I bet you more will get done about this by people who first look to see who endorses it than who worry first about what party they associate with. Get the names of people involved. Don't even start off by describing them as 'bureaucratic' until you know a few job titles and such. See if any of them are scientists, MD's, representitives. Senators, business leaders, or lobbyists, find out who is on a federal public payroll, who is state funded, and who is on a private one, and then, if it still looks important, yes by then you might want to check party affiliations. But all rushing that part does is alienates some people who might give a damn otherwise.
Oh, and Snake probably won't be played by Kurt Russell if 99% of everybody dies first. Ahnald will naturally survive to play the terminator one last time - he said he'd be back after all. What, nobody argued with John Warner living through the global pandemic from Hell? What's with you people?
The way you tried to turn this into a Dems bad/ Reps good issue is incredibly boneheaded. When some nasty pathogen gets loose, I plan to blame you personally because by subverting this argument to your pathetic politics you have undercut all rational discussion that might have prevented the apocalypse. The deaths of 99% of the human race will be personally on your head, and you will be the most thoroughly damned person ever to live. The survivors will eventually make a movie, where Snake Pliskin and a time traveling robot simultaneously hunt you down, join forces in the end, attach chains to opposite sides of your head, and rip your brain in half to the cheers of the entire surviving population. You will be played by John Warner in a fat suit, and he will set the scene by portraying you eating Dalmatian puppies.
A rigorous experiment would probably involve comparing lots of roughly moon sized objects, in isolated orbits, in tidally locked orbits around larger bodies, and in orbits where they don't keep one face pointed at a nearby larger body.
But, there's something else to consider for our specific, real moon, besides orbital mechanics. There were probably a lot more hits in the early era of the solar system (more rocks then, a lot of what we see is the result of most rocks having been used up). In that era, the Moon probably still had a molten core. Tidal effects from Earth might mean more lunar lava erupted on the side facing us, and more of the craters there were covered with fresh material.
That's an old (1810 to 1950's) theory that was just assumed for a lot of textbooks, and not necessarily the one Selenographers today prefer, but it's not a rejected or disproven idea, just one that there's little interest in doing more work on to make it more rigorous. It got a bit of a nudge from Russian photos of the far side and from the same sort of observations by the Apollo missions in the early and late sixties, respectively, and then all the researchers decided working on it more would probably require someone digging some holes on the moon, so it's simply languishing unless somebody goes back.
The absolute worst possible outcome is that we have made so many other species extinct by that time that there is no stable ecological niche for humans and we go extinct too. I'm not arguing that this is particularly likely, but it's definitely worse than your worst case, unless you were counting subsistence 'living' with population = 0. However, adding that to your list of consequences with a small probability (0.5% or so) shouldn't make any difference to you. In fact, adding it with a very large probability (99,99995% or so), given your 'logic', doesn't make any difference either, so carry on.
Just as a hint, real logic means, if you introduce different facts, you just might reason to a different result. Your real, if unstated 'logic' is 'If it's not me it hurts, it's not a tragedy'. Since you didn't state it openly, but a bunch of unconnected claims you call logic, you don't have to be concerned that someone would point out that you are a sociopath, using an entirely emotional argument to provide pseudo-justification for being a rat-bastard who has basically told every single person reading this you don't care if their loved ones and descendants live or die.
In a weird way, EMP attack sounds like a back-up plan some guy living under an active volcano would use if his main plan were thwarted. More realistically, I can it as something a well established nation state might consider, as in:
"We're at stage 5 of an escalating situation, leading towards what looks to be a possible all out nuclear war. If we use a nuke, but set it off in space and only knock out the enemy's civil power grid, is that something we can sell to the UN nations as a measured response that didn't push things closer to the big one?"
I get the feeling various First and Second world countries have spent a lot of effort analyzing whether an EMP nuke is better or worse strategically or geo-politically than using the same nuke otherwise, i.e. to kill an enemy aircraft carrier. It also sounds like what we sometimes call the third world nations haven't been thinking about such questions much, and if they get their first nuke, won't immediately know if this sort of attack has any value. They probably don't have any formal cost-benefit analysis on EMP attacks. Non-state sponsored terrorists have probably given this idea even less thought.
You also can't really just set off a nuke. If you do it, you've announced to the rest of the world that you probably have more than one, and the rest of the world starts interpreting everything in that light. Everyone decides you can't have been stupid enough to build just one and so you must be lying about having more. Also, the international community will probably assume, if somebody uses one for EMP, they are hoping the enemy won't use one back as a direct people killing weapon because 'that's escalation'. The recipient will count all the people who died indirectly (when they run the frozen traffic lights, starve outside the empty grocery stores, or their hospital can't keep their life support going), and argue that it's still a damned nuke, there are still mass civilian casualties, and by God a 20 megaton ground burst on somebody's capital is an appropriate and sane response, now bend over, here it comes. The UN may or may not bother to deplore it after the fact.
The whiffle bat to the family jewels bit is at least as much about TV (I think the show's called "America's Funniest Home Filmed Agonizing Groin Injuries" or something like that).
Why? Start up costs for a TV show are much bigger than most net applications, but TV once managed with advertising only at the beginning and end of shows. You had product placement (The original 'Hotel' show was actually called "Mariott Hotel" for its first couple of seasons), but it was fairly subtle or secondary to the needs of the program. TV ran lots of content that worked like the Hallmark Hall of Fame show, with no commercial breaks.
News shows had a much freer hand in picking stories and developing them. Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley worked as part of news departments that wouldn't have aired a lot of the puff content (What's Brittney doing since we last saw her 15 minutes ago?), and trashy content (what's Brittney's crotch doing since we last saw it 15 minutes ago?). Yet those companies made a substantial profit.
Somehow now there's not enough profit in the net, not enough profit in TV, Not enough profit anywhere. Average wages have been stagnant for 20 years, or worse with inflation, but if we just let them crowd 173 hours of commercials into a 24 hour day, that will get better.
