I don't know. Why don't you ask that of the people who posted that nonsense above me in the thread? I'm not the guy who believes that physics is deterministic in the sense that no free will is possible, I'm the guy who disagrees with that.
If I trust only 1% of my senses, how can I possibly trust science more than that same 1%? Even worse, what if I trust only 1% of my whole set of experiences? Your 'non-mystical' conclusion seems to be that there is no minimal level of strength in the form of either intital axioms, methods of processing data, or methods of logical verification, below which the conclusions of science become not totally trustable. Sorry, but you fail at Godel AND you're a mystic.
I said a lot more than that I doubted my senses - in fact, I never used the word senses in my original post. Yes, I admit freely that I don't consider my senses 100% infallible when it comes to analyzing reality. That's somewhat vaguely inferable from what I wrote. BUT IT ISN'T WHAT I WROTE, AND ISN'T EVEN CLOSELY RELATED TO WHAT I WROTE, AND MOST EMPHATICALLY ISN'T ALL I WROTE.
This isn't a question of senses, It's a question of what counts as evidence of what. I experience consciousness. It's axiomatic for me, and I don't have to prove to myself it exists. If you demand I prove it to you, don't you have to prove you have it too, and first, so it's worth the bother of my answering you? But, consciousness only impacts the real world in certain ways. I have to infer it from evidence, such as seeing other people act in ways that imply consciousness. I don't have direct sensory detection of consciousness, in other words. If somebody demands I prove consciousness exists by showing it to them, I fail, because people don't have a sense organ to detect consciousness. If somebody demands I prove it by methods more than sufficent to prove objective reality itself exists, I likewise fail, because I can't even stop them from doubting objective reality if they are determined enough.
I can't stop you from sticking your fingers in your ears, singing loudly "La-La-La, I can't hear you", and then running to everyone you know and saying "Artifakt failed to prove consciousness exists." But, if you do that enough with objective reality, you will eventually die of it, and it sure as hell isn't winning a scientific debate.
Add consciousness, as separate from free will, and probably the sharp distinction between living and non-living. Probably you could also add 'life after death', 'heaven', 'hell' and other such concepts, but most people seem to think these can't be separated from the God concept.
Most people (at least in the west) seem to accept the existence of an objective external reality without fundamental problems. Situations such as dreaming, where you may think you are experiencing that reality at the time, but don't believe it later, are things that need study and explanation, but almost nobody (again in the Western tradition) says dreaming proves external reality doesn't exist.
But (and this is my major point) there are unresolved aspects and peripherally related phenomina tangential to 'consciousness' and 'free will', and some people gladly point at them and say things such as "See, this proves free will is just an illusion!". Often, they are simply not big enough issues, nor in many cases are they themselves solidly researched and integrated into the body of science, if you use the same standard of proof as you would for the things you already take uncritically. Alternately, taking the same hyper-critical position on whatever you do believe in as for the thing you are claiming is disproved works to negate anything. You can even doubt that 'you think, therefore you are', and 'you are, therefore you'll think' both, if you want to take it far enough.
I'm not going to address whether this same argument applies to religion or spirituality. People need to think about that point for themselves.
Back when I first took a physics class, the teacher introduced four axioms: Matter, Energy, Space & Time. The people who just wouldn't accept these as givens ended up failing AP physics instead of making an original contribution to philosophy. Most theorizing about thought assumes only one or two such axioms (Consciousness and maybe Free Will).
When I took my first course on modern physics, I learned that it was really Matter/Energy and Space/Time. I didn't take this as proof that Matter itself didn't exist. But it's very normal for people who want to eliminate the concept of consciousness to do something parallel. That is, if someone dealing with consciousness says there's significant overlap with free will, and maybe even the fundamental axiomatic idea is Consciousness/Free Will, those people treat it like not being entirely separable means not existing at all.
Boy did you miss the point. 'I' don't exist when I'm sleeping. My body does, or so I infer from my belief in an external reality and various people's comments, but the 'I' certainly doesn't. I'm not just my body, but my mind.
Of course, some people disagree. Plenty of people even insist that I still exist when I am unconscious, but I definitely won't exist when I am dead. That there is actually no evidence whatsoever to support this, and plenty of evidence to negate the distinction, doesn't stop those people from claiming it. Those same people then tend to argue that I can't prove consciousness exists. This amounts to claiming there is some sort of distinction between a conscious creature, an unconscious body and a dead one, but that distinction is actually non-existent.
And to those of you who think this is rhetorical: In the 60's, one presidential candidate supported a guaranteed income of 1,200$ per year minimum to every citizen, regardless of whether they worked or not. (That was enough to buy a new Mustang convertible back then). That same candidate supported government price fixing for all major commodities, and worked hard to establish closer ties with a major communist country once elected. That candidate had a plan to fix up decaying inner cities that would have assigned up to five union carpenters, electricians and plumbers just to training roles for each new laborer inducted from the local areas into those unions, with most of the actual work being done by the local hires (and this plan failed to be implemented only because the unions wanted even more trainers per new hire and another politician promised them up to a 17 to 1 ratio). That same candidate ran on a promise to pull troops out of an unpopular war, and did so. He set time tables for withdrawing and winding down the war in many cases, and was widely characterized as being out of touch to the far, far right when he insisted upon keeping even some of his plans for withdrawing secret.
That candidate was Richard Nixon, the guy seen then as moderately right of center only because Barry Goldwater was 'even farther right'. By todays standards, Nixon would score about as far left as Dennis Kucinich or Ted Kennedy, maybe even farther.
There are several kinds of low probability events. A lottery has a low probability of any one ticket winning, but a very high probability that somebody will win because there are so many tickets. For universes to work like that, there have to be enough universes that as you put it, "it's got to happen to someone". Science hasn't "uncovered" (again, your word) this situation, unless they have proved that parallel universes definitely exist, there are definitely enough of them for the low probabilities to sum, and the meta-laws of these universes allow summing the low probabilities.
Uncovered would mean: 1. Scientist observes parallel universes. 2. Scientist counts enough of them to prove the low odds can sum to likely odds, or finds a good proof there are enough. A good proof has to be more rigorous than is usual in physics, because our universe's physics may not be the ruleset in any of these others. Probably this means the proof has to meet formal mathematical standards. 3. Scientist has to have a Theory of Everything for our universe. 4. Scientist has to derive similar theories for the other universes and a meta-theory that combines them. 5. Scientist then has to show that the meta-ToE allows low probability events to sum.
I'm pretty sure none of those steps have happened. If I'm wrong, I'd like to predict what discoveries get awarded the next ten Nobel prizes in physics, and probably a Fields medal or two.
