Actually, circular orbits are the lowest energy state. Thus, tidal forces cause the system to gradually lose energy until it settles into a circular orbit.
Except that the tidal forces in the Earth-Moon system give energy to the Moon, not take it (to be more exact, they transfer Earth's rotational energy to the Moon, causing Moon's orbital speed to grow and Earth's day to lengthen). And those tidal forces are the strongest when the Moon is closest to the Earth. Now, all you astronavigators out there, what happens when an object in an elliptical orbit gets a speed boost at the lowest point of the orbit ? That's right, the highest point rises and the lowest point is unchanged.
So, Moon's orbit should become more, not less, elliptical over time due to the tidal forces of the Earth-Moon system.
Of course Moon also gets a speed boost at the highest point of its orbit, but that boost is less strong because the distance to Earth is greater; nonetheless, the lowest point of the orbit also rises over time, just slower than the highest point.
IANACosmologist/Astronomer...but I think you can explain the Earth's bulge because it is still active;i.e. is not solid so it can expand here, contract there, sorta like a water balloon. The moon is probably completely solid and therefore should not bulge.
As you may or may not know, if you take liquid and keep it in a certain shape while it cools and solidifies, it stays in that shape. So, any bulges the Moon might have developed when it was still molten won't go away just because it solidifies.
Besides, even solid stone deforms. For example, the solid rock that makes up Himalaya has deformed quite a bit from its original flat configuration.
You know, since on-screen sex seems to be more or less okay these days, and computers allow special effects to be done for cheap, a new sci-fi series could conceivably have some other attraction than neurotic crew in a piece-of-shit starship solving their relationship problems and personal issues in the middle of a war. It's about as cliched as the overuse of darkness in FPS games.
So, any amateur filmmakers up to making interspecies sci-fi p0rn ?-)
a geforce4 card is a damn good 3d card, no reason for it not to be supported flawlessly like the newer stuff.
Hah, my Geforce2MX card is still supported by the latest NVIDIA drivers !-)
Of course this could change at any time. That's the nasty side of binary only drivers - forced hardware updates. Which, of course, is a good thing for hardware manufacturer, and likely the real reason why NVIDIA doesn't want to release an open-sourced driver.
Unfortunately, my main processor is too old model to be able to play that:(. I lack the memory protection features - the DID unit - needed to keep several personalities separate and from accessing each other's memory.
I know saying something good about Trusted Computing around here is largely akin to taping meat to myself and dancing with lions, so here is an AC post.
Only when you are clearly lying; in this particular case, you are trying to make it seem like Digital Restrictions Management is increasing security for the user of the computer, as opposed to some remote authority, which is a lie.
One of the goals that Trusted Computing is working towards is 'Sealed Storage': only the program that generates the data can access the data it has encrypted.
This is only usefull if the goal is to lock the user of the computer out of the data - that is, to prevent the user of the computer from doing anything with the data that the program make doesn't want them to, such as, say, opening a Word file in OpenOffice.
For increasing security for the user, kernel-enforced access controls are far preferable - they are both sufficient and allow the user to transfer data from application to application. For an example of such controls, see the access control system of Unix-like operating systems, such as GNU/Linux; these controls need to be revised somewhat to allow finer-grained control, but this doesn't require DRM.
I hope your corporate masters gave you a good price for your soul, astroturfer, but I doubt it very much.
all the text kept getting rewritten in demonic sanskrit.
You joke, but my parents, who recently updated from Works 2.x to Word whatever certainly didn't laugh when they realized that all their documents had indeed become incomprehensible.
I guess it says something about Microsoft when jokes like these bring back memories of actual events...
Come on, switch to Maya already. It's lightyears ahead of 3DS Max and runs great on Linux, much better performance than the windows version and doesn't crash.
