Most of those Americans who don't see the problem with spying on other countries think the NSA is watching the military activities of those countries, looking for terrorists, mad bombers, and organized warfare risks. Ask those people if it's right to spend that many billions on helping huge international conglomerates, which happen to be headquartered in the US, beat out their competition, which just happens to be huge international conglomerates which in some case actually employ more US citizens, but are headquartered in other countries, and see what the level of support is for that.
I don't see this as 'doing DRM right', so much as 'doing it less wrong'. Many of us tolerate Steam's DRM because it's less annoying than what other companies want to use, often much less annoying. Compared to Steam, some of the other DRM schemes we've seen are nightmarish. But saying Steam's DRM is good is still only true in the sense that brushing and flossing and having your teeth cleaned every 6 months is much less annoying than a root canal - it doesn't mean we actually wake up mornings thinking, "Oh swell, I get to have my teeth cleaned today!".
You list several things Steam does that are advantagious, but any company distributing content online should give you the benefit of not having to search out discs, that's a core function of their business. Sequentially reinstalling games after a drive failure or three, and having it generally work smoothly and 'painlessly', is something that becomes more critical to get right because of DRM, as people also sometimes need to redownload and reinstall if the DRM itself screws something up. When DRM has just done something annoying to the customer, you want the experience of fixing it to be as pleasant as possible so the greater experience of your business as a whole doesn't leave a negative impression.
To put it simply, there are things which should not be allowed at all by free men and women, and asking what safeguards are in place implies that there potentially exists some set of safeguards that should make those things allowable. Gathering evidence without both a warrant and probable cause is one of those things, as the U.S. Constitution says, that should NEVER be allowed.
If you're going to ask a question that assumes there is some way around the Constitution, OR SHOULD BE, you're the person who has to defend your position. You're the person who might want to be more honest and admit you are implicity asking for the Constitution to be set aside. If you really feel that way, how about saying so explicity? Talking down to people who take exception to that point isn't clever, or adult, or enlightened, especially when it's an attempt to deflect that you are the one with the extreme, radical, and generally un-thought-out position you're scared to express openly. I say un-thought-out because if you are consiously supporting just ignoring that 'little' question of the large scale violation of fundamental human rights, you are something much worse than a person who needs things at the 1st grade level.
While I agree we should still blame the criminal, what's wrong with blaming the banks too? Poor security is a real factor in most of these cases, and being neglectful enough of security is negligence, in some cases even criminal negligence. Making promises to safeguard other people's money and then blowing off those promises may rise to the level of fraud. Indeed, the fees charged by those financial institutions are one of the reasons the law should see it as fraud, as the more money a legal entity makes off an action, the higher the standards of negligence and due dilligence generally are. If we would hold a doctor or civil engineer at fault for more than a nursing aide or a technician, why shouldn't we hold a financial institution to a stricter standard than the doctor or engineer?
If someone crashes into you because they have had too much to drink, AND because a poorly installed guardrail gave way, why should you blame just the driver and not the road constructor? Aren't the multiple actions that caused the crash ALL part of what the law should consider?
What's not to get? "Wachowski" - It's easy to see how that could be confused with "Jackson". All he had to do was shift his fingers one unit to the reft and one unit borwards on the six dimensional* holographic keyboard - happens all the time.
*The three you probably haven't met are Borwards and Fackwards, Light and Reft, and Dup and Own.
Great, you've just proved that Cptn. Picard only drinks Earl Grey when the Enterprise is having something exciting enough to make it into the documentaries happen. Sadly, we will never know what he drinks when being captain of the Enterprise settles into a boring routine.
As for science having a "belief system", I strongly suggest you not attempt to "disbelieve" in gravity while near the edge of a high building or in electromagnetism while sticking an uninsulated conductor into a live socket.
That's an absolutly miserable analogy. Gravity and Electricity in themselves aren't the same as the Scientific Laws describing Gravity or Electricity. People still died from falling off cliffs before Newton ever put some math to Gravity. Disbelieving that Newton has correctly described Gravity with the inverse square equations may mean you will screw up your Moon-shot, but it never made anybody jump off a cliff and hope to fly, and a lot of people built heavier than air craft that failed to fly before anyone got it right, even though they did believe in Newton's laws.
