What does it say about the quality of a democracy when all it takes to win is to advertise more? If victory goes to whoever spends the most, there is a deeper and far more fundamental flaw in democracy than just too much money. You are not having citizens select good leaders any more. What you really have is just a game where the person who can raise the most money wins.
The purpose of democracy isn't to select good leaders, it's to limit the damage bad leaders can do and to get rid of them without that messy revolution business.
Also, when every special interest group can spread their message without limit, the voter ends up hearing thousands of messages, some of them true, some of them inaccurate, some of them outright lies. It's a bit like being in the middle of a huge crowd where everyone chants their own thing. How do you get your message through the noise? You shout, and he who shouts the loudest, reaches the most people.
The political system is simply too complex for people to make informed decisions. It's not that they are too stupid to understand it, it's simply that they don't have time to do the research into each candidate and issue. This gives rise to party-line voting and all the issues that has.
I'm not saying it isn't true, but I am saying that it shines a big old spotlight on the weakness of a democracy when you need to perfectly balance the sides in terms of resources or else the idiot masses will vote for the one with more bling. Even if you balance out the candidates, it is a pretty safe assumption that your citizenry is being swayed on something inane rather than the quality of the leader.
They aren't idiots, they are simply too busy with all the other things that demand their attention to study politics in-depth. The candidates with lots of bling catch their attention, and the size of the campaign suggests that these are the "major" candidates, so the people use their limited research time to choose between them.
Being swayed by inane things is another symptom of this same problem: when you don't really understand the thing you're looking at, you have no way of focusing your attention on relevant things, since you don't know what those might be. You'll end up looking what other people are focusing on, and whatever makes the most noise/shines prettiests/whatever.
I'm not saying I am not for laws regulating how much people can spend on speech. I am saying the fact that anyone thinks they are a good idea is a pretty good sign something is rotten in terms of our governing system.
Yes: people don't have enough time to pay sufficient attention to it.
Mind you, this problem could be fixed by having dedicated political journalists summarizing and abstracting politics from various points of view, but then you get the problem of corrupting these journalists...
And you could also fix it temporarily by enhancing the human brain with technology, connecting it to supercomputer-on-a-chip or something, but then the politicians do the same and the system gets even more complex to compensate.
Democracy worked in ancient Greece because slaves did all the work, so citizens could focus their attention to politics. It doesn't work well in the modern world, because we are the wage slaves and can only give an extremely shallow attention to politics. Yet every alternative to democracy is even worse, as history has demonstrated us time and again. So, I don't think that there's anything we can really do about this problem; it's inherent in popular democracy where everyone can vote, and popular democracy is the best political system of all known - and, I suspect, all possible - by a ridiculously large margin.
If you attend a college or university, chances are you are held to a standard of behaviour that prevents you from making the learning institution look like a fool.
Held by what authority? Please explain the logic that justifies the university - or, for that matter, any organization - demanding complete control over its students lives?
Admissions papers are full of "Sign here on the X", one of them was your agreement to not be a jackass and accept the college's rulings on your behavior.
Do you honestly think that you are bound to university's will just because you signed a paper? That they can simply decide that they don't like something you've done so you have to pay them 300 pounds? Seriously?
Don't like it? There's the door.
Except that, as you yourself noted, the student and the university have a contract.
You would think there would be an eventual breaking point, yes?
And when that is reached, you get a revolution, which usually ends up putting even nastier people in power, since a revolution temporarily suspends the rule of law, giving the advantage to ruthless people since there's no longer anyone capable of reining them in.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't stop playing. The game is stacked against you from the very laws of thermodynamics to the notion of "corporate personhood".
What you'll see: spacing between each "o" varies at each rotation step, and you can see "steps" in the underlining. That wouldn't happen with flash.
It wouldn't happen with SVG either. Which, I might add, is supported by every modern browser and will be supported even by IE in the next version.
Basically while the fonts are anti-aliased, the position of each letter is computed as an integer. In flash, every coordinate is computed in floating point.