Unless you happen to accidentally double-click on some control. That makes it crash almost every time - at least 6.0, I don't know about any newer versions. There's also a weird problem where particles can't be rendered on software (at least I haven't been able to figure out how to do it), which hampers my efforts to create fire-haired characters quite a bit (make a hair system, set output to NURBS curves, make the curves emit particles that turn from white to yellow to red and decrease in luminosity in time, and apply a force field upwards - slow to simulate, but works otherwise fine):(.
But, on the good side, the computer stays responsive even when Maya is rendering the scene, which is more than I can say about Poser in a lot better (processor power and display adapter) Windows XP machine. I guess that's a better scheduler at work...
music recognition doesn't work with polyphonics. that's why midi pickups are needed. those actually are six pickups (one for each string) in a single case.
I know very little about MIDI, but I have to ask: why doesn't it work ? After all, the strings are all vibrating at different frequencies (that's why you have different strings to begin with:), so it should trivial to separate each ones contribution to the overall sound wave. I'm sure an experienced person could just look at a graphical representation of the waveform and say which peak is which string.
Besides, if it's really impossible to say which strings are being used from the sound alone, then why have those strings in the first place ? After all, the listener can't tell if they're being used or not.
Is Outlook then his idea of 'exciting software'? I doubt it, Outlook is the most boring piece of software ever.
On the contrary, Outlook is a very exiting piece of software. When you open it, you never know if your machine is going to pick up some new virus that sniffs your credit card numbers and sends them to the Russian Mafia.
Outlook is very exiting, in the same way that walking across a minefield is exiting, and largely for the same reasons too. Linux email clients tend to be very boring in comparison.
there is no reason openGL cannot be a two part API, very reliable and simpler interfaces for industrial use and less stable gaming focused interfaces for non critical things that need to be bleeding edge new
You mean, like have a core API and an extension mechanism ?-)
Well, I'm no authority on the issue, but from what I understand, English is incredibly versatile in terms of its vocabulary. For example, English is the only language that lets you splice a word into a another word and still have it make sense, like "abso-fucking-lutely". As far as I know, no other language has this capability.
A finnish word (a single word, altought Slascode may end up splicing it due to its length) which means "An exhibit showing paintings about a bolt that is used to fasten the protective side fence of a railroad bridge".
When it comes to inventing new words on the spot, english really can't compete.
What you suggest is both onerous and immoral. I RTFA, and it was a lightweight 101.
I suggest that
The moral advice of the parent to the employee does not help the employer to secure themselves against malcontent employees.
The doctrine of non-violence does not work against ruthless people. It worked against the British because, in the end, the British were decent people who were not prepared to commit mass murder to maintain their control of India. Had they been willing to do so, Gandhi's methods would have not worked.
Which of these two points is immoral in any way ?
The response/parent suggested that misbehavior was justified when management does bad things. It's not. And it never will be in a civilized society. That's why we're civilized and not unconstrained to do what we want.
Is it human nature to be vandals and thieves? Yes. And murderers and rapists, too.
So which one is it ? Are we civilized or thieves, murderers and rapists ?
Try to understand. I'm not advocating any course of action. I am simply saying that there is a price for sticking to non-confrontational methods. That price is that it leaves you defenseless against evil - the thieves, murderers and rapists, and oh yes, ruthless employers.
Chose whatever path you want, but don't do so just because a path had a witty saying as an advertisement; instead, carefully consider the likely consequences and requirements of each path.
If an employer does bad things to you, leave. Nothing chains you to them-- although people try to rationalize all sorts of bad behavior based on their belief that somehow the world owes them a living, and in their world, this employer specifically. It doesn't.
But apparently the employee owes loyalty to his employer, to not sell him out to the highest bidder, and to the world, to not screw it up for his own profit, despite them owing him nothing. Funny how the responsibilities come up when talking about the employees, but employers can outsource all jobs to India and fuck their employees and that's just business like usual.
If the world owes you nothing, then you owe nothing to the world. If you owe something to the world, then the world owes you something. A relationship where only one party has responsibilities is unfair, and no one has a duty to uphold his end of an unfair relationship - the only exception being parents and really young children.