Scientific axioms are ideas such as Naturalism (meaning simply "the rejection of the Supernatural as a possible explanation for a given phenomenon", not the whole, complex philosophy we would properly call Naturalism). The principle that a theory must make testable predictions to be a part of Science is one of those Axioms of Science, as you yourself point out. You just cited a big part of Science's belief system as proof it doesn't have a belief system. A given theorem, i.e. Alfred Wegener's continental drift hypothesis, Darwin and Wallace's Natural Selection, or even Einstein's General Relativity is NOT part of the belief systems of Science - such things are the results of applying the Scientific Method, and it's the things that make up the method itself that count as belief systems. Again, the results of the method are not, and can NEVER be, themselves part of the method, in just the way Korzibski said "The map is not the territory".
I, you, or anyone else can certainly build theories that are not scientific, in that they can't be tested. Does that mean they have negative value, (in a way analogous to your "falling off a high building" analogy)?. Not at all. I can devise an idea that can't currently be tested but might be testable later (Ideas can become scientific with time, as new technologies make it possible to test things we once couldn't, but there is no Axiom of Science that explains, for all hypothesi, how to judge in advance whether a hypothesis can ever become scientific or not), I can speculate about subjects that don't fall under Strict Naturalism at all, such as what another person was thinking when they did the action I observed. I can judge various matters by a different standard than in Science (such as applying a legalstandard instead of a scientific one in determining whether someone is guilty of a crime.
None of that deserves to analogized to various forms of painful death inflicted on people for not 'believing'. Acknowledging that Science has a belief system may not count as making it into a religion, but when you conflate specific theories with the method, and then use that to threaten non-believers with painful consequences for their non-belief, you've definitely started treating Science as a religion.
Read some Kurt Gödel, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Karl Popper, please.
In a word, NO. Stross wrote three books that are formally Singularity/Post Singularity novels, and I guarentee you he absolutely cannot write a nice utopic singularity (although Accelerando has a happy ending for some lobster dataclones, and some individual people in the Iron Sunrise duology make it through all the horrible things happening and have nice enough individual lives, a Strossian Singularity inevitiably includes mass extinctions.). His current series include one with a possible future singularity-like event looming over the protagonists, as directed by Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep, and a "fun with cultural misunderstandings of various robots, settling down after they have already killed off their human masters" series. Read his short novella, "Missle Gap", or "A Colder War", and THEN ask youself if he could write a story where where everything changes but nothing horrible happens to anyone. You could offer him income like J. K. Rowling's to do it, it's the one thing he just couldn't do.
I'm 57, the Ex is 54, the youngest child is 29, and we have been divorced for 8 years and 9 months, (and having a great time dating each other for 8 years, 8 months, and 19 days.) (It's complicated).
Right now, I have some Christians telling me we are going to Hell for not getting remarried, other Christians telling me we cannot ever remarry in their church, others telling me we should stop having sex because we are past reproductive age, and still others telling me we should get remarried immediately, but they require a 1 year waiting period, and we should lay off the sex until that expires.
An Islamic friend from one of the smaller branches tells me that if we embrace Islam, she must first be married to someone else and divorce them before she can remarry me - He informed me that couples wishing to reconcile in this way usually have the woman briefly marry one of the man's relatives and then immediately divorce them - it's frequent to avoid gossip by having a very quick turn-around on these ceremonies. I don't know if this means my younger brother would also have to convert, or not.
I'm starting to miss the 'good old days', when these groups would settle it all by yelling "Heretic" and then gouging out each other's eyes, etc. in a Christian manner. Seriously, it says something that the Roman Catholic church, supposedly so uncompromising on their definition of sin, or a splinter Muslem branch, are far from the most restrictive by doctrine. Some of the charismatic, fundamentalist sects are sounding just like the Skoptsy.
The organized, Anton laVey founded Church of Satan, is basically espousing something very close to Ayn Rand's Objectivism. They preach 'Individual Rights' trumping governmental and social norms more than anything else. A lot of them (probably 80-90%) consider Satan as nothing more than a symbol and use that symbol like training wheels for their Atheist-o-cycles. Many would call themselves 'secular humanists' who want to make their move away from Christian churches and all belief in the Supernatural more emphatic - saying, in effect, "You've threatened me with Hellfire if I leave - I just want you to know that doesn't scare me anymore". If you could somehow get a court to rule that their doctrine was unconstitutional, that decision would also just about have to support burning all copies of "Atlas Shrugged" and arresting the entire Libertarian party as well.
