Agreed that the subsidies are a bad idea . . they keep bad ideas alive and make it harder for good ones to get going. However, there are very good reasons to pursue ways of producing oil-like fuels as cheaply as possible even if the prices are not yet competitive with oil. It's very likely that the world will soon experience at least one of either (a) economic recovery, and/or (b) large-scale war, either or both of which will (a) reduce the value of the dollar, and (b) greatly increase demand for the limited amount of cheap oil that's left. All these factors will make imported oil very, very difficult for Americans to afford. If other more or less equivalent fuels can be produced domestically, and in a sustainable fashion, at prices even CLOSE to being competitive with oil today, then they will be more than competitive with oil tomorrow.
Make sure you note the Biblical definition of love, as found in 1 Cor. 13 among other places. Forcing your moral code on others does not meet any part of this definition. Tolerance on the other hand is mentioned fairly explicitly there and in many other places in Scripture: not that you have to agree with everyone or everything, but you accept that like you they also are created in the image of God, and therefore of inherent dignity and worth, regardless of any differences we may have.
As a Bible-believing aspiring Christian (one who aspires to being worthy of being called a follower of Christ, not one who claims to have attained that aspiration):
I can agree with a lot of what you have to say - almost all of it really. The failures and weaknesses that people should be most concerned with are their own, which they can control, not other people's, which they can't. (And of course that assumes that we agree with one another what constitutes a weakness or failure in the first place, which, even among Christians, we often don't).
The greatest commandments for any Christian, according to Christ Himself, are: (a) to love God with all our being and (b) to love our neighbor as ourselves. This implies tolerance. It implies that we should not attempt to use force, including the force of a state, to inflict our will upon others. It implies that we can disagree and still be friends and still relate to one another. It implies a moral standard that is more concerned with love than with rigid dogma. It does not imply that we turn a blind eye to sin - especially our own - but rather, that we do all we can with God's help to deal with our own, then offer help (NOT judgment or condemnation) to those around us who may want it.
Now, there is a bit more to Christianity than law. We find that we are unable to keep the law. None of us is free from sin in one sort or another. Few if any of us are totally sexually pure. Few of us are truly un-judgmental. Few if any of us always live up to even our own moral standards, much less God's. So we find that, even if we understand and try to follow God's Law of Love, we still will fall short, and thus will find ourselves in need of His forgiveness. And we find in Scripture that this forgiveness is available to all those who trust in Christ. That is not the same as implying that all those who claim to be Christians possess this forgiveness and the eternal life that follows . . . nor that all those who do not so claim are outside of it. But it is wise to seek it where we know it may be found.
Much of this is summed up in the story of Christ forgiving the woman taken in adultery, whom the "religious" leaders of the day were about to stone to death, in accordance with their understanding of Mosaic law, but also in total hypocrisy, as she had done nothing they had not also done: "Neither do I condemn you;" He said, "go, and sin no more."
I am horrified by how badly many "Christians" treat many members of the LGBT community, how many people get hurt as a result, and how badly the Christian message gets distorted in the process. It isn't "do whatever you want and God will look away" and neither is it "do exactly what we say or God will burn you." It is that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life." And we are ALL sinners, so we don't have any right to judge anyone else, but we have been given the privilege and responsibility to live according to what we know of God's love (as well as His justice), and also to invite (NOT force) others who are willing to do the same if they wish.
Doesn't the neighboring Dominican Republic have similar issues, and, historically, wasn't it desperately poor as well throughout much of its history? Yet by all appearances it is improving rapidly, due to a far less corrupt government.
There is always hope, IF people are free. Lack of freedom, and in particular corrupt, thieving and murderous "governments," are the cause of much poverty, war, and other suffering.
Price is not the only reason people prefer Free as in Freedom. I for one would rather pay $500 for Linux than to use Windows at no cost, even if Windows were better suited to my needs than Linux rather than the other way around. Freedom is what matters most to me, not price. Freedom doesn't guarantee that there won't be problems, but it does guarantee that you and your data will not be held hostage by them. Likewise it doesn't guarantee perfect security, but it does mean that security problems can, and very likely will, be found and fixed.