Treatment isn't a relevant defense against theft, damage, and so on. If you're not treated well, then either find a way to get treated better or leave.
This isn't a world where the ends justify the means (sorry Bush Administration).
Yes, business practices suck. But it doesn't justify boorish and/or illegal behavior. Then you're stooping as low as they are.
None of which helps you any when you're the manager trying to keep such things from happening. Which was what this story was about.
It's like the adage where if you believe in an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, everyone will need dentures and seeing-eye dogs.
The problem is that if you don't take vengeance, either by yourself or through the legal system or some equivalent, then people will keep on stabbing your eyes and stealing your teeth, since they can get away with it. Following the old adage means that there is no punishment for mistreating you, and so you will be mistreated for fun and profit.
That's a really nasty choice there - either take revenge and contribute to the problem, or don't and be crushed by those who see you as defenseless and therefore easy prey. Dead if you don't, damned if you do.
Actually, I wouldn't mind it if the person is on death row with appeals exhausted. The person on death row killed one (or more!) people to get there, and this could be a form of restitution. You can't bring the murder victim(s) back, but maybe you could save a lot of other lives.
So now I, the big pharmaneutical company, have an incentive to lobby for tougher laws - the kinds that put more people on death row for less evidence and lesser crimes. I also have an incentive to bribe judges and police officers to get more people sent to death row, all to ensure that I'll have my pick of guinea pigs. And I, the police officer, have already falsified evidence to send innocent people to their deaths more than once, so why wouldn't I do it for money ?
Besides, the last well-known doctor to experiment on people sentenced to death - completely in accordance to the laws of their society, I might add - was called Josef Mengele. Do you really want to imitate Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan ?
I bought Neverwinter Nights Saturday, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
Be sure to check Neverwinter Vault for fan-made content. While most of the modules are crap, there are some true gems there - I especially liked the Shadowlords -> Dreamcatcher -> Demon -campaign series (altought it starts only getting really good at Dreamcatcher), and the Kunoichi (warning: K-18) ones.
Pity the editor doesn't work on Linux, otherwise I'd propably try to make my own...
I remember running Doom on Linux back in 1996 at 320x240 on an unsupported trident card under XFree86 with an 8-bit color palette that got real ugly if I moved the mouse out of the window area, which was mostly full screen. It was aweful, but better than nothing. 486 DX2 66, at least 8MB of RAM, probably 16. I bet it would run better now..
The king/queen is made aware that any actions intended to reward the king/queen will result in immediate dismissal.
If the king truly does not want power, he'll simply take an action that leads to his dismissal as soon as possible, which goes on until a candidate who does want power and is smart enough to mask his self-serving actions as public good gets selected. And then you're right where you started.
You could, of course, make being dismised carry some kind of penalty; but then whoever holds the power to dismiss holds the king hostage, and can blackmail him into doing whatever he wants.
All of this, of course, assumes that the king and the who dismiss won't simply ally for their mutual benefit.
In short, some poor bastard is picked for extraordinary responsibility based solely upon their ability to lead, not upon any popularity contest, and the dictator can be overthrown in a bloodless fashion if the person turns out to be easily corruptible.
"If you keep on overthrowing leaders until I'm selected, I'll give your something good once I'm in power."
You can't stop any kind of elections from becoming popularity contests, because you can't force people to not vote based on how much they like someone. In fact any election is a popularity contest by definition; after all, one of the meanings of popular is accepted by or prevalent among the people in general.
And you can't make an incorruptible system out of corruptible humans. Power-hungry people will find ways to gain power, no matter how good the system looks on paper. After all, what forces the participants to play the parts you've written for them ?
Politicians will wake up when President Stallman of the GNU/Hurd Party is sworn in on January 21, 2009, after taking 53% of the votes, against 47% for the OSS Party, led by candidate Eric Raymond. (Raymond credits his near-victory to having a landslide amongst the "Retired CIA/NSA Agents" demographic, on account of his party having "a more intel-friendly acronym":)
So, instead of having a career politician who's main (and usually only) skill is the ability to lie with a straight face, you'd get a person who:
Is quite knowleadgable about technology.
