The problem you have with not making something legal, but doing it anyway, is you force an ever increasing number of civil servents to do something illegal as a condition of their employment which tends to suck for them.
Some will do it without reservation, some will do it but have serious personal reservations which they may vent publicly or internalize, some may refuse to do it in the first place putting them in legal and employment limbo.
It dramatically increases the likelihood that some of your people will turn whistleblower and expose the whole program to the New York times, kind of like Elsberg did with the Pentagon papers or Manning did with Wikileaks.
"Obama is responsible for the effects of Republican led deregulation of the financial industry"
You do know that some of the more catastrophic deregulation was a bipartisan effort and was led by Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin, especially repealing Glass Steagal and blocking derivatives regulation. You seem to be doing them same thing you are ridiculing, saying its all the other parties fault. Its entrenched power and greed that is at fault, and both parties have it in equal measure.
Not sure how this rambling mess made insightul but I assure you "selling stuff" is not the major issue. It may be "a" issue but it is way down on the list.
The U.S. doesn't have to use nukes to acheive their goals. All they need is A) a credible first strike offensive capability Russia and China can't stop and B) a credible defensive capability that has the potential to stop Russian and Chinese weapons.
It is extremely tacky on the part of the U.S. to be developing defensive missile capabilities on one hand while they are asking Russia to reduce its arsenal with START treaties, making it more vulnerable to a defensive shield.
If the U.S. has a credible chance of winning a nuclear war, it doesn't have to fight one to win. It wins when it can dictate global policy on everything, economics and economic systems, commodities(oil), who runs which third world country, etc. and no one can say NO. Russia in particular is furious the U.S. toppled a close ally in Serbia with military force, and is on the verge of doing the same to Russia's allies in Syria and Iran.
If the U.S thinks it can win any confrontation, it can start dictating terms without ever resorting to an actual military confrontation.
When the Soviet Union collapsed the U.S., especially the neocons, began proclaiming the U.S. as the worlds sole remaining superpower and acting accordingly. If they ever develop a real shield against nukes they will be even worse. That's why the Reaganauts and the Neocons keep spending staggering sums trying to develop one.
To counter my own argument it is totally NUTS for the U.S. to think they CAN develop an effective shield against nukes. There are simply to many countries with them, too many ways to deliver them and they are too smal. You have low flying cruise missiles, hypersonic air breathers, stealth, a tramp steamer or fishing boat sailing in to the harbor of a major coastal city, a pack mule walking across the Canadian border, etc.
99.9% of people DONT use TOR, a VM, or even a blocker in their browser. The NSA may not even be looking for a well trained "terrorist" or a "spy".
They can just mine a vast treasure trove of information on what most of the people on the planet are interested in by looking at all the data Google and Facebook are accumulating. I wouldn't be surprised if you could use the data to fairly accurately predict which countries are ripe for or on the virge of a revolution just by looking at the X's its people are interested in.
The problem is if you want to know something about X one thing you do these days is a Google search about X, followed by clicking on links in the results. If you are afraid Google is tracking your search queries maybe you will use DuckDuckGo or go to some other website. Whatever, when you get to the web site on X there is a fair chance the web site will have embedded in it HTTP connections to doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com, googlesyndication.com, googleadservices.com or the Google API like apis.google.com/js/plusone.js.
You don't actually need to post anything about X, or tell anyone about X, you just need to leave bread crumbs scattered about the Internet showing you have interest in X, and Google will know.
All the bread crumbs Google tracks would, no doubt, be extremely interesting to any intelligence agency.
I should add if state statute has overreached to the point of giving school boards authority over every moment of the lives of children, it doesn't make it any more right than school boards overreaching and giving themselves this authority.
If parents choose to put their children in private schools and to surrender their children's rights to these corporations I suppose its their prerogative and part of the price of admission. Me personally, I would want the children themselves to be made aware of what they are signing up for and decide for themselves if they value the school enough to justify surrendering their rights to it.
The problem with public education is there is substantial coercsion involved in that its nearly mandatory, so me personally I dont think attendance at public schools should be accompanied by the abandonment of children's rights in their totality to school boards and school principals, especially since local school boards are frequently packed with people with disurbing agendas you can get with the tyranny of a majority.
I think I'm suddenly seeing why home schooling is appealing to many.
"Schools may very well be an appropriate venue for handling most petty activities involving minors."
I can see your point, since schools are substantially less about actually educating children, and more about indoctrinating them to their subservient roles in society and preparing them for a life working for corporations.
