Well, I wouldn't trust the ratings so much; I've seen so much dreck rated four and five stars on Amazon, I don't even bother looking at the aggregate rating anymore. Reading the reviews is helpful though - skip all the "this is the best evar!!!" filler, and you often find thoughtful posts that help you separate the grain from the chaff.
Just as an aside - I agree that Karel Capek was a serious writer, but he's not a serious writer - I've seldom laughed the way I did at parts of War with the Newts and The Absolute at Large
Oh, yes. My post was not clear (sorry), and Count Fenring is absolutely right. When Capek does funny he does it very well indeed. (and when will Slashdot support Unicode properly? We're in 2012, folks, it's not rocket surgery anymore!)
He only published a few books, but "Bridge of Birds" (and its follow ups) is a wonderful mixture of Chinese folklore, Indiana Jones, and Sherlock Holmes
I have to second that. I can't understad how as good a writer as Hughart can be so little known. Go get "Bridge of Birds". Then, if you liked it (and I believe there's a good chance you will) get "Eight Skilled Gentlemen" and "Story of the Stone". They're very, very good - especially the first.
Starting chronologically, have you had a chance to read the real classics? Wells, maybe Verne? They're really good, especially Wells. While I see Verne as more of a scientific plodder (in the sense that his future technology is often just an extension of the things that already existed at the time), Wells was a real visionary. I've always been amazed at the way Wells blazed so many trails later travelled by so many writers - time travel, invisibility, unfriendly aliens and interplanetar war, animal "uplift", and many others.
Since you asked for the obscure, how about Karel ÄOEapek (the guy that coined the word "robot")? Read "The Absolute at Large", "War with the Newts" or "Krakatit". Understand though that this guy, like Wells, was a serious writer, whose purpose wasn't so much to develop science fiction ideas - he was using SF as a tool to talk about societal and individual issues. In the same time frame, have you had a chance to read Mihail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita"? It's a wonderful fantasy, describing the Devil's visit to Soviet Moskow. Very very nice
Moving to the fifties and sixties, I've always been partial to Fredric Brown - an anthology of his short stories was published a couple of years ago. Highly recommended! Theodore Sturgeon is another of the great classic authors - and a few volumes of his short stories were also published relatively recently. Around the same time frame, I liked some of the British "cosy catastrophes", especially John Wyndham: try "The Kraken Wakes", or "Day of the Triffids".
For more modern writers, Stanislaw Lem's "Cyberiad" is very, very funny. If you get a chance, give it a try. Also, take a look at Tim Powers! If you haven't already, get "The Anubis Gates"; it's a wonderful book - I always loved the architecture of the plot, the way he throws so many strings in the air and finishes by tying them all in nicely ordered knots at the end. Then if you liked it, get "Declare".
the Bussard collectors at the front of all warp drives are designed to scoop up interstellar particles and radiation for fuel replenishment.
Won't work though: a Bussard ramjet uses magnetic fields to collect the interstellar gas (mostly hydrogen ions). A magnetic field may stop charged particles, but won't do anything for the gamma rays.
It's just the editors being up to their usual standards of quality. The elevator cable doesn't end at the geostationary station (at 36000 km); it continues beyond it for another 60000 km, and terminates in a counterweight. This counterweight is supposed to be positioned 96 THOUSAND kilometers from the surface, hence the mention of the quarter of the distance to the moon.
There have been some schools of thought that the ages of death for most of those pre-Noah days were actual mistranslations of MONTHS
Noah=950 months=79 years
Adam=930=77
Seth=912=76
Enosh=905=75
And Seth had Enosh when he was 105 months (or 8 years and 9 months) old, but Enosh was even more virile, and begat Methuselah at the ripe age of 65 months (that is, five years and a half). Truly those were days of great wonders!
could you use a UV flashlight to walk around in what appears to be almost complete darkness but you see just fine with the UV flashlight? I suppose that would be cool, not sure how useful that would be but interesting anyway.
Those millennia old tribal conflicts are rather recent, and spurred on by western companies delivering weapons to local warlords in exchange for free extraction of resources.
I don't know what to make of this statement. It's a very stretched interpretation of history. I'd say it's stretched so far it's very close to pure unadulterated lying. The history of the African continent suffers of a scarcity of written material, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the information we have completely contradicts your assertion. Africa (as a whole) wasn't ever a loving peaceful society, before or after the arrival of the "evil western companies", as you imply. It always had its share of wars, military conquests, bloody battles and so on, just like all other continents. Look at North African history, which is better documented, due to the formation there of large statal structures, and to its closeness to Europe: you'll see the huge wars Egypt was involved in millenia ago, complete with genocides and other fun events. You'll see the often bloody fights between Islamic groups, and the military Islamic conquest of North Africa - all before the 15th century, when Europeans started seriously entering Africa. The things we know about Sub-Saharan Africa indicate the same pattern (keeping in mind that fewer really large statal formations existed there). Look at the Mali Empire and its military expansion during the 13th and 14th centuries (which expansion included razing of cities and enslaving of conquered peoples - see Ibn Battuta's description of his return from the Mali Empire on a caravan that transported 600 female slaves to be sold in Morocco).
