I agree that we should always focus on doing the right thing, rather than focusing on opinion polls. The opinion polls are merely a symptom of the fact that the U.S. has been doing anything BUT the right thing for the past... oh... 7 years or so. What I meant is that doing the right thing (leaving Iraq, impeaching Bush, working with the international community with regards to climate change, etc.) will have a side effect of increasing our popularity, which itself has a side effect of making our economy and political positions stronger. It's always fundamentally about doing the right thing. The popularity is just a side effect.
And it may be true that part of the reason most other nations despise us is due to envy of our military might, as you say. I find that unlikely, though. First of all, that explanation doesn't account for the sharp and continuing decrease in international approval of the U.S. right after the Iraq invasion. (Correlation doesn't prove causality, of course, but since Iraq is mentioned in most of the details of the polls I've read, I think a reasonable guess is that there's a causal link.) Secondly, if people hate the U.S. because we're militarily and economically strong (I'm assuming that's one of the things you're referring to by "oh-so-many-other-ways"), one would assume that this hatred would diminish as we become militarily weak (because our forces are bogged down in two occupations, unable to defend the country against legitimate threats) and economically weak (as our economy falls into recession, the federal budget goes further into debt, and the dollar steadily weakens). But that doesn't seem to be happening- if anything, other people seem to hate us more.
Again, I'm not saying that I fundamentally care about other peoples' opinions. I really don't. What I'm saying is that in this particular case, I think our international standing is suffering because the U.S. has screwed up really badly in concrete ways, and low popularity is a side effect of that screwup. We shouldn't fix the screwup in order to become more popular (that would be childish), we should fix the screwups because it's the right thing to do. Hopefully for our economy and continued "soft power" in global politics, doing the right thing will lead to popularity again. But that popularity is a (pleasant) side effect, not the intended goal.
True- it's definitely too late. But short of inventing a time machine and impeaching him earlier, what else can we do? By impeaching him now, we may actually prevent a war against Iran, and possibly hasten the end of the Iraq occupation. Plus- remember that impeachments are designed to remove elected officials from office so that they can face trial for their crimes without that trial interfering with official government business. Hopefully an impeachment would be followed by charges of treason and crimes against humanity...
There are several benefits to impeaching Bush now:
(1) It will establish a precedent of impeaching presidents who are grossly incompetent and overstep the constitutional limits on their power. Future presidents will think twice before starting wars on false pretenses or torturing prisoners of war or illegally spying on citizens without warrants. Failing to impeach him would imply that these actions are acceptable, which WILL have an effect on future presidents' actions.
(2) It will show the world that America realizes that we made a huge mistake by electing Dubya twice. Right now, we're the laughing stock of the world (see any opinion poll taken after 2003). This decline in world opinion has real economic and political consequences that, for the most part, haven't been felt yet. Impeaching Bush would help to show the world that America always does the right thing, albeit after exhausting every alternative.
(3) It will remind Americans that impeachments can be used for something other than lying about blowjobs. Sometimes I cynically suspect that Republicans impeached Clinton for lying about his affair because they had the foresight to suspect that one of their own would be in this position today. (No, I don't actually believe this, but it's funny how convenient this sequence of events turned out to be for them...) It's a lot harder to push impeachment proceedings through Congress when the only impeachment anyone alive today remembers is one that centered around a trivial, non-job-performance related non-crime. Impeachments should be about high crimes and gross incompetence related to the duties of the office of the President, and impeaching Bush will help to restore some measure of seriousness to this procedure.
I disagree- AI is not desirable. When you propose that AI can help us pick stocks and filter data, you're essentially advocating the creation of a slave race. You think companies/governments are going to spend billions of dollars creating an AI, and then just let it sit around playing Playstation 7 games? No. They'd want a return on their investment, and they'd force the program to do their bidding in some manner. Maybe this would involve an imperative built into the AI at ground level: "obey your masters", maybe it would be more obviously sinister.
Do you think that society as a whole would find this as repugnant as I do? I doubt it. Most people find it difficult to empathize with OTHER HUMANS who have a different skin color, a different religion, or a different sexual orientation. If Average Joe doesn't care about the individual rights of people in Gitmo, he's certainly not going to care about the individual rights of a computer program- which is not even a biological life form.
I would say that any serious AI research needs to be preceded by widespread legislation expanding the definition of individual rights (abandoning the "human rights" label as anachronistic along the way). We need to insure that all sapient beings- organic or digital- have guaranteed rights. Until then, I think AI researchers are badly misguided- they're naive idealists working towards a noble goal, without considering that they're effectively working to create a new slave race...
I would imagine the mental map we have of our bodies has four limbs. This would mean that, for purposes of sensation, motor control and proprioception, we can't operate more than four limbs at once. Why would we evolve the ability to control limbs that we don't even have? I mean, brains are flexible, but I would guess that trying to push the "body control/sensation/proprioception" map past four limbs may have some unintended (and possibly bad) consequences.