This kind of arms race always favors, all other things being equal, the wealthier player. It also favors, all other things being equal, the aggressor; missiles are cheap and abundant while missile defense systems are neither. The U.S. may be able to win this race in the short term. But longer-term it has no chance whatsoever. Developing and building the technology that will ultimately kill most of us isn't a great strategic move.
Perhaps if they decide to make heavy use of these, they might reconsider.
Seriously . . . you want something as important and heavily used as a filesystem to be as future-proof as possible, and there remains serious question about who will maintain reiser4 going forward. Ext4 is a stepping-stone to btrfs, which seems to have a bright future, and incorporates many of the same ideas as reiserfs.
Hyperinflation, though likely in my opinion, is still not inevitable, nor can any foreign power unilaterally cause it; it is caused by massive and accelerating expansion of the money supply, which is completely within the control of the Federal Reserve and hence the federal government. The reason we will likely get it is that it is the politically easier of the only two options available for addressing the massive debt, including off-book future liabilities, of the U.S. government.
The other option would be for the central government to accept that in order to survive, it must accept an eventual return to rule of law and to Constitutional principles. It must accept a much smaller role in the economy. It must accept that the only way for its share of the pie to grow bigger is to let the pie itself grow, which requires, at least in the short term, getting its hands out of that pie, and allowing the economy to grow bereft of any regulations at the federal level save, at most, those that are necessary to protect basic human rights. It must forever give up its present role of purposely enriching some at the expense of all others. It must forever give up its alleged "right" to manipulate the economy through the Federal Reserve. None of this seems likely to happen on its own, but, like all institutions, governments value their own survival above all else, and as the economy collapses and the prospect of widespread revolt and even civil war looms large, it will adapt (or it will die, and the states will take over).
In my example, EM radiation was exonerated. That does not imply that it is harmless. Your microwave oven operates at almost exactly the same frequency range as a WiFi transmitter, and that frequency was not selected by accident; it is one of those most readily absorbed by water molecules, and we are about 70% water by weight.
You are very likely correct that the small amount of radiation resulting from WiFi - several orders of magnitude less than that in your microwave oven - is harmless, not absorbed by the body in any significant amount, and indeed dwarfed by other source of radiation in or around that same frequency range. Nevertheless, until we learn a LOT more about cellular biology, we will never be able to guarantee that it will never adversely affect anyone at all. Maybe the way that signal is modulated causes changes to the way some specific protein unfolds in some small percentage of people. There are a number of far more likely causes, which should be investigated and ruled out before we even consider the possibility of it being WiFi. But to dismiss the possibility out of hand, as has been done historically for MANY technologies that later proved harmful, would be both premature and unwise.
It wasn't necessarily in their heads. It was long believed that the EM radiation from power lines caused cancer. Controlled studies seemed to provide no evidence of any harmful effects, yet there continued to be cancer clusters near power lines. Finally, after many decades, someone figured out that the cancers were caused by the herbicides used to clear the area around those lines.
It's not implausible that something similar might be occurring here, especially since we know some people are drastically more sensitive to EM radiation and environmental anomalies than others, and since there is still a great deal we don't know about how these things affect our bodies.
From their point of view, you are denying them their beliefs. They believe that drinking beer on a Sunday is a sin. They have the moral responsibility, enforced on them by their religious hierarchy, all the way up to their Creator, who, by the way, created you too, to stop you drinking on Sunday.
OP is not denying Christian beliefs, merely human ones. The Christian duty is not to try to force one's belief on others (which is impossible anyway) but to love one's neighbor as one's self. Granted, too many Christians don't understand this, which creates major headaches for everyone; but the way to fight drunkenness, blasphemy, or other vices is through persuasion and through setting a better example, not by threatening those who disagree with the coercion and violence inherent in anything that any government does.
