I seem to recall some of our 'premium' eastern universities were charging insane tuition fees, but nearly guaranteeing a huge leg up on the corporate ladder (and of course the paycheque to go with it). This of course turned everything into a 'Return on Investment', not an education.
There's another major problem with this as well. When a good education is affordable, people with a lot of potential but not much money can use universities to move up the socioeconomic ladder. Education acts as an equalizer, a place where people who haven't had many advantages can still be successful and get ahead in society, and I think that's important in a society where (supposedly) we are supposed to be able to succeed or fail based on merit alone, rather than the size of dad's portfolio, or who our parents know. In short, it makes for a fairer society.
When you start charging people more to go into higher paying fields, what's going to happen? The people who most need a leg up- kids from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder- are less likely to choose those career paths. The kids from rich families are more likely to take those courses. The poor stay poor and the rich get richer. Society as a whole becomes less fair. It's already happening at the Ivy League colleges. These days the overwhelming majority of the kids at the Ivies come from well-off families- maybe not all of them are fabulously rich, but many of them come from the upper ranks of the middle class, and very few of them come from blue collar or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Then many of these kids go off to join Wall Street, or become congressmen and presidents. Basically, the Ivies help the rich get even richer, and the powerful to become even more powerful. They help make society less fair, rather than more fair, to start creating permanent upper and lower classes; they've gone from being part of the solution, to part of the problem. They give opportunity to the people who have already had every opportunity in life.
It's up to you whether you believe that part of the University's mission is to produce a more fair, just society. I happen to believe that should be a university's goal to produce equality of opportunity, but it's a question of your values. A libertarian would argue that, just like individuals, universities should be free to do whatever the hell they want. Fine. I don't agree with that on principle, but I can see how you would justify that argument. However, I think that this situation is not just unfair, it's potentially dangerous. You don't need to look further than the President of the United States to see what happens when you start giving people opportunity based on connections and money, rather than on ability and merit: you get spoiled, rich, idiotic brats running the show. You have the system being run by people who have never had to learn from their failures, pay for their mistakes, or succeed on their own merit. And we're going to be paying for that mistake for years to come.
Correct infrmation does not matter when the boss has an agenda. The CIA gave Bush a report that predicted failure in Iraq and it's consequences.
Exactly. When General Shinseki said that 400,000 troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq, Rumsfeld announced Shinseki's replacement. If a computer had told him the same thing, he probably would have had it melted down and sold for scrap metal. There were intelligence failures that contributed to the disaster in Iraq, but the primary failure was one of leadership. The people in power knew what they wanted, and they ignored any facts or intelligence that said otherwise.
I bet the sheer volume of discovery would actually exceed the romance of humans in space.
When is the last time the manned space actually really made you feel inspired? For me, it was the Hubble repair mission. Which says a lot: the last time NASA's manned program made me feel excited was when people were repairing a robot.
And the fact that we're discussing the Mars rovers instead of astronauts says volumes. The only time the manned program generates any press these days is when a shuttle blows up, the space station malfunctions, the shuttle gets delayed, or hit with foam yet again. The manned program spends tens of billions just treading water and malfunctioning, while for a fraction of that the unmanned program is doing science, and pushing out into the unknown. We're seeing the future: the explorers of the next century are going to look like remote controlled refugees from Radio Shack, not like Captain Kirk.
Instead, perhaps we would be better focussing on how nations cannot protect themselves without an organization like this.
Sometimes, the ends justify the means, and the means ain't too pretty. But the thing is, most of these abuses are just that- they're abuses, not places where tough choices had to be made to save lives. For instance, in the 1960s, Johnson was convinced that the Communists were behind all the protests, so the CIA had agents grow long hair and learn to talk like hippies so they could infiltrate leftist groups, where they collected hundreds of thousands of names and created dossiers on thousands of people. And they found that among the foreign supporters who contributed money to these groups were John Lennon. Lennon, hm? Sounds a lot like "Lenin".
Coincidence? They were spying on reporters, testing LSD on citizens, and to put things in context, there were some doors at a little place called the Watergate that the Nixon administration wanted opened, and that's why the CIA was asked about a lockpicker.
The lesson I take from this isn't that dangerous times require drastic measures. It's that breaking the law didn't really produce much in the way of good intelligence, didn't uncover many Commie plots, and didn't save many lies. And likewise, I think that 30 years from now, we'll look back at the secret prisons, Guantanamo Bay, domestic wiretapping, and uses of torture, and find that it did damned little to make the United States safer, and if anything, made us less safe because it convinced more people that America really is an Evil Empire which has to be fought.
Personally, I hope that the new edition won't add anything to settle the argument... that would be a tragedy on the order of having Greedo fire first. At the end of the Director's Cut, we're left with hints that Deckard could be a replicant- that line where Rachel asks him if he's ever taken the test, the unicorn dream... but we don't know for sure. And I like that ambiguity, because it forces you to ask: well, what does it really matter if he is, or if he isn't? He has emotions, fears, dreams, memories; those exist whether or not the Tyrrell corporation manufactured him. Even if his memories are manufactured, they feel real and therefore define who he is. The only major difference is that he won't have long to live if he's a replicant, but again the movie asks, what's the difference? We all die, and we never know when it will come.
