Then cite _that_ work, or at least cite it as well as the degree in education. It lends credence to your claim of expertise, and in itself seems interesting work. You're making the claim: you provide the data, the reasoning, or at least the citations. And because I don't put anything in my profile myself, for privacy reasons, I've never bothered to read others. And yours doesn't even cite your degrees in other languages.
A mere few moments on Google reveals http://www.linfo.org/lower_case.html, and a lot of anecdotal claims that lower case is easier to read. But I'm finding it difficult to detect actual research on it. If you can remember anything of the references you mentioned, perhaps you can find a pointer to _actual research_ on it.
Oh, my. I seem to have touched a nerve. This is too easy.
First, with degrees in 3 languages, this gentleman seems to have to resort to 3rd grade cursing when caught out. That's actually funny, and typical of the buraucrats coming out of "Education" programs. When they're caught making up stuff out of whole cloth. I've been running into this the last few years with "educational policies" that seem entrenched in stone, but have in fact no legal basis, no authorization, and were merely invented by local bureaucrats. And oh my, but they get upset when asked to provide the written guideline or any justification.
Second, yes, my suspicion was currect, he's not actually a teacher. _Teachers_ I respect tremendously: I've done a limited amount, mostly seminars and tutorials, and worked with enough school age relatives and college age interns to respect the work. I've also heard their complaints about the "education" professionals who fill middle management in their schools: it's awful. Like MBA's in charge of engineers, do not assume that an "education" degree conveys knowledge of the field they usually manage. Many such people do have excellent knowledge, but the degree itself does not assure it by any means.
Last, if he had any actual such studies he remembered in enough detail to cite this way, he should be able to find a reference. This doesn't mean none exist, but it calls the accuracy of his recollection into question. If he's going to cite himself as an authority, I'm afraid a degree in education won't cut it. Such a degree with a specialization in childhood learning, or in fact study of linguistics (as opposed to languages)? Great. I'd cite such a person myself as a knowledgeable source. But the degree itself isn't enough.
No, he used 'I have a grad degree in Education". That matches _none_ of your 3 examples. And the capitalized versions are titles, where the _degree_ is what needs to be capitalized, not the field of study. Imagine my surprise that his degree is in "Education" to get such a basic linguistic issue wrong: imagine my surprise that it also aggrandizes the idea that a degree in "Education" somehow actually makes you an expert in how people read.
I'm asserting that his degree in Education should not necessarily be held in contempt, but that it is not even strong enough to be a reasonable citing of authority. A "degree in Education" can cover a wide variety of fields. For example, http://www.pittstate.edu/office/registrar/general-education-degree-requirements-starting-fall-2005.dot lists some fascinating requirements, but none of them would seem to apply to this question.
Now, if he were actually a teacher of children learning to readn and observed them, I'd lend his claim more credence. Sadly, I've also seen some "studies" in in soft sciences (psychology is a favorite for this, but it happens in medicine and I'm sure education as well) that don't actually examine any data whatsoever. They examine data about studies of data, "meta-analysis" that simply count up the studies, perhaps refer to their margins of error, and then derive their own levels of certainty. And then they've wound up cited as scholarly studies for students to review and cite, rather than reading the original study and seeing if it's any _good_.
Class? Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this approach, or policies based on this?
I think you _wildly_ overestimate the power of a single neuron, and the advantage for computers of being able to consistently and reliably reproduce results: that eliminates a lot of the complexity and uncertainty of the data processing of real neurons and allows some significant improvements in efficiency for some tasks, such as memory and comparing memories. Neural memory is wonderfully holographic, but also unfortunately plastic: it's very easy to distort by simply recalling it repeatedly.
The human brain is also tied to the senses in fascinating ways: the eye, for example, does a tremendous amount of local processing. What it sends to the brain is _wildly_ different from the simple set of photons that impinge on it. And this disconnect between reality and perception applies to every possible computer perception: even Descartes described the problem, in some detail, in his ideas on "dualism". Rather than being worried about this, we can accept this is part of "how things work" and not worry about it for what is reality versus "virtual reality" with its attempts to present a synthetic world to the user. The real world is synthetic enough for such needs.
