Man, VB is a great language to write your first programs in. You don't have to worry at all about the UI elements. You can just concentrate on whipping up a group of UI elements that do something. If they gave VB away with Vista it'd be worth the price to me. Many times I've wanted to write a program that automates some mathematical trick, but since I would also have to program some sort of UI element to control it I figured "why bother? I can do it be by hand faster."
Sure VB is slow as molasses, but whenever I've needed something simple like that I've always been on computers where the processor could grind through it.
Hell, if Microsoft repurposed their OSes to be very programmer-friendly then people would buy it because it comes with free tools. The reason OSX is well-liked is because you don't have to buy anything extra to be productive. Compared to that, Windows is barebones, even with the premium version. It's like the entire purpose of the OS is to sell copies of Office and Visual Studio. If they gave away Office and VB for free it would be the perfect system for business users.
And then a mysterious genetic anomaly will strike in 2012 when the fourth world ends and the fifth world begins. This anomaly will express itself by causing otherwise normal human children to be born with pointed ears, or to have stunted growth and an unusually dense body. By 2030 we will have wireless mesh networks surrounding us, and will communicate with each other through a form of Augmented Reality where all the information the mesh is transmitting appears overlayed on our normal perceptions. Corporations will become the new governmental agencies.
About webmail: I use gmail, and I find it to be just as responsive as a regular client. I can think of a few interfaces where I've had problems, though, like Hotmail and Yahoo. I used to use OE back in the day, then I switched to Opera for M2, then I got a gmail invite from a friend. I find Gmail to be much easier for me to trade emails in, not because of the overall interface design, but because of the fact that it organizes mail into conversations which are easy to follow. Frankly I find it hard to use M2 because it doesn't organize my mail for me. I have to manually push everything into folders. I should be able to just set up a rule and have all email that matches that rule be pushed into folders.
So if the endless patches don't break the original purpose at all, then what's wrong with having them?
So what you're saying is that the document browsers of today suck because:
1.) They're complicated. 2.) Documents are meant to be static and not interactive. 3.) The original design in fact sucks, so whatever you build into it also sucks.
2 is silly. For one thing, nobody specified that documents are meant to be static noninteractive objects. I write in the margins of papers all the time. I mark them up and give them back to someone else or show them to someone else. It may be that your paradigm is antiquated.
3 has some merit. If the original browser sucks and you build in a bunch of extra functionality, you're still going to get a crappy browser. Unfortunately you're going to have to actually prove that the functionality is crap, because I really like online banking and webmail and am finding it hard to believe that whatever my browser uses to render those applications sucks, or even that my browser sucks.
The only legitimate government is that government whose citizens have not and are not laying down their lives to oust. Every moment you spend doing nothing about the evils of your government is another moment lending legitimacy to its actions. The British Empire was the legitimate government of the US colonies right up to the point we gave them the finger and started fighting them. Even when you're talking to them about how crappy they are and how you would like them to go away, they're still your legitimate government until you physically remove them.
Of course, this is in no way meant to be taken as me urging anyone to forcibly remove the US government. I'm merely saying that your government is your government right up until you start fighting their control. Even those who meekly vote for minority parties are still legitimizing our government, since they're still working within the system to change it.
Ayn Rand's definition is bullshit, since tyranny is tolerated, if not accepted by the people living under it. Essentially what you're saying is that we should enforce our own ethical and moral code on other people whether they like it or not.
The other problem with her definition is that it only justifies our invasion of Iraq, but not our continued occupation since you could make the case that we are imposing our will(Democracy) on their people without their consent.
Wow, that would be a great way to celebrate Adams's birthday. All around the world we get together to mark up all the places mentioned in his book. If someone in the UK could be bothered to make a gigantic arrow pointing at a swamp which said "Ark B," we'd be in business.