Further south, look at the Kingdom of Kongo, who was founded via the military conquest of the kingdom of Mwene Kabunga. The Kingdom of Kongo used his expansion wars to obtain slaves; slavery was well established in Kongo, and later, when the Portuguese arrived, slaves became one of the kingdom's exports. Even further south, we have the lesser Kingdom of Mutapa, also born of conquest, who warred against the neighboring Butwa empire. This pattern exists in pre-colonial Africa almost everywhere you look. Kingdoms or empires are formed and destroyed through military conquest, dinasties rise and fall, sometimes entire tribes or peoples are destroyed or displaced.
Surely, the "evil western companies" made full use of the "divide and conquer" approach, used the internal dissensions of Africa to their advantage and sometimes caused them. There is no doubt about that. However, saying the conflicts are recent and implying they didn't exist before the arrival of the companies takes you beyond the simple political correctness frontier and drops you straight into the bullshit area.
In a case like that the "deleted" flag still means the data mustn't be accessible from the outside anymore. That is, unless your developers belong behind a McDonald's counter in the first place.
Or, unless the company is hit with a subpoena that forces it to give up your data. Or, unless it is bought by another company that wants to monetize the purchase. Or, unless it decides to unilaterally change the privacy policy, and you have a week to opt out, but oh, don't you check daily for policy changes for this company you haven't used for years now? Then it's your fault if all your "deleted" data suddenly surfaces!
sooner or later some scientist is going to kill most the planet by a malicious release or careless negligence, it is not "if" but "when".
Do you have any support for your assertion, other than Luddite paranoia?
Well, I think his assertion can be reasonably argued for, and the arguments should be looked at before dismissing the whole thing as Luddite paranoia. Let's compare the nuclear industry and the biological technologies currently being developed - I'll even ignore the intentional release of biological agents, and just consider the risk of accidents.
The first factor is the number of potential accident sites. Look at the difference in accessibility: nuclear technology requires expensive materials, and highly specialized tools and equipment. That makes nuclear development very controllable, and difficult to hide. In comparison, the tools and technologies required for creating new virus and bacteria strains are very cheap and growing even cheaper - see for example how the cost of DNA sequencing has gone down over the last few years. Moreover, most of the equipment necessary for biology manipulation is easily obtained with a trip to the local mall. It's a reasonable conclusion that more and more people will use those technologies, for research, development, or even hobbies, so there'll be many more potential sites for biological accidents
The second factor is the risk of an accident for a site. Nuclear industry is very safety conscious: very smart people have worked hard to create safe designs, lots of money has been spent in building the necessary infrastructure, and there are only a few hundreds of nuclear reactors in the whole world. Despite all that, accidents still happen. While some of the people working on biological development will be safety conscious AND will be able to afford the safety infrastructure necessary, many of them won't (if you spent a few thousand bucks for a biological reactor and a couple of thermometers, you probably can't afford another hundred thousand or so to build a negative sterile pressure room with proper sealing). In conclusion, the chances of an accident happening at a biological site can be considered much higher on average.
The third factor to consider is the potential impact of an accident: with radioactive materials, you need a certain amount of spill to cause serious effects; otherwise the consequences will be mostly local. Even major accidents still have only relatively local effects (see how even Chernobyl and Fukushima have mostly affected the surrounding areas, and had reduced impact further away). With a self-replicating biological agent, even a very small spill can have serious consequences. No nuclear accident can even theoretically kill us all. A biological accident can.
In conclusion, from all points of view the biological risk is much higher than nuclear. We're looking at a lot of potential sources of spill, difficult or impossible to track, supervised by people of varying qualifications, with varying (but on average not great) safety procedures, and with a chance to cause hugely destructive consequences. I'd say the GP's conclusion shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
The cool thing about an intangible is, you don't need to produce anything to have it.
Only if you mean "produce" in the most narrow sense possible, like "produce some material object with the purpose of commercialization". But getting the intangible initially often requires you to create material objects, with the purpose of experimentation, prototyping, measurements, etc. See how the theoretical physicists that produce "intangible" theories require products costing billions (for example, the LHC) as an initial condition that allows them to actually come up and "have" the intangible result. And getting the intangible the first time usually requires a lot of work and expenses. The argument that copying it afterward is easy and doesn't remove it from the "possession" of the author is a poor rationalization, used by freeloaders to present themselves as somehow fighting for freedom.
It's important to understand that "ownership" means different things for tangible and intangible objects. For tangible objects, like a house, "ownership" means control of the physical object. For intangible objects, "ownership" means control of the distribution. When you steal somebody's wallet, you infringe on his ownership rights, because you take away his control of the physical object. When you copy somebody's song, you also infringe on his ownership rights, because you take away his control of the distribution of the (non-physical) object. Your argument is faulty because it attempts to extend the first meaning to the second case, where it doesn't apply.
You can argue that in some cases the owners of the intangible are too aggresive in protecting their property, and attempt to break the rules or at least bend them in their favor (for example, through DVD region coding, expanding copyright until the heat death of the universe, ignoring or trying to reverse fair use, and so on). I agree, and those abuses need to be stopped. However, that doesn't make piracy right. If your local icecream store decided to sell icecream for 1000 bucks a scoop, you wouldn't be justified in breaking into the store and stealing the icecream, because the store owner is abusive.