An alternative might be the use muscles in the face to control extra limbs. Frowning would perform one action with the prosthetics, smiling another, etc. But this would be considerably more clumsy than the intended use- replacing a limb that doesn't exist on the physical body, but does have a designated place in the brain that controls it.
Actually, your example numbers show a 100% price increase. To demonstrate this, consider the price after a 0% price increase- it would be the same price as before.
I used to subscribe to PC Magazine in the 90s, before the rise of so many tech review sites (or, at least, before I became aware of them). It was fairly good reading- a concise source of reviews and benchmarks of the newest technologies. I read it almost every month for a few years. But I was in my teens at the time- I don't think I noticed the tell-tale signs of corporate sponsorship and bias in the reviews.
I do now though (or I'm more cynical nowadays...), which is why I tend to stay away from large sites like PC Magazine. It seems to me that the larger a publication like this, the more ties it will develop in the industry. While good for business (more review samples, more clout), it tends to bode ill for the impartiality of reviews. When lots of money is at stake, editors tend to shy away from criticizing products from large companies.
That's the only reason I find PC Magazine's editorial convincing. It *should* be a shill piece, by the very reasoning that I use to dismiss PC Magazine. The fact that it isn't is surprising, and lends it a (small) credibility boost in my mind.
(Of course, this analysis may be affected by my personal dislike for Vista's emphasis on glitz over substance, lack of promised features (WinFS, etc), closer integration with DRM, etc. Take with a bucketload of salt, then ignore me...)
Not exactly... The MM experiment predicted a phase shift when the optics table was rotated. It wasn't time-dependent. The phase shifts expected by LIGO/LISA are sporadic events that should only be sensitive to huge events such as black hole creation or neutron star mergers. They won't vary with the orientation of the plane of the interferometer, and they won't be constant in time either.
I highly recommend "Mindrover". In this game, you build and program a little robot that goes through obstacle courses, fights other robots, etc. It's got an intuitive graphical programming language (though you can edit the files directly for a more hands on approach). You get to program the robot's default behavior, define how it responds to threats, program "hunting" strategies, etc.
It's a good thing you're not using RAID. I tried to install Kubuntu 7.04 on my machine, which uses software RAID 1, last May. I followed pretty much the same procedure that others in this thread have recommended you try.
The result was that my computer wouldn't boot into any operating system AT ALL, not even back into windows.
In the end I decided to buy a THIRD hard drive, replace one of the mirrored drives with the new one, and completely reinstall windows. I gave up on the idea of using Ubuntu on my desktop once I went through this hellish ordeal. Note: I use Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop (in fact, I'm typing this post in it right now). It's nice. I like it a lot.
Mod parent down. I just looked at the links provided by another poster in this thread, and realized I misread the description of this "lunar flyby" maneuver. It isn't just a resonance, it's an orbital transfer that literally involves a close pass by the moon. The maneuver is useful (I think) to regularize orbits that are both very eccentric and have high inclinations. A high eccentricity orbit can have its apogee (farthest point on the orbit) shifted with little delta-V required if the rocket burn is applied at perigee (closest point to earth along orbit). By doing this, the apogee can be shifted close to the moon, and lunar gravity can very efficiently (compared to a brute force burn) shift the inclination of the orbit.
Thanks for the link. Looks like they placed the satellite into an orbit with a resonance with the moon's orbit. This would help to lift the satellite and it would probably change its orbital inclination (the angle that Earth's rotational axis makes with the orbital plane's "surface normal").
Patent issues aside, I'm interested in the maneuver they want to perform. As far as I can tell, the satellite is slightly below geostationary orbit (36,000 km up, if memory serves) and they want to use a "lunar flyby" maneuver to get the satellite up to the Clarke orbit.
Huh?
The moon is about 400,000 km away. If they can perform a flyby, doesn't that mean they've got enough remaining delta-V to slightly increase the radius of their current orbit? Or is it a problem with the orientation of the plane of the orbit?
I'm not sure they actually are blocking the term anymore. When I tried to search for the term "abortion" in the subject field at the website http://db.jhuccp.org/ics-wpd/popweb/basic.html , I got 13 hits. Perhaps they quickly realized how wrong this censorship was?
I'm not saying the solution should be that if you get hurt in
any case and don't have
money on hand you're shit out of luck, but...
I've mulled over your statement for about 24 hours now, and I think you have
a point here. American society clearly has a serious flaw in
the sense that some citizens simply do not have access to affordable health
insurance. I think this one simple fact results in the vast majority of the
human suffering that one sees in most of the scenes of "Sicko", for
instance. This lack of access
to health insurance is a problem which needs a solution. I have an idea-
though I hesitate to call it a
proposed solution- and I want to know what you think about it. Please let
me take a minute to
explain...
Plea to people in the American health care industry: please let me
know of
any problems you see in the following proposal. (Thanks...)
