"With over 18 million inhabitants, Mumbai has a population density four times that of New York City, and fully half of these inhabitants are homeless... Yet as of March 31, only 133 murders had been registered in all of Mumbai since New Years. This means that there has been one murder for roughly every 136,000 people this year, whereas Boston has had 16 murders in a city of under 600,000–roughly one murder for every 37,000 people."
I often see Boston get singled out in comparisons of this sort, most likely due to the unfortunate fact that the limits of the actual legally defined "City of Boston" are quite small compared with the metro area, and that the area contains a couple predominantly black neighborhoods that have been in a constant state of gang warfare since time immemorial. It takes a great statistical leap of faith to extrapolate that anomaly into how "safe" or "unsafe" the entire city of Boston is- if one were so inclined one could take the entire Boston Metro area into account and the per capita muder rate would drop through the floor. Don't expect anyone at the Harvard Crimson to acknowledge that detail, but they'll certainly use the statistics as an argument to get more gun control legislation passed -- as if anyone in Roxbury gives a fuck.
A planet of slums is hardly the dream of the environmental movement, Stalinist or otherwise. If anything it's the endgame of neoliberal economics -- a world of billions of poor ruled over by a godlike wealthy elite is its apotheosis.
Yeah, but sewage contains a whole lot more than just human shit, and there's an enormous volume of the stuff. The difference between a nutrient and toxin is often just a matter of degree. But if you're convinced that fertilizer and raw sewage are equivalent in practice, why not route your dwelling's sewage outflow pipe into your garden and tell us how it goes?
Next on NBC, the 2046 winter olympics. At 8PM, the US and Canada face off for the snowball fights, followed by the mackeral slapping contest between Great Britain and France. At 11PM, Greece and Latvia compete in 'walk around the block', and then Bolivia and Japan face off in a rematch of the famous 2042 "fill the slurpee cup as full as you can without spilling" contest. Stay tuned...
The Olympics generally attracts a larger share of female 18-49 viewers than most sporting events, therefore many advertisers produce advertisements that cater to that demographic. In turn, the network plays its part in the symbiotic relationship by showing Olympic programming that will attract as much of that demographic as possible. The Canada/US hockey coverage was preempted simply because prime-time ice dancing draws that demographic's eyeballs and prime-time ice hockey does not - I don't think there was anything "botched" in the way it was covered, at least from NBC's point of view.
Alan Greenspan, a long time Randist, had the same opinion about fraud in financial markets. He essentially argued that there was no such thing as "fraud", and that anything done within the bounds of the "free market" was a valid expression of the mechanics of that system, whatever those mechanics may be. It does work out well if you happen to be the one committing the fraud, and for an Objectivist the line between "I have the right to keep what's mine" and "I have the right to take what's yours" seems like it would be an easy one to cross.
We've been down this road a couple of times with our kids being bullied at school. In nearly all cases, I'd judge that the bully kids were the ones with the social problems.
I went to school in a relatively affluent suburb of a large Northeastern city, and many of the bullies I had the displeasure of dealing with were considered to be the best and brightest in the student body - straight A students who excelled in math and science. I on the other hand was a fairly ordinary student who was much lower down the socioeconomic ladder, and made a good target. Of course bullies like that are much less violent and more cunning - they're not into physical violence so much as what might be called psychological violence. Escalation to physical violence did happen on occasion however, and bullies like that are much better at making sure they cover their tracks and have the authority figures on their side. Almost all went on to college, with Ivy League schools and engineering giants like Stanford and MIT being well represented. They're now our society's doctors, lawyers, scientists, and politicians.
One could make the argument that the also had "social problems," but it may be a more subtle issue as to what they were. It is clear that many of them were the children of parents determined that their offspring were going to achieve great things in life, and it may be they were brought up in this environment of "specialness" to the exclusion of any form of moral compass or ethical standard. I turned away from academic pursuits and the love I had once had of the sciences for a long time after that experience, because I felt if these were an example of the kind of character one needed to have to excel in those areas, I concluded the whole enterprise was built on a faulty foundation and the sacrifice of one's morality too great a price to pay.
