Much like we don't know exactly how much wealth is hiding under someone's mattress (or stored in the form of precious items that could be sold at any time) yet we still manage to find a value for currency that in modern times more or less represents a fraction of GDP... Bitcoin will find a value regardless of how much is lost.
If there's confidence a certain percentage of tokens have become permanently inaccessible, their 'confirmed' loss from the Bitcoin economy will encourage the market to share their perceived value among those tokens still accessible.
It's been a while since I used a Bitcoin client. It used to be that the units were more or less hard coded, so significant inflation or deflation required a client update if you didn't want to deal with large numbers of zeroes. If Bitcoin was actually usable for common purchases that could be a problem.
>Let's rather go collect some money and buy us a ho ourselves.
It might be better to bankroll a professional lobbyist, so you have the potential to persuade more than one politician. Give your lobbyist a list of issues to work and a budget for researchers, lawyers, and bribes (I mean.. err, an entertainment budget for business lunches, etc). They're going to need an office, too.
Now, the lobbyist is going to cost about US 150K + bonuses and benefits. A legislative researcher pulls about 50K, and you're probably going to fork out another 80K for the lawyer. To be honest... you're going to want someone to handle office administration, reception, and errands, so probably throw another 35-40K in there for that. Oh, and you're going to pay around US 4500/month for office space.
You're getting close to 400K just to start up, and that's before you've figured out how much it costs to actually DO something with that office and those people. It's not unusual to spend millions on lobbying in DC.
So... maybe 1.5 million per year to start. Can you crowd fund that? Given the events of the last year, are you prepared to show all the money comes from Americans? How are you going to decide which issues your team should work on? (I can answer the last question - break your crowd funding attempt up by subject, divide efforts by the budget proportions). Who is going to give the orders to the team, judge their effectiveness, etc.?
It's perhaps not as big a job as you might think, but it's not simple, either.
I wonder what it says about my view of the world compared to yours that I went straight to the "must be about sex predators" and you saw the innocent alternative.
BTW - letting the kids play video games or watch a movie works just fine... with a privacy-lock doorknob or a barrel bolt on the master bedroom door just in case.
The problem is that SOME Americans need to have their noses rubbed in shit to understand they're soiling their own nest. The rest of 'em just get to enjoy the health risks even if they're actively trying to prevent the situation.
Beyond that... damn it, you shouldn't have to spend all your free time trying to stop assholes from ruining your life. Politicians are there to handle things for you, so you can do your job instead of theirs... and they're all dropping the ball.
Don't forget, it's the party that chose its representatives, and it's the party that is currently willfully ignoring their options for taking corrective action... because they're choosing power over what's right. The average shmuck voted for the choice they were given, and even then the system passed their votes to a second tier that was created specifically to stop someone like Trump from getting elected... and anyone who tried to do that job was prevented from doing so.
Rugged individualism, unfettered capitalism, propaganda-fed nationalism, and a lack of respect for education. That's what gave the USA what it has today, and that's what's taking it away again.
Who hasn't typed disturbing things into a search engine just to see if you get results, or to shock the person watching you surf?
I can't take the query, "How to have sex with your kids" very seriously, since anyone who actually has kids probably knows how sex works, and predators seem to instinctively understand how to groom and control their targets... they don't need a manual for that part, either.
If the questions were about finding darknet child porn exchange forums, THEN I'd be more concerned about finding the people making the queries.
>Why does everyone think rising sea levels will force all the people out of cities?
Global warming is about more than just sea level rise... there will also be more heat in the system, driving more powerful storms.
You're thinking about the effects of sea level being perhaps a dozen feet higher within a single human lifetime (and that's from now... but it sounds an awful lot like that's waiting for the dam to burst and the actual level increase will happen much faster than that once it begins). Now imagine it comes with more hurricanes and tropical storms on top of that.
The time scale matters, too. If sea level creeps up slowly, then yes... people will build protective infrastructure where the land permits it (if you're on fairly porous land, a dike isn't going to cut it). But if you only have a few decades... well, for that kind of mega-engineering project, you might be looking at 50 years for a rush job. And that's if your economy can support the effort.
Rising sea levels won't force all the people out of cities... it will force MOST people out of MOST low-lying coastal cities.
