Bugs in the code are simple to fix. The more problematic issue is that often times the bugs are in the design. Part of the problem is that people don't apply good engineering practices to code. I've never heard of a software FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis) or things of that nature. Do people do boundary diagrams for a piece of software? Are all the noise factors analyzed? Do people conform to the specifications? Do people unit test their code?
Software problems generally exist because the specification was either nonexistant or poorly written, or the specification wasn't followed. Very rarely is it actual incompetance of a coder. But when a spec for a message handler, for instance, assumes that there will only be a certain length and nothing outside that spec guarantees that length, it's not the person coding that function to check for the length - s/he only has the spec by which to go (because people still haven't figured out how to not throw designs over the wall for implementation).
Complexity of a system does make things difficult, but good design mitigates a lot of problems. (Note I didn't say "eliminates" but "mitigates").
Indeed, the average is about 1kW/m^2. That means if you have 5 m^2 of roof on your house, you should be good (5 kW continuous power is pretty reasonable for a typical household. Peak you might need 10 kW or so, but idle your house should probably only pull around 2-2.5 kW). Most people have 5 m^2 easily. Even if a solar cell is 20% efficient, you only need 25m^2. (A 1000-sqft house (32' by 32' square to make things easy - it's 1024 sq.ft) has 1024 square feet+ of roof. That's 95 square meters. So slap on 50 square meters for good measure, wire up some kind of capacitor battery system for high-demand peak loads and cloudy days, and you're all set.
Indeed, here is some useful information from the EIA:
electrical grid power plants by type, 2003
coal: 53%
nuclear: 21%
natural gas: 15%
hydroelectric: 7%
oil: 3%
geothermal and "other": 1%
Indeed, since oil is used in manufacturing and for vehicle fuel, nuclear plants for electricity won't halt the use of oil. Heck, we use hydro for electricity more than oil by more than 2 to 1!
What I mean is that being black or white or disabled or German or Asian has nothing to do with morality. Practicing homosexuality, though, is a moral issue (whether you like it or not, despite all the media about it being genetic, etc. etc. What if they find that murder is genetic? Does that make it right then? They think that pedophilia might be genetic - does that make it ok?).
That was the point I was trying to make. That does not mean that there shouldn't be discussion about how to protect the rights of homosexuals and how to balance that against protecting the moral beliefs of those who think that is wrong.
I'll even go so far as to say this: just because you may be free to do something does not make that thing right (and just because you may not be free to do something does not make that thing wrong - you could also spin it that just because something is right doesn't guarantee you're free to do it, and just because something is wrong doesn't guarantee that you will be prevented from doing it).
The problem with replacing "gay" with "black" or "asian" or "interracial" or "handicapped" or "midget" is that none of the items in your list are moral issues. Gender, nationality, wealth, physical fitness, and race are amoral things and as such shouldn't have a bearing on availability of education, housing, rights, etc.
And you are wrong that same-sex marriages do not take away from people - they make people feel uncomfortable, they take away peace-of-mind, they make people have to be careful about what they say for fear of "offeding" someone. With as many lawsuits and therapists we have to counter "emotional suffering" as we have, our society obviously recognizes non-physical impacts of certain activities.
We could debate on this all day, and unfortunately I don't think either of us is going to change our mind. The issues are numerous and ultimately center around the idea of absolute truth versus relativism, which I don't care to get into right now.
However, beware that you yourself could be considered a bigot for being intolerant of those who believe that same-sex marriages are inappropriate. Just because their belief is not the same as yours doesn't mean you should bash them for it.
Okay, I went out and did some homework from here and here. This data is all from 1948-2003 (so we avoid the depression and most of the immediate effects of WWII). It does appear that there is no correlation (at best there is a very weak one) between national unemployment rate and nominal minimum wage percent change. Scaling to real minimum wage (using readily available CPI data) there is even less correlation. There is not even very much correlation between inflation and unemployment rate. I went to check the correlations using real GDP per capita growth and found that it has a fairly strong correlation (R-squared = 0.75) with unemployment. (Since no other parameters I used correlated with unemployment, no others will correlate with real GDP per capita growth either).
So, I will cede the point that there is no historical evidence that a rise in minimum wage has an impact on national unemployment or real GDP per capita growth. I decided to look at real income per capita as well (the data I found only went to 1967-2001) and there is a very loose correlation between unemployment and per-capita income growth (R-squared.4) but, again, there was no correlation between minimum wage growth and real income growth.
I guess what we have learned here is that minimum wage doesn't really have any correlation with unemployment, personal income growth, or GDP growth - on a national scale. However, if I'm a pizza shop owner and I can afford $100 worth of salary per day, if minimum wage goes up that means I can a)hire fewer workers or b)keep the same number of workers for fewer hours each. The latter scenario basically keeps unemployment and income rates the same - the difference is that folks have more free time to possibly have more than one job. Hrm. There's an interesting idea that I'll have to pursue a little further I think...
Here are some actual "rational" reasons why this may be the case:
Economy and jobs: Raising minimum wage ~40% in 2 years will cause the unemployment rate to skyrocket. If I recall, Kerry's plan is to raise minimum wage to $7 from about $5.30 or so by 2007. I'm thinking someone forgot to tell him that yes, those few people left with jobs will be paid more, but you'll have about 40% fewer people currently at the minimum wage level employed. Or, a lot more people will be paid under the table. That's not to say minimum wage increases aren't due, it's unclear how raising minimum wage 40% in 2 years will create 10M jobs in 4.
