Because your president is a cowboy (lit. cattle herder). Ever since the last frontier fell to the "pioneers" in the old west, the American people have been intoxicated with finding somewhere to do the same thing all over again. Well, sadly it ain't gonna be that easy.
First of all, once a semi habitable planet exists, India and China (places with chronic overpopulation) are going to pack in as many people into dirty rockets as they can. Think coffin ships from Ireland in the 19th century, coupled with the safety and efficiency of the reaver ships from "Firefly". They will gamble on getting there, landing, and seizing as much territory as they can, then expanding in "New China" or what have you.
Of course, the USA won't want its perfect new frontier sullied, (or its terraforming investment stolen), and so they will....
Shoot them down.
Needless to say none of the powers who just lost their ships will take this lightly, and so we will probably see a large scale war or two, with evens odds of someone unloading bioweapons of one sort or another on the surface of mars, spoiling it for human habitation for the forseeable future. Hopefully no nukes back home though, unless they are REALLY sure the terraforming will take.
So you can forget wagons rolling, dusty desert trails with exotic herd creatures, and a nostalgic white washed return to what basically amounted to the genocide of various native peoples and the eradication of their cultures, because the only thing that much usable land is going to do for us is start a war.
A friend of mine, a fairly competent sales rep, started his own printing company a couple of years ago. I worked for him for a while doing pre-print and graphic design, but I couldn't hack it for very long, as he gave the reps he employed free rein. The company was a sales person paradise, perks, insanely high wages, they could say what they liked to whoever they liked. It was the kind of company my friend would have liked to work for, so thats what he built.
Needless to say, that went under in about a year, and I got the equipment in lieu of pay that had been given to salespeople instead, but the point of this is that google was founded by highly intelligent, academic people, and what they are doing is building an academics dream job. Intelligence is rewarded, whether applying for a job, or within the job itself. I do applaud their strategies, which are fairly novel, but you can't run a business like that. Their results have been slipping in terms of accuracy and reliability, their image search is actually less useful than the new MSN effort, and the pay per click model (which I'm betting is a good portion of their income) is starting to get a seriously bad name, as companies realise that competitors are costing them money by simply clicking on their adverts.
By indulging in these "gentlemans club" policies, and losing sight of their core functionality, google will go the way of the dot bombs. Intelligence doth not a successful business make.
I'm not sure whether you personally are advocating this approach, but I have seen plenty of other posts here that do specifically support the idea, and even a few volunteers. To you and all of those others, I ask have you lost your ever loving minds?
You are talking about sacrificing a human life in exchange for a few months of scientific data. Heres a news flash for you, the whole of mars for the rest of its natural existence, and for that matter the whole of the sterile solar planetary system, isn't worth the cost of one human life. If it was a choice between seeing it all turned to rubble and saving a single person, I would not hesitate for a heartbeat to push the button and consign the dust to the solar winds.
You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
I have plenty of mod points here, but I felt it was more constructive to reply rather than modding this post into oblivion...
Yeah but take a football on a field... flawed analogy on many levels, I know, but bear with me. If you give it a kick, it rolls. A giant mega-quake would be a kick. If you push it with a finger lightly, it moves slightly then rolls back. If you push it two or three times lightly however, before it had a chance to reassume its original position, it would roll enough to settle in its new position, such as a series of powerful quakes would effect.
Besides we know very little about the internal structure of the earth. Perhaps there is a massive concentration of minerals just below Antartica that made it "ripe to tumble" or something (the "configuration" of the grass in the field). Thats stretching it even more, but you must admit it is possible.
Heres an idea thats been floating around in my head for the last while... how much of an earthquake, raised landmass or change would you need to move the poles significantly? Not that I'm planning any Doctor Evil maneuvers, but thinking back on global flood legends, in many cultures, how much would it take to roll antartica north enough to melt the kilometers high ice on it? Or vice-versa, before it was that far south?
