It's their prerogative to do so should they first decide to withdraw from the NPT, similar to what North Korea did.
That was what I meant. Curious that so many people didn't seem to understand that it would work that way, and that they'd be within their right as a sovereign nation to decide which treaties they'll be party to.
As it stands, they are party to that treaty, and are complying with it.
They are within striking distance of regional weapons. When Israel has nuclear weapons, missiles, and planes to deliver them, they can be considered neighbors.
Also, Israel seems to think they have a right or responsibility to stop Iran from developing any nuclear technology, peaceful or otherwise. If they were developing nuclear weapons that might even make them justified in certain cases, but so far we have no proof of that. They have absolutely no right to sabotage peaceful nuclear power production, and so far that's all Iran has been doing.
Israel will have ill-feelings toward Iran regardless of what Iran does because Israel is run by a group with the biggest persecution complex in the world--largely justified. Anything but fawning obsequiousness is taken as hostility. Look at the incredibly small movement away from Israel that the US has made in its foreign policy. The hardliners compare Obama to the appeasers of Hitler for having the audacity not to be completely in lockstep with Israel.
No matter who was responsible, they pushed the world closer to war with that virus.
I'm not convinced by what we've seen so far, what little evidence there is, that Iran is producing nuclear weapons or wants to. Even if you could prove that to me, it wouldn't change my position that we shouldn't be involved in their affairs and have no right to punish or sanction a nation for doing the same thing we do. It's the US after all with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the only nation to have ever used them (we get sort of a pass since they were unprecedented at the time).
Iran is a sovereign nation and if they wish to produce nuclear weapons because they feel threatened by their neighbors (Israel, a nuclear power) or as a deterrent then that is their prerogative. Israel claims to feel threatened and vulnerable, that they're being menaced by Iran, yet they're the ones murdering scientists and sabotaging industries of other nations.
A lot of the positions of the founding fathers are outdated and suited for a country that ceased to exist over 100 years ago. In the 21st century there are a lot of things that a viable country's government needs to do that simply weren't even conceived of in the middle of the 18th century. A glaring example is healthcare. Having a national healthcare system, taking that burden away from business and workers, is a huge competitive advantage in the world today.
The constitution isn't frightening, but it's also not a holy document given to us from god. It was made by flawed men with limited vision who were products of their time and place. It's only survived so long precisely because it was so broad, vague, and we chose not to strictly observe it. Something being "constitutional" doesn't make it automatically right or good.
I'll give him foreign policy though, he's got a lot of good ideas about that. He knows that sanctions and saber rattling only angers other countries and pushes us closer to war. You make the world peaceful by trading and cooperating economically with other countries. You respect their sovereignty even when they make decisions internally that you don't like. You don't wave around a banner of "freedom" and force them to be like us.
Aye, that was the last thread holding my father to paying for cable as well. I eventually convinced him to start reading his news instead of watching it. I showed him the CNN website and the BBC, and got him to start listening to NPR.
Text is superior to watching a talking head anyway; it's just hard to convince people of that generation--assuming your parents are within a generation of 50yo.
It came down to time. You can read a rundown of the news in just a few minutes that would normally take an hour if you were trying to watch it on cable with commercials. But I know a lot of people are devoted to their particular favorite news personality so that keeps them tuning into that channel every day.
My mom learned to use bittorrent to get new shows, and also watches Hulu. My brother uses an Xbox with a friend's Netflix account and also torrents. They canceled cable TV last month. There's really no need to have cable anymore unless you want live sports. Practically everything else is available online for free.
I'd rather not have poisoned groundwater, thank you.
I'm convinced by the evidence I've seen that we could satisfy our power needs with wind, solar, and nuclear. Yes, I'm an environmentalist who supports nuclear power. It's the greenest energy source we have currently available.
