Y'know, I can almost respect them for torching SUVs - If the government won't tell people "No, you may not drive a vehicle that presents a significant danger* to everyone else on the road, without special training for the appropriate license class", then perhaps fear of having their car burn down one night kept at least a few people driving more realistic vehicles.
Please think more carefully.
You condone ideological crime? Because the government fails you, it is fair to fix the situation by yourself?
One thing that you should think is, how are you sure you are right? You are basically forcing your opinion on others.
This type of thinking, in a far greater scale, leads to the current situation of Africa - a humanitarian disaster largely caused by marxist guerrillas, radical islamic guerrillas and other people who take matters on their hands because the government fails them.
By the way, I too dislike SUVs and I ride a bicycle.
If it displeases environmentalists, it will be because it's still really bad for the environment.
No sources.
Using solar to preheat the water instead of more coal to preheat it just admits that solar is a more effective tech for generating energy than coal is.
Nonsense, and if parent had read the article he would have read
"The net effect is that less coal is used to generate a given amount of electricity, and the augmented system reduces carbon dioxide emissions as much as a stand-alone solar-thermal plant with the same size array, but at a much lower cost"
and
"The turbines and generators in solar-thermal plants are optimized to run at the temperatures generated by parabolic mirrors (at least in current designs), which are lower than those generated in fossil fuel-powered plants--about 400C versus 500C or higher. Using the higher-temperature turbines in coal plants results in higher efficiency--about 45 percent of the energy in the heat generated by the coal and solar concentrators combined is converted into electricity, as opposed to only 38 percent of the heat with a typical solar-thermal plant."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1203/p06s01-woam.html: "Since president Chávez was elected in 1998, the homicide rate in the capital has more than doubled from 63 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants to 130 today. The country has experienced a parallel spike: from 20 to 48. That compares with a homicide rate in the US of 5.6, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)."
Venezuela's defense spending is just over $2B/year. Their oft-foe, Colombia, spends about $6B/year.
Except that Colombia faces a bitter civil war. What next, will you compare with Israel?
And the US spends over $400B/year.
No, you will settle for the US, which has 43 times the GDP.
And, FYI, your "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.
Huh? Care to elaborate?
Didn't bother to mention that New Orleans came in right after Caracas, with only one less murder per 100,000 people, did you?
Maybe because such a comparison would be a textbook example of bias - comparing the "murder capital" of country A with the capital and largest city of country B? If you wanted a faint hope of impartiality, you would have compared Caracas with Washington, DC, or with a large and important US city such as New York.
Or that Caracas's murder rate fell dramatically since their last survey.
Sources? Comparison to previous years? (A comparison of two years is a really, really lousy way to establish a trend)
You might not want to put a full email address unless you have a very good spam filter.
I doubt a spam filter could handle an email inbox after its address having been posted in a widely read website. This would bring an amount of spam so big that a spam filter would need a very low false-negative rate, and such an aggressive filter would likely have a false-positive rate high enough that he would have to check the spam folder frequently to check for important emails.
So Sam should probably 1-) Use another address for important email needing quick replies. 2-) Do use a good spam filter on this sramji AT HISEMPLOYER DOT com inbox. 3-) Check the spam folder of the widely published inbox every couple of days
Interesting, then. Your point was not clear, and among the possible interpretations was that you are against cloning research because it is a slippery slope. That would be pretty much luddism, with which I disagree.
My opinion (as if you cared... ): I value human life, so I find horrible any experience that includes the loss of human beings (at any stage of their natural life). So cloning research should be legally required not to discard human embryos or otherwise treat humans as disposable objects. But I see no reason to object to cloning research in general. This South Korean development, for example, has no inherent moral problems that I can see (supposing the dogs don't suffer, etc.). As for cloning dead pets (which occasionally gets on the news), I think it is stupid and cruel to the new pet (which is likely to be born with defects, without a real justification), and I would never do it, but in principle I don't think it should be a crime (depends on the amount of animal cruelty).
