Three Bitcoin articles on the front page in as many weeks? Sure, this one is a bit sideways, but seriously, the number of people involved with Bitcoin is insignificantly small and should remain that way. Stop hyping this project which is either an ill-fated experiment or a scam.
I don't understand why there is such a push to use grids to display sorted lists. Unity, Gnome 3, Android, Windows Explorer, iOS, MacOSX, etc. (even posix CLI commands such as ls): all of them have default settings to take a list of elements and then break the list up into meaningless rows and display a grid. I find it far too easy to miss important elements in these grids and I observe this behavior in others. Why are grids so damn popular?
Note that in this instance I am not complaining about grids where the user can create an arbitrary organization (such as a desktop not set to auto-arrange), but when the computer is taking a list of items and organizing it for you in a grid.
This is not to say that all Libertarians are ignorant, but that Bitcoin appeals to Libertarian ideals and requires ignorance of how money works to be sold. Bitcoin has no in-built velocity. Taxing authorities won't accept them and having a fixed amount of them means that they don't have a debt-based life-cycle as does the money most of us claim ownership to. Also, even if Bitcoin were to take off, as demand for it increased, it would create its own valuation bubble where it becomes more valuable to hold the money than it does to invest it. Nobody would be able to borrow in Bitcoins at a reasonable rate of interest, real demand drops, then speculators are left holding a bunch of worthless digital currency.
If you think that Bitcoin is a good idea, you are likely in need of an education in economics and accounting and need to lay off of the conspiracy theories.
It's a problem that you don't have to carry around pockets full of change and pay a sizable portion of it just in the servicing of thousands of machines all over town? Too bad all of the profits and savings are now going to a private profit making entity instead of your tax coffers.
I hope that the inconvenience finally gets people to start parking outside of the city center and cities will invest more heavily in public transit. Maybe we can turn to digging up some of these streets and putting in useable space for people instead.
Although I am in strong support of net neutrality, the debate around it is not completely without merit. Having worked for a small local ISP I know first hand the difficulties of managing available bandwidth in an age of ever escalating average use load. Your ISP made promises of a certain amount of bandwidth at a certain price based on how much they expected the average user to use during peak times. There are costs associated with changes in these usage patterns and the issue of net neutrality is how to reduce load, increase revenue, or accept lower earnings. Net neutrality legislation would not allow ISPs to a: shift costs onto content providers who are changing average usage rates or b: target internet traffic only used by a small portion of very high usage customers to be deprioritized. At this point there aren't many options aside from increasing the cost of bandwidth, taking less revenue, charging for data transmitted instead of just bandwith, or (my preference) charging for quality of service based on amount of data transmitted. If we get net neutrality, our ISPs are going to have increased pressure to change their business strategies and may move to strategies like the one here, so in this sense, it is intimately linked to the discussion.
You could also use a citation because the corrolation of monetary supply to booms and busts is not necessarily causal.
Also, just to look at the obvious a bit, financial institutions such as Leahman Brothers and AIG show how an ineffectively regulated market can foster systemic risk and the government has a central role to play in exposing systemic risk so that it can be incorporated into decisions. Austrian school economics overly emphasizes the ability of the market to self-correct appropriately. While I won't disagree that the federal interest rate policy created pressure on financial institutions to find ways to obscure risk in order to provide financial products for those fleeing treasury bonds, I don't think it is reasonable to say that this policy is to blame for the failure of these institutions to responsibly manage their clients money.
This seems to be a popular story for the past few weeks, but it is a mistake to blame the statistical method used. The problem wasn't that they were all using the equaton, it is that they were all mis-using the equation. All statistical tools can fail to be sensitive to certain aspects which may be critical to an application.
People in finance applied these statistical tools believing that they would be able to master risk with them. Unfortunately, they made assumptions that certain things would continue to be the same in the future, plugged the information into the equation, and now science was telling them that everything would be alright. If everybody on Wall Street was making decisions based on the Magic 8 Ball would we blame the ball or the foolishness of those misapplying it?
Of the suggestions I have seen this one makes the most sense to me (with a close second being the games suggestion a bit down). Education simply works better when you are learning to DO something. The language you choose isn't as important here as what the interests of the students are. After you know the student interest you will then have a better idea of what language to write in.
