The only problem is people don't get very motivated until we're really on the edge.
The key problem with that is that the longer you wait the more equipment you have to replace and/or upgrade. And more upgrades and replacements means more money spent that would otherwise not had the equipment been installed with IPv6 from the get go.
So if you wait too long you can cripple your company/agency with overhead in contractor and equipment costs which could have been averted if you implemented a plan earlier. Of course, in the process you'll also make a lot of hourly contractors happy for the over time;)
Really? Evolution has been programming people to kill their mates through disease? Whoa, I've missed a lot in sex ed!
You got it backwards. Human evolution is geared to having humans have sex as much as possible regardless of how well the individual human lives long term, whereas the evolution of a virus is pushed towards propagation any means possible. In the case of HIV it is evolved to propagate through sex.
I'm not justifying human actions that are wrong because of evolutionary traits, I'm saying that it is unreasonable to expect the majority of humans who have no understanding of their biological functions to be able to withstand their biological impulses.
Its like expecting a human to not eat saturated fatty foods versus plain old tasteless if you present it to them when they have had no formal education on the fact that it isn't good for them.
You can't just point at people and say "Don't have sex!". It doesn't work and never will. If it was that easy we'd have gone extinct centuries ago.
You want the average human to stop doing what evolution has spent 300 million years programming them to do? Its kind of like asking bears to not eat trout. Its what they do!
So true, I like tactics games like WH40K as much as the next person, but one of the reasons I can't play new D&D and the MMORPGs these days is because it all combat based.
During my 3rd ed hayday back in the early 90s the majority of the fun for the players was creative ways on how to avoid combat.
This ranged from anything to defeating undead pirates by setting the ships's sails on fire, to letting the villagers get eaten by vampires at night and then showing up at the graveyard during with a cart full of barrels of ignitable oil to shove down the crypt (well one of our party members was a pryomaniac) because we were all role playing cowards, and various countless other things that make the DM beat his head on the table, tear up his notes, and weep...
I remember one day the DM at summer camp went something like this after our wizard used a vine spell to restrain a group of attacking half orcs chasing a dwarf who had run off.
DM: (rolls dice) Ok vine spell has critical hit and you capture entire party of half orcs. You slay them and prepare to follow the dwarf. You all gain 50 xp each and 50 gold... Me: Hold on! Who said anything about killing them and chasing after the dwarf? DM: Well... What do you want to do with them? Player (with the pyromaniac gnome): Set them on fire! Me: No... We'll interrogate them and find out why they were chasing after the dwarf and then find their HQ and take them out their master at the source! I'll start poking one in the arm with my sword! DM: *sigh* As you poke him you discover that the half orcs have had their tounges cut out! Me: Fine... Lets untie one and force him to take us to his camp! DM: They are also deaf... Me: I search their possessions to look for a note from their master... DM: Arrghh! You find "KILL THE DWARF" carved in their chest! Will you please just follow the dwarf! Me: How about we return to town? DM: Nnnnnggg!!!! *tears up his campaign notes* A DRAGON EATS YOU ALL!!!
Fun times like that are rare when all you do is kill things....
People debate the merits of e-voting for a variety of reasons, including suspicion of new technologies and a general distrust of politics
I don't think its as much as a suspicion of new technologies as much as the objections of those familiar with it. Even those who works with computers at a basic level understand that its far easier to drag and drop a thousand doc files into a trash can on the desktop than it is to shred a thousand physical copies.
That is my biggest argument for paper ballots is not fear of new technology, but rather a safe guard of making it harder to destroy evidence of tampering. If you wanted to cheat and election, it is far easier to type an SQL command in a console than it is to dispose of or forge thousands of physical ballots without anyone noticing.
In a perfect world, electronic voting would be the obvious choice, but given human nature and politics there should be as many safeguards as possible against possible corruption.
"It's like proving something exists buy using something that doesn't exist."
To be fair, if you can prove something doesn't exist or isn't true, then you can assume another theory is the more probable scenario. However, one must be opened minded that the next best possible scenario also might be proven to be false eventually as well.
Actually, I think most of astronomy and quantum physics is basically about what you can prove isn't true rather than what you can prove true mostly for the fact that we are limited to how little we can observe at really large and small scales. Its not like a researcher can get an exacto knife and split atoms into their core parts for view under a microscope or ask his assistant to run to the nearest neighbor galaxy to pick up a sample of dark mater. The best they can do is say "Well... We know its not that!" and cross it off an almost infinite list of theories.
Keep in mind that driving is a highly regulated privilege, not a right.
Freedom of travel is a basic human right. (Papers please!) I suppose its questionable how you do it though. If you can't get there by bus, train, or air and hitchhiking and pedestrians on highways are illegal then tell me how does one travel freely?
