I would patent common sense in patent awards, and could claim no prior art with some validity, but I'm afraid that the licensing revenue would be pretty damned small.
There were proposals from the patent office to close down the patent office, because "everything potentially patentable had already been invented." I think that we need to go back and revisit that decision, in light of the obviously decreased usefulness of patents in promoting actual innovation.
Geeks do not (generally) belong on the list, because they are not (generally) authority figures. I was making the point that classes of people in authority tend to have two particular traits, which does not imply that others having those traits are in authority.
In other words, A implies B does not mean that B necessarily implies A.
Do you really believe what you're saying, or are you exaggerating to make some kind of point?
I am exaggerating to make a point. That said, while there are certainly humble politicians, CEOs, doctors and journalists, it does seem that the majority of each of these professions have large egos and a significant number of professionals in each category seem to have little conscience in some senses.
How many politicians, CEO's or doctors do you actually know?
Personally know? 1 politician, 2 current and 1 former CEOs, 1 doctor and 1 ex-journalist.
Also note that by "huge ego", I am not saying "arrogant". The difference is that a person with a huge ego assumes that they are correct and acts on that assumption until convinced otherwise, while a person who is arrogant cannot be convinced that they are in any way wrong.
He most likely meant to say that these estimates assumed that the rate of growth was linear, and possibly constant, rather than that the total bandwidth growth was linear.
This kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes it's an honest mis-statement or a result of unstated assumptions. Sometimes it's a blatant lie. The perception of the false comment's status generally depends on your political views. (For example, a Republican would be suspicious of Clintonian whoppers, while a Democrat would be forgiving; and the opposite dynamic would hold with Republican political statements.)
That said, the reason that most people swallow them whole is because people believe what they hear from figures deemed "in authority", such as politicians, CEOs, doctors, and the mainstream media. All, interestingly enough, of these sources have egos the size of Texas and consciences the size of Guam. Why do people trust authority figures, given that there is every rational and historical reason to distrust them instead? Probably has an evolutionary basis (in that cohesive groups had better odds of survival, and adherence to authority in a crisis increased the cohesiveness of the group). In fact, the military deliberately teaches officers and non-coms the tone and style of speach needed to get instant obedience.
So, how do we fix things? It seems to me that these conversations always come back to needing a good, honest, centrist political party that actually *makes sense* and can win on those terms, without having to kowtow to the $$. If that party develops, and makes inroads, then maybe they can stop the madness. But you need a certain critical mass of people / opinions / visibility before a party could start winning elections, and then you need another critical mass inside congress to start actually making a difference.
Actually, you are making a classic mistake: assuming that people will suddenly wake up and act in the greater good, against their own predjudices and in some cases even self-interest. There is a solution though: repeal amendments 16 and 17 and modify the various amendments which have expanded the right of suffrage.
The 16th amendment allows the Federal government to collect income tax, and thus to extend the Federal Legislative power without monetary restraint.
The 17th amendment compels States to choose their Senators by popular election. This means that both the Senators and Representatives are chosen directly. This weakens (in fact, basically eliminates) the power of States to defend themselves by influencing lawmaking that would harm them. In effect, it has expanded Legislative power by removing the restraint of accountability to the States.
The various amendments which have expanded the right of suffrage have been well-intentioned, and in some cases necessary. For example, disallowing a person from voting on account or race or gender is clearly wrong. However, the right of suffrage has been vastly overexpanded. People tend to vote in their own self-interest, so you really only want people to vote when their self-interest is in the long-term interest of the nation, and of its Republican form of government, as a whole. The original Constitution allowed people to vote if they owned significant real property or were otherwise qualified to vote for the most numerous branch of their State Legislature. This tended to meet the test I set out above, because these people tended to be independent and "unbuyable", and their interests were served by the stability and peace of the Republic and the growth of the economy overall. The original definition, however, was too narrow, and excluded people who had shown their dedication to the preservation of the Republic through other means. Personally, I'd say that any person who has attained the age of maturity (there should only be one - for military service, voting, drinking, driving or flying without restrictions, etc) and has met one of the following tests should be allowed to vote:
owns significant non-mobile real property either directly or in joint custody (as a result of marriage, for example)
owns at least 25% of a business generating revenues of at least some fixed amount, which is not purely a service business (so that it could not be easily relocated outside the US if things got bad)
has retired from service in the military, paramilitaries and first responders (reserves, Coast Guards, police and law enforcement agencies, firefighters and paramedics, etc)
has served in combat, combat support or combat service support in an active theater of war, or has lost a spouse or child to such service
an argument could be made for parents of dependent children
The basic idea is that you want voters to be interested in the long-term peace and prosperity of the nation. People who can relocate without significant loss, and who have not already otherwise invested heavily in the peace and stability of the country, have no incentive to vote wisely. They will choose that person who promises them the most goodies over the person who promises expanding wealth and maintaining peace while not impinging on the rights of individuals.