Another idea would be to use Rails to design a school community website and then later design a site for a local non-profit group. Integrating programming with community outreach and provider client interaction would be great at this age.
Does that mean we shouldn't point out when the court system is failing to faithfully execute its office?
Note that I'm not saying that the court shouldn't have primacy in interpreting its laws. I'm saying that the court should force the executive to recognize legislative primacy when enacting laws. This case was about how to discriminate between the national security obligations of the military and the restrictions on environmental impact imposed by legislative action. Does the President have the right to ignore properly approved laws by claiming an impact on a national security matter, or does the President have to request a revision of the law before proceeding.
The court today ruled that the Congress need not be consulted and that the President can ignore the Endangered Species Act, and perhaps all sorts of other legislation, whenever he thinks it gets in the way of national security interests. This is why I say that the Supreme Court failed to enact the law which grants the Congress exclusive legislative power since the executive seems not to be bound to enforce it by this ruling.
I see! Since Congress decided to give the military funding, the President has the authority to issue any order he wishes without regard to to any other congressional statute. We should expect that if the Congress passes a law restricting the activities of government that the President's authority allows him to disregard that. It is great that justices who claim to be supporters of legislative primacy would choose to ignore the plain letter of the law and not require that the executive petition the Congress for redress.
Oh, thanks for pointing out that the Supreme Court has the right to interpret anything any way they want without review or consequence and as such we should all blindly reserve any negative criticism we may have regarding their decisions I had nearly forgotten that those with the authority to make decisions should be revered absolutely when they do.
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
In case you don't recognize it, it is located at the beginning of article I of the Constitution of the United States of America.
This is wretched discrimination and non-constructive. Any child who feels like educators are not empowering them enters into a state of learned helplessness which leads to increased levels of depression. Students with high abilities to achieve actually need more attention than underachieving students to avoid this outcome.
I'm not saying that underachieving students were doing well under the previous system or even overachieving students, but that there are lots of people hungry for the cake for different reasons. What we really need is more cake with higher nutritious value not a platitude requesting those who are skilled learners to shut the hell up.
This is a great summary of the arguments regarding space exploration and my take on each argument.
1. Space exploration will eventually allow us to establish a human civilization on another world (e.g., Mars) as a hedge against the type of catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Two issues arise here. First, the most likely sources of this sort of catastrophe are created by humans or preventable by our actions. If we spend our effort trying to allow the elite to escape the planet instead of trying to save the rest of humanity, what does that say about the people we are? Second, even if the catastrophe is not human affected, should we make such an economic investment simply to preserve our genetic information? Are we so vain as to think that our first purpose is to keep some slim vestige of humanity in existance?
2. We explore space and create important new technologies to advance our economy. It is true that, for every dollar we spend on the space program, the U.S. economy receives about $8 of economic benefit. Space exploration can also serve as a stimulus for children to enter the fields of science and engineering.
The figure is as bunk as virtually every attempt to determine the total economic value of a program. Few are arguing that the space program has been completely free of useful technological advancement, the question here is on the relative value of spending resources on manned, extra-planetary, and deep-space programs versus other research closer to home on programs like climate change, health and human services, and civil engineering. As for exciting children, perhaps educational reform would be a better place to spend that money.
3. Space exploration in an international context offers a peaceful cooperative venue that is a valuable alternative to nation state hostilities. One can look at the International Space Station and marvel that the former Soviet Union and the U.S. are now active partners. International cooperation is also a way to reduce costs.
While space exploration has a WOW! factor, try comparing it to international crisis prevention and non-military aid. It's a lot easier to hate foreign nations when they are spending money similar to your entire country's GDP to send people into outer space instead of feeding and clothing the poor.
4. National prestige requires that the U.S. continue to be a leader in space, and that includes human exploration. History tells us that great civilizations dare not abandon exploration.
In the past, exploration has involved finding other humans. I don't think reasonable people would claim that we stand any chance of finding other people out there. If we did find intelligent life with the capability to interact with us, then only the realm of science fiction can shed a glimmer of light on the outcome of such a meeting.
Perhaps people forget that the prestige that the United States has enjoyed for the past seventy years came not through exploration, but by attempts to strengthen the economies of the crumbling European empires to protect anti-Soviet alliances.
5. Exploration of space will provide humanity with an answer to the most fundamental questions: Are we alone? Are there other forms of life beside those on Earth?