Issues of "safety" vs "freedom". I'm not aware that Kerry has detailed a better plan of how to make us safe without causing the average citizen a little hassle at the airport or border crossing, or the possibility that someone is watching over what you're doing. Thinking that "if we talk nice with the world community people won't attack us" is naivite at best. That's like saying that if you tell the school bully "please don't hit me" he won't hit you. This isn't to say that all Bush's plans are the best either, but in my stance being proactive is better than being reactive. Granted, you can be much too proactive (which is what a lot of the beef with the PATRIOT act and Iraq is), but some folks would rather have someone with a stick they have to be careful around to protect them from others. Maybe not the best idea, but it is at least understandable.
Various moral issues. Not sure how to rate this on the "rational" scale, but judging by the state ballot proposals for things like marriage (most states with this on their ballots have voted to ban same-sex marriage by margins of 2 or 3 to 1), one can see that the majority of the population still has conservative values, and will tend to vote into office a leader which will support those same values. I know that a couple big issues are the marriage issue and abortion and these cannot be overlooked. True, one can argue that limiting marriage and limiting abortion limits freedoms, but in a sense limiting my ability to steal from you limits freedoms as well. The question is how to determine which freedoms are limited and which are not. This is one of the sticky points of a democracit republic - on some level you have to do what the majority wants.
So, while those might not be answers you like, there are at least three reasons why at least 29 million people (as of 22:50 EST) could vote for Bush. They weighed those issues against such things as war, taxes, environment, and that's what they chose. Indeed, you can make a similar list for those some 27 million who voted for Kerry. The thing is, there is no single objective standard that most are willing to accept by which to judge candidates and their platforms, so we still have this voting process. Personally, I like voting better than trying to beat up all the people who think differently than I, because I know I'd have been pummelled quite some time ago.
Yes, there are some folks who vote irrationally, and some who actually deliberate over which issues they are going to weigh more than others and vote a certain way even considering the shortcomings of the person (and by consequence, administration) for whom they have voted.
I actually read the patent and it's basically a patent on using matrix transforms to set up a model space and a viewer. Considering I wrote something that does this in about 2 hours about 2 weeks ago, does that mean I'm infringing upon this patent? I used simple coordinate transforms that I learned in geometry. Should it be possible to patent mathematical processes? (IMHO, no, since you should be the discoverer of something - but discovery is not the same as ownership!)
The thing we ought to, as responsible slashdotters, push on the USPTO is not even "prior art" as most of the crowd pushes on, but the "unobvious to one skilled in the art" clause. Anyone who deals with coordinate transforms - in physics, graphics, or whatever, would have come up with the use of matrix manipulations to view graphics information based on viewer position. The other half of this "invention" is manipulating the viewpoints in a manner which emulates reality - basically it's a patent for an interface which is the same as you or I walking around an object to get a different vantage point.
That aside, there is the issue that 3D graphics have been out in the mainstream for over 10 years and nobody brought this patent up. I hope they're going to lose on statute of limitations.
Perhaps we should draft and file a Friend of the Court brief?
Ah, you're confusing, I think, the difference between 'freedom' and 'right'. 'Freedom' is not a behavior - 'freedom' is indeed a state of being able to do something without having that something be inhibited. In your example of the D of I, the document gives the populace the "right" to tear down a government - the problem is, the D of I doesn't have the ability to enforce this "right". This is why, as you noted correctly, that the last recourse is "bloody revolution" - the people have to take authority (as I defined it) for themselves - the people are the ultimate authority here.
On "freedom to not be killed intentionally by another person": there is and never will be no such freedom (mostly because we can't control things like lightning or hurricanes). The government could, however, grant a "right to not be killed." In this case, the government would forcibly, if necessary, stop people from trying to kill you. Unfortunately, our system is reactive rather than proactive in this instance - our system doesn't do anything to prevent someone from killing you; it just makes it a pain for the person if they fail in their attempt or if they get caught after the fact.
On "freedom to not be enslaved": Again, like being murdered, you cannot have a freedom to "not" have something happen to you. You can, however, have a right granted to you which says "we will forcibly protect you from being enslaved, and if you do happen to be enslaved we'll forcibly get you out".
The point here is that freedom cannot stop something from happening to you (I picked at you for saying "freedom to not...". Freedom simply means that you can act unhindered on your desires. Freedom can only be guaranteed by force, because the only way to have freedom is to prevent people from stopping you from being free. Incidentally this is where rights come in - there is no such right to kill someone (except, arguably, in war, capital punishment, and, unfortunately, abortions) - that is, no authority is (openly) willing to forcibly stop someone from being prevented from killing someone. I know that's a lot of double-negatives, but it's the only way the logic works. There is, however, a right to stay alive - and (ostensibly) the government will use force to prevent others from trying to take your life.
The real kicker is that rights must limit freedom because once you have a right, that means some other party is not free (without consequence) to act in opposition to that right.