The Atlantis myth could have been a case of a mega-quake (or series of powerful quakes after a long period of stability) completing just such a polar roll, the ice very rapidly melting, and then refreezing more slowly as it reached its new latitudes. Massive global flooding followed by a withdrawal of the waters, erasing a relatively advanced civilisation that was powerful at the time, and many records of its existance.
Wait a second, just hold everything... Microsoft release buggy, flawed software in a hurry to get the first to market advantage, and then the unscrupulous use those flaws to hijack the computers of hundreds of thousands world wide... then Microsoft PURCHASES THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE to apply band aids to their seeping wounds?
Maybe I'm going mad here, but since they wrote the damned OS in the first place, wouldn't they know best where to apply system patches etc., and wouldn't it be better and faster to get the people that originally developed the OS to fix it up?
But why would they when they can actually charge people for their patches now? Sure its free for now, but not for long, as the EULA states. Not to mention their OS authentication services (which you can turn off, if you buy that line), which their patches ostensibly never mentioned.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know when someone is trying to pass off horse manure as honey...
I'm afraid I disagree. The creation of entire worlds, societies, complex interactions and the rules behind those interactions are completed every day by games masters in role playing games. Big nerd that I am, I have dozens of such worlds mouldering on my shelves, and the spinning cores of dozens more in my mind.
Heck I even wrote a 600 page RPG, not entirely from scratch I might add, but mostly original, giving rules (detailed rules) for everything from cave men hunting prey to the most advanced starships, politics, mass combat, organised crime, corporate horse trading on the stock markets, the works.
And my players (a core group of 3, with many more coming and going down the years) have grown what I built in surprising ways. What I'm trying to say is that the ability is there, everywhere, whats missing is the motivation.
it (the soul) derives from the concept of the animus, or "spark of life".
Well that certainly would be your interpretation of it anyway.
The church teaches that a soul can only be created by god, not humans.
Whose church would that be again exactly? Because the last time I checked the Roman Catholic church only spoke for a small percentage of the human race.
He didn't mention god.
And yet you were quick enough to link these two concepts.
And as far as it being impossible to disprove such things, it is equally impossible to PROVE them....The soul is a cultural construct.
How would you know? Have you come up with some remarkable theorem or axiom which will revolutionise our views of spirituality and the modern world? Do tell.
he has as much right to speak his mind as anyone else
Not when he as a respected member of the scientific community who has just achieved a remarkable goal uses the publicity generated as a platform to espouse his own skewed view of the world. The cloning of human embryos and the existence of souls (to whit, the continuance of life after death) are not mutually exclusive in any way. And thats not an opinion.
Read it again without your blinders, grandma.
Nice, nice, nothing like a good ad hominem attack to lend weight to an argument.
Don't get me wrong, I sympathise with your attitude. Every time some flute of a creationist starts warbling about proof, I feel the uncontrollable need to abandon rational debate and make my primitive ancestors proud. But get a grip man.
And just what the hell is IIX? Maybe you meant VIII?
Americans will be at least somewhat mollified to learn that outsourcing is not confined to the USA. Your story really struck a note with me, as the process you describe exactly matches what is happening to a friend of mine, a young man with a young family, trying to get a house built. So its important to remember that the cost of outsourcing is not just in terms of economy, it can have a heavy social and cultural cost also.
Ireland is one of the world's largest exporters of software, due to the large tax cuts our government offers to American corporations that make their base here (MS European HQ is in Ireland), but the benefits of lower tax rates is quickly being outweighed by simple lower salaries that poorer countries offer. This trend is not particularily new, I was hit by the same thing back in 2000 - thanks Nortel - but it is only now that it is becoming the rule rather than the exeption.