You tell me. And more importantly, what exactly is your point? Are you disputing that a big (and increasing) chunk of the most popular videos (from expensive (even if crappy) Hollywood movies to inexpensive internet movies) are DRMed, and that in many important areas the DRM is getting more and more strict (think VHS -> DVD -> Bluray)?
Tasteless yes, but flamebait? This is clearly moderation abuse.
Note that I even disagree with the post in more than one aspect, and would have used different wording. But it deserves no kind of downmod, and absolutely not flamebait.
What is exactly your point? Are you against a technology because it COULD (your emphasis) be used for evil? What exactly do you propose, then? Should research on mobile biomass-based energy converters be banned, existing knowledge be censored, be denied federal funds, or what?
Whatever your proposal is, how would it apply to other technologies that can be used for enormous evil? Nuclear energy? High energy physics? Rocket propulsion? Genetic engineering? Nanotechnology? All of the previous technologies could be used to even extinguish the whole human species. How about the single technology that enormously accelerates the progress of other technologies - computing?
You are taking the right to copy an original work from the artist who created it. You are depriving him or her of the right bestowed to him by law, just as freedom of speech is bestowed unto him or her by law.
What? So there is no morality outside of law? You seem to implicate that if freedom of speech wasn't codified in law it wouldn't be a right.
Private property is a right. Physical items can *belong* to a person. A government that doesn't respect people's right of property is an unacceptable government. A government must not violate this right even if it thinks that it would benefit society as a whole. Some people accept exception in rare situations such as eminent domain (as long as the government compensates the owner *and* there is a pressing need for the act), some do not accept these exceptions. Private property is a right, not something that is enforced by law just because it is useful. If the law does not recognize the right to private property the law is wrong. It is similar to the right to live. No one can kill a person, even if doing so is a net benefit to society (like killing a person with a serious contagious disease). There are strict exceptions such as self defense (widely recognized) and capital punishment (more polemic).
But ideas do not belong to anyone. No one has a *right* to "own" an idea. What the lobbyists call "intellectual property" is an artificial restriction created by the government on the dissemination of ideas. Far from being a right, it violates people's right to disseminate ideas. It may be acceptable if 1) It creates an overall society benefit. 2) It doesn't overly limit the citizens' freedom.
The lobbyist idea of "intellectual property", that is "stolen" when someones copies an electronic file, leads to effectively unlimited copyright terms, the patentability of mathematical ideas, bigger and bigger penalties for copyright infringers, lower and lower standars of proof...
Trademarks, copyrights and specially patents, when correctly implemented and limited, can be a necessary evil. The way they are currently implemented, they are just evil.
DRM was stillborn, but its mother didn't realize that
But it is *far* from dead. Videos for example are very often DRMed (be it on a physical media or streamed), and new standards seem to come with more and more DRM. DRM is still a big threat.
"I'm dead, stop fighting me. Leave me alone". This is the same trick pulled by Communism. I hope it doesn't succeed as well.
TPB had a trial -- in a free country, with competent legal help and with abundant mass-media coverage of every aspect...
Which all mean little if the judge was indeed biased.
They also have a meaningful appeal going on right now.
There are quite different legal recourses depending on whether you are in a trial or in an appeal.
Second, yes, there is a difference in graveness between the alleged human rights violations suffered by the Pirate Bay defendants and the clear and horrible human rights violations caused by the communist dictators of Burma.
But that is not the point.
The point is that if a right of yours is violated, you have a right (in the legal sense and in the moral sense) to appeal to a higher court. That is what the defendants are doing.
I fail to see your point. You seem to think that only serious right violations should be fought, while others should be accepted.
I cannot understand that.
"There are people in far worse situations" can be a good argument to convince a person to live happily and positively even in face of difficulties, but it is a really lousy argument to convince someone not to fight injustice.
It seems you are correct. I don't remember why I concluded javascript was unnecessary. Maybe I set Noscript to forbid Javascript but forgot to reload the site? Anyway, it is a relatively bling-free website (and of course, no Flash), and one can easily use it without Javascript too. One can use the "text version" (which is better by the way). It is nice that one can access the pages by URL too, which is very useful (among other things, it means you can make a smart bookmark for it - which I have in both browsers I use).