People can go from thin to morbidly obese in very little time due to things like known, documented side effects of certain psychiatric drugs (mostly antipsychotics, also some alleged treatments for ADHD and depression) that frack up the liver. (You are supposed to have monthly liver function monitoring when on those drugs, but that rarely happens, and without it, you can suffer permanent damage to liver, pancreas, and kidneys.) Obesity can result from other problems that affect these organs, as can diabetes, hypertension and the other aspects of "metabolic syndrome." In some cases it is a cause, in others an effect. It is not possible to generalize without knowing a person's medical history. There appears to be a large correlation between certain additives like HFCS and obesity even when other factors are held constant, and some good reasons to believe this is a causative relationship (for instance the tendency of fructose metabolism to take place in the liver rather than throughout the entire body, and to not produce proper levels of leptin to regulate subsequent hunger). It is simply more complex then "fat people lack self-control." Even if that were true we do not have sufficient data to conclude that the poor self-control led to the obesity, rather than perhaps the other way around. And, finally, there is the idea that people are people, and are entitled to a certain amount of respect and dignity regardless of whether we agree with the choices they make (even presuming that their obesity is a choice).
that we are an open source and not a free software foundation
For me that tells me everything I need to know. I value free software for the freedom. The fact that source is available is only one of the freedoms I would like my software to respect. There are many others. That Mr. Ramji understands the difference between "Open" and "Free," and explicitly adopts the former while rejecting the latter, tells me that he and by extension the CodePlex foundation are interested in freedom only for the incidental benefits it might bring, not for its own sake. Which is fine for Open Source advocates, but not Free Software advocates such as myself.
That shouldn't be necessary, because if good UI design principles were followed, you could set your font sizes and screen resolution any way you wanted, and dialogs would both respect your choices and try to reformat themselves intelligently to fit them. From what I've seen, both major desktop environments (Gnome and KDE) have made significant improvements but also still have quite a ways to go. You can file UI bug reports with either team, and I'd highly recommend it.
I don't know for sure that they are sharing data with government thugs . . . but I have to assume they are and act accordingly, because it's in the interest of the thugs to ask and for anyone they ask to comply lest "Bad Things" happen. Hence, per Occam's Razor, it seems far more plausible that they are than that they aren't.
I do have a long history of having and expressing eeevil libertarian and anarchist thoughts, including opposition to the very concept of coercive government itself, and there is no longer any point in trying to deny or erase that history. But I no longer make any effort to use the Internet to organize or even to discuss these ideas in any depth with other like-minded folks. I understand that there are those who would consider those ideas a threat, and might try to use coercion or violence against me, or worse, against those I care about, in order to get me to stop. Rather than risk that, I simply make sure that the political side of my life stays "off the radar" insofar as possible, which, while inconvenient, is no more difficult than it was in the days before the Internet.
They arn't publishing your search history in the newspaper.. they are using it to increment a counter that you might be interested in office supply ads.
OK, then, please explain to me how they could possibly think I need Viagra????
I for one do understand the military/industrial/banking/education/media/medical/pharma complex, and in fact I am part of it (not because I'm proud of it, but because I must feed my family and have no other way to do so). I agree for the most part with your observations. But it does NOT control the entire world, and in fact it is being kept on an increasingly short leash by those who do, by those whose money is older by centuries than the American experiment itself. They view American imperialism and militarism as no longer a business opportunity, but rather a significant threat to their entire way of life. They are engineering a war that will end this threat, while preserving their own wealth and investments by shifting them to the places they believe will survive and even prosper in the aftermath of that war.
Energy is indeed being suppressed; people are being manipulated to believe that it is scarce and dangerous and that consuming it is a bad thing. And oil, which most people equate with energy, is indeed scarce at the moment. But, in the form of uranium, thorium, and coal (which can be converted to cleaner forms of energy), among other things, there is PLENTY. The US and world elites are struggling to maintain control over it, which means both ensuring that they have "their" share but also that others do not, since this way others can be manipulated into fighting each other for it and increasing its value. But the resulting shortages that all of us normal people see are PURELY political in nature. Even barring any future technological innovations, there is plenty of energy for all of us, and our descendants, and theirs, for generations to come. We just aren't being allowed to access it.
I believe this could work, and in fact it is what I advocate, and what will be done in more economically free countries (ironically including China which is already building the infrastructure now). There are no technological challenges that I see, only political ones.
