You don't actually need to smelt any ore, about half of the metal asteroids are essentially pure iron and nickel. It's not like earth where you have to worry about complex plate tectonics and chemical reactions affecting what's available, or about conducting geographic surveys and moving massive amounts of earth to access it. Just scope out the asteroid display case for an asteroid that has what you want and begin harvesting it.
Assuming our criterion for legislation is, say, whatever can reduce the number of fatalities by a hundred or more a year, I hope you don't mind saying goodbye to buying snackfood, owning a car, drinking alcohol, swimming in lakes, going out after dark, or pretty much enjoying life in any way.
what's left is "I want a gun more than I want other people not die from gun-related crime."
"I want to enjoy peanut butter more than I want other people not die from peanut allergies." "I want home lighting more than I want other people not die from electrocution." "I want easy transportation more than I want other people not die in motor accidents."
I guess we all share an awful lot of contempt for human life.
Or maybe even if we consider each human life to be particularly sacred, things that account for 0.000001% of our mortality rate just are not worth making major sacrifices to prevent, and if we did bend over to address each possible threat at that scale, life would not be worth living in the first place.
(apart from threatening to kill people, which is much the same thing)
Why is threatening to kill (realistically, more likely to be a miss or serious injury) the same thing?
There is a mistake here which is a bit the same as when people who are "against hunting" are perfectly okay with buying meat at the supermarket. What they really mean is that they want animals to come out of some mysterious black box ground and packaged in a way that lets them avoid thinking about it.
Well, your government, and every government, is threatening to kill you. Even if it is so enlightened as to have no official death penalty, it works like this: "Obey the law." "No." "Then go to prison." "No." "We have sent people to take you to prison." "I will fight them." "Okay, but if they can not take you in another way, they may kill you." Governments can set up other intermediate steps, but in the end, killing you is always the last thing on the list of ultimatums which ensures compliance.
That said, is it really any different for me to have a gun for self-defense? My position is the same as the government: obey the law, I leave you alone; disobey the law in a way that threatens me and you get an ultimatum. Refuse the ultimatum, I may have to kill or injure you.
The reason I need to cut out the police as middlemen is simply that they cannot teleport to the scene of an attack in progress. Realistically, if someone has a very serious intent to kill me, I won't have police rise out of the shadows to begin battling my opponent. I will have police show up 10 minutes later to detain him for my murder or, if he has escaped, at least begin collecting evidence in the relevant homicide case.
Criminals also don't follow laws against theft, murder, etc. And?
Incorrect. Criminals do follow these laws. Mostly. Potential criminals are dissuaded. Mostly. Not a lot of people going around stealing AND murdering AND all other things, they are actually fairly law abiding apart from wear they feel the need to make exception. Plenty of bank robberies occur without a weapon being used precisely because, while bankrobbery itself is a crime which will result in a prison sentence, the criminals know that they will be facing a lighter sentence if they don't use a gun, and view this as an acceptable tradeoff against their expectations of success. The vast majority of criminals are opportunists, not sociopaths, and if they are sociopaths, they are not irrational sociopaths. They play by the rules to the degree that they are able to satisfy their other objectives.
But do you see any parallels to that in the situation of a killing spree? Is the culprit going to be concerned with incurring additional charges? Will the consequences of murdering with an illegal assault rifle be so severe that the person decides it's better to instead use a legal baseball bat to effect the same purpose? Laws do not and will not ever protect against crazy mass murdering freaks. I'll bet even most people who have gone to prison whether for theft, murder, or other charges, would still consider what this guy did at an elementary school absolutely abhorrent. However, laws can certainly defang the day-to-day ability of honest people to defend themselves.
If you want to protect against mass murder by depriving the general populace of the offending instruments, why not go after diesel fuel and plant fertilizer as well as alarm clocks, cell phones, remote controls, and just about everything in the cleaning aisle of most department stores.
It's more cost effective if they make it to their destination. Keep in mind we are still at the "will it explode?" and "if it doesn't explode, will it avoid crashing?" and "if it doesn't crash, will it keep working?" part of the technology. So if the Mars rover works out, that's great, and in fact is a valuable enough confirmation to justify trying to do something similar again.