Corporations have long since grasped the idea that I first saw in the movie The Edge (I think)... What one man can do, another can do. So what can you do? Well what I did was I started my own business, and before hiring anyone, I looked into the global job market, and found several areas where I could get top quality web designers at a wage which in my country would be ludicrously low. Once you get over the dependability and communications risks, not only does it make sense, it offers a small business (with neither capital nor government aid, and precious little money - realistically, I only had a couple of computers and a laptop I had to go into hock to buy) the only chance to survive and prosper in an extremely densely populated market.
Maybe that sounds like I am going back on my earlier statements, but the crucial difference here is that I never hired local programmers and designers in the first place. The few jobs lost to the local economy make an insignificant impact as opposed to the expansion to the businesses of my customers, who have more business, and thus employ more people, something I am not in a position to do.
Is it exploitation? Cerainly not, the countries where I employ people have cripplingly poor economies, and jobs of any sort are hard to come by. Due to a very favourable exchange rate, what I pay them here comes out for them as a very good salary (think house, car and family of four fed and educated), so everyone wins. If you can't beat them, join them, with reservations.
Its not a question of whether or not they will attempt to break court orders - the court orders are there in the first place to stop them from doing something they like / need / want to do. The court knows this and assumes this.
The real issue here is accountability. Someone banned from driving stands a fighting chance of running into a police presence on the road sometime. The victims of stalkers with a court barring order only need to complain to the authorities again, and the penalties are inflicted. Sort of a self correcting problem.
But internet bans are almost entirely toothless, unless you want to patrol public libraries and internet cafes, and monitor the criminal's purchases to ensure that he or she did not slip in a laptop with that 42 inch television, among many other routes an individual can take to get online.
I mean, how many fine articles and comments on slashdot itself provide details instructions for evading censorship and maintaining anonymity on the web?
Internet bans can therefore be seen as being largely unenforceable without a serious allocation of manpower, which is arguably not worth the effort, in the light of other more easily pursued and still serious crimes. And any part of the law which is unenforceable can only weaken the whole body of the law. End result? Like so much with technology and the law, the problem isn't the law or technology, its how they address the problem. In this case, not at all.
I think underground construction is vastly more expensive than above ground, and you would need to put it pretty deep to avoid "bunker busters". A dome would only provide added fragmentation debris to ay missile strike on a major civilian centre.
Whats needed here is to realise that the kind of lasers or direct energy weapons you need to provide a truly effective defence can only be ground based, with a very powerful energy source.
Basing a nuclear plant with an array of insanely powerful lasers attached at or near your important targets should do the trick. On the other hand, with the vast power of such a defence, you could just put a chain of them up the coasts. One of those firing for a minute should be enough to take out any number of hostile targets within reach. Also, it sure would make purty lights.
Way late and will never be read, but what the hell... Since Bush and his cohorts lied in order to invade a country, resulting in many deaths, could they not be accused of murder in the first? Premeditated, cold blooded, and callous? To run by Georgie's own state of Texas' laws, if found guilty, well...
I just tried to play that monkeyboy thing on my patched Win2k machine here, and Media Player wouldn't touch it. Just didn't play, full stop. Tried several versions, renaming the file, nothing. Ran it through winamp, ran without a hitch. And I don't think its a codec issue either, folks.
Eh you just have to talk them on a level they can savvy. Party conversations for example, you have to smack em in the gob with a good opener, then build up from there. Like this...
You have to admire the Russian Mafia, really.
Silence. A few fascinated and mildly horrified eyebrows are raised.
Well, they are early adopters to a new economic model, outpacing all the wall street analysts and clever people in finance! They have worked out how to turn the average home user's PC into a viable money maker for them. They probably have what, a third of the market already locked down? Shows great intiative, that.
Heheh, dunno how much business that line has gotten me. But a lot.
No you are talking about laws, which are different to rules, in that you can and will end up in prison if you break a law. I see no point in debating the relative virtues of Communism, talk about well trodden ground...
The western world got where they are by invading, stealing, oppressing and deal-cutting
And in order to do so, you have to be in a position of strength, which can only be attained by organising faster and working harder in the first place.