Me I would rather we were raising our children to be highly educated, actively thinking, highly questioning rebels, who would give "honor courts" the "Animal House" treatment. Maybe if we had been raising kids like that for the last 40 years our presidential candidates wouldn't be a horror.
I'm reminded of a quote from Kim Stanley Robinson's BlueMars , its more about corporations than schools but the two entities are remarkably similard, for a reason:
"If democracy and self-rule are the fundementals, then why should people give up these rights when the enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, for choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue,-- control of our lives in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is,-- a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives' labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work."
Robinson wrote this in 1996, he didn't know we would completely give up figthing for our political rights five years later or that twelve years later his portrait of capitalism as feudalism would be so vividly illustrated.
Tank Man is a fascinating story. Very few know what happened to him. His fate ranges from the Chinese authorities denying they ever identified him so he was never punished to his being executed right after the famous incident.
Peoples do still revolt, though it more typically occurs because of economic issues than purely civil rights issues. When people are starving, disenfranchised and have nothing left to lose they tend to be less afraid of the consequences of revolution. When people have a job, place to live and food to eat, they generally dont really care if their country is turning to a totalitarian state.
Revolt is typically a horrible thing and it usually ends badly. Revolt is the ultimate collapse in the rule of law, so its paradoxical to resort to revolution to remedy the break down in the rule of law instituted by your government. But when your government no longer adheres to the rule of law what else do you do?
I recently read I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave and discovered a new word, "workampers". They are people who live in RV's and drive from one warehouse to another getting minimum wage temp jobs. These are places like Amazon's warehouses where most of the work force is permenently temporary so they can keep wages to a minimum since there are no raises or seniority among temp workers, and there are no benefits. One wonders if the U.S. is edging towards the place where economic conditions are so bad for so many that one day they will in fact revolt on economic grounds even if they dont care about the loss of their basic civil liberties.
Just because a school board/administrator writes it in to their policies doesn't make it legal or right. Those policies grossly exceed their jurisdiction when the activities occur outside school hours, on a students personal computer, and not on school property. The student is only subject to local, state and Federal law at that point not the whims of the school board.
People with some power often seek to acquire more power, and it regretably often falls on the shoulders of the people whose rights are being trampled to try to stop them.
For example the U.S. President and Attorney General have recently bestowed upon themselves the power to assasinate American citizens without any judicial oversight. Just because they say they can doesn't change the fact that they are probably violating the Constitution and their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. The burden has now shifted on entities like the ACLU to engage in a multi year battle in the courts to try to prove them wrong.
In a similar vein the Bush administration gave themselve the power to torture people which is also a violation of Federal laws and international treaties.
A problem may arise when the politicians who are breaking the laws manage to stack the judicial process, especially the Supreme court, so the courts also fail to do the right thing, and let them get away with it.
Another problem arises when you have a two party system and both parties have become equally complicit in dismantling the rule of law and trampling civil liberties.
When those two things happen all the checks and balances the founding fathers built in to the Constitution are gone, and you are on the road to a totalitarian state unless the actual people up and say NO. That is a hard thing though, most people are too afraid.
Actually there IS a comparison to a "base camp". You need to land a two or three small, self contained nuclear reactors on Mars near an abundant source of ice. Then you need to land a couple self contained robot labs next to them to start making Hydrogen, Oxygen and liquid water out of ice. At that point you have in abundance the two most essential supplies you need for a manned base without having to ship them from Earth. Once you land some habitats and cargo ships with food, essential supplies and maybe green houses you could eventually build a base camp so when you land people you have a reasonable probablity of supporting them indefinitely. You also probably need some construction equipment either electric or Hydrogen power to move dirt to shielding the habitats.
If you have an economical launcher like Falcon Heavy so you can launch a bunch of significant payloads every time there is a launch window, coupled with an economical heavy lander you can set up a reliable logistics operation to support a permenent manned presence on Mars, which will hopefully, with time, become increasingly self sustaining and self supporting for everything except things which require a large manufacturing base, like electronics and reactors.
The essential things is getting power and heat there in abundance, which is why you need redundant, highly reliable, modular reactors. Once you have those everything else gets easier.
I'm a big fan of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy if you can't tell. Its more visionary than anything out of NASA since Apollo.
Its a circular problem because the "US lack of excitement" for space exploration is because NASA seldom does anything particularly exciting. The Shuttle and ISS were/are an exercise in tedious boredom, very expensive exercises too.
Some of JPL's missions and some of the great observatory's are modestly interesting, almost exciting even, but they aren't going to capitivate the public.