I'm increasingly a classical Liberal - that is, I will defend the right of libertarians, Athiests, and even those perverts you managed to work into your post. That's making me sad, as I'd really love to put tongue in cheek and say I don't see any downside to such a decision, but I do - a bunch of people I disagree with won't get a fair chance to express their beliefs and just maybe persuade me differently.
One of the things that allows the US government to claim the inflation rate is extremely low is that they get to adjust for improved tech capabilities. If Moore's law is finally hitting its end, the extra value of computation on cheaper, newer iron will stop being one of the things that lets them fudge the reporting. The other most major fudge area is those stagnant wages you alluded to, which will have to become where just about all of the lying with statistics will take place in the future. It's interesting you found yourself connecting these same two factors to clarify your point, despite what looks like a completely different subject.
Every single "Trade Secret" is an attempt to get Security through Obscurity - yet some of the most massive companies still seem to love them. The original goals of having patents includes stopping people from using trade secrets instead, as the holder can't keep anything secret as part of getting a patent (it's called "failure to disclose"). Back when any patent had to have a working drawing, they were automatically rejected if there was any 'black box' element in the drawings, where some part of the operation was supposed to be a trade secret.
So I guess i don't see why you are pointing out that security through obscurity is one of the alternatives here, as though it was stupid to suggest using it. It's not a rare option - there are, for example, thousands of commercial foods that rely on it, including formulas theoretically worth billions, as in Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Lawyers who get paid $500,000 a year or more by their business clients, have built their whole reputations on advising some companies to rely on this form of security through obscurity. It's a huge part of how the current system works, even though many of these trade secrets are no longer secret at all and some of them have been cracked for a hundred years or more. (There are people who can brew up a basement batch of imitation Coca-cola to any version of the formula from the time it still included oil of lavender to "new Coke", and routinely make a hundred gallons at a time of whichever they want, and even sell it - so much for security through obscurity - but they still can't advertise that they know for sure the exact original formula, for fear they might have to explain how they got it if Coca-cola took them to court). There are world class CEOs who think patents are generally stupid, simply because they expire so quickly, and prefer trade secrets as a matter of course. Publicly traded companies frequently brag in their prospecti about how their trade secrets won't expire, as patents will, in trying to influence the sale value of their stock, and there is a whole branch of tax law involving about 2,000 IRS court decisions and nearly 100 pages of regulations and non-binding opinions just covering the tax consequences of them.
I grant you, it does sound absurd, put that way. It's just that sounding surprised that anyone would say anything that even might encourage it is sort of like if you said you were surprised to hear that anyone advocated using helecopters in warfare instead of horses. There are, in total, literally trillions of dollars of financial pressure pushing people towards not always seeking patents, and "very important" industry insiders who think security through obscurity is the right choice, however absurd that sounds.
Something emitting enough gamma in all directions to be lethal within days at 1 Km plus ranges will generally not have a "same room" around it, unless we are talking a very well armored and solid form of construction and a rather largish minimum sized room, with the walls kept well away from the something. You really couldn't stay in the same room with it once it starts, just in the same rapidly expanding volume of superheated gasses.
I'm wondering what datasheet the poster looked at. The typical decay path from Cobalt 60 to Nickel 60 results in two Gamma rays with total energy (as measured in good old fashioned Watts) nearly 30 times the typical energy for the commonest path of Plutonium decay. Not keeping sufficient track of just a single one of these small medical Co 60 sources has already been the cause of 3 deaths and 7 long term dehabilitating exposures in a single junkyard accident in Thailand
In large enough amounts, admittedly much larger than medical uses, it's literally one of the most frightening substances known to man. A jacket of C60 is the stuff that would hypothetically make a 'normal' Plutonium based H-bomb into a "doomsday weapon" that could, at least theoretically, leave a small nation sized area totally uninhabitable for decades, even centuries. It's claimed that everybody who considered building one of these turned away from it when they realized it would most probably destroy the user as thoroughly as the enemy.
Was this, perhaps, a "datasheet" that only covered the chemical toxicity of regular Cobalt?
Besides, his last "trip" involved taking four tabs of acid
Nothing strange about that - people going to be out of the local reality set that damned long should definitely pack for the journey. I recommend an original era Steve Ditko Doctor Strange comic, and an autograph book just in case they see Leonard Nimoy or John Nobel.
