It can't work, anything that is designed to go through the extremes in temperature associated with space travel will have to be tiled; otherwise thermal expansion will (quite literally) kill the craft.
I don't know exactly how much the tiles on the current space shuttle expand but I'd be willing to bet if it were a single piece re-entry would cause it to crack, buckle, fall off, and ultimately the craft to burn up.
The heat shield designs on a capsule might be simpler, cheaper, and more well understood, but they are still tiled. The reason they are easier to use is that it is easier to cover a dome (more or less) with tiles than an airfoil.
One thing thats important about the traditional layout is that there is lots of "hidden" information in it that you don't need to have memorized.
Several people have hinted at this, but not fleshed out the point. One good example is electro-negativity. In the traditional layout the closer an atom is to Flourine the more electronegative it is. In the new one its difficult or impossible to intuit this.
Which is why, as I understand it, these clauses are typically found to be unconscionable if challenged, especially if you're not critically important to the company.
For example, a lab tech who works for a large pharma company and signs a non-compete agreement has a much better chance of it being overturned if challenged than a TV or Radio personality, or high level executive.
A big reason why these agreements are found to be unconscionable is that they unreasonably interfere with your ability to make a living. If all your training and experience is in a particular field, and then your company says you can't do that kind of work, there is little chance that the agreement will be upheld.
IANAL, but I do believe that NDAs do in fact necessarily expire at some point, typically 10 years after the end of the collaboration.
If however, the code in question was licensed to IBM under the condition that it could not be released without MS's express permission then I believe that would not fall under a NDA, and would be subject to the terms of the license.
I may or may not be talking out of my ass
Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again
on
Meet Web Hypochondriacs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Agreed, but I feel the need to point out that just because its bad for hypocondriacs, doesn't mean its bad period.
There is a lot of valuable information about all kinds of diseases and medicine that should be available to us, and is with WebMD.
I am tempted to say that if you are stupid enough to diagnose yourself with some obscure disease from WebMD thats your own damn fault, but unfortunately a lot of really intelligent people do the same thing. The methods of problem solving we were taught in school seemingly is a perfect fit for diagnosing medical conditions, but blindly combining symptoms is now substitute for a doctors experience.
Personally, I think that the responsible thing for WebMD and the like to do is to disallow searching by symptom. That way if you know about the disease you can research it, but if your shakrahs are just out of alignment and you need to figure out whats wrong with you its more difficult.
Lets compare *Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, 4Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, 6and Jesse the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife, 7Solomon the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa, 8Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram, Jehoram the father of Uzziah, 9Uzziah the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, 10Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amon, Amon the father of Josiah, 11and Josiah the father of Jeconiah[a] and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon. 12After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, 13Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, Abiud the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, 14Azor the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akim, Akim the father of Eliud, 15Eliud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, 16and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.
or *JAR JAR: Oh, noooooooooo! Hey, help me! Help me!! QUI-GON: Let go! JAR JAR Oyi, mooie-mooie! I luv yous! QUI-GON Are you brainless? You almost got us killed! JAR JAR I spake. QUI-GON The ability to speak does not make you intelligent. Now get outta here! QUI-GON starts to move off, and JAR JAR follows. JAR JAR No...no! Mesa stay...Mesa yous humble servaunt. QUI-GON That wont be necessary. JAR JAR Oh boot tis! Tis demunded byda guds. Tis a live debett, tis. Mesa culled Jaja Binkss. QUI-GON I have no time for this now... JAR JAR Say what? Oh, nooooo! Weesa ganna.... QUI-GON Stay down! JAR JAR...dieeee! OBI-WAN Sorry, Master, the water fried my weapon. QUI-GON You forgot to turn your power off again, didn't you? QUI-GON It won't take long to recharge, but this is a lesson I hope you've learned, my young Padawan. OBI-WAN Yes, Master. JAR JAR Yousa sav-ed my again, hey? OBI-WAN What's this? QUI-GON A local. Let's go, before more of those droids show up. JAR JAR Mure? Mure did you spake??!? JAR JAR Ex-squeeze me, but da moto grande safe place would be Otoh Gunga. Tis where I grew up...Tis safe city. QUI-GON A city! Can you take us there? JAR JAR Ahhh, will...on second taut...no, not willy. QUI-GO No??! JAR JAR Iss embarrissing, boot... My afrai my've bean banished. My forgoten der Bosses would do terrible tings to my. Terrible tings if my goen back dare. QUI-GON You hear that? QUI-GON That's the sound of a thousand terrible things heading this way... OBI-WAN When they find us, they will crush us, grind us into little pieces, then blast us into oblivion! JAR JAR Oh! Yousa point is well seen. Dis way! Hurry!
