Typical approach, sate the demand rather than reduce it. Once cheap new power is on line everyone will put a heavier draw on it and we'll be back where we are.
What's the key difference between a hunter-gatherer and us? Available power. Reducing it in a meaningful way is fraught with difficulties. I see only two legitimate possibilities:
1) Vastly higher energy prices - this will happen automatically if we really start to run out of cheap fossil fuels.
2) New technologies, like high efficiency light bulbs, that provide the same function at a lower power consumption.
In the long run, reducing demand is not a solution, because people will always come up with new and useful ways to employ energy. The real solution is finding creative ways to obtain it cleanly and cheaply.
Your entire argument amounts to one big ad-hominem attack. If you're going to assert "libertarian==extreme right", you'd better give us some facts.
As for not understanding history, most of the libertarians I know became libertarians by reading an awful lot of history and economics. I'd be happy to debate FDR's record. Why stop there, let's talk about *really* terrible US presidents - how about Lincoln?
We do not need advanced propulsion to support a growing and ambitious human outpost on Mars. Read the work of Robert Zubrin.
Furthermore, waiting for advanced propulsion just makes the mission cost balloon until its politically impossible. We can do it today. I believe the Mars Society's estimate is $20 billion for a government run mission, or $5 billion done in the private sector.
That's exactly the problem. Our current system of laws recognizes a corporation as a legal person. So when a corporation screws up and kills people, the individuals responsible hide behind their corporate identity.
One plank of the libertarian platform is an end to the legal fiction of corporations as people. When a business kills people or pollutes, the individual officers, managers, etc should be personally liable for the full damages they caused.
Oh, and by the way, the government is a big souless entity too, and the government has guns, not just money.
The idea that most public schools are poor is FUD. They only *seem* poor because so much money is wasted. For example, the NY state school system employs more administrators than teachers.
There are numerous examples of private schools that spend *FAR LESS* per child than your average failing inner city school, yet they achieve vastly better results, even with children who were referred to them as "problem cases" who couldn't succeed in public school.
I had an interesting conversation with a nuclear engineer once about why all the nuclear waste storage facilities leak. His argument was that from an engineering point of view, you want to store everything above ground so its easy to monitor and contain potential leaks before they get anywhere. But because of people's intense fears about radiation, above ground storage is politically infeasiable, and we're forced to store it deep underground, where monitoring and containment are much more difficult and it's easier to leak into ground water supplies.
If you read the article, you'd see that Badnarik favors *increased* legal immigration.
We have bases in Germany, South Korea, etc. Are those places "military states"? No. And neither is any American town with a military base. You need to distinguish between what happens when you put troops in a foreign and hostile country to what happens when you put them in a familiar, welcoming country. El Paso would not suddenly turn into Baghdad.
Personally, I'd like to see a vast reduction in our standing military, moving toward a Switzerland-like citizen militia system. But in the mean time, bringing troops home is the correct solution.
Well, once we've pulled our forces out of the over 150 countries they're stationed in now, we get two big security benefits:
1. Lots of people freed up to guard borders, infrastructure, ports, etc, from the existing terrorists of the world. It is called the Department of *Defense*, after all.
2. The elimination of all the free recruiting propaganda we generate for the terrorists by messing around in their countries.
The FDA is responsible for a vast number of deaths. Consider - their approval process adds an average of 7 years to the development time for a drug. How many people will die in 7 years?
But of course approving a dangerous drug is bad too. Since drug effects are highly variable in different people and difficult to measure, there is really no good way to objectively decide what is "safe". The only sane solution is to give doctors and patients as much information as possible and let them make their own choices.
If the illusion of FDA protection is removed, people (especially doctors) would suddenly care a lot more about the reputation of a given drug manufacturer, and one that tried to push a dangerous drug would be doomed, because everyone would be afraid to touch their stuff forever after.
The bulk of corporate pollution occurs on publicly owned land, because neither the government nor the corporation has any incentive to maintain the value of the property.
Wilderness areas owned by private businesses (such as the paper industry) are typically far better cared for than public land that the government allows them to work on temporarily.
This is documented, for example, in the writings of Mary Ruwart.
Yes, read the work of John Taylor Gatto. His Underground history of Education documents the people and organizations that shaped our present failure of a system.
Entities that fulfill the role of the SEC would likely exist, but there's no need for them to be government controlled. Instead they could be private companies (or nonprofits). A corporation would pay them to perform an audit in order to earn a "Seal of Approval" for their stock.
Investors would learn pretty quick that they should only do business with corporations that have a reputable seal of approval.