The usual anthropic principle argument about formation of stars relates to the cosmological constant (yes we have one of those again, at least if there's anything to dark matter and dark energy). That constant is very, very poorly predicted by some particle physics models such as the ones that predict a Higgs boson. The observations suggest a value that is a full 120 orders of magnitude less than the prediction. If that value were as little as 119 orders below the prediction, cosmic expansion would prevent star formation.
The article instead talks about three other numbers, such as the gravitational and fine structure constants, and says some of these could vary significantly in particular combinations without making stars impossible, especially if you count things such as IR radiating black holes as starlike. So, it's not even addressing the constant most important to the original argument and it still has to hedge its bets.
The other important arguments lumped under the anthropic principle do deal with other numbers than the cosmological constant. Some of these say that varying some of these other numbers (again, such as the gravitational and fine structure constants) gives universes with stars that don't last long enough for life to evolve around them, stars where no elements heavier than say oxygen ever form, universes where the hydrogen all fuses to helium in the first three minutes, and such, and argues these universes won't support life. So the proponents of the anthropic principle have already stipulated that stars or something similar are probably possible in many of the very same cases this article supports. The researchers have identified a few interesting possibilities for combinations that would seem exotic to us but might make complex, interesting universes with something just conceivably like life or other really high complexity phenomina, and that's all very nice but it is totally irrelevant to the argument the slashdot editor says it affects, and is actually pretty compatible with the other arguments the editor didn't mention.
I'd submit that you can't avoid caring about them, because underling them are universal human questions. Take the question, "Who is my neighbor?". Half the world still assumes it is a person of their own race, religion, economic class, gender, etc. The Story of the Good Samaritan says it's the person who would help you, even if he comes from a different group, even a group you have been specifically trained to despise. Would you really claim you have no strong opinion about whether racism or classism are right or wrong?
Or take something a guy named Paul said. "Charity is bigger than Faith or Hope." Would you really say this is simply not worth thinking about one way or the other?
I'm not urging you to accept all the same opinions on these issues as the various writers of the Bible did, but what in the hell does any culture's scientific achievement have to do with whether these questions still matter? If they've stopped mattering, then forget caring about Shakespeare, or Mozart, or Jefferson as well.
I am aware 100% of the time that I exist. During the times I (allegedly) don't exist, I am not aware of them. I have never experienced something without being aware of it - the two states are synonyms.
But, I have been aware of many things that don't indicate an external reality. My own internal thoughts and emotions don't necessarily correspond to reality, my memories may or may not be accurate to varying degrees when checked against new experiences, plus there's dreams, delusions, and many other states where I have strong doubt the things I am aware of at that time match in any way with an objective external universe.
So, I believe in an external reality, but I simply must do so based on a lot less than 100% of my total awareness. If I thought the percentage was very small, I wouldn't believe that the rest of you are real enough to bother typing this, but if I set the percentage at or very close to 100%, I'd be assuming my dreams are real, my emotions are tools of reason, and railroad tracks really do get closer together in the distance!
Now 'freewill' seems to be real to me, but it acts in many cases in relation to things I also can't prove are real. I can't really prove to anyone else that I have 'real' emotions instead of just 'simulating them', I can't prove I was genuinely mistaken about something instead of pretending to be mistaken, etc. So, I can't use any of these to prove I have free will, since they themselves can also be doubted.
But, I've just shown that the idea of an external reality, and particularly one where processes of Chemistry and Physics imply there is no true free will possible, is itself subject to doubt. So the real reason we can doubt free will exists is that we can actually doubt just about everything. Now what really bugs me is you people who are swearing up and down there is no reason to doubt external reality, but doubting everything else for reasons that also apply to that external model, except you won't apply them to that, just everything else.
The assumption is, if somebody did something special for a person that was already dead, they probably believed that some part of that person was 'still around' to appreciate it - else why go to the extra bother.
It's not invariably true - for example we probably try to honor people's last will and testaments as much for the peace of mind it brings them while they are still alive as for any other reason. This burial could arguably have been done just to give the deceased's survivors a mental image that alleviated some of their sorrow, with no real expectation beyond that.
Many prehistoric cultures have done more than just arranging the dead though, such as burying 'killed' tools with them. This goes back to at least some Neanderthal sites in the range of 60 - 65,000 BC, also shows up in some of our direct ancestors, and some particular symbolic rituals span roughly 50,000 years, making them part of what was probably by far the longest continuous religious system ever. One of the roughly 60,000 year old Neanderthal sites involved the burial of a young girl, about 5 or 6. Her corpse was laid on a sort of rug made of woven flowers, and carefully equipped with bone needles, a waterskin, spools of sinew, flint knapping stones, shell jewelry, and clothing in various sizes from hers at time of death to items which would have fit her fully grown. Many of the items showed signs of being neatly broken or damaged in a ritualistic fashion, as though to send them with her by some form of sympathetic magic.
If the article's writer is inferring spiritual beliefs just from the position of the corpses, they may well be in error, but if this is the opinion of the research anthropologists, they have probably noticed enough similarities to other sites to be confident it's part of the same cultural context.
This particular case looks like pretty flaky modding, but lots of people don't like to award flamebait mods for some topics, and that's not just GWB. I know personally, that if the subject is something like an ongoing murder trial (i.e. Hans Reiser), or the War in Georgia, or Abortion or something like that, I almost never award a flamebait. Politics and Religion in particular draw lots of strong comments out.
I myself am not unbiased, and would probably award flamebaits to one side more than the other on any discussion of some lightning rod issues. I think the people who claim copyright violation = theft are simply wrong, and often feel personally insulted by posters who assume anyone who disagrees has never rationally considered the issue, or is automatically themselves a 'pirate', but I would never use a flamebait mod in a discussion where that claim was on topic.
I have awarded flamebaits before when the discourse is a little less polarized, and it looked like there was some calm, rational discussion going on and the post actually triggered a flame war that might not have happened otherwise.
Here, do you really think we can discuss the DoD developing mind altering drugs without half of us entering with a very strong opinion?
First, my argument isn't based on either of the assumptions you are trying to put in my mouth. If you want to create a straw man and then attack it, please don't do it to me. It wastes both of our times and makes you look clueless.
Second, if you can cite one single case where any of the lobbying groups that supported this law sued an infringer under it without including damages, please do so. Since it's new law, how about a single case by any of those lobbying groups under the old laws, without damages being involved, against any entity that would count as a profiteer under this law. For that matter, if you can find a single, solitary case where the American equivalents such as the RIAA or MPAA or any one of their constituents sued under similar laws, or any older versions passed since the Berne act laid down the basics of this area of law, without including damages, produce it. I'd even agree your argument had some merit if you can cite a single case outside both the U.S.A and Europe. Show me one single case, anywhere in the whole wide world since international copyright law accords began for a given country, where a commercial rights holder sued where there was alleged sale for profit, and did not ask for damages.