Shouldn't you simply turn the whole thing to bezier curves, and then apply a rotation matrix? This sounds more like a rendering bug than anything else.
GGGP may have been being a bit unscientific by saying "it will happen",but short of a truly astounding discovery that we haven't made yet (of the unique bit), consensus points to his sentiments being basically right.
Actually, "it will happen" implies that it'll happen for sure everywhere life can exist. The difference between "it might happen" and "it will happen" is the difference between universe with some life-bearing planets scattered here and there and one full of bug-eyed aliens. It's not being "a bit unscientific", it changes the nature of universe completely. That was my complaint.
If they are forced to pay $50 billion, they got screwed by the government.
And if they aren't, real human beings get screwed over by them.
You can't change the rules while the game is in progress.
Yes, you can. And in fact they regularly are, in more complex games, such as D&D. Humans are imperfect and the rules they make sometimes have holes which let some players screw other players.
This is especially true of games where a huge disparity of power exists between players, such as the game of BP vs. real human beings.
No matter how much we like to hate BP, you have to realize they were just playing the game as it was presented by the US government. I think we can all agree that the liability caps were a stupid, stupid idea by now and if we retroactively enforce them, we essentially give the government to take down whatever business they don't really like.
And that's a great idea. Businesses aren't holy cows, they are the workhorses of economy; if one acts all uppity, why shouldn't it be put down and shipped to the glue factory?
In fact I say we start the slaughter right now. I, for one, am tired of carrying horses on my back.
Should BP pay for the spill? Absolutely, but we missed our chance in 1990, it is simply unfair to change the rules of a game in progress.
Whenever there's a story about some company doing something technically legal but horribly unfair, we get a hundred posts defending their right to do so, saying that the "world is not fair; deal with it". The second someone dares to suggest dealing with it by treating a company the same way, we get cries of "wah! unfair!".
Either fairness is important or it isn't. Either you can do anything you can get away with, or you can't. You can't have it both ways depending on whichever suits you best at the moment. Corporate America, which way do you want it?
What's the problem? It is! This stuff is leaking out of the EARTH, with no factory processing, it's just, you know, leaking... All Natural (TM) oil. Just the Earth "doing it's thing".
The periodic extinction of dominant megafauna (that's currently us) is also natural and just the Earth "doing it's thing".
If you're like me (and most serious scientists, I gather) and believe life on Earth formed spontaneously, then it's reasonable enough to assume it can happen again. We have absolutely zero ideas how easy this is to happen, so there's no good reason to claim it can't be happening all the time.
There's no good reason to assume it is.
In short, it seems more likely that it'd happen again than not. And for all we know, Titan is paradise incarnate for methane-drinking, hydrogen breathing life.
It may or may not be more likely than not to happen again somewhere in the universe. None of this says anything about the likelihood of Titan having any kind of life. It most certainly doesn't justify grandparent's assertion that "If the chemistry is right, it will start itself."
And, frankly, we don't know if methane-based life is even possible. We are speculating that it might, but we don't know any actual examples of it. Why are people always jumping from "coulde be" into "sure is"?
On what basis do you make this statement? What's the link between consistency and whether something is implementable?
"Internally consistent" means that there are no logical conflicts. This, in turn, means that there is a set of values of variables - and possibly several sets - that satisfy the policy; that is, there is some set of circumstances where the policy can be said to have been implemented.
By contrast, being internally inconsistent means that the policy conflicts with itself; no matter what set of circumstances come about, some part or parts of the policy will always remain unimplemented.
How are political problems ever not implementable anyway? It seems like just about any idea in politics could be implemented. The goals might not be achieved, but when have the expressed goals of any political policy (consistent or otherwise) ever been fully achieved?
Well, for example, the idea "complete freedom for everyone" is unimplementable, since it gives one person freedom to oppress others and those others freedom from being oppressed. It's not that the goals can't be achieved; it's that the goals themselves don't actually describe any conceivable circumstances.