Those who claim that the question of our extra-planetary neighbors is more important to humanity at this point than our ability to co-exist peacefully are dangerously foolish. The timeless problem of humanity is "How can we maintain a decent standard of living given the environmental and social fluctuations which endanger it?".
Although a lack of salt is a fine excuse to not send a mission here, the better reason is that these missions are a tremendous waste of taxpayer resources. While I am no free market capitalist, it is waste like this which give fire to those who say that government can't make financially sound decisions. Lets focus our space program on useful tasks such as orbital solar energy collection and leave the fruitless search for extraterrestrial life to the hobbiests.
Look at civil forfeiture law in the US. The government can sue your property and is given the ability to seize and sell your property based on a mere probable cause that the property was used for criminal purposes.
No, but it does suggest that the genetic evidence for this was not found in this study. Small genetic populations can easily be lost in a larger population. All this says is that the populations which survive today have markers and appropriate genetic variation to be descendants of descendants of populations in Asia.
This doesn't explain the cultural aspects of how the move occurred or how they were culturally linked to each other and to groups outside of the Americas. This mostly reinforces what was already known: that around 15,000 years ago, there was a dramatic population increase in the Americas starting in the Pacific Northwest and moving down to South America.
This information doesn't say anything about a land bridge or existing populations of people except to say that if there were existing populations that their genetics didn't survive to modern times in significant amounts which is suggestive of small populations which did not integrate into the new-coming population; if they existed at all.
Firstly, the OP didn't say that libertarians were leftist. It was ambiguous, but another valid interpretation is that the OP is a nerd who is a leftist, but is unable to find many other nerds who share these views.
The thought that libertarianism is 'logical' is a terrible self-justification. While we can have a definition war if we want, libertarianism is only logical in this example if one assumes a lot of premises which are quite contentious. The most important of these premises to the argument of libertarianism vs. leftism is the appropriate balance between individualism and collectivism. There are demographic factors which will help shape which premises you accept and which you reject. Understanding this is an important task for anybody who wants to understand why the world works.
The issue of income is extremely important on this, though probably flawed an an analysis. Income is a heavily studied indicator of political ideology and affiliation. Those with higher incomes tend to want lower governmental interference in their economic affairs. If you view the fundamental divides within the Republican party (the mainstream right-wing party in the U.S.) there is a break between lower income social ideologues and upper income economic libertarians.
Income, though, is not the only factor which plays into why nerds are probably more libertarian than other groups (a phenomenae I have also observed, but not seen documented). Income is probably important in that nerds are more likely fall into two groups (non-exclusive):
People who receive living wages from their employers.
People who idolize persons who have achieved economic success.
An apparent driver for those who want increased government economic intervention is low income without the appearance of mobility. If you don't think that your employment path will lead you to anything better, you probably want somebody to fix it, and that entity is probably not going to be a company like the one exploiting you.
I can imagine at least two other factors contributing to an increased appeal for libertarianism. Nerds of lower incomes tend to have jobs with acceptable work environments. Iron works are not places one would expect to find a large proportion of nerds. While nerd jobs tend to be high stress, there is usually not a fear of bodily harm associated with working at a retail store or a call center.
The final, and probably most important, reason I think nerds are more libertarian than the general population is because nerds are self-selecting introverts. Nerds are defined by their lack of ability or desire to integrate with the larger social order. Many nerds have a disdain or contempt for people who they think act 'illogically'. They don't join religious congregations at society's rate. This would naturally lead to a highly individualistic way of viewing the world, and without the normal forces which propel people to a more collectivist viewpoint and a lack of mainstream religiosity, libertarian ideologies must be appealing.
What they fail to figure is the opportunity cost of turning all of that cellulose into ethanol vs. its current use, which is largely animal feed and compost that is used to make products, as cover for off seasons, and to enrich soils for another season of crops. What is the energy cost of destroying your soil or offsetting the loss in other areas of the economy?
The number comes from estimates that agricultural analysts make about the energy inputs of farm production. Human inputs are generally not considered, but equipment repair costs (not replacement) are. The big energy inputs are equipment, water, and soil enrichment.
Another facet of the point is that natural gas (and coal) is an already useful source of energy in itself. The major components of fertilizer will always require useful hydrocarbons. This is a huge drag on the total energy efficiency of ethanol.