Lawsuits are a form of contract arbitration by a third party. We sue over breach of contract because the breach may cause significant hardship for us. What would you do if someone breaks a contract that states that you are to work for 1 year at $xxxxxx.xx? Would you just suck it up and move on even though you'll only find a crappier job? What if you were doing construction work on someone's house and they decided not to pay you even though you completed what was outlined in the contract?
In short, what are you supposed to do to make contracts legally binding if you can't sue anyone? I agree that it's overreacting to sue immediately, but frankly your characterization of all of us Americans as litigious bastards is unfair and makes you look like a jackass.
Modding isn't about rewarding correctness. Modding is about rewarding concise, insightful ideas. Whether or not they're scientifically correct, or even based in science is another story entirely and not something that any of the moderators should even deal with. If you find yourself shaking your head and grimacing at someone's misinformation, mod them up so that someone else can debunk it. Or better yet, ignore it and let someone else debunk it.
Don't silence the voices of ignorance. Pull them up into knowledge.
I don't need a car where I live because I can get from one end of town to the other in less than an hour. Everything I need is at most a mile away from where I live, and I can walk that no sweat.
Contrast this to where I used to live, where anything useful or meaningful to me was at least a half-hour away from me. Half-hour drive. So essentially to get anywhere I'd have to walk for about 4 hours or drive for 30 minutes. Guess which option I chose? I really like living inside the city for a change because everything is close to everything else. I can run errands during my lunch hour. It's nice that the downtown area isn't more than 50% restaurants, too.
Given a choice I'd choose the urban area over the sprawl. I walk way more in the urban area than when I lived in the sprawl. I also eat better too, because I have time to pop home and cook something. Where I lived, if I was out somewhere I either had to pack a lunch or buy something.
Never listen to music while you're working on something that requires you to concentrate. You'll fuck up a lot. It's okay for surgeons to eat in the OR though, as long as they scrub after they're done. In a 4+ hour procedure it's common to get hungry. I know that when I'm hungry I tend to find it hard to concentrate on what I'm doing.
Right, and I'm saying that I'm not buying any of their new tech until they stop. I might make the case that SD works better than HD since SD doesn't require me to screw with resolutions, boxes, HDCP, or any of that other stuff. Especially in light of the fact that HDCP seems to break on a number of people's consoles and cable boxes.
If you bought an HD TV, quit bitching about all the DRM and stuff unless you're also prepared to back that up with money. Why did you buy the HDTV if you knew that the DRM might possibly pose a problem for you? I'd assume that you went out and did your research on the product before you bought it. Never invest in a technology that you know is designed to keep you from accessing content which you purchased.
The beauty of SD is that 100% of the time I can sit down and just watch it. Not only that, whatever country you're shopping in carries a selection of televisions that will just work. With HD you have to shop for various resolutions, make sure you're not missing any resolutions, make sure you've got HDCP compliant equipment in the right spec., order a new box from the cable company, and hope you don't have to restart both of them at the same time in order for them to work properly together.
Whatever happened to simple, reliable technology? And how is SD confusing to anyone? You don't have to worry about standards unless you switch continents.
Boy, that sucks. When I turn my regular old television on, I don't have to worry about handshakes, DRM, blinking pictures, or any of that buggy crap. What's great about analog cable is that it works. Yessir, after reading all these horror stories about HDCP and HD televisions, I don't think I'm ever going to upgrade from good old regular televisions until they pry the thing from my cold dead fingers. When they stop selling DVDs I'll probably just pirate shows in low-def and pipe them to my TV.
The SD television standard has a total of one resolution, and only three real standards which vary by country. Not only that, my television has a cable box built in so that all I have to do is plug cable into my TV and I can watch television. Sure beats having to screw around with a box and play with it for an hour until I figure out how to get it handshaking.
In short, I'm saying that everyone who bought into the DRM-laden technologies got bit because they didn't understand the real purpose of DRM. DRM is really just designed to make your content harder to access. Reading your anecdote, it appears to be working. Anyone who bought DRM tacitly accepted the technology.