The problem is that the government had no business getting into the marriage business in the first place.
I'd argue the opposite is true. The problem is the fact that churches could perform religious ceremonies that gave legal rights to the participants (things like inheritance, property and a whole passel of other things). This also allowed churches to deny those rights to people they disagreed with (be they gay, of the wrong religion or because they fidgeted during the sermon). The correct solution is to enforce the separation: let no religious ceremony influence or change somebody's legal rights. Don't legally acknowledge any purely religious baptism, marriage, separation or anything else. If somebody desires, they can have both a state marriage and any number of religious ceremonies, but the only one that legally counts should be the state one. That change would rid us of a LOT of headaches. (BTW. IANAL, but I think marriage law belongs somewhere under the general area of contract law.)
Only if national policy resigns to it. Once the US is willing, it can override the "global competition" herpderp.
Well, that's exactly my point. The national policy doesn't just "resign to it", it pushes in this direction. The "US" that's willing is actually a comparatively small group; what I believe is a greater group is suspicious of educated people, and lots of politicians pander to them, by cuts to the education budget, by painting educated people as not "real Americans" and so on.
I don't know how flexible (if at all) the parameters are for your very own "chip" sized satellite but wouldn't it be possible to make it survive re-entry?
There's my chance to beat the world record for longest drop of an egg without breaking!
If your own citizens are inept, uneducated and incapable of doing the work required, companies have to fill the skilled positions somehow
Then you train said people to correct for such deficiencies - should they really exist.
This won't happen because correcting those deficiencies isn't in the interest of the establishment. An uneducated voter is easily swayed with bad arguments and silly wedge issues, and can be led to repeatedly vote against his own interest. That's why education is consistently attacked by the right-wing sound machine, and educated people are consistently presented as "elitists", "out of touch", and somehow not "true Americans". And it works. For a terrible demonstration, see how the Republican contenders had to affirm their disbelief in evolution at one of the first debates. For another, think about the way Romney and Huntsman were attacked for speaking more than one language (Chinese for Huntsman, French for Romney). That's why the situation won't be corrected anytime soon.
Another result of the vilification of education is the loss of quality teaching. While most politicians express very vocally their support and concern for education, in reality quality education becomes more and more difficult to access. The salaries in teaching are already rather low (a quick check on Payscale.com shows K12 teacher median salaries to be under 45k, comparing unfavorably for example with a journeyman electrician's median income), and there is a nation-wide effort to reduce them even more (see how many of the cuts envisioned by the Republican candidates come from the Education budget). The social respect for teachers is also really low (compared to other countries). As a result, good performers don't go into lower education (maybe excepting a few really dedicated people who sacrifice their lifetime earnings for the responsibility of teaching, or the ones that manage to get a position at a high tier university).
Invoking the words global, competition and skilled are just code words for expressing contempt towards US citizens.
Not really - global competition is a reality. American companies need skilled employees, but can't get them in the USA because of the above. The establishment helps companies (via mechanisms like elimination of trade barriers) access skilled employees outside the country, where they won't vote in the US elections.
Life is defined as something that feeds and reproduces.
Meh, not so simple. I won't even talk about things like mules, or other infertile animals; but are for example erythrocytes (red blood cells) alive? They feed, but don't reproduce, you know; how about viruses? They do reproduce, but surely don't feed. Or prions? They also reproduce, but don't even carry nucleic acids. What about Sydney Fox's protobionts? They both (kind of) reproduce and (kind of) feed, but can form spontaneously from inorganic matter.
Bribes within Kenya is a concern. But the Somali border is even more worrying
True. Moreover, brazen attacks by Somali bandits in Kenya are scaring away the tourist trade, which makes a sizable dent in the country's finances. Tourism had already been hit by the violence after the 2008 elections, but recent events, like the kidnappings of foreign tourists in Lamu, have made it even worse. It's really a pity because Kenya is a beautiful country(*) , and it has followed a fairly responsible path of conservation and sustainable use of their natural resources (especially compared to other African countries).
(*) Seriously, if you're planning a vacation, consider an African safari. It's a very special experience. Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa are good places, and the price isn't as exorbitant as you'd expect.
It no longer matters who you vote for, they are all owned.
I wouldn't go quite that far. While I agree they're all owned, they're owned in different ways, and (at this moment) I'm much more scared by the ones owning the Republicans. Metaphorically, voting Democrat now would be shooting yourself in the foot, but voting Republican would be shooting yourself in the head.
I spent a portion of my life in Michigan, where tax incentives were all over the place, trying to keep GM, Ford, Chrysler in the towns they were in, but even after all the tax breaks and assistance the companies still moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Japan, etc. Now almost everyone is moving manufacturing to Thailand, China or Vietnam - with reform efforts in Burma expect investment (read: moving manufacturing and research there as well.)
Of course this happens, and I don't know why anybody is surprised. Even with taxes at 0, the companies in the US would still need to pay the workers' wages, and comply with various environmental and work safety laws. All the kowtowing to corporations states and municipalities do is just pathetic and sad - states and municipalities don't use any stick and just don't have enough carrot, since even with no taxes at all, the balance sheet is still very much in favor of corporations moving their production elsewhere. That's a direct result of unfettered globalization, and that's why I think politicians peddling economic revival via tax cuts are mostly liars, and people buying into this concept are mostly idiots.