The real problems are physical constraints - that is, there is not enough value in circulation to give these people the share they want, even if we leave nothing for the rest of us. It just can't happen. Daddy can't get them the pony this year.
Because it's not arrogance, it's humility. Scientists are trying to avoid circular logic. If you aren't careful, evolution reduces to a tautology - The fittest survive, because that's how you know they were the fittest, they survived. Evolution predicts there are some reasons why a change might stay around after it's not advantageous in the way it once was.
It could be of trivial cost, so it has little pressure to vanish. That's a testable prediction, and therefore scientific - we could watch for a few generations and see if the adaptation is gradually getting less common.
It could still be an advantage for some other reason. That's a testable prediction and therefore scientific - we could look for other things besides Moas that are still around eating the plants, or for advantages unrelated to being not eaten by an animal.
What's arrogant is treating evolution as a doctrine that is self proving and needs no experimental verification, instead of a scientific theory that deserves support only because it makes testable predictions. Don't assume the tree has a good reason, find out.
Bingo! You've stated one of the most basic points, yet most frequently overlooked. When you're talking about evolution, years is an almost totally meaningless unit. Generations is what counts, and for most logical analysis, it's the only thing that counts.
I've seen people here on slashdot babble about how viruses must have a higher individual mutation rate than advanced organisms, because they evolve so fast, and totally ignore that the virus may have a 1.7 day average reproductive cycle, and the advanced organism take an average of 20 years for one generation. How often an individual organism is a mutant may have little or no correlation to how long a species lasts before becoming a new species.
Now counting anything else besides survival as a success is more debatable... What if a species becomes a very specialized niche organism in the process of driving its predator to extinction, for just one example? In the article's case for another example, the plant defenses didn't actually contribute much if anything towards making Moas extinct, human presence did most of the work there, if not all. Big Drumsticks!
My reply is Copyright isn't supposed to protect secrets, the idea is to REVEAL knowledge in exchange for the limited monopoly. Same for patents.
This is why I hate the whole term Intellectual Property. If the people pushing it just wanted a convenient grouping term, that would be one thing. But, every individual type has restrictions as well as benefits:
Copyright - limited time. Originally, there was also the requirement to actually publish, and a presumption the rights holder wouldn't actively try to prevent a work that was approaching reversion from actually surviving to enter the public domain (that was why you originally had to give the library of congress a copy).
Patent - limited time again, plus requirements to fully and accurately disclose, no mixing trade secrets with patents. Plus some constraint by novelty and practicality, and once upon a time a requirement to actually submit a working model.
Trade Secret - very limited protection (essentially, only against corporate espionage). No protection against reverse engineering or independent development. Plus relying on it originally limited use of patents.
Trademark - It's mandatory, defend it or lose it. Slip up on that, and no second chances. Originally, strong distinction between just claiming one and having registered it, as to how much protection you actually got.
The IP movement seems to be all about getting something that lasts as long as a trademark, has no registration requirements or fees to file, doesn't have to be defended, can be your little secret until you spring it on somebody else in court, and doesn't create any negative encumbrance if you connect it to any other forms of IP. Oh, and it has to improve your stock valuation more than any material assets would, let you out-compete all companies that actually manufacture something, and not be taxable.
I'm starting to think there must be some big legal structure I've missed that says authors are specifically forbidden to set any part of their profits aside to pay for their kids raising, medical care or education. There's another one that says authors can't leave anything to their children in their wills, and maybe a few other such laws. Who knew?
The original clause in the constitution is much like a contract (and in fact in classes it's sometimes pointed to as an example of 'the social compact' idea in operation). Now if you look at it in that light, it really says the citizens must do something starting immediately - pay the costs of protecting the author's work for a fixed time. The creator only has to do something much later - let the work eventually enter the public domain.
Have you ever seen a contract-like situation, where one side has to fulfill terms starting immediately, and the other side only has to meet any obligations many years later? Which side most commonly cheats in such contracts? And here we have some people on that side claiming they don't already have access to all the same ways the rest of us have to pass something on to their kids.
If you abolish copyright entirely, this doesn't happen.
True, but the pirate party doesn't advocate abolishment, it's advocating reducing copyright terms to 5 years, not Zero. And Richard Stallman, at least in the article, is pointing out some consequences of a 5 year rule, not of abolishment. Arguing about what RS has advocated in the past, or what's implied by other comments he has made, seems to me to be tangental. Yeah, maybe we should discuss his other positions, but first, let's look at the most on topic part. Either he's given a good reason why 5 years is not a good option or he hasn't, but if it's a good enough reason, then whether we go to Zero length or some other number such as 14 years plus 1 renewal option, 20 years fixed, or even Life plus 99 years, we ought to take this reasoning into account and avoid 5 year terms (and other short term copyrights within some general range).
I'm more concerned with indirect evidence than your hypothetical no evidence somethings. There's more reason to reject a flying spaghetti monster than some alternate hypothesi. In general the idea that creation could begin with an action such as being touched by His noodly appendage is the sort of thing we can and should dismiss automatically. It becomes a linguistic game, one of how can we redefine spaghetti to mean a substance that existed before the universe when we normally mean a substance that only came into existence after men first milled flour, and to preserve the FSM as a hypothesis we have to play many other such word games.
Some models of God are the same way. If I insist that my theoretical God loves everybody, and that he is going to send 90% or more to burn eternally for not loving him back enough, I've proposed something internally absurd. But those models aren't the only ones. You, in your position, are faced with claims that God exists, and He is further defined by most with other traits such as Omnescience. That still leaves you stuck in some ways. Can something be hypothesized that isn't omnescient but still creates at least one universe? Is it still fair to use the term God if that something has some limits? What does omnescience really mean anyway, is it knowing everything simultaneously, or just knowing as much as can be known from one viewpoint? Would something that knows a lot more than us, but not everything, count as God, or as something else? Does a hypothetical God have to be able to make four sided triangles, or could it be limited at least in such ways?