I think you're also underestimating the external requirements for the evolution of intelligence. Providing shelter for organisms that are potentially intelligent but may lack other resources, providing enough language and play and cultural training to raise youngsters to grow and exhibit intelligence, preserving the experience of the elders to speed that training, etc., all require having enough other intelligences to work with. They don't work well in isolation as single instances.
We also have porn sites where to download the porn, you have to beat a CAPTCHA. The back end of the server is presenting CAPTCHAS from more legitimate sites, ranging from gmail account generation for spammers to banksites for phishers, to streamline the cracking of CAPTCHAS for the price of a porn server filled with downloaded porn from elsewhere.
No. You capitalized "Education" to make it seem more important. That's not a matter of formal versus informal English, the degree should not be capitalized in _neither_ form of English, unless it's part of a formal title, such as "Master of the Arts in Education". If it's not a typo, it's a simple attempt at self-aggrandizement by someone citing their own degree as proof of their authority. Languages get capitalized because of their national association, I can't think of any other field of study which would automatically be capitalized. Getting your first degree in German has little to do with that, unless you want to start playing "find the verb" at the end of your sentences, and you say nothing about not being a native English speaker with that more reasonable excuse for that kind of slip.
Given that "education" is the formal meaning of the word "teaching", the idea that your authority as someone with a degree in it has nothing to do with the actual craft you were _supposed_ to study merely confirms the idea that a degree in "Education" is a waste of college tuition, classroom space, and printer paper better filled by having students actually study the subjects they are supposed to teach, actually working with students, and ideally taking some business courses to learn to manage the bureaucracy. (My opinion on "Educatiors" may be somewhat poisoned: the school district I live in has become famous for amazingly wasteful policies, massive bureaucracies that spend their budget on hiring more bureaucrats instead of teachers or the kids, and blowing their time on union negotiations instead of gettng the money into the hands of the teachers.)
And 'giving your background as an authority' is merely compounding your appeal to authority with a personal claim as an authority. It makes an even _worse_ logical fallacy, since there's not even the external reputation of a real authority that might have previously earned some respect for his or her work. It is, in my experience, typical of far too many people in your field. Unless your degree is going to be as meaningful as a bowling trophy in a league that only your team plays in, I suggest you actually provide a citation or two with some actual data in it.
And you have proof of this theorem, "which this margin is too narrow to contain". In other words, your "proof" is a proof by "appeal to authority", and you cannot even be bothered to name the authority. And by the way, "education" should not be capitalized in the sentence "I have a grad degree in Education". But that would require the ability to write clear English, as opposed to Important Papers In Education With No Actual Data Except Citing Other Papers.
Still dark, yes. But the higher resolution, larger screen size, and better frame rate helped a lot to notice texture in the dark, and kept using the flashlight from absolutely washing out anything else on the screen. It was much more playable.
It depends tremendously on the orbit and the object. Some 'objects', like dumped urine or water, submlimate. They're still deadly if they hit you from even a slightly different orbit, since we're talking about base speeds of roughly 18,000 mph in low earth orbit: it's the difference between the orbits that determines their relative velocity, and that's easily as much as 10%. (Head-on collisions are basically unheard of: one object would have to be orbiting the other way entirely, and no one does that due to the launch costs of orbiting against the Earth's spin.)
Small objects in low orbits are also subject to normal orbital decay, from the extremely thin atmosphere and very slight gaseous content of ordinary space, which is very thin but very real. Even solar wind can help decay orbits, by providing a consistent though slight thrust in a direction at an angle to that orbit, and depleting the orbit of its angular components. (Tidal effects are not noticeable factors on an object _that_ small.)
Geosynchronous orbits are a whole separate problem: they last much, much, much longer, and that orbital space is getting crowded by junk.
Especially the bulky boxes and advertising that go with those disks. And especially when the first few patches are actually _larger_ than the original disks.
I would love to see all game and software distribution restricted to standard CD case size, just for enironmental reasons. I can see having a recyclable plastic case to protect it, but who needs those artifically long DVD boxes?