This submission seems a lot like the Saturn oxygen submission yesterday. I'm starting to think/. is the new forum for JPL/ESA/university teams to lobby for funding for their pet projects.
A sample return mission would be an interesting technical achievement, but I seriously can't see the payoff being worth the expense. Curiosity is going to be able to examine samples in fairly considerable depth and probably in greater volume than a sample return mission. We also think we already have 99 samples from Mars from metereoites that were ejected from Mars and have landed on Earth.
That is certainly a gross simplification. For one thing providing sufficient food currently involves something resembling strip mining the oceans and this has severely distressed a number of species. If we manage to crash enough species a significant part of our food supply will be gone.
Producing food on farms is increasingly dependent on industrial farming techniques which, in particular, require high volumes of potassium, phosphorous and nitrogen fertilizer. Without industrial fertilizers the worlds agricultural yeild will drop dramatically.
Nitrogen fertilizers are usually produced from natural gas and coal, which is a finite resource, though they can be made from atmospheric Nitrogen if you figure out an economical way to do fixation. Nitrogen is probably less of a concern that potash and phosphate which usually come from mines and dry lake beds. They are most definitely a finite resource and when they run out things will get interesting. Prices are already steadily rising as places like China increase the demand for this very finite resource.
Lucky for us population growth is starting to level off, if it doesn't we almost certainly will end up with Soylent Green moments in the future unless we are very clever.
Why exactly is exploring the oceans on Europa, Titan or Enceladus any more or less "half-assed" than either of the things I proposed? I'm assuming you must have a vested career interest in JPL or ESA missions to one of those places to be so strident on something so specific? Oceans are interesting if you are planning to send people there but you seem to have no interest in that, so what is the point other than pure science like searching for "life".
SpaceX is almost certainly already working towards the goal of colonizing Mars, so its not that far out there to be worth the epithet "fantasy". A better source than "Star Trek" is Kim Stanley Robinsons's excellent Mars trilogy. Some of its a bit fanciful but it is an interesting and detailed case for why a new human biosphere is interesting on a number of levels.
Asteroid resource extraction isn't necessarily human spaceflight centric. You can use robotic explorers to find near earth asteroids which are rich in minerals scarce on Earth, like gold. You then use a robotic pusher to move it in to Earth orbit where either machines or people mine it. It would be a way to create wealth and abundance from space exploration, which, like it or not is, a way to pay the bills for space exploration instead of milking tax payers which is the current dominant model and I'm guessing is the model you like.
The obsession with "finding life" is a case of extremely misplaced priorities. It is a worthwhile pursuit, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be pursued but it should NOT be the primary focus of space exploration. Finding life in our solar system is not a particularly high probability and if you do manage it there is a fair chance its going to be microscopic, so making it a primary focus of your research effort is setting yourself up to fail. The longer you keep doing it, the more money you spend, and the longer you go finding nothing, the higher the probababilty the people who fund you, and the public in general, will lose interest in funding you.
Things like asteroid resource exploration or Mars colonization would be goals that would have tangible benefits in the long term, and would actually justify substantial R&D funding, especially as Earth becomes more and more resource challenged.
A pitch based on their being Oxygen around Saturn so its extremely urgent we go looking for life there rings like a desperate act of researchers wanting to get new funding. Its not a visionary pitch.
Which means the security council is pointless except when it comes to picking on countries who don't have a veto or an ally with a veto. Which gets back to the original point, its toothless on every issue of substance.
"A prolonged conventional war between US and USSR was impossible, because, as soon as either side started to lose, it'd switch gears to nuclear."
So, what is your point. I was arguing a hypothetical where the nuclear option wasn't on the table, and you are arguing about the nuclear option being on the table which is totally outside the bounds of the original hypothetical. Please stop, you totally missed the point of the original arguement.
And I have no clue what your last sentence even meant.
No the point is the UN DOESN'T have any teeth whenever a resolution offends a rather small, arbitrarily chosen set of nations who've been given, or actually gave themselves, veto power.
The system that would work is something like the current security council, where the major powers have permenent seats, but DON'T have veto power, so that the security council could act on issues that need to be acted on even though it will offend a major power. Either they learn to deal with that like all the countries who don't have vetoes or they should just stop pretending the UN matters for anything.
The way the security council is currently organized it only acts on issues in which there is consenus among all the major powers, which means the UN never acts on the issues where any major power doesn't want them to act. As a result a broad range of corrosive issues like Israel and lately Syria will never get resolved and in some cases have continued to fester as long as the UN has existed.