Yes! I can see it now. All we need to do is simultaneously fuse 119 deuterium atoms together into one super-atom. If we use tritium we cut that down to 79.33 atoms. (plus tritium sounds more sinister.) Rinse and repeat and we can form the worlds largest supply of wepons grade nuclear material! I knew those damn Frenchies were up to something, and those sneeky Japanese still want payback.
Ok, I'm re-reading this thread this morning, any you seem to be making two points, feel free to correct me if I'm misrepresenting you.
1.) The political spectrum is silly, because its too simplified.
2.) Everyone is free, because they chose to be a member of their particular society. If they don't like it they are free to leave.
Of course I'm just arguing for the hell of it too. I feel that expresing my opinions and gaining feedback helps me strengthen my arguments,and codify by beliefs...
As for the political spectrum, I think it is exceedingly useful to group single ideas, and slightly less useful to group people who likely have some rightist and some leftist ideas. Personally when I think of the spectrum I picture it as a horseshoe, rather than a straight line. The right capped with despotic facism, and the left capped with communism (maybe anarcy, but no sane person even pretends anything like that will ever be realised). I think the horseshoe image is useful because Mussolini's and Stalin's societies were more similar than either of them would admit, and what do you know on a horseshoe the right and left ends are pretty close together...
As far as freedom is concerned, while it is true that we can all technically do whatever we want, some of our freedom can be removed by threat of harm. I think this is the main distinction between practical and absolute freedom. Since we are all animals we will do alot of things that go against our principles (i.e. things we don't want to do) for the sake so self-preservation.
Since there is no society on earth, and rather no plausible society which could ever impliment unmitigated absolute freedom I say such a beast does not exist (except of course in a metaphysical sense so that we can talk about it like we are doing now.) As soon as the primordial society told Ugg he couldn't eat Grogg's mammoth burger we left the realm of absolute freedom for good.
As such I think we should be talking about degrees of practical freedom, and this is where the two points tie together, since IMHO the best way to talk about degrees of practical freedom is by with the political spectrum.
I would put my pilot out on the internet in a heartbeat. Want five more? Come buy the boxed set
I would love to see somethign like this ahppen. If they guy made some money maybe the RIAA and MPAA could STFU about how P2P is killing there buisness.
Of course I wouldn't actually expect them to stop bitching, but at least we'd have somethign to point to that shows how P2P can help buisness.
I don't particularly want to argue semantics, but if we tak about absolute freedom, and practical freedom I think that we eliminate some of the problems. If ideal freedom is the ability to do whatever one wants, and practical freedom implies consequences I think we get closer to the mark.
Of course there are some always going to be problems with any definition. In this case Absolute freedom doesn't exists, because even if you live on an island with absolutely no human interaction you are still forced to feed yourself and drink. Since dying would be a consequence of failing to nurish yourself everything would fall under practical freedom, so the distinction loses meaning.
The point being that saying everything is ultimately free is the same as saying that nothing is free. At some point we need to draw a destinction between free and not free. It is convinient to define practical freedom as the ability to do whatever you want, so long as it does not effect my ability to do the same.
This of course tends to draw a fuzzy line, but it is better than calling everything free. It is also of practical importance to be able to speak in degrees of freedom (e.g. China is more free than it was, France is more free than Iran, etc.)