Has a principles and has, AFAIK, never once sold out on them.
Gives stuff away for free, since one of the principles in question is to share software freely. This in the socialism-phobic USA.
Despite 2 and 3, has created an organization that has been succesfull in spreading his ideology and financially stable, too.
Has done something usefull with his life - the GNU tools are what made Linux's success possible.
Compared to what usually floats to the top in politics, Stallman's a winner in all fronts. Go Diebold !
Why? Because Jabba has, and will always be, exactly the same throughout the eons of time from the big bang forward?
Yes. It is one of the fundamental laws of physics - "The size of Jabba is invariant over time" - and is also the very reason why Big Bang happened: a universe smaller than Jabba couldn't contain Jabba, so it had to expand. If that expanding would ever stop, the universe would begin to collapse, and eventually be smaller than Jabba; that's what kept the expansion going (but just barely at the speed neccessary to prevent the collapse). By killing Jabba, princess Leia destroyed the very force keeping the universe from collapsing and has therefore doomed us all.
Yes, kids, the universe is going to collapse, we're all going to die, and it's all princess Leia's fault.
The problem is that CG still (typically) doesn't look as good as using scale models, puppets and costumes.
It's exactly the other way around. CGI looks too good. A real warship has some paint peeled off, there's some rust around, someone's coffee's been spilled on the gunner seat, there's dried muddy footprints going around the place and duct tape holding together some odd device, some doors make a screeching noise when they move no matter what you do...
A CGI ship looks like it came straight from the shipyard. No, scratch that, it looks exactly like the engineer dreamed it would - like no real ship ever can. It's geometrically perfect. It has clearly never seen a battle - heck, it has clearly never been used at all. Sure, you can add dirt and defects, but they all make the model more complicated, and no matter what you do, you'll never quite catch the infinite complexity of real-world defects.
That's how you can tell a computer-generated image from a real human. Does it have visible skin pores, some of them clearly abnormally large ? Odd decolorations of skin ? Dirt beneath its fingernails ? Visible blood vessels ? Split hairs ? Old scars ? Some fat that jiggles where solid muscle should be ? Barely visible limp ? If not, it's not a human being.
Computer generated images are perfect, and in reality nothing is perfect. That infinite depth of imperfection, which makes real beings so interesting, is simply impossible to model with a computer with current techniques. A polygon-based human is never going to pass for a real one, no matter how much effort you pour into it; there's always going to be a feeling of something being not quite right with it.
Another example, loook at the difference between Chewbacca in the original and JarJar in the new movies. Again, one looks real, the other looks like a cartoon.
Actually, Jar Jar is quite convincing, simply because it's not human and doesn't try to be. Pity that Jar Jar was written to be a clown with no history or personality either; with some real character Jar would actually have made a pretty good character despite the unrealness - or maybe because of it; Star Wars is, after all, at least as much fantasy as it is sci-fi.
No. When communist manifesto was written, the workers were slaves to the capitalists who owned the factories, since handiwork cannot compete with mass production, and mass production needs a huge amount of funds - capital - to get started, and there was a huge oversupply of laborers, so it was "my way or the highway" - and highway meant starvation.
Marx great idea was that those who do the work should get to keep the fruits of their labors; to ensure this they should own the means of production they use to do the work with. Since the means of production of that day meant factories, and since it is impossible to operate a factory alone, the only way to achieve the goal was communal ownership - the people working in the factory should be the ones who owned the factory and got the fruits of their labor, also known as profit.
It's a great idea and basically meant turning everyone into a private enterpreneur.
Then there is the nonsense about "the withering away of the state". That could never happen, as the state would not give up power willingly.
To me it seems that most states are withering away, giving more and more of their power to international corporations, a phenomenon known as globalization.
And if it did, who would make everyone share?