I got Doom 3 as a gift, and had to upgrade my old system to play it. Doom 3 was so dark and difficult to see anything that I felt like I must have gone blind and grown hair hands. Not all of us can afford $500 video cards and $1000 monitors: does Left for Dead suffer from the same lack of photons on the screen? I've been debating upgrading my game box to play it and Stubbs the Zombie.
Irritating the few legitimate purchasers at that date is guaranteed to irritate those legitimate customers, who have personally done nothing wrong.
An announcement that "GameStop released early, my god a lot of people jumped on, we're bringing the rest of our servers online ASAP" would be reasonable.
Much of what TPB supports is used illegally: a simple view of any of their bittorrent listings provides clear evidence of this. But their hands-off approach to allowing torrents is very handy for those of us with legitimate uses. I've grabbed clean images of scratched game and DVD's, used cracked versions of games I had already bought so that I don't have to keep the CD in my drive to play it, and used it to see shows I could see on TV or streaming services but had failed to tape, or which weren't available for Linux. And I've used to get ISO images of Linux and other open source software due to the speed and ease of Bittorrent. I've also used it to grab region-free versions of DVD's I bought in the USA but could not show my friends when traveling with a foreign laptop, or in my hotel room's DVD player.
So there is a lot of _ethical_, and what should be legal, use of their website. As soon as they start content filtering, though, all bets are off. So just as freedom of speech, especially anonymous speech, makes it easy for people to lie, there are real social benefits to allowing anonymity and easy speech. The same thing happens with Pirate Bay and their like. Pirate Bay is also great for entertainment value: watching a legal eagle flash their plumage and expect the pigeons to scatter is nowhere near as much fun as watching the eagle try to soar its way the the chain link fence of anonymity and off-shore operations that The Pirate Bay provides, especially when so many of the claims by the legal eagles are so far beyond any reasonably justified claim.
You've apparently always had spare horsepower in your hardware. I've repeatedly kept servers up and running past a few major OS updates, and newer OS's _do_ wind up taking more disk for all the utilities, more RAM for the larger programs, and more CPU to drive the new features. This is especially true with increasingly powerful anti-virus tools also in play, because they have to check for even more possible abuses. That takes resources.
It's typically microwave. That interacts with _metal_, and needs to interact with some kind of receiver. That makes it potentially a weapon. Moreover, tuned somewhat, microwaves _can_ heat water very efficiently. With high enough energy density, it could make human popcorn.
Dropping rocks is great, and I recommend looking up the old "crowbars from orbit" tank killers described by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in Footfall. But the question wouldn't be "is this the best weapon". The question would be "is this also a weapon that can cause serious damage", and the answer is yes.
Yes, indeed, advertising and shelf space and maintaining stock gets expensive: so does paying for insurance plans for vice presidents, making fancy PowerPoint presentations to investors, and showing up at trade shows to showcase your games.
For an example of how modest, "indie" games can work well, take a look at http://www.cheapass.com/. These guys make small, funny as all heck, modest board games that spend their efforts on making the game fun, not on fancy graphics. They're the "Kingdom of Loathing" of the board game world. And speaking of Kingdom of Loathing, there's an example of awfully fun computer gaming with minimal hardware requirements, modest infrastructure needs, and a well-earned fanbase for a game run on donations and buying in-game items.
This _strongly_ depends on your orbit and your technology. Unless your collector is a sphere of solar cells, your collector or reflector arrangement will get different efficiencies depending on where it is pointing relative to the Sun. And for many geosynchronous orbits, the Earth will occlude the sunlight in the middle of the night.
Now, the currently available geosynchronous orbital space is dangerously cluttered. Big mirrors there are begging to get hit by satellite debris. A reasonably large solar mirror/solar sail can actually suspend itself in a wide variety of otherwise unstable orbits, using solar pressure for thrust. Those orbits are typically considerably higher than geo-synchronous, to take advantage of very modest thrust to balance the Earth's gravity, but there are big advantages in that you can put these _out_ of the way of the geosynchronous satellites, even off the ecliptic, and you can steer them into place using solar pressure from a lower altitude release. And, cleverly steered, you can make the orbit unstable enough to bring it right back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere when the system fails.