Regarding how to store the relatively cheap electricity we could be getting from fission done right, the easiest way in the short term would be by coal gasification. This would allow us to convert low-quality, high-sulfur coal, which we have in abundance in the U.S. (and also in China, Russia, and India), into a higher-quality, less polluting, but definitely non-carbon-neutral liquid fuel. Eventually, the incremental improvements we are already seeing in fuel cell technology should allow us to transition to carbon-neutral or carbon-negative methods of storing and converting energy.
The market will work if we let it. We won't completely run out of oil, but as proven and recoverable reserves shrink, prices will rise, making other forms of energy production more competitive. Carbon emissions will not shrink in the near term due to growth in the developing world, but if sustainable green technology is developed in the wealthier nations, it can be shared so as to allow other places to develop more cleanly and sustainably. (I don't believe in AGW but I understand there are other good reasons to wean ourselves from oil dependency, and I also understand that energy usage is one of the prime determinants of quality of life and we should be looking for ways to provide clean energy, not forcing people at gunpoint to use less of it.)
Large-scale sciences like climatology and astronomy suffer from an inability to isolate variables or to yield "reproducible results."
Yes, and in my view this places them in a very different category than experimental sciences, which involve the scientific method, and which tend to yield results that are not only reproducible (and therefore independently verifiable), but useful as well.
Observational "science" is inherently subject to bias, for at least the reason that selective "observation" can result in just about any conclusion one desires. It is very much like those who selectively read religious texts to try to find justification for things they want to find, as opposed to what is really there. And frankly I do not see how this sort of "science" contributes anything to society comparable to what the hard, experimental sciences produce on a routine basis. That is not to say that it doesn't have value; observation is necessary in order to form testable theories that eventually form the basis for experimental science. But it isn't the same thing, and it doesn't produce results that can be treated as established and dogmatic facts.
I tend to concur that people are not losing their faith in science . . . they are losing faith in quasi-scientific dogma and insisting that the scientific process be followed rigorously, or else that any "conclusions" derived from be treated with the skepticism that they rightfully deserve since, without that process having been followed rigorously, those conclusions are speculative and unproven (and perhaps unprovable) in nature.
I just battled a new AMD64 machine trying to get low-latency (alsa/jack/jack-rack for realtime DSP) to work. I found that the ACPI on my motherboard was buggy and was starving all of the real-time processes. Disabling it at the kernel command line (acpi=off) did the trick for me. YMMV, but any modern system should be able to do low-latency audio without a problem, provided everything is configured and working correctly.
YMMV. My experience is that Linux installs may or may not be painful depending mainly on one thing: whether the hardware is well-supported and of reasonably acceptable quality. A Knoppix or other "live CD/DVD" is a great test: if it "just works" including all of your hardware, then any modern Linux distro is likely to install and run nicely; if not, you might want to Google a bit regarding any of your hardware that doesn't "just work," to determine whether other Linux users have gotten it to work and if so whether doing so entailed an acceptable (to you) level of hassle. I'm a Gentooer, so I don't mind recompiling kernels and editing config files, but others might, which is fine, but which also means they will need hardware that works against a stock kernel and distro, which is a smaller subset of the hardware that can be made to work with some tweaking.
I would differentiate between someone who collaborated willingly and someone who was coerced into doing so, for instance by threats to his or her family.
How is this reasoning different than bin Laden's? Could he not argue that Muslims are in a fight for their survival and that any methods are appropriate because they have no choice but to win?? Actually, he, and many other terrorists, have made EXACTLY that argument, and it is no different than yours, and if I for one am forced to either take innocent lives or to die, then I will die, because I have no right to deliberately take an innocent life, for any reason or under any circumstances I can imagine. Neither do you, nor does bin Laden, nor do the U.S. or Israeli governments, nor did the British nor the Germans. Every life is precious and irreplaceable, and all of the monotheistic religions, among others, teach that to kill an innocent is a crime for which one will answer, if not in this life, then in the next.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that it is a far more significant "greenhouse gas" than carbon dioxide!