The taxes aren't and haven't been the problem (and neither are environmental regulations, no matter what the Wall Street Journal whines about). The problem is rather the fact that corporations are allowed to game the system. They use the freedom of trade to create jobs where wages and regulations are low, and to sell the merchandise where the money (still) is. The money corporations get isn't invested it back nor used to pay wages in the rich countries, where it comes from; instead corporations pay a pittance to the workers, some good bribes to a few select politicians, to make sure the status quo is maintained, and the rest is profit.
IMHO, the government should take a much harder look at outsourcing; a corporation that has outsourced its factories should be forced by law to respect the USA environmental and labor standards for any product it wants to sell back into the USA. This would go some way towards making production in the USA a more interesting alternative, and it would also help the workers everywhere. Unfortunately the government doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to even look askance at corporations
1. But $100 violin, then claim it's a fake 2. Buy $5 violin, smash it up, send photo to PayPal 3. Profit!
Pfft, 95 bucks profit. That's chicken feed. Here's a better business plan
1. Buy $5 violin. Smash it up 2. Exhibit the debris at an art gallery, under a fancy name like "Postmodern deconstruction 7" 3. Buy drinks to an art critic until he writes an article about "the latest development in modern art" and quotes you as a founder of the new movement 4. Sell the debris for one million bucks
Yes, I just visited the local modern art museum, why do you ask?
That would mean that the area is officially recognized as part of Moldova, and it would be up to the authorities in Moldova to put a stop to it.
The options of the Moldovan leadership are limited, because of Russian interference (as it is so often in this general area). It's not a case of Transnistria deserving official autonomy as much as a case of Russia imposing their will by military force and running roughshod over the rights of other countries, and over their own legal commitments. Transnistria is only recognized as a state by a few other fly-by-night former Soviet teritorries, such as Abkhazia, but Russia has opened a consulate there, and is strongly supporting the hardcore former communists. As part of this support, Russian troops have launched artillery attacks on Moldovan forces, killing over a hundred people (see here. At this moment, units of the 14th Russian army are still illegally stationed in Transnistria and ensuring the maintenance of the status quo, despite a number of promises by the Russian leadership that they'll resolve the issue.
You need to have your brain coexist with the new one for some amount of time so your consciousness transfers to the new one seamlessly
How exactly does consciousness "transfer"? There is no physical process that does that. If you could somehow obtain two identical copies of the brain, down to quantum level, you could perhaps keep adjusting the state of the copy to match the state of the original, but it's still a copy, and as soon as you stop adjusting the mental processes in the two will start diverging immediately (at various speeds, depending on the situation - differences in the environment could cause immediate divergence, but even if you kept the enviromnments identical, basic quantum effects will still ensure the states of the two brains won't remain the same).
I philosophically agree with people that define a copy/replacement process as suicide; the replacement, even if identical to begin with is still a different person from me. So, no "upload to the machine", nor "Star Trek teleportation" for me. That doesn't mean there isn't a way to migrate to hardware, Kurzweill style, just that the process shouldn't be "snapshot and copy".
I think the migration process should be via gradual extension, starting with grafts: develop small processing modules that can interface directly with the brain, and implant them into the body. I'd expect the initial stuff to be simple, maybe small enhancers for people with different nerve diseases. Later some more complex stuff, for example a device for advanced arithmetic, or a big knowledge database. When the graft recipient sees a complicated numerical calculation, or wants to know what the Latin word was for "soup", he shouldn't require any effort to compute the result, or search for the translation; he should just "know" the answer, just as if he recalled something he knew - while in reality the work was handled by the addon. As technology advances, I'd expect extra memory grafts, giving everybody total recall, followed by "intelligence" processing modules. The brain will gradually adapt and start using the extra resources, and some of the thinking and storage tasks will be done in silicon. As the capacity and capability of the machine parts increases, the percentage of the work handled by the biological components becomes smaller and smaller, until finally it becomes negligible compared to the total processing taking place. At this moment the biological brain can be discarded, and conscience has completely migrated to the machine seamlessly, with no discontinuity - without "suicide".
But if a car is affordable, there will be many buyers, thus driving up the demand for parts, thus an increase in stealing
Well, first, if a car is affordable, the parts themselves must be relatively cheap. Second, if a car sells a lot, all garages and auto parts stores will stock the parts, so there shouldn't be a lot of demand for back-alley market parts, unless the thieves sell them really cheap, making the theft less profitable. I'd expect thieves to target less popular cars; there is probably some kind of curve, tracing profit vs. popularity, and I'd expect it to peak somewhere in the middle, where the car isn't popular enough for parts to be widely available but neither is it scarce enough that you'll find no customers for your stolen parts
If phantom menace was re-created in 3D (and if they did a good job of it)
It is, they showed the trailer. Sometime next year, I forget the date. I think it's much too late for doing a good job (they should have tried that when making the film in the first place) but, if the 3D part is handled with the same subtlety as the rest of the movie, I'd expect Jar Jar's ears to fly out of the screen and threaten to slap the viewers...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I wouldn't trust the ratings so much; I've seen so much dreck rated four and five stars on Amazon, I don't even bother looking at the aggregate rating anymore. Reading the reviews is helpful though - skip all the "this is the best evar!!!" filler, and you often find thoughtful posts that help you separate the grain from the chaff.