If the chimp, by law, is limited to only the same rights as a minor child, regardless of age, then presumably it would follow it can't be tried as an adult, so the human would be guilty of both the homicide and corrupting a minor equivalent as an agent of that homicide. Only deciding to try the chimp as an adult would set a precedent for chimps even possibly having other aspects of adult status, leading to possibly having rights such as voting or holding office. So long as the chimp is strictly held to be the lifelong equivalent of a minor child, the issue is moot.
One question then becomes; can a biologically homo sapiens person, with certain mental deficiencies also be relegated to the lifelong equivalency of a minor if that status is first created by law for other reasons? Whenever a law recognizing only limited human status is ever again passed, I expect some humans to try and move some other biological humans into the less fully protected category it creates. Unfortunately, the question of whether it is ever possible to downgrade some people's rights is never moot, unless we forget abundant and tragic history.
Limited rights for some of the more intelligent animals can, at least in theory, have consistant logic behind it (remembering logically consistant is not necessarily the same thing as true), but another real question is, would real humans ever be either consistant or logical in setting up such laws?
Adam Smith himself defined his perfect "Free Market" as including everyone knowing how much the productive process cost, and broke this down into such costs as labor, raw materials, and financial charges in his examples. Even by a very strict pro-capitalist model, that sounds like the government would be legitimately supporting capitalism by providing a lot more information than just weights and measures. Consumer safety information for one example, or average salaries for a given area, or an acurately derived inflationary index for others. (Of course, modern capital theory claims there would be no inflation in a pure capitalism, but even so, the government would need to accurately index inflation in a mixed economy trying to move towards that pure state - not reporting it would be retarding the motion). I'd point out too, that all of these could also fit your clause about preventing deception to a greater or lesser extent. But, that still means a medium-large role for governments, although yes, it's theoretically much less in some areas than what we see currently.
Such things as a business holding trade secrets while continuing to seek the protection of patents or copyrights are not really part of theoretical Capitalism, by Smith's original work. Most modern business and all publicly traded corporations would not want anything like this level of "money being left alone" This is another reason why we aren't moving towards what you call "truely capitalisitic society" - the people crying out the loudest for more capitalism actually oppose many of the most basic elements of it, and fear the very possibility.
So you're implying, "To make the world permanently safe fron nuclear war, William Shatner must die!"? Sad, but inevitably we must surrender to the remorseless logic of realpolitik.
It's probably best to think in some other terms than radius.
For one example, Tennessee has rather continuous types of bedrock in the middle and western parts of the state, leading right up to the New Madrid faultline in Missouri. If that lets go again, as it did historically, the west and middle parts of the state may see a widespread major earthquake, severe enough to do building damage hundreds of miles from the epicenter, even in Nashville and possibly even Crossville. But in the eastern part of the state, as the plateau region turns to foothills and valleys, there's a narrow zone where any potential damage from a westward quake will fall off extremely swiftly, and east of that, there is likely to be little or no serious damage even if a new New Madrid quake is as strong as the one that caused the Fukashima disaster in Japan. This sounds, to me, like it might be preferential to locate COs on or towards the eastern side of the zone wherever possible.
Planners should do similar analysis for such events as nuclear war, where radius would matter, but it would be the weapon burst radius around their target points. Elevation based analysis could be useful for floods and tsunamis. There's even regions where the primary concern in locating a CO might be forest fires, or the reliability history of local power generation.
If a bunch of people who took LSD had returned with an increased inclination to practice Methodism, or join the Rotary club, or Young Republicans, or re-read Atlas Shrugged forty times, the drug would still be legal. Instead, they tended to get interested in the wrong religions and philosophies (Mostly Eastern ones).
What's the best thing an opiate addict could do? Found Johns Hopkins Hospital [wikipedia.org] There's Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, Austrian physiologist and physician who was an important early investigator of the electrical activity of the brain, and the inventor of several widely adopted medical devices, some still used today, but I think your citation beats mine.
(I was going to say, with tongue firmly in cheek, "Stopped Professor Moriarty" until I remembered that Holmes' vice was Cocaine not Heroin, but I think you would still have me beat - congratulations) (Or was Holmes' chief vice the violin?).
If they are an enemy, you use all the tools you have available to eradicate them.
You use the tools you need to win. If you set the goal in war as eradication instead of victory, you have just said the enemy cannot even be allowed to surrender, the war ends only in genocide, and it becomes the most logical thing for the enemy who has heard this from you to do, to fight to the very last possible combatant.