And; if God imposes Free Will upon man, then the religious types can claim that man is Free to do what he likes. I'm not religious personally, but if God does not directly impose his (His...) will upon Man, then Man is still free to choose to ignore this, and morality is still only God's choice.
The only non-free state then is one which is predetermined. Christianity is rather unique in declaring that humans have free will. Jews ignore the question, and Muslims deny that free will exists. Since you were raised in a Christian society (even though you're not religious yourself) your default position is that we are able to choose. Christians have wrestled with this question ever since there was a Christian church. Of particular interest is that if God imposes anything we are not free. Even if that something is free will we did not have a choice in whether or not to be free, so we are not free to be not free.
Therefore, if we can talk about practical freedom, rather than absolute freedom then the political spectrum has meaning. The extreme right prefers facism, and the extreme left communism. Any two, competeing items in between, that contain an aspect of freedom, can be charactersied as right and left.
Ok I get the point that they're similar, in fact I agree with you, but only in the sense that they're similar in liking certain things and disliking others, and that both groups want to enforce thier idea of right and wrong. i.e they're similar in that they both seek control
Just because someone is a power hungry dictator doesn't mean their not an idealistic power hungry dictator. Infact interpreting your Godwin filter You seem to be saying that while Hitler was clearly only embracing facism to gain power, it apears at least that Mao and Stalin had at least some attachment to their causes. I would tend to argue that oposite. Hitler was not intelligent enough to rise to power without fully embracing the ideals of the major minority. He was only charismatic because he believed the stuff he was spouting. Stalin, who was clearly more intelligent, and maybe even Mao (whos particular history I'm less familiar with) could be considered capable of doublethink, and leveraging Machiavelian principles to control their populations.
And if you live in a world unfettered by outside intelligence- or if you consider your God external to human will- as most people think they do, then you have to accept the premise that all humans-- all *organisms*-- started from a blank slate with no external laws, and used this absolute "freedom" to influence the behaviour of other humans/organisms. Everyone lives in a "free" society in this sense; laws, repression and such are just other organisms using their absolute freedom to influence them.
Here's where I lose you...
First of all I completely disagree that belief in God -> no external laws. In fact I would state the opposite. If God exists then its easy to postulate absolute morality, to which we are all bound. The athiest view point of morality has to be that morality exists, because its more convinient for everybody. There are no absolutes. This is closer to what I would describe as a blank state.
I follow the first half of your argument that real anarchy cannot exist, and that sociey's rules are created in response to freedom (even if it inhibits freedom). And in this sense I agree that freedom can be thought of as a contradiction. However, I think it is much more useful to actually give the word freedom meaning. My favorite definition (paraphrasing) is that your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.
The thing is we are relasing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhous gas. It is only prudent to try to lessen our impact on the enviornment. We're not talking about trying to cool the earth, we're talking about trying to stop warming it. There is a difference there, there really isn't anything that we can feasably do (short of a space ring) that will actually cool the earth.
I am not entirely convinced that we are fully responsible fot the current warming trend (although I'm leaning that way), but I see no reason to not try to cut our CO2 emmissions.
One other thing that I would like to point out is that CO2 is NOT the most important greenhouse gas. Water vapor is. CO2 is in a distant second (methane is third), we just obsess over that because we can concievably do something about that. Since we can't burn anything non-renewable without increasing amount of greenhouse gasses that likely means reducing our power consumption. This has economic ramifications which is why George W. isn't sure if global warming is real or not.
First of all I certainly don't think that everyone who is in college does drugs, nor do I think that soemone caught with drugs should not have to sufffer some consequences. However, I think that "zero tolerance" policies are crap, and do more damage than good.
There are two facets to the drug problem, one is that people do drugs, the other is that society says you're not allowed to do drugs. Take either of these aspects away, and there is not a drug problem.
