...anyway; we can't possibly predict climate without taking technological changes into account, and we can't do that at all.
Technology is the single biggest human factor that we have reason to believe affects climate; it is the primary whipping boy for the "we're killing our planet" hysterics, after all, yet none of these "studies" can even make a start at predicting what is going to be the motive and/or non-motive power technology set du jour in twenty, fifty, two hundred years. Although we do know that it almost certainly won't be oil, because there won't be enough left to use economically for such purposes. Both power transport/storage and method of generation are questions that are totally up in the air. For generation, fusion? Fission? Solar? Tidal? Trans-dimensional down-level leakage? Other? For storage and transport, hydrogen? Ultrabatteries? Other? We have absolutely no idea. What about transport efficiency? Will friction continue to be an energy sink? Maglev? Vacuum containers? Anti-bloody-gravity?
And then there are issues like volcanic activity, solar activity, the Earth's magnetic field is weakening...
Predicting climate without knowing what all these major inputs to the system are going to do is like trying to predict the weather without wind, humidity and temperature information. A random number generator would likely do as well.
The whole thing is an exercise in naval gazing and cynical grant-acquisition.
Of course, it does make a great distraction from the real issues of the day such as multi-national erosion of civil rights, the United States' current attempt to inflict an empire of democracy upon nations that are operating under other systems, starvation in large portions of Africa...
I switched too. Also, I was a (fairly) happy Windows and Linux user, the Mini was so cheap I thought I'd take a look at the machine, and OSX itself won me over. Then I bought a Mac for my sweetheart, and another for my youngest son. So that's three more new Mac owners in total here in my household. This had zero to do with the iPod and everything to do with the Mac Mini. I don't own an iPod; although I am a musician, I'm not fond of running about with earbuds or headphones.
Also... truly, I cannot imagine for even one moment why Apple would want to switch to running Windows. They have no windows software to sell; they have no real hardware advantage to bring to that market. Not even looks. There are plenty of cool looking Intel platforms out there from the nutzo to the trim and stylish and everywhere in between.
I can see why they might consider becoming a software only shop and stop making hardware — there are plenty of nice Intel-based platforms out there, and software margins are far better than hardware margins (speaking as a software vendor myself.) I'd be pretty happy running OSX on a Dell, for instance, and I think the number of people who might try OSX if they could legitimately install it on their PC is probably a very large number. But drop the software and keep the hardware? No. Don't think so.:)
It is very easy to determine if political email is commercial. If the people who wrote, or initiated, or pressed "send" are being paid (or expect to be financially rewarded in the future) to do that as a job or as any part of their job, then a direct commercial mechanism is involved (money for services) and the email is, in fact, commercial.
I can (just barely) imagine emails from an all grass roots, all volunteer, all living-in-their-own-homes campaign who are trying to elect someone for the purpose of raising taxes to feed the homeless to be able to emit non-commercial email, but that's about the end of it.
Otherwise, if you didn't ask for it, it's spam. One time or a thousand times, doesn't matter — it's 100% spam all the way.
In most states you can't do anything about it, because citizens are not involved with the process of making and/or approving legislation except in a few isolated states (California is one, I think.)
There's a very important thing to remember here: Politicians didn't define the Internet, how it works, or the social rules that pervade this "space", as it were. The denzens of the net did that. Now we have politicians trying to formalize our space in such a manner as to allow themselves to magically opt out of the gutter-level definition that spamming has always resided in. They can only do this if we let them. Personally, I'm not going to ever agree that they have any implicit right to do so, legislation otherwise notwithstanding. To me, this assumed "freedom to spam" is one more concrete way that politicians have demonstrated that they have no comprehension of the society they purport to represent. They don't represent me, and they have not for many years now.
The ballot box is useless, and has been for years. Now remaining: Soap box, Ammo box.