But it's really better right now to have each rover be a stepping stone to the next. The sort of answers Curiosity gives us will tell us the sort of questions we want to design the next rover to resolve.
Clearly, the gene in question is the "read the article" gene, which allowed proto-humans to begin amassing knowledge instead of just mindlessly stating opinions.
However, it sometimes is deactivated. Humans without this gene can continue to access many of their other advancements, but they do revert into being simple code monkeys and posting on slashdot.
Technological "invasion" of privacy is not a problem when it simply augments what is already in place physically, i.e., I have no problem with security cameras at a bank, because it is a public area which you enter with the expectation of it being fully monitored and guarded at all times, regardless of whether a camera system is installed. Adding a camera system does not fundamentally impact your expectation of privacy at a bank. I *do* have a problem with sticking cameras on every telephone poll in the city. I expect police to patrol the streets, and give periodic checkups on how things are going, but monitoring every nook and cranny simultaneously and being able to follow my movements camera-to-camera is a gross change and significant limiting of my normal expectation of privacy.
In this case, the girl is minor for whom the school is assuming responsibility during school hours and it is *expected* that they will be supervising her at all times. If teachers don't know where she is or what she is doing at any time during her stay that is indicative of negligence on their part, regardless of whether an RFID monitoring system is in place. So, as long as an uncovered and functional RFID tag is something she is only required to carry on school grounds, and she can put it in a foil sheath before and after, I do not have a big problem with the school adding some automation to what is already a comparable level of physical monitoring.
I'm not saying there aren't some slippery slopes to be vigilant against, but as it's been described, I don't think she is losing much if any privacy by using the school ID card.
That assumes that your opponent has the same technology as you do. Otherwise, it is fully possible to have longer range weapons on your ship than they do in their land based facilities (and America generally does).
There's also some asymmetry in the importance of accuracy. It's a considerable difference if your projectile can fire 10 miles and is accurate to 1 square meter vs. can fire 11 miles and is accurate to 100 square meters. The latter might be fine for naval ships attacking a base but you might need the former if you are a base trying to fend off the naval ships (assuming you can get an accurate targeting of them in the first place).
And, in general, it may be a bad idea to sacrifice mobility even if that nets you bigger range. We're discussing projectiles which are going to penetrate all but the most protected bunkers. A big weapon installation cannot be defended. The only conceivable defense is for the target to not be in the spot that the enemy is shooting at.
More plant growth is largely a simple input/output problem, because plant life is already highly-evolved and adapted to make effective use of the available resources. To get more plant growth you throw more of whatever the limiting resources are: phosphates, nitrates, water, CO2, land area (which builds in things like sunlight). Increasing the availability of these resources is costly, and, therefore, so is increasing plant growth. Unless you just want to fix a lot of CO2 (in which case the oceans, which were not part of this study, may be a better bet) you would actually prefer to limit your augmentation of natural plant growth. What you desire is high efficiency fields, where loss due to pests and drought is minimal, where most of the energy of the plant is invested in producing your desired food product rather than in fighting with weeds, etc., and therefore, where less resources need to be invested to produce the same output. The alternative would be to just grow so many plants that you get what you want out of it regardless of massive crop loss, but that is simply not the best solution. (And, of course, the effect on net plant growth is balances by the fact you are often displacing other plants for the purpose.)
That is certainly a bleak picture you paint. My question is. . . why is it that after considering all the unfair hurdles they must face in obtaining identification, the conclusion is not to remove those hurdles? Why would we instead divert all focus to remedying one particular side-effect, when we could attack the problem itself? We should work on getting these people access to IDs and all the coincident advantages (being able to use public transport, buy cough syrup, etc.). Then we can tout equitable access while still enforcing integrity in the voting process, and generally improve the lot of the potentially disenfranchised.
Misapplying logical fallacies is, of course, a logical fallacy. "Scotsman" is a national identity. It's abusive to add moral and social refinements to that identity per convenience.
"Christianity" is a moral and theological code centered around the teaching of Jesus Christ, generally accepted as being recorded in the four gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and usually including other books attributed to Paul and the disciples which are largely, but not wholly, consistent across denominations).
On the one hand, demographically, it may be convenient to define a "Christian" as anyone who, answering a survey, states that they are a Christian.