A conventional war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. probably wouldn't lead to "hundreds of millions dead". I said if they didn't have the nuclear option on the table, so I was referring to a conventional war, not a nuclear one.
My point was that if the U.S. and U.S.S.R. wanted to settle their differences over economic systems, it would have been more appropriate for them to do it directly between themselves so their people died, their territory was raveged, instead of inflicting the devestation on mostly innocent civilians through proxy wars in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Central America, Africa, etc. which is what they did for most of the second half of the twentieth century.
"The big difference between League of Nations and UN is that UN has the UNSC, which actually has teeth."
Excepting of course the major powers have vetoes so the security council never actually does anything if any of those member have a vested interest in blocking it. Reference resolutions on Israel pretty much since its inception, and the recent attempt to act in Syria which was vetoed by China and Russia. Russia counts Syria as a critical ally, has its main Mediterranean naval base in Syria, and is going to back Assad no matter what he does.
The only time the security council has "teeth" is when the resolution is so obviously good its not opposed by any member with a veto, or when the resolution is so watered down with compromise that it doesn't do anything so no one cares enough to veto it.
All things considered the security council actually gums most issues in to eternity.
If you got rid of the veto power it would have teeth, but that would also mean the superpowers couldn't get their way and obstruct any resolution they don't like, which they wont stand for.
I should add there have been a staggering number of wars since the U.N. was formed, so I'm not even sure the record on wars is even that good.
The U.S. and the U.S.S.R specialized in fighting, small, brutal, dirty proxy wars all over the planet. Most of them were fought in third world shitholes the rest of the world didn't care about, they didn't get much press, they weren't glamorous, they are largely forgotten in public school history so no one counts them but they had devestating impact on a lot of small countries.
Not sure it was exactly "better" that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R couldn't fight an all out war to settle their differences, because of mutual assured destruction. Instead they inflicted massive actual destruction on largely innocent bystanders in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, Afghanistan and the Middle East.
"I can guarantee you that there were less wars than if there were no UN"
Actually, no you can't. Feel free to think that, you might even be right, but you absolutely can't "guarantee" the historical path we chose had a better outcome than all the historical paths we didn't chose. Its total arrogance, similar to that found on a daily basis at the UN and within assorted diplomatic corps.
I'm pretty sure the U.S. is currently seizing domain names on a regular basis, shutting down web sites and free speech, with absolutely no due process, and was recently well on its way to codifying this practice in law with SOPA/PIPA. They were killed but the DHS is still seizing domains like they were law.
The U.S. is also aggressively push ACTA on governments around the globe, often using blackmail, which can also be used to suppress free speech.
Especially since 9/11 the U.S. simply hasn't been the bastion of free speech you are trying to make it sound like.
Turning the Internet over to the UN would probably be bad for a host of reasons, but its quite obvious that the U.S. isn't even remotely trust worthy any more thanks to America's two pronged obsessions stopping piracy at all costs, including basic civil liberties, and to a lesser extent obsessing over Islamic extremism and terrorism.
All things considered I would prefer Internet control were passed to a country like Switzerland with a strong history of neutrality, resonable though not perfect free speech laws and a track record of supporting international agencies. It would be a better choice than either the U.S. or the U.N.
The UN's post World War I precursor the League of Nations collapsed in complete failure as the Axis powers walked out one by one in the 1930's and it was moth balled when World War II started. The UN inherited many of its agencies and is for all practical purposed the same agency with a new name and a new home. The only reason the UN can claim no world wars on its watch is becaused they changed the name after there was a world war on its watch.
The primary reason there haven't been any world wars since the UN was founded is because there have been nuclear weapons since before the UN was founded, and everyone has a vested interest in not letting wars escalate to the point that they would annihalate civilization as we know it.
I think "Don't Be Evil" lost all meaning when Paul Buchheit left Google if not some time before he left. I think he is the idealist who made it their motto and is probably one of the few people who actually lived by it there. Most of their execs, Marissa Mayer in particular, seem to think it is cute marketing propaganda and I dont think they ever subscribed too it, and didn't seem to even really understand what it meant.
Lets be real, most people just want big paychecks and options packages and are going to do what they have to do to get them, ethical or no.
I should add I'm fine with there being buttons on a page to like/share/plus/retweet it. I am totally opposed to them actually making URL requests to these services just because I loaded a web page. If there is going to be a privacy law on the internet it should be "Thou shalt not go to a third party web site unless I click on something asking to go there". Not only are the rampant third party URL requests a privacy disaster they are a pure waste of time and bandwidth.
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The problem you have with not making something legal, but doing it anyway, is you force an ever increasing number of civil servents to do something illegal as a condition of their employment which tends to suck for them.