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Most of those Americans who don't see the problem with spying on other countries think the NSA is watching the military activities of those countries, looking for terrorists, mad bombers, and organized warfare risks. Ask those people if it's right to spend that many billions on helping huge international conglomerates, which happen to be headquartered in the US, beat out their competition, which just happens to be huge international conglomerates which in some case actually employ more US citizens, but are headquartered in other countries, and see what the level of support is for that.
I don't see this as 'doing DRM right', so much as 'doing it less wrong'. Many of us tolerate Steam's DRM because it's less annoying than what other companies want to use, often much less annoying. Compared to Steam, some of the other DRM schemes we've seen are nightmarish. But saying Steam's DRM is good is still only true in the sense that brushing and flossing and having your teeth cleaned every 6 months is much less annoying than a root canal - it doesn't mean we actually wake up mornings thinking, "Oh swell, I get to have my teeth cleaned today!".
You list several things Steam does that are advantagious, but any company distributing content online should give you the benefit of not having to search out discs, that's a core function of their business. Sequentially reinstalling games after a drive failure or three, and having it generally work smoothly and 'painlessly', is something that becomes more critical to get right because of DRM, as people also sometimes need to redownload and reinstall if the DRM itself screws something up. When DRM has just done something annoying to the customer, you want the experience of fixing it to be as pleasant as possible so the greater experience of your business as a whole doesn't leave a negative impression.
To put it simply, there are things which should not be allowed at all by free men and women, and asking what safeguards are in place implies that there potentially exists some set of safeguards that should make those things allowable. Gathering evidence without both a warrant and probable cause is one of those things, as the U.S. Constitution says, that should NEVER be allowed.
If you're going to ask a question that assumes there is some way around the Constitution, OR SHOULD BE, you're the person who has to defend your position. You're the person who might want to be more honest and admit you are implicity asking for the Constitution to be set aside. If you really feel that way, how about saying so explicity? Talking down to people who take exception to that point isn't clever, or adult, or enlightened, especially when it's an attempt to deflect that you are the one with the extreme, radical, and generally un-thought-out position you're scared to express openly. I say un-thought-out because if you are consiously supporting just ignoring that 'little' question of the large scale violation of fundamental human rights, you are something much worse than a person who needs things at the 1st grade level.
While I agree we should still blame the criminal, what's wrong with blaming the banks too? Poor security is a real factor in most of these cases, and being neglectful enough of security is negligence, in some cases even criminal negligence. Making promises to safeguard other people's money and then blowing off those promises may rise to the level of fraud. Indeed, the fees charged by those financial institutions are one of the reasons the law should see it as fraud, as the more money a legal entity makes off an action, the higher the standards of negligence and due dilligence generally are. If we would hold a doctor or civil engineer at fault for more than a nursing aide or a technician, why shouldn't we hold a financial institution to a stricter standard than the doctor or engineer?
If someone crashes into you because they have had too much to drink, AND because a poorly installed guardrail gave way, why should you blame just the driver and not the road constructor? Aren't the multiple actions that caused the crash ALL part of what the law should consider?
What's not to get?
"Wachowski" - It's easy to see how that could be confused with "Jackson". All he had to do was shift his fingers one unit to the reft and one unit borwards on the six dimensional* holographic keyboard - happens all the time.
*The three you probably haven't met are Borwards and Fackwards, Light and Reft, and Dup and Own.
Great, you've just proved that Cptn. Picard only drinks Earl Grey when the Enterprise is having something exciting enough to make it into the documentaries happen. Sadly, we will never know what he drinks when being captain of the Enterprise settles into a boring routine.
As for science having a "belief system", I strongly suggest you not attempt to "disbelieve" in gravity while near the edge of a high building or in electromagnetism while sticking an uninsulated conductor into a live socket.
That's an absolutly miserable analogy. Gravity and Electricity in themselves aren't the same as the Scientific Laws describing Gravity or Electricity. People still died from falling off cliffs before Newton ever put some math to Gravity. Disbelieving that Newton has correctly described Gravity with the inverse square equations may mean you will screw up your Moon-shot, but it never made anybody jump off a cliff and hope to fly, and a lot of people built heavier than air craft that failed to fly before anyone got it right, even though they did believe in Newton's laws.