That's exactly what you mean when you say "we owe them nothing"
What I mean by that is that we owe them nothing for free - no money, no favours, no anything. We can offer an exchange of goods and services, same as anyone else. Just because they are poor, the first world is under NO OBLIGATION to help them.
Actually, your ARE advocating looting the poor for the benefit of the rich
big business continue to exploit 3rd world labour
What on earth makes you think anyone is being exploited? Whatever about isolated sweatshops, Indian programmers make between 80 and 100 dollars a week. That in India will set you up with a big house, two cars, and a maid. Just because they are paid less numerically does not mean they are being paid any less fiscally.
exporting all your jobs overseas
Oh I know all about that, I lost my job four years ago to outsourcing. After a fruitless 12 month long search, I got sick of it and started my own (now highly successful) company. That involved learning new skills, teaching myself graphic design, and going at it without aid from anyone. My point? The situation is as bad as you make it.
pressure other countries to also enforce a minimum wage
To go back to my point about the Indian programmers above. Who on earth is going to pay for this mystical minimum wage? Certainly not the relative governments. Because they can barely afford US minimum wage for many high ranking government officials, never mind semi skilled labourers. So do you suggest that the US pays out to foreign governments for taxable labour in their own countries? Or do only people working for foreign corporations get minimum wage? I can see that turning out well. THAT is the problem with enforcing a minimum wage of US standards... I am standing on both sides of the line here, my own girlfriend is a Filipina, and it doesn't get more wretchedly third world than the Philippines, let me tell you. The fact is, she is very happy that foreign corporations come to her country to employ people, who again do very well by local standards. So, corporations are either "exploiting the third world countries" or "casting aside the local workforce". It can't be both.
Hmm I seem to recall reading something about a gas called Brown's gas that was effective in nuclear waste treatment. Also that it did very little damage to organic compounds and materials, but sliced through metals and such when heated. Anyone ever hear of this?
Remove the profit motive, and you remove the corporations, companies, and businesses of every size. No businesses means everything is run by the government. For reference, see communism, a failed ethos espoused only by academics that have little or no real world experience.
Yes it will increase the cost of production slightly
Try massively. The single biggest cost in any business is its employees.
ALREADY EXCEEDED THE STANDARD OF LIVING IN 3RD WORLD COUNTRIES
So what? The first world is where it is today because it got itself organised faster than anyone else, and worked hard enough to ensure that they stayed that way. The third world does not deserve special consideration just because they have lower living standards. We, in short, owe them nothing. I'm not advocating looting the poor for the benefit of the rich, but its a savagely competitive world, and if you try to enforce a single wage level, within 10 years the only businesses left in the US will be mom and pop corner stores. And that is not enough to sustain any sort of economy beyond hunter gatherer.
They can do it again, and fix this present government if they think that it needs fixing.
But what if they think it needs fixing, and don't want to be run down by a tank? Or their families and friends thrown in prison, tortured, and killed? Or if the idea of midnight calls from the security forces doesn't appeal to them?
The only difference is the type of philosophies that are banned.
Yeah right, the big difference here is that Europeans know the power of FUD. This is where the last sight that about 6 million people saw was the tiled, antiseptic interior of a gas chamber. Right fucking here. Lots of people died to ensure that that wouldn't happen again, and that includes making sure that the FUD never gets out again. Is it wrong to suppress lies?
Try and take a look at if from the third perspective, if you can
Try and look at it from a broader perspective, if you can.
Slashdot Mirror
Because your president is a cowboy (lit. cattle herder). Ever since the last frontier fell to the "pioneers" in the old west, the American people have been intoxicated with finding somewhere to do the same thing all over again. Well, sadly it ain't gonna be that easy.