Some will do it without reservation, some will do it but have serious personal reservations which they may vent publicly or internalize, some may refuse to do it in the first place putting them in legal and employment limbo.
It dramatically increases the likelihood that some of your people will turn whistleblower and expose the whole program to the New York times, kind of like Elsberg did with the Pentagon papers or Manning did with Wikileaks.
"Obama is responsible for the effects of Republican led deregulation of the financial industry"
You do know that some of the more catastrophic deregulation was a bipartisan effort and was led by Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin, especially repealing Glass Steagal and blocking derivatives regulation. You seem to be doing them same thing you are ridiculing, saying its all the other parties fault. Its entrenched power and greed that is at fault, and both parties have it in equal measure.
Not sure how this rambling mess made insightul but I assure you "selling stuff" is not the major issue. It may be "a" issue but it is way down on the list.
The U.S. doesn't have to use nukes to acheive their goals. All they need is A) a credible first strike offensive capability Russia and China can't stop and B) a credible defensive capability that has the potential to stop Russian and Chinese weapons.
It is extremely tacky on the part of the U.S. to be developing defensive missile capabilities on one hand while they are asking Russia to reduce its arsenal with START treaties, making it more vulnerable to a defensive shield.
If the U.S. has a credible chance of winning a nuclear war, it doesn't have to fight one to win. It wins when it can dictate global policy on everything, economics and economic systems, commodities(oil), who runs which third world country, etc. and no one can say NO. Russia in particular is furious the U.S. toppled a close ally in Serbia with military force, and is on the verge of doing the same to Russia's allies in Syria and Iran.
If the U.S thinks it can win any confrontation, it can start dictating terms without ever resorting to an actual military confrontation.
When the Soviet Union collapsed the U.S., especially the neocons, began proclaiming the U.S. as the worlds sole remaining superpower and acting accordingly. If they ever develop a real shield against nukes they will be even worse. That's why the Reaganauts and the Neocons keep spending staggering sums trying to develop one.
To counter my own argument it is totally NUTS for the U.S. to think they CAN develop an effective shield against nukes. There are simply to many countries with them, too many ways to deliver them and they are too smal. You have low flying cruise missiles, hypersonic air breathers, stealth, a tramp steamer or fishing boat sailing in to the harbor of a major coastal city, a pack mule walking across the Canadian border, etc.
99.9% of people DONT use TOR, a VM, or even a blocker in their browser. The NSA may not even be looking for a well trained "terrorist" or a "spy".
They can just mine a vast treasure trove of information on what most of the people on the planet are interested in by looking at all the data Google and Facebook are accumulating. I wouldn't be surprised if you could use the data to fairly accurately predict which countries are ripe for or on the virge of a revolution just by looking at the X's its people are interested in.
The problem is if you want to know something about X one thing you do these days is a Google search about X, followed by clicking on links in the results. If you are afraid Google is tracking your search queries maybe you will use DuckDuckGo or go to some other website. Whatever, when you get to the web site on X there is a fair chance the web site will have embedded in it HTTP connections to doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com, googlesyndication.com, googleadservices.com or the Google API like apis.google.com/js/plusone.js.
You don't actually need to post anything about X, or tell anyone about X, you just need to leave bread crumbs scattered about the Internet showing you have interest in X, and Google will know.
All the bread crumbs Google tracks would, no doubt, be extremely interesting to any intelligence agency.
I should add if state statute has overreached to the point of giving school boards authority over every moment of the lives of children, it doesn't make it any more right than school boards overreaching and giving themselves this authority.
If parents choose to put their children in private schools and to surrender their children's rights to these corporations I suppose its their prerogative and part of the price of admission. Me personally, I would want the children themselves to be made aware of what they are signing up for and decide for themselves if they value the school enough to justify surrendering their rights to it.
The problem with public education is there is substantial coercsion involved in that its nearly mandatory, so me personally I dont think attendance at public schools should be accompanied by the abandonment of children's rights in their totality to school boards and school principals, especially since local school boards are frequently packed with people with disurbing agendas you can get with the tyranny of a majority.
I think I'm suddenly seeing why home schooling is appealing to many.
"Schools may very well be an appropriate venue for handling most petty activities involving minors."
I can see your point, since schools are substantially less about actually educating children, and more about indoctrinating them to their subservient roles in society and preparing them for a life working for corporations.
Me I would rather we were raising our children to be highly educated, actively thinking, highly questioning rebels, who would give "honor courts" the "Animal House" treatment. Maybe if we had been raising kids like that for the last 40 years our presidential candidates wouldn't be a horror.