This is one of the only sources of energy for our industrial world that does not require major technological miracles to expand to fill the entire world's energy needs. It's very expensive to start doing: the launch costs alone require a serious industrial civilization to support.
It doesn't have to be thick: the old, classic scheme is to use a reflector of extremely thin foil to concentrate the energy on a central collector, and use that to transform and beam the microwave more tightly to a target. The big, big concern is weaponry uses, followed by security: the more efficient and effective the system, the more potentially dangerous for aiming at a neighborhood or a building. I'd be extremely concerned about the security of the control system for such collectors, although I see this as a truly excellent to bring cheap energy to the world for manufacturing without the toxic byproducts of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Powering desalination plants, for example, seems an ideal use of cheap, consistently available power.
Oh, my. My friend, I'm sure that "pyramid schemes" of various sorts go right back to the Egyptian pyramids, themselves. It seems ridiculous to assume that Mr. Ponzi invented it completely from scratch, although he did refine it considerably. Getting the lower economic classes to pour money into a hierarchical structure is at the core of government, good and bad.
Except that your model assumes it's the government's fault that paying off that last $5 is such a beggar to do. While money is a nominally limited resource, it's not _that_ limited. To pay off that last $5, you may have to skip going to Starbucks, or that trip to see your mother, or buy a used small car instead of an SUV, or avoid taking out your next loan for a house expecting to sell it for more value than you paid.
That's money, and that's _life_. Blame the government's money mismanagement for what they did do wrong.
Oh, my. You've a set of excellent points, especially considering that the much smaller communities of the time were more likely to have cousins marry. But there are exceptions to some of these rules. If your brother died without children, you were supposed to get his widow pregnant. (This was the story of Onan, where some religions get their prohibition against masturbation, and they should have gotten the prohibition against misleading women and failing to fulfill family obligations.)
Slashdot Mirror
Then cite _that_ work, or at least cite it as well as the degree in education. It lends credence to your claim of expertise, and in itself seems interesting work. You're making the claim: you provide the data, the reasoning, or at least the citations. And because I don't put anything in my profile myself, for privacy reasons, I've never bothered to read others. And yours doesn't even cite your degrees in other languages.
A mere few moments on Google reveals http://www.linfo.org/lower_case.html, and a lot of anecdotal claims that lower case is easier to read. But I'm finding it difficult to detect actual research on it. If you can remember anything of the references you mentioned, perhaps you can find a pointer to _actual research_ on it.
Oh, my. I seem to have touched a nerve. This is too easy.
First, with degrees in 3 languages, this gentleman seems to have to resort to 3rd grade cursing when caught out. That's actually funny, and typical of the buraucrats coming out of "Education" programs. When they're caught making up stuff out of whole cloth. I've been running into this the last few years with "educational policies" that seem entrenched in stone, but have in fact no legal basis, no authorization, and were merely invented by local bureaucrats. And oh my, but they get upset when asked to provide the written guideline or any justification.
Second, yes, my suspicion was currect, he's not actually a teacher. _Teachers_ I respect tremendously: I've done a limited amount, mostly seminars and tutorials, and worked with enough school age relatives and college age interns to respect the work. I've also heard their complaints about the "education" professionals who fill middle management in their schools: it's awful. Like MBA's in charge of engineers, do not assume that an "education" degree conveys knowledge of the field they usually manage. Many such people do have excellent knowledge, but the degree itself does not assure it by any means.
Last, if he had any actual such studies he remembered in enough detail to cite this way, he should be able to find a reference. This doesn't mean none exist, but it calls the accuracy of his recollection into question. If he's going to cite himself as an authority, I'm afraid a degree in education won't cut it. Such a degree with a specialization in childhood learning, or in fact study of linguistics (as opposed to languages)? Great. I'd cite such a person myself as a knowledgeable source. But the degree itself isn't enough.
No, he used 'I have a grad degree in Education". That matches _none_ of your 3 examples. And the capitalized versions are titles, where the _degree_ is what needs to be capitalized, not the field of study. Imagine my surprise that his degree is in "Education" to get such a basic linguistic issue wrong: imagine my surprise that it also aggrandizes the idea that a degree in "Education" somehow actually makes you an expert in how people read.