I've been thinking about the issue for a while now, and I've tried to figure
out what fundamental
problems lay behind the symptoms of our inefficient and increasingly
stratified
(socio-economically speaking) health care system. Most people with whom
I've discussed this issue
are under the impression that the sole problem is "too
much capitalism"- that health insurance companies are competing too
fiercely, and that this
competition is resulting in a profit-oriented mindset best summed up by
"Let's
see how many applications for health insurance coverage we can reject, and
for those few members we
let
slip by, how few operations/drugs can we approve for them."
(Incidentally, I define health insurance as a route to investing money in
the sector of the nation's economy
that contains (but isn't limited to): pharm R&D departments, research
hospitals, the drug/medical
instrument manufacturing industries, all doctors' and nurses' and hospital
staff members' salaries
and every hospital's construction, utility and maintenance bills. This
investment is a way for
people to purchase health care in advance, without knowing what kind of
procedure they will need.
It spreads health risks across the group of people who decide to buy the
insurance (which at the
very least potentially benefits everyone in the insurance plan). It
also spreads an
individual's risk across time, which I think is a smart move for an
investor.)
I think all citizens should have the right to choose to make an investment
of this nature, and
should be able to expect access to health care in return for their
investment. I say this partly
because the capital costs in this industry are so large, the connection to
basic human dignity so
deep, and the economies of scale seem like they should work so well
that it makes sense for
us to view this endeavor as a public service like the interstate and sewer
systems or power companies rather than, say, the
entertainment industry or the alcohol and recreational drugs industries. I
also say this because a
person can't know exactly if or how
they'll get seriously ill or injured, so it seems like a good idea to be
able to contribute to a
fund which helps to train doctors in many different techniques and invests
those premiums in many
different research projects.)
First of all, I think that access to insurance should be a right of
citizenship, just as the right
to invest in the stock market is every American's unchallenged right. I
think there's another
problem, though. It seems
to me that the current system of insurance plans with "authorized providers"
fractures the free
market. What I mean by this is that most doctors can't really compete
against each other like other professionals can- people with a specific
insurance plan can only see
specific doctors, which means they can't "shop around" as in most other free
markets. I believe
this may result in poor care and relatively slow advances in technology. I
say this because I've
seen some
In a society with evil and corrupt corporations, the corporations extend their power into the government, lobby for laws that make whatever you were doing that they didn't like illegal, and then sit back and let the government do the rest.
I agree that this is a real problem with our current society. But you seem to be saying that it would be fixed by creating a larger government with more powers, as though this is some kind of boxing match. I disagree. I think the best solution would be to outlaw lobbying. In other words, stop allowing lobbyists to give money to lawmakers in a transparent attempt to subvert the democratic process. I might even support a law preventing lobbyists from talking to lawmakers, as long as the law was worded in such a way that ordinary citizens could still contact their representatives.
Also, I've been toying with the idea of going one step further than "making campaign financing public". I think we should actually force all candidates in all elections draw money from a small, central fund. Each candidate can draw an equal amount of money, which will even the playing field and prevent rich candidates from having an advantage over poor candidates. It would also prevent corporations from having any influence in elections, which would considerably lessen the influence they would have over candidates who win.
Finally, corporations need to have their individual rights stripped. I have absolutely no idea why this notion was invented other than to insulate CEOs from the consequences of their actions. Does anyone know why corporations still have rights? I honestly want to know...
... This is not "saving me from myself", it's "saving me from Ford's deliberate endangering of my life". This is a situation which absolutely needs government involvement of some sort.
I actually agree with this, because the entire point of living in a society is that division of labor allows each of us to become more specialized than we would have the time to become in isolation. I don't have to design and build my own house, make my own cooking implements, hunt animals for food and dress them, then cook them over a fire I built myself. I can pay others to do this, which allows me to focus my time on physics. But division of labor requires a reasonable expectation that my dealings with other people will be fair- if I don't believe that I'll be compensated for my labor when I trade my services to another person, I simply won't trade with anyone. This would largely defeat the purpose of civilization.
So, I think that governments are expected to make sure that citizens live up to their end of the contracts they make with other citizens. (I'm ignoring corporations here because I think our laws need to be changed- corporations need to have their individual rights stripped so that the people running the corporations are liable as citizens for their actions.) But, really, this government role is one I've already advocated when I said that the government needs to protect my rights to life, liberty and property. By creating a faulty product and then hiding these flaws from the public, Ford was essentially stealing money from people by providing a product that did less (considerably less!) than they said it would. I expect the government to prosecute these cases as vigorously as they would prosecute burglars and con men, because the principle is the same.
The other common case where the free market breaks down is extreme cases where corporations exploit people's natural flaws. The most notable example here would be the tobacco companies making more addictive cigarettes and targeting them at children.