Basically, none of the ideas in politics or public policy work. It's all a mishmash of partial successes, temporary successes, and terrible failures. That's the biggest reason governments should do less and just let citizens sort out their own problems. Citizens will make mistakes too, but they should succeed or fail on their own rather than have failure forced on them by would-be kings and tyrants.
And when governments back away, guess what rises from the woodwork to fill the power vacuum? Kings and tyrants, that's who: your friendly neighbourhood gang leader, the local power company headsman who's no longer bound by regulation and can excersize his power to make you sit in the dark if you don't obey him, the local shopkeeper who makes an agreement with other shopkeepers to rise prices to a level that gives them more profits, etc.
Every leash is held by someone. The only question is whether you have any power over whoever holds it. Representative government tries to do just that to curb the worst abuses of power; weaken it enough and you get to enjoy the joke of those who aren't answerable to you.
And the couple was just lucky this wasn't 20-30 years ago. They may have never made it home.
This rises a question of just why anyone would ever want to visit a casino, if the best you can hope even with fantastic luck is to lose just money? Seriously, if you literally can't win what's the point?
There are *very* strict legal certification and tamper-resistance requirements for gambling machines in the USA. The software is about the quality of what they use on the space shuttle.
I guess we now know what really happened to Challenger and Columbia.
I'll be astonished if the winners' case wouldn't stand up in court.
I'd be astonished if he who has more gold wouldn't win.
Though for that amount of money I wouldn't be surprised if they threatened people with thugs, and hundreds of thousands might be nicer than losing the use of your legs..
"Don't go to Wildwood Casino, if you win they send mafia thugs after you!"
Just apologize, blame it all on some stupid bureaucrat, pay what you owe and a million extra on top, and go back to making money. Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; just because you're a CEO doesn't mean you have to be Stupid Evil.
So when's the lottery going to start this scam? "Oh sorry, I know we read your winning numbers but you really didn't win"
A well-organized lottery doesn't give the organizer any more money even if nobody wins; the prize will simply be given to charity or otherwise disposed of. That way there's no incentive to cheat for short-term profits, and the whole things stays running year after year, decade after decade, making money hand over fist the whole time.
Frankly, this entire story is beyond idiotic. The only reason people play is for the dream of striking it rich; lose that and the whole gambling industry goes belly-up. The people who made the decision to not pay have managed to top even the RIAA in sheer stupidity.
Instead of having the zeitgeist be "we won $11 million at Wildwood Casino" it's "don't go to Wildwood Casino, even if you win they'll cheat you out of your winnings". What utter morons.
The system works both ways with the advantage being to the house. They know when the payout has been incorrectly dispensed because there is a tightly held ratio that should be observed. All large payouts will also require the machine to be inspected. There will be no slipping through the cracks on foul play.
A machine that guarantees a certain percentage of return within a certain time window (probably measured in games played) is not random. If it's not random there's a pattern to how it dispenses winnings. If there's a pattern to it, it should be possible to notice which machines are about to increase their payoff to even the ratio, so it just might be possible to increase your rate of return.
Of course this doesn't guarantee that you can get it over 1. And it especially doesn't guarantee that the casino won't declare you a cheater and ban you, or do something nastier - frankly, these parasites are worse than Al Capone, who at least was providing an actual service to his customers.
Life doesn't have to "get" there. If the chemistry is right, it will start itself.
Maybe. Do you have any actual evidence that this is reasonable likely, or are you just guessing that since it happened on Earth, it must happen everywhere?
If we go back to limiting the Federal government to the powers as outlined in the Constitution, then you'll notice we're not advocating writing a new Constitution or going back to the one from 1776, but rather the current Constitution, which says "small central government, let the localities rule themselves".
"provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States"
Sorry, but as written, your Constitution has a privilege escalation bug;).
Who decided they wanted "an internally consistent" anything? Has anyone established that internal consistency has some sort of value? It doesn't seem to.