Currently, that's the deal, but one of the areas of agricultural research right now is to develop nitrogen fixing traits to high sugar yield crops, and to investigate and tweak non traditional crops that can be grown on marginal land, and make them drought resistant, etc..
To say 'right now' to this is misleading. These areas of research have been at the forefront of agricultural science for almost a century now.
Nitrogen fixing reduces solar efficiency meaning less sugar because the plant is instead fixing nitrogen.
Crops that grow in marginal conditions usually require soil replenishment quite regularly and drought resistant crops have lower yields.
Are you an agricultural professional, a farmer or a researcher with biofuels?
No, but I have taken classes and attended guest lectures from researchers who say that the excitement over ethanol is way overblown. Soil science researchers are pretty sceptical about the fundamental problems with ethanol.
We are in a transition stage now-so of course it isn't as efficient yet.
We are in the feasability research stage. Efficiency is decades out if ever, and we will continue to be dependent on fossile fuels. Even if we solved that problem, we still have the upcoming crisis in agriculture which is loss of topsoil due to erosion, which we have no real solution for. I like technological progress, but when dealing with problems that have been vexing researchers for as long as these, I don't trust that 'we will find a way'.
We are doing corn in the US because that is what we are set up to do in humongous mass quantities at the current time, as in this freaking year we get the corn, so that next year we will have millions of vehicles on the road that are at least partially being fueled with some biofuel.
This isn't a crop transition issue. As much as people try to claim, there is no magic crop which we need to switch to in order to solve the problems with ethanol. Feed corn is actually near the top for solar efficiency due to extended crop selection for the cattle industry.
As for increasing the number of cars partially using biofuel, I think it is extremely premature. The more money we invest in infrastructure for ethanol, the less is available for research in other energy sources and the more we will have to throw away once ethanol lets everybody down.
By the way, how are your solar panels doing?
I don't have solar panels. They aren't ready yet either, though their possibilities look a lot better than ethanol. My energy comes from oil recovered in Alaska which will be depleted and increases carbon emissions, electricity generated at river dams which kill fish and alter riparian ecosystems, and wind from the intermountain west which does alter world climate, but is also the most mature of the 'new' energy sources.
ie, just part of the problem, no part of the solution at all besides a hot head and a sharp tongue.
Actually, I'm working on developing a small, energy efficient house design that utilizes ground-coupled heat pumps to provide about 80% of the home's energy needs without other energy sources. I do use a lot more energy than I would like, but I think the only way we will make it through an energy crisis without resorting to nuclear (the safety net, in my opinion) is through a massive re-thinking of how we design our environment to conserve energy.
Thanks for the personal attack, though.
Sure, it's a semi free country and you can talk all you want, but a lot of people are actually doing stuff to try and make this better for everyone rather than just blogging about it or complaining. If you got a better way, do it, even at a small scale prototype level, then submit an article about it, turn everyone on to your leet energy producing skills.
BP is taking advantage of the political benefits of ethanol as transportation fuel. Politicians are winning over votes of corn growers by inflating the price of their crop and making them feel useful in solving a national problem. BP is positioning itself with this important constituancy with a huge advertizement campaign. I want to rip out my hair every time I see that ignorant farm kid talking about powering crap and growing it back in a year.
Learn a little bit about how agriculture works and you will discover that we are really just trading natural gas for ethanol. What do we do when we run out of cheap sources of fertilizer as natural gas starts getting tight?
Thank you. I would request that/. editors explain these sorts of things in the body of the news stub. It has always been a problem, but lately it feels like it is getting worse.
First, please be aware that it is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time. The extra 's' is extra.
Second, the cops really dropped the ball on this. When they request caller ID records they should be getting a list of all of the calls put into a certain number. When they identified the culprit they should have had a list of all of the other calls for the previous hour above it and should have been scratching their heads as to how many people called since the bomb threat.
Third, as is a widely held view 'round these parts, DST is a big pile of imaginary poo. Most people hate DST in the spring, but love it in the autumn. I vote that we do away with DST as well as time zones and just go with TAI. Sure, it means that kids across the country won't get out of school at 3 and there would have to be some work on when the day flips, but problems like this and the difficulties of getting air support at the Bay of Pigs would be greatly reduced.