The beauty of this method of changing the system, by the way, is that changes to the Constitution can be made without the consent of Congress, by the procedures laid out in Article 5 of the Constitution.
You could script it with AppleScript, since you can set track properties and can do Internet connections, presuming that CDDB has some useful interface for scripting.
... and so any crime that can be buried by corporate conspiracy (Enron-style what if it takes 50 years to stitch the shredded documents together), or buried by Government bureaucracy by red tape, coerscion or assassination for enough time becomes no crime.
The point is that no crime was committed. The legal framework allowed people to own slaves (legally, slaves were property) and they allowed companies to insure property. Attempting to sue a company for legally insuring property (this is what the current reparations cases revolve around, after all, providing services to slaveowners which "allowed them" to continue owning slaves), because you find that the property in question should not have been owned for moral reasons, is nonsensical. Further, the idea of paying "reparations" to people who were not intrinsically harmed, with the money taken from people who did not commit harm themselves, is morally repugnant.
This explains why Americans are ignorant about history, and why they also can't get foreign policies straight (hint: bombing everything in sight is not a moral foreign policy which they should just admit, but even the media doesn't)
If you had ever seen our public school systems, you would understand why Americans are ignorant about history.
That said, the US foreign policy is complicated. It is the output of generations of decisions by people living and dead, American and not. We have manifestly large and obvious ties to Cuba and interests in Cuba, but the seizure of property of Americans by Castro during the revolution, and his subsequent refusal to compensate the property owners, makes it impossible for the US to deal with Cuba as an equal state until Castro is gone. Otherwise, we have made the statement that property legally owned by Americans on foreign shores is not protected by America, and Americans are not willing to make that statement. This is just stated as an example of the complications of American foreign policy.
I agree that "bombing everything in sight" is not a moral foreign policy. However, the US has not done that. We are in the singular position of being the sole international warfighting agency. NATO is such only in the sense that other NATO nations will join us in places like Kosovo or Afghanistan because it was morally right to enter those wars (if not making any policy sense in the case of the Balkans). When peacekeeping and negotiation fail, the international community invariably turns to the US to restore the status quo ante. Examples: the Balkans, Korea, Iraq. In addition to that, there are a number of conflicts that America gets in due to our international presence, but that aren't related to mutlinational affairs per se. For example, we are in Panama because we have to be able to quickly move our Navy around to meet our security and international commitments. When Panama was taken over by a dictator (Noriega) who not only threatened our use of the Canal, but also was running drugs into the US, we took action. This is no less moral than the Spanish/Moroccan conflict over shipping illegals through the Straits of Gibraltar, which resulted in the Spanish occupying an island off the coast of Morocco recently (and whose claim to the island is, to say the least, contested).
The US really doesn't act differently in its interests than Britain in the Falklands campaign, France when it sunk the Rainbow Warrior, or any of a number of other governments around the world. The difference is only that our interests are wider and deeper than most countries due to our size, economy, and international warfighting role.
I put it to you that Enron and the bad historical treatment of blacks is a wide-scale crime like nuking Hiroshima, thus entitling the victims to reasonable compensation from somebody, probably by the Government as it was their policy that hurt those people.
You are wrong on every point you just made. Enron is nothing more than an accounting scandal, where the officers of the company ripped off the shareholders of the company by dubious accounting methods. There is no act here of any comparability to bombing Hiroshima or enslaving people.