I'm reminded of a quote from Kim Stanley Robinson's BlueMars , its more about corporations than schools but the two entities are remarkably similard, for a reason:
"If democracy and self-rule are the fundementals, then why should people give up these rights when the enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, for choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue,-- control of our lives in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is,-- a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives' labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work."
Robinson wrote this in 1996, he didn't know we would completely give up figthing for our political rights five years later or that twelve years later his portrait of capitalism as feudalism would be so vividly illustrated.
Tank Man is a fascinating story. Very few know what happened to him. His fate ranges from the Chinese authorities denying they ever identified him so he was never punished to his being executed right after the famous incident.
Peoples do still revolt, though it more typically occurs because of economic issues than purely civil rights issues. When people are starving, disenfranchised and have nothing left to lose they tend to be less afraid of the consequences of revolution. When people have a job, place to live and food to eat, they generally dont really care if their country is turning to a totalitarian state.
Revolt is typically a horrible thing and it usually ends badly. Revolt is the ultimate collapse in the rule of law, so its paradoxical to resort to revolution to remedy the break down in the rule of law instituted by your government. But when your government no longer adheres to the rule of law what else do you do?
I recently read I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave and discovered a new word, "workampers". They are people who live in RV's and drive from one warehouse to another getting minimum wage temp jobs. These are places like Amazon's warehouses where most of the work force is permenently temporary so they can keep wages to a minimum since there are no raises or seniority among temp workers, and there are no benefits. One wonders if the U.S. is edging towards the place where economic conditions are so bad for so many that one day they will in fact revolt on economic grounds even if they dont care about the loss of their basic civil liberties.
Just because a school board/administrator writes it in to their policies doesn't make it legal or right. Those policies grossly exceed their jurisdiction when the activities occur outside school hours, on a students personal computer, and not on school property. The student is only subject to local, state and Federal law at that point not the whims of the school board.
People with some power often seek to acquire more power, and it regretably often falls on the shoulders of the people whose rights are being trampled to try to stop them.
For example the U.S. President and Attorney General have recently bestowed upon themselves the power to assasinate American citizens without any judicial oversight. Just because they say they can doesn't change the fact that they are probably violating the Constitution and their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. The burden has now shifted on entities like the ACLU to engage in a multi year battle in the courts to try to prove them wrong.
In a similar vein the Bush administration gave themselve the power to torture people which is also a violation of Federal laws and international treaties.
A problem may arise when the politicians who are breaking the laws manage to stack the judicial process, especially the Supreme court, so the courts also fail to do the right thing, and let them get away with it.
Another problem arises when you have a two party system and both parties have become equally complicit in dismantling the rule of law and trampling civil liberties.
When those two things happen all the checks and balances the founding fathers built in to the Constitution are gone, and you are on the road to a totalitarian state unless the actual people up and say NO. That is a hard thing though, most people are too afraid.
"There is no meaningful comparison a "base camp""
Actually there IS a comparison to a "base camp". You need to land a two or three small, self contained nuclear reactors on Mars near an abundant source of ice. Then you need to land a couple self contained robot labs next to them to start making Hydrogen, Oxygen and liquid water out of ice. At that point you have in abundance the two most essential supplies you need for a manned base without having to ship them from Earth. Once you land some habitats and cargo ships with food, essential supplies and maybe green houses you could eventually build a base camp so when you land people you have a reasonable probablity of supporting them indefinitely. You also probably need some construction equipment either electric or Hydrogen power to move dirt to shielding the habitats.
If you have an economical launcher like Falcon Heavy so you can launch a bunch of significant payloads every time there is a launch window, coupled with an economical heavy lander you can set up a reliable logistics operation to support a permenent manned presence on Mars, which will hopefully, with time, become increasingly self sustaining and self supporting for everything except things which require a large manufacturing base, like electronics and reactors.
The essential things is getting power and heat there in abundance, which is why you need redundant, highly reliable, modular reactors. Once you have those everything else gets easier.
I'm a big fan of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy if you can't tell. Its more visionary than anything out of NASA since Apollo.
Its a circular problem because the "US lack of excitement" for space exploration is because NASA seldom does anything particularly exciting. The Shuttle and ISS were/are an exercise in tedious boredom, very expensive exercises too.
Some of JPL's missions and some of the great observatory's are modestly interesting, almost exciting even, but they aren't going to capitivate the public.
This submission seems a lot like the Saturn oxygen submission yesterday. I'm starting to think /. is the new forum for JPL/ESA/university teams to lobby for funding for their pet projects.