Scientific axioms are ideas such as Naturalism (meaning simply "the rejection of the Supernatural as a possible explanation for a given phenomenon", not the whole, complex philosophy we would properly call Naturalism). The principle that a theory must make testable predictions to be a part of Science is one of those Axioms of Science, as you yourself point out. You just cited a big part of Science's belief system as proof it doesn't have a belief system. A given theorem, i.e. Alfred Wegener's continental drift hypothesis, Darwin and Wallace's Natural Selection, or even Einstein's General Relativity is NOT part of the belief systems of Science - such things are the results of applying the Scientific Method, and it's the things that make up the method itself that count as belief systems. Again, the results of the method are not, and can NEVER be, themselves part of the method, in just the way Korzibski said "The map is not the territory".
I, you, or anyone else can certainly build theories that are not scientific, in that they can't be tested. Does that mean they have negative value, (in a way analogous to your "falling off a high building" analogy)?. Not at all. I can devise an idea that can't currently be tested but might be testable later (Ideas can become scientific with time, as new technologies make it possible to test things we once couldn't, but there is no Axiom of Science that explains, for all hypothesi, how to judge in advance whether a hypothesis can ever become scientific or not), I can speculate about subjects that don't fall under Strict Naturalism at all, such as what another person was thinking when they did the action I observed. I can judge various matters by a different standard than in Science (such as applying a legalstandard instead of a scientific one in determining whether someone is guilty of a crime.
None of that deserves to analogized to various forms of painful death inflicted on people for not 'believing'. Acknowledging that Science has a belief system may not count as making it into a religion, but when you conflate specific theories with the method, and then use that to threaten non-believers with painful consequences for their non-belief, you've definitely started treating Science as a religion.
Read some Kurt Gödel, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Karl Popper, please.
In a word, NO. Stross wrote three books that are formally Singularity/Post Singularity novels, and I guarentee you he absolutely cannot write a nice utopic singularity (although Accelerando has a happy ending for some lobster dataclones, and some individual people in the Iron Sunrise duology make it through all the horrible things happening and have nice enough individual lives, a Strossian Singularity inevitiably includes mass extinctions.). His current series include one with a possible future singularity-like event looming over the protagonists, as directed by Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep, and a "fun with cultural misunderstandings of various robots, settling down after they have already killed off their human masters" series. Read his short novella, "Missle Gap", or "A Colder War", and THEN ask youself if he could write a story where where everything changes but nothing horrible happens to anyone. You could offer him income like J. K. Rowling's to do it, it's the one thing he just couldn't do.
20 years without actually using a device, or WITH using one? Popping off one little nuke, with witnesses, really changes the challenge factor there.
I'm 57, the Ex is 54, the youngest child is 29, and we have been divorced for 8 years and 9 months, (and having a great time dating each other for 8 years, 8 months, and 19 days.) (It's complicated).
Right now, I have some Christians telling me we are going to Hell for not getting remarried, other Christians telling me we cannot ever remarry in their church, others telling me we should stop having sex because we are past reproductive age, and still others telling me we should get remarried immediately, but they require a 1 year waiting period, and we should lay off the sex until that expires.
An Islamic friend from one of the smaller branches tells me that if we embrace Islam, she must first be married to someone else and divorce them before she can remarry me - He informed me that couples wishing to reconcile in this way usually have the woman briefly marry one of the man's relatives and then immediately divorce them - it's frequent to avoid gossip by having a very quick turn-around on these ceremonies. I don't know if this means my younger brother would also have to convert, or not.
I'm starting to miss the 'good old days', when these groups would settle it all by yelling "Heretic" and then gouging out each other's eyes, etc. in a Christian manner. Seriously, it says something that the Roman Catholic church, supposedly so uncompromising on their definition of sin, or a splinter Muslem branch, are far from the most restrictive by doctrine. Some of the charismatic, fundamentalist sects are sounding just like the Skoptsy.
The organized, Anton laVey founded Church of Satan, is basically espousing something very close to Ayn Rand's Objectivism. They preach 'Individual Rights' trumping governmental and social norms more than anything else. A lot of them (probably 80-90%) consider Satan as nothing more than a symbol and use that symbol like training wheels for their Atheist-o-cycles. Many would call themselves 'secular humanists' who want to make their move away from Christian churches and all belief in the Supernatural more emphatic - saying, in effect, "You've threatened me with Hellfire if I leave - I just want you to know that doesn't scare me anymore". If you could somehow get a court to rule that their doctrine was unconstitutional, that decision would also just about have to support burning all copies of "Atlas Shrugged" and arresting the entire Libertarian party as well.
