My "vote" has mattered *one* time in over 20 years. Every other time, the system is so gerrymandered that it doesn't matter if I vote for or against someone/something.
The federal government is basically becoming a fascist dictatorship and we are rapidly growing a "noble" class with different rights and privileges than the "wage slave" class. Capitalism has been restructured to create a slave state for most people- giving the illusion of just enough freedom and control to prevent them from revolting.
We are where we are because they tried this system with private fire companies and it had very bad results. Some services only work if they are a required service that everyone pays for and everyone benefits from.
Are you in a high property tax state or a low property tax state?
In alabama, the taxes on my house would be roughly $200 a year. Easy to scratch up. In texas, the taxes on my house are roughly $3000. In new jersey, the taxes are so high that they are now "allowing" seniors to work for the government (basically slavery) to cover their $9,000 property tax bills.
My only issue with sales tax systems is the point I started this thread with.
A libertarian system cannot survive when some companies and citizens have grossly more power and wealth than others. With sales tax only, I see that some people will inevitably build up huge wealth and power. Perhaps sales tax + a really nasty death tax (the real purpose of which is to break up wealth accumulation).
The problem with property taxes is then we only rent our property from the government. We never own it.
The principle benefit of the fair tax is not the rate (because that will change) but the fact that the government no longer has an excuse to track every element of our lives extremely intrusively. They only have to track businesses intrusively (and businesses should have good records, accountants, ledgers, etc. anyway).
The problem with income tax is that as we enter a computerized, data collected society, the "grease" that made things work is being squeezed out by a very cold and grindy system.
Example- home inspectors in my city made wages a little bit low but they had a lot of freedom about how they did their day as long as they inspected a certain number of houses per week. Now with GPS, they get paid no more, but every second of their day is tracked. So they lost a lot of free time and didn't get the compensation for it (but they will eventually- they'll just quit and find jobs that pay better over time).
But for a few years, the city gets to crow about how much money it saves. Managers moving up only care about two to three year windows- after they leave everything can go to hell in a handbasket.
It wants to give a disk intensive job all 64 chips if necessary -- and then the disks melt down.
A possible patch to fix this has been cancelled-- there is no way to control it except scheduling these jobs for wierd hours when you are not using the system.
Been suffering with this for 18 months now since they sold us on using outsourced multiple cpu systems in place of stand along boxes.
And businesses can and do destroy people's lives all the time.
The credit bureaus for example ignore the credit laws and collect on chapter 7 bankruptcy's even tho it violates the law. Anyone *big enough* to ignore the law does so if it is profitable.
Yes- governments are a severe problem. The founders were right in that regard. But if we are going to have enormous quasi-governmental businesses and people with more wealth than some states, then we need a large government to counter them. If you start cutting them down to smaller size, then you do not need such a big government to control them.
And if you do *not* cut them down to size then they eventually do take over the government. The drug industry basically controls the FDA now.
If I have 1,000 dollars (these days even 1,000,000 dollars) people in power will not pay attention to me. If I have 1,000,000,000 dollars- people in power will pay a lot of attention to me even if I spend nothing and really pay attention to me if I spend a lot. So I get laws passed to lock in my position. For example- if we got a "fair tax" within a decade, the top 1% would in someway lower their rate below that rate. Probably by having certain categories of spending not counted. Or buy spending over seas. Or transferring wealth over seas and spending the wealth earned there.
Libertarian philosophy (and capitalism) both work when we respect the golden mean and do not allow excess.
Drugs are great-- but not to excess. Sex is great-- but not to excess.
Being a Libertarian is great- but no to excess. You can't have a truly Libertarian society if you allow 1% of the population to control 99% of the assets. What you have is nobles and wage slaves/serfs.
The basis of libertarian philosophy is the idea that we can live our own lives as we want to as long as it doesn't affect other people. When sony (or any other company or any other individual) has multiple billions of dollars in assets, they do whatever they want and affect the rest of us negatively all the time. And there *must* be something bigger than them to control them or they will accrete power without limit.