My first computer was built out of TTL in my parents' basement; 74181 ALUs and such. That's all there was at the time that you could really get everything you needed at a reasonable(!) price. Ran slow, hot, and had some pretty odd instructions, frankly. But I was young and crazy. It was fun. It was also an entertaining change from hot-rodding guitar amps, which is what I was doing for money at the time.
My second computer was built around an 8008 chip. Not as much fun. All the cool stuff was already on the chip.
My third computer was an SBC from National Semiconductor, using an SC/MP MPU. Nothing to build, so it was all about the programming. The SC/MP was a bit of an oddball, so I learned some new things.
Then I got a SWTPC 6800 "kit", which was really just a solder and screw assembly, then a Gimix 6809 (still have it, and it still works), then an IBM PC, then several Amigas, then several more PCs and RISC PCs (I have PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha machines on shelves, they ran RISC versions of Windows NT), then Linux, finally grabbed a Mac (mini.)
During the course of my career, I worked at IBM (Boca Raton) and got to use their ATOM uP, an old (at the time) punched card machine... the specifics of which have thankfully slipped my mind (punched cards are annoying, suffice it to say) and a scientific mini, the model of that is also fogged out, and I didn't use it that much, really.
I did a lot of hardware designs using the 6809 and its A/B variants when it was current; I liked (I still like) that MPU, it just seemed to have the best instruction balance of any 8-bitter I ever ran into. By comparison, the 68000 and family were pretty much of a dissapointment. I thought they'd be 6809's on steroids; Not so. They were a step wider (good), a step more orthogonal (also good) and a step simpler (backwards.) Fewer clever addressing modes mainly, but that was exactly what made programming the 6809 such a breeze.
So who's really at fault here? The students? The hospital for not securing their computers and network? Or the adware companies for providing the incentive?"
Yes.
Also, add "the lawmakers", for not killing adware right out of the gate.
Your use of them has catapulted your entire post into homomorphic bloggian spacetime. I suggest you recalculate using angle brackets (< and >) before your invalid procedures are used by a student in a critical reasoning process and the entire loop quantum gravity idea collapses, leaving us all floating around, batting away annoying square brackets with rolled up thesis drafts.
You know when you fall down? Well, the part when your head hits the ground, you know that part, that comes after you're mostly done falling? Well, that part confuses me. And there's some kind of relationship to distance, because the further I fall, the more confused I get when my head hits the ground. I have verified this through empirical testing, although lately, I've been unable to commit all the resulting data thus obtained to long term storage.
Well, uh, I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newletter.
...the scan will probably come out showing no oxygen consumption under any circumstances. The man can probably survive underwater for hours without any life support at all.
Well, if you read again, you'll see I'm not really saying what you appear to think I am. I mentioned problems in general, said I didn't think we (US citizens) could get there from here, and suggested that somewhere in space might be a reasonable place to start such a society.
If you got 90% of the people to go along, I'd be amazed. However, like the system we're currently under, the remaining 10% would work to fit in, mostly. The beauty of a libertarian society is there is less work required to do so. Fewer taxes, fewer laws, fewer social levels, fewer criminals, fewer everything, basically.
Regarding voting... there is little point in voting when the choice is between person A who won't do what you want and is nowhere near what you stand for personally, and person B who is essentially the same. Voting only means something if you have reasonable choices. It's kind of like a poll. If I ask what would you like to do with your mother and give you option A "shoot your mother" and option B "strangle your mother" you're not likely to want to answer the question. You need some other options that actually represent what you might want to do with your mother. Similarly, before it becomes reasonable for me to vote for president, you'd have to offer me someone I was (somehow) convinced wasn't going to be just another constitution crushing, superstitious, warmongering, illicit special interest pandering, expansionist, social retard. Or was going to fund space travel at about 50% of the national budget, that might do it.
I'm a US citizen; I'm going to respond as if this were a conversation between two US citizens, as you've not said one way or the other and the odds, if nothing else, favor that.
How is this different than mob rule? "I hear Jim is queer, let's go round him up and kill him!"