How is that abuse? Anyone doing 80mph on a road where the limit is 55mph is breaking the law and should be caught and fined, and if they do it too many times, have their car impounded and crushed into a little cube, and then charged a disposal fee for their cube.
I think the problem is that of now, everyone breaks the law every now and then without really thinking about it. If the world got to a state where you got punished every time you broke the law even slightly then such issue would get quite serious.
In fact, I'd wager (if you have a car) that you broke the speed limit somewhere the last time you drove even if it was simply 1 to 5mph over the limit.
The real problem is that many local and state government gets a great deal of revenue from speeding and parking tickets so rather than to alleviate the core problem of they encourage quotas and sometimes post arbitrary low speed limits in order to increase revenue. I mentioned parking tickets because there was story a while back where an Apple Store offered to buy two parking meters outside their store to mark as no-parking zone for aesthetics (you know Apple) at the theoretical price of what those parking meters could provide if they were maned 24/7 365 days a year, but the city refused on the grounds it had never been done but moreover they made more money from parking tickets than the actual meters. Its the same with speeding... They don't want reduction but they want the violations.
If a cell phone system allowed them to charge violators instantly it would result in more of this at the extreme not to mention possible corruption. Recently in Philadelphia, there is a big spat between city hall and the Parking Authority about revenue and where it is going and complaints about corruption the the Authority organization.
My first suggestion would be to either have revenues earn not go to the gathering organization itself but possibly elsewhere like education or charity.
And if they want a technical solution, then I would argue that make it so cars can't break the posted limit rather than fining them money every time they violate the speed (and or parking). Now keep in mind, I'm probaly one of the more slower drivers out there you'll meet and you'll never see me park in a place I'm not supposed to (I'm that anal) but the issue that these organizations being allowed another way to squeeze money and make things arbitrarily "more illegal" in order to increase revenue bothers me.
None of these government bodies actually want to curb speeding. Their livelihood depends on it.
Point is that there are a million ways to take down a plane, or terrorize a plane, what have you. Almost all of them are simpler than a binary explosive.
And even then it would probaly makes much more sense to the terrorist to just bomb the people standing in line at the airport security since there are no prior security checks before then.
All and all, if there is another attack I doubt it will be plane related. It would make much more sense to just get on a crowded bus or mall. The security at the airport is just wasted time and money.
Ron Paul would let corporations do whatever they want with the Internet, which includes AT&T's plans to violate Net Neutrality and snoop on content (to police for "piracy"), avoid equal access for competition, and every other dirty trick they invent in what passes for their "innovation".
Umm... I though RP wanted to kick corporations out of the Federal Government. Hence, there would be no NSA ATT wiretaps or kickbacks to the telco/cable monopolies or FCC regulations as we know them now.
I think people forget that empowering the Federal Government just means that it leads to corporations investing more control over it. Although I disagree on Paul on many social issues, I will agree that the current situation in DC is pretty much forgone. The problem is that the Federal government is being used to solve problems which ends up being lucrative to a subset of parties.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that you will never acheive a neutering of corporations without fixing the root core of the problem which is "corporate personhood" which Ron Paul is highly against.
Simply arguing over who is going to pass bills that support technology or wedge issues is ignoring the 9 trillion dollar white elephant in the room along with the billion dollar war that appears to have no end in sight.
Unfortunately, neither of the major parties seem to acknowledge that we are in for some hard times and that the current economic and political system has some major issues that might be insurmountable in the near future.
I'm tired of people saying "I like 'X cannidate's' message! It inspires me!"
Not to goodwin this, but Hitler inspired people too and we really need to be pragmatic about the next leader. If not Paul, then someone else who at best is nothing more than good technocrat and not an ideologist who's going to drag us down even further.
As the lead guitarist of the Clash said (paraphrased) "It was easy for kids to jump from long haired glam rockers in the mid 70's to the short spikey haired punks in the late 70's over night. Had they wanted to do the reverse, they would have to wait a while for their hair to grow out."
Except with software it reserved so its easier to add than to remove.
If your business model relies on free but high Google page rank, you might consider another business model... Namely one that involved buying ads so that when someone searches they get you above the first "free" hit.
I think that was the point of technology in general behind terror bombing and would just be a natural evolution of robot warfare.
When Germany and the UK built twin engine bombers, the first thing they did was of course drop bombs on enemy troops but one thing led to another and it came about that both sides thought it was a good idea to bomb the enemy civilian population to bring the war to a quick close.