It's not hypocrisy-- perhaps it's goofy headed-- perhaps it is the result of looking at the goofy parts of libertarianism (great basic philosophy but come on- it ignores human nature and pretty much all history of man enslaving man).
However, I realized in my 30's that the libertarian philosophy breaks down when anyone gets much over 100 times the resources of the average citizen. And becomes increasingly broken the higher they get over that mark.
Sony- if they wanted to, could destroy your house, your life, and get away with it. Bill Gates- if he wanted to, could do the same.
Only a government with enough assets to control the most powerful members of society can deal with these people-- and even then, these people slowly take control of such governments.
If we start from zero, these days the problem would be back in under 20 years. I'm really not sure what the solution is other than draconian taxes on the "winners" who get too big.
Right now, I think 90% taxation on anyone with an income (including corporate provided "benefits") over $5 mill a year is about right. Making 5 mill a year is a phenomenal income . Anything over that is absurd. That's easily 100 times the income of the average citizen-- per year.
And they would still fight really hard for that remaining 10%. Because if you made 105 million, you'd have double the income of people making 5 million. That means you can still buy that rare car over the "poor" 5 million income person. You just can't buy everything and do anything that you desire.
Why is "The Wholesale cost (Before May 2007) of this capacity was about £210 per Mbps, which equates to 21p per Kbps (Kilobit per Second)."?
That cost seems way too high.
A neighborhood full of fiber with a neighborhood cache for each other's downloads wouldn't use fiber outside of the neighbor hood that much. (Once someone gets the window's patch, everyone has it-- once someone gets openoffice 2.3, everyone has it). And likewise, upstream of the severa; neighborhoods, you would have another layer of caching. I know they do that now become sometimes I get crazy fast downloads (like 15mb/second for the entire download duration-- that has to be cached locally and not on the remote servers).
Google seems more and more slimy the longer they exist and the bigger they get. They are setting some kind of land speed record for going from idealistic to scummy.
If I pay someone $10 to dig a rock out of the ground, that rock is going to cost at least $10.
If a lot of people want the rock, then it may go for $2000. If there are many similar rocks around the world, as soon as prices get too high, other people will start digging up rocks.
So... why does it cost "X" to send 1gb of data? Is it the underlying physical cost to install the hardware and the salaries of the employees that support and maintain them. Or is it the scarcity demand?
I.e. Say a cable costs $100 to install, and $100 a year to maintain and can carry 100gb of data. Then you must charge at least $101 a year.
If you have one user, using.1gb, you charge them $101 a year. If you have 100 users, using 1gb of data, you charge them $1.10 a year.
If you have 200 users, then you start gambling but can charge them $.55 a year. Most of the time, you can deliver 1gb to those 200 users because they are on at different times. Occasionally, if they are all on, you degrade to.5gb.
It seems to me that a lot of this is about superior caching models.
I can either transmit 100 gb this way. --- 20gb user --- 20gb user --- 20gb user --- 20gb user --- 20gb user
or this way
ssss should be spaces but the lameness filter would not allow them.
root..local cache ---20gb ---- 20gb user ssssssss---- 20gb user ssssssss---- 20gb user ssssssss---- 20gb user ssssssss---- 20gb user ---20gb ---- user ssssssss---- 20gb user ssssssss---- 20gb user ssssssss---- 20gb user ssssssss---- 20gb user etc. 3 more times.
The local cache's and very short lines should be relatively inexpensive.
if this works even a little- combined with voice control it would be a godsend.
I deal with pain-3 (on a 1-10 scale) all the time now. Mousing is much worse than typing tho. Partially carpal, partially chemo, partially diabetes. The laser off the eyes devices would also very helpful for the total package. And foot pedals.