I agree that penalties need to be significant enough to provide deterrence. In the U.S., there's a rule of thumb frequently used, which allows for triple damages in cases where, for example, simple negligence gives way to criminal levels of negligence. I think that is derived from English common law so the U.K. probably has similar principles in some areas of modern law.
But often, that idea means instead that the penalty becomes stiffer if the tort or crime is one that most of the time goes unpunished or uncorrected.
This can end up resulting in punishing more severely anyone breaking a law the public often disagrees with. If the public (or a big segment of it) actually doesn't want to turn in people committing crime X (i.e. drug use), then the additional penalties would get adjusted upwards to make up for that reluctance. The U.S. already has some penalties like this - for ex. the HOPE tax credit, which the taxpayer can't get if the student was ever convicted of a drug related felony, but could theoretically still claim if the student was convicted of rape, murder or even treason.
The fact that a large minority disagrees with a law, and might passively disregard it, should make the government think the law might be too harsh, rather than serve as an excuse to make it harsher.
It's in civil cases that 'profit' does matter, not criminal ones. Making a profit shows that there was enough demand so damages can be reasonably inferred, and often there are reasons for the court to deviate from treating the issue neutrally and actually assume there is no damage to the plantiff otherwise.
Take a DVD seller, who makes an English language version, encodes only for region 1, and doesn't produce a subtitled version. That seller has effectively said that France wasn't intended as a market, that Katmandu wasn't a market, that Sri Lanka wasn't a market, etc. So, somebody who subtitles the work for local consumption hasn't cost the original rights holder any damages, as there wasn't a market, at the very least until they did something the original rights holder thought wouldn't be cost effective.
But, if there's a profit, then the originator can probably base damages straight from that, and not worry about a bunch of apple and orange comparisons, between what it cost a local group to do subtitling vs what the foreign business was told it would cost, and what price each would have set, etc.
For companies, it's a more straight forward lawsuit, and they don't have to open their books to the court as much, so they can sue without their own employees turning around and suing them for shares of the profits they hid, and such cases.
Most of the time though, 'piracy' isn't completely free to the person doing it. People pay for higher speed connections, blank media, CD & DVD burners, bigger hard drives, and long retention Usenet servers. The wide variety of compression software used means most of them buy some kind of commercial un-.rar'er, and the variety of video formats means many of the video pirates pay for viewers and codecs. Game pirates have to deal with hardware upgrades and compatability problems, usually without tech support. For just one cost commonly encountered, the most commonly used DVD burning software by far is Nero, which is very not freeware, and is seldom usable from cracked copies. Buying a DVD burner gets you a free version with a 30 day trial, but you'd be surprised how many pirates eventually break down and buy a full version, as Nero's security is pretty damned good and the bootleg copies usually stop working pretty quickly. I base that on Nero's sales reports - either very few people who buy a burner are pirates, and there's just not that much piracy out there (in which case, what's the fuss about?), or a lot of the pirates buy the full version.
They also pay in terms of quality (for example losing packaging that can include more durable media, art, or printed instructions, or getting games that have had cinematics stripped out to reduce file size), in time (having to learn to run parity check software to verify downloads, or learning to fix various common trojans they risk getting). There's an extremely steep learning curve in finding out who to trust, how to find 'safe' pirated copies, and a lot of risks for newbies. The average person who sets out, knowing only Internet Explorer and Googling to find unliscenced content, has a better than even chance of getting burned big time, at least to losing a drive's contents and having to reformat it.
Such costs still work out cheaper in some people's minds than buying all the games, music, and video they get. Cash prices can explain some of that, but it's not likely that accounts for the vast majority. There are probably at least sizeable fractions who have other reasons.
For most of the high population areas of the world, the largest religions locally don't have a 'be fruitful and multiply' commandment or anything like it. You could make a fairly strong case for Mexico or some other parts of Latin America, but what about China, which is mostly either Maoist or Confucian? Or India, with Hinduism and Buddhism for most of their religious background? Sub-Saharan Africa, you could blame Islam or Christianity somewhat, but a lot of the highest population growth regions are again dominated by local religions.
Education is certainly a crucial factor, but note, the part of the population that has to be educated is more likely the women than the men. In areas where women are deliberately denied schooling, population problems persist even if the male part of the population is significantly educated.
I suspect the quotes around illegal are intended to reflect that at least some copyright violations are still mere torts, not crimes, as you yourself point out later. 'illegal and/or tortuous' is a terribly awkward phrase, and having to constantly be that precise in discussing this seems pretty nitpicking, particularly when the 'other side' doesn't have to constantly explain that they don't mean peg-legs and parrots every time they use the word pirate. In the same way, the argument about investigations makes more sense if you assume that at least some of what is being investigated at public expense includes those tort violations. That's been a U. S. issue however, and I don't know if it is an Italian one - the article doesn't indicate that the Italian government is gathering information that is only relevant to tort violations rather than crimes.
I have been boycotting a lot of electronic entertainment for years. I don't feel any temptation to 'pirate' it based on just saving the money that would go to developers and artists otherwise. I don't even feel the temptation when there are layers of distributers wanting their cut, and I could probably rationalize ignoring the artist's rights because they have insisted upon yoking themselves to a bunch of other people that are often just parasites.
But, I'm pretty sure the RIAA, BSA, etc, tend to count me as a pirate even though I haven't pirated. That is, they deliberately inflate the reports, so there are fictitious numbers in their claims where I don't buy something and they assume I must have gotten a copy somehow instead of just not buying it. Yeah, this is just a matter of treating consumers in general, or at worst my demographic group, that way, and not me specifically, but still...
If I have ever felt that there was some real justification for illegal downloading, it's been when the corporate types start lumping the people who aren't pirating in with the pirates anyway. Witness various reports to congress, offset taxes on blank media, and the like. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, after all.
It's all about the money - specifically the disposable share of income.
I budget, and entertainment is a category that has no flexible spending cap. Games compete with both electronic entertainment such as film DVD's, and other entertainment, such as gas to go to the lake or new rock climbing gear. This is why I haven't bought an audio CD in 6 years - the money always seems better spent on video, or non-electronic stuff. This is also why I hate 99 cent music downloads, as it looks like buying a whole album's worth of tracks will usually cost about as much as buying the actual CD, so someone expects me to pay them as much as if they still had to pay truck drivers fuel costs even though they don't.