In fact, some rights even elimintate the possibility for other rights. For instance, the right to have a homosexual marriage implicitily nulllifies the right to hold heterosexual marriage special. Regardless of your viewpoint on if homosexual marriage should be a right or not, if it does become a right that means that the authority will now no longer (forcibly) protect the viewpoint that "heterosexual marriage is sacred". In fact, the right to have homosexual marriages removes the freedom from some parties to act on the belief that only heterosexual marriages are appropriate. The reverse is true as well - disallowing homosexual marriages limits the freedom of some while protecting the "right to have marriage defined as heterosexual only".
I wish it were as black-and-white as you indicated by saying "it's pretty damn easy to determine when someone is trampling on the rights of others"; I just don't see that carried out in our or any other system in the world. The reason is you have to, at some point, make a decision about which "right" is more right than another, and which freedom you're willing to forego.
I could chat all day about this sort of thing, and we could argue about which rights and freedoms we currently have and do not have, but I think the more important discussion is on the nature of freedom and rights becuase if you don't have that foundation first, deciding what you will and won't fight over is a moot point.
While I would concede that the current administration has done things that apparently limit "rights" (in quotes because most folks define "right" as "anything I feel like doing" rather than "a behavior allowed and protected by an authority*" which is all a right really is), it is important to note that the government - no matter who is in power - has a responsibility to balance those "rights" against concepts such as justice, personal responsibility, and keeping a social infrastructure in place (i.e., security). Generally those three things are in mutual opposition and it's difficult to improve one area without some sacrifice in one or both of the other two.
*'authority' here is "the group with the biggest stick" - basically authority is really defined as the group that can actually enforce the ahderence to the current set of established rights. Sometimes this authority can be granted (as in "we volunteer to be under your authority") but usually it is taken - or at least maintained - through the use of or potential use of destructive force. And it is an unfortunate reality of our world that destructive force is the only thing that can actually guarantee any rights at all. (Note that I include incarceration as "destructive force" because the choice is to be incarcerated or get physically damaged).
I'm very afraid of the fundamentalist Christian direction this country is going in.
I think you need to study up on what "fundamentalist Christian" doctrine really is. When the nation (I assume you mean the USA) is trying to legalize homosexual marriage, has already legalized abortion and homosexual acts, and said nation has no problem with advertisements and general media programming that focuses on being selfish ("do things that make you feel happy!") and folks don't want to hear about morality ("get those 10 commandments out of my town building that I never go in anyway!"), and everywhere you turn people are screaming, "don't tell me what I can and cannot do with my private - or public for that matter - life!" I cannot comprehend how you think this country is going in a "fundamental Christian" direction.
Fundamental Christianity is this and only this: there is a God, He created us and wants to have a relationship with us. We basically told God to shove it, we know better than Him anyway even though He made the world. This saddened God, so He had a way that He could both be just (i.e., actions would have appropriate consequences) and love us at the same time: come to us by sending Jesus his son to die as a sacrifice so that we could have a restored relationship with God. For those folks that accept that, the relationship with God can be restored; for those that don't accept that, they have to deal with the consequence of their actions (being apart from God - that's the true definition of Hell, not "bad stuff will happen to you." Even the Bible acknowledges that "evil people find success" and "good people suffer.").
That, my friend, is Fundamental Christianity. Morality is actually secondary to that - the whole idea of morality (in a Christian context) comes because of why you need to be moral: God is like pure morality, and if you're not moral, you have to be away from God else God couldn't stay pure. Yeah, that sounds kind of arrogant, but it's perfect arrogance (and God even says "I'm a jealous God!"). The reason "Christians" want to "be good" is to show God that they love Him. It's like if you love your wife, you're not going to go around doing things she hates - you're going to do things to show her you love her! And after "morality" comes the dreaded "E" word - evangelism. This too has been twisted over time, but evangelism is simply this: It's when a person has had their life changed by a relationship with Christ and tells that to another person. That's it - not beating people over the head, not berating them - it's simply showing them what their faith has done in their life. It's also not just telling people that, but showing them that by how they act, by the fact that they show love towards others in a sacrificial way - which is decidedly different than the prevailing "every man for himself" culture in which we find ourselves.
That said, I'm not saying you even have to agree with what Christianity really is. I just wish that folks would actually get educated about things - especially religion - when they talk about them. Of course, the very definition of "Christianity" has gotten confused over the years anyway. Just remember: the fact that people claim something is true does not make it so. This means that just because people claim that a belief is Christian doesn't make it so. Just because people claim a belief is anything doesn't make it so.
Not agreeing with a philosophy, though, does not mean that you shouldn't try and understand that philosophy.
...until there is one compatible, OS-neutral software platform...
What do you mean, "until there is..."? There are many, many "OS-neutral" platforms out there. Part of the problem is that there are too many. But that shouldn't mean all that much - if one company picks one for all their apps they should be fine.
Here's a simple example. I'm working on developing a game. Say I want to sell that game on as many hardware platforms as I can tolerate. Let's say I happen to write that game using OpenGL, GLUT, and one of the standard C variants (ISO, ANSI, whatever). If I do that, I only have to make one version of the source code, compile for a bunch of targets, and I'm done. Sure, the performance might not be the best across all platforms since any interface I make for OpenGL is going to be a "second" window system on top of the host OS. But that's not the point - the point is that if you use some standard API (standard console i/o, OpenGL, etc) and don't go munging in "tricks of the host OS", the technology for OS-neutral applications has existed for years.