Re:Yeah, Mission accomplished, watch W take credit
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 1
I'm sure their judicial process has a lot less protections- yet we put away our people into prison and make them criminals at a higher rate than any 1st (and i think 2nd) world countries on the planet. European countries have a presumption of guilt-- and yet imprison their own people less than we do. The US and Briton are imprisoning people at such a high rate that they are trying to find ways (collars) of keeping them prisoner in their own homes. It's really scary and yet we are letting it happen step by step with cameras and home jails.
Property taxes are so high that we effectively rent our homes and land from the government and must work as wage slaves our entire lives (quit your job for 24 months and you will almost certainly be homeless even if you "own" your own home).
Don't look at the words and hand-waving. Look at what is *actually* happening. Lots of disenfranchised and incarcerated citizens. The ultra-rich just walking all over the other 99% of society (and owning 90% of the assets now). It's like an aristocracy but we pretend it is a democracy. In 80% of cases, our votes do not even matter- the candidates are selected for us. Large corporations and the ultra-wealthy own 90% of our congressmen and senators outright.
Public spaces like beaches and mountains are increasingly sold out-right to the ultra-wealthy (including ultra-wealthy foreign nationals). People who legally purchased good property 30 years ago are now having it condemned and taken from them and given to the ultra-wealthy. The executive (i.e. noble) class receives compensation hundreds or even thousands of times higher than the average population.
Public property (like shows, plays, songs) are also being locked in perpetuity for the wealthy preventing new derivative works. Effective previously legal natural supplements are being banned (without any justification) so that the profits from patented drugs (which are effectively identical to the supplements but with a few molecules moved around) will be protected.
(answering your question) We have legalized prostitution in Nevada. It should be legal everywhere and through the wonders of craigslist and it basically is. Marijuana is mostly a misdemeanor issue here.
I would add that the war on drugs has sky-rocketed drug profits while lowering the cost of drugs. Pot is a $1 a joint now and I read that cocaine is 1/3 the inflation adjusted price it was in the 1980's.
And along with this, we have destroyed the government of mexico. There is essentially no real police or judicial system in most of these countries any more. If they touch anything associated with the drug cartel, they know they will be killed. Many of them went with reality and now work for the drug cartels (who have billions in assets) including the mexican military.
The second we legalize pot and cocaine, all those countries will start healing and becoming good societies again.
Heck, 50 people a year die in all terrain vehicle deaths.
Life is cheap. A lot of the guys in iraq want to be there for at least a year or two. A lot of guys join the military to go fight, blow shit up, etc. knowing that some of them will die (but always assuming it will be someone else).
Then we have relative death rates-- if life is valuable. Are we paying 400 deaths a year to prevent 8,000 iraqi deaths a year? If so, is it worth it? Seems like it should be. Likewise, we may be preventing a lot of american and european deaths by focusing fundamentalist passion on iraq (and I mean- come'on, these thugs use retarded ladies as bombs).
Then there is the "life is too valuable" factor. If we do not start dying off at a higher rate soon, we are going to get in to seriously ugly situations in 30 to 50 years. Then the death rate will be amazing. It will be like a bad sci-fi movie with not enough water, collapsing eco-systems, 1% of the population completely dominating the rest of the world (with no further hope of revolution or change) composed of wage slaves with just enough illusion of freedom to keep them satiated.
Re:Yeah, Mission accomplished, watch W take credit
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 4, Informative
No evidence of limb chopping to a casual search. Lots of executions but mainly during the first 15 years of his rule. Since then it seems to mostly be arbitrary prison terms and allowing the prisoners to be abused (physically and sexually). However, this also happens in American Prisons and America incarcerates its own citizens at a higher rate- we just make everything illegal so we do not have to use bogus crimes like "insulting the president" to put someone away for seven years. OTH, you better not say anything mildly threatening or your fate will be similar. Of course, America has become a lot more of a fascist dictatorship than it was in 1960. And, of course, any good discussion needs to point out that Cuba was a dictatorship and 3/4 of it's property was not owned by its own citizens (conditions ripe for revolution by *someone* and a lot of revolutions were occuring- castro was just the successful one).