Just as an aside - I agree that Karel Capek was a serious writer, but he's not a serious writer - I've seldom laughed the way I did at parts of War with the Newts and The Absolute at Large
Oh, yes. My post was not clear (sorry), and Count Fenring is absolutely right. When Capek does funny he does it very well indeed. (and when will Slashdot support Unicode properly? We're in 2012, folks, it's not rocket surgery anymore!)
He only published a few books, but "Bridge of Birds" (and its follow ups) is a wonderful mixture of Chinese folklore, Indiana Jones, and Sherlock Holmes
I have to second that. I can't understad how as good a writer as Hughart can be so little known. Go get "Bridge of Birds". Then, if you liked it (and I believe there's a good chance you will) get "Eight Skilled Gentlemen" and "Story of the Stone". They're very, very good - especially the first.
Starting chronologically, have you had a chance to read the real classics? Wells, maybe Verne? They're really good, especially Wells. While I see Verne as more of a scientific plodder (in the sense that his future technology is often just an extension of the things that already existed at the time), Wells was a real visionary. I've always been amazed at the way Wells blazed so many trails later travelled by so many writers - time travel, invisibility, unfriendly aliens and interplanetar war, animal "uplift", and many others.
Since you asked for the obscure, how about Karel ÄOEapek (the guy that coined the word "robot")? Read "The Absolute at Large", "War with the Newts" or "Krakatit". Understand though that this guy, like Wells, was a serious writer, whose purpose wasn't so much to develop science fiction ideas - he was using SF as a tool to talk about societal and individual issues. In the same time frame, have you had a chance to read Mihail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita"? It's a wonderful fantasy, describing the Devil's visit to Soviet Moskow. Very very nice
Moving to the fifties and sixties, I've always been partial to Fredric Brown - an anthology of his short stories was published a couple of years ago. Highly recommended! Theodore Sturgeon is another of the great classic authors - and a few volumes of his short stories were also published relatively recently.
Around the same time frame, I liked some of the British "cosy catastrophes", especially John Wyndham: try "The Kraken Wakes", or "Day of the Triffids".
For more modern writers, Stanislaw Lem's "Cyberiad" is very, very funny. If you get a chance, give it a try. Also, take a look at Tim Powers! If you haven't already, get "The Anubis Gates"; it's a wonderful book - I always loved the architecture of the plot, the way he throws so many strings in the air and finishes by tying them all in nicely ordered knots at the end. Then if you liked it, get "Declare".
the Bussard collectors at the front of all warp drives are designed to scoop up interstellar particles and radiation for fuel replenishment.
Won't work though: a Bussard ramjet uses magnetic fields to collect the interstellar gas (mostly hydrogen ions). A magnetic field may stop charged particles, but won't do anything for the gamma rays.
If you mean windows starter edition you can run as many programs at once as you want. check your facts before posting.
I did:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/04/21/1356245/windows-7-starter-edition-3-apps-only
No, you didn't. You're just spreading FUD. See here.
WTF does that last sentence even mean?
It's just the editors being up to their usual standards of quality. The elevator cable doesn't end at the geostationary station (at 36000 km); it continues beyond it for another 60000 km, and terminates in a counterweight. This counterweight is supposed to be positioned 96 THOUSAND kilometers from the surface, hence the mention of the quarter of the distance to the moon.
There have been some schools of thought that the ages of death for most of those pre-Noah days were actual mistranslations of MONTHS
Noah=950 months=79 years
Adam=930=77
Seth=912=76
Enosh=905=75
And Seth had Enosh when he was 105 months (or 8 years and 9 months) old, but Enosh was even more virile, and begat Methuselah at the ripe age of 65 months (that is, five years and a half). Truly those were days of great wonders!
could you use a UV flashlight to walk around in what appears to be almost complete darkness but you see just fine with the UV flashlight? I suppose that would be cool, not sure how useful that would be but interesting anyway.
It's obvious: he can now become a ninja.
Those millennia old tribal conflicts are rather recent, and spurred on by western companies delivering weapons to local warlords in exchange for free extraction of resources.
I don't know what to make of this statement. It's a very stretched interpretation of history. I'd say it's stretched so far it's very close to pure unadulterated lying. The history of the African continent suffers of a scarcity of written material, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the information we have completely contradicts your assertion. Africa (as a whole) wasn't ever a loving peaceful society, before or after the arrival of the "evil western companies", as you imply. It always had its share of wars, military conquests, bloody battles and so on, just like all other continents. Look at North African history, which is better documented, due to the formation there of large statal structures, and to its closeness to Europe: you'll see the huge wars Egypt was involved in millenia ago, complete with genocides and other fun events. You'll see the often bloody fights between Islamic groups, and the military Islamic conquest of North Africa - all before the 15th century, when Europeans started seriously entering Africa. The things we know about Sub-Saharan Africa indicate the same pattern (keeping in mind that fewer really large statal formations existed there). Look at the Mali Empire and its military expansion during the 13th and 14th centuries (which expansion included razing of cities and enslaving of conquered peoples - see Ibn Battuta's description of his return from the Mali Empire on a caravan that transported 600 female slaves to be sold in Morocco).