Um... the United Launch Alliance, one of the private spaceflight corporations which will likely be competing for commercial spaceflight contracts, just launched its 36th successful mission in 36 months.
I should have qualified my statement by saying "Commercial manned spaceflight corporations." Unmanned spaceflight is a obviously a perfectly viable area for commercial ventures.
A number of airlines have gone bankrupt due to crashes, particularly low cost carriers such as ValuJet. The ones that are still around are the ones that crash infrequently enough and have revenue streams great enough to cover the insurance costs, a cost which is made more manageable since the chances of a fatal accident per flight are extremely low. What might the insurance costs be in a commercial space-flight venture, if the chances of a passenger being killed per flight were say, one in 50?
NASA had originally planned to do dozens of flights per year - the logistics of turnaround on the Shuttle turned out to just consume too much time, particularly due to the fact that even with a "reusable" spacecraft it was essentially being rebuilt every time it was turned around. For example, even though the landing gear were rated for say 10 flights they would be stripped down and refurbished after every launch. Same goes for the thermal protection system, the main engines, and hundreds of other functional units. NASA's fastest turnaround performance was in 1985, with 9 flights that year. Next year was Challenger. When something goes wrong and people are killed, who wants to be the person in management who ends up having to say "Yeah, we could have refurbished that part, but we needed to shave a day off our turnaround time"?
How are for-profit corporations going to be any faster at turning around a space vehicle than NASA? Even though manned spaceflight went on hiatus after Challenger and Columbia, it did continue after a time, and all the costs involved in the recovery, analysis, and remediation of the accidents were eventually footed by the US taxpayer. With a for-profit corporation, one fatal accident and you are finished, if not from the legal costs of the inevitable lawsuits, then from the loss of market share in what will most likely be a rather limited market. If you're going to drop $200,000, why do it with the company that killed people? Of course, perhaps companies like Virgin Galactic have figured something out that NASA was unable to figure out during the 30+ years of the Shuttle program. Then again, it's not like the current private spaceflight corporations have exactly been racking up the numbers of completed flights. It's a money pit, if there is no longer the political and/or economic will in the US to continue manned space flight for reasons of national pride, technological research, or scientific discovery, I don't think one should expect for-profit reasons to continue doing it to suddenly materialize. I'm of the opinion that you'd probably have more luck opening a transatlantic steamship line.
Only masochists and lunatics try to wade through The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I prefer to get the abridged version by listening to Rush albums from about 1975 to 1982, when they started dabbling in New Wave. Synthesizers are collectivist instrument really, if you think about it. Early on though, they wrote like 4 Randian rock operas! Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind......eeeeeeyow!
.Religion is a mild schizophrenia. A disease where people don't use the outside world as a reference for their internal model of it, but a made-up internal model.
You seem to have a quite simplistic view of religion. Religious beliefs arose out of one of the characteristics that makes us human - our seemingly innate desire to ask questions about reality and know chains of cause-and-effect. Science has answered many of the questions that religion once was used for, but that doesn't mean there are many deep questions to which the scientific method cannot be applied. Some atheists appear to expect humans to throw up their hands in the face of these questions and say "Well! These are not scientific questions, therefore they cannot and will not be approached." It won't happen, our natural desire to know which gave birth to the scientific method in the first place prevents that.
If you see someone who is very religious (and normally also very easily driven out of his calm state, when faced with the disparity of reality and his model of it), try to find the roots, help him face and fix them, and let him work the way up again, fixing the disparities in the process. Or at least don’t make his life even worse.:)
Do you suppose this approach would work at say, the Harvard Divinity School? Do you feel that all religious people are a priori ignorant bumpkins, simply waiting for you to bring the blinding light of reason to raise them up?