Thousands of political opponents to the Castro regime have been killed, primarily during the first decade of his leadership.[135][136] Some Cubans labeled "counterrevolutionaries", "fascists", or "CIA operatives" were also imprisoned in poor conditions without trial.[137][138] Military Units to Aid Production, or UMAPs, were labor camps established in 1965 to confine "social deviants" including homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses to work "counter-revolutionary" influences out of certain segments of the population.[139] The camps were closed in 1967 in response to international outcries.[140] Professor Marifeli Pérez Stable, a Cuban immigrant and former Castro supporter has said that "There were thousands of executions, forty, fifty thousand political prisoners. The treatment of political prisoners, with what we today know about human rights and the international norms governing human rights... it is legitimate to raise questions about possible crimes against humanity in Cuba."[141]
Castro acknowledges that Cuba holds political prisoners, but argues that Cuba is justified because these prisoners are not jailed because of their political beliefs, but have been convicted of "counter-revolutionary" crimes, including bombings. Castro portrays opposition to the Cuban government as illegitimate, and the result of an ongoing conspiracy fostered by Cuban exiles with ties to the United States or the CIA..[142]
Always keep in mind when some stranger or unknown corporation has to pay extra money, the cost always passes through to you.
Bank pays more. Bank raises fees until extra cost covered. Tens of thousands of people slightly pinched by overall inflation including those fees raise prices to you or someone you buy from.
So the best thing is to not give asshats ways to loot billions of dollars from society in general. I haven't read up to see if this is a real patent or an ambush (patent some easy idea- let it become popular by hiding the patent- then ambush). It sounds like an ambush tho.
I'm against software patents because many trivial and obvious things like caching a screen to speed display, maintaining data in an array, then in a linked list, having a "table of contents" to disk data, compressing redundant data are all patentable.
The net result is that until all those patents expire, the entire software industry is basically paralyzed and can be waylaid at any time for huge fees.
Software development has *always* relied on code reuse. The question is what amount of code needs to be written to implement the idea. Anything less than 5,000 bytes of assembly code should be unpatentable. (you can't use lines of code-- because you can write a language where a 50,000 line construct is a single opcode.)
While 1/10th of 1% of software does represent patentable ideas- the other 99.9% just isn't. So the tiny amount of patentable ideas are not worth the risk and additional cost to the rest of the industry.
25 randomly slowly rotating satellite debris pieces. Each sweeps the area below (and above). Based on contrast the dark imagary is not even saved. The 25 data stream are broadcast to a commercial satellite in orbit which transmits the data down (one tree in a forest of other data). The data is patched together to form a solid image. One swipe might be 100 pixel by 3000pixel swipe. Overlay all the swipes.
You might have some weak areas but the point is a stealthy satellite- not a perfect one.
It seems to me that the only time the earth face would get sunlight is "sunrise" and "sunset" and that would be oblique- not head on.
50% of the time the bird is completely behind the earth.
50% of the time it is beside or between the sun and the earth (and the shiny side faces out).
However, as others pointed out- there are still lots of ways to detect it.
I think making the satellite smaller might help. I mean a laptop sized satellite is going to be a lot harder to spot than a volkswagon sized one. You could have a swarm of tiny satellites that communicate with a high orbit general purpose satellite which then sends the signal to earth. You could further design them to look like debris and send up a satellite, claim it was broken, and then destroy it with a missile creating a debris cloud (which was really a functional swarm of mini-satellites).
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all... and please- sit on the toilet while I do my business.
Thank you...
It is going pretty much the same in the US.
My "vote" has mattered *one* time in over 20 years. Every other time, the system is so gerrymandered that it doesn't matter if I vote for or against someone/something.
The federal government is basically becoming a fascist dictatorship and we are rapidly growing a "noble" class with different rights and privileges than the "wage slave" class. Capitalism has been restructured to create a slave state for most people- giving the illusion of just enough freedom and control to prevent them from revolting.