Further south, look at the Kingdom of Kongo, who was founded via the military conquest of the kingdom of Mwene Kabunga. The Kingdom of Kongo used his expansion wars to obtain slaves; slavery was well established in Kongo, and later, when the Portuguese arrived, slaves became one of the kingdom's exports. Even further south, we have the lesser Kingdom of Mutapa, also born of conquest, who warred against the neighboring Butwa empire. This pattern exists in pre-colonial Africa almost everywhere you look. Kingdoms or empires are formed and destroyed through military conquest, dinasties rise and fall, sometimes entire tribes or peoples are destroyed or displaced.
Surely, the "evil western companies" made full use of the "divide and conquer" approach, used the internal dissensions of Africa to their advantage and sometimes caused them. There is no doubt about that. However, saying the conflicts are recent and implying they didn't exist before the arrival of the companies takes you beyond the simple political correctness frontier and drops you straight into the bullshit area.
In a case like that the "deleted" flag still means the data mustn't be accessible from the outside anymore. That is, unless your developers belong behind a McDonald's counter in the first place.
Or, unless the company is hit with a subpoena that forces it to give up your data. Or, unless it is bought by another company that wants to monetize the purchase. Or, unless it decides to unilaterally change the privacy policy, and you have a week to opt out, but oh, don't you check daily for policy changes for this company you haven't used for years now? Then it's your fault if all your "deleted" data suddenly surfaces!
sooner or later some scientist is going to kill most the planet by a malicious release or careless negligence, it is not "if" but "when".
Do you have any support for your assertion, other than Luddite paranoia?
Well, I think his assertion can be reasonably argued for, and the arguments should be looked at before dismissing the whole thing as Luddite paranoia. Let's compare the nuclear industry and the biological technologies currently being developed - I'll even ignore the intentional release of biological agents, and just consider the risk of accidents.
The first factor is the number of potential accident sites. Look at the difference in accessibility: nuclear technology requires expensive materials, and highly specialized tools and equipment. That makes nuclear development very controllable, and difficult to hide. In comparison, the tools and technologies required for creating new virus and bacteria strains are very cheap and growing even cheaper - see for example how the cost of DNA sequencing has gone down over the last few years. Moreover, most of the equipment necessary for biology manipulation is easily obtained with a trip to the local mall. It's a reasonable conclusion that more and more people will use those technologies, for research, development, or even hobbies, so there'll be many more potential sites for biological accidents
The second factor is the risk of an accident for a site. Nuclear industry is very safety conscious: very smart people have worked hard to create safe designs, lots of money has been spent in building the necessary infrastructure, and there are only a few hundreds of nuclear reactors in the whole world. Despite all that, accidents still happen. While some of the people working on biological development will be safety conscious AND will be able to afford the safety infrastructure necessary, many of them won't (if you spent a few thousand bucks for a biological reactor and a couple of thermometers, you probably can't afford another hundred thousand or so to build a negative sterile pressure room with proper sealing). In conclusion, the chances of an accident happening at a biological site can be considered much higher on average.
The third factor to consider is the potential impact of an accident: with radioactive materials, you need a certain amount of spill to cause serious effects; otherwise the consequences will be mostly local. Even major accidents still have only relatively local effects (see how even Chernobyl and Fukushima have mostly affected the surrounding areas, and had reduced impact further away). With a self-replicating biological agent, even a very small spill can have serious consequences. No nuclear accident can even theoretically kill us all. A biological accident can.
In conclusion, from all points of view the biological risk is much higher than nuclear. We're looking at a lot of potential sources of spill, difficult or impossible to track, supervised by people of varying qualifications, with varying (but on average not great) safety procedures, and with a chance to cause hugely destructive consequences. I'd say the GP's conclusion shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
The cool thing about an intangible is, you don't need to produce anything to have it.
Only if you mean "produce" in the most narrow sense possible, like "produce some material object with the purpose of commercialization". But getting the intangible initially often requires you to create material objects, with the purpose of experimentation, prototyping, measurements, etc. See how the theoretical physicists that produce "intangible" theories require products costing billions (for example, the LHC) as an initial condition that allows them to actually come up and "have" the intangible result. And getting the intangible the first time usually requires a lot of work and expenses. The argument that copying it afterward is easy and doesn't remove it from the "possession" of the author is a poor rationalization, used by freeloaders to present themselves as somehow fighting for freedom.
It's important to understand that "ownership" means different things for tangible and intangible objects. For tangible objects, like a house, "ownership" means control of the physical object. For intangible objects, "ownership" means control of the distribution. When you steal somebody's wallet, you infringe on his ownership rights, because you take away his control of the physical object. When you copy somebody's song, you also infringe on his ownership rights, because you take away his control of the distribution of the (non-physical) object. Your argument is faulty because it attempts to extend the first meaning to the second case, where it doesn't apply.
You can argue that in some cases the owners of the intangible are too aggresive in protecting their property, and attempt to break the rules or at least bend them in their favor (for example, through DVD region coding, expanding copyright until the heat death of the universe, ignoring or trying to reverse fair use, and so on). I agree, and those abuses need to be stopped. However, that doesn't make piracy right. If your local icecream store decided to sell icecream for 1000 bucks a scoop, you wouldn't be justified in breaking into the store and stealing the icecream, because the store owner is abusive.