The theologian Paul Tillich might have responded with what I call the "pointer variable" explanation of organized religion - that all the trappings of organized religion including its scriptures and figures merely "point" to the Ultimate, but are in the end only Penultimate, not the Ultimate itself. So by practicing one religion over another one is merely denying the validity of some pointers with respect to others, but not denying the Ultimate to which those pointers point. Indeed, the continual mistaking of things which were Penultimate for the actual Ultimate itself in human history has been the cause of, in Tillich's words, "great existential dissatisfaction."
There was an exhibit I remember seeing as a kid at the Boston Museum of Science in an area dedicated to exploring the human nervous system that did this. It asked you to attempt to read a paragraph of text into a microphone while your own voice was being fed back to you via headphones, slightly delayed. I remember it being extremely difficult to read the text properly.
I'm currently using the Arduino to construct an effects processor inspired by the long discontinued Waldorf 4-Pole. Writing the software for the envelope generator, display, and LFOs has been a great way to brush up on my long-disused C programming skills. Even though the AtMega168 that the Arduino platform is based on is not a DSP, the hardware seems powerful enough to do some direct digital synthesis; I believe there actually is an open source hardware synthesizer based on the AVR microcontroller.
There's no such thing as a "post-industrial" economy. All the things Stephenson mentions are consequences of industrialized society, not substitutes for industrialized society. Nothing happens without steel, coal, copper, petrochemicals, and precious metals. Without these things industrialized society ceases to exist - music, movies, microcode, and pizza delivery become irrelevant the instant fuel sources become scarce and the lights start going out. The West is now deficient in the raw materials of industrial civilization, while the "undeveloped" world is still relatively rich in them; note how China is making all efforts to secure the resources of Africa for itself while the Western industrial societies deal with the consequences of attempting to make an economy out of speculation and data manipulation rather than production of tangibles. One wonders how long nations that do have fundamental resources will continue to trade them for the ever decreasing quality of product the West has to offer. I'm sure the Chinese are quite capable of producing enough music, movies, and microcode to satisfy themselves without having to pay some "knowledge based economy" for it.
If there really isn't much oil left, then oil will slowly become more and more expensive as the remaining oil becomes harder and harder to extract. We will never truly run out of it -- it will just get so expensive that it will be used for only a few things.
Evolution is the obvious consequence of reproduction coupled with imperfect trait heritability. I don't 'believe' in it dogmatically, I accept it as a self-evident description of what occurs due to these traits.
In what way is evolution self-evident? Perhaps in hindsight, but it was after all only 150 years ago that the theory was first proposed. The theory doesn't require belief to exist, but unless you work directly with it and can conduct your own analysis on whether it is an accurate model of reality you're always relying on second hand information. A television program, a teacher, a textbook, in the end you have to believe that someone is giving you correct information to the best of their ability.
I think your understanding of evolution is flawed. There aren't "other factors that influence the development of species", because any possible factor that affects survival in any way is part of the fitness function. If you accept that traits are heritable between parent and offspring, and that small changes in the set of inherited traits occur, then you must accept evolution as a description of what happens when any organism interacts with the environment over long time periods.
Guided evolution by "Intelligent Design" is a variable outside any fitness function we would be able to objectively measure - an argument which is used by ID adherents to reject the theory of evolution. That's the idea I was going for.
Actually, it's because we have long empirical evidence of our total inability to predict whether it'll be rain or sunshine next Tuesday, much less in 50 years' time. Meteorology is incredibly imprecise and we know thanks to chaos theory that it will NEVER be much more precise than it is. Fairly or not, climatology gets lumped in with meteorology as being next to useless over time spans of more than a week.
You admit that it may be unfair to make the comparison between climatology and meteorology for long timescales, but you're willing to take that position anyhow. One might ask oneself "What level of evidence do I need to see to convince myself that climatologists aren't completely mistaken?" If the answer is "It doesn't matter how much" then you've found yourself to be not a skeptic, but a zealot.
