No, it was about a magnetic field, which needs a hot convecting molten core.
Fiction? Yes. I can't imagine the injection method that takes the heat and pressure of Mars, halfway down. And I'd think you'd need to get close to the center, if you wanted to see results in your lifetime. But if it really is solid all the way down, maybe you could get pretty close, I have no idea.
But at least you wouldn't have to heat the core directly (incomprehensibly impossible); you just have to get a good amount of that fissile material down there (comprehensibly impossible).
Okay, Okay. (actually I miss my Star-Tac, but that's another thing..)
Not everything under the sun has yet been patented. Point taken.
Was I wrong about Dragon owning the patents to speech recognition on a computer? Was I wrong in implying that no one can feasibly publish speech recognition, designed from scratch or not; without paying Dragon on Dragon's terms?
I would like to be wrong about that. Somebody tell me I'm wrong about that.
I'm sure they have lobbyists of some sort. You writing a letter to your congressman is lobbying him. But it would be better to get face time, right? Can you take that much time off work? Do others feel as you do? Could you all get together and hire somebody to go down there and talk to him for you? Maybe someone who is an expert in the field, and could answer any questions the congressman might have...
I never bought into the 'it's the lobbyists fault' thing. Lobbyists don't pass legislation. Elected representatives do.
"deny the antitrust exemption"... "to any league"..."that does not:"..."(1) prohibit sponsored telecast"..."or (2) make a sponsored telecast...available to consumers, using an Internet platform"
So, if they sell an internet feed (which I think they do now), or; just let the local cable outfit show it (and not necessarily the network's feed; a wide angle camera on a pole would satisfy 'showing it')......then they get to keep their antitrust exemption. Am I reading that wrong?
"Well, the feds did manage to put a man on the moon in under a decade,"
Yes, you found an exception. Two things with that though. If Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, we would have not made the decade, and due to that, we threw *a lot* of money at Apollo. So the 'effectively managed' part might still be debatable.
"A lot of the problems with the health care system can be laid at the feet of lobbyists."
No, it can't, unless and until lobbyists vote on the floor of the House and the Senate.
Actually I have mod points at the moment. But instead of modding him down, I answered. Yes, I'm naive, and in hindsight regret throwing 'moron' back at him. I'm really interested in the discussion.
Now the parent of AC, Noah, made a silly statement about all regulation or something, but just because I take AC to task, doesn't mean I agree with Noah. Noah, you sounded like you meant all regulation. Meat packing houses? No inspections? Not even a drive-by? A letter asking the estimated amount of rat feces in the average hotdog? Nothing? Seriously?
Anyway, AC's response seems pretty typical; that we would all die without the FDA, because corporations want to kill us for profit. The FDA (and/or FTC, FCC, FAA,...) is our only hope to live good lives.
Or more concisely, The amount of their power is equal to our quality of life.
"If they didn't regulate anything, you'd be eating toxic food, driving cars which burst into flames, and using products which are outright dangerous."
Not me. I wouldn't buy that food or those cars. Instead, I would have depend on a company's reputation and their fear of the courts. I wonder if you really think that all food was toxic before the FDA existed.
"Only a moron would believe that without regulations corporations wouldn't just screw consumers every chance they get."
Sort of like the moron that thinks all history started in 1950 or something.
"But, hey, I hear you can probably buy some cheap baby formula from China which has melamine in it... I'm sure it will only make you a little sick."
That is very scary, and obviously justifies anything you want it to. (I'd throw in 'think of the children' next time)
"The 'free market' doesn't exist, and doesn't solve problems like this."
If you have free people, and more than one place to buy something at, then you have a free market. No one ever claimed that the free market solved crooks, charlatans, and melamine pushers.
"You're an idiot, who only dimly understands the world around you."
Nah, I think you're the idiot, to equate the FCC allowing local stations to show football games with poisoned baby formula as justification for your socialism.
I assume the vote is not rigged and the ballot box not stuffed; I assume our elections are 'real'. So then, what the 'capitalists' do, or don't do, is fairly irrelevant. (btw, we are all 'capitalists')
If that is the case, then the politicians are indeed under the control of the electorate. The fact that the electorate rarely chooses to control their politicians is another matter.
For some of that land, we paid for it. We even overpaid for the Gadsen purchase (the final addition) to help make things right after all the war and unpleasantness.