I'm increasingly a classical Liberal - that is, I will defend the right of libertarians, Athiests, and even those perverts you managed to work into your post. That's making me sad, as I'd really love to put tongue in cheek and say I don't see any downside to such a decision, but I do - a bunch of people I disagree with won't get a fair chance to express their beliefs and just maybe persuade me differently.
One of the things that allows the US government to claim the inflation rate is extremely low is that they get to adjust for improved tech capabilities. If Moore's law is finally hitting its end, the extra value of computation on cheaper, newer iron will stop being one of the things that lets them fudge the reporting. The other most major fudge area is those stagnant wages you alluded to, which will have to become where just about all of the lying with statistics will take place in the future. It's interesting you found yourself connecting these same two factors to clarify your point, despite what looks like a completely different subject.
Every single "Trade Secret" is an attempt to get Security through Obscurity - yet some of the most massive companies still seem to love them. The original goals of having patents includes stopping people from using trade secrets instead, as the holder can't keep anything secret as part of getting a patent (it's called "failure to disclose"). Back when any patent had to have a working drawing, they were automatically rejected if there was any 'black box' element in the drawings, where some part of the operation was supposed to be a trade secret.
So I guess i don't see why you are pointing out that security through obscurity is one of the alternatives here, as though it was stupid to suggest using it. It's not a rare option - there are, for example, thousands of commercial foods that rely on it, including formulas theoretically worth billions, as in Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Lawyers who get paid $500,000 a year or more by their business clients, have built their whole reputations on advising some companies to rely on this form of security through obscurity. It's a huge part of how the current system works, even though many of these trade secrets are no longer secret at all and some of them have been cracked for a hundred years or more. (There are people who can brew up a basement batch of imitation Coca-cola to any version of the formula from the time it still included oil of lavender to "new Coke", and routinely make a hundred gallons at a time of whichever they want, and even sell it - so much for security through obscurity - but they still can't advertise that they know for sure the exact original formula, for fear they might have to explain how they got it if Coca-cola took them to court). There are world class CEOs who think patents are generally stupid, simply because they expire so quickly, and prefer trade secrets as a matter of course. Publicly traded companies frequently brag in their prospecti about how their trade secrets won't expire, as patents will, in trying to influence the sale value of their stock, and there is a whole branch of tax law involving about 2,000 IRS court decisions and nearly 100 pages of regulations and non-binding opinions just covering the tax consequences of them.
I grant you, it does sound absurd, put that way. It's just that sounding surprised that anyone would say anything that even might encourage it is sort of like if you said you were surprised to hear that anyone advocated using helecopters in warfare instead of horses. There are, in total, literally trillions of dollars of financial pressure pushing people towards not always seeking patents, and "very important" industry insiders who think security through obscurity is the right choice, however absurd that sounds.
Something emitting enough gamma in all directions to be lethal within days at 1 Km plus ranges will generally not have a "same room" around it, unless we are talking a very well armored and solid form of construction and a rather largish minimum sized room, with the walls kept well away from the something. You really couldn't stay in the same room with it once it starts, just in the same rapidly expanding volume of superheated gasses.
What, you think you're better than the universe?
(Yeah, me too...)
I'm wondering what datasheet the poster looked at. The typical decay path from Cobalt 60 to Nickel 60 results in two Gamma rays with total energy (as measured in good old fashioned Watts) nearly 30 times the typical energy for the commonest path of Plutonium decay. Not keeping sufficient track of just a single one of these small medical Co 60 sources has already been the cause of 3 deaths and 7 long term dehabilitating exposures in a single junkyard accident in Thailand
In large enough amounts, admittedly much larger than medical uses, it's literally one of the most frightening substances known to man. A jacket of C60 is the stuff that would hypothetically make a 'normal' Plutonium based H-bomb into a "doomsday weapon" that could, at least theoretically, leave a small nation sized area totally uninhabitable for decades, even centuries. It's claimed that everybody who considered building one of these turned away from it when they realized it would most probably destroy the user as thoroughly as the enemy.
Was this, perhaps, a "datasheet" that only covered the chemical toxicity of regular Cobalt?
Besides, his last "trip" involved taking four tabs of acid
Nothing strange about that - people going to be out of the local reality set that damned long should definitely pack for the journey. I recommend an original era Steve Ditko Doctor Strange comic, and an autograph book just in case they see Leonard Nimoy or John Nobel.
Thank you. Just thank you.