Do you believe in the theory of evolution? If so, why? The theory is quite incomplete and there could be many other factors that influenced/influence the development of different species. Do you believe in Big Bang cosmology? If so, why? The theory is quite incomplete and there are many other factors that certainly could have made the universe turn out the way that it has. Unless you happen to be a cosmologist or an evolutionary scientist, all (sane) people really have to go on to form your opinion about these things is what you learn the general consensus among those researching in the fields in question is. I don't think that many members of the Slashdot community question the theory of evolution or the Big Bang theory of cosmology. I certainly don't think many educated people would accuse these scientists in engaging in a conspiracy to tilt the evidence in favor of these theories.
Now, along come climatologists with their data pointing to anthropogenic global warming, and some in the Slashdot community, which ordinarily seems to have great respect for scientists and the scientific method, suddenly not only knows more about the subject than those doing the research but also makes thinly veiled accusations of hidden agendas and scientific malpractice. I'll tell you why this is so - it's all political. It is because if anthropogenic global warming is real than the medicine is obvious - massive government intervention on a scale unprecedented in human history. It's tough medicine to swallow for any freethinking person, but for some it's such an anathema that it's better to try to ignore or discredit the messengers than listen to the message. Because if the message is successfully ignored, and the models of climate scientists are correct, the real horror show for Libertarian types begins 25-50 years from now when governments start to act in a panic; never a good frame of mind for governments to be in when it come to the rights of citizens. At that stage civil liberties will be the last thing on the minds of governments as they try to deal with city-killing hurricanes, severe droughts, crop failures, coastal flooding, resource wars, refugees everywhere, and generally trying to salvage something from a world literally going to hell.
I understand now - the system you describe really does sound like the worst of both worlds. It's too bad, I was looking forward to having some good multiplayer snowmobile battles.
As a casual gamer who has never gotten involved with the "clan" scene, it has always irked me that after buying a game like something from the Battlefield series - which is marketed as an online game - it turns out that to actually play the game online one has to use servers rented or owned by independent parties. One's access to the multiplayer content is then restricted to the whims of the server admins and whomever they deem fit to exercise admin powers. Why should this be so? I agreed to an EULA with Electronic Arts; I didn't agree to anything with the administrators of the InsanE KillaZs 64-player Conquest server. If EA is going to sell something as an online game they should provide a network for that game to be played on, and the terms of play should be clearly stated in the EULA and enforced if necessary by the company. Not subject to the moods of the hardcore gamers whose server rules change on a day-to-day basis.
I've met my fair share of "nerdy girls" who write in similar manner to the example essay cited above. It's been my experience that in addition to being bright they're self-absorbed, easily offended, and absolutely won't ever be interested in having sex (with you, that is.) Probably a fan of Babylon 5 too. I imagine they all come off the same assembly line somewhere.
This sounds very much like the Titan Assault mode in Battlefield 2142. After playing as commander a few times in that game I came to feel strangely like I had the least power to affect the outcome of anyone - being a squad leader or member in a squad that worked together and communicated well seemed much more effective in determining the outcome of a round. As commander essentially all you could do was initiate satellite tracks and dispatch UAVs, drop supplies and the occasional orbital strike, and use a large menu to attempt to give orders to the squads on your team. The problem is that nobody is under any obligation to actually follow through on those orders, and the small point rewards that squad members would receive for following orders seemed to be outweighed by the lure of "going where the kills are". The best experiences are to be had on servers where following squad leader and commander orders are mandatory or kick. If DUST 514 is going to be fun to play from a commander's perspective I would hope that the rewards or punishments for following/not following orders would be increased, or that the command structure can in some way be enforced.
HG wells makes the point in _The Food of the Gods_ that every, EVERY technology gets used, no matter how annoying or absurd the consequences. And specifically every tech is ultimately used for war.