The term 'crime' is a problem here, because a crime is really nothing more than a violation of a law. Yet, you use the term (as is commonly done) to mean an offense against some presumably common, though unstated, morality. By that definition, the enslavement of people is clearly a crime - I would say that it is an immoral, unethical and deeply wrong thing to do. The one fundamental flaw in the founding of the United States was that we allowed slavery to continue in order to keep the States from fracturing into two or three separate leagues. Although this had good effects as well, it had the fundamentally bad effect of continuing the enslavement of the Africans whom the British had brought over. It took us almost 100 years, and a brutal and bloody Civil War, to end the practice, and a further 70 years to dismantle the terrible institutions that prevented African-Americans from being full citizens.
Hiroshima is not, on the other hand, a morally reprehensible act. The use of nuclear weapons certainly is frightful, but is not fundamentally different from carpet bombing. Less people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than in Dresden and Tokyo, which were bombed with incendiaries rather than nuclear weapons. Further, the bombing of these two cities drove Japan to sue for peace, which undoubtedly saved hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, and probably millions of Japanese, for the cost of 150000 or so Japanese. Further, had Japan resisted longer, the USSR would have invaded, and Japan would have been partitioned like Korea, Viet Nam and Europe - all of which partitions have been disastrous to the countries involved. Instead, Japan was united, and was brought into economic prosperity and political freedom. All in all, I'd say that the nuclear bombings to end WWII were morally right.
Even assuming that Enron, slavery and Hiroshima were "wide scale crimes", your "thus" clause does not logically follow. What constitutes "reasonable compensation"? Surely the rules would be different for each of the situations you list: a corporate fraud, a horrid cultural practice and an act of war are fundamentally different situations from each other. I'll leave Enron out of this, because the US court system (criminal and civil) will see to it that justice is done in that case. Let's look, though, at the other two in some detail.
There are no people alive in the US today who were once slaves in the US. Who should be compensated? Their descendants? Well, their descendents were not directly and personally harmed by slavery. They have lost no property, no rights, no liberty and have suffered no physical injury. There are certainly vestiges of racism, especially in the South, but those are taken care of by the court system as they arise, and hardly constitute grounds for awarding some kind of blanket settlement. And if some settlement were awarded to the descendents, would the descendents get the money? The groups bringing the suits for reparations in the US generally want the money to go to organizations representing various primarily-black constituencies in the US, such as the Urban League and the NAACP. But none of these institutions did anything to end slavery - they were created later. So on what basis are they to be awarded compensation on behalf of the descendents of the slaves? Further, who should pay? The policies that led to slavery were not Federal, but State policies. The Federal government failed to outlaw slavery, but it did not create or engage in the practice of slavery, nor were Federal laws involved in the recapture of escaped slaves - these were all State laws and policies. So should each individual State pay compensation? None of the States, as far as I am aware, kept slaves. Several (about half, I think) allowed slaves to be kept as property. The States, though, did not own slaves and therefore committed no harm. The slaveowners are all dead, so they cannot pay. Should their descendents pay? Then you would have people who committed no harm paying money to people who were not harmed, or to organizations that represent the people who were not harmed, but had nothing to do with the people who were harmed. What about people who were slaves in other places and times? Should the British government pay reparations because they introduced slavery to the US and other colonies? Should the Italians pay because the Romans enslaved the Carthaginians? How far back do you go before it's just absurd? My answer would be, if someone is alive who was directly harmed by slavery, that is actionable. For everything else, there is no basis for reparations.
Should the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki be compensated? Well, who would compensate them? Should the US government pay because it dropped the bombs, or should the Japanese government pay because it started the war? Should the "at fault" government also pay for all of the people who were killed in non-nuclear attacks? Again, we can follow this down to an absurdity fairly quickly.
So what if it's changed now? Nixon could have argued that the Government has changed 10 years after Watergate, and that the media is no longer necessary and can thus be made illegal, but people know that things don't change that easily.
The media is not necessary just because there are particular scandals like Watergate, and that is why our Constitution specifically protects people's rights to express opinions verbally, in print or in any other way they can think of that doesn't violate the rights of others. A free press is integral to the functioning of a free society, and I don't know of anyone - even Nixon - who would argue that it should be dismantled.