First of all, once a semi habitable planet exists, India and China (places with chronic overpopulation) are going to pack in as many people into dirty rockets as they can. Think coffin ships from Ireland in the 19th century, coupled with the safety and efficiency of the reaver ships from "Firefly". They will gamble on getting there, landing, and seizing as much territory as they can, then expanding in "New China" or what have you.
Of course, the USA won't want its perfect new frontier sullied, (or its terraforming investment stolen), and so they will....
Shoot them down.
Needless to say none of the powers who just lost their ships will take this lightly, and so we will probably see a large scale war or two, with evens odds of someone unloading bioweapons of one sort or another on the surface of mars, spoiling it for human habitation for the forseeable future. Hopefully no nukes back home though, unless they are REALLY sure the terraforming will take.
So you can forget wagons rolling, dusty desert trails with exotic herd creatures, and a nostalgic white washed return to what basically amounted to the genocide of various native peoples and the eradication of their cultures, because the only thing that much usable land is going to do for us is start a war.
Have a shiny day! :D
Or you can, in the true spirit of Open Source, roll your own.
A friend of mine, a fairly competent sales rep, started his own printing company a couple of years ago. I worked for him for a while doing pre-print and graphic design, but I couldn't hack it for very long, as he gave the reps he employed free rein. The company was a sales person paradise, perks, insanely high wages, they could say what they liked to whoever they liked. It was the kind of company my friend would have liked to work for, so thats what he built.
Needless to say, that went under in about a year, and I got the equipment in lieu of pay that had been given to salespeople instead, but the point of this is that google was founded by highly intelligent, academic people, and what they are doing is building an academics dream job. Intelligence is rewarded, whether applying for a job, or within the job itself. I do applaud their strategies, which are fairly novel, but you can't run a business like that. Their results have been slipping in terms of accuracy and reliability, their image search is actually less useful than the new MSN effort, and the pay per click model (which I'm betting is a good portion of their income) is starting to get a seriously bad name, as companies realise that competitors are costing them money by simply clicking on their adverts.
By indulging in these "gentlemans club" policies, and losing sight of their core functionality, google will go the way of the dot bombs. Intelligence doth not a successful business make.
Hahahah... you, sir, are a legend...
From the link in your sig, are YOU rapture ready?
Ah, "Cut Me Own Throat" Dibbler would be proud. Truly, you have taken mercantilism to a new level.
Who modded this up as insightful? Read this, ya creationist clown...
The ever insightful Rei
Lets get this straight...
I'm not sure whether you personally are advocating this approach, but I have seen plenty of other posts here that do specifically support the idea, and even a few volunteers. To you and all of those others, I ask have you lost your ever loving minds?
You are talking about sacrificing a human life in exchange for a few months of scientific data. Heres a news flash for you, the whole of mars for the rest of its natural existence, and for that matter the whole of the sterile solar planetary system, isn't worth the cost of one human life. If it was a choice between seeing it all turned to rubble and saving a single person, I would not hesitate for a heartbeat to push the button and consign the dust to the solar winds.
You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
I have plenty of mod points here, but I felt it was more constructive to reply rather than modding this post into oblivion...
Yeah but take a football on a field... flawed analogy on many levels, I know, but bear with me. If you give it a kick, it rolls. A giant mega-quake would be a kick. If you push it with a finger lightly, it moves slightly then rolls back. If you push it two or three times lightly however, before it had a chance to reassume its original position, it would roll enough to settle in its new position, such as a series of powerful quakes would effect.
Besides we know very little about the internal structure of the earth. Perhaps there is a massive concentration of minerals just below Antartica that made it "ripe to tumble" or something (the "configuration" of the grass in the field). Thats stretching it even more, but you must admit it is possible.
Heres an idea thats been floating around in my head for the last while... how much of an earthquake, raised landmass or change would you need to move the poles significantly? Not that I'm planning any Doctor Evil maneuvers, but thinking back on global flood legends, in many cultures, how much would it take to roll antartica north enough to melt the kilometers high ice on it? Or vice-versa, before it was that far south?