I don't 'pirate' games (or at least I don't have a single pirated copy of any game on any machine I own right now), but I have avoided getting into some stuff that looks like fun (portal mostly), because I'm not sure from what I've read that the 'steam' system isn't analogous (at least somewhat) to the 99 cent downloads I have issues with.
Of course, not a lot of people stick to a really rigorous budget or even live within their means these days. But, such behavior is usually short term, as people who run up huge lines of credit often end up too poor to be entertainment consumers at all. That's all pretty much an agreement with colmore, that the idea of people averaging over 100$ a month on pop culture isn't part of the long term pattern, and I think what I've just said pretty well explains why - it's simply non-sustainable.
So here's my comments for the games industry. 1. For your pricing structure to be long-term sustainable, most of your consumers need to be able to keep buying year to year - this looks absurd with current economic figures. You probably focus too much on the 14-18 demographic and hope their parents don't rein them in too much when the parents get tighter for cash, or that there will always be a new crop of overspenders before the old ones run out of flexibility in their budgets. Your business model becomes dominated by population aging demographics for select target groups, which can do wildly better or worse for a time than the general population, and which make it harder for you to plan for keeping your company in business long term.
2. is it good (ethically) to have a business model that assumes large percentages of your consumer base will literally have to come from the people who don't much budget, save for retirement, or make financially informed decisions, to hit your target numbers?
3. If you follow what passes for market wisdom among the industry's MBAs, your price point calculations probably look better than they actually function. You just possibly are making more in the short run (2-3 years or even less), but face substantial problems over periods as short as 10, and right now, face all the problems the whole economy is seeing in addition. As an independent, you probably wouldn't be involved in the business side at all if you thought it couldn't be sustained for a mere 10 years, rather, you'd focus on starting some other kind of business.
Are the extra dimensions actually limited to those of one of the current models (i.e. the most common 10 dimensional string theory model or one of its alternates?) (In other words, are you assuming the topology is the only thing that really matters, or just that you could find an interesting topology that shows some predictive power, and then refine both it and how many dimensions it applies to, and the tweaks needed would be easier to test and/or simpler and/or more beautiful than starting from the other end?) Are any of the extra dimensions supposed to be time-like, or at least significantly partially time-like? Would the number of time-like dimensions involved impose significant additional limitations on testability, and would the difficulty of testing in general increase (probably exponentially or by some similarly steep function) if the number of time-like dimensions required increases?
Some of the anomalies found on initially auditing A.A. included where people who did not legally have fiduciary duties, i.e. secretaries and even some clerk in shipping and receiving, had signed contracts and other documents that by law require a particular individual holding such responsibility to sign. Some of the destroyed documents are believed to have had more cases of this nature, although that's a hard thing to unambiguously prove.
Normally, while investigating individuals in a medium sized or larger company, the judge identifies people who have fiduciary standing with the company and do not appear to be involved in the crime. Failing that, people who did not enjoy fiduciary duties can be promoted to positions that do imply such duties, or brought in from outside sources to manage the company in some cases. Since most medium sized or larger companies have senior sales staff or internal accounting or legal departments where there are quite a few employees that have fiduciary duties, finding some competent individuals to run the company for at least a month or so, until the board of directors can take further steps if needed, is really not that challenging, except in a case like A.A.'s.
Those people are deployed as needed to such positions as payroll so that they can keep the company going while the suspected individuals are kept away from the company's financial assets, etc. After an initial plan of this sort is adopted, the judge will usually be open to various motions from the company's legal dept. to adjust the system further, but the board will frequently have to get judicial approval for each step of continued tweaking of their management employee pool, often until the initial cases are completely settled. Deals of this sort are frequently worked out between prosecutors and the board for publicly traded companies, usually with C.E.O.s and similar having a great deal of input if they are not themselves among the indicted, and are usually seen as in the shareholder's, the (un-accused) employee's and the general public's interests.
Because A.A. didn't preserve clear lines of accountability, this couldn't be done even if the fed wanted to bend over backwards and jump through flaming hoops to do it. By ignoring the requirement for fiduciary responsibility, Andersen did it to themselves. The Company became 'who' did crime X, not identifiable individuals, and the Company paid so that somebody paid for the crimes. The alternative was to spend 20 years sorting through a deliberately muddled trail and trigger a cascade of dozens of appellate cases that would still just be kicking off about now.
Except we didn't merely assist the Northern Alliance. We chose them as the group we thought should prevail, over the Taliban and various local warlords. They claimed that this would reduce the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan - that's one of the reasons we claimed we were picking the 'right' side. Instead, opium production has repeatedly increased, to the point where the last three years have each been a banner year. To stoop to the same personal straw man you used, I guess you prefer that we let innocent men, women and children in our own country continue to die as a result of that opium trade.
Oh, you didn't mean it that way? Neither did the other poster you attacked. What makes you sure the current government of Afghanistan is actually significantly better, when you are hearing it from the same people who have made the U.S.'s drug problem so much worse?
By the way, Assassination of enemy heads of state by the C.I.A. or other intelligence organizations is specifically illegal. O.B.L. is not primarily a political figure and certainly not a head of state. He counts as either an enemy combatant or just arguably, a criminal. Sending special forces after him is legal, both by U.S. and international law. Using military force is justified if it is focused on political groups attempting to hide him or aid and succor him - if they stick up for him, he becomes their combatant. The phrase "special forces" also used by ArcherB would imply just that - military, and that same body of laws assumes normal military orders, that is, the order given to those forces does not have to be to capture him alive for trial if possible. At the level of a marine gunny sgt. that order can well be to snipe him at 1,000 yards with no chance to surrender, and that is not assassination. Sorry the parent poster misused the word 'assassination', but the rest of his paragraph shows what he was advocating is entirely legal, and your legal opinion is bullshit.
I have my doubts because it's a supposed big breakthrough on more than one front. First, the electricity needed is supposed to drop by roughly an order of magnetude over existing industrial methods, and I'm always a bit skeptical of such big gains.
But more probably, it's over-hyped because it also eliminates 'specialized storage containers' (as the summary puts it, not exactly what the article says, but it seems fairly close). Taking out some or even all of the caustic substances industrial electrolysis methods now put in the liquid water before splitting it isn't enough to make storage of the end product any simpler - hydrogen is still hydrogen and has its own problems. Electrolysis storage involves specialized liquid storage before and specialized gas storage after, and both have some risks on such a large scale. At best, this improvement only addresses the first half of the process. Until you know whether storing the liquid caustics is actually a bigger risk (on this scale) than storing the hydrogen, you don't know if eliminating that risk makes this technology safe enough overall to make any real difference.