I know it's a rhetorical question, but these "problems" are how social scientists make work for themselves. Gender discrimination is something that needs to be crushed, but we're assuming that inequality implies discrimination which is flat out not true. In all cases discrimination implies inequality. However, to invert the predicate and conclusion is fallacious.
What needs to be shown is that there is discrimination against women in the work force. Then we can show that the inequality arises from this. But until that discrimination is demonstrated, this is a non-issue. Suppose that we don't throw nature out the window?
In your case, there is discrimination, and that is a travesty. While there is still any discrimination as opposed to acceptance, we are still back in the dark ages. You may not be being stoned for who you are, but you aren't getting accepted for who you are either.
What really bothers me about the crusade for gender inequality is that few, if any, of the crusaders care about the men in society. When the draft was proposed, there were no feminists crying for compulsory service for women. Why?
Actually, according to the officer he did not get any time to work on it while on the clock. In fact, he wrote "several times more" tickets than other officers on duty. What's in dispute is whether or not he worked on it at work, and thus whether or not it belongs to the state. Also, the software that he wrote has nothing to do with the source the state got, except that it was a set of extensions to the state's software. He extended parts of the original source to work with the Wisconsin system, and he also wrote a program which will import criminal history and driver information data. That software, at least, he could sell. The extensions to the original Iowa software exist in a grey area, but as long as the database import software is not an element of the Iowa program he should be allowed to market it provided that the original dispute is settled.
On another note, I noticed that the article is slightly biased toward the officer. Why do we need to know that "he earns $45,300 a year before overtime?"
Alright, so we've established I can't do math. But seriously, think about this. 1% of a million dollar bonus for one person is 33% of what someone else makes in a year.
And i don't get jealous of your money. I get angry because people that make that kind of money don't often think of all the people who won't be making that kind of money. But no worries, 'eh? Let them eat cake!
Howabout we don't travel down that wonderful slippery slope into a new dark age? The reason our culture is at all cohesive is because of belief in our ability to use rational thought and logic to reason through different situations. If we start evangelizing our beliefs, the next step is to escalate to violence. Violence is the only result when you fervently believe in something. The proper attitude for any "believer" in science is thoughtful skepticism.
Also, your idea of giving parents a voucher for care and feeding instead of just sending their children to school will effectively destroy the purpose of the public education system, which is to provide a baseline level of literacy and knowledge for all of our children regardless of where they're ending up. We're paying for everyone's education in mathematics and science to ensure that they know more than what they were born with. If we allow even one raving fanatic to cripple their child's future by not allowing him/her to learn to read, to learn mathematics, or to have a basic understanding of sex, then we have allowed them to create a burden on our society.
I'm not even going to start on how some poor people would spend that "Care and feeding" voucher. Can anyone say "new car?"
Forget Brazil. Imagine how much it galls many Americans that watch some dumb yuppie on television fritter away a couple of million dollars when that's more money than they will ever see in their lifetime. I can tell you that it makes people very angry to think about that. Not angry enough to take things into their own hands, yet, but still angry. And your salary/wage is indeed your direct access to everything you need to survive. If it's below a certain point then you can't afford to buy things like health care and food because they cost more when it's expected that the average person can pay that.
In America we're creating an underclass where the values are completely different, even from the middle class. Our middle class is shrinking in size, with more people dropping below the line between the two classes and winding up poor. When our middle class is gone we lose the perception of class mobility, and then people start fighting.
I can tell you that I get pretty pissed off when I hear about million-dollar bonuses when if I had 1% of that money I wouldn't have to worry about college tuition for the rest of my career. It makes me angry, so I try to ignore it. Watching commercials also gets me a little mad because of the huge disparity between the way the "average american" is depicted on television, and the way we actually live. If you're willing to buy into the commercial vision, then you start to think that everyone but you is living like that, and then you start to wonder how you can get to that point. When you start to think that you can't, you get angry.