The Atlantis myth could have been a case of a mega-quake (or series of powerful quakes after a long period of stability) completing just such a polar roll, the ice very rapidly melting, and then refreezing more slowly as it reached its new latitudes. Massive global flooding followed by a withdrawal of the waters, erasing a relatively advanced civilisation that was powerful at the time, and many records of its existance.
Its a stretch, but an interesting one.
So what you're saying is the people at Giant know MS' admittedly complex software better than MS does...
Wait a second, just hold everything... Microsoft release buggy, flawed software in a hurry to get the first to market advantage, and then the unscrupulous use those flaws to hijack the computers of hundreds of thousands world wide... then Microsoft PURCHASES THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE to apply band aids to their seeping wounds?
Maybe I'm going mad here, but since they wrote the damned OS in the first place, wouldn't they know best where to apply system patches etc., and wouldn't it be better and faster to get the people that originally developed the OS to fix it up?
But why would they when they can actually charge people for their patches now? Sure its free for now, but not for long, as the EULA states. Not to mention their OS authentication services (which you can turn off, if you buy that line), which their patches ostensibly never mentioned.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know when someone is trying to pass off horse manure as honey...
I'm afraid I disagree. The creation of entire worlds, societies, complex interactions and the rules behind those interactions are completed every day by games masters in role playing games. Big nerd that I am, I have dozens of such worlds mouldering on my shelves, and the spinning cores of dozens more in my mind.
Heck I even wrote a 600 page RPG, not entirely from scratch I might add, but mostly original, giving rules (detailed rules) for everything from cave men hunting prey to the most advanced starships, politics, mass combat, organised crime, corporate horse trading on the stock markets, the works.
And my players (a core group of 3, with many more coming and going down the years) have grown what I built in surprising ways. What I'm trying to say is that the ability is there, everywhere, whats missing is the motivation.
it (the soul) derives from the concept of the animus, or "spark of life".
Well that certainly would be your interpretation of it anyway.
The church teaches that a soul can only be created by god, not humans.
Whose church would that be again exactly? Because the last time I checked the Roman Catholic church only spoke for a small percentage of the human race.
He didn't mention god.
And yet you were quick enough to link these two concepts.
And as far as it being impossible to disprove such things, it is equally impossible to PROVE them....The soul is a cultural construct.
How would you know? Have you come up with some remarkable theorem or axiom which will revolutionise our views of spirituality and the modern world? Do tell.
he has as much right to speak his mind as anyone else
Not when he as a respected member of the scientific community who has just achieved a remarkable goal uses the publicity generated as a platform to espouse his own skewed view of the world. The cloning of human embryos and the existence of souls (to whit, the continuance of life after death) are not mutually exclusive in any way. And thats not an opinion.
Read it again without your blinders, grandma.
Nice, nice, nothing like a good ad hominem attack to lend weight to an argument.
Don't get me wrong, I sympathise with your attitude. Every time some flute of a creationist starts warbling about proof, I feel the uncontrollable need to abandon rational debate and make my primitive ancestors proud. But get a grip man.
And just what the hell is IIX? Maybe you meant VIII?
Americans will be at least somewhat mollified to learn that outsourcing is not confined to the USA. Your story really struck a note with me, as the process you describe exactly matches what is happening to a friend of mine, a young man with a young family, trying to get a house built. So its important to remember that the cost of outsourcing is not just in terms of economy, it can have a heavy social and cultural cost also.
Ireland is one of the world's largest exporters of software, due to the large tax cuts our government offers to American corporations that make their base here (MS European HQ is in Ireland), but the benefits of lower tax rates is quickly being outweighed by simple lower salaries that poorer countries offer. This trend is not particularily new, I was hit by the same thing back in 2000 - thanks Nortel - but it is only now that it is becoming the rule rather than the exeption.