That's why conceding you might be wrong is a good idea for both sides. I might define something that has enough logical consistency and supporting evidence to at least be an interesting theory, and either of us might even see ways to verify or disprove at least part of it and thus bring it into the domain of the sciences, but you might even accept all of that and then argue just as successfully that the something shouldn't even be called God.
My own opinion is that a rational Atheist has to have thought about just what kind of hypotheticals might exist, enough to quickly reject some classes and maybe even to identify others that there is less reason to reject, or they lose the right to claim to be rational. It's sort of like trying to explain a five ton boulder you found in your driveway one morning. You don't have to believe it got there by an invisible giant putting it there, and you're certainly free to look for a more naturalistic explanation, but you should swiftly reject the idea that the neighborhood toddlers you saw playing the day before did it unassisted.
It's not a case of ideal examples. If I claim to be a Communist, and advocate that the Capitalist class should be allowed to bring back debtor's prisons, then I simply am not a Communist at all, not some Communist who has a perfect right to claim to be a Communist except somebody is redefining some boundaries to exclude me. If I claim to be a Scientist, but announce the scientific method should be modified to allow me to count Phrenology as scientific, I'm not really a scientist at all, not someone being redefined by a No True Scotsman fallacy into being a non-scientist.
That has to go for religions just like anything else. If no person can be genuinely wrong about the way they claim to belong to a religion or practice it, and its all a matter of 'redefinition' then the religion has no unalterable tenets or principles. It really has no core content at all. So what you are saying is that the No True Scotsman principle requires all religions be nothing but mush.
I can claim to be a Christian, but believe that my neighbor has to be of my ethnic group or its OK to rob him at knife-point. To hell with what that wimpy Jesus guy said about my neighbor being anyone who would stop to help me if I lay in a ditch, and I should love him regardless of his being Jewish like me or a Samaritan. That wimpy Jesus guy was wrong, and I should know, I'm the true Christian around here. By your argument, if anyone says I'm not a Christian, they're just No True Scotsmaning me.
The way you use the word faith seems to be the core of the problem. Would it surprise you to learn many Christians don't accept blind faith like you are describing either?
I'm going to do a big paraphrase of the Bible here. People disagreeing with this are certainly welcome to read the original and offer their opinions in place of this one:
Saint Paul (arguably at least a pretty mainstream Christian), made an argument in one of his letters. He discussed people who were telling the local Christians that there couldn't be eternal life for the soul, and he pointed out rational reasons to believe there could. He mentioned cases they all knew of people in that community who had become diseased or feeble with age, but whose minds had gotten sharper, not been dragged down by their health. He cited people who had some very poor physical health, but were focused on helping other people to the point where their spiritual conduct had improved even as their health worsened, rather than being dragged down by their bodies. So, he said in essence, 'you have evidence that what happens to the mind and the spirit is not governed by the body, and you should keep your faith, because you have this evidence to confirm it.'. That's how the word faith gets used at some points in the Bible, particularly the New Testament.
Paul couldn't demonstrate that there was a soul that actually survived death, so he urged faith. But he could demonstrate two things. 1. Some subtler parts of the human being, like their rational minds, or their choice to focus only on their immediate physical survival or still treat other people's lives as important, weren't always governed by the health of the body. 2. The people who claimed to have a nice, tidy, rational argument that the mind was always yoked to the body were cherry picking examples to support their opinions, ignoring counterexamples, and therefore were themselves making a leap of faith to get to their conclusion.
Religions do disagree, sometimes even about serious things. But, mostly not as much as you might think. Take a big gap, i.e. Christianity and Buddhism. I heard from a lot of Christians that Buddhism taught reincarnation with a gradual process of enlightenment over many lifespans, a concept called Karma that made forgiveness of sin irrelevant, and neither souls as most Christians conceive of them nor a heaven, nor a supreme God (And these claims were all from the educated Christians, not the crowd of people who called them all damned heathens and left it at that). I heard, not just from religious experts, but secular and scientific ones, that Hinduism was a polytheism, that Islam required accepting the whole Koran literally and not translating it from Arabic, and lots of other claims like those.
And it turns out none of those claims about other religions are true. Yep, look at that first paragraph - Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, as a whole, none of those religions have a commitment to any of those things I outlined as a core of either their beliefs or practices. Some select branches do, and its among those select branches we find most of the groups willing to embrace violence, so maybe that's why we are hearing more about them.
Gradual enlightenment over many reincarnations? Zen is all about enlightenment in this lifetime, coming as quick as lightning. No heaven for souls - Oh, you must have been talking to a Theravadist, not a Mahayanist, and certainly not a Vajrayanist. Brahma, Vishnu, Ganisha? It's all really Atman. And ask a Sufi about Islam.
I mostly practice as a Christian. OK, there's some Gnostic and Kabalistic roots in my case, and I'm perhaps too well aware that the original Greek word translated in the new testament as 'sin' comes from archery and means roughly 'missing the mark', and I do sitting meditation. But I've had good relations with plenty of Episcopalians and Methodists who don't see those opinions as a bar to practice, and by Unitarian standards, I'm a more rigidly dogmatic Christian than some. I've got friends who fit into most of the groups I cited above, though I'm not currently in touch with any Sufis. Basically, we see a lot of common ground, either find underlying agreement or don't see the differences as fundamental, and often aren't sure what other people are fighting about.
I have plenty of disagreements with other religions. I'll look right at a Wiccan and tell them that their claims to a continuous historical link to the old religion are at least as spurious as Madame Blavatski's Mu, and they'd better hope they are getting spiritual inspiration now, because they can't really prove their roots go back to even the middle ages. But is the core of their religion proving all the claims of historical continuity are correct, or is it in their relationship with nature and its feminine and masculine aspects? It's not like we're all in total lockstep, but then, neither is Science nor scientists, and that's a strength, not a weakness.