The problem is that the government had no business getting into the marriage business in the first place.
I'd argue the opposite is true. The problem is the fact that churches could perform religious ceremonies that gave legal rights to the participants (things like inheritance, property and a whole passel of other things). This also allowed churches to deny those rights to people they disagreed with (be they gay, of the wrong religion or because they fidgeted during the sermon). The correct solution is to enforce the separation: let no religious ceremony influence or change somebody's legal rights. Don't legally acknowledge any purely religious baptism, marriage, separation or anything else. If somebody desires, they can have both a state marriage and any number of religious ceremonies, but the only one that legally counts should be the state one. That change would rid us of a LOT of headaches. (BTW. IANAL, but I think marriage law belongs somewhere under the general area of contract law.)
Only if national policy resigns to it. Once the US is willing, it can override the "global competition" herpderp.
Well, that's exactly my point. The national policy doesn't just "resign to it", it pushes in this direction. The "US" that's willing is actually a comparatively small group; what I believe is a greater group is suspicious of educated people, and lots of politicians pander to them, by cuts to the education budget, by painting educated people as not "real Americans" and so on.
I don't know how flexible (if at all) the parameters are for your very own "chip" sized satellite but wouldn't it be possible to make it survive re-entry?
There's my chance to beat the world record for longest drop of an egg without breaking!
If your own citizens are inept, uneducated and incapable of doing the work required, companies have to fill the skilled positions somehow
Then you train said people to correct for such deficiencies - should they really exist.
This won't happen because correcting those deficiencies isn't in the interest of the establishment. An uneducated voter is easily swayed with bad arguments and silly wedge issues, and can be led to repeatedly vote against his own interest. That's why education is consistently attacked by the right-wing sound machine, and educated people are consistently presented as "elitists", "out of touch", and somehow not "true Americans". And it works. For a terrible demonstration, see how the Republican contenders had to affirm their disbelief in evolution at one of the first debates. For another, think about the way Romney and Huntsman were attacked for speaking more than one language (Chinese for Huntsman, French for Romney). That's why the situation won't be corrected anytime soon.
Another result of the vilification of education is the loss of quality teaching. While most politicians express very vocally their support and concern for education, in reality quality education becomes more and more difficult to access. The salaries in teaching are already rather low (a quick check on Payscale.com shows K12 teacher median salaries to be under 45k, comparing unfavorably for example with a journeyman electrician's median income), and there is a nation-wide effort to reduce them even more (see how many of the cuts envisioned by the Republican candidates come from the Education budget). The social respect for teachers is also really low (compared to other countries). As a result, good performers don't go into lower education (maybe excepting a few really dedicated people who sacrifice their lifetime earnings for the responsibility of teaching, or the ones that manage to get a position at a high tier university).
Invoking the words global, competition and skilled are just code words for expressing contempt towards US citizens.
Not really - global competition is a reality. American companies need skilled employees, but can't get them in the USA because of the above. The establishment helps companies (via mechanisms like elimination of trade barriers) access skilled employees outside the country, where they won't vote in the US elections.
Life is defined as something that feeds and reproduces.
Meh, not so simple. I won't even talk about things like mules, or other infertile animals; but are for example erythrocytes (red blood cells) alive? They feed, but don't reproduce, you know; how about viruses? They do reproduce, but surely don't feed. Or prions? They also reproduce, but don't even carry nucleic acids. What about Sydney Fox's protobionts? They both (kind of) reproduce and (kind of) feed, but can form spontaneously from inorganic matter.
Bribes within Kenya is a concern. But the Somali border is even more worrying
True. Moreover, brazen attacks by Somali bandits in Kenya are scaring away the tourist trade, which makes a sizable dent in the country's finances. Tourism had already been hit by the violence after the 2008 elections, but recent events, like the kidnappings of foreign tourists in Lamu, have made it even worse. It's really a pity because Kenya is a beautiful country(*) , and it has followed a fairly responsible path of conservation and sustainable use of their natural resources (especially compared to other African countries).
(*) Seriously, if you're planning a vacation, consider an African safari. It's a very special experience. Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa are good places, and the price isn't as exorbitant as you'd expect.
It no longer matters who you vote for, they are all owned.
I wouldn't go quite that far. While I agree they're all owned, they're owned in different ways, and (at this moment) I'm much more scared by the ones owning the Republicans. Metaphorically, voting Democrat now would be shooting yourself in the foot, but voting Republican would be shooting yourself in the head.
I spent a portion of my life in Michigan, where tax incentives were all over the place, trying to keep GM, Ford, Chrysler in the towns they were in, but even after all the tax breaks and assistance the companies still moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Japan, etc. Now almost everyone is moving manufacturing to Thailand, China or Vietnam - with reform efforts in Burma expect investment (read: moving manufacturing and research there as well.)
Of course this happens, and I don't know why anybody is surprised. Even with taxes at 0, the companies in the US would still need to pay the workers' wages, and comply with various environmental and work safety laws. All the kowtowing to corporations states and municipalities do is just pathetic and sad - states and municipalities don't use any stick and just don't have enough carrot, since even with no taxes at all, the balance sheet is still very much in favor of corporations moving their production elsewhere. That's a direct result of unfettered globalization, and that's why I think politicians peddling economic revival via tax cuts are mostly liars, and people buying into this concept are mostly idiots.