However, internal to Christianity is a series of stipulations on being a true Christian. Christians must acknowledge Jesus as the son of God; they are also required to obey his teachings. Christ is insistent that whether anyone is truly his follower will demonstrate this by their works. (a bad tree gives bad fruit; a good tree gives good fruit)
Jesus supplies edicts such as:
“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.Do to others as you would have them do to you.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
Are we really going to assert that someone who believes the above passage is the sort that goes around burning down Mosques? Those are just nasty malicious people who happen to have adopted the title of "Christian" because their grandpappy wore it, and they go around persecuting people who don't share the title. They might just as well have chosen skin color, political siding, or even favorite sports team (plenty of news articles about the riots which happen after certain sporting events) to define that identity.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to allow Christianity's central figure to offer up the definition of who is and is not truly a Christian.
Of course, that may result in a somewhat narrower definition than most "Christians" would like: "There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him—early." -- Mark Twain
The one thing the US does much better is protecting free speech. We can post pornography, hate speech (who defines that, by the way?), how to make bombs, things that our society and often our government both view as repugnant, but somehow, it's still legal. Not that we don't have occasional attacks on that, but our free speech tends to hold up in the end.
There are few places that would be as good as the United States to to host a network of free discourse. It may well be because of that that the most successful such network is based there.
The UN is a constituency of pro-censorship entities. The only reason they want to control the internet is so that they can control the internet.
So, in order to get particles that are already in the "entangled" state, something must have happened to ordinary particles, first, right? If so, what's the cost (in term of energy) to get originally un-entangled particles to be "entangled"?
Assuming, e.g., a photon decays into two entangled photons, there is not really an energy cost associated with the fact that those two photons are entangled. There are different methods of producing entangled photons. One way is by passing a higher energy photon through a special crystal (see here, but the conversion efficiency is extraordinarily low, so you'll have to spend a lot of extra energy generating unentangled photos. Another way is to trap an electron and wait until it decays into photons. Again, no extra energy required to get the entangled photons from the electron, but you do expend energy getting and holding the electron in the trap.
My impression is that "entanglement" occurs for free, but verifying that you have entangled particles is always going to cost some energy. The neat thing here is that you can perform the verification before you put the particles in the boxes, so the information you have on the particles is kind of like a battery storage in terms of how it can be re-extracted as energy.
I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives did feel a stronger cultural bias—one gathers that part of their motivation is a value for tradition/culture/pragmatically approved philosophies.
However, comparing nuclear power and climate change is a rather poor way to measure the difference in scientific receptiveness. For one thing, climate change is innately more ambiguous, trying to approximately a complex and still largely mysterious system with significant error in the models. You can show numerical indicators but answer the "why" in a fundamental sense can only be loosely done. Explaining the "why" of nuclear reactor is easy in comparison (if addressing a reasonably intelligent person), as well as how it works, why it's better for the environment, and why modern reactors aren't going to explode. I'm not aware that there are any competing explanations which a determined adversary could refer to if he/she wanted to save face, unlike with global warming, where one can start talking about solar activity, natural warming cycles, etc.
Furthermore, the political reasons for a conservative to oppose an "alarmist" view of global warming is because of the vast socio-economic implications. Those concerns are real and will only be reinforced by education on the subject. Contrariwise, the political reasons for a liberal to oppose nuclear power plants are rooted more, e.g., in concerns for the environment's welfare. Being educated on nuclear power would alleviate those concerns, and the liberal will happily go on to parade their pro-environmentalism banner with a pro-nuclear bent, no real ideological concession having been made. A conservative accepting the need for significant restrictions on economic output has a much more difficult pill to swallow.
On the otherhand, technology also has a way of mitigating the need for specialists. Instead of hiring a cook, you can make a fancy italian dinner by heating a frozen packet in the skillet for 10 minutes. Instead of contracting an orchestra, you can select a recording on your mp3 player. In medicine, tasks such as testing for pregnancy have been very successfully relegated to the lay person by certain technological advances. We trust doctors for their significant and extensive training, but who is to say humans will remain the most trustworthy means of either diagnostic or treatment of illnesses in the future? "Specialization" is already something of a hindrance in that you may be bounced around from doctor to doctor before finding the right specialist who can treat you. The reason for specializing is because of the necessity of present human limitations rather than because of its inherent utility. When we rely on humans, and, especially, when we rely on them operating at the full extent of their abilities, we rely on the specializing advantage. But throw in another 25 years of technological advance and the function of humans, even in medicine, may be quite different.