IMO, those reparations are FULLY justified. If Enron was discovered 20 years down the line when their pensions suddenly stopped, imagine what would happen if some Judge said, "Yeah, ancient history, Enron employees should go feed on garbage scows, next please"
The difference is that in your example, the Enron employees would be compensated (if late) to the extent that value could be derived from the remaining assets of the corporation for illegal acts which injured them, while slave reparations would be paid to people who were not injured by companies which committed legal acts, or even just bought companies many years after they committed illegal acts.
As it happens, I do have a better justification. Obviously, the components are not all there yet (this gadget, for example, is not really high quality), but it will be nice to get to the point where I can have TiVo-like features for both TV and radio, and can both output to the screen/speakers and burn CDs/DVDs if I choose to take with me on the road. The thing is, in maybe five years all of the hardware and software should be around to do exactly that. Digital hub yumminess. This is not a solution, but it is a step towards a solution, to the problem of media management in general.
What would be best from my point of view would be a PVR with an OPEN STANDARD guide format (so that competition could arise, and prices would go down as would fear of the provider company collapsing and leaving you with a really expensive VCR), which also had an AM/FM tuner and the appropriate outputs, and also had a combo CD/CD-R/DVD/DVD-R drive. The idea is to get all of the audio and video into a device that can burn copies (including mixes and edits) for you to take on the road, can store gobs of shows/CDs, and can find things that you like with only minimal intervention from you. (When someone invents a radio tuner that can seek out and find the new Rush song for me, then automatically record it, I'll buy it!)
Apple Home Entertainment System
on
Mac PVR Coming Soon
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
OK, so you take an iMac (or a G4 tower or even a PowerBook), hook up one of these gadgets as an input and a digital TV that takes a SVGA hookup as an output. Hook the audio out to the big speakers. All that's needed is a good AM/FM tuner card, and you could get rid of the entire audio component stack (other than the turntable) and the DVD player.
I thought it was funny that he missed the reference, but I hardly think he can be dismissed because he doesn't get it. That's just (odd, kind of pathetic, really) elitism.
how can you say it is near perfect if you haven't tested it
I suspect he has read the literature, which very carefully documents the various shapes that are useful for capsules and for rockets in general, and which are ideal for specific purposes. Then he likely built his capsule and rocket to match those shapes. Unless he's trying to develop new shapes, that should be sufficient for his purposes. (Kind of the way I would not do hydrodynamic modelling to build a rowboat.)
The interesting thing about the supercollider project is that it actually cost more money to tear it down, rework the land and return it to other uses than was budgeted to complete the project!
Corporations need to be convinced that there's money to be made by investing in space exploration.
The ROI case is almost trivial: how much money is the entire resource base of a planet worth? The I is infinitesimal compared to the R, even assuming that you don't bring resources back to the Earth.
PowerMac towers tend to be quieter than x86 boxes. They also tend to be cooler. Design pays.
Memory trumps megahertz, in general, under MacOS X, especially with lots of GUI apps running.
I tend to buy from Apple, except for RAM, but upgrade later from third parties. Get the extended warranty; you probably won't need it but you'll be annoyed if you need it and don't have it.
I'm not really qualified to answer about the video cards, but I've got a couple of friends who have dual GeForce 4 cards and are happy with them.
The SMP support is fantastic!
Unless you are running a server, the SCSI drives are no longer a great deal better than IDE.
I will accept that Yucca Mountain is better than what we have now - waste stored in smaller bits in thousands of insecure and not stable places. That said, why not get rid of the problem permanently? Shooting into space is way too expensive, but why not dump the waste into the planet's core, whence it originally came? Seal the stuff in ceramic (that is, make a ceramic with the waste embedded, then put that into a damage-resistent cask, etc), then ship it to a subduction zone and drop it in. In a small (geologically) amount of time, the casks get drawn under the earth, and melted into component parts in the mantle. Then they are no more dangerous really than natural radioactive substances in the ground.
Not true. Five 9s in the airlines means that you'd see an airliner late or in some other way unavailable - possibly due to a crash, but not likely - every other day. Reliability is the availability to do what you need, when you need it. If a server is up 100% of the time, but is not able to be accessed because the network is down, the system is not reliable for you.