Religions are a subset of philosophies. Just try a little substitution in your screed, for example "When choice of philosophy happens independent of parents' philosophical practices and at voting age, then maybe we can say holding a philosophy is a choice. Until then, it's indoctrination and brainwashing of infants with the goal of control." Blocking people from passing on formal religions, while letting them use the same indoctrination and brainwashing for philosophical models that aren't explicitly religious, will still have all the problems.
Humans can be conditioned to believe they must obey society or the state too, and if they are never even exposed before adulthood to the idea they might have an immortal aspect or be an aspect of the very ground of being, or whatever, then they are easily told there is absolutely nothing more enduring or powerful than the all powerful government, and opposing that government is absolute wrongthink. I'd even argue that we have the darkness in most organized religions because we as a species bring that same darkness into all our other philosophies. It's time to stop all of it, and we can only do that by working on our individual selves, and after taking enough responsibility there, with groups of people we can genuinely trust and respect enough to avoid importing the BS elements into our relationships.
I know you meant that as a rhetorical question, but actually, there's a sort of answer. Looking at the media industries, there's been a real pattern of people putting kinds of abstract scoring ahead of profits.
Here's a few examples: 1. Roger Corman - this director made a huge number of very low budget films, all of which made substantial profits. There were several periods where you could take the financials on Corman's last 10 films, compare them with the same numbers for every director in the entire studio system, and for every single Hollywood studio, it would have made a lot more sense to hire Corman and hand him 30 million dollars with very loose, few strings attached contracts, and most likely get 10 more films out of it that would probably gross 100 million plus at the box office, than to risk that 30 million on a single big budget epic with any other director, given those director's reputation for expensive flops. But that didn't happen.
2. Gold and Platinum records - as sales have declined, the number of copies needed to score a gold or platinum has been repeatedly changed so the studios can brag (maybe to their stockholders, since these figures invariably get quoted in the stock prospectus) that they are getting more platinum sales than ever, even though the actual sales numbers are down.
3. Planet of the Apes (the original films): Hollywood dropped the budget lower on each one of the four sequels, and all still made a huge truckload of money. That money went to fund big budget epics (Cleopatra for one), which got Oscars but didn't make their costs back. Despite the sequels making as much money as the original or more, the 'wisdom' of the industry was that sequels never make as much as the original picture, even with the Apes counterexample starting them in the face. The industry didn't revise this position until after Cameron's Aliens.
4. The Monkees: When these four actors responded to criticism that they weren't real musicians by learning to play at least moderately well and trying to do live performances for the press to prove it, their industry handlers didn't recognize this was the four being team players. The industry inside reps made public statements that their own clients couldn't play a note, which was both untrue and practically a guarantee of lost record sales, but as those same people actually wrote, 'it kept them in line for a time'. The Monkees final period, with the film 'Head' and the open statements about LSD on an album back cover, seem pretty solidly anti profit. But, the period before that seems to about be the band focusing on the bottom line, and the studio heads losing all sight of it until the band got burned out.
My part of TN, we have the occasional tornado. F2s. No big ones so far in over 200 years of settlement. One tornado fatality in the last 20 years within a 50 mile radius, and there's claims the wall which fell there was single thickness brick constructed by the amateur homeowner. Floods? My home is over 500 feet above the local river. Earthquakes? If the new Madrid fault lets loose and literally hits Memphis TN with a Richter 10.8 quake and not a building is left in pieces bigger than marble sized, I would see a 3.3. I have a fair chance of living through it even if there really is a supervolcano under Yellowstone running on a 60 million year cycle, and it all lets loose at once and buries the western states under 10 feet of ash.
So you can understand why I say - The most threatening natural disaster of all is an asteroid strike. they can happen anywhere, so it's only fair we devote the bulk of disaster management funds to stopping them.
It's not the sheer magnitude of an earthquake that actually determines damage. Damage should be much more correlated with how much of the energy gets dissipated into a building or other structure.
Try looking at it like this: If you are standing out in a field when an earthquake hits, you personally may be the only thing on top of the ground, that could absorb any energy from that part of a wave passing through the whole area. Just you. Now if you are on the bottom floor of a big concrete parking garage, that whole garage and all the cars in it could absorb various parts of the energy, so if energy really determines the damage, you are safer on the bottommost floor of that garage than out in the open. Doesn't seem at all likely, does it?
Energy in physics is sometimes defined as the ability to do work. A lot of energy means a lot of work can happen, not that it invariably happens where you might expect, or even happens at all. (and yes, knocking down a tall building counts as work for most definitions in physics, even if gravity does most of the job once you get it good and started).
So, we have a structure which doesn't couple strongly to the energy of a quake wave. You can say it deflects the wave, or channels it, or lots of other verbal descriptions, but the point is, not a lot of the energy of the wave passes into the building. That energy could go on to get absorbed by another building, but alternately it could keep on going until it dissipates in the relatively empty countryside many miles from the city. Not absorbing a lot of the locally available energy doesn't mean the energy has been deflected to target some other building, or somehow focused. It also doesn't necessarily mean the energy has changed overall direction, or that you have created more turbulence in the earthquake waves, or lots of other things that could possibly happen but maybe really won't. To see if any of them are really probable, you have to do math, not reason from a verbal model that is already just an approximation.
Or, leave Zenmap in and see if there's really that much bloat, instability or loss of speed to have a good GUI front end for NMap. It's a pretty tight GUI - sure it adds some to load times, but unless you're just determined to prove you go back to the original unix command line days, you are halfway likely to decide you like having a GUI that is well designed for its purpose. The natural terminal display for nmap has the usual problem of terminals, that is doing multiple operations tends to push all the data from older operations off the screen. Sure, you're leet, you set the terminal to much more than the default 1000 lines scrollback long ago, right? There are still ways to set up the GUI that tend to keep more info around onscreen at a time. It's up to the operator, of course, whether these are worth it or not.
You're right, all that crap in the constitution about 'for a limited time' is Marxist drivel. Now write your congressman and demand they get all that commie stuff out of the constitution.
