Grow a pair, stop blaming other people for your own bad eating habits, take control of your life and stop being conned by all the faddy diets aimed at quick fixes.
Yup, that's precisely what the summary was talking about:
"But in addition, George Bray thinks that socioeconomic factors play into physicians' lack of enthusiasm for treating obesity because obesity is, disproportionately, a disease of poverty. Because of this association, many erroneously see obesity as more of a social condition than a medical one, a condition that simply requires people to try harder."
Thank you for providing a fine example of how people still associate the frailty of mortals with moral failure. I wonder if this is another thing we can thank religion for, after all a quick reading of Genesis might easily lead to such a connection.
There are no quick fixes, just good, healthy ways to eat.
This is, if you think about it, pretty weird. Getting fat is not like stuffing a balloon full of lard; rather, your body builds fat tissue in response to hormonal cues. There's no erason whatsoever why you should ever get fat beyond some cutoff point no matter what your diet; the unused calories would simply pass by and be excreted. That you do means that your body's control system fails somehow, which should be treatable/adjustable once the details have been researched.
The same goes for muscles, bones and pretty much everything else. There's no reason why staying fit should require running in circles and lifting heavy objects just to lower them again. The effect of excersize is to change your hormonal balance, the actual tissue-building happens afterwards.
Not that I particularly pursued an answer, mind you.
And this here nicely sums up anti-vaccination movement and most other problems in modern society.
Oh well, another 10 millenia and perhaps humans will actually get competent enough with abstract thought that it'll happen automatically without needing a constant reminder, such as sick children, on sight.
You seem to think a corporation is a sentient being or something.
In a sense, it is. A corporation is an interacting organization of information-handling units, and your brain is an interacting organization of information-handling units. The difference is that employees have much greater internal than external bandwidth, and don't exist solely in the context of the corporation; nonetheless, a corporation typically has its own culture - it's own personality - separate from any one individual.
This is true of other organizations too, and is the reason why it makes sense to be talking about "China" and "USA" like they were living things. Sure, every action they actually take is taken by someone on their behalf, but there's an entity authorizing that, dispersed in little bits and pieces into millions of humans. It could be described as a lifeform inhabiting the noosphere, and since the capacity to produce said sphere of culture is very new and unoptimized, evolutionarily speaking, the entity is pretty primitive yet. Of course, as we continue to evolve, so do our shadows, and it might be an interesting experiment to make those pieces better able to communicate and see if that might result in true self-awareness.
But why doesn't Android sandbox apps in a way that the app is unaware of? Just present all apps with an empty contact list, a fake GPS location, an empty drive, etc and the user grants permissions to substitute the real ones as needed.
Same reason your PC doesn't: developers and users have a natural conflict of interests, and developers have the control.
Reagan and Thatcher were hesitant to cut off South Africa not because they gave a shit about Mandela or because they loved sticking it to black people; they saw SA as a pawn in the cold war.
So their support for a racist, oppressive regime was based on selfishness and imperialism rather than racism. What a relief, for a moment I thought they might have been bad people.
Ignoring mining, with Bitcoin there is no function within the current universe of things we value.
Sure there is: accounting. Bitcoin is a distributed accounting system with access controls on account transactions. Every trader in history would find that valuable.
Seriously, your stuffed-full-of-mail strawman is still a strawman, and a rather absurd one at that. Do you think that the NYSE has a little mailslot out in the front door, so that if you send a letter, the postman just tosses it in, and if 9,999,999 others send a letter, they keep piling them in the little slot until they're piling up so much in the hallway that no one can push the front door open with all the mail? Is that really the image that you have in your head?
I have no idea how NYSE handles its mail. I've never been there. I'm making an analogy for the purpose of applying physical intuitions to the problem; the actual physical layout and mail handling procedures of NYSE are irrelevant for that.
I'm surprised you're apparently unaware of the concept - but perhaps I shouldn't be, since you also seem to not know what a strawman is.
The basis of the criminal law is intent: they presumably intended to cause damage to Paypal, and had no legitimate reason for their action. Note that I say *presumably* -- their intent must still be proven to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Not being a court, we can take malicious intent as given, at least for the purposes of this conversation.
This bears no relation to sending a letter of complaint.
"What if I knew those 9,999,999 other people were going to be sending their letters at the same time, and the combined effect would take the exchange down?"