It is hugely different. Jim is at zero risk, because he has not interfered with life, liberty, or property. Hitler, on the other hand, has, and is at risk. If you, for instance, in a fit of homphobic idiocy, were to decide to harm Jim, I'd be perfectly happy to shoot you in the head at the very first opportunity. This is the very considerable force that underlies a libertarian society; it's not that no one will be held accountable (like a mob), it's that everyone is accountable, all the time, to everyone else. As a member of such a society, you'd know that interfering with Jim's day to day life would result in you not having a life. So you'd behave, or you'd die — which solves society's problem with you. At the very least, you'd not get to misbehave any longer, and you'd not cost society any more than a bullet or two to stop. You can't avoid the consequences, either — if you were to shoot me instead, the next citizen would step up and shoot you.
Do you really think leaving justice up to random bands of men is a good idea?
I think leaving justice up to the individual is a good idea, as long as that individual is just as accountable to their neighbors as everyone else is. I can tell you one thing: leaving justice to a bunch of power-seeking, barely-to-non accountable men and women has not proven to be a good idea here in the USA. Our system is flat-out busted.
To back that up, I point to the incredible mess that is US law — criminal and civil, and the separate, independently power-based tax system — there is no question in my mind that the system as it stands does not make good law, and consequently everything downline from that is working less and less well each and every day.
Yes, a libertarian system would pose many challenges, not the least of which would be transitional if the society wasn't a new one (I suspect it would have to be, though.) Right now, people are sheep. They'd have to be responsible citizens instead of passive victims of a power-base. It's a huge difference, and no, honestly, I can't see it happening because the populace is conditioned to not know how to take care of itself at this point in time. In the unlikely event that we get into space, new frontiers may provide the opportunity for such a society. I like to hope so, anyway. That doesn't make libertarian ideals any less attractive to me today.
Many people did support Hitler and his ideas... Who's to say libertarian justice in Germany would've have been carried out against Jews as well as Nazis?
Libertarian ideals don't recognize idiot concepts like superiority of race, to start with; further, as rule from above isn't in the game plan, lunatics shouting for pogroms would be very lonely people. Lunatics trying to implement pogroms would be dead. Hitler got into power and was able to do what he did because he rode in on the very power structure you are thinking is a good thing, while that same structure forbade any citizen from doing anything about it. It didn't happen overnight; it was a political mechanism that put Hitler into power, not a libertarian system or even a mob. It was a political system where responsibility and power were vested in members of the system, but not the citizens. In other words, a system very like ours today.
Hitler is long gone, however. Lets talk about a current, but similar problem, namely, Bush and his royal court.
Bush, by setting policies, and the system downstream from him by following said policies, is torturing people, taking people's property, kidnapping people's wives, eavesdropping on people,
Hitler was one man. In a libertarian society, only one person (and one or two bullets) would have been needed to stop him. Therefore, little or no organization is likely to be required, no troops, and little, if any, funding. "You're rounding up citizens based on ethnicity?" Bang. No more of that, then. Next problem?
The thing is, you need an army to stop an army; but you don't need an army to stop a single person. When extreme problems flow from one person, you're quite likely to change the situation radically if you remove that person. In Hitler's case, stopping him early would have done more, I think, but stopping him at any point would have been beneficial.
Something else flows from this approach: People who would emulate Hitler are likely to observe how he ended up, especially if he was nipped in the bud, so to speak. That leads to either suppression of the behavior, which is fine, or attempts to unite groups of people, which might serve to gather them in one place so they are more easily killed.:)
Because a libertarian would have noted, "you've stepped over the line and you're in my face now", and then would have proceeded to kill him where he stood, ASAP.
Remember that one of the most basic, bedrock positions of the libertarian stance is that you should be allowed to do pretty much anything as long as you don't interfere with others. Or to put it another way, Hitler's right to swing his fist ended at everyone else's face. Once Hitler stepped over that line, he would have been just target practice to any libertarian worthy of the name.