Sadly even with all the human suffering, terror bombing was not attributed to the end of the war in either Europe nor Japan. German war capacity was at its highest in 1944 (they simply moved their factories east out of range or underground) and the Japanese were more or less starving and incapacitated not because of the bombing raids but due to the unrestricted submarine warfare that had so successfully crippled their imports of food and natural resources via their navy.
Now apply this to a modern application. I believe it will be true that nations with robotic armed forces will be less hesitant to use their forces in war, but its like the US and Soviets with the Nuclear arms race. Had the neither the Soviets or the Americans not build nuclear weapons equivalently, one side would have had less reason to not use their weapons. Had it not been for fear of Soviet retaliation, we'd have most likley used Nukes in the Korean war for example.
That said... It was most like fear of American nuclear retaliation that kept the Soviets out of West germany and one would suspect even with a fully automated robotic force that the US would not attack any nation with nuclear capabilities due to the fact that not only robots are fully damageable by EMP generated by them, but human civilians generally are still as burnable as they were in 1945 by atomic weapons as they are now.
Of course if you are a small nation without WMDs then I think the idea of robotic warfare won't go in your favor.
Losing touch with a focal point of popular culture and the related detrimental social side-effects is definitely a valid point.
From a personal and purely anecdotal story one of my child hood friends growing up in the mid 80's had parents that were super strict. They didn't have a TV, didn't allow soda, no video games, and no toy guns. They weren't religious as much as they were more hippies like my parents, but mine seem to let me watch TV (including Ren and Stimpy), play NES, and play with lots of toy guns. They moved away and I lost touch, but it turned out that he got really rebellious when he turned teen, died his hair green, listened to popular (I suppose it was gen X) music. Around the turn of the century or so I found out that he OD'd on heroin and died while attending college.
Now, this isn't a subjective view of everyone who bans TV and popular culture, but I thought it was sadly ironic given my parents had been so liberal in my upbringing. I was playing Doom around 12 or 13 and loved Mortal Kombat to death and I have never gotten in a real world fight ever. At the same time I was pretty wild, but I guess I had outlets.
To be fair, TV's changed and if I were a parent, I'd probaly block everything except the History Channel, Discovery Channel, CNN, public stations, Nick, and Cartoon network. Hell thats all I watch now...
And to be really fair, I know a girl who had extreme religious parents who basically disowned her for being rebellious and she has been quite successful even with a sort alternative/club lifestyle.
It is just something to consider there is a small chance that being too sheltering can be detrimental. I think the best thing my parents did was take an interest in what I was interested in and helped me support it.
You bought your house in the wrong place. Next time look for bus stops when you buy.
I live in a city where decent housing near public transportation are nearly 3 times in price what they should be. I mean... Its great if you have money to blow on a $600,000 house, but othere wise not so great if you don't make they much.
just blanking a page.... how unprofessional, it did no good to the world the way then the way it could have been done.
Hrm... To me a blank page would most likley mean a server problem than a hack. Maybe the server had an issue and everyone assumed that the site had been hacked and someone pretended to claim responbility?
These guys lived in a non-stop world of abstractions, symbols, logic and ideas. And that's a useful world in many ways, but it's not the real world. The real world is the world you see, hear, taste, smell, feel & experience directly.
I disagree. Both are the real world because they affect each other. In a sense the world of abstractions, symbols, logic and ideas affects what you can see, hear, taste, etc and experience directly. Or better yet gives you control of what you experience... Like reading music notation (symbols) and pushing piano keys (logic) to get the sounds.
As much as I am pro-"meditation", I really doubt it would have solved their situations. As much as I meditate, it would never bring about a direct change in that world simply by meditating other than how I see it, but even if you were a 10 year veteran of meditation Chronic pain is not something one can will away with ease.
Meditation is good for compulsions and understanding what you do. But if you are clinically depressed, most instructors will still tell you to get professional help.
My position is that until there is no improvement regarding political ethics you will end up with the same quality of political discussion/decision making that you have today. In short, you have to create a proper set of choices first.
I really doubt you'd ever get the political parties fixed before you would the voting system. I'd argue that the key benefits of a proportional parliamentary system is that it limits the damage caused by one party over another.
The problem with Western (I'm assuming American) Winner takes all is that you have 51% of the people literally telling the other 49% what to do without recourse. This gets exorbitantly bad when the same party controls both the Presidency and Congress. In fact, I'll argue that the quality of what the government does (or the fact it isn't doing as much) is when either the congress and presidency is in opposition.
The only real good solution is to set up the system so that there is always an opposition or some sort of road block and consolation of the people who did not win the election.
If you have ever studied US history, you will know that during the beginning the Vice President was not appointed or chosen by the winning President but rather was the person who lost but had the most votes. He didn't have veto power, but over all I think it provided some obstacles for a President who wanted to railroad the opposition.