Agreed that the subsidies are a bad idea . . they keep bad ideas alive and make it harder for good ones to get going. However, there are very good reasons to pursue ways of producing oil-like fuels as cheaply as possible even if the prices are not yet competitive with oil. It's very likely that the world will soon experience at least one of either (a) economic recovery, and/or (b) large-scale war, either or both of which will (a) reduce the value of the dollar, and (b) greatly increase demand for the limited amount of cheap oil that's left. All these factors will make imported oil very, very difficult for Americans to afford. If other more or less equivalent fuels can be produced domestically, and in a sustainable fashion, at prices even CLOSE to being competitive with oil today, then they will be more than competitive with oil tomorrow.
Make sure you note the Biblical definition of love, as found in 1 Cor. 13 among other places. Forcing your moral code on others does not meet any part of this definition. Tolerance on the other hand is mentioned fairly explicitly there and in many other places in Scripture: not that you have to agree with everyone or everything, but you accept that like you they also are created in the image of God, and therefore of inherent dignity and worth, regardless of any differences we may have.
As a Bible-believing aspiring Christian (one who aspires to being worthy of being called a follower of Christ, not one who claims to have attained that aspiration):
I can agree with a lot of what you have to say - almost all of it really. The failures and weaknesses that people should be most concerned with are their own, which they can control, not other people's, which they can't. (And of course that assumes that we agree with one another what constitutes a weakness or failure in the first place, which, even among Christians, we often don't).
The greatest commandments for any Christian, according to Christ Himself, are: (a) to love God with all our being and (b) to love our neighbor as ourselves. This implies tolerance. It implies that we should not attempt to use force, including the force of a state, to inflict our will upon others. It implies that we can disagree and still be friends and still relate to one another. It implies a moral standard that is more concerned with love than with rigid dogma. It does not imply that we turn a blind eye to sin - especially our own - but rather, that we do all we can with God's help to deal with our own, then offer help (NOT judgment or condemnation) to those around us who may want it.
Now, there is a bit more to Christianity than law. We find that we are unable to keep the law. None of us is free from sin in one sort or another. Few if any of us are totally sexually pure. Few of us are truly un-judgmental. Few if any of us always live up to even our own moral standards, much less God's. So we find that, even if we understand and try to follow God's Law of Love, we still will fall short, and thus will find ourselves in need of His forgiveness. And we find in Scripture that this forgiveness is available to all those who trust in Christ. That is not the same as implying that all those who claim to be Christians possess this forgiveness and the eternal life that follows . . . nor that all those who do not so claim are outside of it. But it is wise to seek it where we know it may be found.
Much of this is summed up in the story of Christ forgiving the woman taken in adultery, whom the "religious" leaders of the day were about to stone to death, in accordance with their understanding of Mosaic law, but also in total hypocrisy, as she had done nothing they had not also done: "Neither do I condemn you;" He said, "go, and sin no more."
I am horrified by how badly many "Christians" treat many members of the LGBT community, how many people get hurt as a result, and how badly the Christian message gets distorted in the process. It isn't "do whatever you want and God will look away" and neither is it "do exactly what we say or God will burn you." It is that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life." And we are ALL sinners, so we don't have any right to judge anyone else, but we have been given the privilege and responsibility to live according to what we know of God's love (as well as His justice), and also to invite (NOT force) others who are willing to do the same if they wish.
Doesn't the neighboring Dominican Republic have similar issues, and, historically, wasn't it desperately poor as well throughout much of its history? Yet by all appearances it is improving rapidly, due to a far less corrupt government.
There is always hope, IF people are free. Lack of freedom, and in particular corrupt, thieving and murderous "governments," are the cause of much poverty, war, and other suffering.
Price is not the only reason people prefer Free as in Freedom. I for one would rather pay $500 for Linux than to use Windows at no cost, even if Windows were better suited to my needs than Linux rather than the other way around. Freedom is what matters most to me, not price. Freedom doesn't guarantee that there won't be problems, but it does guarantee that you and your data will not be held hostage by them. Likewise it doesn't guarantee perfect security, but it does mean that security problems can, and very likely will, be found and fixed.