Well, an internally consistent political program does have the itty bitty advantage of being actually implementable.
We do want environmental regulation because your rights don't involve the right to harm others, including polluting their environment. We don't want this to be used an excuse for the government to intrude in every aspect of our lives though.
Unfortunately, everything you do can affect someone else, possibly in harmful ways. By accepting environmental regulation you have already extended the sphere of "harm" beyond direct physical violence (which itself extended it one step beyond "none"), so why stop there? Why not go one step further, or one step back?
No matter what, you're almost always doing something that causes trouble for someone else, and they want to do something about it. Since physical violence is verboten, the only way left to do so is through regulations. That's why governments tend to eventually extend to intrude on all areas of human life.
I'm neither interested in being ruled by 200-year-dead men, nor rewriting the Constitution every two or three years to account for the most recent maturation of society.
The whole point of having two levels of laws - the Constitution and the rest - is to allow the normal laws that deal with day-to-day matters be easily adjusted as needed, yet make it hard for a demagogue to use his popularity to rewrite laws to grab himself dictatorial powers. If you need to change your Constitution every few years, you are doing it wrong.
Of course, US has special problems caused by starting as a loose alliance of states, evolving into a nation-state only later, and failing to update its Constitution to more accurately reflect the new reality, leading to some rather "creative" reinterpretations of said document, but still...
Strange, I thought most Corporatist were Lawful Evil... Chaotic Stupid just doesn't seem to fit.
Corporations are Neutral Evil: they use the law when it benefits them, but are just as happy to break it.
"A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple. She sheds no tears for those she kills, whether for profit, sport, or convenience. She has no love of order and holds no illusion that following laws, traditions, or codes would make her any better or more noble. On the other hand, she doesn't have the restless nature or love of conflict that a chaotic evil villain has." -http://easydamus.com/neutralevil.html
A person can self-govern himself. A bunch of people can't, because they aren't a single entity, yet they must if they live next to each other, or they'll end up killing each other. Add the fact that humans are physically too feeble to survive on their own, and you get a nasty little problem, which we still haven't really solved.
Who is the rightful ruler, then?
No one. It's one of those "we're in a lifeboat and have no food, so let's draw lots to see who gets eaten" -situations. It's not right by any stretch of imagination, but it's that or everyone dies.
And how is a government protecting people by forcing them under rule they might find oppressive? I can see that under many strains of conservatism and paternalistic liberalism, but...
If government allowed people to secede whenever they wanted, I could simply secede, mug someone, then rejoin. By not accepting my secession the government is not protecting me, obviously, but both my victims and the victims of vigilantes that would rise to hunt me down if the police failed to do so. And if the government doesn't allow me to secede whenever I want, then it's keeping me in by force.
Basically, rule that's not backed by force is just another name for anarchy, since you can simply ignore it, and anarchy can only work if humans are not bastards, and, well...
Maybe you could use one of those morphing tools that were all the rage a few years back? They were near-realtime even then, and used a kind of skeletal animation as a control rig.
What we need is students who were taught SELF discipline. If you teach kids "Do as you're told or bad things happen" (translation of your words: 'actions with consequences') then all you are teaching them is "don't get caught."
Thus setting them for a fast-track to a CEO position. Hey, I guess those schools are trying their best to help the kids afterall:).
If you teach them "do the right thing, because it is right" - then you're creating kids who will (nearly) always choose to DO the right thing, even when it's hard and there's no chance of getting caught.
Right, by who's morality? Yours? Self-disclipine is the ability to choose long-term goals over short-term instinct satisfaction; this, on the other hand, souds more like what Pratchett called "a whip in the soul" in "Interesting Times".
Do the right thing because you are afraid of being caught, or because you're a Nietschean ubermensch and have chosen doing the right thing as part of your identity, or because you think you'll go to Hell if you won't, or because you want to change the world, or whatever! These are all good reasons to do the right thing. But saying "because it's the right thing to do" sounds like wishy-washy circular reasoning to me, and suggests that you haven't really bothered to think it through. You certainly aren't going to convince anyone else to do likewise with it.