If we were to really reform in the United States, I would argue that the Vice Presidency go to the looser in the election and he would get veto power. Not an overriding veto though. If the President's party owns the congress and he wants to sign the legislation but the Vice President does not like it, the VP can of course veto it just like the president and congress has to get 2/3rds just like the regular President. However, if the President Vetoes a bill the VP can't unveto it and congress has to do the old 2/3rds method.
Also, the President and VP can choose their Deputy President and and Deputy VP in case one of them dies or is hospitalized so that the Presidency or Vice Presidency stays within the same party until the next election.
I suppose the biggest argument against this is that government won't get anything done, and I say that is a good thing because when you setup a situation in which every party must compromise with the other then usually the 49% of the losers aren't going to get railroaded with things they are vehemently against.
As far as addressing proportional representations, I would argue that we would have to do away with the house of representatives as we know it and do a popular election. If there are a total of 500 seats then you would divide that into 300,000,000 you would get around 600,000 votes per seat. So you could run for a seat in the House and as long as you got 600,000 votes you would be guaranteed a seat. If you got more than that, it wouldn't count. Now of course since all 300 million people don't usually vote, you are going to get plenty of people who didn't get the 600,000 votes to get a seat so you just allow those runner up in the order of highest nation wide votes until you run out of 500 seats.
That way candidates can run across states so have a more populist view.
BUT in order to retain the power of the states, I would argue the Senate revert back to its old method of having the senators being elected directly by the state governments or a sort of electoral college for each of the states districts. Now this might seem a step backwards, but in order to balance things out and retain some sort of local constituency of the Senators, they need to be elected by the state or appointed by the State legislators.
However, there might be better ways to reform the US government, but currently I think its quite broke that we let winners take all do whatever they want while the 49% who voted against the party have little or not say.
The only reason that the Hindenburg seems so bad in retrospect is because there were a buttload of reporters at the right place at the right time (they planned to report a successful zeppelin trip), and because zeppelins don't die quietly, but rather in a huge exploding fireball.
True, the most fatal Commercial Air Accident was the Japan Airlines Flight 123 with 520 fatalities and a surprising 4 survivors, yet we still have plenty of 747s flying around today.
That said, I don't think the Hindenburg disaster was the real cause of end of the airships. Germany had decided early on that Airships (especially ones filled with Hydrogen since they couldn't buy Helium from the Americans) would not work in combat that well and really needed the steel due to shortages.
Secondly, the US Navy did pursue Helium rigid Airships before WWII, but lost them all in storms and came up with the non-rigid ones we have today like the Good Year blimp because they wouldn't snap in half in heavy winds.
Now with the more flexible materials like aluminum, plastics, and titanium relatively cheap compared to the 1930's I wonder if rigid airships could make a come back.
There is just something a bunch of 0's and 1's can't replace.
The first step I do when I get a CD is rip it to MP3 and then the last is put the CD in a storage container. I might look at the artwork in between, but the nostalgia of music has been lost on me lately.
The basic evidence for 'dark matter' is that galaxies are rotating to fast and maintaining there shape differently than gravitational allows for. They should fly apart or never been formed. Rather then change the current theory, scientists went out and invented 'dark matter'.
So care to explain why there appears to be an expanding universe? Dark matter is a stop gap, but unless you provide a better reason, its all we got. I think that was the point of projects like this to either prove or disprove 'dark matter'.
No! That's what some creationists say, but it is a fallacy. It is well known that science makes the materialistic assumption that everything has a natural cause, and this obviously excludes supernatural things such as God.
The key problem is interpretation of religion taken into literally context excludes a universe without supernatural occurrences. Either you have to change the scientific method to take into account super-natural occurrences or you have to reinterpret religion to conform with science.
For the most part religion has discounted science without changing, but one could reverse that and say something like God is a quantum simulation and Jesus Christ was the inevitably outcome of a civilization that had to reach a technological singularity before the next meteor impact because had Christianity not come about the Roman empire would have not fallen as soon and slave labor would not have gone out of style in which technology would not have flourished quick enough to avoid the next impact that would put mankind into extinction which would go against the idea of quantum observation.
Of course this entails nothing of an afterlife or salvation which puts Christianity, Judaism, and Islam at odds with Science if all were taken literally. The only religion as of know that comes close to being compatible literally with science is of course Buddhism which simply explains the situation of the mind, but not trying to claim away all natural phenomena as the will of god or gods.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem is people don't get very motivated until we're really on the edge.
;)
The key problem with that is that the longer you wait the more equipment you have to replace and/or upgrade. And more upgrades and replacements means more money spent that would otherwise not had the equipment been installed with IPv6 from the get go.