If the chimp, by law, is limited to only the same rights as a minor child, regardless of age, then presumably it would follow it can't be tried as an adult, so the human would be guilty of both the homicide and corrupting a minor equivalent as an agent of that homicide. Only deciding to try the chimp as an adult would set a precedent for chimps even possibly having other aspects of adult status, leading to possibly having rights such as voting or holding office. So long as the chimp is strictly held to be the lifelong equivalent of a minor child, the issue is moot.
One question then becomes; can a biologically homo sapiens person, with certain mental deficiencies also be relegated to the lifelong equivalency of a minor if that status is first created by law for other reasons? Whenever a law recognizing only limited human status is ever again passed, I expect some humans to try and move some other biological humans into the less fully protected category it creates. Unfortunately, the question of whether it is ever possible to downgrade some people's rights is never moot, unless we forget abundant and tragic history.
Limited rights for some of the more intelligent animals can, at least in theory, have consistant logic behind it (remembering logically consistant is not necessarily the same thing as true), but another real question is, would real humans ever be either consistant or logical in setting up such laws?
Adam Smith himself defined his perfect "Free Market" as including everyone knowing how much the productive process cost, and broke this down into such costs as labor, raw materials, and financial charges in his examples. Even by a very strict pro-capitalist model, that sounds like the government would be legitimately supporting capitalism by providing a lot more information than just weights and measures. Consumer safety information for one example, or average salaries for a given area, or an acurately derived inflationary index for others. (Of course, modern capital theory claims there would be no inflation in a pure capitalism, but even so, the government would need to accurately index inflation in a mixed economy trying to move towards that pure state - not reporting it would be retarding the motion). I'd point out too, that all of these could also fit your clause about preventing deception to a greater or lesser extent. But, that still means a medium-large role for governments, although yes, it's theoretically much less in some areas than what we see currently.
Such things as a business holding trade secrets while continuing to seek the protection of patents or copyrights are not really part of theoretical Capitalism, by Smith's original work. Most modern business and all publicly traded corporations would not want anything like this level of "money being left alone" This is another reason why we aren't moving towards what you call "truely capitalisitic society" - the people crying out the loudest for more capitalism actually oppose many of the most basic elements of it, and fear the very possibility.
So you're implying, "To make the world permanently safe fron nuclear war, William Shatner must die!"? Sad, but inevitably we must surrender to the remorseless logic of realpolitik.
It's probably best to think in some other terms than radius.
For one example, Tennessee has rather continuous types of bedrock in the middle and western parts of the state, leading right up to the New Madrid faultline in Missouri. If that lets go again, as it did historically, the west and middle parts of the state may see a widespread major earthquake, severe enough to do building damage hundreds of miles from the epicenter, even in Nashville and possibly even Crossville. But in the eastern part of the state, as the plateau region turns to foothills and valleys, there's a narrow zone where any potential damage from a westward quake will fall off extremely swiftly, and east of that, there is likely to be little or no serious damage even if a new New Madrid quake is as strong as the one that caused the Fukashima disaster in Japan. This sounds, to me, like it might be preferential to locate COs on or towards the eastern side of the zone wherever possible.
Planners should do similar analysis for such events as nuclear war, where radius would matter, but it would be the weapon burst radius around their target points. Elevation based analysis could be useful for floods and tsunamis. There's even regions where the primary concern in locating a CO might be forest fires, or the reliability history of local power generation.
If a bunch of people who took LSD had returned with an increased inclination to practice Methodism, or join the Rotary club, or Young Republicans, or re-read Atlas Shrugged forty times, the drug would still be legal. Instead, they tended to get interested in the wrong religions and philosophies (Mostly Eastern ones).
What's the best thing an opiate addict could do? Found Johns Hopkins Hospital [wikipedia.org]
There's Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, Austrian physiologist and physician who was an important early investigator of the electrical activity of the brain, and the inventor of several widely adopted medical devices, some still used today, but I think your citation beats mine.
(I was going to say, with tongue firmly in cheek, "Stopped Professor Moriarty" until I remembered that Holmes' vice was Cocaine not Heroin, but I think you would still have me beat - congratulations) (Or was Holmes' chief vice the violin?).
If they are an enemy, you use all the tools you have available to eradicate them.
You use the tools you need to win. If you set the goal in war as eradication instead of victory, you have just said the enemy cannot even be allowed to surrender, the war ends only in genocide, and it becomes the most logical thing for the enemy who has heard this from you to do, to fight to the very last possible combatant.