More importantly, you will be supporting a fuel source that can be grown out of the earth, and unlike oil, you won't be giving your money to a foreign dictator or Texas oil-baron.
As a Texan (not, sadly, an oil baron) and an ADM stockholder, I'd appreciate y'all taking his advice. More ethanol is better for all of us, or at least for me as the ADM stock price rises.
sure it "works" now, and will continue to work this way in the future the way it currently does, but porting to newer technologies allows the "business" to grow quickly and to adapt to an ever changing environment.
Having managed a number of technology projects for businesses, I'd be very skeptical of such arguments until presented with concrete examples of where the code base as it stands is causing me to lose potential business. In real life, the conversion costs are huge, and the benefits rarely exist at all. Where they do exist, they tend to be small and hard to capture.
One thing that you could do is have a class or classes on programming the handsprings. Get ideas from the class for something simple and of use to them, then teach them how to make it on the PDA. (Even a game would be fine.) It both gets them something they need, and teaches them a useful skill.
Slashdot Mirror
I would patent common sense in patent awards, and could claim no prior art with some validity, but I'm afraid that the licensing revenue would be pretty damned small.
There were proposals from the patent office to close down the patent office, because "everything potentially patentable had already been invented." I think that we need to go back and revisit that decision, in light of the obviously decreased usefulness of patents in promoting actual innovation.
Geeks do not (generally) belong on the list, because they are not (generally) authority figures. I was making the point that classes of people in authority tend to have two particular traits, which does not imply that others having those traits are in authority.
In other words, A implies B does not mean that B necessarily implies A.
I am exaggerating to make a point. That said, while there are certainly humble politicians, CEOs, doctors and journalists, it does seem that the majority of each of these professions have large egos and a significant number of professionals in each category seem to have little conscience in some senses.
Personally know? 1 politician, 2 current and 1 former CEOs, 1 doctor and 1 ex-journalist.
Also note that by "huge ego", I am not saying "arrogant". The difference is that a person with a huge ego assumes that they are correct and acts on that assumption until convinced otherwise, while a person who is arrogant cannot be convinced that they are in any way wrong.
He most likely meant to say that these estimates assumed that the rate of growth was linear, and possibly constant, rather than that the total bandwidth growth was linear.
This kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes it's an honest mis-statement or a result of unstated assumptions. Sometimes it's a blatant lie. The perception of the false comment's status generally depends on your political views. (For example, a Republican would be suspicious of Clintonian whoppers, while a Democrat would be forgiving; and the opposite dynamic would hold with Republican political statements.)
That said, the reason that most people swallow them whole is because people believe what they hear from figures deemed "in authority", such as politicians, CEOs, doctors, and the mainstream media. All, interestingly enough, of these sources have egos the size of Texas and consciences the size of Guam. Why do people trust authority figures, given that there is every rational and historical reason to distrust them instead? Probably has an evolutionary basis (in that cohesive groups had better odds of survival, and adherence to authority in a crisis increased the cohesiveness of the group). In fact, the military deliberately teaches officers and non-coms the tone and style of speach needed to get instant obedience.
Ah, but the comment is currently at +2, so obviously I was whoring. :-) (Is there a down-mod for using a smiley???)
You forgot to put in the end tag! Now all of the following posts will be karma whores.
</whore>
Whew!
Actually, you are making a classic mistake: assuming that people will suddenly wake up and act in the greater good, against their own predjudices and in some cases even self-interest. There is a solution though: repeal amendments 16 and 17 and modify the various amendments which have expanded the right of suffrage.
The 16th amendment allows the Federal government to collect income tax, and thus to extend the Federal Legislative power without monetary restraint.
The 17th amendment compels States to choose their Senators by popular election. This means that both the Senators and Representatives are chosen directly. This weakens (in fact, basically eliminates) the power of States to defend themselves by influencing lawmaking that would harm them. In effect, it has expanded Legislative power by removing the restraint of accountability to the States.