Russia should have paid Ukraine for Crimea. Not full retail of course, but something for the 60ish years worth of administration and investment (probably not a lot).
A few of us over here realize that the Crimea was never on the table for any real separation from Russia. As long as the border between Russia and Ukraine didn't exist for practical purposes, Russia was fine with it. Now that Ukraine wants some distance, and is cozying up to Europe; the Crimea needed to go back to Russia one way or another.
There were better ways for Putin to have done that, although I doubt there was a better way to pump up the political base.
Yeah, sorry about that. I'm not sure why making fun of the French is so funny to us.
Of all our allies, the French do the most to maintain some semblance of armed forces, rather than depend on the existence of our carrier fleet. The French are the only ones besides us to run a 'real' aircraft carrier. Carriers are expensive and hard.
So the truth is not lost on all of us. But it is still funny to make fun of the French..
"Unless you sit there while they deploy a 20-meter mirror and take images of the whole sky with enough angular resolution to actually see a mysterious dark square against a background nebula, you'll have to be practically on top of them before they see anything."
Seems obvious when you say it like that, and now I feel a little dumb, but yeah; that's how you would build a planetary defense system. And it would have to watch the whole solar system (at least out to Saturn) to provide any useful warning to an inner planet like Earth. So, a bigger mirror for that, and a bunch of them.
"In the 1960s, corporate taxes amounted to about 22 percent of overall tax receipts, and averaged 3.9 percent of gross domestic product. In the most recent decade, the figures are about 12 percent of total taxes and 2.2 percent of G.D.P."
Your link backs me up. And too bad they don't tax on percentage of GDP, but rather, profits, which are even lower than their lowered GDP percentage would suggest. Well, except for the very big corporations, who are still making decent profits globally, but don't seem to be in a hurry to bring that money back to the IRS. And I didn't say manufacturing; I said business.
Re-read your article, while trying to ignore the tea bagger hating stuff, and ask yourself: If we were crushing the life out business here in the US, what would I expect to see? Could it be, lowered tax revenues, and lower percentage of GDP?
Yeah, I should probably get that in the mail asap. That's why I said a dollar, something I could afford to lose.
Your point was my point, perhaps made poorly; a steady state universe would be far stranger than the big bang. I find the big bang more intuitive than steady state. Steady state blows my mind, whereas science and religion agree on the big bang. That makes the big bang far more comfortable. And that, makes me suspicious.
"The "conservative" choice is clearly to treat global warming as a legitimate threat."
Very correct. And yet, we seem completely locked out of considering conservative solutions. Conservative solutions that actually make things better, even if AGW turns out to be NBD. Easy solutions that make us better off in either case, and nobody has to make do with less.
1. Carbon Tax. This is how to tell a true conservative from, what do you call them, 'Neocons'? Libs prevent a carbon tax from happening in two ways: The tax burden now is as high as the economy will sustain (a bit higher actually, as we see businesses flee the US, and the only real growth is from inflation.), so to get a carbon tax, we would have to back off some income taxes somewhere. But now that the welfare state is so inextricably wound into our tax returns, any real tax reform is not an option. The only 'debate' on the subject is asking if the 39.5% rate for the rich is too high/high enough, and how should capital gains be taxed. Both completely irrelevant, tiny issues, but continually harping on it does keep the poor stirred up against the rich.
2. Modern Nuclear. The sane policy when trying to eliminate one form of energy, is to make it up with another. Windmills and solar farms are nice (well if you're not a bird, or almost any other animal, or actually any creature other than a human living in a city), but there are two forms of power stored on this planet besides carbon; nuclear and geothermal. (Which are sort of the same power source). In my conservative utopia, where everyone is rich; electric power is too cheap to meter. Nobody does without, in fact; everybody has more. You're never going to get that with windmills and solar. (And if you could, how much land are you talking about?) And before you try to say you could, remember; I'm a conservative. Thus, I love people, and look forward to 20 billion of them on the planet, all using more power than the average American does now. At least that should illustrate why windmills do not appeal to me.
Libs can't have that, because if everybody gets more, then the rich's more will be more than the poor's more, and that is unfair. Also, if you're the party of the downtrodden and oppressed, then you can't have your members doing better just because everything is actually getting better. I liked Democrats better when they were the working man's party. They got some shit done at least.