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I don't know. Why don't you ask that of the people who posted that nonsense above me in the thread? I'm not the guy who believes that physics is deterministic in the sense that no free will is possible, I'm the guy who disagrees with that.
If I trust only 1% of my senses, how can I possibly trust science more than that same 1%? Even worse, what if I trust only 1% of my whole set of experiences?
Your 'non-mystical' conclusion seems to be that there is no minimal level of strength in the form of either intital axioms, methods of processing data, or methods of logical verification, below which the conclusions of science become not totally trustable. Sorry, but you fail at Godel AND you're a mystic.
I said a lot more than that I doubted my senses - in fact, I never used the word senses in my original post. Yes, I admit freely that I don't consider my senses 100% infallible when it comes to analyzing reality. That's somewhat vaguely inferable from what I wrote. BUT IT ISN'T WHAT I WROTE, AND ISN'T EVEN CLOSELY RELATED TO WHAT I WROTE, AND MOST EMPHATICALLY ISN'T ALL I WROTE.
This isn't a question of senses, It's a question of what counts as evidence of what. I experience consciousness. It's axiomatic for me, and I don't have to prove to myself it exists. If you demand I prove it to you, don't you have to prove you have it too, and first, so it's worth the bother of my answering you? But, consciousness only impacts the real world in certain ways. I have to infer it from evidence, such as seeing other people act in ways that imply consciousness. I don't have direct sensory detection of consciousness, in other words. If somebody demands I prove consciousness exists by showing it to them, I fail, because people don't have a sense organ to detect consciousness. If somebody demands I prove it by methods more than sufficent to prove objective reality itself exists, I likewise fail, because I can't even stop them from doubting objective reality if they are determined enough.
I can't stop you from sticking your fingers in your ears, singing loudly "La-La-La, I can't hear you", and then running to everyone you know and saying "Artifakt failed to prove consciousness exists." But, if you do that enough with objective reality, you will eventually die of it, and it sure as hell isn't winning a scientific debate.
Add consciousness, as separate from free will, and probably the sharp distinction between living and non-living.
Probably you could also add 'life after death', 'heaven', 'hell' and other such concepts, but most people seem to think these can't be separated from the God concept.
Most people (at least in the west) seem to accept the existence of an objective external reality without fundamental problems. Situations such as dreaming, where you may think you are experiencing that reality at the time, but don't believe it later, are things that need study and explanation, but almost nobody (again in the Western tradition) says dreaming proves external reality doesn't exist.
But (and this is my major point) there are unresolved aspects and peripherally related phenomina tangential to 'consciousness' and 'free will', and some people gladly point at them and say things such as "See, this proves free will is just an illusion!". Often, they are simply not big enough issues, nor in many cases are they themselves solidly researched and integrated into the body of science, if you use the same standard of proof as you would for the things you already take uncritically. Alternately, taking the same hyper-critical position on whatever you do believe in as for the thing you are claiming is disproved works to negate anything. You can even doubt that 'you think, therefore you are', and 'you are, therefore you'll think' both, if you want to take it far enough.
I'm not going to address whether this same argument applies to religion or spirituality. People need to think about that point for themselves.
Back when I first took a physics class, the teacher introduced four axioms: Matter, Energy, Space & Time. The people who just wouldn't accept these as givens ended up failing AP physics instead of making an original contribution to philosophy. Most theorizing about thought assumes only one or two such axioms (Consciousness and maybe Free Will).
When I took my first course on modern physics, I learned that it was really Matter/Energy and Space/Time. I didn't take this as proof that Matter itself didn't exist. But it's very normal for people who want to eliminate the concept of consciousness to do something parallel. That is, if someone dealing with consciousness says there's significant overlap with free will, and maybe even the fundamental axiomatic idea is Consciousness/Free Will, those people treat it like not being entirely separable means not existing at all.
Boy did you miss the point. 'I' don't exist when I'm sleeping. My body does, or so I infer from my belief in an external reality and various people's comments, but the 'I' certainly doesn't. I'm not just my body, but my mind.
Of course, some people disagree. Plenty of people even insist that I still exist when I am unconscious, but I definitely won't exist when I am dead. That there is actually no evidence whatsoever to support this, and plenty of evidence to negate the distinction, doesn't stop those people from claiming it. Those same people then tend to argue that I can't prove consciousness exists. This amounts to claiming there is some sort of distinction between a conscious creature, an unconscious body and a dead one, but that distinction is actually non-existent.
And to those of you who think this is rhetorical:
In the 60's, one presidential candidate supported a guaranteed income of 1,200$ per year minimum to every citizen, regardless of whether they worked or not. (That was enough to buy a new Mustang convertible back then). That same candidate supported government price fixing for all major commodities, and worked hard to establish closer ties with a major communist country once elected. That candidate had a plan to fix up decaying inner cities that would have assigned up to five union carpenters, electricians and plumbers just to training roles for each new laborer inducted from the local areas into those unions, with most of the actual work being done by the local hires (and this plan failed to be implemented only because the unions wanted even more trainers per new hire and another politician promised them up to a 17 to 1 ratio). That same candidate ran on a promise to pull troops out of an unpopular war, and did so. He set time tables for withdrawing and winding down the war in many cases, and was widely characterized as being out of touch to the far, far right when he insisted upon keeping even some of his plans for withdrawing secret.
That candidate was Richard Nixon, the guy seen then as moderately right of center only because Barry Goldwater was 'even farther right'. By todays standards, Nixon would score about as far left as Dennis Kucinich or Ted Kennedy, maybe even farther.
There are several kinds of low probability events. A lottery has a low probability of any one ticket winning, but a very high probability that somebody will win because there are so many tickets. For universes to work like that, there have to be enough universes that as you put it, "it's got to happen to someone". Science hasn't "uncovered" (again, your word) this situation, unless they have proved that parallel universes definitely exist, there are definitely enough of them for the low probabilities to sum, and the meta-laws of these universes allow summing the low probabilities.
Uncovered would mean:
1. Scientist observes parallel universes.
2. Scientist counts enough of them to prove the low odds can sum to likely odds, or finds a good proof there are enough. A good proof has to be more rigorous than is usual in physics, because our universe's physics may not be the ruleset in any of these others. Probably this means the proof has to meet formal mathematical standards.
3. Scientist has to have a Theory of Everything for our universe.
4. Scientist has to derive similar theories for the other universes and a meta-theory that combines them.
5. Scientist then has to show that the meta-ToE allows low probability events to sum.
I'm pretty sure none of those steps have happened. If I'm wrong, I'd like to predict what discoveries get awarded the next ten Nobel prizes in physics, and probably a Fields medal or two.