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I bet you more will get done about this by people who first look to see who endorses it than who worry first about what party they associate with. Get the names of people involved. Don't even start off by describing them as 'bureaucratic' until you know a few job titles and such. See if any of them are scientists, MD's, representitives. Senators, business leaders, or lobbyists, find out who is on a federal public payroll, who is state funded, and who is on a private one, and then, if it still looks important, yes by then you might want to check party affiliations. But all rushing that part does is alienates some people who might give a damn otherwise.
Oh, and Snake probably won't be played by Kurt Russell if 99% of everybody dies first. Ahnald will naturally survive to play the terminator one last time - he said he'd be back after all. What, nobody argued with John Warner living through the global pandemic from Hell? What's with you people?
The way you tried to turn this into a Dems bad/ Reps good issue is incredibly boneheaded. When some nasty pathogen gets loose, I plan to blame you personally because by subverting this argument to your pathetic politics you have undercut all rational discussion that might have prevented the apocalypse. The deaths of 99% of the human race will be personally on your head, and you will be the most thoroughly damned person ever to live. The survivors will eventually make a movie, where Snake Pliskin and a time traveling robot simultaneously hunt you down, join forces in the end, attach chains to opposite sides of your head, and rip your brain in half to the cheers of the entire surviving population. You will be played by John Warner in a fat suit, and he will set the scene by portraying you eating Dalmatian puppies.
A rigorous experiment would probably involve comparing lots of roughly moon sized objects, in isolated orbits, in tidally locked orbits around larger bodies, and in orbits where they don't keep one face pointed at a nearby larger body.
But, there's something else to consider for our specific, real moon, besides orbital mechanics. There were probably a lot more hits in the early era of the solar system (more rocks then, a lot of what we see is the result of most rocks having been used up). In that era, the Moon probably still had a molten core. Tidal effects from Earth might mean more lunar lava erupted on the side facing us, and more of the craters there were covered with fresh material.
That's an old (1810 to 1950's) theory that was just assumed for a lot of textbooks, and not necessarily the one Selenographers today prefer, but it's not a rejected or disproven idea, just one that there's little interest in doing more work on to make it more rigorous. It got a bit of a nudge from Russian photos of the far side and from the same sort of observations by the Apollo missions in the early and late sixties, respectively, and then all the researchers decided working on it more would probably require someone digging some holes on the moon, so it's simply languishing unless somebody goes back.
The absolute worst possible outcome is that we have made so many other species extinct by that time that there is no stable ecological niche for humans and we go extinct too. I'm not arguing that this is particularly likely, but it's definitely worse than your worst case, unless you were counting subsistence 'living' with population = 0. However, adding that to your list of consequences with a small probability (0.5% or so) shouldn't make any difference to you. In fact, adding it with a very large probability (99,99995% or so), given your 'logic', doesn't make any difference either, so carry on.
Just as a hint, real logic means, if you introduce different facts, you just might reason to a different result. Your real, if unstated 'logic' is 'If it's not me it hurts, it's not a tragedy'. Since you didn't state it openly, but a bunch of unconnected claims you call logic, you don't have to be concerned that someone would point out that you are a sociopath, using an entirely emotional argument to provide pseudo-justification for being a rat-bastard who has basically told every single person reading this you don't care if their loved ones and descendants live or die.
In a weird way, EMP attack sounds like a back-up plan some guy living under an active volcano would use if his main plan were thwarted. More realistically, I can it as something a well established nation state might consider, as in:
"We're at stage 5 of an escalating situation, leading towards what looks to be a possible all out nuclear war. If we use a nuke, but set it off in space and only knock out the enemy's civil power grid, is that something we can sell to the UN nations as a measured response that didn't push things closer to the big one?"
I get the feeling various First and Second world countries have spent a lot of effort analyzing whether an EMP nuke is better or worse strategically or geo-politically than using the same nuke otherwise, i.e. to kill an enemy aircraft carrier. It also sounds like what we sometimes call the third world nations haven't been thinking about such questions much, and if they get their first nuke, won't immediately know if this sort of attack has any value. They probably don't have any formal cost-benefit analysis on EMP attacks. Non-state sponsored terrorists have probably given this idea even less thought.
You also can't really just set off a nuke. If you do it, you've announced to the rest of the world that you probably have more than one, and the rest of the world starts interpreting everything in that light.
Everyone decides you can't have been stupid enough to build just one and so you must be lying about having more. Also, the international community will probably assume, if somebody uses one for EMP, they are hoping the enemy won't use one back as a direct people killing weapon because 'that's escalation'. The recipient will count all the people who died indirectly (when they run the frozen traffic lights, starve outside the empty grocery stores, or their hospital can't keep their life support going), and argue that it's still a damned nuke, there are still mass civilian casualties, and by God a 20 megaton ground burst on somebody's capital is an appropriate and sane response, now bend over, here it comes. The UN may or may not bother to deplore it after the fact.
I heard he was dead.
The whiffle bat to the family jewels bit is at least as much about TV (I think the show's called "America's Funniest Home Filmed Agonizing Groin Injuries" or something like that).
Free content and ads means a LOT of advertising.
Why? Start up costs for a TV show are much bigger than most net applications, but TV once managed with advertising only at the beginning and end of shows. You had product placement (The original 'Hotel' show was actually called "Mariott Hotel" for its first couple of seasons), but it was fairly subtle or secondary to the needs of the program. TV ran lots of content that worked like the Hallmark Hall of Fame show, with no commercial breaks.
News shows had a much freer hand in picking stories and developing them. Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley worked as part of news departments that wouldn't have aired a lot of the puff content (What's Brittney doing since we last saw her 15 minutes ago?), and trashy content (what's Brittney's crotch doing since we last saw it 15 minutes ago?). Yet those companies made a substantial profit.
Somehow now there's not enough profit in the net, not enough profit in TV, Not enough profit anywhere. Average wages have been stagnant for 20 years, or worse with inflation, but if we just let them crowd 173 hours of commercials into a 24 hour day, that will get better.