If corruption was ever revealed at the auditing company, their seal would become worthless and the market would do away with them. Compare this to the SEC, who will never go out of business, no matter how poorly they do.
This is already how most electrical devices are regulated for safety - they're rated voluntarily by Underwriter Laboratories (the ubiquitous "UL" logo). The same principle can apply to many regulated industries, especially ones where the average consumer does not have enough information to make informed safety decisions.
There is another existing technology that could travel interstellar distances. NASA's Orion project designed a starship propelled by nuclear weapons and a big pusher plate. And yes, the crew can be properly shielded.
Of course what we really should be working on is actual nuclear rockets - controlled nuclear burn instead of explosives. Nuclear gas core rockets are really not beyond present technology, their exhaust is cleaner than the space shuttle's, and they're so powerful you can build big, heavy, safe vehicles.
I, for one, would flame someone who suggested changing the semantics of pipes. Well-defined interfaces are the heart of reliable software. Changing an interface is a very big deal - especially one as entrenched as, for example, pipes.
Of course interfaces need to change sometimes. But first you need to ask how much you're going to break. If the kernel hackers break existing interfaces too much, they risk alienating the users/distros and forking the kernel.
Is this a check on innovation? Absolutely. But I'll point out that Microsoft has even larger checks on innovation - they promise far more backward compatibilty. And it has to be binary compatibility, which is harder than source compatability.
K-12 educators do indeed demand watered down versions of most information, which is part of the problem with basic education today.
Many children are turned off by reading because it is "boring". That's because the books they're forced to read in school have far less complexity and richness than the language children use verbally every day.
There's lots of historical precedent for successfully introducing children to "adult level" books. See for example the writings of John Taylor Gatto.
Why do you think the majority of Americans believe everything they see on TV (ala Fox News)? The public schools teach conformity and a disdain for intellect. Those of us who managed to learn critical thinking have done it despite, not because of, the public schools.
The historical reality is that the US was better educated before the advent of mass government schooling (circa 1915). The architects of our present system explicitly said they wanted to produce docile workers and predictable consumers, not independent men and women. It has been well documented: Underground History of American Education.
For example, here's a quote from Woodrow Wilson about the aims of public education:
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
I certainly agree that math is critical for CS. But I disagree with the idea of not taking advanced math (like Calculus) in high school.
Quite frankly, the primary and secondary education systems (at least in the US) are horribly broken. There's nothing about calculus that is too hard for high school students - even average ones. But they've been taught math so poorly since the very beginning that they're hopelessly behind.
Teach yourself (and teach your own children), school will not do it for you. Just think of all those years you wasted learning to multiply over and over again when you could have been progressing.
The idea that young minds (say, fifth graders) are incapable of grasping more advanced math is a fallacy. Schools teach badly, then students underperform, then schools say "See, the curriculum is too hard - we need to slow down!" Wash, rinse, and recurse, and you get the abysmal state of education today.
Anyone who wants to understand how the American education system got broken needs to read this.
I think the people who worry about humans vs machines are missing an important trend. The distinction between humans and their technology is decreasing, and will continue to do so.
Our technology is beginning to reach the level of biological compexity. And the pace of improvement continues to increase. It's only a matter of time before we can build machines with the capabilities of living things.
At the same time, we're learning to manipulate (aka engineer) our own biology at deeper levels, just like we engineer machines. There are many incentives to reengineer and improve our own bodies.
Put these two trends together, and I predict that the distinction between man and machine will blur and eventually disappear. There will always be people with a metaphysical dislike for the idea, but there is no functional difference between a person and a sufficiently complex machine.
The defining issue of the next century will be defining what "human" really means. We already see the beginning of this debate (abortion, stem cell research, etc). It will only increase.
Contamination has already happened, and its been happening for the past 3.5 billion years.
500 kg/year of unsterilized Martian rocks are estimated to fall on Earth every year, and similarly some amount of Earth rocks fall on Mars. These are asteroids ejected during earlier impacts.
Since we know that many bacteria can survive hard vaccum and extreme cold for very long periods of time, and survive the heat of reentry while within the rocks, contamination in both directions is almost certain to have already occured, and occured many times.
I'm not terribly surprised. I spent a summer working on the Comanche, and it was clear that this was the kind of project that bureaucrats and managers build careers around. There was no incentive to actually get anything built.
"We'll pay you whatever it costs to build it plus 10%" is such blatant corruption.
Many of the "terrorist organizations" shut down by the federal government have been Islamic charities. It's too bad they don't seem to get a trial to defend the accusation that they're linked to terrorists. I have very little doubt that legitimate do-gooders have been caught in the dragnet.