Slashdot Mirror
Crime - Is the crime actually bad in comparison to, say, an American city? Here's a re-print of a newspaper editorial from The Harvard Crimson - Urban Poverty and Crime: Contrasting Boston and Mumbai, India:
"With over 18 million inhabitants, Mumbai has a population density four times that of New York City, and fully half of these inhabitants are homeless... Yet as of March 31, only 133 murders had been registered in all of Mumbai since New Years. This means that there has been one murder for roughly every 136,000 people this year, whereas Boston has had 16 murders in a city of under 600,000–roughly one murder for every 37,000 people."
I often see Boston get singled out in comparisons of this sort, most likely due to the unfortunate fact that the limits of the actual legally defined "City of Boston" are quite small compared with the metro area, and that the area contains a couple predominantly black neighborhoods that have been in a constant state of gang warfare since time immemorial. It takes a great statistical leap of faith to extrapolate that anomaly into how "safe" or "unsafe" the entire city of Boston is- if one were so inclined one could take the entire Boston Metro area into account and the per capita muder rate would drop through the floor. Don't expect anyone at the Harvard Crimson to acknowledge that detail, but they'll certainly use the statistics as an argument to get more gun control legislation passed -- as if anyone in Roxbury gives a fuck.
A planet of slums is hardly the dream of the environmental movement, Stalinist or otherwise. If anything it's the endgame of neoliberal economics -- a world of billions of poor ruled over by a godlike wealthy elite is its apotheosis.
Yeah, but sewage contains a whole lot more than just human shit, and there's an enormous volume of the stuff. The difference between a nutrient and toxin is often just a matter of degree. But if you're convinced that fertilizer and raw sewage are equivalent in practice, why not route your dwelling's sewage outflow pipe into your garden and tell us how it goes?
Next on NBC, the 2046 winter olympics. At 8PM, the US and Canada face off for the snowball fights, followed by the mackeral slapping contest between Great Britain and France. At 11PM, Greece and Latvia compete in 'walk around the block', and then Bolivia and Japan face off in a rematch of the famous 2042 "fill the slurpee cup as full as you can without spilling" contest. Stay tuned...
For curling!
The Olympics generally attracts a larger share of female 18-49 viewers than most sporting events, therefore many advertisers produce advertisements that cater to that demographic. In turn, the network plays its part in the symbiotic relationship by showing Olympic programming that will attract as much of that demographic as possible. The Canada/US hockey coverage was preempted simply because prime-time ice dancing draws that demographic's eyeballs and prime-time ice hockey does not - I don't think there was anything "botched" in the way it was covered, at least from NBC's point of view.
Alan Greenspan, a long time Randist, had the same opinion about fraud in financial markets. He essentially argued that there was no such thing as "fraud", and that anything done within the bounds of the "free market" was a valid expression of the mechanics of that system, whatever those mechanics may be. It does work out well if you happen to be the one committing the fraud, and for an Objectivist the line between "I have the right to keep what's mine" and "I have the right to take what's yours" seems like it would be an easy one to cross.
We've been down this road a couple of times with our kids being bullied at school. In nearly all cases, I'd judge that the bully kids were the ones with the social problems.
I went to school in a relatively affluent suburb of a large Northeastern city, and many of the bullies I had the displeasure of dealing with were considered to be the best and brightest in the student body - straight A students who excelled in math and science. I on the other hand was a fairly ordinary student who was much lower down the socioeconomic ladder, and made a good target. Of course bullies like that are much less violent and more cunning - they're not into physical violence so much as what might be called psychological violence. Escalation to physical violence did happen on occasion however, and bullies like that are much better at making sure they cover their tracks and have the authority figures on their side. Almost all went on to college, with Ivy League schools and engineering giants like Stanford and MIT being well represented. They're now our society's doctors, lawyers, scientists, and politicians.
One could make the argument that the also had "social problems," but it may be a more subtle issue as to what they were. It is clear that many of them were the children of parents determined that their offspring were going to achieve great things in life, and it may be they were brought up in this environment of "specialness" to the exclusion of any form of moral compass or ethical standard. I turned away from academic pursuits and the love I had once had of the sciences for a long time after that experience, because I felt if these were an example of the kind of character one needed to have to excel in those areas, I concluded the whole enterprise was built on a faulty foundation and the sacrifice of one's morality too great a price to pay.