The real problems are physical constraints - that is, there is not enough value in circulation to give these people the share they want, even if we leave nothing for the rest of us. It just can't happen. Daddy can't get them the pony this year.
MTV is both ludicrous and (Over)obvious. They stopped running music videos - why won't they just die?
Because it's not arrogance, it's humility. Scientists are trying to avoid circular logic. If you aren't careful, evolution reduces to a tautology - The fittest survive, because that's how you know they were the fittest, they survived. Evolution predicts there are some reasons why a change might stay around after it's not advantageous in the way it once was.
It could be of trivial cost, so it has little pressure to vanish. That's a testable prediction, and therefore scientific - we could watch for a few generations and see if the adaptation is gradually getting less common.
It could still be an advantage for some other reason. That's a testable prediction and therefore scientific - we could look for other things besides Moas that are still around eating the plants, or for advantages unrelated to being not eaten by an animal.
What's arrogant is treating evolution as a doctrine that is self proving and needs no experimental verification, instead of a scientific theory that deserves support only because it makes testable predictions. Don't assume the tree has a good reason, find out.
Bingo! You've stated one of the most basic points, yet most frequently overlooked. When you're talking about evolution, years is an almost totally meaningless unit. Generations is what counts, and for most logical analysis, it's the only thing that counts.
I've seen people here on slashdot babble about how viruses must have a higher individual mutation rate than advanced organisms, because they evolve so fast, and totally ignore that the virus may have a 1.7 day average reproductive cycle, and the advanced organism take an average of 20 years for one generation. How often an individual organism is a mutant may have little or no correlation to how long a species lasts before becoming a new species.
Now counting anything else besides survival as a success is more debatable... What if a species becomes a very specialized niche organism in the process of driving its predator to extinction, for just one example? In the article's case for another example, the plant defenses didn't actually contribute much if anything towards making Moas extinct, human presence did most of the work there, if not all. Big Drumsticks!
My reply is Copyright isn't supposed to protect secrets, the idea is to REVEAL knowledge in exchange for the limited monopoly. Same for patents.
This is why I hate the whole term Intellectual Property. If the people pushing it just wanted a convenient grouping term, that would be one thing. But, every individual type has restrictions as well as benefits:
Copyright - limited time. Originally, there was also the requirement to actually publish, and a presumption the rights holder wouldn't actively try to prevent a work that was approaching reversion from actually surviving to enter the public domain (that was why you originally had to give the library of congress a copy).
Patent - limited time again, plus requirements to fully and accurately disclose, no mixing trade secrets with patents. Plus some constraint by novelty and practicality, and once upon a time a requirement to actually submit a working model.
Trade Secret - very limited protection (essentially, only against corporate espionage). No protection against reverse engineering or independent development. Plus relying on it originally limited use of patents.
Trademark - It's mandatory, defend it or lose it. Slip up on that, and no second chances. Originally, strong distinction between just claiming one and having registered it, as to how much protection you actually got.
The IP movement seems to be all about getting something that lasts as long as a trademark, has no registration requirements or fees to file, doesn't have to be defended, can be your little secret until you spring it on somebody else in court, and doesn't create any negative encumbrance if you connect it to any other forms of IP. Oh, and it has to improve your stock valuation more than any material assets would, let you out-compete all companies that actually manufacture something, and not be taxable.
I'm starting to think there must be some big legal structure I've missed that says authors are specifically forbidden to set any part of their profits aside to pay for their kids raising, medical care or education. There's another one that says authors can't leave anything to their children in their wills, and maybe a few other such laws. Who knew?
The original clause in the constitution is much like a contract (and in fact in classes it's sometimes pointed to as an example of 'the social compact' idea in operation). Now if you look at it in that light, it really says the citizens must do something starting immediately - pay the costs of protecting the author's work for a fixed time. The creator only has to do something much later - let the work eventually enter the public domain.
Have you ever seen a contract-like situation, where one side has to fulfill terms starting immediately, and the other side only has to meet any obligations many years later? Which side most commonly cheats in such contracts? And here we have some people on that side claiming they don't already have access to all the same ways the rest of us have to pass something on to their kids.
If you abolish copyright entirely, this doesn't happen.
True, but the pirate party doesn't advocate abolishment, it's advocating reducing copyright terms to 5 years, not Zero. And Richard Stallman, at least in the article, is pointing out some consequences of a 5 year rule, not of abolishment. Arguing about what RS has advocated in the past, or what's implied by other comments he has made, seems to me to be tangental. Yeah, maybe we should discuss his other positions, but first, let's look at the most on topic part. Either he's given a good reason why 5 years is not a good option or he hasn't, but if it's a good enough reason, then whether we go to Zero length or some other number such as 14 years plus 1 renewal option, 20 years fixed, or even Life plus 99 years, we ought to take this reasoning into account and avoid 5 year terms (and other short term copyrights within some general range).
I'm more concerned with indirect evidence than your hypothetical no evidence somethings. There's more reason to reject a flying spaghetti monster than some alternate hypothesi. In general the idea that creation could begin with an action such as being touched by His noodly appendage is the sort of thing we can and should dismiss automatically. It becomes a linguistic game, one of how can we redefine spaghetti to mean a substance that existed before the universe when we normally mean a substance that only came into existence after men first milled flour, and to preserve the FSM as a hypothesis we have to play many other such word games.
Some models of God are the same way. If I insist that my theoretical God loves everybody, and that he is going to send 90% or more to burn eternally for not loving him back enough, I've proposed something internally absurd. But those models aren't the only ones. You, in your position, are faced with claims that God exists, and He is further defined by most with other traits such as Omnescience. That still leaves you stuck in some ways. Can something be hypothesized that isn't omnescient but still creates at least one universe? Is it still fair to use the term God if that something has some limits? What does omnescience really mean anyway, is it knowing everything simultaneously, or just knowing as much as can be known from one viewpoint? Would something that knows a lot more than us, but not everything, count as God, or as something else? Does a hypothetical God have to be able to make four sided triangles, or could it be limited at least in such ways?