So yes, it does. DDOS is basically several people mailing the victim simultaneously, so that the final volume grows large enough to jam their mailbox.
For most crimes (homicide generally excepted) the attempt or conspiracy to commit a crime is subject to the same penalties as the completed offense.
Right. So sending a few IP packets constitutes as a conspiracy, then? And the crime of taking down a website should be punished by 15 years in jail and half a million dollar fine?
What's the point of enforcing crime if not to protect the potential victims? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to use this as justification. Perhaps this is a logical fallacy of some kind on my part?
Fantasizing about being a supreme dictator and torturing people to death has nothing to do with law enforcement. Go ahead and daydream about it if that's your thing, but if you post such fantasies publicly, expect your issues to be commented on. Get help.
Right now it doesn't happen because people with actual resources other than two-bit botnets are quite visible and have to obey the law, much as I think everybody else should. And on that same token anonymous should never be above the law.
Hey, they're trying. But until we come up with a way to waterboard people over the Internet, Anonymous simply can't reach the standards of "people with actual resources". And off-country prison camps to keep their kidnap victims out of legal help's reach don't come cheap, you know.
Let's posit that this was a civil action not a criminal action. at what point do actions like this become criminal? For this they took a payment system offline. what if they took the NYSE stock exchange offline? what if they took a powerplant offline? (this may require other tools not just DDOS, but let's assume it was also accomplished by a large group of people as a form of protest).
Let's say I send a strongly worded letter of protest to the NYSE stock exchange. Is this illegal? Now suppose 9,999,999 other people also send similar letters, and the stock exchange is so full of them the personnel can't get in, taking it offline. Am I now a criminal? What if I knew those 9,999,999 other people were going to be sending their letters at the same time, and the combined effect would take the exchange down. Does that make me a criminal, and if it does, should I bear the full responsibility of the combined effect?
In other words: is it just to blame a single snowlake for the entire avalanche?
For that matter, does that matter? Sending someone to jail for 15 years for causing a minor inconvenience is an absurd overreaction. I suspect this is not about justice or even the law but power: someone is feeling theirs threatened and is breaking out the jackboot.
Nobody ever seems to give a shit about the victims of crime, it's all about the criminal and how they had a hard life, boo hoo.
Using victims of crime as an excuse for your fascist fantasies is no different than using children as excuse for censorship. It also fails just as hard to actually justify anything. It does, however, go to show that a lot of people would probably benefit from consultation.
But at least you were honest in the quote: you don't give a shit about the victims.
I don't agree. I think the karma is spot on. The karma is not for what they did but what they could have done with it.
That's... a rather interesting definition of karma. And unfortunate for you, considering what you could do with a computer. Not to mention a pair of hands. Or your life, for that matter.
Do you work in the US judiciary by any chance?
I would agree with you if they had just stolen a truck load of money or just about anything else.
No, because they could had used the money to hire someone else to steal the Cobalt and so forth.
Bitcoin exists because many people don't trust a) the major world governments or b) the major banking institutions.
That's part of it, but there's another reason: Bitcoin is simply the fastest, most convenient and secure way to send and receive payments over the Internet. No need to submit your credit card information, no waiting for wire transfers to complete, no worries about PayPal suddenly deciding they don't like your business and freezing your funds.
Bitcoin has an ecological niche in the Internet age economy.
The Nazi regime didn't last long, but the East German government lasted for about 45 years.
The Nazi regime didn't last long, because it started war after war until it was everyone's enemy - sounds familiar? And East German government lasted for 45 years because it had the backing of a greater power, and fell pretty much instantly when that backing failed.
Anyway, the US doesn't really resemble either. Nazis and Communists were ideology-based tyrants, while the US looks more like a failing state: the economy continues getting worse, everyone loots as much of the pie as they can to themselves and their friends, tribalism rises, the state tries to compensate with ever-increasing internal security (both surveillance and "though" penalties), the rulers mostly live in and react to their own little world... It's the standard "rot from the inside" pattern of collapse, with the "blinded by past glories" flavour.
D=P*S-B, or Deterrence = (Probability of getting caught) * (Severity of punishment) - Benefit.
Since very few participants in a DDoS get caught, the punishment must be severe to have much deterrence.