Um... the United Launch Alliance, one of the private spaceflight corporations which will likely be competing for commercial spaceflight contracts, just launched its 36th successful mission in 36 months.
I should have qualified my statement by saying "Commercial manned spaceflight corporations." Unmanned spaceflight is a obviously a perfectly viable area for commercial ventures.
A number of airlines have gone bankrupt due to crashes, particularly low cost carriers such as ValuJet. The ones that are still around are the ones that crash infrequently enough and have revenue streams great enough to cover the insurance costs, a cost which is made more manageable since the chances of a fatal accident per flight are extremely low. What might the insurance costs be in a commercial space-flight venture, if the chances of a passenger being killed per flight were say, one in 50?
NASA had originally planned to do dozens of flights per year - the logistics of turnaround on the Shuttle turned out to just consume too much time, particularly due to the fact that even with a "reusable" spacecraft it was essentially being rebuilt every time it was turned around. For example, even though the landing gear were rated for say 10 flights they would be stripped down and refurbished after every launch. Same goes for the thermal protection system, the main engines, and hundreds of other functional units. NASA's fastest turnaround performance was in 1985, with 9 flights that year. Next year was Challenger. When something goes wrong and people are killed, who wants to be the person in management who ends up having to say "Yeah, we could have refurbished that part, but we needed to shave a day off our turnaround time"?
How are for-profit corporations going to be any faster at turning around a space vehicle than NASA? Even though manned spaceflight went on hiatus after Challenger and Columbia, it did continue after a time, and all the costs involved in the recovery, analysis, and remediation of the accidents were eventually footed by the US taxpayer. With a for-profit corporation, one fatal accident and you are finished, if not from the legal costs of the inevitable lawsuits, then from the loss of market share in what will most likely be a rather limited market. If you're going to drop $200,000, why do it with the company that killed people? Of course, perhaps companies like Virgin Galactic have figured something out that NASA was unable to figure out during the 30+ years of the Shuttle program. Then again, it's not like the current private spaceflight corporations have exactly been racking up the numbers of completed flights. It's a money pit, if there is no longer the political and/or economic will in the US to continue manned space flight for reasons of national pride, technological research, or scientific discovery, I don't think one should expect for-profit reasons to continue doing it to suddenly materialize. I'm of the opinion that you'd probably have more luck opening a transatlantic steamship line.
Only masochists and lunatics try to wade through The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I prefer to get the abridged version by listening to Rush albums from about 1975 to 1982, when they started dabbling in New Wave. Synthesizers are collectivist instrument really, if you think about it. Early on though, they wrote like 4 Randian rock operas! Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind......eeeeeeyow!
.Religion is a mild schizophrenia. A disease where people don't use the outside world as a reference for their internal model of it, but a made-up internal model.
You seem to have a quite simplistic view of religion. Religious beliefs arose out of one of the characteristics that makes us human - our seemingly innate desire to ask questions about reality and know chains of cause-and-effect. Science has answered many of the questions that religion once was used for, but that doesn't mean there are many deep questions to which the scientific method cannot be applied. Some atheists appear to expect humans to throw up their hands in the face of these questions and say "Well! These are not scientific questions, therefore they cannot and will not be approached." It won't happen, our natural desire to know which gave birth to the scientific method in the first place prevents that.
If you see someone who is very religious (and normally also very easily driven out of his calm state, when faced with the disparity of reality and his model of it), try to find the roots, help him face and fix them, and let him work the way up again, fixing the disparities in the process. Or at least don’t make his life even worse. :)
Do you suppose this approach would work at say, the Harvard Divinity School? Do you feel that all religious people are a priori ignorant bumpkins, simply waiting for you to bring the blinding light of reason to raise them up?