If Ridley Scott does alter that, I think we're going to hear a lot of cries to the effect of "you ruined my childhood memories!" or rather, the memories of my angst-filled adolescence when late at night, watching TV alone in the dark, I stumbled across Blade Runner on TV...
What we're finding is that the planet is pretty much barren. Which means its perfect for us to futz around with.
The thing is, we may not be looking in the right places. Our understanding of what consistitutes a "habitable environment" has changed dramatically in recent years, with the discovery of organisms living in extreme conditions such as geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, or ten thousand feet below the earth's surface. If Martian microbes do exist, they will probably be hiding out deep underground where liquid water is available, but where it will be difficult for us to find them.
Which raises a moral question. Is it right for us to muck around with an inhabited planet, even if it's inhabitants are microbial slime living in the pores in rocks? Basically, should there be something like the Prime Directive even if we're just talking about slime? We're only talking about microbes, but then again they may be our only neighbors for light years in any direction, so do we really want to take the chance of wiping them out? Then again, if there really are microbes living kilometers below Mars' surface, they will probably outlast our species, regardless of what decisions we do or don't make...
Or, God forbid we actually try implementing some reasonable restrictions on handgun ownership in this country. Because, after all, if we did, then we'd turn into a totalitarian dictatorship where violent crime would be even worse, just like what happened Canada.
Damn, with this law in place, how will I get my kicks selling violent video games to minors? You know what someone ought to do is create a video game where you earn points by distributing violent games to minors!
here are asteroids, overpopulation, wars and a number of other things we should keep an eye on along with having a way to survive far away from such things if we intend to survive as a species.
Mars isn't exactly much of a back-up plan. I mean, if we can't hack it on Earth, what are the odds we can survive in a hostile environment like Mars? That's like saying, "oh well, if I can't handle the challenges of community college, I'll go to MIT instead". Even on its worst imaginable day, the Earth is vastly more habitable than Mars or any other place in the solar system. If the Earth got hit by massive overpopulation, global warming, an all-out nuclear exchange, and then a giant asteroid, our species would still have a much better chance surviving here than on Mars, where the temperature, pressure, and gravity are all wrong, and where liquid water is in short supply. If disaster survival is the goal, then Dr. Strangelove's underground bunkers are the answer, not spaceships.
As for overpopulation and war, those problems don't have anything to do with Earth, those have to do with humanity itself. So if humans on Earth can't live sustainably or keep from killing each other off, why is there any reason to think that humans put on Mars would suddenly figure out how to do so?
Lesson: sputtering halfwitted rage is for idiot fanboys. The people who actually make things base their self-esteem on what they accomplish, not on how insanely they hate someone else.
I wonder. Do you really think the movers and shakers of industry are really any more well-balanced and secure than the rest of us? Personally, I doubt it. For one, they have a lot more stress to deal with and blow off. For another, these are extremely driven, focused people. When you're hellbent on becoming the #1 OS in the world, making the #1 MP3 player, or the fact that your company's market value went down a billion dollars in the past 24 hours, well, all those other, minor side issues- like how you treat your fellow human beings- tend to get forgotten. Last, they are in positions of power, surrounded constantly by people who are afraid to call them on their bullshit. So they are free to be arrogant jerks all they want and rarely if ever get called on it. Very few people, I think, manage to resist being surrounded by sycophants and flatterers without coming away with inflated egos and turning into a jerk, or at least, more of a jerk than they otherwise would have been. I suspect that your average CEO deals with money, power, and success no better than your average Hollywood star, which is to say, not all that well.
Sure, here they behaved themselves: they were in public, after all, and knew that people would watch for any hint of animosity. The real question is what happens when these guys are off-camera. Then do we get chair-throwing tirades where they threaten to "F-ing kill" the other guy? To build on the marriage analogy, Steve and Gates may be like a married couple that behave themselves in public and go home and have their vicious, drunken arguments in private. Personally, I think Steve Jobs comes across as an arrogant jerk in public (and I'm speaking as a Mac fanboy who likes what he's done with the company) so I can't imagine that the uncensored, private jobs is any nicer.
In a free market economy, the governments ONLY job is to make sure that competition thrives. They got NO other business in the economy. Their sole and only influence is to make sure that nobody can use undue leverage against competitors and that competitors don't form a cartel to cooperate against competition, customer and supplier.
Oh, bullshit. Look at Iraq. You can go ahead and try to set up a business in Baghdad but you won't get very far, because there's no security, so insurgents, militias, and jihadists can threaten, kidnap, and murder your staff and customers, and blow up your building. Even without those problems, you'd be hard pressed to run a business without reliable access to fresh water and power. And how are you going to distribute goods throughout the city without passable bridges? How will you find managers for your business when many of the educated people have fled to Jordan and Syria? How can you run a business without a reliable court system to settle disputes if one of your contractors doesn't provide goods, or one of your customers doesn't pay?