...I'd have to say my hero(s) would be Linus and his legions of followers.
I own, and regularly use, Mac, Windows, and Linux systems, and frankly, I think the Mac is (by far) the best of the three in terms of what I prefer to be working with at any given moment. But as for who is my hero, it'd definitely be Linus and crew.
Another thing: In a few years, battery life won't even be an issue, is my guess. Fuel cell packs are already available that give you tens of hours of operation, and that'll only get better. Batteries may be peaked out in terms of large gains (or maybe not) but fuel cells are just now sneaking into the marketplace. It won't make a difference if the CPU pulls 2x the power or not.
But things like vector coprocessing do make a difference, as do highly orthoganal architectures and binary compatibility.
My take: Should have stuck with PPC. Nothing I've read about the new machines has made me do anything but yawn as yet. Next year, we'll probably be reading about how the PS3 outruns any computer on the desktop -- using PPC and vector architecture.
Have you ever seen an animal struggling with its existence?
Absolutely. Mothers who lost kittens, older cats who lost lifelong companions. They become miserable, quite visibly so, and in some cases they die. Just like people.
So far as setting animals low, I do not seek to do that. I seek to find some deliniation between humans and animals. Somehow, in some way, humans have become the dominant animal on the planet, effecting climate change, diverting rivers, creating lakes, destroying mountains, building new land, and on and on. More than just genetics set housecats apart from every other creature in the world, and more than just genetics set us apart likewise. The question is, how?
And the answer is, truly astonishing intelligence in some members of our race, combined with generalized manipulators for the environment (hands) and as far as I know, the strongest toolkit for communications of any animal species on the planet.
None of which makes us "not" animals. If there is a line, then I think it is one darned fuzzy line, with some humans crossing it one way and some animals crossing it the other.
No, you are wrong. The idea that "we are all created equal" is correct: it refers to the fact that, within each society, all members have the same rights and obligations.
No, I am right.
Rights: Does a Down's syndrome sufferer truly deserve the same right to speak up in a classroom where string theory is being discussed as those who understand the discussion? Obviously not. Does a person born with a highly communicable disease expect the right to sit hide to hide with a healthy person? Obviously not. Clearly, individual rights depend directly upon our makeup, not just some philosophical mumbo jumbo. Rights are real things; consequently, they depend upon real things. Furthermore, they are socially relative, not some fairy-absolute the founding fathers (or anyone else) can lay down.
Obligations: Does a congenitally armless person have the obligation to hold the door for you? Do you have the obligation to hold the door for them? Is this situation in any way unclear to you, that you would argue that you have equal obligations? Does a rich man have an obligation towards charity? Does a poor man? Are they equal? Postulate: You have a family to support. Medical care, school, shelter, food, etc. Do you have an equal obligation to work for an individual with no money, as compared to one with lots and lots of money and who is prepared to give a sizable chunk of that to you? Is this situation in any way unclear to you in that traditionally (and for very good reason) the obligation to support one's offspring and mate(s) causes other obligations to arise, obligations that are not in any way equal with, for instance, someone who has no family, regardless of if they would prefer to have one, or not?
Equality as objective fact is an illusion on every level. Should you attempt to invoke or force it upon people, you are almost certainly doing the exact opposite of what you thought you were doing: Making people more unequal, and not only that, but unfairly so. Until you understand that, you will be arguing from a false and misleading premise.
All people exit the birth canal with the same prior experiences in the world.
Some people exit without having developed limbs and organs others have. Some people exit in chronic pain. Some people exit having developed not only "next to" mom, but next to a sibling. Some people exit backwards (which is no minor matter.) Some people exit and have their skulls highly malformed by clamps. Some people exit with antibodies trying to consume them from inside. Some people exit with aids, herpes, and other biological gifts. And so on. So in short, no — they don't.
They have done the same number of wrongs, and the same number of rights.