I'd like to bet somebody a dollar that we go to a steady-state universe in our lifetime.
It's just that the big bang is starting to feel too convenient to me. It's just a feeling.
We take it for granted, but it's just a theory. Red shift: these are the gravitational waves you've been looking for. Well, they're dimensional waves, and have the effect to the observer of stretching space, even though the universe is not expanding. It's complicated...
" a God able to create a Universe from a single word"
Doesn't seem plausible. Oh, I believe in a Creator. But I think creating the universe was likely really really hard. Work of a 'lifetime' even.
"forge it to look like it was billions of years old"
Don't see the point of that. Remember; you created the 4 dimensional space-time manifold, so thus obviously exist outside of it. From your perspective, everything happened at once; everything is always happening. By touching something in ancient Egypt or striking dinosaur poop with lightning, you would instantly see the results today and 10,000 years from now. I'm just pointing out that 'forge' is kinda weak.
"Or I could just as easily create the physical laws with the knowledge of the result."
But foreknowledge of the result does not negate the perfection of those laws, or the lack thereof. They either are, or are not, perfect. Whether or not God cheated and looked ahead is irrelevant. I'm going to go out on a limb, and state that the universe and it's laws are perfect. Our science will keep progressing, and we will never find a broken ragged edge to the universe.
If there is such a thing as a perfect law, idk; E=MC2 or whatever, that implies that any old physical laws can't just be easily created. Rather that the laws of the universe have to be exactly what they are, and nothing else. Not that that deserves any special credit; these are the laws of a working universe, and a requirement if you're in the universe building business in the first place. It's all or nothing.
I'll cut to it: I'm with the raw materials guy. The universe came from something. And thermodynamics trumping all other laws, if there is such a hierarchy, has a very good logic to it. It comes down to the very most basic; there is no such thing as magic. Which leaves me with one conclusion: God killed himself to make the universe. It's made out of him. So in the sense that the universe is alive, then so is he. Sort of in the same sense that the deer is still alive in the muscle tissue of the wolf. This is where the religious types that used to like me recoil in horror.;)
Nice open mindedness. Really. But you make one mistake. Your reasoned response assumes that the people they are talking about actually exist, at least in any real numbers.
I've known plenty of thumper Baptist young earth types, and not one of them would engage in any debate on this, or question this research, or anything like that. In fact, they tell their kids the same thing everyone else does about this: "Make good grades and you could be the scientist doing this for a living, and a darned good one." (Depending on how strict they are, they might not say darned.)
There's a handful of these people that these, what are they; radical libs? keep going on about, and they've been here forever. And nobody ever listened to religious nutters before. What it is, is liberalism, unchecked. It's like liberalism is a powerful tool, and when used for a just cause, it's unstoppable and undeniable because it's truth and justice and all that. The last really good one I can think of is King leading the civil rights movement.
Liberalism is sort of leaderless now, but still alive and well, lashing out at Boy Scouts or Christians or Alaskan rednecks or the rich or whoever it is today. But those are not really the causes of our problems today. And the victims seem to pretty much mind their own business, until society screws with them one way or another. Mostly, with exceptions. I'm thinking of the handful of 'nutters?', or they're just lashing out, in a handful of school boards in the south. Almost, about, maybe,... to get a reference to faith into the public school science curriculum. Think about that; that is the extent of their political power now. It's sad really.
I just hate the way they are piling on lately. Thanks for the springboard.
A Snowden demonizer recently said on these boards, that the act of leaking secrets like these two did, is the ultimate act of arrogance. I do agree with that statement.
In Snowden's case, each and every secret he leaked (with one possible exception that may have been better kept secret) is an obvious violation of the Constitution. So while his initial act could be called arrogant, in the end; he's right, and the entire US government is actually in the wrong. That makes the arrogant label less accurate than the term; 'wise'.
In Manning's case, while there were a couple of nuggets there that should not have been covered up, on the whole; he was very wrong to leak all that. Not even close to worth it, if you value anything about sitting here free, able to post on these boards. Two of among many things that exist because of the government we built. His arrogance remains arrogance, in addition to ignorance, and a self-absorbed attitude that almost makes me jealous.:)
As to Snowden's wisdom, he did pull it off; blowing these secrets out of the water with very little direct collateral damage. The indirect damage of our software industry going in the global shitcan, and other fallout; not his fault. Don't shoot the messenger. I wanted to know this, because our highest law is being broken. And not by bad guys; by us.