>here we have a US president failing to take meaningful actions
Actually, you have a US president who is taking meaningful actions to prevent even token support for meaningful actions to alleviate or moderate the effects of global warming.
I've set my minimum threshold to filter most ACs, but really it's so rare I see an AC post that has anything of value - usually it's racist, homophobic, 'first', or someone being vitriolic and not wanting the backlash attached to their account - that I'd be happy to see Slashdot eliminate AC posts.
It's not like we're posting anything here we should be afraid of bringing the cops to our doors with a warrant, or that if we were posting as 'AC' would really help anyway.
I think such a business model could work, and actually start on a small scale and scale up as needed.
Most of the time, you really only care about things in geographical proximity to you, so if your service starts out only handling one small or medium-sized city... OK, there's still utility there.
You'd definitely operate at a loss while building your database (I think you'd have to give away the service for the first year or so), so a decent amount of startup funding would be required.
But imagine the sales pitch: "Pay us to track you so we can be your personal assistant - and because we get paid by YOU and not advertisers, we have no financial motivation to share your information (excepting some we will share with other users if you explicitly tell us we can) and no financial motivation to sell your information either. Even more - we also promise not to as part of our contract with you!"
I think you should call it 'El Goog'. It's catchy, and it's Google backwards, just like the business model.
I assumed when he made the boast that it would be 100 days from the signing of a contract, or that there'd be an allowance for shipping times to Australia and possibly other 'fudge factors'.
I'm now assuming instead that there was a huge loss involved here in order to move and install the required hardware in such a short time, just to prove the point it was possible and would actually work, and thus make future sales more likely.
>The fundamental component that any type of piece would be a cube like Minecraft.
1m x 1m x 4m - though most components would be relatively flat, I would consider each as being attached perpendicularly to the edge of one side of a 1x1 square. The 4m height would be 3m for the interior and then 0.5m for a raised floor and drop ceiling for ease of wiring and plumbing.
That means 12 wall sections could complete a room standard 3m x 3m room, with beams to cross the space and make a 3x3 grid to support 1m x 1m ceiling or floor panels. Maybe I'd even put in a tiny bit of slope to allow for drainage to a center point to minimize water damage in the event of temporary flooding.
You'd have inside/inside walls, and inside/outside walls (insulated), with solid, doorway, and window options for each. Since I'm talking about really inexpensive housing, I don't think I'd worry about double doors (or sliding patio doors, etc.) or bay windows. If someone wanted to, though... we are talking 'snap-in'. There's no reason an aftermarket bay window couldn't be used so long as it remained within the mechanical limits of the wall.
I probably would ensure the system's components were sturdy enough to support a second floor, but only if it made enough sense economically to do that rather than have an additional set of 'heavy-duty' wall sections for the first floor of a two story build. Which ever was ultimately less expensive, right?
The roof gets a bit more 'iffy'. I think the base roof would simply be flat but slightly raised on one side to allow for rain drainage. For colder climates you'd likely have to worry about a pitched roof... which is a problem because the pitch depends on the snow load and the total height on the specific footprint of the floor plan. It'd be a bugger to standardize, and the less square the floor plan, the more complex the roof shape.
And I'd definitely have to double-check if 1m is an adequate width for a wall section. I'm not confident you could fit a door and suitable frame into that and still have it wide enough to allow a standard wheelchair to pass through. Accessibility is important; I imagine that if you're both in the market for such a house AND need a wheelchair... you probably wouldn't have a lot of money to get the home customized.
To make the information usage less likely to be evil, you have to change the customer.
What you're looking for is a Google service you'd pay for, where perhaps venues would also pay to be listed so that if you linger in them they'd be considered valid to bring to your attention again in the future. With a Google app on your mobile device to give a thumbs up or down, and a private/friends only/public option (with Google giving you a reduced service rate if you use 'public' so they can share the ratings with others and improve their services)
Right now, advertisers pay and YOU are the product. They want more information on you to be used to influence you to go to them based on their desire to sell to you, not your desire to purchase from them. To flip that around you have to flip Google's revenue stream around.