Sharing isn't required in communism, except for those resources that can't be operated by a single man.
I understand that the murders of Stalin et al were not mandated by the Communist Manifesto, but the complete abolition of freedom is.
No it isn't. Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the workers from virtual slavery to the capitalists. It even says so: the workers have nothing to lose but their chains.
Marx talked of class strife. In a free society, people can rise above where they were born. With communism, everyone is pulled down to poverty.
In Marx's time, you couldn't rise above where they were born. Doing so required not only huge amounts of capital which you just plain couldn't get from working, but also free time (to study and look for opportunities) which you didn't have - you were required to work 16 hours a day and stya the rest of the time near the factory in case there was a fire or something.
Besides, even if a few people out of millions manages to drag themselves up, how in blazes does that make the society free ? Most people can never be rich, since being rich means having significantly more wealth than the median wealth of your society. How does it help them any even if a few particularly bright (or obsessive) individuals manage to become their new overlords ?
The "Communism is good, but doesn't work" nonsense is repeated too often without thought.
Well, what did you expect ? Slashdot is an american website, where the majority of users are likely to be americans, and americans seem to have a rather ideologial and emotional view of economics instead of seeing them as the tools they are.
The biggest barrier is money, though. I don't mean funding, but rather that money itself is a government monopoly. Ultimately, what you talk about may require acceptance of alternative (non-centralised, community-run) monetary systems. I'd have a look into this if I were you, just so you can keep it in mind. In making the the government redundant, people will have to be able to allocate resources themselves.
You know, the obvious solution to this problem is gold standard. Make coins out of gold and make them weight as much as they're worth. With current technology, it should be easy to build some kind of device that checks that the purity and weight of a coin are within acceptable limits and is easy to carry with you.
In the long run, I think we're going to see an energy standard - energy itself is going to be used as money. Anything else can be synthesized from it with sufficient technology. And since energy is by definition (energy is the ability to do work) usefull, any inflation in such a system means that the price of energy has gone down so the total resources available have gone up, and is therefore actually desirable.
In the long run we'll switch to such systems, whether the current-style governments and corporations keep their power or not. The current system of an unlimited money supply backed with nothing whatsoever has proven itself fundamentally fragile and unstable time and again. The sooner we get rid of it the better for everyone.
Don't forget: one of the reasons why Nazis came to power was the economic chaos in Germany, which in turn was partly caused by the government printing money to the point where the paper the bills were printed on was more valuable than the bills themselves. Such a situation is always a possibility in the current system, and there's no shortage of evil maniacs ready to use it to their advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the tidal forces in the Earth-Moon system give energy to the Moon, not take it (to be more exact, they transfer Earth's rotational energy to the Moon, causing Moon's orbital speed to grow and Earth's day to lengthen). And those tidal forces are the strongest when the Moon is closest to the Earth. Now, all you astronavigators out there, what happens when an object in an elliptical orbit gets a speed boost at the lowest point of the orbit ? That's right, the highest point rises and the lowest point is unchanged.
So, Moon's orbit should become more, not less, elliptical over time due to the tidal forces of the Earth-Moon system.
Of course Moon also gets a speed boost at the highest point of its orbit, but that boost is less strong because the distance to Earth is greater; nonetheless, the lowest point of the orbit also rises over time, just slower than the highest point.
As you may or may not know, if you take liquid and keep it in a certain shape while it cools and solidifies, it stays in that shape. So, any bulges the Moon might have developed when it was still molten won't go away just because it solidifies.
Besides, even solid stone deforms. For example, the solid rock that makes up Himalaya has deformed quite a bit from its original flat configuration.
You know, since on-screen sex seems to be more or less okay these days, and computers allow special effects to be done for cheap, a new sci-fi series could conceivably have some other attraction than neurotic crew in a piece-of-shit starship solving their relationship problems and personal issues in the middle of a war. It's about as cliched as the overuse of darkness in FPS games.