That means very little to me, unless I also know why they are there. If they are there for elective surgeries, or even for non-elective but non-urgent surgeries and they just didn't want to wait an extra month or two in Canada, then it also means very little to me. There'll always be rich people who don't want to wait a little bit. If they want to spend more, fine. It's more important to me that everyone gets the care they need, even if they have to wait a bit more. I'd rather wait than not get treated at all--a real danger in The States.
The real April Fools joke is that their "serious" projects are just as laughable.
As much as I like Minecraft, I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of it, Mojang and Notch are one-hit wonders. It became all too painfully clear when they started rolling back their expectations of what Minecraft was supposed to be because they simply lacked the technical ability, resources, and motivation to accomplish their goals. Which of course didn't stop them from continuing to sell the game based on those promises that they knew would never be delivered. We're never going to get a robust NPC system. We're never going to get user controllable bots to do the menial work. We're never going to get those core RPG elements, even just as a creator kit so the community can create stories that aren't hacked onto the engine like a tabletop game. Every few weeks they make a new block type or a new mob.
Notch got lucky with Minecraft--and the idea wasn't even his. He basically ripped off Infinminer. When he has to actually create something original we'll all see how truly inept he is. Mojang is going to be bankrupt or bought for its properties within 3 years, mark my words.
From a technical standpoint Minecraft is a disaster. Despite having 8-bit graphics on a crude 3D engine it runs horribly even on very powerful machines. Stuttering and glitches abound. Java just wasn't the right tool for the job but he used it because he didn't know anything better. Minecraft will forever be limited by that unless it gets completely rewritten properly. I would have loved for this concept to have been executed by a competent developer. Notch is the George Lucas of video games.
The one hope for Minecraft is that it'll eventually get released as open source. Maybe then the very talented community can finally make something out of it that lives up to its potential.
The death penalty for murder hasn't ended murder in the US. There is strong evidence that it hasn't even reduced the rates (comparing murder rates among populations in states that have and don't have the death penalty). Being killed by the state is a much higher risk than two years in prison, and even that doesn't work, so why would you believe a lesser deterrent would be effective if the ultimate penalty isn't even enough?
I love IBM era Thinkpads (and *nix loves them, too, which makes them all the more useful to me). Such amazing machines in form and function. I'm an Apple fan now, through and through, but those are the only laptops on the PC side of the great divide that I'd ever consider using. The Lenovo stuff is pretty junky, but when IBM still had their mark on them they were sublime.
For their purpose, they'll probably still be useful for another 10 years. Space programs use a surprisingly little amount of CPU power.
The Catholics actually have their own astronomy department and do a fair amount of real science. As a sect of Christianity they are by far the most progressive about such issues. Seems they're making up for lost time after their historical antagonistic relationship with science (see: Galileo)
Synthetic prostheses will probably end up being a dead end, for normal people at least. If your goal is to get someone back to 100% function of their original organic hand (or an idealized perfectly functional human hand if it was already malfunctioning from birth) then growing a new hand, either in situ or in a lab for later grafting, seems more likely. After all, we carry around everything we need to grow more body parts--that's how you got your original hands. Coaxing the body to do that trick again will likely be accomplished before we can make a synthetic body part that works just as well as a real one.
Time management boils down to willpower, which is a trainable skill. A podcast I listen to talked about related topics a few weeks ago. Questions of ergonomics and workspace arrangements and flow are probably specific to your particular job and preferences, but a good chair makes a huge difference. If you splurge on anything in your workspace that should be it.
Until there's a way to install and replace hardware over the internet, I'll never be able to work from home; not with my current job at least.:(
Unfortunately, splitting the difference between all the mainstream cable news means you end up to the right of center.
CNN is center-right. FOX is far, far right, maybe even reactionary "national front" territory. MSNBC is centrist. The biggest lie is that it all balances out. It doesn't balance out. If you take the average of it all, thinking you're getting at the truth by doing that, you end up with an economically right slant to most issues. This is still simplistic, since like the political spectrum, news is best plotted on a 2-axis graph. Amount of bias on one axis, and direction of political bias on the other.