The actualy formula for deterrence (0 - expected utility) is: Deterrence = (Probability of getting caught) * (Severity of punishment) - (Benefit) * (1 - (Probability of getting caught)).
This doesn't actually work for three reasons:
1. People are bad at estimating probabilities, so low probs get rounded to zero.
2. People don't like to think bad things, so the more severe the punishment, the less likely the potential criminal is to imagine it being applied to him - robbing it of much or all of its power.
3. If you are hated, for example because you are perceived to be an unjust tyrant who hands over disproportionate punishments to compensate for incompetent police, the Benefit will go up, since people want to oppose you.
Even ancient Rome, where conservatives demanded criminals be crucified and bleeding-heart liberals merely fed them to lions, never ran out of them.
Another way this is misleading is that the lifetime of debt slavery - what the $183,000 amounts to - is not considered the punishment. 2 years probation is the punishment; $183,000 is "damages". Thus what we have here is an example of a rather nasty loophole in the law, where the main part of a punishment is not subject to normal lawmaking process but is rather ordered by the judge on a case-by-case basis. This leads to exactly this kind of perversions.
Compare: if my dog took a dumb in your lawn, would I be quilty and should I clean it up? Absolutely. If you then spent $183,000 to dog-proof your yard, should I pay for it? Of course not, that's crazy. Except that's exactly what happend here.
So, in one sentence, you substitute your own pet biases for the scientific findings of TFA, and go right back to
the fact far fewer women choose IT careers must by a fault of society.
The scientific finding of TFA is that women and men have their brains wired somewhat differently. The idea that this might have a causal relationship between skill differences is a hypothesis. So is the idea that the different wiring is caused by biology rather than upbringing, as the BBC article explicitly states. The idea that this explains career choices is pure speculation on the part of the submitter. And the amount of people who rushed to accept such speculation as proof that there's no sexism in IT strongly suggests that there is plenty of sexism in IT.
Whether the society in general is at fault for the failures of one of its subcultures is another question.
deep down we're all genetrically programmed to look out for #1 (self) in the end.
Well... no. Deep down people are genetically programmed to try to satisfy a number of reward circuits. Some of these are connected to their own immediate bodily needs, but they are also connected to other people's bodily needs, in infancy via mirror neurons and later via power of abstraction and imagination. This connection can easily get strong enough for people to give their lives for other people or even completely abstract causes.
Now, it's entirely possible to claim that people who die for a cause are still "looking out for number one" in a roundabout way, but the actual resultant behaviour is a good enough facsimile of altruism that it effectively invalidates your assertion.
Just the same way with unions. It was completely legitimate in the beginning, but now, the system has been perverted and abuse appears.
Elaborate. What abuse are you referring to, specifically? Because as far as I can see, the unions are doing the exact same as any other gorup of people: using their bargaining power to benefit their members as much as possible. Which might well be "abuse", but if it is, it applies equally well to, say, corporations and political parties.
I used to WRITE industry-leading ERP software, AND I used to manage 120 offices equipped with desktops at the same time, AND run the cable myself through the ceilings.
You had it easy. We had to mine the copper for the cable ourselves. And walk to the mine through a snowstorm uphill both ways. But at least I had copper; my predecessor had to push hydrogen nucleus together with their teeth.
Heck, I heard the whole Big Bang was just a server room project that got out of hand...
Yes, so can we please stop pretending that it is a travesty that few women are interested in IT?
No, because if it really turns out that what set of genitals you have play a major role in such a huge financial decision as what career you choose, even in the absence of outside coercion, then that instantly invalidates any economic theory that assumes people generally make rational (from purely economic perspective) choices - which would be all of them. Alternatively, if it turns out that career choices are affected by such coercion, for example in the form of sexism, then that is distorting the market and resulting in a needless net loss for the economy which can ill afford it, as well as continuing a tradition of power abuse humanity can afford even less. Either way, this is one subject where we really can't afford to leave any hair unsplit when searching for the answer.
Sure, let them do it if they're interested, but if they aren't interested they don't need to have their noses rubbed into it in high school with the expectation that the gender gap in that particular career field will close.
I'm not sure what you mean here. High school is general education, not vocational training. It's very purpose is to expose students to as many things as possible with the hope that they will be at least somewhat familiar with most things. And computers and programming are unlikely to become any less important anytime soon.