So if you wait too long you can cripple your company/agency with overhead in contractor and equipment costs which could have been averted if you implemented a plan earlier. Of course, in the process you'll also make a lot of hourly contractors happy for the over time
Really? Evolution has been programming people to kill their mates through disease? Whoa, I've missed a lot in sex ed!
You got it backwards. Human evolution is geared to having humans have sex as much as possible regardless of how well the individual human lives long term, whereas the evolution of a virus is pushed towards propagation any means possible. In the case of HIV it is evolved to propagate through sex.
I'm not justifying human actions that are wrong because of evolutionary traits, I'm saying that it is unreasonable to expect the majority of humans who have no understanding of their biological functions to be able to withstand their biological impulses.
Its like expecting a human to not eat saturated fatty foods versus plain old tasteless if you present it to them when they have had no formal education on the fact that it isn't good for them.
You can't just point at people and say "Don't have sex!". It doesn't work and never will. If it was that easy we'd have gone extinct centuries ago.
Is abstinence really that difficult?
You want the average human to stop doing what evolution has spent 300 million years programming them to do? Its kind of like asking bears to not eat trout. Its what they do!
So true, I like tactics games like WH40K as much as the next person, but one of the reasons I can't play new D&D and the MMORPGs these days is because it all combat based.
During my 3rd ed hayday back in the early 90s the majority of the fun for the players was creative ways on how to avoid combat.
This ranged from anything to defeating undead pirates by setting the ships's sails on fire, to letting the villagers get eaten by vampires at night and then showing up at the graveyard during with a cart full of barrels of ignitable oil to shove down the crypt (well one of our party members was a pryomaniac) because we were all role playing cowards, and various countless other things that make the DM beat his head on the table, tear up his notes, and weep...
I remember one day the DM at summer camp went something like this after our wizard used a vine spell to restrain a group of attacking half orcs chasing a dwarf who had run off.
DM: (rolls dice) Ok vine spell has critical hit and you capture entire party of half orcs. You slay them and prepare to follow the dwarf. You all gain 50 xp each and 50 gold...
Me: Hold on! Who said anything about killing them and chasing after the dwarf?
DM: Well... What do you want to do with them?
Player (with the pyromaniac gnome): Set them on fire!
Me: No... We'll interrogate them and find out why they were chasing after the dwarf and then find their HQ and take them out their master at the source! I'll start poking one in the arm with my sword!
DM: *sigh* As you poke him you discover that the half orcs have had their tounges cut out!
Me: Fine... Lets untie one and force him to take us to his camp!
DM: They are also deaf...
Me: I search their possessions to look for a note from their master...
DM: Arrghh! You find "KILL THE DWARF" carved in their chest! Will you please just follow the dwarf!
Me: How about we return to town?
DM: Nnnnnggg!!!! *tears up his campaign notes* A DRAGON EATS YOU ALL!!!
Fun times like that are rare when all you do is kill things....
How many batteries and solar panels can you buy for $1.8 billion dollars?
I don't think its as much as a suspicion of new technologies as much as the objections of those familiar with it. Even those who works with computers at a basic level understand that its far easier to drag and drop a thousand doc files into a trash can on the desktop than it is to shred a thousand physical copies.
That is my biggest argument for paper ballots is not fear of new technology, but rather a safe guard of making it harder to destroy evidence of tampering. If you wanted to cheat and election, it is far easier to type an SQL command in a console than it is to dispose of or forge thousands of physical ballots without anyone noticing.
In a perfect world, electronic voting would be the obvious choice, but given human nature and politics there should be as many safeguards as possible against possible corruption.
"It's like proving something exists buy using something that doesn't exist."
To be fair, if you can prove something doesn't exist or isn't true, then you can assume another theory is the more probable scenario. However, one must be opened minded that the next best possible scenario also might be proven to be false eventually as well.
Actually, I think most of astronomy and quantum physics is basically about what you can prove isn't true rather than what you can prove true mostly for the fact that we are limited to how little we can observe at really large and small scales. Its not like a researcher can get an exacto knife and split atoms into their core parts for view under a microscope or ask his assistant to run to the nearest neighbor galaxy to pick up a sample of dark mater. The best they can do is say "Well... We know its not that!" and cross it off an almost infinite list of theories.
...that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
But sometimes its pretty malicious to be that willfully stupid.
Keep in mind that driving is a highly regulated privilege, not a right.
Freedom of travel is a basic human right. (Papers please!) I suppose its questionable how you do it though. If you can't get there by bus, train, or air and hitchhiking and pedestrians on highways are illegal then tell me how does one travel freely?