I'm asserting that his degree in Education should not necessarily be held in contempt, but that it is not even strong enough to be a reasonable citing of authority. A "degree in Education" can cover a wide variety of fields. For example, http://www.pittstate.edu/office/registrar/general-education-degree-requirements-starting-fall-2005.dot lists some fascinating requirements, but none of them would seem to apply to this question.
Now, if he were actually a teacher of children learning to readn and observed them, I'd lend his claim more credence. Sadly, I've also seen some "studies" in in soft sciences (psychology is a favorite for this, but it happens in medicine and I'm sure education as well) that don't actually examine any data whatsoever. They examine data about studies of data, "meta-analysis" that simply count up the studies, perhaps refer to their margins of error, and then derive their own levels of certainty. And then they've wound up cited as scholarly studies for students to review and cite, rather than reading the original study and seeing if it's any _good_.
Class? Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this approach, or policies based on this?
I think you _wildly_ overestimate the power of a single neuron, and the advantage for computers of being able to consistently and reliably reproduce results: that eliminates a lot of the complexity and uncertainty of the data processing of real neurons and allows some significant improvements in efficiency for some tasks, such as memory and comparing memories. Neural memory is wonderfully holographic, but also unfortunately plastic: it's very easy to distort by simply recalling it repeatedly.
The human brain is also tied to the senses in fascinating ways: the eye, for example, does a tremendous amount of local processing. What it sends to the brain is _wildly_ different from the simple set of photons that impinge on it. And this disconnect between reality and perception applies to every possible computer perception: even Descartes described the problem, in some detail, in his ideas on "dualism". Rather than being worried about this, we can accept this is part of "how things work" and not worry about it for what is reality versus "virtual reality" with its attempts to present a synthetic world to the user. The real world is synthetic enough for such needs.
I think you're also underestimating the external requirements for the evolution of intelligence. Providing shelter for organisms that are potentially intelligent but may lack other resources, providing enough language and play and cultural training to raise youngsters to grow and exhibit intelligence, preserving the experience of the elders to speed that training, etc., all require having enough other intelligences to work with. They don't work well in isolation as single instances.
We also have porn sites where to download the porn, you have to beat a CAPTCHA. The back end of the server is presenting CAPTCHAS from more legitimate sites, ranging from gmail account generation for spammers to banksites for phishers, to streamline the cracking of CAPTCHAS for the price of a porn server filled with downloaded porn from elsewhere.
No. You capitalized "Education" to make it seem more important. That's not a matter of formal versus informal English, the degree should not be capitalized in _neither_ form of English, unless it's part of a formal title, such as "Master of the Arts in Education". If it's not a typo, it's a simple attempt at self-aggrandizement by someone citing their own degree as proof of their authority. Languages get capitalized because of their national association, I can't think of any other field of study which would automatically be capitalized. Getting your first degree in German has little to do with that, unless you want to start playing "find the verb" at the end of your sentences, and you say nothing about not being a native English speaker with that more reasonable excuse for that kind of slip.
Given that "education" is the formal meaning of the word "teaching", the idea that your authority as someone with a degree in it has nothing to do with the actual craft you were _supposed_ to study merely confirms the idea that a degree in "Education" is a waste of college tuition, classroom space, and printer paper better filled by having students actually study the subjects they are supposed to teach, actually working with students, and ideally taking some business courses to learn to manage the bureaucracy. (My opinion on "Educatiors" may be somewhat poisoned: the school district I live in has become famous for amazingly wasteful policies, massive bureaucracies that spend their budget on hiring more bureaucrats instead of teachers or the kids, and blowing their time on union negotiations instead of gettng the money into the hands of the teachers.)
And 'giving your background as an authority' is merely compounding your appeal to authority with a personal claim as an authority. It makes an even _worse_ logical fallacy, since there's not even the external reputation of a real authority that might have previously earned some respect for his or her work. It is, in my experience, typical of far too many people in your field. Unless your degree is going to be as meaningful as a bowling trophy in a league that only your team plays in, I suggest you actually provide a citation or two with some actual data in it.