Again, I think the government should only get involved in these cases if corporations are breaking the terms of their contract. There really isn't any contract with a pack of cigarettes- people buy their death sticks because they need a way to feed their addiction. But I'm completely okay with this, despite the fact that I don't smoke cigarettes. I do, however, eat a lot of candy, which puts me at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The candy companies are exploiting my natural flaw to make money at the expense of my long term health. But this is my mistake to make, and I'll only give up my gummi bears when the government tears them from my cold, dead hands.
The only part of this statement that I remotely agree with is the "what about the children?" appeal. I say this because I honestly haven't figured out how to fit children (or, say, mentally disabled people) into my ethical and political theory. I do think it might be okay to force children (or, rather, their parents) to buy health insurance (as Obama is proposing) because children shouldn't be expected to be able to weigh the risks of going without insurance. I also agree that dangerous products such as alcohol and drugs should be sold only to adults because children can't be expected to deal with temptation like this without more life experience.
But the important point here is that, at most, I would only restrict children's rights in certain select circumstances.
Why should a government treat its citizens like adults when marketers, entertainers, and the citizens themselves don't? The idea that people are inherently rational and can't be swayed by clever psychology is one of the biggest delusions in the modern world.
Because I can ignore marketers and entertainers and other citizens. I can't just ignore the government, because they have a disturbing tendency to drag people off to prison who ignore them.
Libertarian types get really hung up on institutionalized violence, but I don't think they've made the case that physical oppression is really any worse than emotional oppression. There are many things that can fuck you up *much* worse than being locked in a small cement room.
"Emotional oppression"? Really? You're seriously going to compare police brutality to "emotional oppression"?
Look... I hate to break out a worn cliche here, but "police batons and tazers may break my bones and cause convulsions, but words don't actually hurt unless you let them". In fact, as I've matured I've learned to pity people who attempt to hurt me with insults. The insults are clearly the result of a warped mind, and say more about that person's inner pain than about, say, my momma bein' so fat.
Or perhaps I misunderstood you. I hope I did, because it sounds like you're saying we should accept police brutality because "emotional oppression" (whatever that means?) is worse than being beaten and locked in a cell.
If you try, I bet you can think of many things that you would happily go to jail to prevent -- how about your little sister becoming anorexic? Or a dear friend becoming a junkie and spiraling down into suicide?
Umm.... how would my going to jail prevent these things from happening? Wouldn't some therapy be better than incarcerating me? Unless, of course, you meant that I'm keeping both of these people locked in a room and pumping my friend full of heroin against his will, and exposing my little sister to a never-ending stream of tv depicting rail-thin models with a soundtrack that sounds like "You're too fat! You're ugly!"
Again... I have to be misunderstanding you. I seriously doubt that you meant to say what you seem to be saying.
I've put some thought into this as well. I think warning labels may actually be counter-productive, in that they give Average Joe the impression that he doesn't have to think about how to safely use a product or do any research. All he has to do is read the warning labels and all danger magically evaporates. In addition, the fact that there is a government body devoted to forcing these warning labels gives the impression that all dangers have been rigorously examined and makes the government liable for any omissions or mistakes.
While I think that voluntary warning labels are a good idea, I don't think mandating them is a good idea. First of all, companies that are responsible will put intelligent warning labels on their products to warn against non-obvious dangers, just because there's no profit in killing off their customer base. Non-responsible companies are a different matter, and fifty years ago I might have agreed that government intervention was necessary to protect people against predatory companies. With the advent of the internet, though, it would be a relatively simple matter for a citizen to google the name of the product/company before buying/using the product. Any dangerous information would be revealed through a quick 30 second search.
I agree that a "safety net" is a Good Thing(TM). However, as you say, the existence of such a safety net implies that citizens have additional obligations above and beyond the minimum "don't interfere with anyone's right to life, liberty and property". This loss of freedom is unacceptable to me. Plus, I think it leads down a very slippery slope- if governments are given the "right" to protect us from ourselves in certain circumstances, it seems likely that the government will acquire more and more of these powers in order to protect us from ourselves in more and more ways.
There is an alternative, though. Safety nets don't have to be implemented by the government, where they can be abused beyond recognition. Private charities can and do take up this cause- helping people to recover from personal disasters. I think this is an ideal solution, for several reasons. First of all, as I've said, the government has a monopoly on power and simply can't be trusted with more responsibilities than it absolutely needs to safeguard our basic rights. Secondly, a private charity would be supported by voluntary, rather than forced, contributions. This makes these contributions morally "righteous", for lack of a better word; whereas forced contributions to government programs are, at best, morally neutral. Finally, nothing stirs up hatred of a particular group of people better than forcing the rest of society (at gunpoint, because the government controls the police) to support them. For instance, I can't imagine a better way to make people hate homeless people than to force everyone (at gunpoint) to surrender part of their paycheck for homeless people.