That's a question of philosophy, and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole as formulated — my experience is that a significant amount of philosophy is worth precisely what it is made from (nothing.) However, I will certainly observe that there is no assurance that newly born individuals are complicit in the same number of acts. They may have killed a sibling in the womb. Intentionally or otherwise, who's to say? They may have torn the placenta free on exit, killing or severely wounding the mother. They may have been a quiet little embryo, or they may have kicked and punched their way through many months of time, in the process robbing the mother of sleep, nutrition, and perhaps even organ health, just depending on where and how those blows landed. Which brings biological consequences upon their own little heads. Some will be malformed; so where another person might have been sucking a thumb, there was no thumb to suck. Some will have managed to tangle themselves in the umbilical cord, in the process wreaking havoc upon themselves, and/or siblings, and/or the mother. Some may have spent months cringing and generating fatigue (and other) poisons as the sounds of distant argument and hatred penetrated their environment; others may have mooched along to the strains of Bach and Mozart. Again, and so on. And of course, some people exit the birth canal, and kill the mother in the process, while others only split her from stem to stern. Some people render the mother sterile, or incapable of normal birth, in the manner of their arrival. Some people grow so large or are subject to medical conditions that they must be delivered by Cesarian. So, no. There is no assurance of parity here. Right and wrong are questions I'd leave up in the air; but of equality, it is clear that we know there is no assurance.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology is the single biggest human factor that we have reason to believe affects climate; it is the primary whipping boy for the "we're killing our planet" hysterics, after all, yet none of these "studies" can even make a start at predicting what is going to be the motive and/or non-motive power technology set du jour in twenty, fifty, two hundred years. Although we do know that it almost certainly won't be oil, because there won't be enough left to use economically for such purposes. Both power transport/storage and method of generation are questions that are totally up in the air. For generation, fusion? Fission? Solar? Tidal? Trans-dimensional down-level leakage? Other? For storage and transport, hydrogen? Ultrabatteries? Other? We have absolutely no idea. What about transport efficiency? Will friction continue to be an energy sink? Maglev? Vacuum containers? Anti-bloody-gravity?
And then there are issues like volcanic activity, solar activity, the Earth's magnetic field is weakening...
Predicting climate without knowing what all these major inputs to the system are going to do is like trying to predict the weather without wind, humidity and temperature information. A random number generator would likely do as well.
The whole thing is an exercise in naval gazing and cynical grant-acquisition.
Of course, it does make a great distraction from the real issues of the day such as multi-national erosion of civil rights, the United States' current attempt to inflict an empire of democracy upon nations that are operating under other systems, starvation in large portions of Africa...
How... convenient.
Oh, wait. Maybe we weren't talking about communications tools, maybe we were talking about entertainment devices?
Also... truly, I cannot imagine for even one moment why Apple would want to switch to running Windows. They have no windows software to sell; they have no real hardware advantage to bring to that market. Not even looks. There are plenty of cool looking Intel platforms out there from the nutzo to the trim and stylish and everywhere in between.
I can see why they might consider becoming a software only shop and stop making hardware — there are plenty of nice Intel-based platforms out there, and software margins are far better than hardware margins (speaking as a software vendor myself.) I'd be pretty happy running OSX on a Dell, for instance, and I think the number of people who might try OSX if they could legitimately install it on their PC is probably a very large number. But drop the software and keep the hardware? No. Don't think so. :)
I can (just barely) imagine emails from an all grass roots, all volunteer, all living-in-their-own-homes campaign who are trying to elect someone for the purpose of raising taxes to feed the homeless to be able to emit non-commercial email, but that's about the end of it.
Otherwise, if you didn't ask for it, it's spam. One time or a thousand times, doesn't matter — it's 100% spam all the way.
In most states you can't do anything about it, because citizens are not involved with the process of making and/or approving legislation except in a few isolated states (California is one, I think.)