It takes a hell of lot for a marketplace to function. You need infrastructure, like roads, lights, power, and electricity. You need security: armies to keep out foreign threats, and police and firemen to keep the populace safe. You need courts, to enforce laws and settle disputes so that business can be conducted. You need schools for an educated workforce. Yes, some of this stuff can and perhaps should be be done by private industry, but the idea that if the government stops doing everything, private industry will naturally step in and take up the slack is just a Libertarian fantasy. Yes, when you're standing in line waiting for hours to get someone to look at a stupid piece of paper, it's easy to think that government is a great big bloated, inefficient waste of time, money, and human effort... and undeniably, much of it is. But even a bloated, inefficient government is superior to the virtual absence of government, which is what we have in Iraq. The idea that anarchy+capitalism = Libertarian paradise is appealing, but it's wrong. Anarchy+capitalism = anarchy, because free markets can't function without a government setting up all the infrastructure that those markets require.
Libertarians always whine that they could make things better if only they were given the chance to run the show. Well, they finally got the chance when the Libertarian-influenced Neocons took over the rebuilding of Iraq, and all they've done is show just how vital government really is. There are worthwhile elements to Libertarianism, but it's an unrealistic and unworkable scheme, a failed ideology, just like Communism.
Goonfleet is dedicated to Space Libertarianism and not, in fact, to ruining the game and CCP employees' personal lives.
Space Libertarianism? That seems to imply the existence of Space Libertarians. Personally I find the terrestrial ones annoying enough, but Space Libertarians sound a bit scary. I can practically hear the ominous voice of the movie trailer guy:
"They believed in a free market, unfettered by government regulation, and they came... FROM SPACE!"
I suppose they would look like the creature from Alien, but along with bursting out of people's stomachs, they would not pay their taxes and read a lot of Ayn Rand.
I found a pretty cool Easter egg on Google Earth the other day, while digitally roaming through the Gobi Desert. Fire up Google Earth and click "fly to" and then paste in the coordinates 40.4026777778, 99.7833888889 , which will take you to Inner Mongolia. You can see a couple of Badger bombers, Antonov An-12 transports, a Beriev A-50 AWACS plane, some Mig-19s, a couple of Mig-21 Fishbeds, and a few cool-as-all-hell Mig-29 Flankers. Not that I know that much about Russian-made aircraft, I was simply able to figure out what they were using (what else?) Google. It's a pretty amazing tool, though the Chinese must be pissed that so many of their military establishments can now be checked out by anyone with an internet connection...
Pretty much everybody seems to agree that the current situation with patents has gotten out of hand. But if patents are always such a hindrance to technological development, why did the United States produce so much new technology throughout the 20th century? The light bulb, the telephone, the phonograph, the AC motor, the transistor, helicopter, the PC, new drugs to combat AIDS, DNA amplication by PCR, just to name a few... arguably this is one of the most impressive runs of innovation in human history, and it happened with robust patent law in place.
I'd argue that here the system, while imperfect, was doing more or less what it was supposed to. Inventors knew they could make a buck because their rights would be respected. Venture capitalists were willing to fund inventors because of the same thing. And people like Alexander Graham Bell, Igor Sikorsky, and Nikolai Tesla chose to be inventors here, rather than in their respective home countries, despite our system of patents, and probably in part because of it. There must be any number of countries that don't respect patent law, but I can't think of any that have become centers of technological development and innovation, where inventors flock to them. Maybe the system is broken now, but the answer is to fix it, not to throw it out.
several groups (both religious and secular) will be protesting. come join us!
Are you kidding? This museum is doing us a tremendous favor. If anything, we should send them money.
The intelligent design movement managed to make creationism look vaguely scientific. Its proponents had academic degrees and wrote books; Behe is actually a biochemist. They didn't make patently absurd claims about world being 6000 years old, they didn't use the Bible as a primary source, and they didn't directly refer to God and Jesus in every third sentence. They didn't do science, but they did a decent job of pretending to, and made creationism look almost respectable.
But if you want to see creationism made to look ridiculously unsophisticated and ignorant again, nobody could do a better job than this museum. Apatosaurus living with Adam and Eve? Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark? If you were trying to parody creationism, or create a strawman of all the worst creationist arguments, you couldn't do a better job. And the intelligent design guys- Behe and Dembski- will suddenly find that when they're arguing for creationism, people will be asking them if they believe that Jesus rode a Velociraptor.
So I say, put the Genesis account on display, in all its glory, and let people see it. I think most people will leave thinking exactly what they thought when they came in: evangelicals will leave still knowing that every word in the Bible is true, people looking for a laugh will emerge thinking that while science doesn't have all the answers, it's a lot better than a bunch of ancient myths, and kids- well, I say, let them see dinosaurs and men living alongside each other. Because while adults like to be told what they already know, kids like to ask questions, and I think those dioramas will get them asking a lot of questions.
Almost without fail (I said almost), any game based on a movie, or movie based on a game has been crap.
I propose a national task force to deal with this.
SCENE: Office of a big-shot Hollywood MOVIE PRODUCER. He is sitting back in his big leather chair, smoking a fat cigar, thinking out loud.
MOVIE PRODUCER: Hey, I know what we could do. It'd be a shitty movie but if we do it cheap enough, we'll still make a profit! We could base a movie on 'Daikatana'!