HEY! We Pastafarians resent your comment that FSM is not a real religion. Just where in your book does it exactly dictate what God looks like? Perhaps he's just a big lovely ball of noodles, meat, and sauce in the sky. From my point of view it certainly looks like we were created in His image, with noodlyness abound. Our blood flows red as the Sauce, as well. Not only that, clearly He thinks more of us that he should stock our Heaven with beer volcanoes and strippers as far as the eye can see. Does your God do that?
Why not just set up induction charging systems at service stations and sell electricity to power your car without the need to get out and pump it? Or set up a system where the car is charged at a stoplight. The latter option could feasibly be paid for by vehicle license taxes since the driver is the one using the system. This could add a few miles to the range of a car. Imagine going to work on half the battery, and coming out 8 hours later with a fully charged battery. There would be some engineering and security to work out, but it would be worth the simplicity which this would afford you.
Here's an idea: Maybe you shouldn't drink or otherwise incapacitate yourself in places where it is unsafe to do so. If you're drinking someplace where it's dangerous to be outside late at night, find someplace else. There has to be more than one bar in your town. Mine is only a couple of miles across and there are 4 or 5 scattered around.
There's no way any sane person will accept that you weren't responsible at all for any of your actions leading up to a mortality in a collision. It's never happened to you before, and it doesn't seem like it will ever happen, but it's not like you didn't have a choice in how many drinks you had or where you went or whether you called a cab. When you say that you don't want to wait for a cab and would prefer to drive drunk because the area where your bar is is dangerous at night, you're essentially pushing the danger off yourself and onto someone else. Suck it up and accept responsibility for your actions and the danger that they cause to others. Not doing so certainly makes you less of a man.
Wait, who brought a specific time frame or monetary amount into this discussion? The lesson here is that you don't have babies if you can't afford the temporal or monetary investment. Your analogy between space travel and induction reduces the problem far past the actual scale difference. For instance, induction doesn't require you to move materials across vast distances in order to set up an area which will have to be completely supported by the parent colony for a number of decades. In fact, compared to manned colonization, induction can be reduced to a few mathematical descriptions.
Scenario A is highly unlikely, and in Scenario B it would be more cost-effective to move the asteroid out of our way than to move us to another planet.
The fact that you do not enumerate any of your contentions implies that you cannot enumerate any of your contentions. The moon base can be a staging area for a mars mission, but what would be the point of such an expenditure? You're working under the assumption that the technologies developed during such a mission would not be developed during the solution of some other world problem. I would contend that the space race was nothing more than a technological pissing contest between the US and the USSR. Furthermore, the cohesiveness you speak of is nationalism, and while it works perfectly well to hold a society together in the case of the space race, there are many more instances of nationalism fracturing otherwise peaceful societies. See Eastern Europe.
My issue with space exploration, as one of the network generation, is that no matter how much money we pour into it, I will never see any tangible benefits for anyone. Hubble was interesting because it enabled us to do cosmology research without any atmospheric wavelength shift. The only benefit for the ISS so far has been as a money sink and as a way to show that we can occasionally launch parts into space if our spacecraft don't explode. What NASA is forgetting is that a lot of us don't give a damn about space exploration because it's exclusive and doesn't benefit us.
Space exploration doesn't do anything for our failing education system. It doesn't make tuition less expensive. It doesn't feed the starving and homeless. It doesn't ensure my job security. It doesn't provide us with clean alternative energy. It doesn't end our imperialist expansion. It doesn't make us feel less alienated and ignored by people in power.
In short, it doesn't solve or even attempt to solve a number of social problems that currently plague our country and our planet.
And we would need a moon base as a stopover point between Earth and Mars and also to harvest that Helium-3 that I've been hearing so much about.