>The bulk of the cost of building a house is the fittings (Joinery, taps, benchtops, electrical etc)
What's really needed there is standards for home components that allow click-together parts. Houses so built would be even more identical than in a single-builder development, but they'd be a lot less expensive.
Imagine prebuilt wall sections, snap-in windows and doors, factory-drilled wiring channels (with click-connect joins and standard outlet positions), etc. The factory could churn out a lot more homes if they could build multiples of a small set of standard sections that get nailed together on site. Imagine standard drywall panels that simply fit in place and all you have to do is lock them in with a bit of trim (so no mudding over seams, etc., and the trim sections would be standard-cut too).
Prefab's already a decent option, but I always see it being used for custom homes. The whole 'prefab' thing tends to be more 'it was custom built off site' than 'a bunch of factory made standard components'.
> And the Amendment was specifically for enabling the overthrow of a tyrannical government, as well as having the population armed in case of foreign invasion.
Those purposes no longer apply. You're not going to get through the cops, the FBI, the ATF, the national guard, the reserves, and the US military to overthrow your government. And if a foreign force gets by the world-supreme US military, no gun you carry will make a lick of difference.
>Self defense is also an entirely valid purpose.
Only because the bad guys also have guns. If they didn't (or had them less frequently) you wouldn't need one. There are quite a few Western countries that have had a great amount of success with those types of policies.
> So yes, killing people is absolutely defined as a legitimate reason to own guns, as it should be.
If you're in law enforcement or security, sure. Other than that it should be hunting and the range, because the more people walking around thinking they're Rambo, the more dangerous society gets.
your argument basically boils down to "the free market will fix it".
And there is more than ample evidence that that flat out will not happen.
Like... recent history. Or even the present.
There are (many) instances in which a free market does not work, and when the free market fails the situation tends to settle into a consumer-abusive equilibrium.
Given that code sharing is a big part of the GitHub mission, it should come at no surprise that the platform stores a lot of duplicated code: 70 per cent, a study has found. An international team of eight researchers didn't set out to measure GitHub duplication. Their original aim was to try and define the "granularity" of copying -- that is, how much files changed between different clones -- but along the way, they turned up a "staggering rate of file-level duplication" that made them change direction. Presented at this year's OOPSLA (part of the late-October Association of Computing Machinery) SPLASH conference in Vancouver, the University of California at Irvine-led research found that out of 428 million files on GitHub, only 85 million are unique. Before readers say "so what?", the reason for this study was to improve other researchers' work. Anybody studying software using GitHub probably seeks random samples, and the authors of this study argued duplication needs to be taken into account.
Both have legitimate uses and both are force multipliers used to break the law more effectively, so there's no difference there.
However, the laws broken with them ARE different. BitTorrent makes it easier to share or copy material when you do not have the legal right to do so. Firearms make it easier to kill greater numbers of people, and more rapidly, before you can be stopped.
Society could do with a little less intellectual property protection (such protection has been expanded so far it no longer serves its purpose - which was originally to enrich society, not just the owner!), and more gun control. NOT confiscation, mind you. And no, I really don't trust the government not to say they're implementing gun control and not switch to confiscation as soon as they can get away with it. That's a problem.
However, there's nothing wrong with saying there's no legitimate civilian use for a weapon that fires more than [x] rounds per minute or a magazine that holds more the [y] rounds. If you're hunting or going for target practice... you don't need a lead hose. High capacity or high rate of fire weapons are treasured for the capacity to kill people.
Great, you say, because that's for keeping the government in check. I have bad news for you - the USA has a pretty strong military (and for domestic purposes the police and reserves aren't far behind) and you and your buddies don't frighten them one bit huddling in a survivalist camp stroking your firearms erotically. The only reason those nuts manage to hold off the cops is if they have hostages (unarmed family in their camps) and because the police are reluctant to simply kill them all. But make no mistake - it's a one-sided battle if it comes to that.
The ready availability of guns in the USA favors the criminal element far more strongly than the 'prepared concealed carrier hero' - if guns were significantly more difficult to obtain, and if the culture was more about responsible ownership than machismo, there'd be less opportunity for those heroes in the first place.
I'm not saying those guns aren't valuable just for fun (I've fired some myself back in the day), I'm saying the fun isn't worth the cost to society.