That's why conceding you might be wrong is a good idea for both sides. I might define something that has enough logical consistency and supporting evidence to at least be an interesting theory, and either of us might even see ways to verify or disprove at least part of it and thus bring it into the domain of the sciences, but you might even accept all of that and then argue just as successfully that the something shouldn't even be called God.
My own opinion is that a rational Atheist has to have thought about just what kind of hypotheticals might exist, enough to quickly reject some classes and maybe even to identify others that there is less reason to reject, or they lose the right to claim to be rational. It's sort of like trying to explain a five ton boulder you found in your driveway one morning. You don't have to believe it got there by an invisible giant putting it there, and you're certainly free to look for a more naturalistic explanation, but you should swiftly reject the idea that the neighborhood toddlers you saw playing the day before did it unassisted.
It's not a case of ideal examples. If I claim to be a Communist, and advocate that the Capitalist class should be allowed to bring back debtor's prisons, then I simply am not a Communist at all, not some Communist who has a perfect right to claim to be a Communist except somebody is redefining some boundaries to exclude me. If I claim to be a Scientist, but announce the scientific method should be modified to allow me to count Phrenology as scientific, I'm not really a scientist at all, not someone being redefined by a No True Scotsman fallacy into being a non-scientist.
That has to go for religions just like anything else. If no person can be genuinely wrong about the way they claim to belong to a religion or practice it, and its all a matter of 'redefinition' then the religion has no unalterable tenets or principles. It really has no core content at all. So what you are saying is that the No True Scotsman principle requires all religions be nothing but mush.
I can claim to be a Christian, but believe that my neighbor has to be of my ethnic group or its OK to rob him at knife-point. To hell with what that wimpy Jesus guy said about my neighbor being anyone who would stop to help me if I lay in a ditch, and I should love him regardless of his being Jewish like me or a Samaritan. That wimpy Jesus guy was wrong, and I should know, I'm the true Christian around here. By your argument, if anyone says I'm not a Christian, they're just No True Scotsmaning me.
The way you use the word faith seems to be the core of the problem. Would it surprise you to learn many Christians don't accept blind faith like you are describing either?
I'm going to do a big paraphrase of the Bible here. People disagreeing with this are certainly welcome to read the original and offer their opinions in place of this one:
Saint Paul (arguably at least a pretty mainstream Christian), made an argument in one of his letters. He discussed people who were telling the local Christians that there couldn't be eternal life for the soul, and he pointed out rational reasons to believe there could. He mentioned cases they all knew of people in that community who had become diseased or feeble with age, but whose minds had gotten sharper, not been dragged down by their health. He cited people who had some very poor physical health, but were focused on helping other people to the point where their spiritual conduct had improved even as their health worsened, rather than being dragged down by their bodies. So, he said in essence, 'you have evidence that what happens to the mind and the spirit is not governed by the body, and you should keep your faith, because you have this evidence to confirm it.'. That's how the word faith gets used at some points in the Bible, particularly the New Testament.
Paul couldn't demonstrate that there was a soul that actually survived death, so he urged faith. But he could demonstrate two things. 1. Some subtler parts of the human being, like their rational minds, or their choice to focus only on their immediate physical survival or still treat other people's lives as important, weren't always governed by the health of the body. 2. The people who claimed to have a nice, tidy, rational argument that the mind was always yoked to the body were cherry picking examples to support their opinions, ignoring counterexamples, and therefore were themselves making a leap of faith to get to their conclusion.
Religions do disagree, sometimes even about serious things. But, mostly not as much as you might think. Take a big gap, i.e. Christianity and Buddhism. I heard from a lot of Christians that Buddhism taught reincarnation with a gradual process of enlightenment over many lifespans, a concept called Karma that made forgiveness of sin irrelevant, and neither souls as most Christians conceive of them nor a heaven, nor a supreme God (And these claims were all from the educated Christians, not the crowd of people who called them all damned heathens and left it at that). I heard, not just from religious experts, but secular and scientific ones, that Hinduism was a polytheism, that Islam required accepting the whole Koran literally and not translating it from Arabic, and lots of other claims like those.
And it turns out none of those claims about other religions are true. Yep, look at that first paragraph - Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, as a whole, none of those religions have a commitment to any of those things I outlined as a core of either their beliefs or practices. Some select branches do, and its among those select branches we find most of the groups willing to embrace violence, so maybe that's why we are hearing more about them.
Gradual enlightenment over many reincarnations? Zen is all about enlightenment in this lifetime, coming as quick as lightning. No heaven for souls - Oh, you must have been talking to a Theravadist, not a Mahayanist, and certainly not a Vajrayanist. Brahma, Vishnu, Ganisha? It's all really Atman. And ask a Sufi about Islam.
I mostly practice as a Christian. OK, there's some Gnostic and Kabalistic roots in my case, and I'm perhaps too well aware that the original Greek word translated in the new testament as 'sin' comes from archery and means roughly 'missing the mark', and I do sitting meditation. But I've had good relations with plenty of Episcopalians and Methodists who don't see those opinions as a bar to practice, and by Unitarian standards, I'm a more rigidly dogmatic Christian than some. I've got friends who fit into most of the groups I cited above, though I'm not currently in touch with any Sufis. Basically, we see a lot of common ground, either find underlying agreement or don't see the differences as fundamental, and often aren't sure what other people are fighting about.
I have plenty of disagreements with other religions. I'll look right at a Wiccan and tell them that their claims to a continuous historical link to the old religion are at least as spurious as Madame Blavatski's Mu, and they'd better hope they are getting spiritual inspiration now, because they can't really prove their roots go back to even the middle ages. But is the core of their religion proving all the claims of historical continuity are correct, or is it in their relationship with nature and its feminine and masculine aspects? It's not like we're all in total lockstep, but then, neither is Science nor scientists, and that's a strength, not a weakness.