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Man, VB is a great language to write your first programs in. You don't have to worry at all about the UI elements. You can just concentrate on whipping up a group of UI elements that do something. If they gave VB away with Vista it'd be worth the price to me. Many times I've wanted to write a program that automates some mathematical trick, but since I would also have to program some sort of UI element to control it I figured "why bother? I can do it be by hand faster."
Sure VB is slow as molasses, but whenever I've needed something simple like that I've always been on computers where the processor could grind through it.
Hell, if Microsoft repurposed their OSes to be very programmer-friendly then people would buy it because it comes with free tools. The reason OSX is well-liked is because you don't have to buy anything extra to be productive. Compared to that, Windows is barebones, even with the premium version. It's like the entire purpose of the OS is to sell copies of Office and Visual Studio. If they gave away Office and VB for free it would be the perfect system for business users.
Fry's Electronics.
And then a mysterious genetic anomaly will strike in 2012 when the fourth world ends and the fifth world begins. This anomaly will express itself by causing otherwise normal human children to be born with pointed ears, or to have stunted growth and an unusually dense body. By 2030 we will have wireless mesh networks surrounding us, and will communicate with each other through a form of Augmented Reality where all the information the mesh is transmitting appears overlayed on our normal perceptions. Corporations will become the new governmental agencies.
About webmail: I use gmail, and I find it to be just as responsive as a regular client. I can think of a few interfaces where I've had problems, though, like Hotmail and Yahoo. I used to use OE back in the day, then I switched to Opera for M2, then I got a gmail invite from a friend. I find Gmail to be much easier for me to trade emails in, not because of the overall interface design, but because of the fact that it organizes mail into conversations which are easy to follow. Frankly I find it hard to use M2 because it doesn't organize my mail for me. I have to manually push everything into folders. I should be able to just set up a rule and have all email that matches that rule be pushed into folders.
So if the endless patches don't break the original purpose at all, then what's wrong with having them?
So what you're saying is that the document browsers of today suck because:
1.) They're complicated.
2.) Documents are meant to be static and not interactive.
3.) The original design in fact sucks, so whatever you build into it also sucks.
2 is silly. For one thing, nobody specified that documents are meant to be static noninteractive objects. I write in the margins of papers all the time. I mark them up and give them back to someone else or show them to someone else. It may be that your paradigm is antiquated.
3 has some merit. If the original browser sucks and you build in a bunch of extra functionality, you're still going to get a crappy browser. Unfortunately you're going to have to actually prove that the functionality is crap, because I really like online banking and webmail and am finding it hard to believe that whatever my browser uses to render those applications sucks, or even that my browser sucks.
The only legitimate government is that government whose citizens have not and are not laying down their lives to oust. Every moment you spend doing nothing about the evils of your government is another moment lending legitimacy to its actions. The British Empire was the legitimate government of the US colonies right up to the point we gave them the finger and started fighting them. Even when you're talking to them about how crappy they are and how you would like them to go away, they're still your legitimate government until you physically remove them.
Of course, this is in no way meant to be taken as me urging anyone to forcibly remove the US government. I'm merely saying that your government is your government right up until you start fighting their control. Even those who meekly vote for minority parties are still legitimizing our government, since they're still working within the system to change it.
Ayn Rand's definition is bullshit, since tyranny is tolerated, if not accepted by the people living under it. Essentially what you're saying is that we should enforce our own ethical and moral code on other people whether they like it or not.
The other problem with her definition is that it only justifies our invasion of Iraq, but not our continued occupation since you could make the case that we are imposing our will(Democracy) on their people without their consent.
Wow, that would be a great way to celebrate Adams's birthday. All around the world we get together to mark up all the places mentioned in his book. If someone in the UK could be bothered to make a gigantic arrow pointing at a swamp which said "Ark B," we'd be in business.