Datagrid or not, if your site requires flash for anything other than playing sound or video files, then it is more than likely I will not spend much time there
Absolutely. And it is not just for being unavailable to disabled people, slow, insecure, buggy, destroyer of the control a user has about the navigation (top-of-the-head example: if a menu is implemented in flash, how do you choose whether to open a menu entry in a new tab or new window?), bandwidth-wasting, proprietary, restricted and not class-platform; it is also about the content.
There is a very strong negative correlation between the usefulness of a site and the amount of bling in it.
Now compare this to a typical teenager-oriented website: even menus are Flash. They choose Flash both for things that make 0 sense being flash (like menus) and for things that may be easier with Flash, but are almost always a big waste of time. They think a website needs to animate every other element.
The one positive aspect in Flash is that it its use warns you against the quality of the content before you waste your time loading and reading it.
Comparing Soviet and Nazi occupations is just insane. It's way beyond bending of history.
Really? Why? Stalin killed far more people than Hitler. The difference between Stalin and Hitler was the target of the genocide. Hitler decimated Jews, Gypsies, and other undesired races, while Stalin decimated people accused of being bourgeois by the millions, performed ethnic cleansing and ethnic relocation to avoid separatism, oppressed and killed a huge number of religious people, performed genocide through engineered famines such as Holodomor... In short: Hitler: The German people is superior, and we will ensure our power through *whatever means necessary* Stalin: Communism is superior, and we will ensure our power through *whatever means necessary* Oh, and the Soviet "liberation" of Nazi occupied areas: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1382565/Red-Army-troops-raped-even-Russian-women-as-they-freed-them-from-camps.html Let me ask an interesting question: do you see any justification at all for 1) Stalin fighting alongside Hitler, until Hitler betrayed him (and then he defeated Hitler, and rewrote History to say that "The Soviets were always allied with^W^W against the Nazi comrades^W menace" 2) USSR occupying Eastern Europe? "Oh, to free them from Nazism, we shall occupy them, put them under a bloody communist dictatorship, and of course, perform genocide against all dissidents. They will thank us for that. Even though we helped the Nazis in the first place. Since we write the history books, they don't even have to know that."
And now Russia helps the rebels in Georgia and other countries, because rebels are freedom fighters! They must be helped. Specially separatist rebels in other countries, of course. Specially if they want to get their territories annexed by Russia.
But the rebels from Chechnya? Oh, those are terrorists! They must all be decimated to keep Russian sovereignty!
I'll happily vote for anyone else, be they Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, Green, or Pirate. My vote is a protest vote
You vote for someone just because he is different (as in, not Democrat or Republican)? This so-called "protest vote" is useless, immature, and IMHO just a shallow excuse for the electoral laziness of not researching the candidates positions and choosing which one you agree more.
If you honestly research all parties and find you do agree with the positions of the, say, Pirate Party, then vote for them. But, saying again, the attitude of voting on anyone different (or just not voting) and claiming "this a conscious protest vote"... this is ridiculous and contemptible.
First: I realized my post was offensive. When you wrote "arguing what specifically the money is spent on is ridiculous!" you may have typed without thinking enough, or accidentally written something much more broad than what you actually thought, but I lumped you together with the people that don't understand the broken window fallacy (and thus think that government spending is inherently good because "it stimulates the economy") and attacked you angrily and perhaps disrespectfully. My apologies.
Now, I still disagree with you. If I understood correctly, your idea is
1) Only a small amount of money goes to unpractical science, so why bother about the destination of what is 0.5% of the budget?
2) Scientists will policy themselves.
Regarding 1, I don't agree with you. Even if it is a small percentage of the multi-trillion budget, it is still a lot of money. If we allow this kind of logic, than we will see, for example, politicians wanting to raise their salaries because "it will only make the budget 0.01% bigger, whats the deal"? I think every person must do their part. For example, I don't litter the streets, and sometimes even catch trash (that other people threw in the streets) and put it in the bin. I am aware that my trash is maybe 1/600000 of the total city trash, but I should do my part.