This kind of arms race always favors, all other things being equal, the wealthier player. It also favors, all other things being equal, the aggressor; missiles are cheap and abundant while missile defense systems are neither. The U.S. may be able to win this race in the short term. But longer-term it has no chance whatsoever. Developing and building the technology that will ultimately kill most of us isn't a great strategic move.
Oh, I don't know . . umm . . maybe anyone with a toddler?
Perhaps if they decide to make heavy use of these, they might reconsider.
Seriously . . . you want something as important and heavily used as a filesystem to be as future-proof as possible, and there remains serious question about who will maintain reiser4 going forward. Ext4 is a stepping-stone to btrfs, which seems to have a bright future, and incorporates many of the same ideas as reiserfs.
Hyperinflation, though likely in my opinion, is still not inevitable, nor can any foreign power unilaterally cause it; it is caused by massive and accelerating expansion of the money supply, which is completely within the control of the Federal Reserve and hence the federal government. The reason we will likely get it is that it is the politically easier of the only two options available for addressing the massive debt, including off-book future liabilities, of the U.S. government.
The other option would be for the central government to accept that in order to survive, it must accept an eventual return to rule of law and to Constitutional principles. It must accept a much smaller role in the economy. It must accept that the only way for its share of the pie to grow bigger is to let the pie itself grow, which requires, at least in the short term, getting its hands out of that pie, and allowing the economy to grow bereft of any regulations at the federal level save, at most, those that are necessary to protect basic human rights. It must forever give up its present role of purposely enriching some at the expense of all others. It must forever give up its alleged "right" to manipulate the economy through the Federal Reserve. None of this seems likely to happen on its own, but, like all institutions, governments value their own survival above all else, and as the economy collapses and the prospect of widespread revolt and even civil war looms large, it will adapt (or it will die, and the states will take over).
In my example, EM radiation was exonerated. That does not imply that it is harmless. Your microwave oven operates at almost exactly the same frequency range as a WiFi transmitter, and that frequency was not selected by accident; it is one of those most readily absorbed by water molecules, and we are about 70% water by weight.
You are very likely correct that the small amount of radiation resulting from WiFi - several orders of magnitude less than that in your microwave oven - is harmless, not absorbed by the body in any significant amount, and indeed dwarfed by other source of radiation in or around that same frequency range. Nevertheless, until we learn a LOT more about cellular biology, we will never be able to guarantee that it will never adversely affect anyone at all. Maybe the way that signal is modulated causes changes to the way some specific protein unfolds in some small percentage of people. There are a number of far more likely causes, which should be investigated and ruled out before we even consider the possibility of it being WiFi. But to dismiss the possibility out of hand, as has been done historically for MANY technologies that later proved harmful, would be both premature and unwise.
It wasn't necessarily in their heads. It was long believed that the EM radiation from power lines caused cancer. Controlled studies seemed to provide no evidence of any harmful effects, yet there continued to be cancer clusters near power lines. Finally, after many decades, someone figured out that the cancers were caused by the herbicides used to clear the area around those lines.
It's not implausible that something similar might be occurring here, especially since we know some people are drastically more sensitive to EM radiation and environmental anomalies than others, and since there is still a great deal we don't know about how these things affect our bodies.
From their point of view, you are denying them their beliefs. They believe that drinking beer on a Sunday is a sin. They have the moral responsibility, enforced on them by their religious hierarchy, all the way up to their Creator, who, by the way, created you too, to stop you drinking on Sunday.
OP is not denying Christian beliefs, merely human ones. The Christian duty is not to try to force one's belief on others (which is impossible anyway) but to love one's neighbor as one's self. Granted, too many Christians don't understand this, which creates major headaches for everyone; but the way to fight drunkenness, blasphemy, or other vices is through persuasion and through setting a better example, not by threatening those who disagree with the coercion and violence inherent in anything that any government does.