And you have proof of this theorem, "which this margin is too narrow to contain". In other words, your "proof" is a proof by "appeal to authority", and you cannot even be bothered to name the authority. And by the way, "education" should not be capitalized in the sentence "I have a grad degree in Education". But that would require the ability to write clear English, as opposed to Important Papers In Education With No Actual Data Except Citing Other Papers.
You don't actually teach, do you?
You're quite correct: I neglected that polar orbits, if launchers don't pay a bit of attention to existing orbits, could easily create such cases.
Still dark, yes. But the higher resolution, larger screen size, and better frame rate helped a lot to notice texture in the dark, and kept using the flashlight from absolutely washing out anything else on the screen. It was much more playable.
It depends tremendously on the orbit and the object. Some 'objects', like dumped urine or water, submlimate. They're still deadly if they hit you from even a slightly different orbit, since we're talking about base speeds of roughly 18,000 mph in low earth orbit: it's the difference between the orbits that determines their relative velocity, and that's easily as much as 10%. (Head-on collisions are basically unheard of: one object would have to be orbiting the other way entirely, and no one does that due to the launch costs of orbiting against the Earth's spin.)
Small objects in low orbits are also subject to normal orbital decay, from the extremely thin atmosphere and very slight gaseous content of ordinary space, which is very thin but very real. Even solar wind can help decay orbits, by providing a consistent though slight thrust in a direction at an angle to that orbit, and depleting the orbit of its angular components. (Tidal effects are not noticeable factors on an object _that_ small.)
Geosynchronous orbits are a whole separate problem: they last much, much, much longer, and that orbital space is getting crowded by junk.
Especially the bulky boxes and advertising that go with those disks. And especially when the first few patches are actually _larger_ than the original disks.
I would love to see all game and software distribution restricted to standard CD case size, just for enironmental reasons. I can see having a recyclable plastic case to protect it, but who needs those artifically long DVD boxes?
I got Doom 3 as a gift, and had to upgrade my old system to play it. Doom 3 was so dark and difficult to see anything that I felt like I must have gone blind and grown hair hands. Not all of us can afford $500 video cards and $1000 monitors: does Left for Dead suffer from the same lack of photons on the screen? I've been debating upgrading my game box to play it and Stubbs the Zombie.
I'm a sucker for zombie games, it's true.
Irritating the few legitimate purchasers at that date is guaranteed to irritate those legitimate customers, who have personally done nothing wrong.
An announcement that "GameStop released early, my god a lot of people jumped on, we're bringing the rest of our servers online ASAP" would be reasonable.
Much of what TPB supports is used illegally: a simple view of any of their bittorrent listings provides clear evidence of this. But their hands-off approach to allowing torrents is very handy for those of us with legitimate uses. I've grabbed clean images of scratched game and DVD's, used cracked versions of games I had already bought so that I don't have to keep the CD in my drive to play it, and used it to see shows I could see on TV or streaming services but had failed to tape, or which weren't available for Linux. And I've used to get ISO images of Linux and other open source software due to the speed and ease of Bittorrent. I've also used it to grab region-free versions of DVD's I bought in the USA but could not show my friends when traveling with a foreign laptop, or in my hotel room's DVD player.
So there is a lot of _ethical_, and what should be legal, use of their website. As soon as they start content filtering, though, all bets are off. So just as freedom of speech, especially anonymous speech, makes it easy for people to lie, there are real social benefits to allowing anonymity and easy speech. The same thing happens with Pirate Bay and their like. Pirate Bay is also great for entertainment value: watching a legal eagle flash their plumage and expect the pigeons to scatter is nowhere near as much fun as watching the eagle try to soar its way the the chain link fence of anonymity and off-shore operations that The Pirate Bay provides, especially when so many of the claims by the legal eagles are so far beyond any reasonably justified claim.
For the people are still alive. (http://www.mindonfire.com/2008/10/13/music-monday-still-alive/, the closing song from Portal.)
You've apparently always had spare horsepower in your hardware. I've repeatedly kept servers up and running past a few major OS updates, and newer OS's _do_ wind up taking more disk for all the utilities, more RAM for the larger programs, and more CPU to drive the new features. This is especially true with increasingly powerful anti-virus tools also in play, because they have to check for even more possible abuses. That takes resources.