A sample return mission would be an interesting technical achievement, but I seriously can't see the payoff being worth the expense. Curiosity is going to be able to examine samples in fairly considerable depth and probably in greater volume than a sample return mission. We also think we already have 99 samples from Mars from metereoites that were ejected from Mars and have landed on Earth.
"we can produce the food easily"
That is certainly a gross simplification. For one thing providing sufficient food currently involves something resembling strip mining the oceans and this has severely distressed a number of species. If we manage to crash enough species a significant part of our food supply will be gone.
Producing food on farms is increasingly dependent on industrial farming techniques which, in particular, require high volumes of potassium, phosphorous and nitrogen fertilizer. Without industrial fertilizers the worlds agricultural yeild will drop dramatically.
Nitrogen fertilizers are usually produced from natural gas and coal, which is a finite resource, though they can be made from atmospheric Nitrogen if you figure out an economical way to do fixation. Nitrogen is probably less of a concern that potash and phosphate which usually come from mines and dry lake beds. They are most definitely a finite resource and when they run out things will get interesting. Prices are already steadily rising as places like China increase the demand for this very finite resource.
Lucky for us population growth is starting to level off, if it doesn't we almost certainly will end up with Soylent Green moments in the future unless we are very clever.
"half-assed star trek fantasy"
Nice troll, anonymous coward dude.
Why exactly is exploring the oceans on Europa, Titan or Enceladus any more or less "half-assed" than either of the things I proposed? I'm assuming you must have a vested career interest in JPL or ESA missions to one of those places to be so strident on something so specific? Oceans are interesting if you are planning to send people there but you seem to have no interest in that, so what is the point other than pure science like searching for "life".
SpaceX is almost certainly already working towards the goal of colonizing Mars, so its not that far out there to be worth the epithet "fantasy". A better source than "Star Trek" is Kim Stanley Robinsons's excellent Mars trilogy. Some of its a bit fanciful but it is an interesting and detailed case for why a new human biosphere is interesting on a number of levels.
Asteroid resource extraction isn't necessarily human spaceflight centric. You can use robotic explorers to find near earth asteroids which are rich in minerals scarce on Earth, like gold. You then use a robotic pusher to move it in to Earth orbit where either machines or people mine it. It would be a way to create wealth and abundance from space exploration, which, like it or not is, a way to pay the bills for space exploration instead of milking tax payers which is the current dominant model and I'm guessing is the model you like.
The obsession with "finding life" is a case of extremely misplaced priorities. It is a worthwhile pursuit, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be pursued but it should NOT be the primary focus of space exploration. Finding life in our solar system is not a particularly high probability and if you do manage it there is a fair chance its going to be microscopic, so making it a primary focus of your research effort is setting yourself up to fail. The longer you keep doing it, the more money you spend, and the longer you go finding nothing, the higher the probababilty the people who fund you, and the public in general, will lose interest in funding you.
Things like asteroid resource exploration or Mars colonization would be goals that would have tangible benefits in the long term, and would actually justify substantial R&D funding, especially as Earth becomes more and more resource challenged.
A pitch based on their being Oxygen around Saturn so its extremely urgent we go looking for life there rings like a desperate act of researchers wanting to get new funding. Its not a visionary pitch.
Which means the security council is pointless except when it comes to picking on countries who don't have a veto or an ally with a veto. Which gets back to the original point, its toothless on every issue of substance.
"A prolonged conventional war between US and USSR was impossible, because, as soon as either side started to lose, it'd switch gears to nuclear."
So, what is your point. I was arguing a hypothetical where the nuclear option wasn't on the table, and you are arguing about the nuclear option being on the table which is totally outside the bounds of the original hypothetical. Please stop, you totally missed the point of the original arguement.
And I have no clue what your last sentence even meant.
No the point is the UN DOESN'T have any teeth whenever a resolution offends a rather small, arbitrarily chosen set of nations who've been given, or actually gave themselves, veto power.
The system that would work is something like the current security council, where the major powers have permenent seats, but DON'T have veto power, so that the security council could act on issues that need to be acted on even though it will offend a major power. Either they learn to deal with that like all the countries who don't have vetoes or they should just stop pretending the UN matters for anything.
The way the security council is currently organized it only acts on issues in which there is consenus among all the major powers, which means the UN never acts on the issues where any major power doesn't want them to act. As a result a broad range of corrosive issues like Israel and lately Syria will never get resolved and in some cases have continued to fester as long as the UN has existed.