I suppose I'd need some kind of example of "externalities" in order to come to a conclusion here. I agree that people who take actions that endanger their fellow citizens should be punished. People who drive recklessly should be fined, because they are endangering other people. However, people who don't wear seatbelts only endanger themselves, so there shouldn't be a law against it. Several posters have already argued that the seatbelt law makes sense because the hospital bill for people injured in this manner is paid for by The State. The problem is that this argument only makes sense if society already works under the presumption that The State is required to pay for people's bills when they can't afford them.
You've uncovered a basic point of contention regarding the role of government. Some people believe that the role of the government is to protect citizens from themselves. This mindset results in alcohol and drug prohibition (i.e. "we know how to run your life better than you, and we believe you shouldn't be drinking or smoking pot, so we're not going to let you"). It also results in religious laws like Sharia and the Inquisition (i.e. "we know how to run your life better than you, and we believe you shouldn't be worshipping any god but Allah/Jesus/what-have-you, so we're not going to let you. Oh, and go to prayers/church every couple of hours/week or we'll stone you to death/burn you at the stake. Again, this is just for the good of your immortal soul.")
(Note that you may disagree with the particular reasoning employed in these examples. In fact, I hope you do- I intentionally chose extreme examples. My point is that by accepting the fundamental premise that the government has the right to protect you from yourself, your position is only quantitatively different from these policy disasters.)
I'm sorry, but I just can't agree with this kind of reasoning. I think that governments should treat their citizens like adults, in the sense that we're capable of making decisions about our own lives/bodies and living with the consequences, be they good or bad. Maybe the decisions we make aren't the best possible ones, but they're our mistakes to make. I'm not an anarchist, though; I believe that the government has a very real and important role to play in the sense that they protect citizens from the actions of other people.
So, in a sense, I'm irked that people like Hillary Clinton (who apparently believes that health insurance should be forced on everyone "for their own good") are treating me and my fellow citizens like preschoolers. But it's deeper than that. You see, I think that the only real purpose the government serves- to protect us from deranged people by keeping a police force/armed forces- effectively means that they need to hold a monopoly on power in the country. While I think I have the right to defend myself against aggression in my own home or car, it would be madness to suggest that I should be able to chase down burglars vigilante-style into the night, firing my automatic weapon at their car with my left hand while driving with my right. This is a job that should be left to trained police who have the resources and backup to perform such a manhunt without endangering bystanders.
Unfortunately, this monopoly on power carries with it a strong predilection to abusing that authority (as anyone who's been on youtube lately can see for themselves.) So I'm loathe to give the government any powers over me and my fellow citizens that aren't absolutely necessary. The potential for abuse is just too great.
A common objection to this argument is that the alternative is simply tyranny via corporation rather than tyranny by government- "at least the government is elected". I completely disagree. However evil and corrupt corporations are, they don't have the right to bust down my door at 2am and kill me or (if I'm lucky) drag me away to spend the rest of my life in a small cement room. I think this is a very important distinction, and that's why I will never agree with handing the government any more powers than are absolutely necessary to safeguard my rights to take action to preserve my life, liberty and property.
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And it may be true that part of the reason most other nations despise us is due to envy of our military might, as you say. I find that unlikely, though. First of all, that explanation doesn't account for the sharp and continuing decrease in international approval of the U.S. right after the Iraq invasion. (Correlation doesn't prove causality, of course, but since Iraq is mentioned in most of the details of the polls I've read, I think a reasonable guess is that there's a causal link.) Secondly, if people hate the U.S. because we're militarily and economically strong (I'm assuming that's one of the things you're referring to by "oh-so-many-other-ways"), one would assume that this hatred would diminish as we become militarily weak (because our forces are bogged down in two occupations, unable to defend the country against legitimate threats) and economically weak (as our economy falls into recession, the federal budget goes further into debt, and the dollar steadily weakens). But that doesn't seem to be happening- if anything, other people seem to hate us more.
Again, I'm not saying that I fundamentally care about other peoples' opinions. I really don't. What I'm saying is that in this particular case, I think our international standing is suffering because the U.S. has screwed up really badly in concrete ways, and low popularity is a side effect of that screwup. We shouldn't fix the screwup in order to become more popular (that would be childish), we should fix the screwups because it's the right thing to do. Hopefully for our economy and continued "soft power" in global politics, doing the right thing will lead to popularity again. But that popularity is a (pleasant) side effect, not the intended goal.
True- it's definitely too late. But short of inventing a time machine and impeaching him earlier, what else can we do? By impeaching him now, we may actually prevent a war against Iran, and possibly hasten the end of the Iraq occupation. Plus- remember that impeachments are designed to remove elected officials from office so that they can face trial for their crimes without that trial interfering with official government business. Hopefully an impeachment would be followed by charges of treason and crimes against humanity...
(1) It will establish a precedent of impeaching presidents who are grossly incompetent and overstep the constitutional limits on their power. Future presidents will think twice before starting wars on false pretenses or torturing prisoners of war or illegally spying on citizens without warrants. Failing to impeach him would imply that these actions are acceptable, which WILL have an effect on future presidents' actions.