To say that our brains evolved 'morality' is looking at a complex object and assigning it a single value. Morality can be explained as a combination of individual preferences combined with group association.
We have preferences and so do other people. Also, in order to work as a group we have to care about the preferences of others. It should come as no surprise whatsoever that we have parts of our brain which respond well when we fulfill the preferences of others. If we didn't we would be anti-social and it is much more likely that even if we aren't directly targeted by other humans, we wouldn't get their help and thus these traits are reinforced in the population.
The big questions about morality are how plastic our preference creation process is and how our empathy develops. I would venture to say that even though our brain is wired for the processes needed for morality that the connections with other thoughts and behavior can vary greatly even with identical genetic predispositions. Once again, we find that the nature/nurture debates of last century are largely meaningless and that the reality is that nature+nurture, indivisible, is the correct path.
Slashdot Mirror
Three Bitcoin articles on the front page in as many weeks? Sure, this one is a bit sideways, but seriously, the number of people involved with Bitcoin is insignificantly small and should remain that way. Stop hyping this project which is either an ill-fated experiment or a scam.
I don't understand why there is such a push to use grids to display sorted lists. Unity, Gnome 3, Android, Windows Explorer, iOS, MacOSX, etc. (even posix CLI commands such as ls): all of them have default settings to take a list of elements and then break the list up into meaningless rows and display a grid. I find it far too easy to miss important elements in these grids and I observe this behavior in others. Why are grids so damn popular?
Note that in this instance I am not complaining about grids where the user can create an arbitrary organization (such as a desktop not set to auto-arrange), but when the computer is taking a list of items and organizing it for you in a grid.
This is not to say that all Libertarians are ignorant, but that Bitcoin appeals to Libertarian ideals and requires ignorance of how money works to be sold. Bitcoin has no in-built velocity. Taxing authorities won't accept them and having a fixed amount of them means that they don't have a debt-based life-cycle as does the money most of us claim ownership to. Also, even if Bitcoin were to take off, as demand for it increased, it would create its own valuation bubble where it becomes more valuable to hold the money than it does to invest it. Nobody would be able to borrow in Bitcoins at a reasonable rate of interest, real demand drops, then speculators are left holding a bunch of worthless digital currency. If you think that Bitcoin is a good idea, you are likely in need of an education in economics and accounting and need to lay off of the conspiracy theories.
It's a problem that you don't have to carry around pockets full of change and pay a sizable portion of it just in the servicing of thousands of machines all over town? Too bad all of the profits and savings are now going to a private profit making entity instead of your tax coffers.
I hope that the inconvenience finally gets people to start parking outside of the city center and cities will invest more heavily in public transit. Maybe we can turn to digging up some of these streets and putting in useable space for people instead.
Although I am in strong support of net neutrality, the debate around it is not completely without merit. Having worked for a small local ISP I know first hand the difficulties of managing available bandwidth in an age of ever escalating average use load. Your ISP made promises of a certain amount of bandwidth at a certain price based on how much they expected the average user to use during peak times. There are costs associated with changes in these usage patterns and the issue of net neutrality is how to reduce load, increase revenue, or accept lower earnings. Net neutrality legislation would not allow ISPs to a: shift costs onto content providers who are changing average usage rates or b: target internet traffic only used by a small portion of very high usage customers to be deprioritized. At this point there aren't many options aside from increasing the cost of bandwidth, taking less revenue, charging for data transmitted instead of just bandwith, or (my preference) charging for quality of service based on amount of data transmitted. If we get net neutrality, our ISPs are going to have increased pressure to change their business strategies and may move to strategies like the one here, so in this sense, it is intimately linked to the discussion.
You could also use a citation because the corrolation of monetary supply to booms and busts is not necessarily causal.
Also, just to look at the obvious a bit, financial institutions such as Leahman Brothers and AIG show how an ineffectively regulated market can foster systemic risk and the government has a central role to play in exposing systemic risk so that it can be incorporated into decisions. Austrian school economics overly emphasizes the ability of the market to self-correct appropriately. While I won't disagree that the federal interest rate policy created pressure on financial institutions to find ways to obscure risk in order to provide financial products for those fleeing treasury bonds, I don't think it is reasonable to say that this policy is to blame for the failure of these institutions to responsibly manage their clients money.