I think it's worth backing up a step and asking why we have these rules in the first place. The robbers in your first example committed the same crime under the same circumstances, they've acted as mutual facillitators, and evidence against one of them is pretty much going to amount to evidence against the other. So it makes sense to have a rule that that level of interaction can result in a joint case.
For the bittorrenting, however, where the crime actually occurs is at the other end of a computer terminal, and those terminals are in very different places. You are probably not going to send a detective to the computer used by one defendant and find any evidence against the other defendant. The defendants don't know each other, and they haven't communicated with each other. You will have to present different cases to prove the identity of the person at the other end of the IP address--one might have a router and claim his friend was using his connection, another might have been at a coffee shop. Information about one of the crimes is just going to be utterly irrelevant to the other in any way other than being the same charge. If the law does allow lumping them together, that would seem like a bad feature.
The Chinese do do a lot of copycat architecture, model cities after other famous locations, etc. It is strangely plausible that this could actually be some kind of art heist. . . .
The funny party is how much of your post is undisputed fact. I mean, this would sound crazy "sending some guns to Mexico, causing violence there, maybe having them come back into the US, and getting people shot" but that is just a factual run down of things which have happened.
The real question is simply the motivation. Obama is claiming executive privilege on the matter and withholding most of the relevant documents. Obviously, the Republicans are eager to sink their teeth into a scandal, but if we remove all the political variables, it seems like the sort of issue where people should be held accountable. The best case scenario is that someone was immeasurably stupid.
"He wants to get rid of guns and gun violence, so he's intentionally distributing the guns and causing causing gun violence?" Your assertion is that politicians never adopt an ends-justifies-the-means mentality? The Fast and Furious program is a far cry from some of the worst that has been considered. In any case, it is just obvious that weapons in the hands of drug lords are going to be used to kill people. Someone somewhere made the decision that that was an acceptable trade off, whether because they thought more lives would be saved from gun control measures, or from some other effect.
The interest rate does not have much to do with whether people "get education." The interest, and paying back the loan, does not even kick-in until you stop attending college. (Heck, maybe you want to *raise* interest rates on government loans and use the money to pay for more loans/educational investments!)
Now there is something to be said for not saddling people with overly-burdensome debt that is going to impair their future livelihoods. But it's kind of a different issue, and, frankly, has a lot more to due with the absurd base-cost of going to certain colleges these days.
There is only one sure statistic on the probability of life, and that is (# of planets with life) / (# of planets without life),* our estimate of which comes from our own observations.
If all your theories about biology and astrophysics seem to propose a drastically different number, even as the detection sensitivity and sample size increases, then one thing becomes clear: something is fundamentally wrong with your theories about biology and astrophysics. Because in science, experiment always trumps theory. Experiment is what's real, theory is the best application of your limited understanding.
You are welcome to your hypothesis that their may be a lot more life than we've detected. But to say stuff like, "It isn't just a hunch, it is basic math and rules that govern the whole of existence" is ridiculous. The idea that the universe is teeming with life is, at present, a diminishing possibility, and to assert something else as the "irrefutable truth of the matter" amounts to religious dogma. You assure us that "math" guarantees these things without actually presenting any computation. I don't know that "math" guarantees things in a hopeful/wishful sense.
Contrary to your claims, we have never replicated genesis. That's still a rather long way off, and even when we manage it, having done it in the laboratory is not itself a comment on the probability of it occurring in a natural environment. I mean, even effecting the synthesis of "life" as it has been typically defined is not a success without long term viability -- cells that exist and replicate for a dozen years before being complete wiped out would not really satisify the idea of life inhabiting other parts of the universe. (and, in as much it actually occurred elsewhere, would be undetectable)
Like I said, you are welcome to your hypothesis. Just please keep in mind that at present the evidence weights against it, not for it, at least according to our present science.
*You can of course feel free to extend this to include nebulae, asteroids, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
No other activity shows any significant colleration towards earth temperature.