The usual anthropic principle argument about formation of stars relates to the cosmological constant (yes we have one of those again, at least if there's anything to dark matter and dark energy). That constant is very, very poorly predicted by some particle physics models such as the ones that predict a Higgs boson. The observations suggest a value that is a full 120 orders of magnitude less than the prediction. If that value were as little as 119 orders below the prediction, cosmic expansion would prevent star formation.
The article instead talks about three other numbers, such as the gravitational and fine structure constants, and says some of these could vary significantly in particular combinations without making stars impossible, especially if you count things such as IR radiating black holes as starlike. So, it's not even addressing the constant most important to the original argument and it still has to hedge its bets.
The other important arguments lumped under the anthropic principle do deal with other numbers than the cosmological constant. Some of these say that varying some of these other numbers (again, such as the gravitational and fine structure constants) gives universes with stars that don't last long enough for life to evolve around them, stars where no elements heavier than say oxygen ever form, universes where the hydrogen all fuses to helium in the first three minutes, and such, and argues these universes won't support life. So the proponents of the anthropic principle have already stipulated that stars or something similar are probably possible in many of the very same cases this article supports. The researchers have identified a few interesting possibilities for combinations that would seem exotic to us but might make complex, interesting universes with something just conceivably like life or other really high complexity phenomina, and that's all very nice but it is totally irrelevant to the argument the slashdot editor says it affects, and is actually pretty compatible with the other arguments the editor didn't mention.
I'd submit that you can't avoid caring about them, because underling them are universal human questions.
Take the question, "Who is my neighbor?". Half the world still assumes it is a person of their own race, religion, economic class, gender, etc. The Story of the Good Samaritan says it's the person who would help you, even if he comes from a different group, even a group you have been specifically trained to despise. Would you really claim you have no strong opinion about whether racism or classism are right or wrong?
Or take something a guy named Paul said. "Charity is bigger than Faith or Hope." Would you really say this is simply not worth thinking about one way or the other?
I'm not urging you to accept all the same opinions on these issues as the various writers of the Bible did, but what in the hell does any culture's scientific achievement have to do with whether these questions still matter? If they've stopped mattering, then forget caring about Shakespeare, or Mozart, or Jefferson as well.
You know, that very same 'logic' works to prove that anyone who bothers to argue with you is automatically wrong. How's that working for you?
I am aware 100% of the time that I exist. During the times I (allegedly) don't exist, I am not aware of them. I have never experienced something without being aware of it - the two states are synonyms.
But, I have been aware of many things that don't indicate an external reality. My own internal thoughts and emotions don't necessarily correspond to reality, my memories may or may not be accurate to varying degrees when checked against new experiences, plus there's dreams, delusions, and many other states where I have strong doubt the things I am aware of at that time match in any way with an objective external universe.
So, I believe in an external reality, but I simply must do so based on a lot less than 100% of my total awareness. If I thought the percentage was very small, I wouldn't believe that the rest of you are real enough to bother typing this, but if I set the percentage at or very close to 100%, I'd be assuming my dreams are real, my emotions are tools of reason, and railroad tracks really do get closer together in the distance!
Now 'freewill' seems to be real to me, but it acts in many cases in relation to things I also can't prove are real. I can't really prove to anyone else that I have 'real' emotions instead of just 'simulating them', I can't prove I was genuinely mistaken about something instead of pretending to be mistaken, etc. So, I can't use any of these to prove I have free will, since they themselves can also be doubted.
But, I've just shown that the idea of an external reality, and particularly one where processes of Chemistry and Physics imply there is no true free will possible, is itself subject to doubt. So the real reason we can doubt free will exists is that we can actually doubt just about everything. Now what really bugs me is you people who are swearing up and down there is no reason to doubt external reality, but doubting everything else for reasons that also apply to that external model, except you won't apply them to that, just everything else.
The assumption is, if somebody did something special for a person that was already dead, they probably believed that some part of that person was 'still around' to appreciate it - else why go to the extra bother.
It's not invariably true - for example we probably try to honor people's last will and testaments as much for the peace of mind it brings them while they are still alive as for any other reason. This burial could arguably have been done just to give the deceased's survivors a mental image that alleviated some of their sorrow, with no real expectation beyond that.
Many prehistoric cultures have done more than just arranging the dead though, such as burying 'killed' tools with them. This goes back to at least some Neanderthal sites in the range of 60 - 65,000 BC, also shows up in some of our direct ancestors, and some particular symbolic rituals span roughly 50,000 years, making them part of what was probably by far the longest continuous religious system ever. One of the roughly 60,000 year old Neanderthal sites involved the burial of a young girl, about 5 or 6. Her corpse was laid on a sort of rug made of woven flowers, and carefully equipped with bone needles, a waterskin, spools of sinew, flint knapping stones, shell jewelry, and clothing in various sizes from hers at time of death to items which would have fit her fully grown. Many of the items showed signs of being neatly broken or damaged in a ritualistic fashion, as though to send them with her by some form of sympathetic magic.
If the article's writer is inferring spiritual beliefs just from the position of the corpses, they may well be in error, but if this is the opinion of the research anthropologists, they have probably noticed enough similarities to other sites to be confident it's part of the same cultural context.
This particular case looks like pretty flaky modding, but lots of people don't like to award flamebait mods for some topics, and that's not just GWB. I know personally, that if the subject is something like an ongoing murder trial (i.e. Hans Reiser), or the War in Georgia, or Abortion or something like that, I almost never award a flamebait. Politics and Religion in particular draw lots of strong comments out.
I myself am not unbiased, and would probably award flamebaits to one side more than the other on any discussion of some lightning rod issues. I think the people who claim copyright violation = theft are simply wrong, and often feel personally insulted by posters who assume anyone who disagrees has never rationally considered the issue, or is automatically themselves a 'pirate', but I would never use a flamebait mod in a discussion where that claim was on topic.
I have awarded flamebaits before when the discourse is a little less polarized, and it looked like there was some calm, rational discussion going on and the post actually triggered a flame war that might not have happened otherwise.
Here, do you really think we can discuss the DoD developing mind altering drugs without half of us entering with a very strong opinion?
First, my argument isn't based on either of the assumptions you are trying to put in my mouth. If you want to create a straw man and then attack it, please don't do it to me. It wastes both of our times and makes you look clueless.
Second, if you can cite one single case where any of the lobbying groups that supported this law sued an infringer under it without including damages, please do so. Since it's new law, how about a single case by any of those lobbying groups under the old laws, without damages being involved, against any entity that would count as a profiteer under this law. For that matter, if you can find a single, solitary case where the American equivalents such as the RIAA or MPAA or any one of their constituents sued under similar laws, or any older versions passed since the Berne act laid down the basics of this area of law, without including damages, produce it. I'd even agree your argument had some merit if you can cite a single case outside both the U.S.A and Europe. Show me one single case, anywhere in the whole wide world since international copyright law accords began for a given country, where a commercial rights holder sued where there was alleged sale for profit, and did not ask for damages.