People really need to learn this and take it to heart. Unfortunately the myth of social mobility through hard work is so ingrained in American culture that it'll probably never be rooted out completely and exposed as the lie that it is. It's too convenient a motivator for the masses for the rich to let it fade away easily or completely. It doesn't even require any kind of conspiracy. It's an emergent system that forms from each rich individual doing their own thing.
If you told me there was a near 100% chance I'd die, I'd still volunteer to go into space just for the chance to do it. If I could die knowing I was contributing something useful to science, even better.
I reject the notion that we are, as a species, mortal. More accurately, I don't accept that the twilight of Mankind must occur. Though individuals must die, the human super-organism, as humanity can be likened to, absolutely can transcend death indefinitely if we are careful, plan ahead, and master ourselves.
Mars is a great training ground and testbed for a lot of technology we'll need to develop and perfect. It's not meant to be a "second Earth" but activity there has its place in the larger goal of permanent human habitation off of this planet.
That's not really a question that can be answered, but nor does it need to be. Humans, all self-replicating life, wants to survive, both as individuals and collectively. And maybe the fact that we can even ask that question shows that there's something special about us. As far as we can tell we're the only matter in the universe that's self-aware. We have this ability to understand the world we've found ourselves in, and if the universe is finite as it appears to be then there is an end-state to understanding, a point where it's possible to know all there is to know. I'd like us to get there, even if it's eons after I'm dead.
Google could do well if they pivoted to the niche market of academics, science, engineering, technology, and journalists. Some of the discussions on Google+ for those areas of interest are actually very high quality. Certainly better than anything you get on Facebook.
It's highly subjective and a matter of personal taste, but I find the interface and presentation of Google+ to be superb, it really blows FB out of the water. I can't stand how cluttered and busy it's become while G+ is clean and just feels right. The "circles" metaphor and interface is a pretty good step forward for social networking, it doesn't get the credit it deserves for at least being the easiest to use and understand way to bring some granularity to what you share and who you share it with.
I don't want to see Facebook unseated, but I would love to see Google light a fire under them. Competition is good for users of both sites.
It's really difficult to put into words just how wrong you are. I realize you're probably just a drive by troll, but on the off chance you're really of that opinion I have to at least attempt to provide a counter point to your myopia.
Understanding the universe, stretching humanities legs, literally, out among the planets in our solar system and beyond represents a life and death pursuit for the human species. Eventually, Earth is going to be in existential peril, and if all our eggs are still in this basket over issues as petty and meaningless as politics, economics, or national pride, then we are well and truly, cosmically, fucked.
It's not possible to start this processes too early. We could detect a rogue asteroid or comet tomorrow that will end life on Earth. On a long enough time line this WILL happen. It's happened before, it'll happen again. When it does, your descendants will be thankful that we took a minute amount of money away from the budget for bombs, sugar water, and pornography, to put those first apes in tin cans and got them to Mars and back.
This is all presupposing you subscribe to the radical notion that a universe with humanity in it is in some way better than one without. As a human, I work from that assumption as a given. You may not, but even if that's so it's not too much to ask that you at least stand out of the way of those who do look that far into the future and can see the dangers and the possibilities that your small mind cannot.
We're talking about pennies here. Pennies now, so that humanity will still exist in one, ten, or a hundred centuries. There is no more important goal than space exploration, manned space exploration, and establishing a permanent human presence in space and on other words.
...to the rest of the world: we don't want your business. We don't want any tech companies to set up here. We're going to make this the most hostile nation to internet and technology start ups by bullying anyone who dares defy our notion of imaginary property.
Slashdot Mirror
It's their prerogative to do so should they first decide to withdraw from the NPT, similar to what North Korea did.
That was what I meant. Curious that so many people didn't seem to understand that it would work that way, and that they'd be within their right as a sovereign nation to decide which treaties they'll be party to.