Now that is simply incorrect!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PiratesVsTemp(en).svg
You don't actually need to smelt any ore, about half of the metal asteroids are essentially pure iron and nickel. It's not like earth where you have to worry about complex plate tectonics and chemical reactions affecting what's available, or about conducting geographic surveys and moving massive amounts of earth to access it. Just scope out the asteroid display case for an asteroid that has what you want and begin harvesting it.
Assuming our criterion for legislation is, say, whatever can reduce the number of fatalities by a hundred or more a year, I hope you don't mind saying goodbye to buying snackfood, owning a car, drinking alcohol, swimming in lakes, going out after dark, or pretty much enjoying life in any way.
what's left is "I want a gun more than I want other people not die from gun-related crime."
"I want to enjoy peanut butter more than I want other people not die from peanut allergies."
"I want home lighting more than I want other people not die from electrocution."
"I want easy transportation more than I want other people not die in motor accidents."
I guess we all share an awful lot of contempt for human life.
Or maybe even if we consider each human life to be particularly sacred, things that account for 0.000001% of our mortality rate just are not worth making major sacrifices to prevent, and if we did bend over to address each possible threat at that scale, life would not be worth living in the first place.
(apart from threatening to kill people, which is much the same thing)
Why is threatening to kill (realistically, more likely to be a miss or serious injury) the same thing?
There is a mistake here which is a bit the same as when people who are "against hunting" are perfectly okay with buying meat at the supermarket. What they really mean is that they want animals to come out of some mysterious black box ground and packaged in a way that lets them avoid thinking about it.
Well, your government, and every government, is threatening to kill you. Even if it is so enlightened as to have no official death penalty, it works like this: "Obey the law." "No." "Then go to prison." "No." "We have sent people to take you to prison." "I will fight them." "Okay, but if they can not take you in another way, they may kill you." Governments can set up other intermediate steps, but in the end, killing you is always the last thing on the list of ultimatums which ensures compliance.
That said, is it really any different for me to have a gun for self-defense? My position is the same as the government: obey the law, I leave you alone; disobey the law in a way that threatens me and you get an ultimatum. Refuse the ultimatum, I may have to kill or injure you.
The reason I need to cut out the police as middlemen is simply that they cannot teleport to the scene of an attack in progress. Realistically, if someone has a very serious intent to kill me, I won't have police rise out of the shadows to begin battling my opponent. I will have police show up 10 minutes later to detain him for my murder or, if he has escaped, at least begin collecting evidence in the relevant homicide case.
Criminals also don't follow laws against theft, murder, etc. And?
Incorrect. Criminals do follow these laws. Mostly. Potential criminals are dissuaded. Mostly. Not a lot of people going around stealing AND murdering AND all other things, they are actually fairly law abiding apart from wear they feel the need to make exception. Plenty of bank robberies occur without a weapon being used precisely because, while bankrobbery itself is a crime which will result in a prison sentence, the criminals know that they will be facing a lighter sentence if they don't use a gun, and view this as an acceptable tradeoff against their expectations of success. The vast majority of criminals are opportunists, not sociopaths, and if they are sociopaths, they are not irrational sociopaths. They play by the rules to the degree that they are able to satisfy their other objectives.
But do you see any parallels to that in the situation of a killing spree? Is the culprit going to be concerned with incurring additional charges? Will the consequences of murdering with an illegal assault rifle be so severe that the person decides it's better to instead use a legal baseball bat to effect the same purpose? Laws do not and will not ever protect against crazy mass murdering freaks. I'll bet even most people who have gone to prison whether for theft, murder, or other charges, would still consider what this guy did at an elementary school absolutely abhorrent. However, laws can certainly defang the day-to-day ability of honest people to defend themselves.
If you want to protect against mass murder by depriving the general populace of the offending instruments, why not go after diesel fuel and plant fertilizer as well as alarm clocks, cell phones, remote controls, and just about everything in the cleaning aisle of most department stores.
It's more cost effective if they make it to their destination. Keep in mind we are still at the "will it explode?" and "if it doesn't explode, will it avoid crashing?" and "if it doesn't crash, will it keep working?" part of the technology. So if the Mars rover works out, that's great, and in fact is a valuable enough confirmation to justify trying to do something similar again.
But it's really better right now to have each rover be a stepping stone to the next. The sort of answers Curiosity gives us will tell us the sort of questions we want to design the next rover to resolve.