We are where we are because they tried this system with private fire companies and it had very bad results.
Some services only work if they are a required service that everyone pays for and everyone benefits from.
Are you in a high property tax state or a low property tax state?
In alabama, the taxes on my house would be roughly $200 a year. Easy to scratch up.
In texas, the taxes on my house are roughly $3000.
In new jersey, the taxes are so high that they are now "allowing" seniors to work for the government (basically slavery) to cover their $9,000 property tax bills.
My only issue with sales tax systems is the point I started this thread with.
A libertarian system cannot survive when some companies and citizens have grossly more power and wealth than others. With sales tax only, I see that some people will inevitably build up huge wealth and power. Perhaps sales tax + a really nasty death tax (the real purpose of which is to break up wealth accumulation).
The problem with property taxes is then we only rent our property from the government. We never own it.
The principle benefit of the fair tax is not the rate (because that will change) but the fact that the government no longer has an excuse to track every element of our lives extremely intrusively. They only have to track businesses intrusively (and businesses should have good records, accountants, ledgers, etc. anyway).
The problem with income tax is that as we enter a computerized, data collected society, the "grease" that made things work is being squeezed out by a very cold and grindy system.
Example- home inspectors in my city made wages a little bit low but they had a lot of freedom about how they did their day as long as they inspected a certain number of houses per week. Now with GPS, they get paid no more, but every second of their day is tracked. So they lost a lot of free time and didn't get the compensation for it (but they will eventually- they'll just quit and find jobs that pay better over time).
But for a few years, the city gets to crow about how much money it saves. Managers moving up only care about two to three year windows- after they leave everything can go to hell in a handbasket.
And their current O/S has issues with this.
It wants to give a disk intensive job all 64 chips if necessary -- and then the disks melt down.
A possible patch to fix this has been cancelled-- there is no way to control it except scheduling these jobs for wierd hours when you are not using the system.
Been suffering with this for 18 months now since they sold us on using outsourced multiple cpu systems in place of stand along boxes.
And businesses can and do destroy people's lives all the time.
The credit bureaus for example ignore the credit laws and collect on chapter 7 bankruptcy's even tho it violates the law. Anyone *big enough* to ignore the law does so if it is profitable.
Yes- governments are a severe problem. The founders were right in that regard. But if we are going to have enormous quasi-governmental businesses and people with more wealth than some states, then we need a large government to counter them. If you start cutting them down to smaller size, then you do not need such a big government to control them.
And if you do *not* cut them down to size then they eventually do take over the government. The drug industry basically controls the FDA now.
You miss this fact.
If I have 1,000 dollars (these days even 1,000,000 dollars) people in power will not pay attention to me.
If I have 1,000,000,000 dollars- people in power will pay a lot of attention to me even if I spend nothing and really pay attention to me if I spend a lot. So I get laws passed to lock in my position. For example- if we got a "fair tax" within a decade, the top 1% would in someway lower their rate below that rate. Probably by having certain categories of spending not counted. Or buy spending over seas. Or transferring wealth over seas and spending the wealth earned there.
Sales tax (aka fair tax) + a monstrous Estate tax might work.
We are very well along the way to developing a nobility class here in america. The dynasty like political trends we are developing concern me greatly.
I think Headcase recognizes what I was saying.
Libertarian philosophy (and capitalism) both work when we respect the golden mean and do not allow excess.
Drugs are great-- but not to excess.
Sex is great-- but not to excess.
Being a Libertarian is great- but no to excess. You can't have a truly Libertarian society if you allow 1% of the population to control 99% of the assets. What you have is nobles and wage slaves/serfs.
The basis of libertarian philosophy is the idea that we can live our own lives as we want to as long as it doesn't affect other people. When sony (or any other company or any other individual) has multiple billions of dollars in assets, they do whatever they want and affect the rest of us negatively all the time. And there *must* be something bigger than them to control them or they will accrete power without limit.