Murmurs of assent come from around the room. But suddenly, the door to the MOVIE PRODUCER's office bursts open. We see a FEDERAL AGENT, dressed in a dark suit and dark glasses, burst in, flanked by two members of an elite team wearing body armor and carrying submachine guns. The MOVIE PRODUCER gets up, backs away. The FEDERAL AGENT walks right up to him, stares him directly in the eye, unblinking. Then punches him in the nuts.
MOVIE PRODUCER: Argh!!! What did you do that for???
The FEDERAL AGENT pulls out a badge and shows it to the MOVIE PRODUCER.
FEDERAL AGENT: Sorry, sir. My name is Agent Rex Hightower, and I'm a member of the FBI's Movie Adaptation Task Force. Any time a member of America's movie industry decides to adapt an old TV sitcom, cartoon, or videogame into a movie, I'm required by federal law to intervene and stop them. The American people finally decided that they had taken enough of your crappy movies and that direct action was required. And that's where we come in.
MOVIE PRODUCER: It'll take more than a tap in the cojones to keep me from making that movie! You don't understand the money involved! That movie will make millions!
FEDERAL AGENT: No sir. You don't understand. We're very serious about what we do. You see, that was just a warning. Next time, the gloves comes off. [quiet for a moment] You don't even want to know about what happened to that poor bastard who was trying to turn 'Mister Ed' into a feature film...
So that's my idea for how things would work. Actually, it probably wouldn't work as a law. But it would be a clever premise for a movie... hm. Have your people call my people.
Personally, I think the bigger mistake was first putting himself in a situation where even the slightest misstep could result in death. He pushed his luck, and his luck ran out. Outside Magazine just loves this kind of death-by-adventure story. There was the one about the kid who went into the backwoods of Alaska to live off the land and starved to death, and there was the one about all the people who died in a storm on Everest (both appeared first in the magazine and were later written up as Into The Wild and Into Thin Air, respectively, both by Jon Krakauer).
But I have a hard time crying too much about those stories where someone takes a lot of risks and then dies. Either you're incompetent and in over your head, in which case you deserve whatever you get. Or, you know the risks but take them anyway, figuring a potentially short, but adventure-filled life is better than a long, boring, risk-averse one, in which case you knew exactly what you were getting into, so you can't complain too much. Still, they do make for great reading.
Until recently, the Smithsonian was headed by Lawrence Small. Small is not a scientist, never has been, and has no scientific background. He was president of Fanny Mae, an organization that itself has a history of distorting the facts to get the answers they like.
By most accounts, and I've talked with curators at the Smithosonian about this, Small was a terrible leader of the organization. He apparently did bring a lot of money into the organization, but you didn't see any evidence of this behind the scenes at the museum. Instead, he had almost $50,000 spent on furniture for his office, $15,000 spent on the doors at his house, spent $160,000 spent on renovating his office at the Smithsonian castle building, and by using his house to host a few Smithsonian functions, was given $1.15 million dollars in housing allowances. All your tax dollars. Not to mention, his total salary for 2007 was supposed to be $915,000- nearly a million dollars, more than the president and vice president combined. Meanwhile, science seems to have taken a back seat at the Smithsonian, and I suspect the scientists threw a party when he finally resigned. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/03/18/AR2007031801369.html
But Small is just one symptom of a much larger problem, which is appointing incompetent hacks to important government positions, and pushing politics over facts. This is what happened at FEMA with Heckuvajob Brownie. This is what happened in Iraq, when the White House sent over people who had the proper Republican Party credentials, but not the credentials to do the job; it's one of the major reasons the occupation there has been such a disaster. The problem has been summed up pretty well by the phrase, "the triumph of the hacks over the wonks". See, the wonks are the policy guys, the analytical guys who can analyze the facts and tell you what you need to do in order to achieve a desired outcome. They are the political equivalent of a computer geek, except they write policy instead of code. The hacks are the political guys, the guys who don't give a shit what the facts are, they are only there to push their party agenda. And this administration has favored the hacks over the wonks, so the result is that facts get shoved aside by politics, whether it's climate change, or the debatable effectiveness of "abstinence-only" education, or the infamous case of General Shinseki getting sacked by Rumsfeld after he said we would need several hundred thousand troops to effectively occupy Iraq.
What exactly would you suggest is a better use of our time and effort then? Wanking around on the golf course? Playing the newest Final Fantasy? Raising some squalling brat who's going to grow up to find a world nowhere near as full of opportunity as the one your grandparents (or even you) had available?
The issue is, you get to decide what's meaningful, important, and what's worth having your money spent on. For you, space travel ranks high. And that's fine, and that's your right to feel that way.
But for other people, maybe there are other things that they feel are more pressing, and a better use of their money- taking care of their family, improving the K-12 educational system, putting the kids through college, nonprofits working to end hunger in Africa, fighting deforestation in the Amazon, ending AIDS, donating to their local church, keeping abortion legal, making abortion illegal, whatever. People find lasting meaning in those things, certainly a hell of a lot more people than find lasting meaning in knowing that we've filled a pressurized cylinder in low earth orbit with people and that it goes around and around the earth endlessly. And maybe you don't agree with them, but that's their right to feel that way, and it's their money, so they get to vote on how the government spends it, or whether it should even go to the government and be spent in the first place. And people may decide that they don't want "lasting meaning", just a bit of fun, and blow it on Final Fantasy, golf, lotto tickets, designer jeans, cocaine and hookers. Again, that's their choice.