As an aside, I'll bet a dollar that Snowden gave himself a 50/50 chance of ending up in Leavenworth or Ecuador, and did not envision becoming stuck in Moscow. I was also surprised at the speed with which the US was able to get the planet to fall in line with revoking his passport and ground him where he was. (Snowden haters: Of course he had to go through Moscow to get to any country that would have protected him from extradition). Or the other possibility, is that Moscow is the only place on the planet in 2014 that is reasonably safe from agents of the US government. That sounds so Tom Clancy, but if true, then Snowden was smart enough to know it.
But we didn't in 2006, did we? Oh a few did, dismissed by the mainstream as gun loving preppers (mostly) or left wing Bush haters (a bit) and such.
Dupe, blackmailed, or delusional. Those are the only 3 choices? Act of conscience not possible? Or do you just know him well enough to know that?
Free man in Russia - we know he's not though, don't we? Oh he's probably free enough to walk down the street to the store or theater; assigned security in tow. But no, not free at all.
I have never been to Scotland. Here in the US, there are, I guess, thousands and thousands of 'local' banks. Spread across the country, generally serving local customers. Not that they can't land a big international client, there's just a lot more small banks than there are big fish, who are likely to do business with bigger banks anyway.
The Bank of Senatobia Mississippi was (still is I'm sure) a really good full service bank. Our country is littered with banks just like it.
I understand there will be no giant international banks with headquarters in Scotland in the event of a yes vote; they are going to move their headquarters. The phrase "no local banks" just has to be wrong, and sounds like scaremongering.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it was about a magnetic field, which needs a hot convecting molten core.
Fiction? Yes. I can't imagine the injection method that takes the heat and pressure of Mars, halfway down. And I'd think you'd need to get close to the center, if you wanted to see results in your lifetime. But if it really is solid all the way down, maybe you could get pretty close, I have no idea.
But at least you wouldn't have to heat the core directly (incomprehensibly impossible); you just have to get a good amount of that fissile material down there (comprehensibly impossible).
Okay, Okay. (actually I miss my Star-Tac, but that's another thing..)
Not everything under the sun has yet been patented. Point taken.
Was I wrong about Dragon owning the patents to speech recognition on a computer?
Was I wrong in implying that no one can feasibly publish speech recognition, designed from scratch or not; without paying Dragon on Dragon's terms?
I would like to be wrong about that. Somebody tell me I'm wrong about that.
I'm sure they have lobbyists of some sort. You writing a letter to your congressman is lobbying him. But it would be better to get face time, right? Can you take that much time off work? Do others feel as you do? Could you all get together and hire somebody to go down there and talk to him for you? Maybe someone who is an expert in the field, and could answer any questions the congressman might have...
I never bought into the 'it's the lobbyists fault' thing. Lobbyists don't pass legislation. Elected representatives do.
Can't innovate man. The tech is covered by patents.
You're not allowed to build your own Siri from scratch.
Give me a break, "they do what they do in India Russia and China because it's the right thing to do."
They follow the law over there while trying to make a buck, same as we do here.
Don't blame our people for obeying the law.
"deny the antitrust exemption" ... "to any league" ..."that does not:"..."(1) prohibit sponsored telecast"..."or (2) make a sponsored telecast...available to consumers, using an Internet platform"
So, if they sell an internet feed (which I think they do now), or; just let the local cable outfit show it (and not necessarily the network's feed; a wide angle camera on a pole would satisfy 'showing it')... ...then they get to keep their antitrust exemption. Am I reading that wrong?
"Well, the feds did manage to put a man on the moon in under a decade,"
Yes, you found an exception. Two things with that though. If Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, we would have not made the decade, and due to that, we threw *a lot* of money at Apollo. So the 'effectively managed' part might still be debatable.
"A lot of the problems with the health care system can be laid at the feet of lobbyists."
No, it can't, unless and until lobbyists vote on the floor of the House and the Senate.
Yeah, just inject lots of thorium and/or uranium into the core until it starts heating up...
Actually I have mod points at the moment. But instead of modding him down, I answered. Yes, I'm naive, and in hindsight regret throwing 'moron' back at him. I'm really interested in the discussion.