It's not hypocrisy-- perhaps it's goofy headed-- perhaps it is the result of looking at the goofy parts of libertarianism (great basic philosophy but come on- it ignores human nature and pretty much all history of man enslaving man).
I am still fairly libertarian.
However, I realized in my 30's that the libertarian philosophy breaks down when anyone gets much over 100 times the resources of the average citizen. And becomes increasingly broken the higher they get over that mark.
Sony- if they wanted to, could destroy your house, your life, and get away with it.
Bill Gates- if he wanted to, could do the same.
Only a government with enough assets to control the most powerful members of society can deal with these people-- and even then, these people slowly take control of such governments.
If we start from zero, these days the problem would be back in under 20 years. I'm really not sure what the solution is other than draconian taxes on the "winners" who get too big.
Right now, I think 90% taxation on anyone with an income (including corporate provided "benefits") over $5 mill a year is about right. Making 5 mill a year is a phenomenal income . Anything over that is absurd. That's easily 100 times the income of the average citizen-- per year.
And they would still fight really hard for that remaining 10%. Because if you made 105 million, you'd have double the income of people making 5 million. That means you can still buy that rare car over the "poor" 5 million income person. You just can't buy everything and do anything that you desire.
Good post but...
Why is "The Wholesale cost (Before May 2007) of this capacity was about £210 per Mbps, which equates to 21p per Kbps (Kilobit per Second)."?
That cost seems way too high.
A neighborhood full of fiber with a neighborhood cache for each other's downloads wouldn't use fiber outside of the neighbor hood that much. (Once someone gets the window's patch, everyone has it-- once someone gets openoffice 2.3, everyone has it). And likewise, upstream of the severa; neighborhoods, you would have another layer of caching. I know they do that now become sometimes I get crazy fast downloads (like 15mb/second for the entire download duration-- that has to be cached locally and not on the remote servers).
I've been on altavista now for a couple weeks.
Seems just as good.
And they are not so big and scummy yet.
Google seems more and more slimy the longer they exist and the bigger they get. They are setting some kind of land speed record for going from idealistic to scummy.
If I pay someone $10 to dig a rock out of the ground, that rock is going to cost at least $10.
.1gb, you charge them $101 a year.
.5gb.
If a lot of people want the rock, then it may go for $2000. If there are many similar rocks around the world, as soon as prices get too high, other people will start digging up rocks.
So... why does it cost "X" to send 1gb of data?
Is it the underlying physical cost to install the hardware and the salaries of the employees that support and maintain them.
Or is it the scarcity demand?
I.e. Say a cable costs $100 to install, and $100 a year to maintain and can carry 100gb of data.
Then you must charge at least $101 a year.
If you have one user, using
If you have 100 users, using 1gb of data, you charge them $1.10 a year.
If you have 200 users, then you start gambling but can charge them $.55 a year.
Most of the time, you can deliver 1gb to those 200 users because they are on at different times.
Occasionally, if they are all on, you degrade to
It seems to me that a lot of this is about superior caching models.
I can either transmit 100 gb this way.
--- 20gb user
--- 20gb user
--- 20gb user
--- 20gb user
--- 20gb user
or this way
ssss should be spaces but the lameness filter would not allow them.
root..local cache
---20gb ---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
---20gb ---- user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
etc. 3 more times.
The local cache's and very short lines should be relatively inexpensive.
So-- what am I missing-- where am I wrong?
How about designing the entire lamp so it can stand on both ends?
Then you just lay it on the floor, and stand it back up again on the opposite end.
I guess maybe the rotors can only gear one way or something.
if this works even a little- combined with voice control it would be a godsend.
I deal with pain-3 (on a 1-10 scale) all the time now. Mousing is much worse than typing tho. Partially carpal, partially chemo, partially diabetes. The laser off the eyes devices would also very helpful for the total package. And foot pedals.