Clearly, the gene in question is the "read the article" gene, which allowed proto-humans to begin amassing knowledge instead of just mindlessly stating opinions.
However, it sometimes is deactivated. Humans without this gene can continue to access many of their other advancements, but they do revert into being simple code monkeys and posting on slashdot.
Technological "invasion" of privacy is not a problem when it simply augments what is already in place physically, i.e., I have no problem with security cameras at a bank, because it is a public area which you enter with the expectation of it being fully monitored and guarded at all times, regardless of whether a camera system is installed. Adding a camera system does not fundamentally impact your expectation of privacy at a bank. I *do* have a problem with sticking cameras on every telephone poll in the city. I expect police to patrol the streets, and give periodic checkups on how things are going, but monitoring every nook and cranny simultaneously and being able to follow my movements camera-to-camera is a gross change and significant limiting of my normal expectation of privacy.
In this case, the girl is minor for whom the school is assuming responsibility during school hours and it is *expected* that they will be supervising her at all times. If teachers don't know where she is or what she is doing at any time during her stay that is indicative of negligence on their part, regardless of whether an RFID monitoring system is in place. So, as long as an uncovered and functional RFID tag is something she is only required to carry on school grounds, and she can put it in a foil sheath before and after, I do not have a big problem with the school adding some automation to what is already a comparable level of physical monitoring.
I'm not saying there aren't some slippery slopes to be vigilant against, but as it's been described, I don't think she is losing much if any privacy by using the school ID card.
That assumes that your opponent has the same technology as you do. Otherwise, it is fully possible to have longer range weapons on your ship than they do in their land based facilities (and America generally does).
There's also some asymmetry in the importance of accuracy. It's a considerable difference if your projectile can fire 10 miles and is accurate to 1 square meter vs. can fire 11 miles and is accurate to 100 square meters. The latter might be fine for naval ships attacking a base but you might need the former if you are a base trying to fend off the naval ships (assuming you can get an accurate targeting of them in the first place).
And, in general, it may be a bad idea to sacrifice mobility even if that nets you bigger range. We're discussing projectiles which are going to penetrate all but the most protected bunkers. A big weapon installation cannot be defended. The only conceivable defense is for the target to not be in the spot that the enemy is shooting at.
More plant growth is largely a simple input/output problem, because plant life is already highly-evolved and adapted to make effective use of the available resources. To get more plant growth you throw more of whatever the limiting resources are: phosphates, nitrates, water, CO2, land area (which builds in things like sunlight). Increasing the availability of these resources is costly, and, therefore, so is increasing plant growth. Unless you just want to fix a lot of CO2 (in which case the oceans, which were not part of this study, may be a better bet) you would actually prefer to limit your augmentation of natural plant growth. What you desire is high efficiency fields, where loss due to pests and drought is minimal, where most of the energy of the plant is invested in producing your desired food product rather than in fighting with weeds, etc., and therefore, where less resources need to be invested to produce the same output. The alternative would be to just grow so many plants that you get what you want out of it regardless of massive crop loss, but that is simply not the best solution. (And, of course, the effect on net plant growth is balances by the fact you are often displacing other plants for the purpose.)
That is certainly a bleak picture you paint. My question is. . . why is it that after considering all the unfair hurdles they must face in obtaining identification, the conclusion is not to remove those hurdles? Why would we instead divert all focus to remedying one particular side-effect, when we could attack the problem itself? We should work on getting these people access to IDs and all the coincident advantages (being able to use public transport, buy cough syrup, etc.). Then we can tout equitable access while still enforcing integrity in the voting process, and generally improve the lot of the potentially disenfranchised.
Misapplying logical fallacies is, of course, a logical fallacy. "Scotsman" is a national identity. It's abusive to add moral and social refinements to that identity per convenience.
"Christianity" is a moral and theological code centered around the teaching of Jesus Christ, generally accepted as being recorded in the four gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and usually including other books attributed to Paul and the disciples which are largely, but not wholly, consistent across denominations).
On the one hand, demographically, it may be convenient to define a "Christian" as anyone who, answering a survey, states that they are a Christian.