I agree that penalties need to be significant enough to provide deterrence. In the U.S., there's a rule of thumb frequently used, which allows for triple damages in cases where, for example, simple negligence gives way to criminal levels of negligence. I think that is derived from English common law so the U.K. probably has similar principles in some areas of modern law.
But often, that idea means instead that the penalty becomes stiffer if the tort or crime is one that most of the time goes unpunished or uncorrected.
This can end up resulting in punishing more severely anyone breaking a law the public often disagrees with. If the public (or a big segment of it) actually doesn't want to turn in people committing crime X (i.e. drug use), then the additional penalties would get adjusted upwards to make up for that reluctance. The U.S. already has some penalties like this - for ex. the HOPE tax credit, which the taxpayer can't get if the student was ever convicted of a drug related felony, but could theoretically still claim if the student was convicted of rape, murder or even treason.
The fact that a large minority disagrees with a law, and might passively disregard it, should make the government think the law might be too harsh, rather than serve as an excuse to make it harsher.
It's in civil cases that 'profit' does matter, not criminal ones.
Making a profit shows that there was enough demand so damages can be reasonably inferred, and often there are reasons for the court to deviate from treating the issue neutrally and actually assume there is no damage to the plantiff otherwise.
Take a DVD seller, who makes an English language version, encodes only for region 1, and doesn't produce a subtitled version. That seller has effectively said that France wasn't intended as a market, that Katmandu wasn't a market, that Sri Lanka wasn't a market, etc. So, somebody who subtitles the work for local consumption hasn't cost the original rights holder any damages, as there wasn't a market, at the very least until they did something the original rights holder thought wouldn't be cost effective.
But, if there's a profit, then the originator can probably base damages straight from that, and not worry about a bunch of apple and orange comparisons, between what it cost a local group to do subtitling vs what the foreign business was told it would cost, and what price each would have set, etc.
For companies, it's a more straight forward lawsuit, and they don't have to open their books to the court as much, so they can sue without their own employees turning around and suing them for shares of the profits they hid, and such cases.
Most of the time though, 'piracy' isn't completely free to the person doing it. People pay for higher speed connections, blank media, CD & DVD burners, bigger hard drives, and long retention Usenet servers. The wide variety of compression software used means most of them buy some kind of commercial un-.rar'er, and the variety of video formats means many of the video pirates pay for viewers and codecs. Game pirates have to deal with hardware upgrades and compatability problems, usually without tech support. For just one cost commonly encountered, the most commonly used DVD burning software by far is Nero, which is very not freeware, and is seldom usable from cracked copies. Buying a DVD burner gets you a free version with a 30 day trial, but you'd be surprised how many pirates eventually break down and buy a full version, as Nero's security is pretty damned good and the bootleg copies usually stop working pretty quickly. I base that on Nero's sales reports - either very few people who buy a burner are pirates, and there's just not that much piracy out there (in which case, what's the fuss about?), or a lot of the pirates buy the full version.
They also pay in terms of quality (for example losing packaging that can include more durable media, art, or printed instructions, or getting games that have had cinematics stripped out to reduce file size), in time (having to learn to run parity check software to verify downloads, or learning to fix various common trojans they risk getting). There's an extremely steep learning curve in finding out who to trust, how to find 'safe' pirated copies, and a lot of risks for newbies. The average person who sets out, knowing only Internet Explorer and Googling to find unliscenced content, has a better than even chance of getting burned big time, at least to losing a drive's contents and having to reformat it.
Such costs still work out cheaper in some people's minds than buying all the games, music, and video they get. Cash prices can explain some of that, but it's not likely that accounts for the vast majority. There are probably at least sizeable fractions who have other reasons.
For most of the high population areas of the world, the largest religions locally don't have a 'be fruitful and multiply' commandment or anything like it. You could make a fairly strong case for Mexico or some other parts of Latin America, but what about China, which is mostly either Maoist or Confucian? Or India, with Hinduism and Buddhism for most of their religious background? Sub-Saharan Africa, you could blame Islam or Christianity somewhat, but a lot of the highest population growth regions are again dominated by local religions.
Education is certainly a crucial factor, but note, the part of the population that has to be educated is more likely the women than the men. In areas where women are deliberately denied schooling, population problems persist even if the male part of the population is significantly educated.
I suspect the quotes around illegal are intended to reflect that at least some copyright violations are still mere torts, not crimes, as you yourself point out later. 'illegal and/or tortuous' is a terribly awkward phrase, and having to constantly be that precise in discussing this seems pretty nitpicking, particularly when the 'other side' doesn't have to constantly explain that they don't mean peg-legs and parrots every time they use the word pirate. In the same way, the argument about investigations makes more sense if you assume that at least some of what is being investigated at public expense includes those tort violations. That's been a U. S. issue however, and I don't know if it is an Italian one - the article doesn't indicate that the Italian government is gathering information that is only relevant to tort violations rather than crimes.
Your desk has a frozen throne?
I have been boycotting a lot of electronic entertainment for years. I don't feel any temptation to 'pirate' it based on just saving the money that would go to developers and artists otherwise. I don't even feel the temptation when there are layers of distributers wanting their cut, and I could probably rationalize ignoring the artist's rights because they have insisted upon yoking themselves to a bunch of other people that are often just parasites.
But, I'm pretty sure the RIAA, BSA, etc, tend to count me as a pirate even though I haven't pirated. That is, they deliberately inflate the reports, so there are fictitious numbers in their claims where I don't buy something and they assume I must have gotten a copy somehow instead of just not buying it. Yeah, this is just a matter of treating consumers in general, or at worst my demographic group, that way, and not me specifically, but still...
If I have ever felt that there was some real justification for illegal downloading, it's been when the corporate types start lumping the people who aren't pirating in with the pirates anyway. Witness various reports to congress, offset taxes on blank media, and the like. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, after all.
It's all about the money - specifically the disposable share of income.
I budget, and entertainment is a category that has no flexible spending cap. Games compete with both electronic entertainment such as film DVD's, and other entertainment, such as gas to go to the lake or new rock climbing gear. This is why I haven't bought an audio CD in 6 years - the money always seems better spent on video, or non-electronic stuff. This is also why I hate 99 cent music downloads, as it looks like buying a whole album's worth of tracks will usually cost about as much as buying the actual CD, so someone expects me to pay them as much as if they still had to pay truck drivers fuel costs even though they don't.