But could he take Chuck Norris?
I'm sure their judicial process has a lot less protections- yet we put away our people into prison and make them criminals at a higher rate than any 1st (and i think 2nd) world countries on the planet. European countries have a presumption of guilt-- and yet imprison their own people less than we do. The US and Briton are imprisoning people at such a high rate that they are trying to find ways (collars) of keeping them prisoner in their own homes. It's really scary and yet we are letting it happen step by step with cameras and home jails.
Property taxes are so high that we effectively rent our homes and land from the government and must work as wage slaves our entire lives (quit your job for 24 months and you will almost certainly be homeless even if you "own" your own home).
Don't look at the words and hand-waving. Look at what is *actually* happening. Lots of disenfranchised and incarcerated citizens. The ultra-rich just walking all over the other 99% of society (and owning 90% of the assets now). It's like an aristocracy but we pretend it is a democracy. In 80% of cases, our votes do not even matter- the candidates are selected for us. Large corporations and the ultra-wealthy own 90% of our congressmen and senators outright.
Public spaces like beaches and mountains are increasingly sold out-right to the ultra-wealthy (including ultra-wealthy foreign nationals). People who legally purchased good property 30 years ago are now having it condemned and taken from them and given to the ultra-wealthy. The executive (i.e. noble) class receives compensation hundreds or even thousands of times higher than the average population.
Public property (like shows, plays, songs) are also being locked in perpetuity for the wealthy preventing new derivative works. Effective previously legal natural supplements are being banned (without any justification) so that the profits from patented drugs (which are effectively identical to the supplements but with a few molecules moved around) will be protected.
(answering your question)
We have legalized prostitution in Nevada. It should be legal everywhere and through the wonders of craigslist and it basically is.
Marijuana is mostly a misdemeanor issue here.
I would add that the war on drugs has sky-rocketed drug profits while lowering the cost of drugs. Pot is a $1 a joint now and I read that cocaine is 1/3 the inflation adjusted price it was in the 1980's.
And along with this, we have destroyed the government of mexico. There is essentially no real police or judicial system in most of these countries any more. If they touch anything associated with the drug cartel, they know they will be killed. Many of them went with reality and now work for the drug cartels (who have billions in assets) including the mexican military.
The second we legalize pot and cocaine, all those countries will start healing and becoming good societies again.
4,000 is about 400 a year.
The death rate from the iraq war is less than any other listed causes here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
Heck, 50 people a year die in all terrain vehicle deaths.
Life is cheap. A lot of the guys in iraq want to be there for at least a year or two. A lot of guys join the military to go fight, blow shit up, etc. knowing that some of them will die (but always assuming it will be someone else).
Then we have relative death rates-- if life is valuable. Are we paying 400 deaths a year to prevent 8,000 iraqi deaths a year? If so, is it worth it? Seems like it should be. Likewise, we may be preventing a lot of american and european deaths by focusing fundamentalist passion on iraq (and I mean- come'on, these thugs use retarded ladies as bombs).
Then there is the "life is too valuable" factor. If we do not start dying off at a higher rate soon, we are going to get in to seriously ugly situations in 30 to 50 years. Then the death rate will be amazing. It will be like a bad sci-fi movie with not enough water, collapsing eco-systems, 1% of the population completely dominating the rest of the world (with no further hope of revolution or change) composed of wage slaves with just enough illusion of freedom to keep them satiated.
No evidence of limb chopping to a casual search.