Lawsuits are a form of contract arbitration by a third party. We sue over breach of contract because the breach may cause significant hardship for us. What would you do if someone breaks a contract that states that you are to work for 1 year at $xxxxxx.xx? Would you just suck it up and move on even though you'll only find a crappier job? What if you were doing construction work on someone's house and they decided not to pay you even though you completed what was outlined in the contract?
In short, what are you supposed to do to make contracts legally binding if you can't sue anyone? I agree that it's overreacting to sue immediately, but frankly your characterization of all of us Americans as litigious bastards is unfair and makes you look like a jackass.
Modding isn't about rewarding correctness. Modding is about rewarding concise, insightful ideas. Whether or not they're scientifically correct, or even based in science is another story entirely and not something that any of the moderators should even deal with. If you find yourself shaking your head and grimacing at someone's misinformation, mod them up so that someone else can debunk it. Or better yet, ignore it and let someone else debunk it.
Don't silence the voices of ignorance. Pull them up into knowledge.
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Seriously though? That would just remind some of us of how much we need a wife.
I don't need a car where I live because I can get from one end of town to the other in less than an hour. Everything I need is at most a mile away from where I live, and I can walk that no sweat.
Contrast this to where I used to live, where anything useful or meaningful to me was at least a half-hour away from me. Half-hour drive. So essentially to get anywhere I'd have to walk for about 4 hours or drive for 30 minutes. Guess which option I chose? I really like living inside the city for a change because everything is close to everything else. I can run errands during my lunch hour. It's nice that the downtown area isn't more than 50% restaurants, too.
Given a choice I'd choose the urban area over the sprawl. I walk way more in the urban area than when I lived in the sprawl. I also eat better too, because I have time to pop home and cook something. Where I lived, if I was out somewhere I either had to pack a lunch or buy something.
There's some very good points in that article.
By the way, I'm an American.
Never listen to music while you're working on something that requires you to concentrate. You'll fuck up a lot. It's okay for surgeons to eat in the OR though, as long as they scrub after they're done. In a 4+ hour procedure it's common to get hungry. I know that when I'm hungry I tend to find it hard to concentrate on what I'm doing.
Right, and I'm saying that I'm not buying any of their new tech until they stop. I might make the case that SD works better than HD since SD doesn't require me to screw with resolutions, boxes, HDCP, or any of that other stuff. Especially in light of the fact that HDCP seems to break on a number of people's consoles and cable boxes.
If you bought an HD TV, quit bitching about all the DRM and stuff unless you're also prepared to back that up with money. Why did you buy the HDTV if you knew that the DRM might possibly pose a problem for you? I'd assume that you went out and did your research on the product before you bought it. Never invest in a technology that you know is designed to keep you from accessing content which you purchased.
The beauty of SD is that 100% of the time I can sit down and just watch it. Not only that, whatever country you're shopping in carries a selection of televisions that will just work. With HD you have to shop for various resolutions, make sure you're not missing any resolutions, make sure you've got HDCP compliant equipment in the right spec., order a new box from the cable company, and hope you don't have to restart both of them at the same time in order for them to work properly together.
Whatever happened to simple, reliable technology? And how is SD confusing to anyone? You don't have to worry about standards unless you switch continents.
Boy, that sucks. When I turn my regular old television on, I don't have to worry about handshakes, DRM, blinking pictures, or any of that buggy crap. What's great about analog cable is that it works. Yessir, after reading all these horror stories about HDCP and HD televisions, I don't think I'm ever going to upgrade from good old regular televisions until they pry the thing from my cold dead fingers. When they stop selling DVDs I'll probably just pirate shows in low-def and pipe them to my TV.
The SD television standard has a total of one resolution, and only three real standards which vary by country. Not only that, my television has a cable box built in so that all I have to do is plug cable into my TV and I can watch television. Sure beats having to screw around with a box and play with it for an hour until I figure out how to get it handshaking.
In short, I'm saying that everyone who bought into the DRM-laden technologies got bit because they didn't understand the real purpose of DRM. DRM is really just designed to make your content harder to access. Reading your anecdote, it appears to be working. Anyone who bought DRM tacitly accepted the technology.