So, any amateur filmmakers up to making interspecies sci-fi p0rn ?-)
Hah, my Geforce2MX card is still supported by the latest NVIDIA drivers !-)
Of course this could change at any time. That's the nasty side of binary only drivers - forced hardware updates. Which, of course, is a good thing for hardware manufacturer, and likely the real reason why NVIDIA doesn't want to release an open-sourced driver.
Unfortunately, my main processor is too old model to be able to play that :(. I lack the memory protection features - the DID unit - needed to keep several personalities separate and from accessing each other's memory.
Only when you are clearly lying; in this particular case, you are trying to make it seem like Digital Restrictions Management is increasing security for the user of the computer, as opposed to some remote authority, which is a lie.
This is only usefull if the goal is to lock the user of the computer out of the data - that is, to prevent the user of the computer from doing anything with the data that the program make doesn't want them to, such as, say, opening a Word file in OpenOffice.
For increasing security for the user, kernel-enforced access controls are far preferable - they are both sufficient and allow the user to transfer data from application to application. For an example of such controls, see the access control system of Unix-like operating systems, such as GNU/Linux; these controls need to be revised somewhat to allow finer-grained control, but this doesn't require DRM.
I hope your corporate masters gave you a good price for your soul, astroturfer, but I doubt it very much.
You joke, but my parents, who recently updated from Works 2.x to Word whatever certainly didn't laugh when they realized that all their documents had indeed become incomprehensible.
I guess it says something about Microsoft when jokes like these bring back memories of actual events...
Unless you happen to accidentally double-click on some control. That makes it crash almost every time - at least 6.0, I don't know about any newer versions. There's also a weird problem where particles can't be rendered on software (at least I haven't been able to figure out how to do it), which hampers my efforts to create fire-haired characters quite a bit (make a hair system, set output to NURBS curves, make the curves emit particles that turn from white to yellow to red and decrease in luminosity in time, and apply a force field upwards - slow to simulate, but works otherwise fine) :(.
But, on the good side, the computer stays responsive even when Maya is rendering the scene, which is more than I can say about Poser in a lot better (processor power and display adapter) Windows XP machine. I guess that's a better scheduler at work...
I know very little about MIDI, but I have to ask: why doesn't it work ? After all, the strings are all vibrating at different frequencies (that's why you have different strings to begin with :), so it should trivial to separate each ones contribution to the overall sound wave. I'm sure an experienced person could just look at a graphical representation of the waveform and say which peak is which string.
Besides, if it's really impossible to say which strings are being used from the sound alone, then why have those strings in the first place ? After all, the listener can't tell if they're being used or not.
On the contrary, Outlook is a very exiting piece of software. When you open it, you never know if your machine is going to pick up some new virus that sniffs your credit card numbers and sends them to the Russian Mafia.
Outlook is very exiting, in the same way that walking across a minefield is exiting, and largely for the same reasons too. Linux email clients tend to be very boring in comparison.
You mean, like have a core API and an extension mechanism ?-)
Rautatiesiltakaiteenkiinnitinniittimaalausnäytte ly.
A finnish word (a single word, altought Slascode may end up splicing it due to its length) which means "An exhibit showing paintings about a bolt that is used to fasten the protective side fence of a railroad bridge".
When it comes to inventing new words on the spot, english really can't compete.
I suggest that
Which of these two points is immoral in any way ?
So which one is it ? Are we civilized or thieves, murderers and rapists ?
Try to understand. I'm not advocating any course of action. I am simply saying that there is a price for sticking to non-confrontational methods. That price is that it leaves you defenseless against evil - the thieves, murderers and rapists, and oh yes, ruthless employers.
Chose whatever path you want, but don't do so just because a path had a witty saying as an advertisement; instead, carefully consider the likely consequences and requirements of each path.
But apparently the employee owes loyalty to his employer, to not sell him out to the highest bidder, and to the world, to not screw it up for his own profit, despite them owing him nothing. Funny how the responsibilities come up when talking about the employees, but employers can outsource all jobs to India and fuck their employees and that's just business like usual.