Now the parent of AC, Noah, made a silly statement about all regulation or something, but just because I take AC to task, doesn't mean I agree with Noah. Noah, you sounded like you meant all regulation. Meat packing houses? No inspections? Not even a drive-by? A letter asking the estimated amount of rat feces in the average hotdog? Nothing? Seriously?
Anyway, AC's response seems pretty typical; that we would all die without the FDA, because corporations want to kill us for profit. The FDA (and/or FTC, FCC, FAA, ...) is our only hope to live good lives.
Or more concisely, The amount of their power is equal to our quality of life.
Where do you even start with that?
"If they didn't regulate anything, you'd be eating toxic food, driving cars which burst into flames, and using products which are outright dangerous."
Not me. I wouldn't buy that food or those cars. Instead, I would have depend on a company's reputation and their fear of the courts. I wonder if you really think that all food was toxic before the FDA existed.
"Only a moron would believe that without regulations corporations wouldn't just screw consumers every chance they get."
Sort of like the moron that thinks all history started in 1950 or something.
"But, hey, I hear you can probably buy some cheap baby formula from China which has melamine in it ... I'm sure it will only make you a little sick."
That is very scary, and obviously justifies anything you want it to. (I'd throw in 'think of the children' next time)
"The 'free market' doesn't exist, and doesn't solve problems like this."
If you have free people, and more than one place to buy something at, then you have a free market. No one ever claimed that the free market solved crooks, charlatans, and melamine pushers.
"You're an idiot, who only dimly understands the world around you."
Nah, I think you're the idiot, to equate the FCC allowing local stations to show football games with poisoned baby formula as justification for your socialism.
I assume the vote is not rigged and the ballot box not stuffed; I assume our elections are 'real'. So then, what the 'capitalists' do, or don't do, is fairly irrelevant. (btw, we are all 'capitalists')
If that is the case, then the politicians are indeed under the control of the electorate. The fact that the electorate rarely chooses to control their politicians is another matter.
For some of that land, we paid for it. We even overpaid for the Gadsen purchase (the final addition) to help make things right after all the war and unpleasantness.
Russia should have paid Ukraine for Crimea. Not full retail of course, but something for the 60ish years worth of administration and investment (probably not a lot).
A few of us over here realize that the Crimea was never on the table for any real separation from Russia. As long as the border between Russia and Ukraine didn't exist for practical purposes, Russia was fine with it. Now that Ukraine wants some distance, and is cozying up to Europe; the Crimea needed to go back to Russia one way or another.
There were better ways for Putin to have done that, although I doubt there was a better way to pump up the political base.
Yeah, sorry about that. I'm not sure why making fun of the French is so funny to us.
Of all our allies, the French do the most to maintain some semblance of armed forces, rather than depend on the existence of our carrier fleet. The French are the only ones besides us to run a 'real' aircraft carrier. Carriers are expensive and hard.
So the truth is not lost on all of us. But it is still funny to make fun of the French..
"Unless you sit there while they deploy a 20-meter mirror and take images of the whole sky with enough angular resolution to actually see a mysterious dark square against a background nebula, you'll have to be practically on top of them before they see anything."
Seems obvious when you say it like that, and now I feel a little dumb, but yeah; that's how you would build a planetary defense system. And it would have to watch the whole solar system (at least out to Saturn) to provide any useful warning to an inner planet like Earth. So, a bigger mirror for that, and a bunch of them.
My God man, really?
"In the 1960s, corporate taxes amounted to about 22 percent of overall tax receipts, and averaged 3.9 percent of gross domestic product. In the most recent decade, the figures are about 12 percent of total taxes and 2.2 percent of G.D.P."
Your link backs me up. And too bad they don't tax on percentage of GDP, but rather, profits, which are even lower than their lowered GDP percentage would suggest. Well, except for the very big corporations, who are still making decent profits globally, but don't seem to be in a hurry to bring that money back to the IRS. And I didn't say manufacturing; I said business.
Re-read your article, while trying to ignore the tea bagger hating stuff, and ask yourself: If we were crushing the life out business here in the US, what would I expect to see? Could it be, lowered tax revenues, and lower percentage of GDP?
Yeah, I should probably get that in the mail asap. That's why I said a dollar, something I could afford to lose.