>But we space nutters don't really consider Mars a good target for colonization anyway: there is little economic benefit, and it's a deep gravity well.
Speak for yourself. Since we have no way (yet) to adapt the human body to zero-g or radiation exposure significantly above what we get on Earth... Mars gives us gravity (but less than Earth's, which is handy so long as it's sufficient for human physiology) and a place to burrow for protection from radiation.
It gives us a place we can plausibly survive with minor improvements to existing technology. Perhaps that plausibility is only because of ignorance of the depth and breadth of the problems involved, but it's still very definitely easier than living in a can floating in vacuum (though still much harder than surviving in, say, present-day Antarctica without a supply line).
There's little economic benefit, it's true... unless and until there's a thriving colony which will be its own excuse for existing. And it's further from the Sun so it's probably a better launching point than Earth for capturing and mining asteroids (they'll be moving more slowly further out). It's definitely a better place to start if you're heading to the asteroid belt to grab something there.
>Only problems I can think of are that it could either unfairly harm niche product monopolies, or allow them through a loophole, depending on how you look at it
You might have to put in exemptions based on the percentage of GDP or something (I prefer relative measurements because it reduces the need to update the legislation periodically). If some company has a complete monopoly on making a widget but only has ten customers... nobody's going to care. And you'd have to have language that handles regional monopolies - either allowing them because there's no local economic case for competition or denying them because the company is using a federal-level 49% to justify regional 100% market share.
Nothing's easy once you get people involved who are all very much motivated to find loopholes to exploit.
> It is a fact that Venus is the more earth-like planet inside the solar system
By mass and gravity. The surface and atmospheric conditions on Mars are closer to Earth than those of Venus, by a longshot. Mars, for instance, has remnants of a magnetic field, Venus doesn't. Mars has an average temperature of -60c, Venus is 462c. Mars has a surface pressure of 600mbar. Venus has a surface pressure of 93bar. The Martian atmosphere is mostly CO2, as is that of Venus... but Venus also has sulfuric acid. A day on Venus is 243 days long. A day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than one on Earth. Mars has a couple of small moons (though admittedly not really significant compared to ours). Venus does not.
If you ask me which rock is more like Earth, for anything other than mass and density I'll choose Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
This is only sort of a problem.
Much like we don't know exactly how much wealth is hiding under someone's mattress (or stored in the form of precious items that could be sold at any time) yet we still manage to find a value for currency that in modern times more or less represents a fraction of GDP... Bitcoin will find a value regardless of how much is lost.
If there's confidence a certain percentage of tokens have become permanently inaccessible, their 'confirmed' loss from the Bitcoin economy will encourage the market to share their perceived value among those tokens still accessible.
It's been a while since I used a Bitcoin client. It used to be that the units were more or less hard coded, so significant inflation or deflation required a client update if you didn't want to deal with large numbers of zeroes. If Bitcoin was actually usable for common purchases that could be a problem.
>Storms are caused by differentials, not absolute heat levels
Which is why it's called 'global warming', not 'even warming around the globe'. Even then, there are other effects in play.
https://earthobservatory.nasa....
>rest of your idiocy, just can't be arsed to argue with an idiot.
Uh huh. So I assume you avoid talking to mirrors.
>Let's rather go collect some money and buy us a ho ourselves.
It might be better to bankroll a professional lobbyist, so you have the potential to persuade more than one politician. Give your lobbyist a list of issues to work and a budget for researchers, lawyers, and bribes (I mean.. err, an entertainment budget for business lunches, etc). They're going to need an office, too.
Now, the lobbyist is going to cost about US 150K + bonuses and benefits. A legislative researcher pulls about 50K, and you're probably going to fork out another 80K for the lawyer. To be honest... you're going to want someone to handle office administration, reception, and errands, so probably throw another 35-40K in there for that. Oh, and you're going to pay around US 4500/month for office space.
You're getting close to 400K just to start up, and that's before you've figured out how much it costs to actually DO something with that office and those people. It's not unusual to spend millions on lobbying in DC.
So... maybe 1.5 million per year to start. Can you crowd fund that? Given the events of the last year, are you prepared to show all the money comes from Americans? How are you going to decide which issues your team should work on? (I can answer the last question - break your crowd funding attempt up by subject, divide efforts by the budget proportions). Who is going to give the orders to the team, judge their effectiveness, etc.?