There's a very important thing to remember here: Politicians didn't define the Internet, how it works, or the social rules that pervade this "space", as it were. The denzens of the net did that. Now we have politicians trying to formalize our space in such a manner as to allow themselves to magically opt out of the gutter-level definition that spamming has always resided in. They can only do this if we let them. Personally, I'm not going to ever agree that they have any implicit right to do so, legislation otherwise notwithstanding. To me, this assumed "freedom to spam" is one more concrete way that politicians have demonstrated that they have no comprehension of the society they purport to represent. They don't represent me, and they have not for many years now.
The ballot box is useless, and has been for years. Now remaining: Soap box, Ammo box.
My second computer was built around an 8008 chip. Not as much fun. All the cool stuff was already on the chip.
My third computer was an SBC from National Semiconductor, using an SC/MP MPU. Nothing to build, so it was all about the programming. The SC/MP was a bit of an oddball, so I learned some new things.
Then I got a SWTPC 6800 "kit", which was really just a solder and screw assembly, then a Gimix 6809 (still have it, and it still works), then an IBM PC, then several Amigas, then several more PCs and RISC PCs (I have PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha machines on shelves, they ran RISC versions of Windows NT), then Linux, finally grabbed a Mac (mini.)
During the course of my career, I worked at IBM (Boca Raton) and got to use their ATOM uP, an old (at the time) punched card machine... the specifics of which have thankfully slipped my mind (punched cards are annoying, suffice it to say) and a scientific mini, the model of that is also fogged out, and I didn't use it that much, really.
I did a lot of hardware designs using the 6809 and its A/B variants when it was current; I liked (I still like) that MPU, it just seemed to have the best instruction balance of any 8-bitter I ever ran into. By comparison, the 68000 and family were pretty much of a dissapointment. I thought they'd be 6809's on steroids; Not so. They were a step wider (good), a step more orthogonal (also good) and a step simpler (backwards.) Fewer clever addressing modes mainly, but that was exactly what made programming the 6809 such a breeze.
Yes.
Also, add "the lawmakers", for not killing adware right out of the gate.
Square brackets are not an element of HTML.
Your use of them has catapulted your entire post into homomorphic bloggian spacetime. I suggest you recalculate using angle brackets (< and >) before your invalid procedures are used by a student in a critical reasoning process and the entire loop quantum gravity idea collapses, leaving us all floating around, batting away annoying square brackets with rolled up thesis drafts.
You know when you fall down? Well, the part when your head hits the ground, you know that part, that comes after you're mostly done falling? Well, that part confuses me. And there's some kind of relationship to distance, because the further I fall, the more confused I get when my head hits the ground. I have verified this through empirical testing, although lately, I've been unable to commit all the resulting data thus obtained to long term storage.
Well, uh, I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newletter.
No shit?
**cough**religion**cough
If you got 90% of the people to go along, I'd be amazed. However, like the system we're currently under, the remaining 10% would work to fit in, mostly. The beauty of a libertarian society is there is less work required to do so. Fewer taxes, fewer laws, fewer social levels, fewer criminals, fewer everything, basically.
Regarding voting... there is little point in voting when the choice is between person A who won't do what you want and is nowhere near what you stand for personally, and person B who is essentially the same. Voting only means something if you have reasonable choices. It's kind of like a poll. If I ask what would you like to do with your mother and give you option A "shoot your mother" and option B "strangle your mother" you're not likely to want to answer the question. You need some other options that actually represent what you might want to do with your mother. Similarly, before it becomes reasonable for me to vote for president, you'd have to offer me someone I was (somehow) convinced wasn't going to be just another constitution crushing, superstitious, warmongering, illicit special interest pandering, expansionist, social retard. Or was going to fund space travel at about 50% of the national budget, that might do it.