And last, this story just drives home a point: the manned program consumes a tremendous amount of money and resources, but when is the last time it created as much lasting meaning, for as many people, as these robots are doing right now? NASA is inspiring us, and inspiring the whole world, by pushing into the void, and making us reimagine what exists, and what is possible. It's looking into the possibility that liquid water, and therefore life, once existed elsewhere in the world. How much more "lasting meaning" can we ask for? But the face of that exploration, at least the one that gets on the cover of the newspaper is now robotic. And the other face of that exploration is -instead of some rugged fighter jock- a pasty geek sitting for hours at a time in front of a monitor trying to drive these machines, hackers trying to debug their code, engineers field-testing a new rover in the desert. Just because there isn't a primate in a pressurized suit doesn't mean it's not human exploration.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, he turned me into a newt.
There's another major problem with this as well. When a good education is affordable, people with a lot of potential but not much money can use universities to move up the socioeconomic ladder. Education acts as an equalizer, a place where people who haven't had many advantages can still be successful and get ahead in society, and I think that's important in a society where (supposedly) we are supposed to be able to succeed or fail based on merit alone, rather than the size of dad's portfolio, or who our parents know. In short, it makes for a fairer society.
When you start charging people more to go into higher paying fields, what's going to happen? The people who most need a leg up- kids from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder- are less likely to choose those career paths. The kids from rich families are more likely to take those courses. The poor stay poor and the rich get richer. Society as a whole becomes less fair. It's already happening at the Ivy League colleges. These days the overwhelming majority of the kids at the Ivies come from well-off families- maybe not all of them are fabulously rich, but many of them come from the upper ranks of the middle class, and very few of them come from blue collar or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Then many of these kids go off to join Wall Street, or become congressmen and presidents. Basically, the Ivies help the rich get even richer, and the powerful to become even more powerful. They help make society less fair, rather than more fair, to start creating permanent upper and lower classes; they've gone from being part of the solution, to part of the problem. They give opportunity to the people who have already had every opportunity in life.
It's up to you whether you believe that part of the University's mission is to produce a more fair, just society. I happen to believe that should be a university's goal to produce equality of opportunity, but it's a question of your values. A libertarian would argue that, just like individuals, universities should be free to do whatever the hell they want. Fine. I don't agree with that on principle, but I can see how you would justify that argument. However, I think that this situation is not just unfair, it's potentially dangerous. You don't need to look further than the President of the United States to see what happens when you start giving people opportunity based on connections and money, rather than on ability and merit: you get spoiled, rich, idiotic brats running the show. You have the system being run by people who have never had to learn from their failures, pay for their mistakes, or succeed on their own merit. And we're going to be paying for that mistake for years to come.
Exactly. When General Shinseki said that 400,000 troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq, Rumsfeld announced Shinseki's replacement. If a computer had told him the same thing, he probably would have had it melted down and sold for scrap metal. There were intelligence failures that contributed to the disaster in Iraq, but the primary failure was one of leadership. The people in power knew what they wanted, and they ignored any facts or intelligence that said otherwise.
When is the last time the manned space actually really made you feel inspired? For me, it was the Hubble repair mission. Which says a lot: the last time NASA's manned program made me feel excited was when people were repairing a robot.
And the fact that we're discussing the Mars rovers instead of astronauts says volumes. The only time the manned program generates any press these days is when a shuttle blows up, the space station malfunctions, the shuttle gets delayed, or hit with foam yet again. The manned program spends tens of billions just treading water and malfunctioning, while for a fraction of that the unmanned program is doing science, and pushing out into the unknown. We're seeing the future: the explorers of the next century are going to look like remote controlled refugees from Radio Shack, not like Captain Kirk.
Sometimes, the ends justify the means, and the means ain't too pretty. But the thing is, most of these abuses are just that- they're abuses, not places where tough choices had to be made to save lives. For instance, in the 1960s, Johnson was convinced that the Communists were behind all the protests, so the CIA had agents grow long hair and learn to talk like hippies so they could infiltrate leftist groups, where they collected hundreds of thousands of names and created dossiers on thousands of people. And they found that among the foreign supporters who contributed money to these groups were John Lennon. Lennon, hm? Sounds a lot like "Lenin". Coincidence? They were spying on reporters, testing LSD on citizens, and to put things in context, there were some doors at a little place called the Watergate that the Nixon administration wanted opened, and that's why the CIA was asked about a lockpicker.
The lesson I take from this isn't that dangerous times require drastic measures. It's that breaking the law didn't really produce much in the way of good intelligence, didn't uncover many Commie plots, and didn't save many lies. And likewise, I think that 30 years from now, we'll look back at the secret prisons, Guantanamo Bay, domestic wiretapping, and uses of torture, and find that it did damned little to make the United States safer, and if anything, made us less safe because it convinced more people that America really is an Evil Empire which has to be fought.