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What's the key difference between a hunter-gatherer and us? Available power. Reducing it in a meaningful way is fraught with difficulties. I see only two legitimate possibilities:
1) Vastly higher energy prices - this will happen automatically if we really start to run out of cheap fossil fuels.
2) New technologies, like high efficiency light bulbs, that provide the same function at a lower power consumption.
In the long run, reducing demand is not a solution, because people will always come up with new and useful ways to employ energy. The real solution is finding creative ways to obtain it cleanly and cheaply.
20% market share is hardly a monopoly.
Your entire argument amounts to one big ad-hominem attack. If you're going to assert "libertarian==extreme right", you'd better give us some facts.
As for not understanding history, most of the libertarians I know became libertarians by reading an awful lot of history and economics. I'd be happy to debate FDR's record. Why stop there, let's talk about *really* terrible US presidents - how about Lincoln?
We do not need advanced propulsion to support a growing and ambitious human outpost on Mars. Read the work of Robert Zubrin.
Furthermore, waiting for advanced propulsion just makes the mission cost balloon until its politically impossible. We can do it today. I believe the Mars Society's estimate is $20 billion for a government run mission, or $5 billion done in the private sector.
That's exactly the problem. Our current system of laws recognizes a corporation as a legal person. So when a corporation screws up and kills people, the individuals responsible hide behind their corporate identity.
One plank of the libertarian platform is an end to the legal fiction of corporations as people. When a business kills people or pollutes, the individual officers, managers, etc should be personally liable for the full damages they caused.
Oh, and by the way, the government is a big souless entity too, and the government has guns, not just money.
There are numerous examples of private schools that spend *FAR LESS* per child than your average failing inner city school, yet they achieve vastly better results, even with children who were referred to them as "problem cases" who couldn't succeed in public school.
Read the facts in The Underground History of Education, full text online.
I had an interesting conversation with a nuclear engineer once about why all the nuclear waste storage facilities leak. His argument was that from an engineering point of view, you want to store everything above ground so its easy to monitor and contain potential leaks before they get anywhere. But because of people's intense fears about radiation, above ground storage is politically infeasiable, and we're forced to store it deep underground, where monitoring and containment are much more difficult and it's easier to leak into ground water supplies.
I find your side note curious, because it is exactly my own understanding of human nature that attracts me to libertarianism. I believe that:
1. Power corrupts.
2. People are self-interested.
That's really all it takes. What do you disagree with?
If you read the article, you'd see that Badnarik favors *increased* legal immigration.
We have bases in Germany, South Korea, etc. Are those places "military states"? No. And neither is any American town with a military base. You need to distinguish between what happens when you put troops in a foreign and hostile country to what happens when you put them in a familiar, welcoming country. El Paso would not suddenly turn into Baghdad.
Personally, I'd like to see a vast reduction in our standing military, moving toward a Switzerland-like citizen militia system. But in the mean time, bringing troops home is the correct solution.
Well, once we've pulled our forces out of the over 150 countries they're stationed in now, we get two big security benefits:
1. Lots of people freed up to guard borders, infrastructure, ports, etc, from the existing terrorists of the world. It is called the Department of *Defense*, after all.
2. The elimination of all the free recruiting propaganda we generate for the terrorists by messing around in their countries.
The FDA is responsible for a vast number of deaths. Consider - their approval process adds an average of 7 years to the development time for a drug. How many people will die in 7 years?
But of course approving a dangerous drug is bad too. Since drug effects are highly variable in different people and difficult to measure, there is really no good way to objectively decide what is "safe". The only sane solution is to give doctors and patients as much information as possible and let them make their own choices.
If the illusion of FDA protection is removed, people (especially doctors) would suddenly care a lot more about the reputation of a given drug manufacturer, and one that tried to push a dangerous drug would be doomed, because everyone would be afraid to touch their stuff forever after.
The bulk of corporate pollution occurs on publicly owned land, because neither the government nor the corporation has any incentive to maintain the value of the property.
Wilderness areas owned by private businesses (such as the paper industry) are typically far better cared for than public land that the government allows them to work on temporarily.
This is documented, for example, in the writings of Mary Ruwart.
Yes, read the work of John Taylor Gatto. His Underground history of Education documents the people and organizations that shaped our present failure of a system.
Entities that fulfill the role of the SEC would likely exist, but there's no need for them to be government controlled. Instead they could be private companies (or nonprofits). A corporation would pay them to perform an audit in order to earn a "Seal of Approval" for their stock.
Investors would learn pretty quick that they should only do business with corporations that have a reputable seal of approval.