I only say this because I have written simple and fairly complex (generally console based, mind you) applications using standard language features that first-time compile and run on Windows, Mac OS (X), HP-UX, and Solaris. I've even done the aforementioned OpenGL work that is consistent across Mac and Windows (I don't have access any more to the HP-UX or Solaris machines).
What people sacrifice to follow this route is a "host OS look and feel" by using the host OS API calls. I'd rather, as an application programmer, have the ability to call simple graphics APIs and define my own behavior - closer to what things like OpenGL, GLUT, X-windows, and even DirectX provide rather than even things like Swing or all the widget toolkits for X-windows. Yes, it's nice when a host OS provides "standard controls" but then I have to port and "support multiple platforms". If I hire some guy to write my own standard GUI library and use something like OpenGL that's fairly ubiquitous as my "OS abstraction layer" then my application looks and behaves the same on all systems. This, to me, is more valuable than having all the applications on a system look the same.
Okay, I realize that was a lot of text to try and illustrate my point. My gut feeling on what you propose, though, is that it's more politics than technical difficulties. After all, what is an operating system really but an abstraction layer to the hardware; all the rest of the crap that is part of a modern "OS" is really applications. I think when the paradigm shifts back to "the OS just provides access to the hardware functionality" then software writers will be better able to write applications that work on any hardware - so long as the hardware API is consistent!
Incidentally, the cost of software would indeed come down if there were fewer platforms to support as complexity will be reduced. The more combinations of any product there are, cost goes up drastically. But, again, the "common OS" or whatever doesn't really even begin to address the issue of cost of hardware having anything to do with software piracy. Piracy is simply a market reaction to the cost of purchase vs the cost of getting copying, distributing, posessing, and using unpurchased software. (Since the cost to do this is zero, and the cost of risk getting caught is below the purchase price of most software, people will continue to pirate software).
The funny thing is, you're only partly right. To go from a low-altitude stable orbit to a high-altitude one, you increase your speed (in the direction of motion) to kick you into a transfer orbit. Then, when you reach your desired altitude, you kick your speed up to stay at that altitude (and not fall back down into your transfer orbit). Now, your speed relative to your original speed will be lower, but you actually have to speed up to get to the stable orbit at the higher altitude (during the transfer orbit you slow down quite a bit).
It's a question of total energy expended. You always have to expend energy to get to a given altitude just to fight gravity. To minimize the total energy required you want to spend as little time as you can in the atmosphere - that's why NASA launches straight up.
There are, however, other reasons for launching horizontally; one is that you need smaller rockets at first to get moving (you don't have gravity pulling against you horizontally). It's a not so much an energy question but "how big a rocket do you want" question in this example.
This is all well and good, but it actually takes quite a bit of energy to get the carbon out of a CO2 molecule. There's a reason why CO2 is the product of combustion reactions.
So, yes, there's all this carbon sitting around, but you'd need a way to get the carbon away from the oxygen...
...a country like the US where a lot of people don't even have access to basic modern comfort...
I find this comment almost a troll, but probably it is just a result of emotion. Firstly, you have to define what it means to have access to something. If you mean "it's available if you choose to get it" then there is absolutely no "basic modern comfort" inaccessible here in the US. If you mean "you can get it without having to do anything for it" then yes, there are lots of things inaccessible here in the US.
I find it naive to think that it's a "right" to have basic infrastructure without contributing to the upkeep and advancment of that infrastructure. Note that I did NOT say that it's not a right to have infrastructure!!
When you have people on the poor end of society spending their meager incomes on cigarettes or alcohol or lottery tickets, which they're welcome to choose to do in a "free" nation, I don't think it's right that they complain about not having money for food, clothing, electricty, etc. Sure, you can complain about how [industry X] lied and twisted their arm into buying [product A] and now they're addicted, but there are still personal decisions that were made.
I'd rather see the general public not spend $400 million dollars to go watch a movie and use that for education, but you don't hear anyone complaining about box office returns being too high. You don't hear the public saying they refuse to pay $50+ per pro-sports ticket to support superstars' 7 or 8 digit salaries - when those hundreds of millions would be MUCH better spent on education programs to get people out of the cycle of poverty, divorce, and broken families - or just on food and housing programs. I don't think the public has a right to criticize the government for its "irresponsible" spending when in general the public is far more irresponsible...
But, that's what you get in a democracy like ours - people are free to choose to spend as they like, but then they complain when the [government] says they want to use tax money for some program because the general public isn't responsible enough to take care of [issue Q], like health care or even war.
I just don't understand how you can say something's not available when you go walk the aisles of Wal-Mart (or similar) and there's so much more crap than is necessary to live a thriving life. Some people are just not willing to seek out what help is available to get to that solvency point, and then they complain of being intruded upon when some "institution" comes and says they want to help.
...if taste in music is any sign of your personality type and interests...
Hey, sounds like a PhD thesis to figure out the relationship between music preferences and personality type! At best you might find a correlation, but I doubt you'd be able to find causality...
And the fact that any given individual's music interests are usually all over the spectrum makes the problem most likely more unsolvable than all the math puzzles out there...
For instance, what do Mozart, Saviour Machine, and the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge! have in common? Beats me, but I love them all...
Before making statements on "cost of living" going up I think you need to ask yourself, "what costs, and for whom?"