People can go from thin to morbidly obese in very little time due to things like known, documented side effects of certain psychiatric drugs (mostly antipsychotics, also some alleged treatments for ADHD and depression) that frack up the liver. (You are supposed to have monthly liver function monitoring when on those drugs, but that rarely happens, and without it, you can suffer permanent damage to liver, pancreas, and kidneys.) Obesity can result from other problems that affect these organs, as can diabetes, hypertension and the other aspects of "metabolic syndrome." In some cases it is a cause, in others an effect. It is not possible to generalize without knowing a person's medical history. There appears to be a large correlation between certain additives like HFCS and obesity even when other factors are held constant, and some good reasons to believe this is a causative relationship (for instance the tendency of fructose metabolism to take place in the liver rather than throughout the entire body, and to not produce proper levels of leptin to regulate subsequent hunger). It is simply more complex then "fat people lack self-control." Even if that were true we do not have sufficient data to conclude that the poor self-control led to the obesity, rather than perhaps the other way around. And, finally, there is the idea that people are people, and are entitled to a certain amount of respect and dignity regardless of whether we agree with the choices they make (even presuming that their obesity is a choice).
that we are an open source and not a free software foundation
For me that tells me everything I need to know. I value free software for the freedom. The fact that source is available is only one of the freedoms I would like my software to respect. There are many others. That Mr. Ramji understands the difference between "Open" and "Free," and explicitly adopts the former while rejecting the latter, tells me that he and by extension the CodePlex foundation are interested in freedom only for the incidental benefits it might bring, not for its own sake. Which is fine for Open Source advocates, but not Free Software advocates such as myself.
That shouldn't be necessary, because if good UI design principles were followed, you could set your font sizes and screen resolution any way you wanted, and dialogs would both respect your choices and try to reformat themselves intelligently to fit them. From what I've seen, both major desktop environments (Gnome and KDE) have made significant improvements but also still have quite a ways to go. You can file UI bug reports with either team, and I'd highly recommend it.
I don't know for sure that they are sharing data with government thugs . . . but I have to assume they are and act accordingly, because it's in the interest of the thugs to ask and for anyone they ask to comply lest "Bad Things" happen. Hence, per Occam's Razor, it seems far more plausible that they are than that they aren't.
I do have a long history of having and expressing eeevil libertarian and anarchist thoughts, including opposition to the very concept of coercive government itself, and there is no longer any point in trying to deny or erase that history. But I no longer make any effort to use the Internet to organize or even to discuss these ideas in any depth with other like-minded folks. I understand that there are those who would consider those ideas a threat, and might try to use coercion or violence against me, or worse, against those I care about, in order to get me to stop. Rather than risk that, I simply make sure that the political side of my life stays "off the radar" insofar as possible, which, while inconvenient, is no more difficult than it was in the days before the Internet.
They arn't publishing your search history in the newspaper .. they are using it to increment a counter that you might be interested in office supply ads.
OK, then, please explain to me how they could possibly think I need Viagra????
I for one do understand the military/industrial/banking/education/media/medical/pharma complex, and in fact I am part of it (not because I'm proud of it, but because I must feed my family and have no other way to do so). I agree for the most part with your observations. But it does NOT control the entire world, and in fact it is being kept on an increasingly short leash by those who do, by those whose money is older by centuries than the American experiment itself. They view American imperialism and militarism as no longer a business opportunity, but rather a significant threat to their entire way of life. They are engineering a war that will end this threat, while preserving their own wealth and investments by shifting them to the places they believe will survive and even prosper in the aftermath of that war.
Energy is indeed being suppressed; people are being manipulated to believe that it is scarce and dangerous and that consuming it is a bad thing. And oil, which most people equate with energy, is indeed scarce at the moment. But, in the form of uranium, thorium, and coal (which can be converted to cleaner forms of energy), among other things, there is PLENTY. The US and world elites are struggling to maintain control over it, which means both ensuring that they have "their" share but also that others do not, since this way others can be manipulated into fighting each other for it and increasing its value. But the resulting shortages that all of us normal people see are PURELY political in nature. Even barring any future technological innovations, there is plenty of energy for all of us, and our descendants, and theirs, for generations to come. We just aren't being allowed to access it.