And it's an odd expression to use, that "they don't need to have their noses rubbed into it". Because you usually rub someone's nose into their failures or inadequecies, not mere lack of interest in something. It almost sounds like you were defending a weakling from being bullied - in other words, it sounds like you're saying girls can't program and we all should leave them alone already.
Oh well, I'm sure it was just a bad choice of words from your part and you didn't actually mean anything so ridiculously sexist.
What's so special about climatology that even rather small technical problems can't be discussed publicly?
Moneyed interests who quote snippets from any such discussion out of context in order to discredit science and delay any attempts to do anything about the problem, since maintaining status quo is in their short-term interest. But a lot of the credit must also be given to the very human tendency to ignore any unpleasant potential outcomes, even if they're likely (which explains why casinos stay in business, and why Microsoft released Windows 8 with the Metro UI). This time that head-in-the-bushes approach is really going to cost all of us. Just goes to show that humanity is still not that good with that whole sapience thing...
Not that it really matters anymore - the double-whammy of running out of (affordable) oil and constantly growing disaster recovery costs are already taking care of the problem the hard way: by utterly annihilating industrial economies. That ever-increasing capital-leeching effect what keeps the world locked in a depression, and likely will for the next several decades even in the best case (the worst is a collapse and return to agrarian hellhole).
At this point, pretty much the only way this could end well is if someone comes up with an efficient method of converting cellulose to crude oil. Some bacteria show promise.
There's no reason for an advanced, "civilized" human society to treat living, sentient* creatures as products to consume.
And why would you expect a society that refers to its own members as "human resources" to be any less beastly towards any other creature?
Face it: humanity has a lot of growing up to do before it can be trusted. A society that glorifies greed and selfishness and worships power is utterly incapable of any higher-order function than simply consuming everything on its path. We are unable to change even for the sake of survival, eating ourselves to death individually and consuming every last drop of oil and then having our economy collapse as a society, so what on Earth makes you think we'd do so for the sake of ethics?
Oh well, maybe after another 10,000 years and a dark age or three...
Rubbish. The Jewish view of marriage is pretty much just as a legal contract with some added fluff.
Good for Jews. But that doesn't stop a lot of (Christian) people from trying to dictate who can or can't marry who based on their religion - I am, of course, referring to the opposition to gay marriage. So it would be best to officially secularize the state-concerning legal aspects of marriage, and let various churches, sects and suicide cults conduct whatever rituals they want for who they want on whatever basis they want.
It would be better the other way round religion should keep its nose out of marriage.
They won't, and the state doesn't have the authority to demand they do. On the other hand, the state does have the authority to separate any religious aspecs from the legal aspects, to not give them any consideration or the power of law. The end result is the same.
Other primates, even chimpanzees and gorillas, cannot give informed consent, so marrying them would never be justifiable for the same reason marrying a four-year-old is not reasonable.
However, animals are not, in fact, infants, so it's not like there's anything in particular that would need justifying. After all, the default is that you can do anything you like as long as other people have no legitimate reason to stop you, and the main disagreements come over what counts as a legitimate reason.
That the rest of society needs to entertain the tought, even hypothethically, with whether or not to formally recognize a relationship between (wo)man and monkey does highlight why giving marriage a legal status is probably not a good idea. It's ultimately a religious ritual and should be left outside the scope of secular society.
We need a whole lot more evolution and/or alien contact and/or resurrection of neaderthals and/or robots before there's anything non-human to meaningfully get freaky with.
Have some faith in humanity, or at least it's hormones:). Why wait for aliens when you can use applied psychology to make your own?
I swear, if someone found a way to sexualize Tokamaks we'd have fusion power in a year...
Assuming you're in a perfectly circular orbit around something with no atmosphere, if you shoot a bullet directly at it (perpendicular to orbit), the bullet will still keep losing altitude - because what other relative force would there be to increase the altitude?
Short answer: https://kerbalspaceprogram.com//. Not completely accurate, but a great way to learn basic orbital mechanics anyway.