Looking at things "on average" is never a very useful way to look at things for any given individual. Also, the way I look at things, cost of living increases are meaningless if your salary is already above the "living wage" level. You don't need an increase to keep up with "cost of living" when you're already well above that. Notice that it's cost of living and not cost of living how you want. If you're above the cost of living already, you don't need to catch up at all!
Now, at the bottom of the ladder, wage increases should keep pace with some form of inflationary measure (and I think we all can agree that CPI is a really poor measure when you average Hollywood with the poor areas of the South - the media, at least, doesn't post the spread on these figures but I'm pretty sure you can look them up at the Census Bureau).
I'm in agreement, though, that something should be done to help flatten out the disparity between executives getting ~9% raises on at least 10x living wage, while those closer to 1x living wage get at or below the rate of increase in living wage. However, I don't have an answer on how to affect that change in an open-market system; the capitalistic system is designed so that the majority of the money will end up in the hands of the few who are better able to manage it. It's quite possibly urban legend, but I've heard that if you distributed all the wealth in the US equally, within a [short period] the wealth would move around unevenly to the same people that have it today.
It's like the stuff in our newspaper here a while back when some guy was crying because he had to change jobs from $100k / year down to $70k / year. Yeah, it looks bad that that's a 30% pay cut, but he's still about 3 times the poverty level. Deal and get on with it!
Anyway, to summarize, cost of living increases only matter if you're living just at the low end of what you need to get by. If you have to give up luxuries, then you're not at that limit and should not really be expected to get cost of living increases. The only way you get cost of living increases when you're above the "cost of living" line is because your services are at a premium for some reason - what's happening when costs rise faster than salaries for a given profession it simply means that the added value has been reduced for that field, and eventually, when the profession becomes a commodity, there will be no premium over cost of living at all, and if the profession becomes outdated it will disappear. This is the way free markets work, folks...
The reason I don't shut down isn't because I need to keep running or want to waste power. While it is true that shutting down when I don't use my computer would probably save me some electricity dollars, the startup wear-and-tear on the hard drives and even electrical components is greatly reduced by leaving a system on all the time. Parts tend to fail a lot less frequently if you turn them on and leave them on...it's actually surprising the stress you put on even solid state devices during power-on/power-off transients (you ever notice how light bulbs typically burn out just as you turn them on or turn them off? There's a reason for that... check out what happens to current through a simple R-L circuit during step transitions in voltage.). This concept is true even of light and heavy machinery - it's why jet engines are rated on number of start/stop cycles in addition to hours in operation, and why most large industries don't like to stop and start their plants.
So, I keep my system up as much as I can for reliability, not for "ooh look! X days up without a reboot!" bragging rights.
It's an odd thing that most "good capitalists" forget: cooperation is actually better than competition. The trouble is, generally it is only competition that drives people to cooperate...go figure, eh?
And, when you're China and can manage to get your billion-plus population to cooperate...you pretty much don't have anone that can effectively compete against you. It is really quite genious houw they worked that out, even considering the social hardships that we consider them to have (for who are we to tell others what is and is not a hardship anyway?).
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Software problems generally exist because the specification was either nonexistant or poorly written, or the specification wasn't followed. Very rarely is it actual incompetance of a coder. But when a spec for a message handler, for instance, assumes that there will only be a certain length and nothing outside that spec guarantees that length, it's not the person coding that function to check for the length - s/he only has the spec by which to go (because people still haven't figured out how to not throw designs over the wall for implementation).
Complexity of a system does make things difficult, but good design mitigates a lot of problems. (Note I didn't say "eliminates" but "mitigates").
Indeed, the average is about 1kW/m^2. That means if you have 5 m^2 of roof on your house, you should be good (5 kW continuous power is pretty reasonable for a typical household. Peak you might need 10 kW or so, but idle your house should probably only pull around 2-2.5 kW). Most people have 5 m^2 easily. Even if a solar cell is 20% efficient, you only need 25m^2. (A 1000-sqft house (32' by 32' square to make things easy - it's 1024 sq.ft) has 1024 square feet+ of roof. That's 95 square meters. So slap on 50 square meters for good measure, wire up some kind of capacitor battery system for high-demand peak loads and cloudy days, and you're all set.
- electrical grid power plants by type, 2003
- coal: 53%
- nuclear: 21%
- natural gas: 15%
- hydroelectric: 7%
- oil: 3%
- geothermal and "other": 1%
Indeed, since oil is used in manufacturing and for vehicle fuel, nuclear plants for electricity won't halt the use of oil. Heck, we use hydro for electricity more than oil by more than 2 to 1!What I mean is that being black or white or disabled or German or Asian has nothing to do with morality. Practicing homosexuality, though, is a moral issue (whether you like it or not, despite all the media about it being genetic, etc. etc. What if they find that murder is genetic? Does that make it right then? They think that pedophilia might be genetic - does that make it ok?).
That was the point I was trying to make. That does not mean that there shouldn't be discussion about how to protect the rights of homosexuals and how to balance that against protecting the moral beliefs of those who think that is wrong.
I'll even go so far as to say this: just because you may be free to do something does not make that thing right (and just because you may not be free to do something does not make that thing wrong - you could also spin it that just because something is right doesn't guarantee you're free to do it, and just because something is wrong doesn't guarantee that you will be prevented from doing it).