Religions are a subset of philosophies. Just try a little substitution in your screed, for example "When choice of philosophy happens independent of parents' philosophical practices and at voting age, then maybe we can say holding a philosophy is a choice. Until then, it's indoctrination and brainwashing of infants with the goal of control." Blocking people from passing on formal religions, while letting them use the same indoctrination and brainwashing for philosophical models that aren't explicitly religious, will still have all the problems.
Humans can be conditioned to believe they must obey society or the state too, and if they are never even exposed before adulthood to the idea they might have an immortal aspect or be an aspect of the very ground of being, or whatever, then they are easily told there is absolutely nothing more enduring or powerful than the all powerful government, and opposing that government is absolute wrongthink. I'd even argue that we have the darkness in most organized religions because we as a species bring that same darkness into all our other philosophies. It's time to stop all of it, and we can only do that by working on our individual selves, and after taking enough responsibility there, with groups of people we can genuinely trust and respect enough to avoid importing the BS elements into our relationships.
I know you meant that as a rhetorical question, but actually, there's a sort of answer. Looking at the media industries, there's been a real pattern of people putting kinds of abstract scoring ahead of profits.
Here's a few examples:
1. Roger Corman - this director made a huge number of very low budget films, all of which made substantial profits. There were several periods where you could take the financials on Corman's last 10 films, compare them with the same numbers for every director in the entire studio system, and for every single Hollywood studio, it would have made a lot more sense to hire Corman and hand him 30 million dollars with very loose, few strings attached contracts, and most likely get 10 more films out of it that would probably gross 100 million plus at the box office, than to risk that 30 million on a single big budget epic with any other director, given those director's reputation for expensive flops. But that didn't happen.
2. Gold and Platinum records - as sales have declined, the number of copies needed to score a gold or platinum has been repeatedly changed so the studios can brag (maybe to their stockholders, since these figures invariably get quoted in the stock prospectus) that they are getting more platinum sales than ever, even though the actual sales numbers are down.
3. Planet of the Apes (the original films): Hollywood dropped the budget lower on each one of the four sequels, and all still made a huge truckload of money. That money went to fund big budget epics (Cleopatra for one), which got Oscars but didn't make their costs back. Despite the sequels making as much money as the original or more, the 'wisdom' of the industry was that sequels never make as much as the original picture, even with the Apes counterexample starting them in the face. The industry didn't revise this position until after Cameron's Aliens.
4. The Monkees: When these four actors responded to criticism that they weren't real musicians by learning to play at least moderately well and trying to do live performances for the press to prove it, their industry handlers didn't recognize this was the four being team players. The industry inside reps made public statements that their own clients couldn't play a note, which was both untrue and practically a guarantee of lost record sales, but as those same people actually wrote, 'it kept them in line for a time'. The Monkees final period, with the film 'Head' and the open statements about LSD on an album back cover, seem pretty solidly anti profit. But, the period before that seems to about be the band focusing on the bottom line, and the studio heads losing all sight of it until the band got burned out.
My part of TN, we have the occasional tornado. F2s. No big ones so far in over 200 years of settlement. One tornado fatality in the last 20 years within a 50 mile radius, and there's claims the wall which fell there was single thickness brick constructed by the amateur homeowner. Floods? My home is over 500 feet above the local river. Earthquakes? If the new Madrid fault lets loose and literally hits Memphis TN with a Richter 10.8 quake and not a building is left in pieces bigger than marble sized, I would see a 3.3. I have a fair chance of living through it even if there really is a supervolcano under Yellowstone running on a 60 million year cycle, and it all lets loose at once and buries the western states under 10 feet of ash.
So you can understand why I say - The most threatening natural disaster of all is an asteroid strike. they can happen anywhere, so it's only fair we devote the bulk of disaster management funds to stopping them.
It's not the sheer magnitude of an earthquake that actually determines damage. Damage should be much more correlated with how much of the energy gets dissipated into a building or other structure.
Try looking at it like this: If you are standing out in a field when an earthquake hits, you personally may be the only thing on top of the ground, that could absorb any energy from that part of a wave passing through the whole area. Just you. Now if you are on the bottom floor of a big concrete parking garage, that whole garage and all the cars in it could absorb various parts of the energy, so if energy really determines the damage, you are safer on the bottommost floor of that garage than out in the open. Doesn't seem at all likely, does it?
Energy in physics is sometimes defined as the ability to do work. A lot of energy means a lot of work can happen, not that it invariably happens where you might expect, or even happens at all. (and yes, knocking down a tall building counts as work for most definitions in physics, even if gravity does most of the job once you get it good and started).
So, we have a structure which doesn't couple strongly to the energy of a quake wave. You can say it deflects the wave, or channels it, or lots of other verbal descriptions, but the point is, not a lot of the energy of the wave passes into the building. That energy could go on to get absorbed by another building, but alternately it could keep on going until it dissipates in the relatively empty countryside many miles from the city. Not absorbing a lot of the locally available energy doesn't mean the energy has been deflected to target some other building, or somehow focused. It also doesn't necessarily mean the energy has changed overall direction, or that you have created more turbulence in the earthquake waves, or lots of other things that could possibly happen but maybe really won't. To see if any of them are really probable, you have to do math, not reason from a verbal model that is already just an approximation.
You could have just said "Google Leeroy Jenkins"
Or, leave Zenmap in and see if there's really that much bloat, instability or loss of speed to have a good GUI front end for NMap. It's a pretty tight GUI - sure it adds some to load times, but unless you're just determined to prove you go back to the original unix command line days, you are halfway likely to decide you like having a GUI that is well designed for its purpose. The natural terminal display for nmap has the usual problem of terminals, that is doing multiple operations tends to push all the data from older operations off the screen. Sure, you're leet, you set the terminal to much more than the default 1000 lines scrollback long ago, right? There are still ways to set up the GUI that tend to keep more info around onscreen at a time. It's up to the operator, of course, whether these are worth it or not.
You're right, all that crap in the constitution about 'for a limited time' is Marxist drivel. Now write your congressman and demand they get all that commie stuff out of the constitution.