Long answer: no, because you're moving sideways and so will the bullet. If you were to shoot a bullet towards the Sun from Earth orbit, the actual velocity vector (direction) of the bullet would be your initial motion (~29.8 km/s) + the velocity given to the bullet by the gun (a lot less, unless you have one hell of a gun). Actually hitting the Sun would require aiming backwards against the sideways (orbital) motion, but since the motion is so huge you can't cancel more than a tiny fraction of it. Not without huge-ass engines or taking advantage of chaos theory, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that's precisely what the summary was talking about:
"But in addition, George Bray thinks that socioeconomic factors play into physicians' lack of enthusiasm for treating obesity because obesity is, disproportionately, a disease of poverty. Because of this association, many erroneously see obesity as more of a social condition than a medical one, a condition that simply requires people to try harder."
Thank you for providing a fine example of how people still associate the frailty of mortals with moral failure. I wonder if this is another thing we can thank religion for, after all a quick reading of Genesis might easily lead to such a connection.
This is, if you think about it, pretty weird. Getting fat is not like stuffing a balloon full of lard; rather, your body builds fat tissue in response to hormonal cues. There's no erason whatsoever why you should ever get fat beyond some cutoff point no matter what your diet; the unused calories would simply pass by and be excreted. That you do means that your body's control system fails somehow, which should be treatable/adjustable once the details have been researched.
The same goes for muscles, bones and pretty much everything else. There's no reason why staying fit should require running in circles and lifting heavy objects just to lower them again. The effect of excersize is to change your hormonal balance, the actual tissue-building happens afterwards.
And this here nicely sums up anti-vaccination movement and most other problems in modern society.
Oh well, another 10 millenia and perhaps humans will actually get competent enough with abstract thought that it'll happen automatically without needing a constant reminder, such as sick children, on sight.
In a sense, it is. A corporation is an interacting organization of information-handling units, and your brain is an interacting organization of information-handling units. The difference is that employees have much greater internal than external bandwidth, and don't exist solely in the context of the corporation; nonetheless, a corporation typically has its own culture - it's own personality - separate from any one individual.
This is true of other organizations too, and is the reason why it makes sense to be talking about "China" and "USA" like they were living things. Sure, every action they actually take is taken by someone on their behalf, but there's an entity authorizing that, dispersed in little bits and pieces into millions of humans. It could be described as a lifeform inhabiting the noosphere, and since the capacity to produce said sphere of culture is very new and unoptimized, evolutionarily speaking, the entity is pretty primitive yet. Of course, as we continue to evolve, so do our shadows, and it might be an interesting experiment to make those pieces better able to communicate and see if that might result in true self-awareness.
Same reason your PC doesn't: developers and users have a natural conflict of interests, and developers have the control.
So their support for a racist, oppressive regime was based on selfishness and imperialism rather than racism. What a relief, for a moment I thought they might have been bad people.
Sure there is: accounting. Bitcoin is a distributed accounting system with access controls on account transactions. Every trader in history would find that valuable.
I have no idea how NYSE handles its mail. I've never been there. I'm making an analogy for the purpose of applying physical intuitions to the problem; the actual physical layout and mail handling procedures of NYSE are irrelevant for that.
I'm surprised you're apparently unaware of the concept - but perhaps I shouldn't be, since you also seem to not know what a strawman is.
Not being a court, we can take malicious intent as given, at least for the purposes of this conversation.
"What if I knew those 9,999,999 other people were going to be sending their letters at the same time, and the combined effect would take the exchange down?"
So yes, it does. DDOS is basically several people mailing the victim simultaneously, so that the final volume grows large enough to jam their mailbox.
Right. So sending a few IP packets constitutes as a conspiracy, then? And the crime of taking down a website should be punished by 15 years in jail and half a million dollar fine?
Fantasizing about being a supreme dictator and torturing people to death has nothing to do with law enforcement. Go ahead and daydream about it if that's your thing, but if you post such fantasies publicly, expect your issues to be commented on. Get help.
Hey, they're trying. But until we come up with a way to waterboard people over the Internet, Anonymous simply can't reach the standards of "people with actual resources". And off-country prison camps to keep their kidnap victims out of legal help's reach don't come cheap, you know.
Let's say I send a strongly worded letter of protest to the NYSE stock exchange. Is this illegal? Now suppose 9,999,999 other people also send similar letters, and the stock exchange is so full of them the personnel can't get in, taking it offline. Am I now a criminal? What if I knew those 9,999,999 other people were going to be sending their letters at the same time, and the combined effect would take the exchange down. Does that make me a criminal, and if it does, should I bear the full responsibility of the combined effect?
In other words: is it just to blame a single snowlake for the entire avalanche?