This seems to be a popular story for the past few weeks, but it is a mistake to blame the statistical method used. The problem wasn't that they were all using the equaton, it is that they were all mis-using the equation. All statistical tools can fail to be sensitive to certain aspects which may be critical to an application.
People in finance applied these statistical tools believing that they would be able to master risk with them. Unfortunately, they made assumptions that certain things would continue to be the same in the future, plugged the information into the equation, and now science was telling them that everything would be alright. If everybody on Wall Street was making decisions based on the Magic 8 Ball would we blame the ball or the foolishness of those misapplying it?
Of the suggestions I have seen this one makes the most sense to me (with a close second being the games suggestion a bit down). Education simply works better when you are learning to DO something. The language you choose isn't as important here as what the interests of the students are. After you know the student interest you will then have a better idea of what language to write in.
Another idea would be to use Rails to design a school community website and then later design a site for a local non-profit group. Integrating programming with community outreach and provider client interaction would be great at this age.
Does that mean we shouldn't point out when the court system is failing to faithfully execute its office?
Note that I'm not saying that the court shouldn't have primacy in interpreting its laws. I'm saying that the court should force the executive to recognize legislative primacy when enacting laws. This case was about how to discriminate between the national security obligations of the military and the restrictions on environmental impact imposed by legislative action. Does the President have the right to ignore properly approved laws by claiming an impact on a national security matter, or does the President have to request a revision of the law before proceeding.
The court today ruled that the Congress need not be consulted and that the President can ignore the Endangered Species Act, and perhaps all sorts of other legislation, whenever he thinks it gets in the way of national security interests. This is why I say that the Supreme Court failed to enact the law which grants the Congress exclusive legislative power since the executive seems not to be bound to enforce it by this ruling.
I see! Since Congress decided to give the military funding, the President has the authority to issue any order he wishes without regard to to any other congressional statute. We should expect that if the Congress passes a law restricting the activities of government that the President's authority allows him to disregard that. It is great that justices who claim to be supporters of legislative primacy would choose to ignore the plain letter of the law and not require that the executive petition the Congress for redress.
Oh, thanks for pointing out that the Supreme Court has the right to interpret anything any way they want without review or consequence and as such we should all blindly reserve any negative criticism we may have regarding their decisions I had nearly forgotten that those with the authority to make decisions should be revered absolutely when they do.
In case you don't recognize it, it is located at the beginning of article I of the Constitution of the United States of America.
This is wretched discrimination and non-constructive. Any child who feels like educators are not empowering them enters into a state of learned helplessness which leads to increased levels of depression. Students with high abilities to achieve actually need more attention than underachieving students to avoid this outcome.
I'm not saying that underachieving students were doing well under the previous system or even overachieving students, but that there are lots of people hungry for the cake for different reasons. What we really need is more cake with higher nutritious value not a platitude requesting those who are skilled learners to shut the hell up.
This is a great summary of the arguments regarding space exploration and my take on each argument.
Two issues arise here. First, the most likely sources of this sort of catastrophe are created by humans or preventable by our actions. If we spend our effort trying to allow the elite to escape the planet instead of trying to save the rest of humanity, what does that say about the people we are? Second, even if the catastrophe is not human affected, should we make such an economic investment simply to preserve our genetic information? Are we so vain as to think that our first purpose is to keep some slim vestige of humanity in existance?
The figure is as bunk as virtually every attempt to determine the total economic value of a program. Few are arguing that the space program has been completely free of useful technological advancement, the question here is on the relative value of spending resources on manned, extra-planetary, and deep-space programs versus other research closer to home on programs like climate change, health and human services, and civil engineering. As for exciting children, perhaps educational reform would be a better place to spend that money.
While space exploration has a WOW! factor, try comparing it to international crisis prevention and non-military aid. It's a lot easier to hate foreign nations when they are spending money similar to your entire country's GDP to send people into outer space instead of feeding and clothing the poor.
In the past, exploration has involved finding other humans. I don't think reasonable people would claim that we stand any chance of finding other people out there. If we did find intelligent life with the capability to interact with us, then only the realm of science fiction can shed a glimmer of light on the outcome of such a meeting.
Perhaps people forget that the prestige that the United States has enjoyed for the past seventy years came not through exploration, but by attempts to strengthen the economies of the crumbling European empires to protect anti-Soviet alliances.