And you are wrong that same-sex marriages do not take away from people - they make people feel uncomfortable, they take away peace-of-mind, they make people have to be careful about what they say for fear of "offeding" someone. With as many lawsuits and therapists we have to counter "emotional suffering" as we have, our society obviously recognizes non-physical impacts of certain activities.
We could debate on this all day, and unfortunately I don't think either of us is going to change our mind. The issues are numerous and ultimately center around the idea of absolute truth versus relativism, which I don't care to get into right now.
However, beware that you yourself could be considered a bigot for being intolerant of those who believe that same-sex marriages are inappropriate. Just because their belief is not the same as yours doesn't mean you should bash them for it.
So, I will cede the point that there is no historical evidence that a rise in minimum wage has an impact on national unemployment or real GDP per capita growth. I decided to look at real income per capita as well (the data I found only went to 1967-2001) and there is a very loose correlation between unemployment and per-capita income growth (R-squared .4) but, again, there was no correlation between minimum wage growth and real income growth.
I guess what we have learned here is that minimum wage doesn't really have any correlation with unemployment, personal income growth, or GDP growth - on a national scale. However, if I'm a pizza shop owner and I can afford $100 worth of salary per day, if minimum wage goes up that means I can a)hire fewer workers or b)keep the same number of workers for fewer hours each. The latter scenario basically keeps unemployment and income rates the same - the difference is that folks have more free time to possibly have more than one job. Hrm. There's an interesting idea that I'll have to pursue a little further I think...
So, while those might not be answers you like, there are at least three reasons why at least 29 million people (as of 22:50 EST) could vote for Bush. They weighed those issues against such things as war, taxes, environment, and that's what they chose. Indeed, you can make a similar list for those some 27 million who voted for Kerry. The thing is, there is no single objective standard that most are willing to accept by which to judge candidates and their platforms, so we still have this voting process. Personally, I like voting better than trying to beat up all the people who think differently than I, because I know I'd have been pummelled quite some time ago.
Yes, there are some folks who vote irrationally, and some who actually deliberate over which issues they are going to weigh more than others and vote a certain way even considering the shortcomings of the person (and by consequence, administration) for whom they have voted.
The thing we ought to, as responsible slashdotters, push on the USPTO is not even "prior art" as most of the crowd pushes on, but the "unobvious to one skilled in the art" clause. Anyone who deals with coordinate transforms - in physics, graphics, or whatever, would have come up with the use of matrix manipulations to view graphics information based on viewer position. The other half of this "invention" is manipulating the viewpoints in a manner which emulates reality - basically it's a patent for an interface which is the same as you or I walking around an object to get a different vantage point.
That aside, there is the issue that 3D graphics have been out in the mainstream for over 10 years and nobody brought this patent up. I hope they're going to lose on statute of limitations.
Perhaps we should draft and file a Friend of the Court brief?
On "freedom to not be killed intentionally by another person": there is and never will be no such freedom (mostly because we can't control things like lightning or hurricanes). The government could, however, grant a "right to not be killed." In this case, the government would forcibly, if necessary, stop people from trying to kill you. Unfortunately, our system is reactive rather than proactive in this instance - our system doesn't do anything to prevent someone from killing you; it just makes it a pain for the person if they fail in their attempt or if they get caught after the fact.
On "freedom to not be enslaved": Again, like being murdered, you cannot have a freedom to "not" have something happen to you. You can, however, have a right granted to you which says "we will forcibly protect you from being enslaved, and if you do happen to be enslaved we'll forcibly get you out".
The point here is that freedom cannot stop something from happening to you (I picked at you for saying "freedom to not...". Freedom simply means that you can act unhindered on your desires. Freedom can only be guaranteed by force, because the only way to have freedom is to prevent people from stopping you from being free. Incidentally this is where rights come in - there is no such right to kill someone (except, arguably, in war, capital punishment, and, unfortunately, abortions) - that is, no authority is (openly) willing to forcibly stop someone from being prevented from killing someone. I know that's a lot of double-negatives, but it's the only way the logic works. There is, however, a right to stay alive - and (ostensibly) the government will use force to prevent others from trying to take your life.
The real kicker is that rights must limit freedom because once you have a right, that means some other party is not free (without consequence) to act in opposition to that right. In fact, some rights even elimintate the possibility for other rights. For instance, the right to have a homosexual marriage implicitily nulllifies the right to hold heterosexual marriage special. Regardless of your viewpoint on if homosexual marriage should be a right or not, if it does become a right that means that the authority will now no longer (forcibly) protect the viewpoint that "heterosexual marriage is sacred". In fact, the right to have homosexual marriages removes the freedom from some parties to act on the belief that only heterosexual marriages are appropriate. The reverse is true as well - disallowing homosexual marriages limits the freedom of some while protecting the "right to have marriage defined as heterosexual only".
I wish it were as black-and-white as you indicated by saying "it's pretty damn easy to determine when someone is trampling on the rights of others"; I just don't see that carried out in our or any other system in the world. The reason is you have to, at some point, make a decision about which "right" is more right than another, and which freedom you're willing to forego.
I could chat all day about this sort of thing, and we could argue about which rights and freedoms we currently have and do not have, but I think the more important discussion is on the nature of freedom and rights becuase if you don't have that foundation first, deciding what you will and won't fight over is a moot point.