Your point was my point, perhaps made poorly; a steady state universe would be far stranger than the big bang. I find the big bang more intuitive than steady state. Steady state blows my mind, whereas science and religion agree on the big bang. That makes the big bang far more comfortable. And that, makes me suspicious.
"The "conservative" choice is clearly to treat global warming as a legitimate threat."
Very correct. And yet, we seem completely locked out of considering conservative solutions. Conservative solutions that actually make things better, even if AGW turns out to be NBD. Easy solutions that make us better off in either case, and nobody has to make do with less.
1. Carbon Tax. This is how to tell a true conservative from, what do you call them, 'Neocons'? Libs prevent a carbon tax from happening in two ways: The tax burden now is as high as the economy will sustain (a bit higher actually, as we see businesses flee the US, and the only real growth is from inflation.), so to get a carbon tax, we would have to back off some income taxes somewhere. But now that the welfare state is so inextricably wound into our tax returns, any real tax reform is not an option. The only 'debate' on the subject is asking if the 39.5% rate for the rich is too high/high enough, and how should capital gains be taxed. Both completely irrelevant, tiny issues, but continually harping on it does keep the poor stirred up against the rich.
2. Modern Nuclear. The sane policy when trying to eliminate one form of energy, is to make it up with another. Windmills and solar farms are nice (well if you're not a bird, or almost any other animal, or actually any creature other than a human living in a city), but there are two forms of power stored on this planet besides carbon; nuclear and geothermal. (Which are sort of the same power source). In my conservative utopia, where everyone is rich; electric power is too cheap to meter. Nobody does without, in fact; everybody has more. You're never going to get that with windmills and solar. (And if you could, how much land are you talking about?) And before you try to say you could, remember; I'm a conservative. Thus, I love people, and look forward to 20 billion of them on the planet, all using more power than the average American does now. At least that should illustrate why windmills do not appeal to me.
Libs can't have that, because if everybody gets more, then the rich's more will be more than the poor's more, and that is unfair. Also, if you're the party of the downtrodden and oppressed, then you can't have your members doing better just because everything is actually getting better. I liked Democrats better when they were the working man's party. They got some shit done at least.
I'd like to bet somebody a dollar that we go to a steady-state universe in our lifetime.
It's just that the big bang is starting to feel too convenient to me. It's just a feeling.
We take it for granted, but it's just a theory. Red shift: these are the gravitational waves you've been looking for. Well, they're dimensional waves, and have the effect to the observer of stretching space, even though the universe is not expanding. It's complicated...
Any takers?
" a God able to create a Universe from a single word"
Doesn't seem plausible. Oh, I believe in a Creator. But I think creating the universe was likely really really hard. Work of a 'lifetime' even.
"forge it to look like it was billions of years old"
Don't see the point of that. Remember; you created the 4 dimensional space-time manifold, so thus obviously exist outside of it. From your perspective, everything happened at once; everything is always happening. By touching something in ancient Egypt or striking dinosaur poop with lightning, you would instantly see the results today and 10,000 years from now. I'm just pointing out that 'forge' is kinda weak.
"Or I could just as easily create the physical laws with the knowledge of the result."
But foreknowledge of the result does not negate the perfection of those laws, or the lack thereof. They either are, or are not, perfect. Whether or not God cheated and looked ahead is irrelevant. I'm going to go out on a limb, and state that the universe and it's laws are perfect. Our science will keep progressing, and we will never find a broken ragged edge to the universe.
If there is such a thing as a perfect law, idk; E=MC2 or whatever, that implies that any old physical laws can't just be easily created. Rather that the laws of the universe have to be exactly what they are, and nothing else. Not that that deserves any special credit; these are the laws of a working universe, and a requirement if you're in the universe building business in the first place. It's all or nothing.
I'll cut to it: I'm with the raw materials guy. The universe came from something. And thermodynamics trumping all other laws, if there is such a hierarchy, has a very good logic to it. It comes down to the very most basic; there is no such thing as magic. Which leaves me with one conclusion: God killed himself to make the universe. It's made out of him. So in the sense that the universe is alive, then so is he. Sort of in the same sense that the deer is still alive in the muscle tissue of the wolf. This is where the religious types that used to like me recoil in horror. ;)
Nice open mindedness. Really. But you make one mistake. Your reasoned response assumes that the people they are talking about actually exist, at least in any real numbers.