After all, people who question the rules will also question why they should give a rat's ass of something being right or wrong. It's better to have a good answer ready.
Conservatives like yourselves like to couch your arguments in select passages of the constitution without consideration of the larger context.
This reminded me of a recent slacktivist blog entry, which was about how Christian fundamentalists keep on focusing on the few parts of the Bible which talk about homosexuality and ignore the huge passages of text which condemn hoarding wealth. Given the overlap of conservatism and religion - the infamous "religious right" - I wonder if there's a connection?
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The purpose of democracy isn't to select good leaders, it's to limit the damage bad leaders can do and to get rid of them without that messy revolution business.
Also, when every special interest group can spread their message without limit, the voter ends up hearing thousands of messages, some of them true, some of them inaccurate, some of them outright lies. It's a bit like being in the middle of a huge crowd where everyone chants their own thing. How do you get your message through the noise? You shout, and he who shouts the loudest, reaches the most people.
The political system is simply too complex for people to make informed decisions. It's not that they are too stupid to understand it, it's simply that they don't have time to do the research into each candidate and issue. This gives rise to party-line voting and all the issues that has.
They aren't idiots, they are simply too busy with all the other things that demand their attention to study politics in-depth. The candidates with lots of bling catch their attention, and the size of the campaign suggests that these are the "major" candidates, so the people use their limited research time to choose between them.
Being swayed by inane things is another symptom of this same problem: when you don't really understand the thing you're looking at, you have no way of focusing your attention on relevant things, since you don't know what those might be. You'll end up looking what other people are focusing on, and whatever makes the most noise/shines prettiests/whatever.
Yes: people don't have enough time to pay sufficient attention to it.
Mind you, this problem could be fixed by having dedicated political journalists summarizing and abstracting politics from various points of view, but then you get the problem of corrupting these journalists...
And you could also fix it temporarily by enhancing the human brain with technology, connecting it to supercomputer-on-a-chip or something, but then the politicians do the same and the system gets even more complex to compensate.
Democracy worked in ancient Greece because slaves did all the work, so citizens could focus their attention to politics. It doesn't work well in the modern world, because we are the wage slaves and can only give an extremely shallow attention to politics. Yet every alternative to democracy is even worse, as history has demonstrated us time and again. So, I don't think that there's anything we can really do about this problem; it's inherent in popular democracy where everyone can vote, and popular democracy is the best political system of all known - and, I suspect, all possible - by a ridiculously large margin.
Held by what authority? Please explain the logic that justifies the university - or, for that matter, any organization - demanding complete control over its students lives?
Do you honestly think that you are bound to university's will just because you signed a paper? That they can simply decide that they don't like something you've done so you have to pay them 300 pounds? Seriously?
Except that, as you yourself noted, the student and the university have a contract.
And when that is reached, you get a revolution, which usually ends up putting even nastier people in power, since a revolution temporarily suspends the rule of law, giving the advantage to ruthless people since there's no longer anyone capable of reining them in.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't stop playing. The game is stacked against you from the very laws of thermodynamics to the notion of "corporate personhood".
It wouldn't happen with SVG either. Which, I might add, is supported by every modern browser and will be supported even by IE in the next version.
Shouldn't you simply turn the whole thing to bezier curves, and then apply a rotation matrix? This sounds more like a rendering bug than anything else.
Actually, "it will happen" implies that it'll happen for sure everywhere life can exist. The difference between "it might happen" and "it will happen" is the difference between universe with some life-bearing planets scattered here and there and one full of bug-eyed aliens. It's not being "a bit unscientific", it changes the nature of universe completely. That was my complaint.
And if they aren't, real human beings get screwed over by them.
Yes, you can. And in fact they regularly are, in more complex games, such as D&D. Humans are imperfect and the rules they make sometimes have holes which let some players screw other players.
This is especially true of games where a huge disparity of power exists between players, such as the game of BP vs. real human beings.