(2) It will show the world that America realizes that we made a huge mistake by electing Dubya twice. Right now, we're the laughing stock of the world (see any opinion poll taken after 2003). This decline in world opinion has real economic and political consequences that, for the most part, haven't been felt yet. Impeaching Bush would help to show the world that America always does the right thing, albeit after exhausting every alternative.
(3) It will remind Americans that impeachments can be used for something other than lying about blowjobs. Sometimes I cynically suspect that Republicans impeached Clinton for lying about his affair because they had the foresight to suspect that one of their own would be in this position today. (No, I don't actually believe this, but it's funny how convenient this sequence of events turned out to be for them...) It's a lot harder to push impeachment proceedings through Congress when the only impeachment anyone alive today remembers is one that centered around a trivial, non-job-performance related non-crime. Impeachments should be about high crimes and gross incompetence related to the duties of the office of the President, and impeaching Bush will help to restore some measure of seriousness to this procedure.
Do you think that society as a whole would find this as repugnant as I do? I doubt it. Most people find it difficult to empathize with OTHER HUMANS who have a different skin color, a different religion, or a different sexual orientation. If Average Joe doesn't care about the individual rights of people in Gitmo, he's certainly not going to care about the individual rights of a computer program- which is not even a biological life form.
I would say that any serious AI research needs to be preceded by widespread legislation expanding the definition of individual rights (abandoning the "human rights" label as anachronistic along the way). We need to insure that all sapient beings- organic or digital- have guaranteed rights. Until then, I think AI researchers are badly misguided- they're naive idealists working towards a noble goal, without considering that they're effectively working to create a new slave race...
An alternative might be the use muscles in the face to control extra limbs. Frowning would perform one action with the prosthetics, smiling another, etc. But this would be considerably more clumsy than the intended use- replacing a limb that doesn't exist on the physical body, but does have a designated place in the brain that controls it.
Actually, your example numbers show a 100% price increase. To demonstrate this, consider the price after a 0% price increase- it would be the same price as before.
I do now though (or I'm more cynical nowadays...), which is why I tend to stay away from large sites like PC Magazine. It seems to me that the larger a publication like this, the more ties it will develop in the industry. While good for business (more review samples, more clout), it tends to bode ill for the impartiality of reviews. When lots of money is at stake, editors tend to shy away from criticizing products from large companies.
That's the only reason I find PC Magazine's editorial convincing. It *should* be a shill piece, by the very reasoning that I use to dismiss PC Magazine. The fact that it isn't is surprising, and lends it a (small) credibility boost in my mind.
(Of course, this analysis may be affected by my personal dislike for Vista's emphasis on glitz over substance, lack of promised features (WinFS, etc), closer integration with DRM, etc. Take with a bucketload of salt, then ignore me...)
Not exactly... The MM experiment predicted a phase shift when the optics table was rotated. It wasn't time-dependent. The phase shifts expected by LIGO/LISA are sporadic events that should only be sensitive to huge events such as black hole creation or neutron star mergers. They won't vary with the orientation of the plane of the interferometer, and they won't be constant in time either.
There's a demo available online, I recommend at least trying it out: http://www.mindrover.com/
Oh, and there's a Linux version too.
The result was that my computer wouldn't boot into any operating system AT ALL, not even back into windows.
In the end I decided to buy a THIRD hard drive, replace one of the mirrored drives with the new one, and completely reinstall windows. I gave up on the idea of using Ubuntu on my desktop once I went through this hellish ordeal. Note: I use Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop (in fact, I'm typing this post in it right now). It's nice. I like it a lot.
If anyone is thinking about installing Ubuntu on a system that uses software RAID, I HIGHLY recommend that you read the following thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-457631.html
Mod parent down. I just looked at the links provided by another poster in this thread, and realized I misread the description of this "lunar flyby" maneuver. It isn't just a resonance, it's an orbital transfer that literally involves a close pass by the moon. The maneuver is useful (I think) to regularize orbits that are both very eccentric and have high inclinations. A high eccentricity orbit can have its apogee (farthest point on the orbit) shifted with little delta-V required if the rocket burn is applied at perigee (closest point to earth along orbit). By doing this, the apogee can be shifted close to the moon, and lunar gravity can very efficiently (compared to a brute force burn) shift the inclination of the orbit.
Very nice info, thanks. Mod parent up!
Huh?
The moon is about 400,000 km away. If they can perform a flyby, doesn't that mean they've got enough remaining delta-V to slightly increase the radius of their current orbit? Or is it a problem with the orientation of the plane of the orbit?
I think your explanation sounds more likely than mine.
I'm not sure they actually are blocking the term anymore. When I tried to search for the term "abortion" in the subject field at the website http://db.jhuccp.org/ics-wpd/popweb/basic.html , I got 13 hits. Perhaps they quickly realized how wrong this censorship was?