How is that abuse? Anyone doing 80mph on a road where the limit is 55mph is breaking the law and should be caught and fined, and if they do it too many times, have their car impounded and crushed into a little cube, and then charged a disposal fee for their cube.
I think the problem is that of now, everyone breaks the law every now and then without really thinking about it. If the world got to a state where you got punished every time you broke the law even slightly then such issue would get quite serious.
In fact, I'd wager (if you have a car) that you broke the speed limit somewhere the last time you drove even if it was simply 1 to 5mph over the limit.
The real problem is that many local and state government gets a great deal of revenue from speeding and parking tickets so rather than to alleviate the core problem of they encourage quotas and sometimes post arbitrary low speed limits in order to increase revenue. I mentioned parking tickets because there was story a while back where an Apple Store offered to buy two parking meters outside their store to mark as no-parking zone for aesthetics (you know Apple) at the theoretical price of what those parking meters could provide if they were maned 24/7 365 days a year, but the city refused on the grounds it had never been done but moreover they made more money from parking tickets than the actual meters. Its the same with speeding... They don't want reduction but they want the violations.
If a cell phone system allowed them to charge violators instantly it would result in more of this at the extreme not to mention possible corruption. Recently in Philadelphia, there is a big spat between city hall and the Parking Authority about revenue and where it is going and complaints about corruption the the Authority organization.
My first suggestion would be to either have revenues earn not go to the gathering organization itself but possibly elsewhere like education or charity.
And if they want a technical solution, then I would argue that make it so cars can't break the posted limit rather than fining them money every time they violate the speed (and or parking). Now keep in mind, I'm probaly one of the more slower drivers out there you'll meet and you'll never see me park in a place I'm not supposed to (I'm that anal) but the issue that these organizations being allowed another way to squeeze money and make things arbitrarily "more illegal" in order to increase revenue bothers me.
None of these government bodies actually want to curb speeding. Their livelihood depends on it.
Point is that there are a million ways to take down a plane, or terrorize a plane, what have you. Almost all of them are simpler than a binary explosive.
And even then it would probaly makes much more sense to the terrorist to just bomb the people standing in line at the airport security since there are no prior security checks before then.
All and all, if there is another attack I doubt it will be plane related. It would make much more sense to just get on a crowded bus or mall. The security at the airport is just wasted time and money.
Ron Paul would let corporations do whatever they want with the Internet, which includes AT&T's plans to violate Net Neutrality and snoop on content (to police for "piracy"), avoid equal access for competition, and every other dirty trick they invent in what passes for their "innovation".
Umm... I though RP wanted to kick corporations out of the Federal Government. Hence, there would be no NSA ATT wiretaps or kickbacks to the telco/cable monopolies or FCC regulations as we know them now.
I think people forget that empowering the Federal Government just means that it leads to corporations investing more control over it. Although I disagree on Paul on many social issues, I will agree that the current situation in DC is pretty much forgone. The problem is that the Federal government is being used to solve problems which ends up being lucrative to a subset of parties.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that you will never acheive a neutering of corporations without fixing the root core of the problem which is "corporate personhood" which Ron Paul is highly against.
So yes, in theory Ron Paul would never support network neutrality legislation, but don't you think its very strange that many Google employees are highly supportive of him?
Simply arguing over who is going to pass bills that support technology or wedge issues is ignoring the 9 trillion dollar white elephant in the room along with the billion dollar war that appears to have no end in sight.
Unfortunately, neither of the major parties seem to acknowledge that we are in for some hard times and that the current economic and political system has some major issues that might be insurmountable in the near future.
I'm tired of people saying "I like 'X cannidate's' message! It inspires me!"
Not to goodwin this, but Hitler inspired people too and we really need to be pragmatic about the next leader. If not Paul, then someone else who at best is nothing more than good technocrat and not an ideologist who's going to drag us down even further.
How is Ubuntu inherently better in this regard?
As the lead guitarist of the Clash said (paraphrased) "It was easy for kids to jump from long haired glam rockers in the mid 70's to the short spikey haired punks in the late 70's over night. Had they wanted to do the reverse, they would have to wait a while for their hair to grow out."
Except with software it reserved so its easier to add than to remove.
If your business model relies on free but high Google page rank, you might consider another business model... Namely one that involved buying ads so that when someone searches they get you above the first "free" hit.
I think that was the point of technology in general behind terror bombing and would just be a natural evolution of robot warfare.
When Germany and the UK built twin engine bombers, the first thing they did was of course drop bombs on enemy troops but one thing led to another and it came about that both sides thought it was a good idea to bomb the enemy civilian population to bring the war to a quick close.