*'authority' here is "the group with the biggest stick" - basically authority is really defined as the group that can actually enforce the ahderence to the current set of established rights. Sometimes this authority can be granted (as in "we volunteer to be under your authority") but usually it is taken - or at least maintained - through the use of or potential use of destructive force. And it is an unfortunate reality of our world that destructive force is the only thing that can actually guarantee any rights at all. (Note that I include incarceration as "destructive force" because the choice is to be incarcerated or get physically damaged).
"It is not possible for me to have died yesterday."
Maybe we should focus on building the thing that allows the secret door to open rather than automatically park the car?
I think you need to study up on what "fundamentalist Christian" doctrine really is. When the nation (I assume you mean the USA) is trying to legalize homosexual marriage, has already legalized abortion and homosexual acts, and said nation has no problem with advertisements and general media programming that focuses on being selfish ("do things that make you feel happy!") and folks don't want to hear about morality ("get those 10 commandments out of my town building that I never go in anyway!"), and everywhere you turn people are screaming, "don't tell me what I can and cannot do with my private - or public for that matter - life!" I cannot comprehend how you think this country is going in a "fundamental Christian" direction.
Fundamental Christianity is this and only this: there is a God, He created us and wants to have a relationship with us. We basically told God to shove it, we know better than Him anyway even though He made the world. This saddened God, so He had a way that He could both be just (i.e., actions would have appropriate consequences) and love us at the same time: come to us by sending Jesus his son to die as a sacrifice so that we could have a restored relationship with God. For those folks that accept that, the relationship with God can be restored; for those that don't accept that, they have to deal with the consequence of their actions (being apart from God - that's the true definition of Hell, not "bad stuff will happen to you." Even the Bible acknowledges that "evil people find success" and "good people suffer.").
That, my friend, is Fundamental Christianity. Morality is actually secondary to that - the whole idea of morality (in a Christian context) comes because of why you need to be moral: God is like pure morality, and if you're not moral, you have to be away from God else God couldn't stay pure. Yeah, that sounds kind of arrogant, but it's perfect arrogance (and God even says "I'm a jealous God!"). The reason "Christians" want to "be good" is to show God that they love Him. It's like if you love your wife, you're not going to go around doing things she hates - you're going to do things to show her you love her! And after "morality" comes the dreaded "E" word - evangelism. This too has been twisted over time, but evangelism is simply this: It's when a person has had their life changed by a relationship with Christ and tells that to another person. That's it - not beating people over the head, not berating them - it's simply showing them what their faith has done in their life. It's also not just telling people that, but showing them that by how they act, by the fact that they show love towards others in a sacrificial way - which is decidedly different than the prevailing "every man for himself" culture in which we find ourselves.
That said, I'm not saying you even have to agree with what Christianity really is. I just wish that folks would actually get educated about things - especially religion - when they talk about them. Of course, the very definition of "Christianity" has gotten confused over the years anyway. Just remember: the fact that people claim something is true does not make it so. This means that just because people claim that a belief is Christian doesn't make it so. Just because people claim a belief is anything doesn't make it so.
Not agreeing with a philosophy, though, does not mean that you shouldn't try and understand that philosophy.
Here's a simple example. I'm working on developing a game. Say I want to sell that game on as many hardware platforms as I can tolerate. Let's say I happen to write that game using OpenGL, GLUT, and one of the standard C variants (ISO, ANSI, whatever). If I do that, I only have to make one version of the source code, compile for a bunch of targets, and I'm done. Sure, the performance might not be the best across all platforms since any interface I make for OpenGL is going to be a "second" window system on top of the host OS. But that's not the point - the point is that if you use some standard API (standard console i/o, OpenGL, etc) and don't go munging in "tricks of the host OS", the technology for OS-neutral applications has existed for years.
I only say this because I have written simple and fairly complex (generally console based, mind you) applications using standard language features that first-time compile and run on Windows, Mac OS (X), HP-UX, and Solaris. I've even done the aforementioned OpenGL work that is consistent across Mac and Windows (I don't have access any more to the HP-UX or Solaris machines).
What people sacrifice to follow this route is a "host OS look and feel" by using the host OS API calls. I'd rather, as an application programmer, have the ability to call simple graphics APIs and define my own behavior - closer to what things like OpenGL, GLUT, X-windows, and even DirectX provide rather than even things like Swing or all the widget toolkits for X-windows. Yes, it's nice when a host OS provides "standard controls" but then I have to port and "support multiple platforms". If I hire some guy to write my own standard GUI library and use something like OpenGL that's fairly ubiquitous as my "OS abstraction layer" then my application looks and behaves the same on all systems. This, to me, is more valuable than having all the applications on a system look the same.
Okay, I realize that was a lot of text to try and illustrate my point. My gut feeling on what you propose, though, is that it's more politics than technical difficulties. After all, what is an operating system really but an abstraction layer to the hardware; all the rest of the crap that is part of a modern "OS" is really applications. I think when the paradigm shifts back to "the OS just provides access to the hardware functionality" then software writers will be better able to write applications that work on any hardware - so long as the hardware API is consistent!