It is hugely different. Jim is at zero risk, because he has not interfered with life, liberty, or property. Hitler, on the other hand, has, and is at risk. If you, for instance, in a fit of homphobic idiocy, were to decide to harm Jim, I'd be perfectly happy to shoot you in the head at the very first opportunity. This is the very considerable force that underlies a libertarian society; it's not that no one will be held accountable (like a mob), it's that everyone is accountable, all the time, to everyone else. As a member of such a society, you'd know that interfering with Jim's day to day life would result in you not having a life. So you'd behave, or you'd die — which solves society's problem with you. At the very least, you'd not get to misbehave any longer, and you'd not cost society any more than a bullet or two to stop. You can't avoid the consequences, either — if you were to shoot me instead, the next citizen would step up and shoot you.
I think leaving justice up to the individual is a good idea, as long as that individual is just as accountable to their neighbors as everyone else is. I can tell you one thing: leaving justice to a bunch of power-seeking, barely-to-non accountable men and women has not proven to be a good idea here in the USA. Our system is flat-out busted.
To back that up, I point to the incredible mess that is US law — criminal and civil, and the separate, independently power-based tax system — there is no question in my mind that the system as it stands does not make good law, and consequently everything downline from that is working less and less well each and every day.
Yes, a libertarian system would pose many challenges, not the least of which would be transitional if the society wasn't a new one (I suspect it would have to be, though.) Right now, people are sheep. They'd have to be responsible citizens instead of passive victims of a power-base. It's a huge difference, and no, honestly, I can't see it happening because the populace is conditioned to not know how to take care of itself at this point in time. In the unlikely event that we get into space, new frontiers may provide the opportunity for such a society. I like to hope so, anyway. That doesn't make libertarian ideals any less attractive to me today.
Libertarian ideals don't recognize idiot concepts like superiority of race, to start with; further, as rule from above isn't in the game plan, lunatics shouting for pogroms would be very lonely people. Lunatics trying to implement pogroms would be dead. Hitler got into power and was able to do what he did because he rode in on the very power structure you are thinking is a good thing, while that same structure forbade any citizen from doing anything about it. It didn't happen overnight; it was a political mechanism that put Hitler into power, not a libertarian system or even a mob. It was a political system where responsibility and power were vested in members of the system, but not the citizens. In other words, a system very like ours today.
Hitler is long gone, however. Lets talk about a current, but similar problem, namely, Bush and his royal court.
Bush, by setting policies, and the system downstream from him by following said policies, is torturing people, taking people's property, kidnapping people's wives, eavesdropping on people,
The thing is, you need an army to stop an army; but you don't need an army to stop a single person. When extreme problems flow from one person, you're quite likely to change the situation radically if you remove that person. In Hitler's case, stopping him early would have done more, I think, but stopping him at any point would have been beneficial.
Something else flows from this approach: People who would emulate Hitler are likely to observe how he ended up, especially if he was nipped in the bud, so to speak. That leads to either suppression of the behavior, which is fine, or attempts to unite groups of people, which might serve to gather them in one place so they are more easily killed. :)
Because a libertarian would have noted, "you've stepped over the line and you're in my face now", and then would have proceeded to kill him where he stood, ASAP.
Remember that one of the most basic, bedrock positions of the libertarian stance is that you should be allowed to do pretty much anything as long as you don't interfere with others. Or to put it another way, Hitler's right to swing his fist ended at everyone else's face. Once Hitler stepped over that line, he would have been just target practice to any libertarian worthy of the name.
I own, and regularly use, Mac, Windows, and Linux systems, and frankly, I think the Mac is (by far) the best of the three in terms of what I prefer to be working with at any given moment. But as for who is my hero, it'd definitely be Linus and crew.
"I am Pentium of Borg. You will be approximated."
Tequila and railguns.
Handguns are, like, so yesterday.
Another thing: In a few years, battery life won't even be an issue, is my guess. Fuel cell packs are already available that give you tens of hours of operation, and that'll only get better. Batteries may be peaked out in terms of large gains (or maybe not) but fuel cells are just now sneaking into the marketplace. It won't make a difference if the CPU pulls 2x the power or not.
But things like vector coprocessing do make a difference, as do highly orthoganal architectures and binary compatibility.