Regarding 2, maybe you are being naive. Some "scientists" just want to boast their resumes, and then get a good job either in academia or (perhaps more likely, for this kind of "scientist") in the industry. Others will work on a subject for 2 years, realize their hypothesis was false, and, instead of dealing with it honestly, will get desperate and try to falsify the results. Some people study something frivolous and call themselves scientists (so how do you define the "scientific community"?), and think they deserve funding. And some people will want to use unethical methods of research. Now, I know that politicians are not always very bright and are sometimes almost illiterate in mathematics; they reflect the average population, after all. But "scientists" do need control. Not every "scientist" is intelligent, honest and ethical. I put quotation marks around "scientist" because some people who claim to be scientists arguably aren't.
Now, if the USA has a good and working system for this, but you are claiming that Jindal bypassed it without reason, then you may be right. But your wording suggests that taxpayer money spent on science is good because it quickly puts money on the economy. This is wrong. If the government gives money to research of, say, fashion, or how people react to substance Y (by giving Y to people without performing safe tests first), that is money that didn't go to, say, researching Europa (as an example of something that won't benefit us in the next year but we should study nevertheless). Researching Europa would stimulate the economy *and* produce valuable knowledge.
Please avoid this wording. It reinforces the idea that government spending is inherently good because "it moves the economy". A sizable portion of the population believes this. Restating my opinion, government spending is only efficient if, despite the overhead, it causes more benefit than what the citizen would do without having his money taken away. But even when efficient on utilitarian grounds, government spending is a necessary evil that should be restricted to critical investments, because of the moral wrongness of taking away people's property.
So, even if this strategy of fighting the recession by taxing the future is efficient on utilitarian grounds, we should 1) spend the money as well as possible, to maximize the efficiency. As I argued, *not all spending is equal* 2) spend as little as possible. Note: I'm not specifically saying that Obama spends too much - I don't know his government enough to state this, as I'm not from the USA -, I'm saying that "he can spend as much as he wants, as it will stimulate the economy" is wrong. Government spending is a necessary evil, and spending more than the necessary means taking people's property without necessity. And even on utilitarian grounds, spending too much means an excessive debt in the future.
arguing what specifically the money is spent on is ridiculous!
Do you really think that?
1) Have you ever heard of the broken window fallacy? It is quite easy to understand that taking tax money and spending on X is only good if the benefits from X (remembering that there is a big inefficiency, since government overhead, bureaucracy and corruption means that the money that actually arrives on X is much smaller than the money taken from the tax-paying citizen) is greater than the benefits of what the citizen would spend *his* money on. And since we are forcibly *taking* money that *belongs* to a citizen, this should be restricted to certain situations (armed forces, police, important infrastructure, basic education, certain areas of scientific research and some other critical areas), even when the government thinks he can decide spending better than the citizen.
2) Even if the government wants to spend money to stimulate the economy*, it is freaking obvious that it is extremely important to spend the money wisely.
"arguing what specifically the money is spent on is ridiculous!". This sentence itself is ridiculous, and *seriously* wrong.
* clarification. Government spending to provide economic stimulus makes has positive aspects in certain specific situations. For example, if the money comes not from (present) taxes but from the debt, you are effectively taxing the future, which may make sense if you are in a recession and foresee that the future will be better. The effectiveness of this practice is arguable, and I don't want to argue for or against it here. I do want to argue against the idea the we should just throw (tax payers') money at the problem and the destination of the money doesn't matter. This is, again, *seriously* wrong
And I love science, and favor science funding, but clearly the *amount* and *destination* of the money must be carefully studied. Now don't get me in details of the specific volcano monitoring deal, I am not from the USA (as you may have realized from my English).
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, I can almost respect them for torching SUVs - If the government won't tell people "No, you may not drive a vehicle that presents a significant danger* to everyone else on the road, without special training for the appropriate license class", then perhaps fear of having their car burn down one night kept at least a few people driving more realistic vehicles.
Please think more carefully.
You condone ideological crime? Because the government fails you, it is fair to fix the situation by yourself?
One thing that you should think is, how are you sure you are right? You are basically forcing your opinion on others.
This type of thinking, in a far greater scale, leads to the current situation of Africa - a humanitarian disaster largely caused by marxist guerrillas, radical islamic guerrillas and other people who take matters on their hands because the government fails them.