For that matter, does that matter? Sending someone to jail for 15 years for causing a minor inconvenience is an absurd overreaction. I suspect this is not about justice or even the law but power: someone is feeling theirs threatened and is breaking out the jackboot.
Using victims of crime as an excuse for your fascist fantasies is no different than using children as excuse for censorship. It also fails just as hard to actually justify anything. It does, however, go to show that a lot of people would probably benefit from consultation.
But at least you were honest in the quote: you don't give a shit about the victims.
That's... a rather interesting definition of karma. And unfortunate for you, considering what you could do with a computer. Not to mention a pair of hands. Or your life, for that matter.
Do you work in the US judiciary by any chance?
No, because they could had used the money to hire someone else to steal the Cobalt and so forth.
That's part of it, but there's another reason: Bitcoin is simply the fastest, most convenient and secure way to send and receive payments over the Internet. No need to submit your credit card information, no waiting for wire transfers to complete, no worries about PayPal suddenly deciding they don't like your business and freezing your funds.
Bitcoin has an ecological niche in the Internet age economy.
The Nazi regime didn't last long, because it started war after war until it was everyone's enemy - sounds familiar? And East German government lasted for 45 years because it had the backing of a greater power, and fell pretty much instantly when that backing failed.
Anyway, the US doesn't really resemble either. Nazis and Communists were ideology-based tyrants, while the US looks more like a failing state: the economy continues getting worse, everyone loots as much of the pie as they can to themselves and their friends, tribalism rises, the state tries to compensate with ever-increasing internal security (both surveillance and "though" penalties), the rulers mostly live in and react to their own little world... It's the standard "rot from the inside" pattern of collapse, with the "blinded by past glories" flavour.
The actualy formula for deterrence (0 - expected utility) is: Deterrence = (Probability of getting caught) * (Severity of punishment) - (Benefit) * (1 - (Probability of getting caught)).
This doesn't actually work for three reasons:
Even ancient Rome, where conservatives demanded criminals be crucified and bleeding-heart liberals merely fed them to lions, never ran out of them.
Another way this is misleading is that the lifetime of debt slavery - what the $183,000 amounts to - is not considered the punishment. 2 years probation is the punishment; $183,000 is "damages". Thus what we have here is an example of a rather nasty loophole in the law, where the main part of a punishment is not subject to normal lawmaking process but is rather ordered by the judge on a case-by-case basis. This leads to exactly this kind of perversions.
Compare: if my dog took a dumb in your lawn, would I be quilty and should I clean it up? Absolutely. If you then spent $183,000 to dog-proof your yard, should I pay for it? Of course not, that's crazy. Except that's exactly what happend here.
The scientific finding of TFA is that women and men have their brains wired somewhat differently. The idea that this might have a causal relationship between skill differences is a hypothesis. So is the idea that the different wiring is caused by biology rather than upbringing, as the BBC article explicitly states. The idea that this explains career choices is pure speculation on the part of the submitter. And the amount of people who rushed to accept such speculation as proof that there's no sexism in IT strongly suggests that there is plenty of sexism in IT.
Whether the society in general is at fault for the failures of one of its subcultures is another question.
Well... no. Deep down people are genetically programmed to try to satisfy a number of reward circuits. Some of these are connected to their own immediate bodily needs, but they are also connected to other people's bodily needs, in infancy via mirror neurons and later via power of abstraction and imagination. This connection can easily get strong enough for people to give their lives for other people or even completely abstract causes.
Now, it's entirely possible to claim that people who die for a cause are still "looking out for number one" in a roundabout way, but the actual resultant behaviour is a good enough facsimile of altruism that it effectively invalidates your assertion.
Elaborate. What abuse are you referring to, specifically? Because as far as I can see, the unions are doing the exact same as any other gorup of people: using their bargaining power to benefit their members as much as possible. Which might well be "abuse", but if it is, it applies equally well to, say, corporations and political parties.
You had it easy. We had to mine the copper for the cable ourselves. And walk to the mine through a snowstorm uphill both ways. But at least I had copper; my predecessor had to push hydrogen nucleus together with their teeth.
Heck, I heard the whole Big Bang was just a server room project that got out of hand...