It's perhaps not as big a job as you might think, but it's not simple, either.
I wonder what it says about my view of the world compared to yours that I went straight to the "must be about sex predators" and you saw the innocent alternative.
BTW - letting the kids play video games or watch a movie works just fine... with a privacy-lock doorknob or a barrel bolt on the master bedroom door just in case.
The problem is that SOME Americans need to have their noses rubbed in shit to understand they're soiling their own nest. The rest of 'em just get to enjoy the health risks even if they're actively trying to prevent the situation.
Beyond that... damn it, you shouldn't have to spend all your free time trying to stop assholes from ruining your life. Politicians are there to handle things for you, so you can do your job instead of theirs... and they're all dropping the ball.
Don't forget, it's the party that chose its representatives, and it's the party that is currently willfully ignoring their options for taking corrective action... because they're choosing power over what's right. The average shmuck voted for the choice they were given, and even then the system passed their votes to a second tier that was created specifically to stop someone like Trump from getting elected... and anyone who tried to do that job was prevented from doing so.
Rugged individualism, unfettered capitalism, propaganda-fed nationalism, and a lack of respect for education. That's what gave the USA what it has today, and that's what's taking it away again.
Who hasn't typed disturbing things into a search engine just to see if you get results, or to shock the person watching you surf?
I can't take the query, "How to have sex with your kids" very seriously, since anyone who actually has kids probably knows how sex works, and predators seem to instinctively understand how to groom and control their targets... they don't need a manual for that part, either.
If the questions were about finding darknet child porn exchange forums, THEN I'd be more concerned about finding the people making the queries.
>Why does everyone think rising sea levels will force all the people out of cities?
Global warming is about more than just sea level rise... there will also be more heat in the system, driving more powerful storms.
You're thinking about the effects of sea level being perhaps a dozen feet higher within a single human lifetime (and that's from now... but it sounds an awful lot like that's waiting for the dam to burst and the actual level increase will happen much faster than that once it begins). Now imagine it comes with more hurricanes and tropical storms on top of that.
The time scale matters, too. If sea level creeps up slowly, then yes... people will build protective infrastructure where the land permits it (if you're on fairly porous land, a dike isn't going to cut it). But if you only have a few decades... well, for that kind of mega-engineering project, you might be looking at 50 years for a rush job. And that's if your economy can support the effort.
Rising sea levels won't force all the people out of cities... it will force MOST people out of MOST low-lying coastal cities.
>here we have a US president failing to take meaningful actions
Actually, you have a US president who is taking meaningful actions to prevent even token support for meaningful actions to alleviate or moderate the effects of global warming.
Also c) not an economics major
So... a redundant post just to be insulting? Nice.
Thank you for proving my point and posting as AC to avoid your vitriolic post from being associated to your Slashdot account.
>Bye Coward!
I've set my minimum threshold to filter most ACs, but really it's so rare I see an AC post that has anything of value - usually it's racist, homophobic, 'first', or someone being vitriolic and not wanting the backlash attached to their account - that I'd be happy to see Slashdot eliminate AC posts.
It's not like we're posting anything here we should be afraid of bringing the cops to our doors with a warrant, or that if we were posting as 'AC' would really help anyway.
I think such a business model could work, and actually start on a small scale and scale up as needed.
Most of the time, you really only care about things in geographical proximity to you, so if your service starts out only handling one small or medium-sized city... OK, there's still utility there.
You'd definitely operate at a loss while building your database (I think you'd have to give away the service for the first year or so), so a decent amount of startup funding would be required.
But imagine the sales pitch: "Pay us to track you so we can be your personal assistant - and because we get paid by YOU and not advertisers, we have no financial motivation to share your information (excepting some we will share with other users if you explicitly tell us we can) and no financial motivation to sell your information either. Even more - we also promise not to as part of our contract with you!"
I think you should call it 'El Goog'. It's catchy, and it's Google backwards, just like the business model.
I assumed when he made the boast that it would be 100 days from the signing of a contract, or that there'd be an allowance for shipping times to Australia and possibly other 'fudge factors'.