By the way, I too dislike SUVs and I ride a bicycle.
Will you please not reproduce?
If it displeases environmentalists, it will be because it's still really bad for the environment.
No sources.
Using solar to preheat the water instead of more coal to preheat it just admits that solar is a more effective tech for generating energy than coal is.
Nonsense, and if parent had read the article he would have read
"The net effect is that less coal is used to generate a given amount of electricity, and the augmented system reduces carbon dioxide emissions as much as a stand-alone solar-thermal plant with the same size array, but at a much lower cost"
and
"The turbines and generators in solar-thermal plants are optimized to run at the temperatures generated by parabolic mirrors (at least in current designs), which are lower than those generated in fossil fuel-powered plants--about 400C versus 500C or higher. Using the higher-temperature turbines in coal plants results in higher efficiency--about 45 percent of the energy in the heat generated by the coal and solar concentrators combined is converted into electricity, as opposed to only 38 percent of the heat with a typical solar-thermal plant."
After a quick Google search:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1203/p06s01-woam.html:
"Since president Chávez was elected in 1998, the homicide rate in the capital has more than doubled from 63 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants to 130 today. The country has experienced a parallel spike: from 20 to 48. That compares with a homicide rate in the US of 5.6, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)."
Venezuela's defense spending is just over $2B/year. Their oft-foe, Colombia, spends about $6B/year.
Except that Colombia faces a bitter civil war. What next, will you compare with Israel?
And the US spends over $400B/year.
No, you will settle for the US, which has 43 times the GDP.
And, FYI, your "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.
Huh? Care to elaborate?
Didn't bother to mention that New Orleans came in right after Caracas, with only one less murder per 100,000 people, did you?
Maybe because such a comparison would be a textbook example of bias - comparing the "murder capital" of country A with the capital and largest city of country B? If you wanted a faint hope of impartiality, you would have compared Caracas with Washington, DC, or with a large and important US city such as New York.
Or that Caracas's murder rate fell dramatically since their last survey.
Sources? Comparison to previous years? (A comparison of two years is a really, really lousy way to establish a trend)
http://xkcd.com/117/
You might not want to put a full email address unless you have a very good spam filter.
I doubt a spam filter could handle an email inbox after its address having been posted in a widely read website. This would bring an amount of spam so big that a spam filter would need a very low false-negative rate, and such an aggressive filter would likely have a false-positive rate high enough that he would have to check the spam folder frequently to check for important emails.
So Sam should probably
1-) Use another address for important email needing quick replies.
2-) Do use a good spam filter on this sramji AT HISEMPLOYER DOT com inbox.
3-) Check the spam folder of the widely published inbox every couple of days
So your post was of the type "I wonder if" ?
Interesting, then. Your point was not clear, and among the possible interpretations was that you are against cloning research because it is a slippery slope.
That would be pretty much luddism, with which I disagree.
My opinion (as if you cared... ): I value human life, so I find horrible any experience that includes the loss of human beings (at any stage of their natural life). So cloning research should be legally required not to discard human embryos or otherwise treat humans as disposable objects. But I see no reason to object to cloning research in general. This South Korean development, for example, has no inherent moral problems that I can see (supposing the dogs don't suffer, etc.). As for cloning dead pets (which occasionally gets on the news), I think it is stupid and cruel to the new pet (which is likely to be born with defects, without a real justification), and I would never do it, but in principle I don't think it should be a crime (depends on the amount of animal cruelty).
You tell me.
And more importantly, what exactly is your point?
Are you disputing that a big (and increasing) chunk of the most popular videos (from expensive (even if crappy) Hollywood movies to inexpensive internet movies) are DRMed, and that in many important areas the DRM is getting more and more strict (think VHS -> DVD -> Bluray)?
Tasteless yes, but flamebait? This is clearly moderation abuse.
Note that I even disagree with the post in more than one aspect, and would have used different wording. But it deserves no kind of downmod, and absolutely not flamebait.
What is exactly your point?
Are you against a technology because it COULD (your emphasis) be used for evil?