As it stands, they are party to that treaty, and are complying with it.
They are within striking distance of regional weapons. When Israel has nuclear weapons, missiles, and planes to deliver them, they can be considered neighbors.
Also, Israel seems to think they have a right or responsibility to stop Iran from developing any nuclear technology, peaceful or otherwise. If they were developing nuclear weapons that might even make them justified in certain cases, but so far we have no proof of that. They have absolutely no right to sabotage peaceful nuclear power production, and so far that's all Iran has been doing.
Israel will have ill-feelings toward Iran regardless of what Iran does because Israel is run by a group with the biggest persecution complex in the world--largely justified. Anything but fawning obsequiousness is taken as hostility. Look at the incredibly small movement away from Israel that the US has made in its foreign policy. The hardliners compare Obama to the appeasers of Hitler for having the audacity not to be completely in lockstep with Israel.
No matter who was responsible, they pushed the world closer to war with that virus.
I'm not convinced by what we've seen so far, what little evidence there is, that Iran is producing nuclear weapons or wants to. Even if you could prove that to me, it wouldn't change my position that we shouldn't be involved in their affairs and have no right to punish or sanction a nation for doing the same thing we do. It's the US after all with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the only nation to have ever used them (we get sort of a pass since they were unprecedented at the time).
Iran is a sovereign nation and if they wish to produce nuclear weapons because they feel threatened by their neighbors (Israel, a nuclear power) or as a deterrent then that is their prerogative. Israel claims to feel threatened and vulnerable, that they're being menaced by Iran, yet they're the ones murdering scientists and sabotaging industries of other nations.
A lot of the positions of the founding fathers are outdated and suited for a country that ceased to exist over 100 years ago. In the 21st century there are a lot of things that a viable country's government needs to do that simply weren't even conceived of in the middle of the 18th century. A glaring example is healthcare. Having a national healthcare system, taking that burden away from business and workers, is a huge competitive advantage in the world today.
The constitution isn't frightening, but it's also not a holy document given to us from god. It was made by flawed men with limited vision who were products of their time and place. It's only survived so long precisely because it was so broad, vague, and we chose not to strictly observe it. Something being "constitutional" doesn't make it automatically right or good.
I'll give him foreign policy though, he's got a lot of good ideas about that. He knows that sanctions and saber rattling only angers other countries and pushes us closer to war. You make the world peaceful by trading and cooperating economically with other countries. You respect their sovereignty even when they make decisions internally that you don't like. You don't wave around a banner of "freedom" and force them to be like us.
Aye, that was the last thread holding my father to paying for cable as well. I eventually convinced him to start reading his news instead of watching it. I showed him the CNN website and the BBC, and got him to start listening to NPR.
Text is superior to watching a talking head anyway; it's just hard to convince people of that generation--assuming your parents are within a generation of 50yo.
It came down to time. You can read a rundown of the news in just a few minutes that would normally take an hour if you were trying to watch it on cable with commercials. But I know a lot of people are devoted to their particular favorite news personality so that keeps them tuning into that channel every day.
My mom learned to use bittorrent to get new shows, and also watches Hulu. My brother uses an Xbox with a friend's Netflix account and also torrents. They canceled cable TV last month. There's really no need to have cable anymore unless you want live sports. Practically everything else is available online for free.
I'd rather not have poisoned groundwater, thank you.
I'm convinced by the evidence I've seen that we could satisfy our power needs with wind, solar, and nuclear. Yes, I'm an environmentalist who supports nuclear power. It's the greenest energy source we have currently available.
That means very little to me, unless I also know why they are there. If they are there for elective surgeries, or even for non-elective but non-urgent surgeries and they just didn't want to wait an extra month or two in Canada, then it also means very little to me. There'll always be rich people who don't want to wait a little bit. If they want to spend more, fine. It's more important to me that everyone gets the care they need, even if they have to wait a bit more. I'd rather wait than not get treated at all--a real danger in The States.