I believe this could work, and in fact it is what I advocate, and what will be done in more economically free countries (ironically including China which is already building the infrastructure now). There are no technological challenges that I see, only political ones.
Regarding how to store the relatively cheap electricity we could be getting from fission done right, the easiest way in the short term would be by coal gasification. This would allow us to convert low-quality, high-sulfur coal, which we have in abundance in the U.S. (and also in China, Russia, and India), into a higher-quality, less polluting, but definitely non-carbon-neutral liquid fuel. Eventually, the incremental improvements we are already seeing in fuel cell technology should allow us to transition to carbon-neutral or carbon-negative methods of storing and converting energy.
The market will work if we let it. We won't completely run out of oil, but as proven and recoverable reserves shrink, prices will rise, making other forms of energy production more competitive. Carbon emissions will not shrink in the near term due to growth in the developing world, but if sustainable green technology is developed in the wealthier nations, it can be shared so as to allow other places to develop more cleanly and sustainably. (I don't believe in AGW but I understand there are other good reasons to wean ourselves from oil dependency, and I also understand that energy usage is one of the prime determinants of quality of life and we should be looking for ways to provide clean energy, not forcing people at gunpoint to use less of it.)
Large-scale sciences like climatology and astronomy suffer from an inability to isolate variables or to yield "reproducible results."
Yes, and in my view this places them in a very different category than experimental sciences, which involve the scientific method, and which tend to yield results that are not only reproducible (and therefore independently verifiable), but useful as well.
Observational "science" is inherently subject to bias, for at least the reason that selective "observation" can result in just about any conclusion one desires. It is very much like those who selectively read religious texts to try to find justification for things they want to find, as opposed to what is really there. And frankly I do not see how this sort of "science" contributes anything to society comparable to what the hard, experimental sciences produce on a routine basis. That is not to say that it doesn't have value; observation is necessary in order to form testable theories that eventually form the basis for experimental science. But it isn't the same thing, and it doesn't produce results that can be treated as established and dogmatic facts.
I tend to concur that people are not losing their faith in science . . . they are losing faith in quasi-scientific dogma and insisting that the scientific process be followed rigorously, or else that any "conclusions" derived from be treated with the skepticism that they rightfully deserve since, without that process having been followed rigorously, those conclusions are speculative and unproven (and perhaps unprovable) in nature.
I just battled a new AMD64 machine trying to get low-latency (alsa/jack/jack-rack for realtime DSP) to work. I found that the ACPI on my motherboard was buggy and was starving all of the real-time processes. Disabling it at the kernel command line (acpi=off) did the trick for me. YMMV, but any modern system should be able to do low-latency audio without a problem, provided everything is configured and working correctly.
YMMV. My experience is that Linux installs may or may not be painful depending mainly on one thing: whether the hardware is well-supported and of reasonably acceptable quality. A Knoppix or other "live CD/DVD" is a great test: if it "just works" including all of your hardware, then any modern Linux distro is likely to install and run nicely; if not, you might want to Google a bit regarding any of your hardware that doesn't "just work," to determine whether other Linux users have gotten it to work and if so whether doing so entailed an acceptable (to you) level of hassle. I'm a Gentooer, so I don't mind recompiling kernels and editing config files, but others might, which is fine, but which also means they will need hardware that works against a stock kernel and distro, which is a smaller subset of the hardware that can be made to work with some tweaking.
I would differentiate between someone who collaborated willingly and someone who was coerced into doing so, for instance by threats to his or her family.
How is this reasoning different than bin Laden's? Could he not argue that Muslims are in a fight for their survival and that any methods are appropriate because they have no choice but to win?? Actually, he, and many other terrorists, have made EXACTLY that argument, and it is no different than yours, and if I for one am forced to either take innocent lives or to die, then I will die, because I have no right to deliberately take an innocent life, for any reason or under any circumstances I can imagine. Neither do you, nor does bin Laden, nor do the U.S. or Israeli governments, nor did the British nor the Germans. Every life is precious and irreplaceable, and all of the monotheistic religions, among others, teach that to kill an innocent is a crime for which one will answer, if not in this life, then in the next.