... it is legitimate to raise questions about possible crimes against humanity in Cuba."[141]
.[142]
Lots of executions but mainly during the first 15 years of his rule. Since then it seems to mostly be arbitrary prison terms and allowing the prisoners to be abused (physically and sexually). However, this also happens in American Prisons and America incarcerates its own citizens at a higher rate- we just make everything illegal so we do not have to use bogus crimes like "insulting the president" to put someone away for seven years. OTH, you better not say anything mildly threatening or your fate will be similar. Of course, America has become a lot more of a fascist dictatorship than it was in 1960. And, of course, any good discussion needs to point out that Cuba was a dictatorship and 3/4 of it's property was not owned by its own citizens (conditions ripe for revolution by *someone* and a lot of revolutions were occuring- castro was just the successful one).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro#Human_rights_record
Human rights record
Main article: Human rights in Cuba
Thousands of political opponents to the Castro regime have been killed, primarily during the first decade of his leadership.[135][136] Some Cubans labeled "counterrevolutionaries", "fascists", or "CIA operatives" were also imprisoned in poor conditions without trial.[137][138] Military Units to Aid Production, or UMAPs, were labor camps established in 1965 to confine "social deviants" including homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses to work "counter-revolutionary" influences out of certain segments of the population.[139] The camps were closed in 1967 in response to international outcries.[140] Professor Marifeli Pérez Stable, a Cuban immigrant and former Castro supporter has said that "There were thousands of executions, forty, fifty thousand political prisoners. The treatment of political prisoners, with what we today know about human rights and the international norms governing human rights
Castro acknowledges that Cuba holds political prisoners, but argues that Cuba is justified because these prisoners are not jailed because of their political beliefs, but have been convicted of "counter-revolutionary" crimes, including bombings. Castro portrays opposition to the Cuban government as illegitimate, and the result of an ongoing conspiracy fostered by Cuban exiles with ties to the United States or the CIA.
http://www.hrw.org/wr2k2/americas5.html
Always keep in mind when some stranger or unknown corporation has to pay extra money, the cost always passes through to you.
Bank pays more.
Bank raises fees until extra cost covered.
Tens of thousands of people slightly pinched by overall inflation including those fees raise prices to you or someone you buy from.
So the best thing is to not give asshats ways to loot billions of dollars from society in general. I haven't read up to see if this is a real patent or an ambush (patent some easy idea- let it become popular by hiding the patent- then ambush). It sounds like an ambush tho.
So what would be the average of both noble philanthropist and devious scammer?
I'm against software patents because many trivial and obvious things like caching a screen to speed display, maintaining data in an array, then in a linked list, having a "table of contents" to disk data, compressing redundant data are all patentable.
The net result is that until all those patents expire, the entire software industry is basically paralyzed and can be waylaid at any time for huge fees.
Software development has *always* relied on code reuse. The question is what amount of code needs to be written to implement the idea. Anything less than 5,000 bytes of assembly code should be unpatentable. (you can't use lines of code-- because you can write a language where a 50,000 line construct is a single opcode.)
While 1/10th of 1% of software does represent patentable ideas- the other 99.9% just isn't. So the tiny amount of patentable ideas are not worth the risk and additional cost to the rest of the industry.
Actually I was thinking more along these lines.
25 randomly slowly rotating satellite debris pieces.
Each sweeps the area below (and above). Based on contrast the dark imagary is not even saved.
The 25 data stream are broadcast to a commercial satellite in orbit which transmits the data down (one tree in a forest of other data). The data is patched together to form a solid image. One swipe might be 100 pixel by 3000pixel swipe. Overlay all the swipes.
You might have some weak areas but the point is a stealthy satellite- not a perfect one.
I thought about it.
It seems to me that the only time the earth face would get sunlight is "sunrise" and "sunset" and that would be oblique- not head on.
50% of the time the bird is completely behind the earth.
50% of the time it is beside or between the sun and the earth (and the shiny side faces out).
However, as others pointed out- there are still lots of ways to detect it.
I think making the satellite smaller might help. I mean a laptop sized satellite is going to be a lot harder to spot than a volkswagon sized one. You could have a swarm of tiny satellites that communicate with a high orbit general purpose satellite which then sends the signal to earth. You could further design them to look like debris and send up a satellite, claim it was broken, and then destroy it with a missile creating a debris cloud (which was really a functional swarm of mini-satellites).