The real April Fools joke is that their "serious" projects are just as laughable.
As much as I like Minecraft, I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of it, Mojang and Notch are one-hit wonders. It became all too painfully clear when they started rolling back their expectations of what Minecraft was supposed to be because they simply lacked the technical ability, resources, and motivation to accomplish their goals. Which of course didn't stop them from continuing to sell the game based on those promises that they knew would never be delivered. We're never going to get a robust NPC system. We're never going to get user controllable bots to do the menial work. We're never going to get those core RPG elements, even just as a creator kit so the community can create stories that aren't hacked onto the engine like a tabletop game. Every few weeks they make a new block type or a new mob.
Notch got lucky with Minecraft--and the idea wasn't even his. He basically ripped off Infinminer. When he has to actually create something original we'll all see how truly inept he is. Mojang is going to be bankrupt or bought for its properties within 3 years, mark my words.
From a technical standpoint Minecraft is a disaster. Despite having 8-bit graphics on a crude 3D engine it runs horribly even on very powerful machines. Stuttering and glitches abound. Java just wasn't the right tool for the job but he used it because he didn't know anything better. Minecraft will forever be limited by that unless it gets completely rewritten properly. I would have loved for this concept to have been executed by a competent developer. Notch is the George Lucas of video games.
The one hope for Minecraft is that it'll eventually get released as open source. Maybe then the very talented community can finally make something out of it that lives up to its potential.
So does just locking the murderer up, and there's no risk of accidentally killing an innocent, wrongly convicted, person.
Oh and the "it's cheaper to kill them" argument is false, too. Carrying out a death penalty costs more than life in prison.
The death penalty for murder hasn't ended murder in the US. There is strong evidence that it hasn't even reduced the rates (comparing murder rates among populations in states that have and don't have the death penalty). Being killed by the state is a much higher risk than two years in prison, and even that doesn't work, so why would you believe a lesser deterrent would be effective if the ultimate penalty isn't even enough?
MSN/Live Messenger, yes. It's incredibly popular in Asia, especially South Korea.
I love IBM era Thinkpads (and *nix loves them, too, which makes them all the more useful to me). Such amazing machines in form and function. I'm an Apple fan now, through and through, but those are the only laptops on the PC side of the great divide that I'd ever consider using. The Lenovo stuff is pretty junky, but when IBM still had their mark on them they were sublime.
For their purpose, they'll probably still be useful for another 10 years. Space programs use a surprisingly little amount of CPU power.
The Catholics actually have their own astronomy department and do a fair amount of real science. As a sect of Christianity they are by far the most progressive about such issues. Seems they're making up for lost time after their historical antagonistic relationship with science (see: Galileo)
Synthetic prostheses will probably end up being a dead end, for normal people at least. If your goal is to get someone back to 100% function of their original organic hand (or an idealized perfectly functional human hand if it was already malfunctioning from birth) then growing a new hand, either in situ or in a lab for later grafting, seems more likely. After all, we carry around everything we need to grow more body parts--that's how you got your original hands. Coaxing the body to do that trick again will likely be accomplished before we can make a synthetic body part that works just as well as a real one.
Time management boils down to willpower, which is a trainable skill. A podcast I listen to talked about related topics a few weeks ago. Questions of ergonomics and workspace arrangements and flow are probably specific to your particular job and preferences, but a good chair makes a huge difference. If you splurge on anything in your workspace that should be it.
Until there's a way to install and replace hardware over the internet, I'll never be able to work from home; not with my current job at least. :(
Unfortunately, splitting the difference between all the mainstream cable news means you end up to the right of center.