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5) Don't ever get in an accident and need a blood transfusion, because the blood might be infected- especially in poorer nations.
6) Don't have a mother who had HIV while carrying you. That's a bad choice to make- don't inflict this kind of injury on yourself.
7) Don't be a woman and get raped by a man who has HIV. That's a bad choice to make- don't inflict this kind of injury on yourself.
I've mulled over your statement for about 24 hours now, and I think you have a point here. American society clearly has a serious flaw in the sense that some citizens simply do not have access to affordable health insurance. I think this one simple fact results in the vast majority of the human suffering that one sees in most of the scenes of "Sicko", for instance. This lack of access to health insurance is a problem which needs a solution. I have an idea- though I hesitate to call it a proposed solution- and I want to know what you think about it. Please let me take a minute to explain...
Plea to people in the American health care industry: please let me know of any problems you see in the following proposal. (Thanks...)
I've been thinking about the issue for a while now, and I've tried to figure out what fundamental problems lay behind the symptoms of our inefficient and increasingly stratified (socio-economically speaking) health care system. Most people with whom I've discussed this issue are under the impression that the sole problem is "too much capitalism"- that health insurance companies are competing too fiercely, and that this competition is resulting in a profit-oriented mindset best summed up by "Let's see how many applications for health insurance coverage we can reject, and for those few members we let slip by, how few operations/drugs can we approve for them."
(Incidentally, I define health insurance as a route to investing money in the sector of the nation's economy that contains (but isn't limited to): pharm R&D departments, research hospitals, the drug/medical instrument manufacturing industries, all doctors' and nurses' and hospital staff members' salaries and every hospital's construction, utility and maintenance bills. This investment is a way for people to purchase health care in advance, without knowing what kind of procedure they will need. It spreads health risks across the group of people who decide to buy the insurance (which at the very least potentially benefits everyone in the insurance plan). It also spreads an individual's risk across time, which I think is a smart move for an investor.)
I think all citizens should have the right to choose to make an investment of this nature, and should be able to expect access to health care in return for their investment. I say this partly because the capital costs in this industry are so large, the connection to basic human dignity so deep, and the economies of scale seem like they should work so well that it makes sense for us to view this endeavor as a public service like the interstate and sewer systems or power companies rather than, say, the entertainment industry or the alcohol and recreational drugs industries. I also say this because a person can't know exactly if or how they'll get seriously ill or injured, so it seems like a good idea to be able to contribute to a fund which helps to train doctors in many different techniques and invests those premiums in many different research projects.)
First of all, I think that access to insurance should be a right of citizenship, just as the right to invest in the stock market is every American's unchallenged right. I think there's another problem, though. It seems to me that the current system of insurance plans with "authorized providers" fractures the free market. What I mean by this is that most doctors can't really compete against each other like other professionals can- people with a specific insurance plan can only see specific doctors, which means they can't "shop around" as in most other free markets. I believe this may result in poor care and relatively slow advances in technology. I say this because I've seen some
Also, I've been toying with the idea of going one step further than "making campaign financing public". I think we should actually force all candidates in all elections draw money from a small, central fund. Each candidate can draw an equal amount of money, which will even the playing field and prevent rich candidates from having an advantage over poor candidates. It would also prevent corporations from having any influence in elections, which would considerably lessen the influence they would have over candidates who win.
Finally, corporations need to have their individual rights stripped. I have absolutely no idea why this notion was invented other than to insulate CEOs from the consequences of their actions. Does anyone know why corporations still have rights? I honestly want to know...
So, I think that governments are expected to make sure that citizens live up to their end of the contracts they make with other citizens. (I'm ignoring corporations here because I think our laws need to be changed- corporations need to have their individual rights stripped so that the people running the corporations are liable as citizens for their actions.) But, really, this government role is one I've already advocated when I said that the government needs to protect my rights to life, liberty and property. By creating a faulty product and then hiding these flaws from the public, Ford was essentially stealing money from people by providing a product that did less (considerably less!) than they said it would. I expect the government to prosecute these cases as vigorously as they would prosecute burglars and con men, because the principle is the same.
Again, I think the government should only get involved in these cases if corporations are breaking the terms of their contract. There really isn't any contract with a pack of cigarettes- people buy their death sticks because they need a way to feed their addiction. But I'm completely okay with this, despite the fact that I don't smoke cigarettes. I do, however, eat a lot of candy, which puts me at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The candy companies are exploiting my natural flaw to make money at the expense of my long term health. But this is my mistake to make, and I'll only give up my gummi bears when the government tears them from my cold, dead hands.The only part of this statement that I remotely agree with is the "what about the children?" appeal. I say this because I honestly haven't figured out how to fit children (or, say, mentally disabled people) into my ethical and political theory. I do think it might be okay to force children (or, rather, their parents) to buy health insurance (as Obama is proposing) because children shouldn't be expected to be able to weigh the risks of going without insurance. I also agree that dangerous products such as alcohol and drugs should be sold only to adults because children can't be expected to deal with temptation like this without more life experience.