The theologian Paul Tillich might have responded with what I call the "pointer variable" explanation of organized religion - that all the trappings of organized religion including its scriptures and figures merely "point" to the Ultimate, but are in the end only Penultimate, not the Ultimate itself. So by practicing one religion over another one is merely denying the validity of some pointers with respect to others, but not denying the Ultimate to which those pointers point. Indeed, the continual mistaking of things which were Penultimate for the actual Ultimate itself in human history has been the cause of, in Tillich's words, "great existential dissatisfaction."
There was an exhibit I remember seeing as a kid at the Boston Museum of Science in an area dedicated to exploring the human nervous system that did this. It asked you to attempt to read a paragraph of text into a microphone while your own voice was being fed back to you via headphones, slightly delayed. I remember it being extremely difficult to read the text properly.
I'm currently using the Arduino to construct an effects processor inspired by the long discontinued Waldorf 4-Pole. Writing the software for the envelope generator, display, and LFOs has been a great way to brush up on my long-disused C programming skills. Even though the AtMega168 that the Arduino platform is based on is not a DSP, the hardware seems powerful enough to do some direct digital synthesis; I believe there actually is an open source hardware synthesizer based on the AVR microcontroller.
There's no such thing as a "post-industrial" economy. All the things Stephenson mentions are consequences of industrialized society, not substitutes for industrialized society. Nothing happens without steel, coal, copper, petrochemicals, and precious metals. Without these things industrialized society ceases to exist - music, movies, microcode, and pizza delivery become irrelevant the instant fuel sources become scarce and the lights start going out. The West is now deficient in the raw materials of industrial civilization, while the "undeveloped" world is still relatively rich in them; note how China is making all efforts to secure the resources of Africa for itself while the Western industrial societies deal with the consequences of attempting to make an economy out of speculation and data manipulation rather than production of tangibles. One wonders how long nations that do have fundamental resources will continue to trade them for the ever decreasing quality of product the West has to offer. I'm sure the Chinese are quite capable of producing enough music, movies, and microcode to satisfy themselves without having to pay some "knowledge based economy" for it.
If there really isn't much oil left, then oil will slowly become more and more expensive as the remaining oil becomes harder and harder to extract. We will never truly run out of it -- it will just get so expensive that it will be used for only a few things.
Military vehicles, warships, and aircraft.
Evolution is the obvious consequence of reproduction coupled with imperfect trait heritability. I don't 'believe' in it dogmatically, I accept it as a self-evident description of what occurs due to these traits.
In what way is evolution self-evident? Perhaps in hindsight, but it was after all only 150 years ago that the theory was first proposed. The theory doesn't require belief to exist, but unless you work directly with it and can conduct your own analysis on whether it is an accurate model of reality you're always relying on second hand information. A television program, a teacher, a textbook, in the end you have to believe that someone is giving you correct information to the best of their ability.
I think your understanding of evolution is flawed. There aren't "other factors that influence the development of species", because any possible factor that affects survival in any way is part of the fitness function. If you accept that traits are heritable between parent and offspring, and that small changes in the set of inherited traits occur, then you must accept evolution as a description of what happens when any organism interacts with the environment over long time periods.
Guided evolution by "Intelligent Design" is a variable outside any fitness function we would be able to objectively measure - an argument which is used by ID adherents to reject the theory of evolution. That's the idea I was going for.
Actually, it's because we have long empirical evidence of our total inability to predict whether it'll be rain or sunshine next Tuesday, much less in 50 years' time. Meteorology is incredibly imprecise and we know thanks to chaos theory that it will NEVER be much more precise than it is. Fairly or not, climatology gets lumped in with meteorology as being next to useless over time spans of more than a week.
You admit that it may be unfair to make the comparison between climatology and meteorology for long timescales, but you're willing to take that position anyhow. One might ask oneself "What level of evidence do I need to see to convince myself that climatologists aren't completely mistaken?" If the answer is "It doesn't matter how much" then you've found yourself to be not a skeptic, but a zealot.