I don't 'pirate' games (or at least I don't have a single pirated copy of any game on any machine I own right now), but I have avoided getting into some stuff that looks like fun (portal mostly), because I'm not sure from what I've read that the 'steam' system isn't analogous (at least somewhat) to the 99 cent downloads I have issues with.
Of course, not a lot of people stick to a really rigorous budget or even live within their means these days. But, such behavior is usually short term, as people who run up huge lines of credit often end up too poor to be entertainment consumers at all. That's all pretty much an agreement with colmore, that the idea of people averaging over 100$ a month on pop culture isn't part of the long term pattern, and I think what I've just said pretty well explains why - it's simply non-sustainable.
So here's my comments for the games industry.
1. For your pricing structure to be long-term sustainable, most of your consumers need to be able to keep buying year to year - this looks absurd with current economic figures. You probably focus too much on the 14-18 demographic and hope their parents don't rein them in too much when the parents get tighter for cash, or that there will always be a new crop of overspenders before the old ones run out of flexibility in their budgets. Your business model becomes dominated by population aging demographics for select target groups, which can do wildly better or worse for a time than the general population, and which make it harder for you to plan for keeping your company in business long term.
2. is it good (ethically) to have a business model that assumes large percentages of your consumer base will literally have to come from the people who don't much budget, save for retirement, or make financially informed decisions, to hit your target numbers?
3. If you follow what passes for market wisdom among the industry's MBAs, your price point calculations probably look better than they actually function. You just possibly are making more in the short run (2-3 years or even less), but face substantial problems over periods as short as 10, and right now, face all the problems the whole economy is seeing in addition. As an independent, you probably wouldn't be involved in the business side at all if you thought it couldn't be sustained for a mere 10 years, rather, you'd focus on starting some other kind of business.
Are the extra dimensions actually limited to those of one of the current models (i.e. the most common 10 dimensional string theory model or one of its alternates?)
(In other words, are you assuming the topology is the only thing that really matters, or just that you could find an interesting topology that shows some predictive power, and then refine both it and how many dimensions it applies to, and the tweaks needed would be easier to test and/or simpler and/or more beautiful than starting from the other end?)
Are any of the extra dimensions supposed to be time-like, or at least significantly partially time-like?
Would the number of time-like dimensions involved impose significant additional limitations on testability, and would the difficulty of testing in general increase (probably exponentially or by some similarly steep function) if the number of time-like dimensions required increases?
Some of the anomalies found on initially auditing A.A. included where people who did not legally have fiduciary duties, i.e. secretaries and even some clerk in shipping and receiving, had signed contracts and other documents that by law require a particular individual holding such responsibility to sign. Some of the destroyed documents are believed to have had more cases of this nature, although that's a hard thing to unambiguously prove.
Normally, while investigating individuals in a medium sized or larger company, the judge identifies people who have fiduciary standing with the company and do not appear to be involved in the crime. Failing that, people who did not enjoy fiduciary duties can be promoted to positions that do imply such duties, or brought in from outside sources to manage the company in some cases. Since most medium sized or larger companies have senior sales staff or internal accounting or legal departments where there are quite a few employees that have fiduciary duties, finding some competent individuals to run the company for at least a month or so, until the board of directors can take further steps if needed, is really not that challenging, except in a case like A.A.'s.
Those people are deployed as needed to such positions as payroll so that they can keep the company going while the suspected individuals are kept away from the company's financial assets, etc. After an initial plan of this sort is adopted, the judge will usually be open to various motions from the company's legal dept. to adjust the system further, but the board will frequently have to get judicial approval for each step of continued tweaking of their management employee pool, often until the initial cases are completely settled. Deals of this sort are frequently worked out between prosecutors and the board for publicly traded companies, usually with C.E.O.s and similar having a great deal of input if they are not themselves among the indicted, and are usually seen as in the shareholder's, the (un-accused) employee's and the general public's interests.
Because A.A. didn't preserve clear lines of accountability, this couldn't be done even if the fed wanted to bend over backwards and jump through flaming hoops to do it. By ignoring the requirement for fiduciary responsibility, Andersen did it to themselves. The Company became 'who' did crime X, not identifiable individuals, and the Company paid so that somebody paid for the crimes. The alternative was to spend 20 years sorting through a deliberately muddled trail and trigger a cascade of dozens of appellate cases that would still just be kicking off about now.
Except we didn't merely assist the Northern Alliance. We chose them as the group we thought should prevail, over the Taliban and various local warlords. They claimed that this would reduce the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan - that's one of the reasons we claimed we were picking the 'right' side. Instead, opium production has repeatedly increased, to the point where the last three years have each been a banner year. To stoop to the same personal straw man you used, I guess you prefer that we let innocent men, women and children in our own country continue to die as a result of that opium trade.
Oh, you didn't mean it that way? Neither did the other poster you attacked. What makes you sure the current government of Afghanistan is actually significantly better, when you are hearing it from the same people who have made the U.S.'s drug problem so much worse?
By the way, Assassination of enemy heads of state by the C.I.A. or other intelligence organizations is specifically illegal. O.B.L. is not primarily a political figure and certainly not a head of state. He counts as either an enemy combatant or just arguably, a criminal. Sending special forces after him is legal, both by U.S. and international law. Using military force is justified if it is focused on political groups attempting to hide him or aid and succor him - if they stick up for him, he becomes their combatant. The phrase "special forces" also used by ArcherB would imply just that - military, and that same body of laws assumes normal military orders, that is, the order given to those forces does not have to be to capture him alive for trial if possible. At the level of a marine gunny sgt. that order can well be to snipe him at 1,000 yards with no chance to surrender, and that is not assassination. Sorry the parent poster misused the word 'assassination', but the rest of his paragraph shows what he was advocating is entirely legal, and your legal opinion is bullshit.
I have my doubts because it's a supposed big breakthrough on more than one front. First, the electricity needed is supposed to drop by roughly an order of magnetude over existing industrial methods, and I'm always a bit skeptical of such big gains.
But more probably, it's over-hyped because it also eliminates 'specialized storage containers' (as the summary puts it, not exactly what the article says, but it seems fairly close). Taking out some or even all of the caustic substances industrial electrolysis methods now put in the liquid water before splitting it isn't enough to make storage of the end product any simpler - hydrogen is still hydrogen and has its own problems. Electrolysis storage involves specialized liquid storage before and specialized gas storage after, and both have some risks on such a large scale. At best, this improvement only addresses the first half of the process. Until you know whether storing the liquid caustics is actually a bigger risk (on this scale) than storing the hydrogen, you don't know if eliminating that risk makes this technology safe enough overall to make any real difference.