However, internal to Christianity is a series of stipulations on being a true Christian. Christians must acknowledge Jesus as the son of God; they are also required to obey his teachings. Christ is insistent that whether anyone is truly his follower will demonstrate this by their works. (a bad tree gives bad fruit; a good tree gives good fruit)
Jesus supplies edicts such as:
“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.Do to others as you would have them do to you.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
Are we really going to assert that someone who believes the above passage is the sort that goes around burning down Mosques? Those are just nasty malicious people who happen to have adopted the title of "Christian" because their grandpappy wore it, and they go around persecuting people who don't share the title. They might just as well have chosen skin color, political siding, or even favorite sports team (plenty of news articles about the riots which happen after certain sporting events) to define that identity.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to allow Christianity's central figure to offer up the definition of who is and is not truly a Christian.
Of course, that may result in a somewhat narrower definition than most "Christians" would like:
"There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him—early." -- Mark Twain
The one thing the US does much better is protecting free speech. We can post pornography, hate speech (who defines that, by the way?), how to make bombs, things that our society and often our government both view as repugnant, but somehow, it's still legal. Not that we don't have occasional attacks on that, but our free speech tends to hold up in the end.
There are few places that would be as good as the United States to to host a network of free discourse. It may well be because of that that the most successful such network is based there.
The UN is a constituency of pro-censorship entities. The only reason they want to control the internet is so that they can control the internet.
So, in order to get particles that are already in the "entangled" state, something must have happened to ordinary particles, first, right?
If so, what's the cost (in term of energy) to get originally un-entangled particles to be "entangled"?
Assuming, e.g., a photon decays into two entangled photons, there is not really an energy cost associated with the fact that those two photons are entangled. There are different methods of producing entangled photons. One way is by passing a higher energy photon through a special crystal (see here, but the conversion efficiency is extraordinarily low, so you'll have to spend a lot of extra energy generating unentangled photos. Another way is to trap an electron and wait until it decays into photons. Again, no extra energy required to get the entangled photons from the electron, but you do expend energy getting and holding the electron in the trap.
My impression is that "entanglement" occurs for free, but verifying that you have entangled particles is always going to cost some energy. The neat thing here is that you can perform the verification before you put the particles in the boxes, so the information you have on the particles is kind of like a battery storage in terms of how it can be re-extracted as energy.
I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives did feel a stronger cultural bias—one gathers that part of their motivation is a value for tradition/culture/pragmatically approved philosophies.
However, comparing nuclear power and climate change is a rather poor way to measure the difference in scientific receptiveness. For one thing, climate change is innately more ambiguous, trying to approximately a complex and still largely mysterious system with significant error in the models. You can show numerical indicators but answer the "why" in a fundamental sense can only be loosely done. Explaining the "why" of nuclear reactor is easy in comparison (if addressing a reasonably intelligent person), as well as how it works, why it's better for the environment, and why modern reactors aren't going to explode. I'm not aware that there are any competing explanations which a determined adversary could refer to if he/she wanted to save face, unlike with global warming, where one can start talking about solar activity, natural warming cycles, etc.
Furthermore, the political reasons for a conservative to oppose an "alarmist" view of global warming is because of the vast socio-economic implications. Those concerns are real and will only be reinforced by education on the subject. Contrariwise, the political reasons for a liberal to oppose nuclear power plants are rooted more, e.g., in concerns for the environment's welfare. Being educated on nuclear power would alleviate those concerns, and the liberal will happily go on to parade their pro-environmentalism banner with a pro-nuclear bent, no real ideological concession having been made. A conservative accepting the need for significant restrictions on economic output has a much more difficult pill to swallow.
On the otherhand, technology also has a way of mitigating the need for specialists. Instead of hiring a cook, you can make a fancy italian dinner by heating a frozen packet in the skillet for 10 minutes. Instead of contracting an orchestra, you can select a recording on your mp3 player. In medicine, tasks such as testing for pregnancy have been very successfully relegated to the lay person by certain technological advances. We trust doctors for their significant and extensive training, but who is to say humans will remain the most trustworthy means of either diagnostic or treatment of illnesses in the future? "Specialization" is already something of a hindrance in that you may be bounced around from doctor to doctor before finding the right specialist who can treat you. The reason for specializing is because of the necessity of present human limitations rather than because of its inherent utility. When we rely on humans, and, especially, when we rely on them operating at the full extent of their abilities, we rely on the specializing advantage. But throw in another 25 years of technological advance and the function of humans, even in medicine, may be quite different.