If the world owes you nothing, then you owe nothing to the world. If you owe something to the world, then the world owes you something. A relationship where only one party has responsibilities is unfair, and no one has a duty to uphold his end of an unfair relationship - the only exception being parents and really young children.
If this wasn't a time of pedophilic hysteria, I'd suggest giving them to me for safe-keeping. But since it is, I won't.
None of which helps you any when you're the manager trying to keep such things from happening. Which was what this story was about.
The problem is that if you don't take vengeance, either by yourself or through the legal system or some equivalent, then people will keep on stabbing your eyes and stealing your teeth, since they can get away with it. Following the old adage means that there is no punishment for mistreating you, and so you will be mistreated for fun and profit.
That's a really nasty choice there - either take revenge and contribute to the problem, or don't and be crushed by those who see you as defenseless and therefore easy prey. Dead if you don't, damned if you do.
So now I, the big pharmaneutical company, have an incentive to lobby for tougher laws - the kinds that put more people on death row for less evidence and lesser crimes. I also have an incentive to bribe judges and police officers to get more people sent to death row, all to ensure that I'll have my pick of guinea pigs. And I, the police officer, have already falsified evidence to send innocent people to their deaths more than once, so why wouldn't I do it for money ?
Besides, the last well-known doctor to experiment on people sentenced to death - completely in accordance to the laws of their society, I might add - was called Josef Mengele. Do you really want to imitate Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan ?
Be sure to check Neverwinter Vault for fan-made content. While most of the modules are crap, there are some true gems there - I especially liked the Shadowlords -> Dreamcatcher -> Demon -campaign series (altought it starts only getting really good at Dreamcatcher), and the Kunoichi (warning: K-18) ones.
Pity the editor doesn't work on Linux, otherwise I'd propably try to make my own...
It sure does.
If the king truly does not want power, he'll simply take an action that leads to his dismissal as soon as possible, which goes on until a candidate who does want power and is smart enough to mask his self-serving actions as public good gets selected. And then you're right where you started.
You could, of course, make being dismised carry some kind of penalty; but then whoever holds the power to dismiss holds the king hostage, and can blackmail him into doing whatever he wants.
All of this, of course, assumes that the king and the who dismiss won't simply ally for their mutual benefit.
"If you keep on overthrowing leaders until I'm selected, I'll give your something good once I'm in power."
You can't stop any kind of elections from becoming popularity contests, because you can't force people to not vote based on how much they like someone. In fact any election is a popularity contest by definition; after all, one of the meanings of popular is accepted by or prevalent among the people in general .
And you can't make an incorruptible system out of corruptible humans. Power-hungry people will find ways to gain power, no matter how good the system looks on paper. After all, what forces the participants to play the parts you've written for them ?
So, instead of having a career politician who's main (and usually only) skill is the ability to lie with a straight face, you'd get a person who:
Compared to what usually floats to the top in politics, Stallman's a winner in all fronts. Go Diebold !
Really ? My gut tells me to reduce my coffee intake to 1 liter per 24 hours and to lose 15 kilograms :(...
Yes. It is one of the fundamental laws of physics - "The size of Jabba is invariant over time" - and is also the very reason why Big Bang happened: a universe smaller than Jabba couldn't contain Jabba, so it had to expand. If that expanding would ever stop, the universe would begin to collapse, and eventually be smaller than Jabba; that's what kept the expansion going (but just barely at the speed neccessary to prevent the collapse). By killing Jabba, princess Leia destroyed the very force keeping the universe from collapsing and has therefore doomed us all.
Yes, kids, the universe is going to collapse, we're all going to die, and it's all princess Leia's fault.
It's exactly the other way around. CGI looks too good. A real warship has some paint peeled off, there's some rust around, someone's coffee's been spilled on the gunner seat, there's dried muddy footprints going around the place and duct tape holding together some odd device, some doors make a screeching noise when they move no matter what you do...