What exactly do you propose, then? Should research on mobile biomass-based energy converters be banned, existing knowledge be censored, be denied federal funds, or what?
Whatever your proposal is, how would it apply to other technologies that can be used for enormous evil? Nuclear energy? High energy physics? Rocket propulsion? Genetic engineering? Nanotechnology?
All of the previous technologies could be used to even extinguish the whole human species.
How about the single technology that enormously accelerates the progress of other technologies - computing?
You are taking the right to copy an original work from the artist who created it. You are depriving him or her of the right bestowed to him by law, just as freedom of speech is bestowed unto him or her by law.
What? So there is no morality outside of law? You seem to implicate that if freedom of speech wasn't codified in law it wouldn't be a right.
Private property is a right. Physical items can *belong* to a person. A government that doesn't respect people's right of property is an unacceptable government. A government must not violate this right even if it thinks that it would benefit society as a whole. Some people accept exception in rare situations such as eminent domain (as long as the government compensates the owner *and* there is a pressing need for the act), some do not accept these exceptions.
Private property is a right, not something that is enforced by law just because it is useful. If the law does not recognize the right to private property the law is wrong. It is similar to the right to live. No one can kill a person, even if doing so is a net benefit to society (like killing a person with a serious contagious disease). There are strict exceptions such as self defense (widely recognized) and capital punishment (more polemic).
But ideas do not belong to anyone. No one has a *right* to "own" an idea. What the lobbyists call "intellectual property" is an artificial restriction created by the government on the dissemination of ideas. Far from being a right, it violates people's right to disseminate ideas. It may be acceptable if
1) It creates an overall society benefit.
2) It doesn't overly limit the citizens' freedom.
The lobbyist idea of "intellectual property", that is "stolen" when someones copies an electronic file, leads to effectively unlimited copyright terms, the patentability of mathematical ideas, bigger and bigger penalties for copyright infringers, lower and lower standars of proof...
Trademarks, copyrights and specially patents, when correctly implemented and limited, can be a necessary evil. The way they are currently implemented, they are just evil.
DRM was stillborn, but its mother didn't realize that
But it is *far* from dead. Videos for example are very often DRMed (be it on a physical media or streamed), and new standards seem to come with more and more DRM. DRM is still a big threat.
"I'm dead, stop fighting me. Leave me alone".
This is the same trick pulled by Communism. I hope it doesn't succeed as well.
Could you tell me what was your point?
First,
TPB had a trial -- in a free country, with competent legal help and with abundant mass-media coverage of every aspect...
Which all mean little if the judge was indeed biased.
They also have a meaningful appeal going on right now.
There are quite different legal recourses depending on whether you are in a trial
or in an appeal.
Second, yes, there is a difference in graveness between the alleged human rights violations
suffered by the Pirate Bay defendants and the clear and horrible human rights violations
caused by the communist dictators of Burma.
But that is not the point.
The point is that if a right of yours is violated, you have a right (in the legal sense
and in the moral sense) to appeal to a higher court. That is what the defendants are doing.
I fail to see your point. You seem to think that only serious right violations should be
fought, while others should be accepted.
I cannot understand that.
"There are people in far worse situations" can be a good argument to convince a person to
live happily and positively even in face of difficulties, but it is a really lousy argument
to convince someone not to fight injustice.
It seems you are correct. I don't remember why I concluded javascript was unnecessary. Maybe
I set Noscript to forbid Javascript but forgot to reload the site?
Anyway, it is a relatively bling-free website (and of course, no Flash), and one can easily
use it without Javascript too. One can use the "text version" (which is better by the way).
It is nice that one can access the pages by URL too, which is very useful (among other
things, it means you can make a smart bookmark for it - which I have in both browsers I use).
class-platform
I naturally meant "cross-platform". When I aimed the "preview" button, I hit "submit".
Datagrid or not, if your site requires flash for anything other than playing sound or video files, then it is more than likely I will not spend much time there
Absolutely. And it is not just for being unavailable to disabled people, slow, insecure, buggy, destroyer of the control a user has about the navigation (top-of-the-head example: if a menu is implemented in flash, how do you choose whether to open a menu entry in a new tab or new window?), bandwidth-wasting, proprietary, restricted and not class-platform; it is also about the content.