The various amendments which have expanded the right of suffrage have been well-intentioned, and in some cases necessary. For example, disallowing a person from voting on account or race or gender is clearly wrong. However, the right of suffrage has been vastly overexpanded. People tend to vote in their own self-interest, so you really only want people to vote when their self-interest is in the long-term interest of the nation, and of its Republican form of government, as a whole. The original Constitution allowed people to vote if they owned significant real property or were otherwise qualified to vote for the most numerous branch of their State Legislature. This tended to meet the test I set out above, because these people tended to be independent and "unbuyable", and their interests were served by the stability and peace of the Republic and the growth of the economy overall. The original definition, however, was too narrow, and excluded people who had shown their dedication to the preservation of the Republic through other means. Personally, I'd say that any person who has attained the age of maturity (there should only be one - for military service, voting, drinking, driving or flying without restrictions, etc) and has met one of the following tests should be allowed to vote:
The basic idea is that you want voters to be interested in the long-term peace and prosperity of the nation. People who can relocate without significant loss, and who have not already otherwise invested heavily in the peace and stability of the country, have no incentive to vote wisely. They will choose that person who promises them the most goodies over the person who promises expanding wealth and maintaining peace while not impinging on the rights of individuals.
The beauty of this method of changing the system, by the way, is that changes to the Constitution can be made without the consent of Congress, by the procedures laid out in Article 5 of the Constitution.
You could script it with AppleScript, since you can set track properties and can do Internet connections, presuming that CDDB has some useful interface for scripting.
The point is that no crime was committed. The legal framework allowed people to own slaves (legally, slaves were property) and they allowed companies to insure property. Attempting to sue a company for legally insuring property (this is what the current reparations cases revolve around, after all, providing services to slaveowners which "allowed them" to continue owning slaves), because you find that the property in question should not have been owned for moral reasons, is nonsensical. Further, the idea of paying "reparations" to people who were not intrinsically harmed, with the money taken from people who did not commit harm themselves, is morally repugnant.
If you had ever seen our public school systems, you would understand why Americans are ignorant about history.
That said, the US foreign policy is complicated. It is the output of generations of decisions by people living and dead, American and not. We have manifestly large and obvious ties to Cuba and interests in Cuba, but the seizure of property of Americans by Castro during the revolution, and his subsequent refusal to compensate the property owners, makes it impossible for the US to deal with Cuba as an equal state until Castro is gone. Otherwise, we have made the statement that property legally owned by Americans on foreign shores is not protected by America, and Americans are not willing to make that statement. This is just stated as an example of the complications of American foreign policy.
I agree that "bombing everything in sight" is not a moral foreign policy. However, the US has not done that. We are in the singular position of being the sole international warfighting agency. NATO is such only in the sense that other NATO nations will join us in places like Kosovo or Afghanistan because it was morally right to enter those wars (if not making any policy sense in the case of the Balkans). When peacekeeping and negotiation fail, the international community invariably turns to the US to restore the status quo ante. Examples: the Balkans, Korea, Iraq. In addition to that, there are a number of conflicts that America gets in due to our international presence, but that aren't related to mutlinational affairs per se. For example, we are in Panama because we have to be able to quickly move our Navy around to meet our security and international commitments. When Panama was taken over by a dictator (Noriega) who not only threatened our use of the Canal, but also was running drugs into the US, we took action. This is no less moral than the Spanish/Moroccan conflict over shipping illegals through the Straits of Gibraltar, which resulted in the Spanish occupying an island off the coast of Morocco recently (and whose claim to the island is, to say the least, contested).
The US really doesn't act differently in its interests than Britain in the Falklands campaign, France when it sunk the Rainbow Warrior, or any of a number of other governments around the world. The difference is only that our interests are wider and deeper than most countries due to our size, economy, and international warfighting role.
You are wrong on every point you just made. Enron is nothing more than an accounting scandal, where the officers of the company ripped off the shareholders of the company by dubious accounting methods. There is no act here of any comparability to bombing Hiroshima or enslaving people.