A conventional war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. probably wouldn't lead to "hundreds of millions dead". I said if they didn't have the nuclear option on the table, so I was referring to a conventional war, not a nuclear one.
My point was that if the U.S. and U.S.S.R. wanted to settle their differences over economic systems, it would have been more appropriate for them to do it directly between themselves so their people died, their territory was raveged, instead of inflicting the devestation on mostly innocent civilians through proxy wars in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Central America, Africa, etc. which is what they did for most of the second half of the twentieth century.
"The big difference between League of Nations and UN is that UN has the UNSC, which actually has teeth."
Excepting of course the major powers have vetoes so the security council never actually does anything if any of those member have a vested interest in blocking it. Reference resolutions on Israel pretty much since its inception, and the recent attempt to act in Syria which was vetoed by China and Russia. Russia counts Syria as a critical ally, has its main Mediterranean naval base in Syria, and is going to back Assad no matter what he does.
The only time the security council has "teeth" is when the resolution is so obviously good its not opposed by any member with a veto, or when the resolution is so watered down with compromise that it doesn't do anything so no one cares enough to veto it.
All things considered the security council actually gums most issues in to eternity.
If you got rid of the veto power it would have teeth, but that would also mean the superpowers couldn't get their way and obstruct any resolution they don't like, which they wont stand for.
I should add there have been a staggering number of wars since the U.N. was formed, so I'm not even sure the record on wars is even that good.
The U.S. and the U.S.S.R specialized in fighting, small, brutal, dirty proxy wars all over the planet. Most of them were fought in third world shitholes the rest of the world didn't care about, they didn't get much press, they weren't glamorous, they are largely forgotten in public school history so no one counts them but they had devestating impact on a lot of small countries.
Not sure it was exactly "better" that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R couldn't fight an all out war to settle their differences, because of mutual assured destruction. Instead they inflicted massive actual destruction on largely innocent bystanders in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, Afghanistan and the Middle East.
"I can guarantee you that there were less wars than if there were no UN"
Actually, no you can't. Feel free to think that, you might even be right, but you absolutely can't "guarantee" the historical path we chose had a better outcome than all the historical paths we didn't chose. Its total arrogance, similar to that found on a daily basis at the UN and within assorted diplomatic corps.
I'm pretty sure the U.S. is currently seizing domain names on a regular basis, shutting down web sites and free speech, with absolutely no due process, and was recently well on its way to codifying this practice in law with SOPA/PIPA. They were killed but the DHS is still seizing domains like they were law.
The U.S. is also aggressively push ACTA on governments around the globe, often using blackmail, which can also be used to suppress free speech.
Especially since 9/11 the U.S. simply hasn't been the bastion of free speech you are trying to make it sound like.
Turning the Internet over to the UN would probably be bad for a host of reasons, but its quite obvious that the U.S. isn't even remotely trust worthy any more thanks to America's two pronged obsessions stopping piracy at all costs, including basic civil liberties, and to a lesser extent obsessing over Islamic extremism and terrorism.
All things considered I would prefer Internet control were passed to a country like Switzerland with a strong history of neutrality, resonable though not perfect free speech laws and a track record of supporting international agencies. It would be a better choice than either the U.S. or the U.N.
The UN's post World War I precursor the League of Nations collapsed in complete failure as the Axis powers walked out one by one in the 1930's and it was moth balled when World War II started. The UN inherited many of its agencies and is for all practical purposed the same agency with a new name and a new home. The only reason the UN can claim no world wars on its watch is becaused they changed the name after there was a world war on its watch.
The primary reason there haven't been any world wars since the UN was founded is because there have been nuclear weapons since before the UN was founded, and everyone has a vested interest in not letting wars escalate to the point that they would annihalate civilization as we know it.
All things considered your statement is nonsense.
I think "Don't Be Evil" lost all meaning when Paul Buchheit left Google if not some time before he left. I think he is the idealist who made it their motto and is probably one of the few people who actually lived by it there. Most of their execs, Marissa Mayer in particular, seem to think it is cute marketing propaganda and I dont think they ever subscribed too it, and didn't seem to even really understand what it meant.
Lets be real, most people just want big paychecks and options packages and are going to do what they have to do to get them, ethical or no.
I should add I'm fine with there being buttons on a page to like/share/plus/retweet it. I am totally opposed to them actually making URL requests to these services just because I loaded a web page. If there is going to be a privacy law on the internet it should be "Thou shalt not go to a third party web site unless I click on something asking to go there". Not only are the rampant third party URL requests a privacy disaster they are a pure waste of time and bandwidth.