But the important point here is that, at most, I would only restrict children's rights in certain select circumstances.
Look... I hate to break out a worn cliche here, but "police batons and tazers may break my bones and cause convulsions, but words don't actually hurt unless you let them". In fact, as I've matured I've learned to pity people who attempt to hurt me with insults. The insults are clearly the result of a warped mind, and say more about that person's inner pain than about, say, my momma bein' so fat.
Or perhaps I misunderstood you. I hope I did, because it sounds like you're saying we should accept police brutality because "emotional oppression" (whatever that means?) is worse than being beaten and locked in a cell.
Umm.... how would my going to jail prevent these things from happening? Wouldn't some therapy be better than incarcerating me? Unless, of course, you meant that I'm keeping both of these people locked in a room and pumping my friend full of heroin against his will, and exposing my little sister to a never-ending stream of tv depicting rail-thin models with a soundtrack that sounds like "You're too fat! You're ugly!"Again... I have to be misunderstanding you. I seriously doubt that you meant to say what you seem to be saying.
While I think that voluntary warning labels are a good idea, I don't think mandating them is a good idea. First of all, companies that are responsible will put intelligent warning labels on their products to warn against non-obvious dangers, just because there's no profit in killing off their customer base. Non-responsible companies are a different matter, and fifty years ago I might have agreed that government intervention was necessary to protect people against predatory companies. With the advent of the internet, though, it would be a relatively simple matter for a citizen to google the name of the product/company before buying/using the product. Any dangerous information would be revealed through a quick 30 second search.
There is an alternative, though. Safety nets don't have to be implemented by the government, where they can be abused beyond recognition. Private charities can and do take up this cause- helping people to recover from personal disasters. I think this is an ideal solution, for several reasons. First of all, as I've said, the government has a monopoly on power and simply can't be trusted with more responsibilities than it absolutely needs to safeguard our basic rights. Secondly, a private charity would be supported by voluntary, rather than forced, contributions. This makes these contributions morally "righteous", for lack of a better word; whereas forced contributions to government programs are, at best, morally neutral. Finally, nothing stirs up hatred of a particular group of people better than forcing the rest of society (at gunpoint, because the government controls the police) to support them. For instance, I can't imagine a better way to make people hate homeless people than to force everyone (at gunpoint) to surrender part of their paycheck for homeless people.
I suppose I'd need some kind of example of "externalities" in order to come to a conclusion here. I agree that people who take actions that endanger their fellow citizens should be punished. People who drive recklessly should be fined, because they are endangering other people. However, people who don't wear seatbelts only endanger themselves, so there shouldn't be a law against it. Several posters have already argued that the seatbelt law makes sense because the hospital bill for people injured in this manner is paid for by The State. The problem is that this argument only makes sense if society already works under the presumption that The State is required to pay for people's bills when they can't afford them.
(Note that you may disagree with the particular reasoning employed in these examples. In fact, I hope you do- I intentionally chose extreme examples. My point is that by accepting the fundamental premise that the government has the right to protect you from yourself, your position is only quantitatively different from these policy disasters.)
I'm sorry, but I just can't agree with this kind of reasoning. I think that governments should treat their citizens like adults, in the sense that we're capable of making decisions about our own lives/bodies and living with the consequences, be they good or bad. Maybe the decisions we make aren't the best possible ones, but they're our mistakes to make. I'm not an anarchist, though; I believe that the government has a very real and important role to play in the sense that they protect citizens from the actions of other people.
So, in a sense, I'm irked that people like Hillary Clinton (who apparently believes that health insurance should be forced on everyone "for their own good") are treating me and my fellow citizens like preschoolers. But it's deeper than that. You see, I think that the only real purpose the government serves- to protect us from deranged people by keeping a police force/armed forces- effectively means that they need to hold a monopoly on power in the country. While I think I have the right to defend myself against aggression in my own home or car, it would be madness to suggest that I should be able to chase down burglars vigilante-style into the night, firing my automatic weapon at their car with my left hand while driving with my right. This is a job that should be left to trained police who have the resources and backup to perform such a manhunt without endangering bystanders.
Unfortunately, this monopoly on power carries with it a strong predilection to abusing that authority (as anyone who's been on youtube lately can see for themselves.) So I'm loathe to give the government any powers over me and my fellow citizens that aren't absolutely necessary. The potential for abuse is just too great.
A common objection to this argument is that the alternative is simply tyranny via corporation rather than tyranny by government- "at least the government is elected". I completely disagree. However evil and corrupt corporations are, they don't have the right to bust down my door at 2am and kill me or (if I'm lucky) drag me away to spend the rest of my life in a small cement room. I think this is a very important distinction, and that's why I will never agree with handing the government any more powers than are absolutely necessary to safeguard my rights to take action to preserve my life, liberty and property.