Corporations have long since grasped the idea that I first saw in the movie The Edge (I think)... What one man can do, another can do. So what can you do? Well what I did was I started my own business, and before hiring anyone, I looked into the global job market, and found several areas where I could get top quality web designers at a wage which in my country would be ludicrously low. Once you get over the dependability and communications risks, not only does it make sense, it offers a small business (with neither capital nor government aid, and precious little money - realistically, I only had a couple of computers and a laptop I had to go into hock to buy) the only chance to survive and prosper in an extremely densely populated market.
Maybe that sounds like I am going back on my earlier statements, but the crucial difference here is that I never hired local programmers and designers in the first place. The few jobs lost to the local economy make an insignificant impact as opposed to the expansion to the businesses of my customers, who have more business, and thus employ more people, something I am not in a position to do.
Is it exploitation? Cerainly not, the countries where I employ people have cripplingly poor economies, and jobs of any sort are hard to come by. Due to a very favourable exchange rate, what I pay them here comes out for them as a very good salary (think house, car and family of four fed and educated), so everyone wins. If you can't beat them, join them, with reservations.
Link goes to a somewhat indecent picture.
Its not a question of whether or not they will attempt to break court orders - the court orders are there in the first place to stop them from doing something they like / need / want to do. The court knows this and assumes this.
The real issue here is accountability. Someone banned from driving stands a fighting chance of running into a police presence on the road sometime. The victims of stalkers with a court barring order only need to complain to the authorities again, and the penalties are inflicted. Sort of a self correcting problem.
But internet bans are almost entirely toothless, unless you want to patrol public libraries and internet cafes, and monitor the criminal's purchases to ensure that he or she did not slip in a laptop with that 42 inch television, among many other routes an individual can take to get online.
I mean, how many fine articles and comments on slashdot itself provide details instructions for evading censorship and maintaining anonymity on the web?
Internet bans can therefore be seen as being largely unenforceable without a serious allocation of manpower, which is arguably not worth the effort, in the light of other more easily pursued and still serious crimes. And any part of the law which is unenforceable can only weaken the whole body of the law. End result? Like so much with technology and the law, the problem isn't the law or technology, its how they address the problem. In this case, not at all.
I think underground construction is vastly more expensive than above ground, and you would need to put it pretty deep to avoid "bunker busters". A dome would only provide added fragmentation debris to ay missile strike on a major civilian centre.
Whats needed here is to realise that the kind of lasers or direct energy weapons you need to provide a truly effective defence can only be ground based, with a very powerful energy source.
Basing a nuclear plant with an array of insanely powerful lasers attached at or near your important targets should do the trick. On the other hand, with the vast power of such a defence, you could just put a chain of them up the coasts. One of those firing for a minute should be enough to take out any number of hostile targets within reach. Also, it sure would make purty lights.
Well what do you expect from a poster as obviously pro-science as the grandparent?
Prefer the facts indeed...
Way late and will never be read, but what the hell... Since Bush and his cohorts lied in order to invade a country, resulting in many deaths, could they not be accused of murder in the first? Premeditated, cold blooded, and callous? To run by Georgie's own state of Texas' laws, if found guilty, well...
Hang him high, boys...
Ah so you've tried it then? No? What a shock...
I just tried to play that monkeyboy thing on my patched Win2k machine here, and Media Player wouldn't touch it. Just didn't play, full stop. Tried several versions, renaming the file, nothing. Ran it through winamp, ran without a hitch. And I don't think its a codec issue either, folks.
Eh you just have to talk them on a level they can savvy. Party conversations for example, you have to smack em in the gob with a good opener, then build up from there. Like this...
You have to admire the Russian Mafia, really.
Silence. A few fascinated and mildly horrified eyebrows are raised.
Well, they are early adopters to a new economic model, outpacing all the wall street analysts and clever people in finance! They have worked out how to turn the average home user's PC into a viable money maker for them. They probably have what, a third of the market already locked down? Shows great intiative, that.