I've known plenty of thumper Baptist young earth types, and not one of them would engage in any debate on this, or question this research, or anything like that. In fact, they tell their kids the same thing everyone else does about this: "Make good grades and you could be the scientist doing this for a living, and a darned good one." (Depending on how strict they are, they might not say darned.)
There's a handful of these people that these, what are they; radical libs? keep going on about, and they've been here forever. And nobody ever listened to religious nutters before. What it is, is liberalism, unchecked. It's like liberalism is a powerful tool, and when used for a just cause, it's unstoppable and undeniable because it's truth and justice and all that. The last really good one I can think of is King leading the civil rights movement.
Liberalism is sort of leaderless now, but still alive and well, lashing out at Boy Scouts or Christians or Alaskan rednecks or the rich or whoever it is today. But those are not really the causes of our problems today. And the victims seem to pretty much mind their own business, until society screws with them one way or another. Mostly, with exceptions. I'm thinking of the handful of 'nutters?', or they're just lashing out, in a handful of school boards in the south. Almost, about, maybe,... to get a reference to faith into the public school science curriculum. Think about that; that is the extent of their political power now. It's sad really.
I just hate the way they are piling on lately. Thanks for the springboard.
Yeah I was thinking the same.
You used oligarchs though; I would not have. I'm not against making money, or even the rich.
But I do want my cut, our cut. Which would be about the whole ticket price, wouldn't it, since we just shelled out 4ish billion for it?
A Snowden demonizer recently said on these boards, that the act of leaking secrets like these two did, is the ultimate act of arrogance. I do agree with that statement.
In Snowden's case, each and every secret he leaked (with one possible exception that may have been better kept secret) is an obvious violation of the Constitution. So while his initial act could be called arrogant, in the end; he's right, and the entire US government is actually in the wrong. That makes the arrogant label less accurate than the term; 'wise'.
In Manning's case, while there were a couple of nuggets there that should not have been covered up, on the whole; he was very wrong to leak all that. Not even close to worth it, if you value anything about sitting here free, able to post on these boards. Two of among many things that exist because of the government we built. His arrogance remains arrogance, in addition to ignorance, and a self-absorbed attitude that almost makes me jealous. :)
As to Snowden's wisdom, he did pull it off; blowing these secrets out of the water with very little direct collateral damage. The indirect damage of our software industry going in the global shitcan, and other fallout; not his fault. Don't shoot the messenger. I wanted to know this, because our highest law is being broken. And not by bad guys; by us.
As an aside, I'll bet a dollar that Snowden gave himself a 50/50 chance of ending up in Leavenworth or Ecuador, and did not envision becoming stuck in Moscow. I was also surprised at the speed with which the US was able to get the planet to fall in line with revoking his passport and ground him where he was. (Snowden haters: Of course he had to go through Moscow to get to any country that would have protected him from extradition). Or the other possibility, is that Moscow is the only place on the planet in 2014 that is reasonably safe from agents of the US government. That sounds so Tom Clancy, but if true, then Snowden was smart enough to know it.
I should get started on that statue...
"... right to know?"
You made that right up. There is no such thing as a right to know.
There is such a thing though, as the right to be free of illegal search and seizure. That's difference between Snowden and Manning. A big one.
But we didn't in 2006, did we? Oh a few did, dismissed by the mainstream as gun loving preppers (mostly) or left wing Bush haters (a bit) and such.
Dupe, blackmailed, or delusional. Those are the only 3 choices? Act of conscience not possible? Or do you just know him well enough to know that?
Free man in Russia - we know he's not though, don't we? Oh he's probably free enough to walk down the street to the store or theater; assigned security in tow. But no, not free at all.
He gave up pretty much everything, didn't he?
"God doesn't want people to have knowledge"
You missed the point of the lesson...
I know, big banks.
I have never been to Scotland. Here in the US, there are, I guess, thousands and thousands of 'local' banks. Spread across the country, generally serving local customers. Not that they can't land a big international client, there's just a lot more small banks than there are big fish, who are likely to do business with bigger banks anyway.
The Bank of Senatobia Mississippi was (still is I'm sure) a really good full service bank. Our country is littered with banks just like it.
I understand there will be no giant international banks with headquarters in Scotland in the event of a yes vote; they are going to move their headquarters. The phrase "no local banks" just has to be wrong, and sounds like scaremongering.