Do you believe in the theory of evolution? If so, why? The theory is quite incomplete and there could be many other factors that influenced/influence the development of different species. Do you believe in Big Bang cosmology? If so, why? The theory is quite incomplete and there are many other factors that certainly could have made the universe turn out the way that it has. Unless you happen to be a cosmologist or an evolutionary scientist, all (sane) people really have to go on to form your opinion about these things is what you learn the general consensus among those researching in the fields in question is. I don't think that many members of the Slashdot community question the theory of evolution or the Big Bang theory of cosmology. I certainly don't think many educated people would accuse these scientists in engaging in a conspiracy to tilt the evidence in favor of these theories.
Now, along come climatologists with their data pointing to anthropogenic global warming, and some in the Slashdot community, which ordinarily seems to have great respect for scientists and the scientific method, suddenly not only knows more about the subject than those doing the research but also makes thinly veiled accusations of hidden agendas and scientific malpractice. I'll tell you why this is so - it's all political. It is because if anthropogenic global warming is real than the medicine is obvious - massive government intervention on a scale unprecedented in human history. It's tough medicine to swallow for any freethinking person, but for some it's such an anathema that it's better to try to ignore or discredit the messengers than listen to the message. Because if the message is successfully ignored, and the models of climate scientists are correct, the real horror show for Libertarian types begins 25-50 years from now when governments start to act in a panic; never a good frame of mind for governments to be in when it come to the rights of citizens. At that stage civil liberties will be the last thing on the minds of governments as they try to deal with city-killing hurricanes, severe droughts, crop failures, coastal flooding, resource wars, refugees everywhere, and generally trying to salvage something from a world literally going to hell.
I understand now - the system you describe really does sound like the worst of both worlds. It's too bad, I was looking forward to having some good multiplayer snowmobile battles.
As a casual gamer who has never gotten involved with the "clan" scene, it has always irked me that after buying a game like something from the Battlefield series - which is marketed as an online game - it turns out that to actually play the game online one has to use servers rented or owned by independent parties. One's access to the multiplayer content is then restricted to the whims of the server admins and whomever they deem fit to exercise admin powers. Why should this be so? I agreed to an EULA with Electronic Arts; I didn't agree to anything with the administrators of the InsanE KillaZs 64-player Conquest server. If EA is going to sell something as an online game they should provide a network for that game to be played on, and the terms of play should be clearly stated in the EULA and enforced if necessary by the company. Not subject to the moods of the hardcore gamers whose server rules change on a day-to-day basis.
I've met my fair share of "nerdy girls" who write in similar manner to the example essay cited above. It's been my experience that in addition to being bright they're self-absorbed, easily offended, and absolutely won't ever be interested in having sex (with you, that is.) Probably a fan of Babylon 5 too. I imagine they all come off the same assembly line somewhere.
Your real problems start when you're a Caucasian male from the US. "How will he help make our community a more diverse place?" puzzles Admissions.
This sounds very much like the Titan Assault mode in Battlefield 2142. After playing as commander a few times in that game I came to feel strangely like I had the least power to affect the outcome of anyone - being a squad leader or member in a squad that worked together and communicated well seemed much more effective in determining the outcome of a round. As commander essentially all you could do was initiate satellite tracks and dispatch UAVs, drop supplies and the occasional orbital strike, and use a large menu to attempt to give orders to the squads on your team. The problem is that nobody is under any obligation to actually follow through on those orders, and the small point rewards that squad members would receive for following orders seemed to be outweighed by the lure of "going where the kills are". The best experiences are to be had on servers where following squad leader and commander orders are mandatory or kick. If DUST 514 is going to be fun to play from a commander's perspective I would hope that the rewards or punishments for following/not following orders would be increased, or that the command structure can in some way be enforced.
HG wells makes the point in _The Food of the Gods_ that every, EVERY technology gets used, no matter how annoying or absurd the consequences. And specifically every tech is ultimately used for war.
You're talking about the SlapChop, right?