Sadly even with all the human suffering, terror bombing was not attributed to the end of the war in either Europe nor Japan. German war capacity was at its highest in 1944 (they simply moved their factories east out of range or underground) and the Japanese were more or less starving and incapacitated not because of the bombing raids but due to the unrestricted submarine warfare that had so successfully crippled their imports of food and natural resources via their navy.
Now apply this to a modern application. I believe it will be true that nations with robotic armed forces will be less hesitant to use their forces in war, but its like the US and Soviets with the Nuclear arms race. Had the neither the Soviets or the Americans not build nuclear weapons equivalently, one side would have had less reason to not use their weapons. Had it not been for fear of Soviet retaliation, we'd have most likley used Nukes in the Korean war for example.
That said... It was most like fear of American nuclear retaliation that kept the Soviets out of West germany and one would suspect even with a fully automated robotic force that the US would not attack any nation with nuclear capabilities due to the fact that not only robots are fully damageable by EMP generated by them, but human civilians generally are still as burnable as they were in 1945 by atomic weapons as they are now.
Of course if you are a small nation without WMDs then I think the idea of robotic warfare won't go in your favor.
Losing touch with a focal point of popular culture and the related detrimental social side-effects is definitely a valid point.
From a personal and purely anecdotal story one of my child hood friends growing up in the mid 80's had parents that were super strict. They didn't have a TV, didn't allow soda, no video games, and no toy guns. They weren't religious as much as they were more hippies like my parents, but mine seem to let me watch TV (including Ren and Stimpy), play NES, and play with lots of toy guns. They moved away and I lost touch, but it turned out that he got really rebellious when he turned teen, died his hair green, listened to popular (I suppose it was gen X) music. Around the turn of the century or so I found out that he OD'd on heroin and died while attending college.
Now, this isn't a subjective view of everyone who bans TV and popular culture, but I thought it was sadly ironic given my parents had been so liberal in my upbringing. I was playing Doom around 12 or 13 and loved Mortal Kombat to death and I have never gotten in a real world fight ever. At the same time I was pretty wild, but I guess I had outlets.
To be fair, TV's changed and if I were a parent, I'd probaly block everything except the History Channel, Discovery Channel, CNN, public stations, Nick, and Cartoon network. Hell thats all I watch now...
And to be really fair, I know a girl who had extreme religious parents who basically disowned her for being rebellious and she has been quite successful even with a sort alternative/club lifestyle.
It is just something to consider there is a small chance that being too sheltering can be detrimental. I think the best thing my parents did was take an interest in what I was interested in and helped me support it.
You bought your house in the wrong place. Next time look for bus stops when you buy.
I live in a city where decent housing near public transportation are nearly 3 times in price what they should be. I mean... Its great if you have money to blow on a $600,000 house, but othere wise not so great if you don't make they much.
just blanking a page.... how unprofessional, it did no good to the world the way then the way it could have been done.
Hrm... To me a blank page would most likley mean a server problem than a hack. Maybe the server had an issue and everyone assumed that the site had been hacked and someone pretended to claim responbility?
These guys lived in a non-stop world of abstractions, symbols, logic and ideas. And that's a useful world in many ways, but it's not the real world. The real world is the world you see, hear, taste, smell, feel & experience directly.
I disagree. Both are the real world because they affect each other. In a sense the world of abstractions, symbols, logic and ideas affects what you can see, hear, taste, etc and experience directly. Or better yet gives you control of what you experience... Like reading music notation (symbols) and pushing piano keys (logic) to get the sounds.
As much as I am pro-"meditation", I really doubt it would have solved their situations. As much as I meditate, it would never bring about a direct change in that world simply by meditating other than how I see it, but even if you were a 10 year veteran of meditation Chronic pain is not something one can will away with ease.
Meditation is good for compulsions and understanding what you do. But if you are clinically depressed, most instructors will still tell you to get professional help.
My position is that until there is no improvement regarding political ethics you will end up with the same quality of political discussion/decision making that you have today. In short, you have to create a proper set of choices first.
I really doubt you'd ever get the political parties fixed before you would the voting system. I'd argue that the key benefits of a proportional parliamentary system is that it limits the damage caused by one party over another.
The problem with Western (I'm assuming American) Winner takes all is that you have 51% of the people literally telling the other 49% what to do without recourse. This gets exorbitantly bad when the same party controls both the Presidency and Congress. In fact, I'll argue that the quality of what the government does (or the fact it isn't doing as much) is when either the congress and presidency is in opposition.
The only real good solution is to set up the system so that there is always an opposition or some sort of road block and consolation of the people who did not win the election.