And that's a great idea. Businesses aren't holy cows, they are the workhorses of economy; if one acts all uppity, why shouldn't it be put down and shipped to the glue factory?
In fact I say we start the slaughter right now. I, for one, am tired of carrying horses on my back.
Whenever there's a story about some company doing something technically legal but horribly unfair, we get a hundred posts defending their right to do so, saying that the "world is not fair; deal with it". The second someone dares to suggest dealing with it by treating a company the same way, we get cries of "wah! unfair!".
Either fairness is important or it isn't. Either you can do anything you can get away with, or you can't. You can't have it both ways depending on whichever suits you best at the moment. Corporate America, which way do you want it?
The periodic extinction of dominant megafauna (that's currently us) is also natural and just the Earth "doing it's thing".
Just saying.
I see your 39 years and rise to 6000.
There's no good reason to assume it is.
It may or may not be more likely than not to happen again somewhere in the universe. None of this says anything about the likelihood of Titan having any kind of life. It most certainly doesn't justify grandparent's assertion that "If the chemistry is right, it will start itself."
And, frankly, we don't know if methane-based life is even possible. We are speculating that it might, but we don't know any actual examples of it. Why are people always jumping from "coulde be" into "sure is"?
"Internally consistent" means that there are no logical conflicts. This, in turn, means that there is a set of values of variables - and possibly several sets - that satisfy the policy; that is, there is some set of circumstances where the policy can be said to have been implemented.
By contrast, being internally inconsistent means that the policy conflicts with itself; no matter what set of circumstances come about, some part or parts of the policy will always remain unimplemented.
Well, for example, the idea "complete freedom for everyone" is unimplementable, since it gives one person freedom to oppress others and those others freedom from being oppressed. It's not that the goals can't be achieved; it's that the goals themselves don't actually describe any conceivable circumstances.
And when governments back away, guess what rises from the woodwork to fill the power vacuum? Kings and tyrants, that's who: your friendly neighbourhood gang leader, the local power company headsman who's no longer bound by regulation and can excersize his power to make you sit in the dark if you don't obey him, the local shopkeeper who makes an agreement with other shopkeepers to rise prices to a level that gives them more profits, etc.
Every leash is held by someone. The only question is whether you have any power over whoever holds it. Representative government tries to do just that to curb the worst abuses of power; weaken it enough and you get to enjoy the joke of those who aren't answerable to you.
This rises a question of just why anyone would ever want to visit a casino, if the best you can hope even with fantastic luck is to lose just money? Seriously, if you literally can't win what's the point?
I guess we now know what really happened to Challenger and Columbia.
I'd be astonished if he who has more gold wouldn't win.
"Don't go to Wildwood Casino, if you win they send mafia thugs after you!"
Just apologize, blame it all on some stupid bureaucrat, pay what you owe and a million extra on top, and go back to making money. Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; just because you're a CEO doesn't mean you have to be Stupid Evil.
A well-organized lottery doesn't give the organizer any more money even if nobody wins; the prize will simply be given to charity or otherwise disposed of. That way there's no incentive to cheat for short-term profits, and the whole things stays running year after year, decade after decade, making money hand over fist the whole time.
Frankly, this entire story is beyond idiotic. The only reason people play is for the dream of striking it rich; lose that and the whole gambling industry goes belly-up. The people who made the decision to not pay have managed to top even the RIAA in sheer stupidity.
Instead of having the zeitgeist be "we won $11 million at Wildwood Casino" it's "don't go to Wildwood Casino, even if you win they'll cheat you out of your winnings". What utter morons.
A machine that guarantees a certain percentage of return within a certain time window (probably measured in games played) is not random. If it's not random there's a pattern to how it dispenses winnings. If there's a pattern to it, it should be possible to notice which machines are about to increase their payoff to even the ratio, so it just might be possible to increase your rate of return.