Those who claim that the question of our extra-planetary neighbors is more important to humanity at this point than our ability to co-exist peacefully are dangerously foolish. The timeless problem of humanity is "How can we maintain a decent standard of living given the environmental and social fluctuations which endanger it?".
Although a lack of salt is a fine excuse to not send a mission here, the better reason is that these missions are a tremendous waste of taxpayer resources. While I am no free market capitalist, it is waste like this which give fire to those who say that government can't make financially sound decisions. Lets focus our space program on useful tasks such as orbital solar energy collection and leave the fruitless search for extraterrestrial life to the hobbiests.
Look at civil forfeiture law in the US. The government can sue your property and is given the ability to seize and sell your property based on a mere probable cause that the property was used for criminal purposes.
http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/looting-of-america.html
No, but it does suggest that the genetic evidence for this was not found in this study. Small genetic populations can easily be lost in a larger population. All this says is that the populations which survive today have markers and appropriate genetic variation to be descendants of descendants of populations in Asia.
This doesn't explain the cultural aspects of how the move occurred or how they were culturally linked to each other and to groups outside of the Americas. This mostly reinforces what was already known: that around 15,000 years ago, there was a dramatic population increase in the Americas starting in the Pacific Northwest and moving down to South America.
This information doesn't say anything about a land bridge or existing populations of people except to say that if there were existing populations that their genetics didn't survive to modern times in significant amounts which is suggestive of small populations which did not integrate into the new-coming population; if they existed at all.
Firstly, the OP didn't say that libertarians were leftist. It was ambiguous, but another valid interpretation is that the OP is a nerd who is a leftist, but is unable to find many other nerds who share these views.
The thought that libertarianism is 'logical' is a terrible self-justification. While we can have a definition war if we want, libertarianism is only logical in this example if one assumes a lot of premises which are quite contentious. The most important of these premises to the argument of libertarianism vs. leftism is the appropriate balance between individualism and collectivism. There are demographic factors which will help shape which premises you accept and which you reject. Understanding this is an important task for anybody who wants to understand why the world works.
The issue of income is extremely important on this, though probably flawed an an analysis. Income is a heavily studied indicator of political ideology and affiliation. Those with higher incomes tend to want lower governmental interference in their economic affairs. If you view the fundamental divides within the Republican party (the mainstream right-wing party in the U.S.) there is a break between lower income social ideologues and upper income economic libertarians.
Income, though, is not the only factor which plays into why nerds are probably more libertarian than other groups (a phenomenae I have also observed, but not seen documented). Income is probably important in that nerds are more likely fall into two groups (non-exclusive):
People who receive living wages from their employers.
People who idolize persons who have achieved economic success.
An apparent driver for those who want increased government economic intervention is low income without the appearance of mobility. If you don't think that your employment path will lead you to anything better, you probably want somebody to fix it, and that entity is probably not going to be a company like the one exploiting you.
I can imagine at least two other factors contributing to an increased appeal for libertarianism. Nerds of lower incomes tend to have jobs with acceptable work environments. Iron works are not places one would expect to find a large proportion of nerds. While nerd jobs tend to be high stress, there is usually not a fear of bodily harm associated with working at a retail store or a call center.
The final, and probably most important, reason I think nerds are more libertarian than the general population is because nerds are self-selecting introverts. Nerds are defined by their lack of ability or desire to integrate with the larger social order. Many nerds have a disdain or contempt for people who they think act 'illogically'. They don't join religious congregations at society's rate. This would naturally lead to a highly individualistic way of viewing the world, and without the normal forces which propel people to a more collectivist viewpoint and a lack of mainstream religiosity, libertarian ideologies must be appealing.
What they fail to figure is the opportunity cost of turning all of that cellulose into ethanol vs. its current use, which is largely animal feed and compost that is used to make products, as cover for off seasons, and to enrich soils for another season of crops. What is the energy cost of destroying your soil or offsetting the loss in other areas of the economy?
The number comes from estimates that agricultural analysts make about the energy inputs of farm production. Human inputs are generally not considered, but equipment repair costs (not replacement) are. The big energy inputs are equipment, water, and soil enrichment.
Thank you for the addition.