Incidentally, the cost of software would indeed come down if there were fewer platforms to support as complexity will be reduced. The more combinations of any product there are, cost goes up drastically. But, again, the "common OS" or whatever doesn't really even begin to address the issue of cost of hardware having anything to do with software piracy. Piracy is simply a market reaction to the cost of purchase vs the cost of getting copying, distributing, posessing, and using unpurchased software. (Since the cost to do this is zero, and the cost of risk getting caught is below the purchase price of most software, people will continue to pirate software).
Don'tcha just love physics?
There are, however, other reasons for launching horizontally; one is that you need smaller rockets at first to get moving (you don't have gravity pulling against you horizontally). It's a not so much an energy question but "how big a rocket do you want" question in this example.
So, yes, there's all this carbon sitting around, but you'd need a way to get the carbon away from the oxygen...
You have, in this one sentence, summed up a great many of my observations on the strange rhetoric of many ... rhetoric - spewing ... groups!
I find this comment almost a troll, but probably it is just a result of emotion. Firstly, you have to define what it means to have access to something. If you mean "it's available if you choose to get it" then there is absolutely no "basic modern comfort" inaccessible here in the US. If you mean "you can get it without having to do anything for it" then yes, there are lots of things inaccessible here in the US.
I find it naive to think that it's a "right" to have basic infrastructure without contributing to the upkeep and advancment of that infrastructure. Note that I did NOT say that it's not a right to have infrastructure!!
When you have people on the poor end of society spending their meager incomes on cigarettes or alcohol or lottery tickets, which they're welcome to choose to do in a "free" nation, I don't think it's right that they complain about not having money for food, clothing, electricty, etc. Sure, you can complain about how [industry X] lied and twisted their arm into buying [product A] and now they're addicted, but there are still personal decisions that were made.
I'd rather see the general public not spend $400 million dollars to go watch a movie and use that for education, but you don't hear anyone complaining about box office returns being too high. You don't hear the public saying they refuse to pay $50+ per pro-sports ticket to support superstars' 7 or 8 digit salaries - when those hundreds of millions would be MUCH better spent on education programs to get people out of the cycle of poverty, divorce, and broken families - or just on food and housing programs. I don't think the public has a right to criticize the government for its "irresponsible" spending when in general the public is far more irresponsible...
But, that's what you get in a democracy like ours - people are free to choose to spend as they like, but then they complain when the [government] says they want to use tax money for some program because the general public isn't responsible enough to take care of [issue Q], like health care or even war.
I just don't understand how you can say something's not available when you go walk the aisles of Wal-Mart (or similar) and there's so much more crap than is necessary to live a thriving life. Some people are just not willing to seek out what help is available to get to that solvency point, and then they complain of being intruded upon when some "institution" comes and says they want to help.
Anyway, I should get off my soap-box now...
The problem with auto-pilot is, where's the fun in that?
Hey, sounds like a PhD thesis to figure out the relationship between music preferences and personality type! At best you might find a correlation, but I doubt you'd be able to find causality...
And the fact that any given individual's music interests are usually all over the spectrum makes the problem most likely more unsolvable than all the math puzzles out there...
For instance, what do Mozart, Saviour Machine, and the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge! have in common? Beats me, but I love them all...
Looking at things "on average" is never a very useful way to look at things for any given individual. Also, the way I look at things, cost of living increases are meaningless if your salary is already above the "living wage" level. You don't need an increase to keep up with "cost of living" when you're already well above that. Notice that it's cost of living and not cost of living how you want. If you're above the cost of living already, you don't need to catch up at all!
Now, at the bottom of the ladder, wage increases should keep pace with some form of inflationary measure (and I think we all can agree that CPI is a really poor measure when you average Hollywood with the poor areas of the South - the media, at least, doesn't post the spread on these figures but I'm pretty sure you can look them up at the Census Bureau).
I'm in agreement, though, that something should be done to help flatten out the disparity between executives getting ~9% raises on at least 10x living wage, while those closer to 1x living wage get at or below the rate of increase in living wage. However, I don't have an answer on how to affect that change in an open-market system; the capitalistic system is designed so that the majority of the money will end up in the hands of the few who are better able to manage it. It's quite possibly urban legend, but I've heard that if you distributed all the wealth in the US equally, within a [short period] the wealth would move around unevenly to the same people that have it today.
It's like the stuff in our newspaper here a while back when some guy was crying because he had to change jobs from $100k / year down to $70k / year. Yeah, it looks bad that that's a 30% pay cut, but he's still about 3 times the poverty level. Deal and get on with it!
Anyway, to summarize, cost of living increases only matter if you're living just at the low end of what you need to get by. If you have to give up luxuries, then you're not at that limit and should not really be expected to get cost of living increases. The only way you get cost of living increases when you're above the "cost of living" line is because your services are at a premium for some reason - what's happening when costs rise faster than salaries for a given profession it simply means that the added value has been reduced for that field, and eventually, when the profession becomes a commodity, there will be no premium over cost of living at all, and if the profession becomes outdated it will disappear. This is the way free markets work, folks...
So, I keep my system up as much as I can for reliability, not for "ooh look! X days up without a reboot!" bragging rights.
And, when you're China and can manage to get your billion-plus population to cooperate...you pretty much don't have anone that can effectively compete against you. It is really quite genious houw they worked that out, even considering the social hardships that we consider them to have (for who are we to tell others what is and is not a hardship anyway?).
Yes, I have and am looking forward to it. However, as good as I expect it will be, it will not be the same as a 22-episode season 5.