It's typically microwave. That interacts with _metal_, and needs to interact with some kind of receiver. That makes it potentially a weapon. Moreover, tuned somewhat, microwaves _can_ heat water very efficiently. With high enough energy density, it could make human popcorn.
Dropping rocks is great, and I recommend looking up the old "crowbars from orbit" tank killers described by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in Footfall. But the question wouldn't be "is this the best weapon". The question would be "is this also a weapon that can cause serious damage", and the answer is yes.
Yes, indeed, advertising and shelf space and maintaining stock gets expensive: so does paying for insurance plans for vice presidents, making fancy PowerPoint presentations to investors, and showing up at trade shows to showcase your games.
For an example of how modest, "indie" games can work well, take a look at http://www.cheapass.com/. These guys make small, funny as all heck, modest board games that spend their efforts on making the game fun, not on fancy graphics. They're the "Kingdom of Loathing" of the board game world. And speaking of Kingdom of Loathing, there's an example of awfully fun computer gaming with minimal hardware requirements, modest infrastructure needs, and a well-earned fanbase for a game run on donations and buying in-game items.
This _strongly_ depends on your orbit and your technology. Unless your collector is a sphere of solar cells, your collector or reflector arrangement will get different efficiencies depending on where it is pointing relative to the Sun. And for many geosynchronous orbits, the Earth will occlude the sunlight in the middle of the night.
Now, the currently available geosynchronous orbital space is dangerously cluttered. Big mirrors there are begging to get hit by satellite debris. A reasonably large solar mirror/solar sail can actually suspend itself in a wide variety of otherwise unstable orbits, using solar pressure for thrust. Those orbits are typically considerably higher than geo-synchronous, to take advantage of very modest thrust to balance the Earth's gravity, but there are big advantages in that you can put these _out_ of the way of the geosynchronous satellites, even off the ecliptic, and you can steer them into place using solar pressure from a lower altitude release. And, cleverly steered, you can make the orbit unstable enough to bring it right back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere when the system fails.
This is one of the only sources of energy for our industrial world that does not require major technological miracles to expand to fill the entire world's energy needs. It's very expensive to start doing: the launch costs alone require a serious industrial civilization to support.
It doesn't have to be thick: the old, classic scheme is to use a reflector of extremely thin foil to concentrate the energy on a central collector, and use that to transform and beam the microwave more tightly to a target. The big, big concern is weaponry uses, followed by security: the more efficient and effective the system, the more potentially dangerous for aiming at a neighborhood or a building. I'd be extremely concerned about the security of the control system for such collectors, although I see this as a truly excellent to bring cheap energy to the world for manufacturing without the toxic byproducts of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Powering desalination plants, for example, seems an ideal use of cheap, consistently available power.
A lot of folks in SF find a sudden need to head to the bathroom, preferably with wire cutters, to get those genital piercings _off_?
Oh, my. My friend, I'm sure that "pyramid schemes" of various sorts go right back to the Egyptian pyramids, themselves. It seems ridiculous to assume that Mr. Ponzi invented it completely from scratch, although he did refine it considerably. Getting the lower economic classes to pour money into a hierarchical structure is at the core of government, good and bad.
Except that your model assumes it's the government's fault that paying off that last $5 is such a beggar to do. While money is a nominally limited resource, it's not _that_ limited. To pay off that last $5, you may have to skip going to Starbucks, or that trip to see your mother, or buy a used small car instead of an SUV, or avoid taking out your next loan for a house expecting to sell it for more value than you paid.
That's money, and that's _life_. Blame the government's money mismanagement for what they did do wrong.
Oh, my. You've a set of excellent points, especially considering that the much smaller communities of the time were more likely to have cousins marry. But there are exceptions to some of these rules. If your brother died without children, you were supposed to get his widow pregnant. (This was the story of Onan, where some religions get their prohibition against masturbation, and they should have gotten the prohibition against misleading women and failing to fulfill family obligations.)
You've never examined the history of the Inquisition, have you? Or of most combined church-state religions?