I'm now assuming instead that there was a huge loss involved here in order to move and install the required hardware in such a short time, just to prove the point it was possible and would actually work, and thus make future sales more likely.
>The fundamental component that any type of piece would be a cube like Minecraft.
1m x 1m x 4m - though most components would be relatively flat, I would consider each as being attached perpendicularly to the edge of one side of a 1x1 square. The 4m height would be 3m for the interior and then 0.5m for a raised floor and drop ceiling for ease of wiring and plumbing.
That means 12 wall sections could complete a room standard 3m x 3m room, with beams to cross the space and make a 3x3 grid to support 1m x 1m ceiling or floor panels. Maybe I'd even put in a tiny bit of slope to allow for drainage to a center point to minimize water damage in the event of temporary flooding.
You'd have inside/inside walls, and inside/outside walls (insulated), with solid, doorway, and window options for each. Since I'm talking about really inexpensive housing, I don't think I'd worry about double doors (or sliding patio doors, etc.) or bay windows. If someone wanted to, though... we are talking 'snap-in'. There's no reason an aftermarket bay window couldn't be used so long as it remained within the mechanical limits of the wall.
I probably would ensure the system's components were sturdy enough to support a second floor, but only if it made enough sense economically to do that rather than have an additional set of 'heavy-duty' wall sections for the first floor of a two story build. Which ever was ultimately less expensive, right?
The roof gets a bit more 'iffy'. I think the base roof would simply be flat but slightly raised on one side to allow for rain drainage. For colder climates you'd likely have to worry about a pitched roof... which is a problem because the pitch depends on the snow load and the total height on the specific footprint of the floor plan. It'd be a bugger to standardize, and the less square the floor plan, the more complex the roof shape.
And I'd definitely have to double-check if 1m is an adequate width for a wall section. I'm not confident you could fit a door and suitable frame into that and still have it wide enough to allow a standard wheelchair to pass through. Accessibility is important; I imagine that if you're both in the market for such a house AND need a wheelchair... you probably wouldn't have a lot of money to get the home customized.
To make the information usage less likely to be evil, you have to change the customer.
What you're looking for is a Google service you'd pay for, where perhaps venues would also pay to be listed so that if you linger in them they'd be considered valid to bring to your attention again in the future. With a Google app on your mobile device to give a thumbs up or down, and a private/friends only/public option (with Google giving you a reduced service rate if you use 'public' so they can share the ratings with others and improve their services)
Right now, advertisers pay and YOU are the product. They want more information on you to be used to influence you to go to them based on their desire to sell to you, not your desire to purchase from them. To flip that around you have to flip Google's revenue stream around.
I don't see it happening.
>The bulk of the cost of building a house is the fittings (Joinery, taps, benchtops, electrical etc)
What's really needed there is standards for home components that allow click-together parts. Houses so built would be even more identical than in a single-builder development, but they'd be a lot less expensive.
Imagine prebuilt wall sections, snap-in windows and doors, factory-drilled wiring channels (with click-connect joins and standard outlet positions), etc. The factory could churn out a lot more homes if they could build multiples of a small set of standard sections that get nailed together on site. Imagine standard drywall panels that simply fit in place and all you have to do is lock them in with a bit of trim (so no mudding over seams, etc., and the trim sections would be standard-cut too).
Prefab's already a decent option, but I always see it being used for custom homes. The whole 'prefab' thing tends to be more 'it was custom built off site' than 'a bunch of factory made standard components'.
>Off a bit on the Math there...
Some people have a human nemesis, I have decimal places.
> And the Amendment was specifically for enabling the overthrow of a tyrannical government, as well as having the population armed in case of foreign invasion.
Those purposes no longer apply. You're not going to get through the cops, the FBI, the ATF, the national guard, the reserves, and the US military to overthrow your government. And if a foreign force gets by the world-supreme US military, no gun you carry will make a lick of difference.
>Self defense is also an entirely valid purpose.
Only because the bad guys also have guns. If they didn't (or had them less frequently) you wouldn't need one. There are quite a few Western countries that have had a great amount of success with those types of policies.
> So yes, killing people is absolutely defined as a legitimate reason to own guns, as it should be.