If corruption was ever revealed at the auditing company, their seal would become worthless and the market would do away with them. Compare this to the SEC, who will never go out of business, no matter how poorly they do.
This is already how most electrical devices are regulated for safety - they're rated voluntarily by Underwriter Laboratories (the ubiquitous "UL" logo). The same principle can apply to many regulated industries, especially ones where the average consumer does not have enough information to make informed safety decisions.
There is another existing technology that could travel interstellar distances. NASA's Orion project designed a starship propelled by nuclear weapons and a big pusher plate. And yes, the crew can be properly shielded.
Of course what we really should be working on is actual nuclear rockets - controlled nuclear burn instead of explosives. Nuclear gas core rockets are really not beyond present technology, their exhaust is cleaner than the space shuttle's, and they're so powerful you can build big, heavy, safe vehicles.
I, for one, would flame someone who suggested changing the semantics of pipes. Well-defined interfaces are the heart of reliable software. Changing an interface is a very big deal - especially one as entrenched as, for example, pipes.
Of course interfaces need to change sometimes. But first you need to ask how much you're going to break. If the kernel hackers break existing interfaces too much, they risk alienating the users/distros and forking the kernel.
Is this a check on innovation? Absolutely. But I'll point out that Microsoft has even larger checks on innovation - they promise far more backward compatibilty. And it has to be binary compatibility, which is harder than source compatability.
Many children are turned off by reading because it is "boring". That's because the books they're forced to read in school have far less complexity and richness than the language children use verbally every day.
There's lots of historical precedent for successfully introducing children to "adult level" books. See for example the writings of John Taylor Gatto.
The historical reality is that the US was better educated before the advent of mass government schooling (circa 1915). The architects of our present system explicitly said they wanted to produce docile workers and predictable consumers, not independent men and women. It has been well documented: Underground History of American Education.
For example, here's a quote from Woodrow Wilson about the aims of public education:
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
"And will we some integration of Solaris' strong points into other open source OSes like Linux and BSD?"
Mmmm. Some integration will we make.
I certainly agree that math is critical for CS. But I disagree with the idea of not taking advanced math (like Calculus) in high school.
Quite frankly, the primary and secondary education systems (at least in the US) are horribly broken. There's nothing about calculus that is too hard for high school students - even average ones. But they've been taught math so poorly since the very beginning that they're hopelessly behind.
Teach yourself (and teach your own children), school will not do it for you. Just think of all those years you wasted learning to multiply over and over again when you could have been progressing.
The idea that young minds (say, fifth graders) are incapable of grasping more advanced math is a fallacy. Schools teach badly, then students underperform, then schools say "See, the curriculum is too hard - we need to slow down!" Wash, rinse, and recurse, and you get the abysmal state of education today.
Anyone who wants to understand how the American education system got broken needs to read this.
I think the people who worry about humans vs machines are missing an important trend. The distinction between humans and their technology is decreasing, and will continue to do so.
Our technology is beginning to reach the level of biological compexity. And the pace of improvement continues to increase. It's only a matter of time before we can build machines with the capabilities of living things.
At the same time, we're learning to manipulate (aka engineer) our own biology at deeper levels, just like we engineer machines. There are many incentives to reengineer and improve our own bodies.
Put these two trends together, and I predict that the distinction between man and machine will blur and eventually disappear. There will always be people with a metaphysical dislike for the idea, but there is no functional difference between a person and a sufficiently complex machine.
The defining issue of the next century will be defining what "human" really means. We already see the beginning of this debate (abortion, stem cell research, etc). It will only increase.
Passwords can be strong and still easy to remember. I always recommend choosing a phrase and taking the first letters of each word.
Contamination has already happened, and its been happening for the past 3.5 billion years.
500 kg/year of unsterilized Martian rocks are estimated to fall on Earth every year, and similarly some amount of Earth rocks fall on Mars. These are asteroids ejected during earlier impacts.
Since we know that many bacteria can survive hard vaccum and extreme cold for very long periods of time, and survive the heat of reentry while within the rocks, contamination in both directions is almost certain to have already occured, and occured many times.
Read more in "Mars on Earth" by Robert Zubrin.
I'm not terribly surprised. I spent a summer working on the Comanche, and it was clear that this was the kind of project that bureaucrats and managers build careers around. There was no incentive to actually get anything built.
"We'll pay you whatever it costs to build it plus 10%" is such blatant corruption.
Many of the "terrorist organizations" shut down by the federal government have been Islamic charities. It's too bad they don't seem to get a trial to defend the accusation that they're linked to terrorists. I have very little doubt that legitimate do-gooders have been caught in the dragnet.