If you don't like it, vote with your wallet.
I know it's a rhetorical question, but these "problems" are how social scientists make work for themselves. Gender discrimination is something that needs to be crushed, but we're assuming that inequality implies discrimination which is flat out not true. In all cases discrimination implies inequality. However, to invert the predicate and conclusion is fallacious.
What needs to be shown is that there is discrimination against women in the work force. Then we can show that the inequality arises from this. But until that discrimination is demonstrated, this is a non-issue. Suppose that we don't throw nature out the window?
In your case, there is discrimination, and that is a travesty. While there is still any discrimination as opposed to acceptance, we are still back in the dark ages. You may not be being stoned for who you are, but you aren't getting accepted for who you are either.
What really bothers me about the crusade for gender inequality is that few, if any, of the crusaders care about the men in society. When the draft was proposed, there were no feminists crying for compulsory service for women. Why?
Actually, according to the officer he did not get any time to work on it while on the clock. In fact, he wrote "several times more" tickets than other officers on duty. What's in dispute is whether or not he worked on it at work, and thus whether or not it belongs to the state. Also, the software that he wrote has nothing to do with the source the state got, except that it was a set of extensions to the state's software. He extended parts of the original source to work with the Wisconsin system, and he also wrote a program which will import criminal history and driver information data. That software, at least, he could sell. The extensions to the original Iowa software exist in a grey area, but as long as the database import software is not an element of the Iowa program he should be allowed to market it provided that the original dispute is settled.
On another note, I noticed that the article is slightly biased toward the officer. Why do we need to know that "he earns $45,300 a year before overtime?"
Alright, so we've established I can't do math. But seriously, think about this. 1% of a million dollar bonus for one person is 33% of what someone else makes in a year.
And i don't get jealous of your money. I get angry because people that make that kind of money don't often think of all the people who won't be making that kind of money. But no worries, 'eh? Let them eat cake!
Howabout we don't travel down that wonderful slippery slope into a new dark age? The reason our culture is at all cohesive is because of belief in our ability to use rational thought and logic to reason through different situations. If we start evangelizing our beliefs, the next step is to escalate to violence. Violence is the only result when you fervently believe in something. The proper attitude for any "believer" in science is thoughtful skepticism.
Also, your idea of giving parents a voucher for care and feeding instead of just sending their children to school will effectively destroy the purpose of the public education system, which is to provide a baseline level of literacy and knowledge for all of our children regardless of where they're ending up. We're paying for everyone's education in mathematics and science to ensure that they know more than what they were born with. If we allow even one raving fanatic to cripple their child's future by not allowing him/her to learn to read, to learn mathematics, or to have a basic understanding of sex, then we have allowed them to create a burden on our society.
I'm not even going to start on how some poor people would spend that "Care and feeding" voucher. Can anyone say "new car?"
Forget Brazil. Imagine how much it galls many Americans that watch some dumb yuppie on television fritter away a couple of million dollars when that's more money than they will ever see in their lifetime. I can tell you that it makes people very angry to think about that. Not angry enough to take things into their own hands, yet, but still angry. And your salary/wage is indeed your direct access to everything you need to survive. If it's below a certain point then you can't afford to buy things like health care and food because they cost more when it's expected that the average person can pay that.
In America we're creating an underclass where the values are completely different, even from the middle class. Our middle class is shrinking in size, with more people dropping below the line between the two classes and winding up poor. When our middle class is gone we lose the perception of class mobility, and then people start fighting.
I can tell you that I get pretty pissed off when I hear about million-dollar bonuses when if I had 1% of that money I wouldn't have to worry about college tuition for the rest of my career. It makes me angry, so I try to ignore it. Watching commercials also gets me a little mad because of the huge disparity between the way the "average american" is depicted on television, and the way we actually live. If you're willing to buy into the commercial vision, then you start to think that everyone but you is living like that, and then you start to wonder how you can get to that point. When you start to think that you can't, you get angry.