No, because if it really turns out that what set of genitals you have play a major role in such a huge financial decision as what career you choose, even in the absence of outside coercion, then that instantly invalidates any economic theory that assumes people generally make rational (from purely economic perspective) choices - which would be all of them. Alternatively, if it turns out that career choices are affected by such coercion, for example in the form of sexism, then that is distorting the market and resulting in a needless net loss for the economy which can ill afford it, as well as continuing a tradition of power abuse humanity can afford even less. Either way, this is one subject where we really can't afford to leave any hair unsplit when searching for the answer.
I'm not sure what you mean here. High school is general education, not vocational training. It's very purpose is to expose students to as many things as possible with the hope that they will be at least somewhat familiar with most things. And computers and programming are unlikely to become any less important anytime soon.
And it's an odd expression to use, that "they don't need to have their noses rubbed into it". Because you usually rub someone's nose into their failures or inadequecies, not mere lack of interest in something. It almost sounds like you were defending a weakling from being bullied - in other words, it sounds like you're saying girls can't program and we all should leave them alone already.
Oh well, I'm sure it was just a bad choice of words from your part and you didn't actually mean anything so ridiculously sexist.
Moneyed interests who quote snippets from any such discussion out of context in order to discredit science and delay any attempts to do anything about the problem, since maintaining status quo is in their short-term interest. But a lot of the credit must also be given to the very human tendency to ignore any unpleasant potential outcomes, even if they're likely (which explains why casinos stay in business, and why Microsoft released Windows 8 with the Metro UI). This time that head-in-the-bushes approach is really going to cost all of us. Just goes to show that humanity is still not that good with that whole sapience thing...
Not that it really matters anymore - the double-whammy of running out of (affordable) oil and constantly growing disaster recovery costs are already taking care of the problem the hard way: by utterly annihilating industrial economies. That ever-increasing capital-leeching effect what keeps the world locked in a depression, and likely will for the next several decades even in the best case (the worst is a collapse and return to agrarian hellhole).
At this point, pretty much the only way this could end well is if someone comes up with an efficient method of converting cellulose to crude oil. Some bacteria show promise.
And why would you expect a society that refers to its own members as "human resources" to be any less beastly towards any other creature?
Face it: humanity has a lot of growing up to do before it can be trusted. A society that glorifies greed and selfishness and worships power is utterly incapable of any higher-order function than simply consuming everything on its path. We are unable to change even for the sake of survival, eating ourselves to death individually and consuming every last drop of oil and then having our economy collapse as a society, so what on Earth makes you think we'd do so for the sake of ethics?
Oh well, maybe after another 10,000 years and a dark age or three...
Good for Jews. But that doesn't stop a lot of (Christian) people from trying to dictate who can or can't marry who based on their religion - I am, of course, referring to the opposition to gay marriage. So it would be best to officially secularize the state-concerning legal aspects of marriage, and let various churches, sects and suicide cults conduct whatever rituals they want for who they want on whatever basis they want.
They won't, and the state doesn't have the authority to demand they do. On the other hand, the state does have the authority to separate any religious aspecs from the legal aspects, to not give them any consideration or the power of law. The end result is the same.
However, animals are not, in fact, infants, so it's not like there's anything in particular that would need justifying. After all, the default is that you can do anything you like as long as other people have no legitimate reason to stop you, and the main disagreements come over what counts as a legitimate reason.
That the rest of society needs to entertain the tought, even hypothethically, with whether or not to formally recognize a relationship between (wo)man and monkey does highlight why giving marriage a legal status is probably not a good idea. It's ultimately a religious ritual and should be left outside the scope of secular society.
Have some faith in humanity, or at least it's hormones :). Why wait for aliens when you can use applied psychology to make your own?
I swear, if someone found a way to sexualize Tokamaks we'd have fusion power in a year...
Short answer: https://kerbalspaceprogram.com//. Not completely accurate, but a great way to learn basic orbital mechanics anyway.
Long answer: no, because you're moving sideways and so will the bullet. If you were to shoot a bullet towards the Sun from Earth orbit, the actual velocity vector (direction) of the bullet would be your initial motion (~29.8 km/s) + the velocity given to the bullet by the gun (a lot less, unless you have one hell of a gun). Actually hitting the Sun would require aiming backwards against the sideways (orbital) motion, but since the motion is so huge you can't cancel more than a tiny fraction of it. Not without huge-ass engines or taking advantage of chaos theory, anyway.