CNN is center-right. FOX is far, far right, maybe even reactionary "national front" territory. MSNBC is centrist. The biggest lie is that it all balances out. It doesn't balance out. If you take the average of it all, thinking you're getting at the truth by doing that, you end up with an economically right slant to most issues. This is still simplistic, since like the political spectrum, news is best plotted on a 2-axis graph. Amount of bias on one axis, and direction of political bias on the other.
People really need to learn this and take it to heart. Unfortunately the myth of social mobility through hard work is so ingrained in American culture that it'll probably never be rooted out completely and exposed as the lie that it is. It's too convenient a motivator for the masses for the rich to let it fade away easily or completely. It doesn't even require any kind of conspiracy. It's an emergent system that forms from each rich individual doing their own thing.
If you told me there was a near 100% chance I'd die, I'd still volunteer to go into space just for the chance to do it. If I could die knowing I was contributing something useful to science, even better.
There'll always be people like me.
I reject the notion that we are, as a species, mortal. More accurately, I don't accept that the twilight of Mankind must occur. Though individuals must die, the human super-organism, as humanity can be likened to, absolutely can transcend death indefinitely if we are careful, plan ahead, and master ourselves.
Mars is a great training ground and testbed for a lot of technology we'll need to develop and perfect. It's not meant to be a "second Earth" but activity there has its place in the larger goal of permanent human habitation off of this planet.
That's not really a question that can be answered, but nor does it need to be. Humans, all self-replicating life, wants to survive, both as individuals and collectively. And maybe the fact that we can even ask that question shows that there's something special about us. As far as we can tell we're the only matter in the universe that's self-aware. We have this ability to understand the world we've found ourselves in, and if the universe is finite as it appears to be then there is an end-state to understanding, a point where it's possible to know all there is to know. I'd like us to get there, even if it's eons after I'm dead.
Google could do well if they pivoted to the niche market of academics, science, engineering, technology, and journalists. Some of the discussions on Google+ for those areas of interest are actually very high quality. Certainly better than anything you get on Facebook.
It's highly subjective and a matter of personal taste, but I find the interface and presentation of Google+ to be superb, it really blows FB out of the water. I can't stand how cluttered and busy it's become while G+ is clean and just feels right. The "circles" metaphor and interface is a pretty good step forward for social networking, it doesn't get the credit it deserves for at least being the easiest to use and understand way to bring some granularity to what you share and who you share it with.
I don't want to see Facebook unseated, but I would love to see Google light a fire under them. Competition is good for users of both sites.
It's really difficult to put into words just how wrong you are. I realize you're probably just a drive by troll, but on the off chance you're really of that opinion I have to at least attempt to provide a counter point to your myopia.
Understanding the universe, stretching humanities legs, literally, out among the planets in our solar system and beyond represents a life and death pursuit for the human species. Eventually, Earth is going to be in existential peril, and if all our eggs are still in this basket over issues as petty and meaningless as politics, economics, or national pride, then we are well and truly, cosmically, fucked.
It's not possible to start this processes too early. We could detect a rogue asteroid or comet tomorrow that will end life on Earth. On a long enough time line this WILL happen. It's happened before, it'll happen again. When it does, your descendants will be thankful that we took a minute amount of money away from the budget for bombs, sugar water, and pornography, to put those first apes in tin cans and got them to Mars and back.
This is all presupposing you subscribe to the radical notion that a universe with humanity in it is in some way better than one without. As a human, I work from that assumption as a given. You may not, but even if that's so it's not too much to ask that you at least stand out of the way of those who do look that far into the future and can see the dangers and the possibilities that your small mind cannot.
We're talking about pennies here. Pennies now, so that humanity will still exist in one, ten, or a hundred centuries. There is no more important goal than space exploration, manned space exploration, and establishing a permanent human presence in space and on other words.
Self-censorship isn't an acceptable alternative to no censorship at all.
...to the rest of the world: we don't want your business. We don't want any tech companies to set up here. We're going to make this the most hostile nation to internet and technology start ups by bullying anyone who dares defy our notion of imaginary property.