If Ridley Scott does alter that, I think we're going to hear a lot of cries to the effect of "you ruined my childhood memories!" or rather, the memories of my angst-filled adolescence when late at night, watching TV alone in the dark, I stumbled across Blade Runner on TV...
The thing is, we may not be looking in the right places. Our understanding of what consistitutes a "habitable environment" has changed dramatically in recent years, with the discovery of organisms living in extreme conditions such as geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, or ten thousand feet below the earth's surface. If Martian microbes do exist, they will probably be hiding out deep underground where liquid water is available, but where it will be difficult for us to find them.
Which raises a moral question. Is it right for us to muck around with an inhabited planet, even if it's inhabitants are microbial slime living in the pores in rocks? Basically, should there be something like the Prime Directive even if we're just talking about slime? We're only talking about microbes, but then again they may be our only neighbors for light years in any direction, so do we really want to take the chance of wiping them out? Then again, if there really are microbes living kilometers below Mars' surface, they will probably outlast our species, regardless of what decisions we do or don't make...
iD Pony Adventures.
Or, God forbid we actually try implementing some reasonable restrictions on handgun ownership in this country. Because, after all, if we did, then we'd turn into a totalitarian dictatorship where violent crime would be even worse, just like what happened Canada.
Damn, with this law in place, how will I get my kicks selling violent video games to minors? You know what someone ought to do is create a video game where you earn points by distributing violent games to minors!
Mars isn't exactly much of a back-up plan. I mean, if we can't hack it on Earth, what are the odds we can survive in a hostile environment like Mars? That's like saying, "oh well, if I can't handle the challenges of community college, I'll go to MIT instead". Even on its worst imaginable day, the Earth is vastly more habitable than Mars or any other place in the solar system. If the Earth got hit by massive overpopulation, global warming, an all-out nuclear exchange, and then a giant asteroid, our species would still have a much better chance surviving here than on Mars, where the temperature, pressure, and gravity are all wrong, and where liquid water is in short supply. If disaster survival is the goal, then Dr. Strangelove's underground bunkers are the answer, not spaceships.
As for overpopulation and war, those problems don't have anything to do with Earth, those have to do with humanity itself. So if humans on Earth can't live sustainably or keep from killing each other off, why is there any reason to think that humans put on Mars would suddenly figure out how to do so?
I wonder. Do you really think the movers and shakers of industry are really any more well-balanced and secure than the rest of us? Personally, I doubt it. For one, they have a lot more stress to deal with and blow off. For another, these are extremely driven, focused people. When you're hellbent on becoming the #1 OS in the world, making the #1 MP3 player, or the fact that your company's market value went down a billion dollars in the past 24 hours, well, all those other, minor side issues- like how you treat your fellow human beings- tend to get forgotten. Last, they are in positions of power, surrounded constantly by people who are afraid to call them on their bullshit. So they are free to be arrogant jerks all they want and rarely if ever get called on it. Very few people, I think, manage to resist being surrounded by sycophants and flatterers without coming away with inflated egos and turning into a jerk, or at least, more of a jerk than they otherwise would have been. I suspect that your average CEO deals with money, power, and success no better than your average Hollywood star, which is to say, not all that well.
Sure, here they behaved themselves: they were in public, after all, and knew that people would watch for any hint of animosity. The real question is what happens when these guys are off-camera. Then do we get chair-throwing tirades where they threaten to "F-ing kill" the other guy? To build on the marriage analogy, Steve and Gates may be like a married couple that behave themselves in public and go home and have their vicious, drunken arguments in private. Personally, I think Steve Jobs comes across as an arrogant jerk in public (and I'm speaking as a Mac fanboy who likes what he's done with the company) so I can't imagine that the uncensored, private jobs is any nicer.
Oh, bullshit. Look at Iraq. You can go ahead and try to set up a business in Baghdad but you won't get very far, because there's no security, so insurgents, militias, and jihadists can threaten, kidnap, and murder your staff and customers, and blow up your building. Even without those problems, you'd be hard pressed to run a business without reliable access to fresh water and power. And how are you going to distribute goods throughout the city without passable bridges? How will you find managers for your business when many of the educated people have fled to Jordan and Syria? How can you run a business without a reliable court system to settle disputes if one of your contractors doesn't provide goods, or one of your customers doesn't pay?
It takes a hell of lot for a marketplace to function. You need infrastructure, like roads, lights, power, and electricity. You need security: armies to keep out foreign threats, and police and firemen to keep the populace safe. You need courts, to enforce laws and settle disputes so that business can be conducted. You need schools for an educated workforce. Yes, some of this stuff can and perhaps should be be done by private industry, but the idea that if the government stops doing everything, private industry will naturally step in and take up the slack is just a Libertarian fantasy. Yes, when you're standing in line waiting for hours to get someone to look at a stupid piece of paper, it's easy to think that government is a great big bloated, inefficient waste of time, money, and human effort... and undeniably, much of it is. But even a bloated, inefficient government is superior to the virtual absence of government, which is what we have in Iraq. The idea that anarchy+capitalism = Libertarian paradise is appealing, but it's wrong. Anarchy+capitalism = anarchy, because free markets can't function without a government setting up all the infrastructure that those markets require.