There is a very strong negative correlation between the usefulness of a site and the amount of bling in it.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook : no Flash; javascript unnecessary
http://www.c-faq.com/ : no Flash; no javascript
http://news.google.com/ : no Flash ; javascript not necessary
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ : Fash restricted to the videos ; javascript unnecessary
Now compare this to a typical teenager-oriented website: even menus are Flash. They choose Flash both
for things that make 0 sense being flash (like menus) and for things that may be easier with Flash, but are almost always a big waste of time. They think a website needs to animate every other element.
The one positive aspect in Flash is that it its use warns you against the quality of the content before you waste your time loading and reading it.
Well, Georgia shot first.
Shot first against whom? Against separatists in its own territory?
Do you use the same standard for Chechnya?
a Russian can not be a president of Latvia
For the love of Jesus, do you expect any country to allow a non-native citizen to become its president?
Do you think the problem would occur if those lands weren't forcefully populated with non-natives in the first place?
Why didn't you answer this?
There are no troops in Georgia. There are troops in Abkhazia and Ossetia. Read Wiki about conflicts between them and Georgia.
You've got to be kidding. Abkhazia is not part of Georgia?
Is Chechnya part of Russia?
Comparing Soviet and Nazi occupations is just insane. It's way beyond bending of history.
Really? Why? Stalin killed far more people than Hitler. The difference between Stalin and Hitler was the target of the genocide. Hitler decimated Jews, Gypsies, and other undesired races, while Stalin decimated people accused of being bourgeois by the millions, performed ethnic cleansing and ethnic relocation to avoid separatism, oppressed and killed a huge number of religious people, performed genocide through engineered famines such as Holodomor...
In short:
Hitler: The German people is superior, and we will ensure our power through *whatever means necessary*
Stalin: Communism is superior, and we will ensure our power through *whatever means necessary*
Oh, and the Soviet "liberation" of Nazi occupied areas:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1382565/Red-Army-troops-raped-even-Russian-women-as-they-freed-them-from-camps.html
Let me ask an interesting question: do you see any justification at all for
1) Stalin fighting alongside Hitler, until Hitler betrayed him (and then he defeated Hitler, and rewrote History to say that "The Soviets were always allied with^W^W against the Nazi comrades^W menace"
2) USSR occupying Eastern Europe? "Oh, to free them from Nazism, we shall occupy them, put them under a bloody communist dictatorship, and of course, perform genocide against all dissidents. They will thank us for that. Even though we helped the Nazis in the first place. Since we write the history books, they don't even have to know that."
And now Russia helps the rebels in Georgia and other countries, because rebels are freedom fighters! They must be helped. Specially separatist rebels in other countries, of course. Specially if they want to get their territories annexed by Russia.
But the rebels from Chechnya? Oh, those are terrorists! They must all be decimated to keep Russian sovereignty!
I'll happily vote for anyone else, be they Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, Green, or Pirate. My vote is a protest vote
You vote for someone just because he is different (as in, not Democrat or Republican)?
This so-called "protest vote" is useless, immature, and IMHO just a shallow excuse for the electoral laziness of not researching the candidates positions and choosing which one you agree more.
If you honestly research all parties and find you do agree with the positions of the, say, Pirate Party, then vote for them. But, saying again, the attitude of voting on anyone different (or just not voting) and claiming "this a conscious protest vote"... this is ridiculous and contemptible.
First: I realized my post was offensive. When you wrote "arguing what specifically the money is spent on is ridiculous!" you may have typed without thinking enough, or accidentally written something much more broad than what you actually thought, but I lumped you together with the people that don't understand the broken window fallacy (and thus think that government spending is inherently good because "it stimulates the economy") and attacked you angrily and perhaps disrespectfully. My apologies.
Now, I still disagree with you. If I understood correctly, your idea is
1) Only a small amount of money goes to unpractical science, so why bother about the destination of what is 0.5% of the budget?
2) Scientists will policy themselves.