I think it's worth backing up a step and asking why we have these rules in the first place. The robbers in your first example committed the same crime under the same circumstances, they've acted as mutual facillitators, and evidence against one of them is pretty much going to amount to evidence against the other. So it makes sense to have a rule that that level of interaction can result in a joint case.
For the bittorrenting, however, where the crime actually occurs is at the other end of a computer terminal, and those terminals are in very different places. You are probably not going to send a detective to the computer used by one defendant and find any evidence against the other defendant. The defendants don't know each other, and they haven't communicated with each other. You will have to present different cases to prove the identity of the person at the other end of the IP address--one might have a router and claim his friend was using his connection, another might have been at a coffee shop. Information about one of the crimes is just going to be utterly irrelevant to the other in any way other than being the same charge. If the law does allow lumping them together, that would seem like a bad feature.
They would cease their countdown for initiating thermonuclear war.
The Chinese do do a lot of copycat architecture, model cities after other famous locations, etc. It is strangely plausible that this could actually be some kind of art heist. . . .
The funny party is how much of your post is undisputed fact. I mean, this would sound crazy "sending some guns to Mexico, causing violence there, maybe having them come back into the US, and getting people shot" but that is just a factual run down of things which have happened.
The real question is simply the motivation. Obama is claiming executive privilege on the matter and withholding most of the relevant documents. Obviously, the Republicans are eager to sink their teeth into a scandal, but if we remove all the political variables, it seems like the sort of issue where people should be held accountable. The best case scenario is that someone was immeasurably stupid.
"He wants to get rid of guns and gun violence, so he's intentionally distributing the guns and causing causing gun violence?"
Your assertion is that politicians never adopt an ends-justifies-the-means mentality? The Fast and Furious program is a far cry from some of the worst that has been considered. In any case, it is just obvious that weapons in the hands of drug lords are going to be used to kill people. Someone somewhere made the decision that that was an acceptable trade off, whether because they thought more lives would be saved from gun control measures, or from some other effect.
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1899#comic
The interest rate does not have much to do with whether people "get education." The interest, and paying back the loan, does not even kick-in until you stop attending college. (Heck, maybe you want to *raise* interest rates on government loans and use the money to pay for more loans/educational investments!)
Now there is something to be said for not saddling people with overly-burdensome debt that is going to impair their future livelihoods. But it's kind of a different issue, and, frankly, has a lot more to due with the absurd base-cost of going to certain colleges these days.
Perhaps if we all started talking about how politicians are upright and honourable it might give them something to aim for.
How important is it that we keep a straight-face while saying that?
There is only one sure statistic on the probability of life, and that is (# of planets with life) / (# of planets without life),* our estimate of which comes from our own observations.
If all your theories about biology and astrophysics seem to propose a drastically different number, even as the detection sensitivity and sample size increases, then one thing becomes clear: something is fundamentally wrong with your theories about biology and astrophysics. Because in science, experiment always trumps theory. Experiment is what's real, theory is the best application of your limited understanding.
You are welcome to your hypothesis that their may be a lot more life than we've detected. But to say stuff like, "It isn't just a hunch, it is basic math and rules that govern the whole of existence" is ridiculous. The idea that the universe is teeming with life is, at present, a diminishing possibility, and to assert something else as the "irrefutable truth of the matter" amounts to religious dogma.
You assure us that "math" guarantees these things without actually presenting any computation. I don't know that "math" guarantees things in a hopeful/wishful sense.
Contrary to your claims, we have never replicated genesis. That's still a rather long way off, and even when we manage it, having done it in the laboratory is not itself a comment on the probability of it occurring in a natural environment. I mean, even effecting the synthesis of "life" as it has been typically defined is not a success without long term viability -- cells that exist and replicate for a dozen years before being complete wiped out would not really satisify the idea of life inhabiting other parts of the universe. (and, in as much it actually occurred elsewhere, would be undetectable)
Like I said, you are welcome to your hypothesis. Just please keep in mind that at present the evidence weights against it, not for it, at least according to our present science.
*You can of course feel free to extend this to include nebulae, asteroids, etc.