A CGI ship looks like it came straight from the shipyard. No, scratch that, it looks exactly like the engineer dreamed it would - like no real ship ever can. It's geometrically perfect. It has clearly never seen a battle - heck, it has clearly never been used at all. Sure, you can add dirt and defects, but they all make the model more complicated, and no matter what you do, you'll never quite catch the infinite complexity of real-world defects.
That's how you can tell a computer-generated image from a real human. Does it have visible skin pores, some of them clearly abnormally large ? Odd decolorations of skin ? Dirt beneath its fingernails ? Visible blood vessels ? Split hairs ? Old scars ? Some fat that jiggles where solid muscle should be ? Barely visible limp ? If not, it's not a human being.
Computer generated images are perfect, and in reality nothing is perfect. That infinite depth of imperfection, which makes real beings so interesting, is simply impossible to model with a computer with current techniques. A polygon-based human is never going to pass for a real one, no matter how much effort you pour into it; there's always going to be a feeling of something being not quite right with it.
Actually, Jar Jar is quite convincing, simply because it's not human and doesn't try to be. Pity that Jar Jar was written to be a clown with no history or personality either; with some real character Jar would actually have made a pretty good character despite the unrealness - or maybe because of it; Star Wars is, after all, at least as much fantasy as it is sci-fi.
No. When communist manifesto was written, the workers were slaves to the capitalists who owned the factories, since handiwork cannot compete with mass production, and mass production needs a huge amount of funds - capital - to get started, and there was a huge oversupply of laborers, so it was "my way or the highway" - and highway meant starvation.
Marx great idea was that those who do the work should get to keep the fruits of their labors; to ensure this they should own the means of production they use to do the work with. Since the means of production of that day meant factories, and since it is impossible to operate a factory alone, the only way to achieve the goal was communal ownership - the people working in the factory should be the ones who owned the factory and got the fruits of their labor, also known as profit.
It's a great idea and basically meant turning everyone into a private enterpreneur.
To me it seems that most states are withering away, giving more and more of their power to international corporations, a phenomenon known as globalization.
Sharing isn't required in communism, except for those resources that can't be operated by a single man.
No it isn't. Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the workers from virtual slavery to the capitalists. It even says so: the workers have nothing to lose but their chains.
In Marx's time, you couldn't rise above where they were born. Doing so required not only huge amounts of capital which you just plain couldn't get from working, but also free time (to study and look for opportunities) which you didn't have - you were required to work 16 hours a day and stya the rest of the time near the factory in case there was a fire or something.
Besides, even if a few people out of millions manages to drag themselves up, how in blazes does that make the society free ? Most people can never be rich, since being rich means having significantly more wealth than the median wealth of your society. How does it help them any even if a few particularly bright (or obsessive) individuals manage to become their new overlords ?
Well, what did you expect ? Slashdot is an american website, where the majority of users are likely to be americans, and americans seem to have a rather ideologial and emotional view of economics instead of seeing them as the tools they are.
You know, the obvious solution to this problem is gold standard. Make coins out of gold and make them weight as much as they're worth. With current technology, it should be easy to build some kind of device that checks that the purity and weight of a coin are within acceptable limits and is easy to carry with you.
In the long run, I think we're going to see an energy standard - energy itself is going to be used as money. Anything else can be synthesized from it with sufficient technology. And since energy is by definition (energy is the ability to do work) usefull, any inflation in such a system means that the price of energy has gone down so the total resources available have gone up, and is therefore actually desirable.
In the long run we'll switch to such systems, whether the current-style governments and corporations keep their power or not. The current system of an unlimited money supply backed with nothing whatsoever has proven itself fundamentally fragile and unstable time and again. The sooner we get rid of it the better for everyone.
Don't forget: one of the reasons why Nazis came to power was the economic chaos in Germany, which in turn was partly caused by the government printing money to the point where the paper the bills were printed on was more valuable than the bills themselves. Such a situation is always a possibility in the current system, and there's no shortage of evil maniacs ready to use it to their advantage.