I had 15 years of low paid work on sawmills, fishing trawlers, farms, building sites, and several depressing factories.
...well... a tragedy. Exluding the noble nations, pollution and non-renewable depletion do not factor as costs of doing bussiness, google for texaco and bolivia, BHP and Papua, Shell and Nigeria and just about anything that happens in Asia. The tragedy of the commons is - the - major bug in our current version of capitalist system.
"I interpreted "the problem" to be green house gases/CO2 not other environmental damage."
That's the diffrence between reductionist science and engineering, right there in that sentance. The "environment" is the system thats stops us all from looking like the poor bastards in Sudan, "capitalisim" and "environmentalisim" are not seperate things...stay with me here
The "problem" is that the industrial revolution is making our one and only biosphere unsuitable for civilization at such a rate that system will crash in a catastrophic manner rather than a "gracefull" degredation that can be adapted to with ease, humans (as opposed to life) can't reboot from a blue globe of death. Some of the major symptoms of this impending system crash are know by the following reductionist soundbites (in rough order of importance)...
Sixth great extinction.(#0 - The "problem" in a nutshell)
Climate change. (#1 - For it's observable impact on our agriculture)
Collapsed fisheries. (#2 - No grain OR seafood)
Peak oil. (#3 - The global economy fighting itself.)
Deforestation. (#4 - Way too fast for anything to adapt.)
Desertification. (#5 - A symptom of #1 & #4.)
Oil wars. (#6 - A symptom of #3)
I don't hold out a lot of hope for human nature either.
"I don't understand that at all."
That's why the tradgedy of the commons is
"In a democratic sense everybody has the same right to emit CO2....everybody should get a particular fraction thereof and if they choose to sell it great."
Still reading? - I agree with you and I think the majority of mankind are on our side.
That would lead to increased costs for everything as the "noble" class who purchased up tons and tons of indulgences resell them to actual businesses that create products.
So (in a capitialist sense) how is that different to any other service side industry, eg: a bank loan? The English civil war, the French revolution and the war of independece were all reactions to the excesses of nobility - on a modern global scale we are "the nobility". At the end of the day no amount of politics will change a physical limit of nature, politicians generally refuse to acknowledge any kind of limit that they themselves have not set. If they set that limit according to GDP then the "buying of indulgences" is meaningless because the indulgences are as limitless as GDP.
If our leaders suddenly started using logic, then the difficult part of a demoractic cap and trade scheme is how to credit everyones individual "C02 account" when a large chunk of the population have never seen a letter box. The pra
"Many actors majored in some field of science rather than art..."
Comic Guy voice: "I like to refer to these people as "closet geeks", their many faux friends call them "interesting"...pffft!"
No, I think he is talking about the followers of the new, new testament.
I'm not saying plants don't take carbon from the atmosphere, what I am saying is that it won't scale without doing incredible environmental damage (that has nothing to do with GHG). Not to mention that making fuel from food on a large scale is morally disturbing if you really are intrested in the poor.
The reason I don't agree with carbon credits for trees is that nations will claim plantations are trees, ero replacing native forrest with palm trees will garner even more profit than it does now. Also it is not simply a matter of calculating C02 extraction potential from the size of the plant, there are a miriad of other factors and in some circumstances plants can produce more C02 than they consume. All this uncertainty and potential profit will lead to people doing exactly what you accuse Gore of doing.
I think your wrong about Al Gore, he is not proposing a 'tax' rather he is promoting the IPCC's proposal of a 'rationing' scheme for emmisions, ie: auction the right to pollute by the ton and limit the amount of tons emitted globally to match what the biosphere can physically absorb (~2.5Gt/pa). The idea is commonly known as "cap and trade", unfortunately it looks like the powerfull polluters such as US, India, Russia & China want the "cap" based on GDP (as opposed to the actual physical limit that exists in nature).
BTW: Gore doesn't carry the same political baggage here as he does in the US and you are entitled to an opinion.
Thanks for the link. :)
I notice they have a picture of the "morning glory", I haven't seen it myself but my younger brother runs a safari style camping/touring bussiness around where it occurs so I am hoping to see it on one of my visits.