HEY! We Pastafarians resent your comment that FSM is not a real religion. Just where in your book does it exactly dictate what God looks like? Perhaps he's just a big lovely ball of noodles, meat, and sauce in the sky. From my point of view it certainly looks like we were created in His image, with noodlyness abound. Our blood flows red as the Sauce, as well. Not only that, clearly He thinks more of us that he should stock our Heaven with beer volcanoes and strippers as far as the eye can see. Does your God do that?
Why not just set up induction charging systems at service stations and sell electricity to power your car without the need to get out and pump it? Or set up a system where the car is charged at a stoplight. The latter option could feasibly be paid for by vehicle license taxes since the driver is the one using the system. This could add a few miles to the range of a car. Imagine going to work on half the battery, and coming out 8 hours later with a fully charged battery. There would be some engineering and security to work out, but it would be worth the simplicity which this would afford you.
Here's an idea: Maybe you shouldn't drink or otherwise incapacitate yourself in places where it is unsafe to do so. If you're drinking someplace where it's dangerous to be outside late at night, find someplace else. There has to be more than one bar in your town. Mine is only a couple of miles across and there are 4 or 5 scattered around.
There's no way any sane person will accept that you weren't responsible at all for any of your actions leading up to a mortality in a collision. It's never happened to you before, and it doesn't seem like it will ever happen, but it's not like you didn't have a choice in how many drinks you had or where you went or whether you called a cab. When you say that you don't want to wait for a cab and would prefer to drive drunk because the area where your bar is is dangerous at night, you're essentially pushing the danger off yourself and onto someone else. Suck it up and accept responsibility for your actions and the danger that they cause to others. Not doing so certainly makes you less of a man.
Wait, who brought a specific time frame or monetary amount into this discussion? The lesson here is that you don't have babies if you can't afford the temporal or monetary investment. Your analogy between space travel and induction reduces the problem far past the actual scale difference. For instance, induction doesn't require you to move materials across vast distances in order to set up an area which will have to be completely supported by the parent colony for a number of decades. In fact, compared to manned colonization, induction can be reduced to a few mathematical descriptions.
Scenario A is highly unlikely, and in Scenario B it would be more cost-effective to move the asteroid out of our way than to move us to another planet.
The fact that you do not enumerate any of your contentions implies that you cannot enumerate any of your contentions. The moon base can be a staging area for a mars mission, but what would be the point of such an expenditure? You're working under the assumption that the technologies developed during such a mission would not be developed during the solution of some other world problem. I would contend that the space race was nothing more than a technological pissing contest between the US and the USSR. Furthermore, the cohesiveness you speak of is nationalism, and while it works perfectly well to hold a society together in the case of the space race, there are many more instances of nationalism fracturing otherwise peaceful societies. See Eastern Europe.
My issue with space exploration, as one of the network generation, is that no matter how much money we pour into it, I will never see any tangible benefits for anyone. Hubble was interesting because it enabled us to do cosmology research without any atmospheric wavelength shift. The only benefit for the ISS so far has been as a money sink and as a way to show that we can occasionally launch parts into space if our spacecraft don't explode. What NASA is forgetting is that a lot of us don't give a damn about space exploration because it's exclusive and doesn't benefit us.
Space exploration doesn't do anything for our failing education system. It doesn't make tuition less expensive. It doesn't feed the starving and homeless. It doesn't ensure my job security. It doesn't provide us with clean alternative energy. It doesn't end our imperialist expansion. It doesn't make us feel less alienated and ignored by people in power.
In short, it doesn't solve or even attempt to solve a number of social problems that currently plague our country and our planet.
And we would need a moon base as a stopover point between Earth and Mars and also to harvest that Helium-3 that I've been hearing so much about.