Another facet of the point is that natural gas (and coal) is an already useful source of energy in itself. The major components of fertilizer will always require useful hydrocarbons. This is a huge drag on the total energy efficiency of ethanol.
To say 'right now' to this is misleading. These areas of research have been at the forefront of agricultural science for almost a century now.
Nitrogen fixing reduces solar efficiency meaning less sugar because the plant is instead fixing nitrogen.
Crops that grow in marginal conditions usually require soil replenishment quite regularly and drought resistant crops have lower yields.
No, but I have taken classes and attended guest lectures from researchers who say that the excitement over ethanol is way overblown. Soil science researchers are pretty sceptical about the fundamental problems with ethanol.
We are in the feasability research stage. Efficiency is decades out if ever, and we will continue to be dependent on fossile fuels. Even if we solved that problem, we still have the upcoming crisis in agriculture which is loss of topsoil due to erosion, which we have no real solution for. I like technological progress, but when dealing with problems that have been vexing researchers for as long as these, I don't trust that 'we will find a way'.
This isn't a crop transition issue. As much as people try to claim, there is no magic crop which we need to switch to in order to solve the problems with ethanol. Feed corn is actually near the top for solar efficiency due to extended crop selection for the cattle industry.
As for increasing the number of cars partially using biofuel, I think it is extremely premature. The more money we invest in infrastructure for ethanol, the less is available for research in other energy sources and the more we will have to throw away once ethanol lets everybody down.
I don't have solar panels. They aren't ready yet either, though their possibilities look a lot better than ethanol. My energy comes from oil recovered in Alaska which will be depleted and increases carbon emissions, electricity generated at river dams which kill fish and alter riparian ecosystems, and wind from the intermountain west which does alter world climate, but is also the most mature of the 'new' energy sources.
Actually, I'm working on developing a small, energy efficient house design that utilizes ground-coupled heat pumps to provide about 80% of the home's energy needs without other energy sources. I do use a lot more energy than I would like, but I think the only way we will make it through an energy crisis without resorting to nuclear (the safety net, in my opinion) is through a massive re-thinking of how we design our environment to conserve energy.
Thanks for the personal attack, though.
Mod parent up!
BP is taking advantage of the political benefits of ethanol as transportation fuel. Politicians are winning over votes of corn growers by inflating the price of their crop and making them feel useful in solving a national problem. BP is positioning itself with this important constituancy with a huge advertizement campaign. I want to rip out my hair every time I see that ignorant farm kid talking about powering crap and growing it back in a year.
Learn a little bit about how agriculture works and you will discover that we are really just trading natural gas for ethanol. What do we do when we run out of cheap sources of fertilizer as natural gas starts getting tight?
Thank you. I would request that /. editors explain these sorts of things in the body of the news stub. It has always been a problem, but lately it feels like it is getting worse.
Mod parent up!
First, please be aware that it is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time. The extra 's' is extra.
Second, the cops really dropped the ball on this. When they request caller ID records they should be getting a list of all of the calls put into a certain number. When they identified the culprit they should have had a list of all of the other calls for the previous hour above it and should have been scratching their heads as to how many people called since the bomb threat.
Third, as is a widely held view 'round these parts, DST is a big pile of imaginary poo. Most people hate DST in the spring, but love it in the autumn. I vote that we do away with DST as well as time zones and just go with TAI. Sure, it means that kids across the country won't get out of school at 3 and there would have to be some work on when the day flips, but problems like this and the difficulties of getting air support at the Bay of Pigs would be greatly reduced.
To say that our brains evolved 'morality' is looking at a complex object and assigning it a single value. Morality can be explained as a combination of individual preferences combined with group association.
We have preferences and so do other people. Also, in order to work as a group we have to care about the preferences of others. It should come as no surprise whatsoever that we have parts of our brain which respond well when we fulfill the preferences of others. If we didn't we would be anti-social and it is much more likely that even if we aren't directly targeted by other humans, we wouldn't get their help and thus these traits are reinforced in the population.
The big questions about morality are how plastic our preference creation process is and how our empathy develops. I would venture to say that even though our brain is wired for the processes needed for morality that the connections with other thoughts and behavior can vary greatly even with identical genetic predispositions. Once again, we find that the nature/nurture debates of last century are largely meaningless and that the reality is that nature+nurture, indivisible, is the correct path.