The term 'crime' is a problem here, because a crime is really nothing more than a violation of a law. Yet, you use the term (as is commonly done) to mean an offense against some presumably common, though unstated, morality. By that definition, the enslavement of people is clearly a crime - I would say that it is an immoral, unethical and deeply wrong thing to do. The one fundamental flaw in the founding of the United States was that we allowed slavery to continue in order to keep the States from fracturing into two or three separate leagues. Although this had good effects as well, it had the fundamentally bad effect of continuing the enslavement of the Africans whom the British had brought over. It took us almost 100 years, and a brutal and bloody Civil War, to end the practice, and a further 70 years to dismantle the terrible institutions that prevented African-Americans from being full citizens.
Hiroshima is not, on the other hand, a morally reprehensible act. The use of nuclear weapons certainly is frightful, but is not fundamentally different from carpet bombing. Less people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than in Dresden and Tokyo, which were bombed with incendiaries rather than nuclear weapons. Further, the bombing of these two cities drove Japan to sue for peace, which undoubtedly saved hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, and probably millions of Japanese, for the cost of 150000 or so Japanese. Further, had Japan resisted longer, the USSR would have invaded, and Japan would have been partitioned like Korea, Viet Nam and Europe - all of which partitions have been disastrous to the countries involved. Instead, Japan was united, and was brought into economic prosperity and political freedom. All in all, I'd say that the nuclear bombings to end WWII were morally right.
Even assuming that Enron, slavery and Hiroshima were "wide scale crimes", your "thus" clause does not logically follow. What constitutes "reasonable compensation"? Surely the rules would be different for each of the situations you list: a corporate fraud, a horrid cultural practice and an act of war are fundamentally different situations from each other. I'll leave Enron out of this, because the US court system (criminal and civil) will see to it that justice is done in that case. Let's look, though, at the other two in some detail.
There are no people alive in the US today who were once slaves in the US. Who should be compensated? Their descendants? Well, their descendents were not directly and personally harmed by slavery. They have lost no property, no rights, no liberty and have suffered no physical injury. There are certainly vestiges of racism, especially in the South, but those are taken care of by the court system as they arise, and hardly constitute grounds for awarding some kind of blanket settlement. And if some settlement were awarded to the descendents, would the descendents get the money? The groups bringing the suits for reparations in the US generally want the money to go to organizations representing various primarily-black constituencies in the US, such as the Urban League and the NAACP. But none of these institutions did anything to end slavery - they were created later. So on what basis are they to be awarded compensation on behalf of the descendents of the slaves? Further, who should pay? The policies that led to slavery were not Federal, but State policies. The Federal government failed to outlaw slavery, but it did not create or engage in the practice of slavery, nor were Federal laws involved in the recapture of escaped slaves - these were all State laws and policies. So should each individual State pay compensation? None of the States, as far as I am aware, kept slaves. Several (about half, I think) allowed slaves to be kept as property. The States, though, did not own slaves and therefore committed no harm. The slaveowners are all dead, so they cannot pay. Should their descendents pay? Then you would have people who committed no harm paying money to people who were not harmed, or to organizations that represent the people who were not harmed, but had nothing to do with the people who were harmed. What about people who were slaves in other places and times? Should the British government pay reparations because they introduced slavery to the US and other colonies? Should the Italians pay because the Romans enslaved the Carthaginians? How far back do you go before it's just absurd? My answer would be, if someone is alive who was directly harmed by slavery, that is actionable. For everything else, there is no basis for reparations.
Should the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki be compensated? Well, who would compensate them? Should the US government pay because it dropped the bombs, or should the Japanese government pay because it started the war? Should the "at fault" government also pay for all of the people who were killed in non-nuclear attacks? Again, we can follow this down to an absurdity fairly quickly.
The media is not necessary just because there are particular scandals like Watergate, and that is why our Constitution specifically protects people's rights to express opinions verbally, in print or in any other way they can think of that doesn't violate the rights of others. A free press is integral to the functioning of a free society, and I don't know of anyone - even Nixon - who would argue that it should be dismantled.
The difference is that in your example, the Enron employees would be compensated (if late) to the extent that value could be derived from the remaining assets of the corporation for illegal acts which injured them, while slave reparations would be paid to people who were not injured by companies which committed legal acts, or even just bought companies many years after they committed illegal acts.