The taxes aren't and haven't been the problem (and neither are environmental regulations, no matter what the Wall Street Journal whines about). The problem is rather the fact that corporations are allowed to game the system. They use the freedom of trade to create jobs where wages and regulations are low, and to sell the merchandise where the money (still) is. The money corporations get isn't invested it back nor used to pay wages in the rich countries, where it comes from; instead corporations pay a pittance to the workers, some good bribes to a few select politicians, to make sure the status quo is maintained, and the rest is profit.
IMHO, the government should take a much harder look at outsourcing; a corporation that has outsourced its factories should be forced by law to respect the USA environmental and labor standards for any product it wants to sell back into the USA. This would go some way towards making production in the USA a more interesting alternative, and it would also help the workers everywhere. Unfortunately the government doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to even look askance at corporations
1. But $100 violin, then claim it's a fake
2. Buy $5 violin, smash it up, send photo to PayPal
3. Profit!
Pfft, 95 bucks profit. That's chicken feed. Here's a better business plan
1. Buy $5 violin. Smash it up
2. Exhibit the debris at an art gallery, under a fancy name like "Postmodern deconstruction 7"
3. Buy drinks to an art critic until he writes an article about "the latest development in modern art" and quotes you as a founder of the new movement
4. Sell the debris for one million bucks
Yes, I just visited the local modern art museum, why do you ask?
That would mean that the area is officially recognized as part of Moldova, and it would be up to the authorities in Moldova to put a stop to it.
The options of the Moldovan leadership are limited, because of Russian interference (as it is so often in this general area). It's not a case of Transnistria deserving official autonomy as much as a case of Russia imposing their will by military force and running roughshod over the rights of other countries, and over their own legal commitments. Transnistria is only recognized as a state by a few other fly-by-night former Soviet teritorries, such as Abkhazia, but Russia has opened a consulate there, and is strongly supporting the hardcore former communists. As part of this support, Russian troops have launched artillery attacks on Moldovan forces, killing over a hundred people (see here. At this moment, units of the 14th Russian army are still illegally stationed in Transnistria and ensuring the maintenance of the status quo, despite a number of promises by the Russian leadership that they'll resolve the issue.
You need to have your brain coexist with the new one for some amount of time so your consciousness transfers to the new one seamlessly
How exactly does consciousness "transfer"? There is no physical process that does that. If you could somehow obtain two identical copies of the brain, down to quantum level, you could perhaps keep adjusting the state of the copy to match the state of the original, but it's still a copy, and as soon as you stop adjusting the mental processes in the two will start diverging immediately (at various speeds, depending on the situation - differences in the environment could cause immediate divergence, but even if you kept the enviromnments identical, basic quantum effects will still ensure the states of the two brains won't remain the same).
I philosophically agree with people that define a copy/replacement process as suicide; the replacement, even if identical to begin with is still a different person from me. So, no "upload to the machine", nor "Star Trek teleportation" for me. That doesn't mean there isn't a way to migrate to hardware, Kurzweill style, just that the process shouldn't be "snapshot and copy".
I think the migration process should be via gradual extension, starting with grafts: develop small processing modules that can interface directly with the brain, and implant them into the body. I'd expect the initial stuff to be simple, maybe small enhancers for people with different nerve diseases. Later some more complex stuff, for example a device for advanced arithmetic, or a big knowledge database. When the graft recipient sees a complicated numerical calculation, or wants to know what the Latin word was for "soup", he shouldn't require any effort to compute the result, or search for the translation; he should just "know" the answer, just as if he recalled something he knew - while in reality the work was handled by the addon. As technology advances, I'd expect extra memory grafts, giving everybody total recall, followed by "intelligence" processing modules. The brain will gradually adapt and start using the extra resources, and some of the thinking and storage tasks will be done in silicon. As the capacity and capability of the machine parts increases, the percentage of the work handled by the biological components becomes smaller and smaller, until finally it becomes negligible compared to the total processing taking place. At this moment the biological brain can be discarded, and conscience has completely migrated to the machine seamlessly, with no discontinuity - without "suicide".
But if a car is affordable, there will be many buyers, thus driving up the demand for parts, thus an increase in stealing
Well, first, if a car is affordable, the parts themselves must be relatively cheap. Second, if a car sells a lot, all garages and auto parts stores will stock the parts, so there shouldn't be a lot of demand for back-alley market parts, unless the thieves sell them really cheap, making the theft less profitable. I'd expect thieves to target less popular cars; there is probably some kind of curve, tracing profit vs. popularity, and I'd expect it to peak somewhere in the middle, where the car isn't popular enough for parts to be widely available but neither is it scarce enough that you'll find no customers for your stolen parts
If phantom menace was re-created in 3D (and if they did a good job of it)
It is, they showed the trailer. Sometime next year, I forget the date. I think it's much too late for doing a good job (they should have tried that when making the film in the first place) but, if the 3D part is handled with the same subtlety as the rest of the movie, I'd expect Jar Jar's ears to fly out of the screen and threaten to slap the viewers...