Regarding 1, I don't agree with you. Even if it is a small percentage of the multi-trillion budget, it is still a lot of money. If we allow this kind of logic, than we will see, for example, politicians wanting to raise their salaries because "it will only make the budget 0.01% bigger, whats the deal"? I think every person must do their part. For example, I don't litter the streets, and sometimes even catch trash (that other people threw in the streets) and put it in the bin. I am aware that my trash is maybe 1/600000 of the total city trash, but I should do my part.
Regarding 2, maybe you are being naive. Some "scientists" just want to boast their resumes, and then get a good job either in academia or (perhaps more likely, for this kind of "scientist") in the industry. Others will work on a subject for 2 years, realize their hypothesis was false, and, instead of dealing with it honestly, will get desperate and try to falsify the results. Some people study something frivolous and call themselves scientists (so how do you define the "scientific community"?), and think they deserve funding. And some people will want to use unethical methods of research.
Now, I know that politicians are not always very bright and are sometimes almost illiterate in mathematics; they reflect the average population, after all. But "scientists" do need control. Not every "scientist" is intelligent, honest and ethical. I put quotation marks around "scientist" because some people who claim to be scientists arguably aren't.
Now, if the USA has a good and working system for this, but you are claiming that Jindal bypassed it without reason, then you may be right. But your wording suggests that taxpayer money spent on science is good because it quickly puts money on the economy. This is wrong. If the government gives money to research of, say, fashion, or how people react to substance Y (by giving Y to people without performing safe tests first), that is money that didn't go to, say, researching Europa (as an example of something that won't benefit us in the next year but we should study nevertheless). Researching Europa would stimulate the economy *and* produce valuable knowledge.
Please avoid this wording. It reinforces the idea that government spending is inherently good because "it moves the economy". A sizable portion of the population believes this. Restating my opinion, government spending is only efficient if, despite the overhead, it causes more benefit than what the citizen would do without having his money taken away. But even when efficient on utilitarian grounds, government spending is a necessary evil that should be restricted to critical investments, because of the moral wrongness of taking away people's property.
So, even if this strategy of fighting the recession by taxing the future is efficient on utilitarian grounds, we should
1) spend the money as well as possible, to maximize the efficiency. As I argued, *not all spending is equal*
2) spend as little as possible. Note: I'm not specifically saying that Obama spends too much - I don't know his government enough to state this, as I'm not from the USA -, I'm saying that "he can spend as much as he wants, as it will stimulate the economy" is wrong. Government spending is a necessary evil, and spending more than the necessary means taking people's property without necessity. And even on utilitarian grounds, spending too much means an excessive debt in the future.
arguing what specifically the money is spent on is ridiculous!
Do you really think that?
1) Have you ever heard of the broken window fallacy? It is quite easy to understand
that taking tax money and spending on X is only good if the benefits from X (remembering that there is a big inefficiency, since government overhead, bureaucracy and corruption means that the money that actually arrives on X is much smaller than the money taken from the tax-paying citizen) is greater than the benefits of what the citizen would spend *his* money on. And since we are forcibly *taking* money that *belongs* to a citizen, this should be restricted to certain situations (armed forces, police, important infrastructure, basic education, certain areas of scientific research and some other critical areas), even when the government thinks he can decide spending better than the citizen.
2) Even if the government wants to spend money to stimulate the economy*, it is freaking obvious that it is extremely important to spend the money wisely.
"arguing what specifically the money is spent on is ridiculous!". This sentence itself is ridiculous, and *seriously* wrong.
* clarification. Government spending to provide economic stimulus makes has positive aspects in certain specific situations. For example, if the money comes not from (present) taxes but from the debt, you are effectively taxing the future, which may make sense if you are in a recession and foresee that the future will be better. The effectiveness of this practice is arguable, and I don't want to argue for or against it here. I do want to argue against the idea the we should just throw (tax payers') money at the problem and the destination of the money doesn't matter. This is, again, *seriously* wrong
And I love science, and favor science funding, but clearly the *amount* and *destination* of the money must be carefully studied.
Now don't get me in details of the specific volcano monitoring deal, I am not from the USA (as you may have realized from my English).