My take: Should have stuck with PPC. Nothing I've read about the new machines has made me do anything but yawn as yet. Next year, we'll probably be reading about how the PS3 outruns any computer on the desktop -- using PPC and vector architecture.
Intel. Pfffft.
That's what I said: We're smarter, and other differences were minor.
Absolutely. Mothers who lost kittens, older cats who lost lifelong companions. They become miserable, quite visibly so, and in some cases they die. Just like people.
And the answer is, truly astonishing intelligence in some members of our race, combined with generalized manipulators for the environment (hands) and as far as I know, the strongest toolkit for communications of any animal species on the planet.
None of which makes us "not" animals. If there is a line, then I think it is one darned fuzzy line, with some humans crossing it one way and some animals crossing it the other.
No, I am right.
Rights: Does a Down's syndrome sufferer truly deserve the same right to speak up in a classroom where string theory is being discussed as those who understand the discussion? Obviously not. Does a person born with a highly communicable disease expect the right to sit hide to hide with a healthy person? Obviously not. Clearly, individual rights depend directly upon our makeup, not just some philosophical mumbo jumbo. Rights are real things; consequently, they depend upon real things. Furthermore, they are socially relative, not some fairy-absolute the founding fathers (or anyone else) can lay down.
Obligations: Does a congenitally armless person have the obligation to hold the door for you? Do you have the obligation to hold the door for them? Is this situation in any way unclear to you, that you would argue that you have equal obligations? Does a rich man have an obligation towards charity? Does a poor man? Are they equal? Postulate: You have a family to support. Medical care, school, shelter, food, etc. Do you have an equal obligation to work for an individual with no money, as compared to one with lots and lots of money and who is prepared to give a sizable chunk of that to you? Is this situation in any way unclear to you in that traditionally (and for very good reason) the obligation to support one's offspring and mate(s) causes other obligations to arise, obligations that are not in any way equal with, for instance, someone who has no family, regardless of if they would prefer to have one, or not?
Equality as objective fact is an illusion on every level. Should you attempt to invoke or force it upon people, you are almost certainly doing the exact opposite of what you thought you were doing: Making people more unequal, and not only that, but unfairly so. Until you understand that, you will be arguing from a false and misleading premise.
Some people exit without having developed limbs and organs others have. Some people exit in chronic pain. Some people exit having developed not only "next to" mom, but next to a sibling. Some people exit backwards (which is no minor matter.) Some people exit and have their skulls highly malformed by clamps. Some people exit with antibodies trying to consume them from inside. Some people exit with aids, herpes, and other biological gifts. And so on. So in short, no — they don't.
That's a question of philosophy, and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole as formulated — my experience is that a significant amount of philosophy is worth precisely what it is made from (nothing.) However, I will certainly observe that there is no assurance that newly born individuals are complicit in the same number of acts. They may have killed a sibling in the womb. Intentionally or otherwise, who's to say? They may have torn the placenta free on exit, killing or severely wounding the mother. They may have been a quiet little embryo, or they may have kicked and punched their way through many months of time, in the process robbing the mother of sleep, nutrition, and perhaps even organ health, just depending on where and how those blows landed. Which brings biological consequences upon their own little heads. Some will be malformed; so where another person might have been sucking a thumb, there was no thumb to suck. Some will have managed to tangle themselves in the umbilical cord, in the process wreaking havoc upon themselves, and/or siblings, and/or the mother. Some may have spent months cringing and generating fatigue (and other) poisons as the sounds of distant argument and hatred penetrated their environment; others may have mooched along to the strains of Bach and Mozart. Again, and so on. And of course, some people exit the birth canal, and kill the mother in the process, while others only split her from stem to stern. Some people render the mother sterile, or incapable of normal birth, in the manner of their arrival. Some people grow so large or are subject to medical conditions that they must be delivered by Cesarian. So, no. There is no assurance of parity here. Right and wrong are questions I'd leave up in the air; but of equality, it is clear that we know there is no assurance.