Of course this doesn't guarantee that you can get it over 1. And it especially doesn't guarantee that the casino won't declare you a cheater and ban you, or do something nastier - frankly, these parasites are worse than Al Capone, who at least was providing an actual service to his customers.
Maybe. Do you have any actual evidence that this is reasonable likely, or are you just guessing that since it happened on Earth, it must happen everywhere?
"provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States"
Sorry, but as written, your Constitution has a privilege escalation bug ;).
Well, an internally consistent political program does have the itty bitty advantage of being actually implementable.
Unfortunately, everything you do can affect someone else, possibly in harmful ways. By accepting environmental regulation you have already extended the sphere of "harm" beyond direct physical violence (which itself extended it one step beyond "none"), so why stop there? Why not go one step further, or one step back?
No matter what, you're almost always doing something that causes trouble for someone else, and they want to do something about it. Since physical violence is verboten, the only way left to do so is through regulations. That's why governments tend to eventually extend to intrude on all areas of human life.
The whole point of having two levels of laws - the Constitution and the rest - is to allow the normal laws that deal with day-to-day matters be easily adjusted as needed, yet make it hard for a demagogue to use his popularity to rewrite laws to grab himself dictatorial powers. If you need to change your Constitution every few years, you are doing it wrong.
Of course, US has special problems caused by starting as a loose alliance of states, evolving into a nation-state only later, and failing to update its Constitution to more accurately reflect the new reality, leading to some rather "creative" reinterpretations of said document, but still...
Corporations are Neutral Evil: they use the law when it benefits them, but are just as happy to break it.
"A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple. She sheds no tears for those she kills, whether for profit, sport, or convenience. She has no love of order and holds no illusion that following laws, traditions, or codes would make her any better or more noble. On the other hand, she doesn't have the restless nature or love of conflict that a chaotic evil villain has." -http://easydamus.com/neutralevil.html
A person can self-govern himself. A bunch of people can't, because they aren't a single entity, yet they must if they live next to each other, or they'll end up killing each other. Add the fact that humans are physically too feeble to survive on their own, and you get a nasty little problem, which we still haven't really solved.
No one. It's one of those "we're in a lifeboat and have no food, so let's draw lots to see who gets eaten" -situations. It's not right by any stretch of imagination, but it's that or everyone dies.
If government allowed people to secede whenever they wanted, I could simply secede, mug someone, then rejoin. By not accepting my secession the government is not protecting me, obviously, but both my victims and the victims of vigilantes that would rise to hunt me down if the police failed to do so. And if the government doesn't allow me to secede whenever I want, then it's keeping me in by force.
Basically, rule that's not backed by force is just another name for anarchy, since you can simply ignore it, and anarchy can only work if humans are not bastards, and, well...
Maybe you could use one of those morphing tools that were all the rage a few years back? They were near-realtime even then, and used a kind of skeletal animation as a control rig.
Thus setting them for a fast-track to a CEO position. Hey, I guess those schools are trying their best to help the kids afterall :).
Right, by who's morality? Yours? Self-disclipine is the ability to choose long-term goals over short-term instinct satisfaction; this, on the other hand, souds more like what Pratchett called "a whip in the soul" in "Interesting Times".
Do the right thing because you are afraid of being caught, or because you're a Nietschean ubermensch and have chosen doing the right thing as part of your identity, or because you think you'll go to Hell if you won't, or because you want to change the world, or whatever! These are all good reasons to do the right thing. But saying "because it's the right thing to do" sounds like wishy-washy circular reasoning to me, and suggests that you haven't really bothered to think it through. You certainly aren't going to convince anyone else to do likewise with it.
After all, people who question the rules will also question why they should give a rat's ass of something being right or wrong. It's better to have a good answer ready.
This reminded me of a recent slacktivist blog entry, which was about how Christian fundamentalists keep on focusing on the few parts of the Bible which talk about homosexuality and ignore the huge passages of text which condemn hoarding wealth. Given the overlap of conservatism and religion - the infamous "religious right" - I wonder if there's a connection?