Libertarians always whine that they could make things better if only they were given the chance to run the show. Well, they finally got the chance when the Libertarian-influenced Neocons took over the rebuilding of Iraq, and all they've done is show just how vital government really is. There are worthwhile elements to Libertarianism, but it's an unrealistic and unworkable scheme, a failed ideology, just like Communism.
Space Libertarianism? That seems to imply the existence of Space Libertarians. Personally I find the terrestrial ones annoying enough, but Space Libertarians sound a bit scary. I can practically hear the ominous voice of the movie trailer guy:
"They believed in a free market, unfettered by government regulation, and they came... FROM SPACE!"
I suppose they would look like the creature from Alien, but along with bursting out of people's stomachs, they would not pay their taxes and read a lot of Ayn Rand.
I found a pretty cool Easter egg on Google Earth the other day, while digitally roaming through the Gobi Desert. Fire up Google Earth and click "fly to" and then paste in the coordinates 40.4026777778, 99.7833888889 , which will take you to Inner Mongolia. You can see a couple of Badger bombers, Antonov An-12 transports, a Beriev A-50 AWACS plane, some Mig-19s, a couple of Mig-21 Fishbeds, and a few cool-as-all-hell Mig-29 Flankers. Not that I know that much about Russian-made aircraft, I was simply able to figure out what they were using (what else?) Google. It's a pretty amazing tool, though the Chinese must be pissed that so many of their military establishments can now be checked out by anyone with an internet connection...
Susie: You sent me a hate-mail valentine and a crummy bunch of dead flowers!
Susie: So here's a valentine for YOU, you insensitive clod!!
Susie throws a snowball at Calvin's face, at point-blank range. POW!
Susie thinks . o O ( A valentine and flowers! He likes me! )
Calvin thinks . o O ( She noticed! She likes me! )
Pretty much everybody seems to agree that the current situation with patents has gotten out of hand. But if patents are always such a hindrance to technological development, why did the United States produce so much new technology throughout the 20th century? The light bulb, the telephone, the phonograph, the AC motor, the transistor, helicopter, the PC, new drugs to combat AIDS, DNA amplication by PCR, just to name a few... arguably this is one of the most impressive runs of innovation in human history, and it happened with robust patent law in place.
I'd argue that here the system, while imperfect, was doing more or less what it was supposed to. Inventors knew they could make a buck because their rights would be respected. Venture capitalists were willing to fund inventors because of the same thing. And people like Alexander Graham Bell, Igor Sikorsky, and Nikolai Tesla chose to be inventors here, rather than in their respective home countries, despite our system of patents, and probably in part because of it. There must be any number of countries that don't respect patent law, but I can't think of any that have become centers of technological development and innovation, where inventors flock to them. Maybe the system is broken now, but the answer is to fix it, not to throw it out.
Are you kidding? This museum is doing us a tremendous favor. If anything, we should send them money.
The intelligent design movement managed to make creationism look vaguely scientific. Its proponents had academic degrees and wrote books; Behe is actually a biochemist. They didn't make patently absurd claims about world being 6000 years old, they didn't use the Bible as a primary source, and they didn't directly refer to God and Jesus in every third sentence. They didn't do science, but they did a decent job of pretending to, and made creationism look almost respectable.
But if you want to see creationism made to look ridiculously unsophisticated and ignorant again, nobody could do a better job than this museum. Apatosaurus living with Adam and Eve? Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark? If you were trying to parody creationism, or create a strawman of all the worst creationist arguments, you couldn't do a better job. And the intelligent design guys- Behe and Dembski- will suddenly find that when they're arguing for creationism, people will be asking them if they believe that Jesus rode a Velociraptor.
So I say, put the Genesis account on display, in all its glory, and let people see it. I think most people will leave thinking exactly what they thought when they came in: evangelicals will leave still knowing that every word in the Bible is true, people looking for a laugh will emerge thinking that while science doesn't have all the answers, it's a lot better than a bunch of ancient myths, and kids- well, I say, let them see dinosaurs and men living alongside each other. Because while adults like to be told what they already know, kids like to ask questions, and I think those dioramas will get them asking a lot of questions.
I propose a national task force to deal with this.
SCENE: Office of a big-shot Hollywood MOVIE PRODUCER. He is sitting back in his big leather chair, smoking a fat cigar, thinking out loud.
MOVIE PRODUCER: Hey, I know what we could do. It'd be a shitty movie but if we do it cheap enough, we'll still make a profit! We could base a movie on 'Daikatana'!
Murmurs of assent come from around the room. But suddenly, the door to the MOVIE PRODUCER's office bursts open. We see a FEDERAL AGENT, dressed in a dark suit and dark glasses, burst in, flanked by two members of an elite team wearing body armor and carrying submachine guns. The MOVIE PRODUCER gets up, backs away. The FEDERAL AGENT walks right up to him, stares him directly in the eye, unblinking. Then punches him in the nuts.
MOVIE PRODUCER: Argh!!! What did you do that for???