As it happens, I do have a better justification. Obviously, the components are not all there yet (this gadget, for example, is not really high quality), but it will be nice to get to the point where I can have TiVo-like features for both TV and radio, and can both output to the screen/speakers and burn CDs/DVDs if I choose to take with me on the road. The thing is, in maybe five years all of the hardware and software should be around to do exactly that. Digital hub yumminess. This is not a solution, but it is a step towards a solution, to the problem of media management in general.
What would be best from my point of view would be a PVR with an OPEN STANDARD guide format (so that competition could arise, and prices would go down as would fear of the provider company collapsing and leaving you with a really expensive VCR), which also had an AM/FM tuner and the appropriate outputs, and also had a combo CD/CD-R/DVD/DVD-R drive. The idea is to get all of the audio and video into a device that can burn copies (including mixes and edits) for you to take on the road, can store gobs of shows/CDs, and can find things that you like with only minimal intervention from you. (When someone invents a radio tuner that can seek out and find the new Rush song for me, then automatically record it, I'll buy it!)
OK, so you take an iMac (or a G4 tower or even a PowerBook), hook up one of these gadgets as an input and a digital TV that takes a SVGA hookup as an output. Hook the audio out to the big speakers. All that's needed is a good AM/FM tuner card, and you could get rid of the entire audio component stack (other than the turntable) and the DVD player.
And yet, you seem to know what it is...
I thought it was funny that he missed the reference, but I hardly think he can be dismissed because he doesn't get it. That's just (odd, kind of pathetic, really) elitism.
I suspect he has read the literature, which very carefully documents the various shapes that are useful for capsules and for rockets in general, and which are ideal for specific purposes. Then he likely built his capsule and rocket to match those shapes. Unless he's trying to develop new shapes, that should be sufficient for his purposes. (Kind of the way I would not do hydrodynamic modelling to build a rowboat.)
The interesting thing about the supercollider project is that it actually cost more money to tear it down, rework the land and return it to other uses than was budgeted to complete the project!
The ROI case is almost trivial: how much money is the entire resource base of a planet worth? The I is infinitesimal compared to the R, even assuming that you don't bring resources back to the Earth.
PowerMac towers tend to be quieter than x86 boxes. They also tend to be cooler. Design pays.
Memory trumps megahertz, in general, under MacOS X, especially with lots of GUI apps running.
I tend to buy from Apple, except for RAM, but upgrade later from third parties. Get the extended warranty; you probably won't need it but you'll be annoyed if you need it and don't have it.
I'm not really qualified to answer about the video cards, but I've got a couple of friends who have dual GeForce 4 cards and are happy with them.
The SMP support is fantastic!
Unless you are running a server, the SCSI drives are no longer a great deal better than IDE.
I will accept that Yucca Mountain is better than what we have now - waste stored in smaller bits in thousands of insecure and not stable places. That said, why not get rid of the problem permanently? Shooting into space is way too expensive, but why not dump the waste into the planet's core, whence it originally came? Seal the stuff in ceramic (that is, make a ceramic with the waste embedded, then put that into a damage-resistent cask, etc), then ship it to a subduction zone and drop it in. In a small (geologically) amount of time, the casks get drawn under the earth, and melted into component parts in the mantle. Then they are no more dangerous really than natural radioactive substances in the ground.
Not true. Five 9s in the airlines means that you'd see an airliner late or in some other way unavailable - possibly due to a crash, but not likely - every other day. Reliability is the availability to do what you need, when you need it. If a server is up 100% of the time, but is not able to be accessed because the network is down, the system is not reliable for you.
As a Texan (not, sadly, an oil baron) and an ADM stockholder, I'd appreciate y'all taking his advice. More ethanol is better for all of us, or at least for me as the ADM stock price rises.
Having managed a number of technology projects for businesses, I'd be very skeptical of such arguments until presented with concrete examples of where the code base as it stands is causing me to lose potential business. In real life, the conversion costs are huge, and the benefits rarely exist at all. Where they do exist, they tend to be small and hard to capture.
One thing that you could do is have a class or classes on programming the handsprings. Get ideas from the class for something simple and of use to them, then teach them how to make it on the PDA. (Even a game would be fine.) It both gets them something they need, and teaches them a useful skill.