If you have ever studied US history, you will know that during the beginning the Vice President was not appointed or chosen by the winning President but rather was the person who lost but had the most votes. He didn't have veto power, but over all I think it provided some obstacles for a President who wanted to railroad the opposition.
If we were to really reform in the United States, I would argue that the Vice Presidency go to the looser in the election and he would get veto power. Not an overriding veto though. If the President's party owns the congress and he wants to sign the legislation but the Vice President does not like it, the VP can of course veto it just like the president and congress has to get 2/3rds just like the regular President. However, if the President Vetoes a bill the VP can't unveto it and congress has to do the old 2/3rds method.
Also, the President and VP can choose their Deputy President and and Deputy VP in case one of them dies or is hospitalized so that the Presidency or Vice Presidency stays within the same party until the next election.
I suppose the biggest argument against this is that government won't get anything done, and I say that is a good thing because when you setup a situation in which every party must compromise with the other then usually the 49% of the losers aren't going to get railroaded with things they are vehemently against.
As far as addressing proportional representations, I would argue that we would have to do away with the house of representatives as we know it and do a popular election. If there are a total of 500 seats then you would divide that into 300,000,000 you would get around 600,000 votes per seat. So you could run for a seat in the House and as long as you got 600,000 votes you would be guaranteed a seat. If you got more than that, it wouldn't count. Now of course since all 300 million people don't usually vote, you are going to get plenty of people who didn't get the 600,000 votes to get a seat so you just allow those runner up in the order of highest nation wide votes until you run out of 500 seats.
That way candidates can run across states so have a more populist view.
BUT in order to retain the power of the states, I would argue the Senate revert back to its old method of having the senators being elected directly by the state governments or a sort of electoral college for each of the states districts. Now this might seem a step backwards, but in order to balance things out and retain some sort of local constituency of the Senators, they need to be elected by the state or appointed by the State legislators.
However, there might be better ways to reform the US government, but currently I think its quite broke that we let winners take all do whatever they want while the 49% who voted against the party have little or not say.
The only reason that the Hindenburg seems so bad in retrospect is because there were a buttload of reporters at the right place at the right time (they planned to report a successful zeppelin trip), and because zeppelins don't die quietly, but rather in a huge exploding fireball.
True, the most fatal Commercial Air Accident was the Japan Airlines Flight 123 with 520 fatalities and a surprising 4 survivors, yet we still have plenty of 747s flying around today.
That said, I don't think the Hindenburg disaster was the real cause of end of the airships. Germany had decided early on that Airships (especially ones filled with Hydrogen since they couldn't buy Helium from the Americans) would not work in combat that well and really needed the steel due to shortages.
Secondly, the US Navy did pursue Helium rigid Airships before WWII, but lost them all in storms and came up with the non-rigid ones we have today like the Good Year blimp because they wouldn't snap in half in heavy winds.
Now with the more flexible materials like aluminum, plastics, and titanium relatively cheap compared to the 1930's I wonder if rigid airships could make a come back.
There is just something a bunch of 0's and 1's can't replace.
The first step I do when I get a CD is rip it to MP3 and then the last is put the CD in a storage container. I might look at the artwork in between, but the nostalgia of music has been lost on me lately.
Air Marshalls?
But it would make more sense if the FAA could just take over the planes controls from the ground.
The basic evidence for 'dark matter' is that galaxies are rotating to fast and maintaining there shape differently than gravitational allows for. They should fly apart or never been formed. Rather then change the current theory, scientists went out and invented 'dark matter'.
So care to explain why there appears to be an expanding universe? Dark matter is a stop gap, but unless you provide a better reason, its all we got. I think that was the point of projects like this to either prove or disprove 'dark matter'.
No! That's what some creationists say, but it is a fallacy. It is well known that science makes the materialistic assumption that everything has a natural cause, and this obviously excludes supernatural things such as God.
The key problem is interpretation of religion taken into literally context excludes a universe without supernatural occurrences. Either you have to change the scientific method to take into account super-natural occurrences or you have to reinterpret religion to conform with science.
For the most part religion has discounted science without changing, but one could reverse that and say something like God is a quantum simulation and Jesus Christ was the inevitably outcome of a civilization that had to reach a technological singularity before the next meteor impact because had Christianity not come about the Roman empire would have not fallen as soon and slave labor would not have gone out of style in which technology would not have flourished quick enough to avoid the next impact that would put mankind into extinction which would go against the idea of quantum observation.
Of course this entails nothing of an afterlife or salvation which puts Christianity, Judaism, and Islam at odds with Science if all were taken literally. The only religion as of know that comes close to being compatible literally with science is of course Buddhism which simply explains the situation of the mind, but not trying to claim away all natural phenomena as the will of god or gods.