The FEDERAL AGENT pulls out a badge and shows it to the MOVIE PRODUCER.
FEDERAL AGENT: Sorry, sir. My name is Agent Rex Hightower, and I'm a member of the FBI's Movie Adaptation Task Force. Any time a member of America's movie industry decides to adapt an old TV sitcom, cartoon, or videogame into a movie, I'm required by federal law to intervene and stop them. The American people finally decided that they had taken enough of your crappy movies and that direct action was required. And that's where we come in.
MOVIE PRODUCER: It'll take more than a tap in the cojones to keep me from making that movie! You don't understand the money involved! That movie will make millions!
FEDERAL AGENT: No sir. You don't understand. We're very serious about what we do. You see, that was just a warning. Next time, the gloves comes off. [quiet for a moment] You don't even want to know about what happened to that poor bastard who was trying to turn 'Mister Ed' into a feature film...
So that's my idea for how things would work. Actually, it probably wouldn't work as a law. But it would be a clever premise for a movie... hm. Have your people call my people.
I can't wait until The Sims Movie: The Game comes out. I bet it'll be such a runaway success, they'll make it into a movie!
Wait a minute. There are actually women on this site?
And don't forget that since Halo was released, there has been a 250% rise in the number of people wounded by needlers and plasma rifles.
But I have a hard time crying too much about those stories where someone takes a lot of risks and then dies. Either you're incompetent and in over your head, in which case you deserve whatever you get. Or, you know the risks but take them anyway, figuring a potentially short, but adventure-filled life is better than a long, boring, risk-averse one, in which case you knew exactly what you were getting into, so you can't complain too much. Still, they do make for great reading.
By most accounts, and I've talked with curators at the Smithosonian about this, Small was a terrible leader of the organization. He apparently did bring a lot of money into the organization, but you didn't see any evidence of this behind the scenes at the museum. Instead, he had almost $50,000 spent on furniture for his office, $15,000 spent on the doors at his house, spent $160,000 spent on renovating his office at the Smithsonian castle building, and by using his house to host a few Smithsonian functions, was given $1.15 million dollars in housing allowances. All your tax dollars. Not to mention, his total salary for 2007 was supposed to be $915,000- nearly a million dollars, more than the president and vice president combined. Meanwhile, science seems to have taken a back seat at the Smithsonian, and I suspect the scientists threw a party when he finally resigned. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/03/18/AR2007031801369.html
But Small is just one symptom of a much larger problem, which is appointing incompetent hacks to important government positions, and pushing politics over facts. This is what happened at FEMA with Heckuvajob Brownie. This is what happened in Iraq, when the White House sent over people who had the proper Republican Party credentials, but not the credentials to do the job; it's one of the major reasons the occupation there has been such a disaster. The problem has been summed up pretty well by the phrase, "the triumph of the hacks over the wonks". See, the wonks are the policy guys, the analytical guys who can analyze the facts and tell you what you need to do in order to achieve a desired outcome. They are the political equivalent of a computer geek, except they write policy instead of code. The hacks are the political guys, the guys who don't give a shit what the facts are, they are only there to push their party agenda. And this administration has favored the hacks over the wonks, so the result is that facts get shoved aside by politics, whether it's climate change, or the debatable effectiveness of "abstinence-only" education, or the infamous case of General Shinseki getting sacked by Rumsfeld after he said we would need several hundred thousand troops to effectively occupy Iraq.
The issue is, you get to decide what's meaningful, important, and what's worth having your money spent on. For you, space travel ranks high. And that's fine, and that's your right to feel that way.
But for other people, maybe there are other things that they feel are more pressing, and a better use of their money- taking care of their family, improving the K-12 educational system, putting the kids through college, nonprofits working to end hunger in Africa, fighting deforestation in the Amazon, ending AIDS, donating to their local church, keeping abortion legal, making abortion illegal, whatever. People find lasting meaning in those things, certainly a hell of a lot more people than find lasting meaning in knowing that we've filled a pressurized cylinder in low earth orbit with people and that it goes around and around the earth endlessly. And maybe you don't agree with them, but that's their right to feel that way, and it's their money, so they get to vote on how the government spends it, or whether it should even go to the government and be spent in the first place. And people may decide that they don't want "lasting meaning", just a bit of fun, and blow it on Final Fantasy, golf, lotto tickets, designer jeans, cocaine and hookers. Again, that's their choice.
And last, this story just drives home a point: the manned program consumes a tremendous amount of money and resources, but when is the last time it created as much lasting meaning, for as many people, as these robots are doing right now? NASA is inspiring us, and inspiring the whole world, by pushing into the void, and making us reimagine what exists, and what is possible. It's looking into the possibility that liquid water, and therefore life, once existed elsewhere in the world. How much more "lasting meaning" can we ask for? But the face of that exploration, at least the one that gets on the cover of the newspaper is now robotic. And the other face of that exploration is -instead of some rugged fighter jock- a pasty geek sitting for hours at a time in front of a monitor trying to drive these machines, hackers trying to debug their code, engineers field-testing a new rover in the desert. Just because there isn't a primate in a pressurized suit doesn't mean it's not human exploration.