Heheh, dunno how much business that line has gotten me. But a lot.
:D
I'm simply saying that they have to follow rules
No you are talking about laws, which are different to rules, in that you can and will end up in prison if you break a law. I see no point in debating the relative virtues of Communism, talk about well trodden ground...
The western world got where they are by invading, stealing, oppressing and deal-cutting
And in order to do so, you have to be in a position of strength, which can only be attained by organising faster and working harder in the first place.
That's exactly what you mean when you say "we owe them nothing"
What I mean by that is that we owe them nothing for free - no money, no favours, no anything. We can offer an exchange of goods and services, same as anyone else. Just because they are poor, the first world is under NO OBLIGATION to help them.
Actually, your ARE advocating looting the poor for the benefit of the rich
big business continue to exploit 3rd world labour
What on earth makes you think anyone is being exploited? Whatever about isolated sweatshops, Indian programmers make between 80 and 100 dollars a week. That in India will set you up with a big house, two cars, and a maid. Just because they are paid less numerically does not mean they are being paid any less fiscally.
exporting all your jobs overseas
Oh I know all about that, I lost my job four years ago to outsourcing. After a fruitless 12 month long search, I got sick of it and started my own (now highly successful) company. That involved learning new skills, teaching myself graphic design, and going at it without aid from anyone. My point? The situation is as bad as you make it.
pressure other countries to also enforce a minimum wage
To go back to my point about the Indian programmers above. Who on earth is going to pay for this mystical minimum wage? Certainly not the relative governments. Because they can barely afford US minimum wage for many high ranking government officials, never mind semi skilled labourers. So do you suggest that the US pays out to foreign governments for taxable labour in their own countries? Or do only people working for foreign corporations get minimum wage? I can see that turning out well. THAT is the problem with enforcing a minimum wage of US standards... I am standing on both sides of the line here, my own girlfriend is a Filipina, and it doesn't get more wretchedly third world than the Philippines, let me tell you. The fact is, she is very happy that foreign corporations come to her country to employ people, who again do very well by local standards. So, corporations are either "exploiting the third world countries" or "casting aside the local workforce". It can't be both.
Hmm I seem to recall reading something about a gas called Brown's gas that was effective in nuclear waste treatment. Also that it did very little damage to organic compounds and materials, but sliced through metals and such when heated. Anyone ever hear of this?
and put limits on corporate activity
Remove the profit motive, and you remove the corporations, companies, and businesses of every size. No businesses means everything is run by the government. For reference, see communism, a failed ethos espoused only by academics that have little or no real world experience.
Yes it will increase the cost of production slightly
Try massively. The single biggest cost in any business is its employees.
ALREADY EXCEEDED THE STANDARD OF LIVING IN 3RD WORLD COUNTRIES
So what? The first world is where it is today because it got itself organised faster than anyone else, and worked hard enough to ensure that they stayed that way. The third world does not deserve special consideration just because they have lower living standards. We, in short, owe them nothing. I'm not advocating looting the poor for the benefit of the rich, but its a savagely competitive world, and if you try to enforce a single wage level, within 10 years the only businesses left in the US will be mom and pop corner stores. And that is not enough to sustain any sort of economy beyond hunter gatherer.
They can do it again, and fix this present government if they think that it needs fixing.
But what if they think it needs fixing, and don't want to be run down by a tank? Or their families and friends thrown in prison, tortured, and killed? Or if the idea of midnight calls from the security forces doesn't appeal to them?
The only difference is the type of philosophies that are banned.
Yeah right, the big difference here is that Europeans know the power of FUD. This is where the last sight that about 6 million people saw was the tiled, antiseptic interior of a gas chamber. Right fucking here. Lots of people died to ensure that that wouldn't happen again, and that includes making sure that the FUD never gets out again. Is it wrong to suppress lies?
Try and take a look at if from the third perspective, if you can
Try and look at it from a broader perspective, if you can.