If you're in law enforcement or security, sure. Other than that it should be hunting and the range, because the more people walking around thinking they're Rambo, the more dangerous society gets.
Like... recent history. Or even the present.
There are (many) instances in which a free market does not work, and when the free market fails the situation tends to settle into a consumer-abusive equilibrium.
Richard Chirgwin, writing for The Register:
Both have legitimate uses and both are force multipliers used to break the law more effectively, so there's no difference there.
However, the laws broken with them ARE different. BitTorrent makes it easier to share or copy material when you do not have the legal right to do so. Firearms make it easier to kill greater numbers of people, and more rapidly, before you can be stopped.
Society could do with a little less intellectual property protection (such protection has been expanded so far it no longer serves its purpose - which was originally to enrich society, not just the owner!), and more gun control. NOT confiscation, mind you. And no, I really don't trust the government not to say they're implementing gun control and not switch to confiscation as soon as they can get away with it. That's a problem.
However, there's nothing wrong with saying there's no legitimate civilian use for a weapon that fires more than [x] rounds per minute or a magazine that holds more the [y] rounds. If you're hunting or going for target practice... you don't need a lead hose. High capacity or high rate of fire weapons are treasured for the capacity to kill people.
Great, you say, because that's for keeping the government in check. I have bad news for you - the USA has a pretty strong military (and for domestic purposes the police and reserves aren't far behind) and you and your buddies don't frighten them one bit huddling in a survivalist camp stroking your firearms erotically. The only reason those nuts manage to hold off the cops is if they have hostages (unarmed family in their camps) and because the police are reluctant to simply kill them all. But make no mistake - it's a one-sided battle if it comes to that.
The ready availability of guns in the USA favors the criminal element far more strongly than the 'prepared concealed carrier hero' - if guns were significantly more difficult to obtain, and if the culture was more about responsible ownership than machismo, there'd be less opportunity for those heroes in the first place.
I'm not saying those guns aren't valuable just for fun (I've fired some myself back in the day), I'm saying the fun isn't worth the cost to society.
>But we space nutters don't really consider Mars a good target for colonization anyway: there is little economic benefit, and it's a deep gravity well.
Speak for yourself. Since we have no way (yet) to adapt the human body to zero-g or radiation exposure significantly above what we get on Earth... Mars gives us gravity (but less than Earth's, which is handy so long as it's sufficient for human physiology) and a place to burrow for protection from radiation.
It gives us a place we can plausibly survive with minor improvements to existing technology. Perhaps that plausibility is only because of ignorance of the depth and breadth of the problems involved, but it's still very definitely easier than living in a can floating in vacuum (though still much harder than surviving in, say, present-day Antarctica without a supply line).
There's little economic benefit, it's true... unless and until there's a thriving colony which will be its own excuse for existing. And it's further from the Sun so it's probably a better launching point than Earth for capturing and mining asteroids (they'll be moving more slowly further out). It's definitely a better place to start if you're heading to the asteroid belt to grab something there.
>Only problems I can think of are that it could either unfairly harm niche product monopolies, or allow them through a loophole, depending on how you look at it
You might have to put in exemptions based on the percentage of GDP or something (I prefer relative measurements because it reduces the need to update the legislation periodically). If some company has a complete monopoly on making a widget but only has ten customers... nobody's going to care. And you'd have to have language that handles regional monopolies - either allowing them because there's no local economic case for competition or denying them because the company is using a federal-level 49% to justify regional 100% market share.
Nothing's easy once you get people involved who are all very much motivated to find loopholes to exploit.
> It is a fact that Venus is the more earth-like planet inside the solar system
By mass and gravity. The surface and atmospheric conditions on Mars are closer to Earth than those of Venus, by a longshot. Mars, for instance, has remnants of a magnetic field, Venus doesn't. Mars has an average temperature of -60c, Venus is 462c. Mars has a surface pressure of 600mbar. Venus has a surface pressure of 93bar. The Martian atmosphere is mostly CO2, as is that of Venus... but Venus also has sulfuric acid. A day on Venus is 243 days long. A day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than one on Earth. Mars has a couple of small moons (though admittedly not really significant compared to ours). Venus does not.
If you ask me which rock is more like Earth, for anything other than mass and density I'll choose Mars.