I'm not advocating leagilization of all drugs either, but I do think that arresting the user, or the dorm room drug dealer does nothing to help solve the problem. If we really want to crack the supply we need to take away the economic motivation for the growers, and the ring leaders. This is the problem with no easy solution, so its no wonder there is no end in sight. We need to attack the problem from the supply, not the demand. Or at least attack the suply punitively, and combat the demand with rehabilitation.
I also reject your notion that a student who doesn't do drugs is somehow more worth of a college education. Again this is attacking the demand, which will never have an appreciable effect on the drug market, without Big Brotheresque monitoring.
Finally when you combine this with the fact that the entire history of drug legislation and drug prosecution is very much racially biased I submit that the War on Drugs only serves to seperate and alienate the poor minorities only perpetuates the problem
Do you know that marajuana, the first drug to be outlawed because of those dangerous mexicans? Opium (and its derivatives) was outlawed because of the dangerous China-men who brought it over when they came to work on the railroads. Now look at the sentancing differences between cocaine and crack. The only reason something gets made illegal is if there's more of them doing it them us.
Right up there with the war on drugs and the war on terrorism right?
So destined to fail?
You can't win a war against an intangible, because you can't conquor an ideal. The "War on Drugs" is a PR nightmare, because it hasn't done anything to "improve" the situation in the past 10 years. It would be an even bigger PR headache to call off the war on drugs because then it looks like we've lost.
As far as expulsion goes we already take away their financial aid, which is the same damn thing to most students, and thats working great right? Of course you miss that population that doesn't go to school. Oh and once somone has been expelled that'll teach 'em, they'll never do drugs again.
I don't have the solution, but it seems to me like we ought to be spending a little more money on treatment, and a little less on punishment. Nothing personal to the parent, it just irks me a little when I hear. "All we have to do is..." If the solution were that simple it wouldn't have become the problem it is in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
It can't work, anything that is designed to go through the extremes in temperature associated with space travel will have to be tiled; otherwise thermal expansion will (quite literally) kill the craft.
I don't know exactly how much the tiles on the current space shuttle expand but I'd be willing to bet if it were a single piece re-entry would cause it to crack, buckle, fall off, and ultimately the craft to burn up.
The heat shield designs on a capsule might be simpler, cheaper, and more well understood, but they are still tiled. The reason they are easier to use is that it is easier to cover a dome (more or less) with tiles than an airfoil.
One thing thats important about the traditional layout is that there is lots of "hidden" information in it that you don't need to have memorized.
Several people have hinted at this, but not fleshed out the point. One good example is electro-negativity. In the traditional layout the closer an atom is to Flourine the more electronegative it is. In the new one its difficult or impossible to intuit this.
The spiral is so that you can connect the end of one row with the beginning of the next, it is useful display visually that sodium comes after neon.
Isn't that the whole point of ever putting someone on retainer?
Which is why, as I understand it, these clauses are typically found to be unconscionable if challenged, especially if you're not critically important to the company.
For example, a lab tech who works for a large pharma company and signs a non-compete agreement has a much better chance of it being overturned if challenged than a TV or Radio personality, or high level executive.
A big reason why these agreements are found to be unconscionable is that they unreasonably interfere with your ability to make a living. If all your training and experience is in a particular field, and then your company says you can't do that kind of work, there is little chance that the agreement will be upheld.
Oh, and for the record IANAL.
IANAL, but I do believe that NDAs do in fact necessarily expire at some point, typically 10 years after the end of the collaboration.
If however, the code in question was licensed to IBM under the condition that it could not be released without MS's express permission then I believe that would not fall under a NDA, and would be subject to the terms of the license.
I may or may not be talking out of my ass
Agreed, but I feel the need to point out that just because its bad for hypocondriacs, doesn't mean its bad period.
There is a lot of valuable information about all kinds of diseases and medicine that should be available to us, and is with WebMD.
I am tempted to say that if you are stupid enough to diagnose yourself with some obscure disease from WebMD thats your own damn fault, but unfortunately a lot of really intelligent people do the same thing. The methods of problem solving we were taught in school seemingly is a perfect fit for diagnosing medical conditions, but blindly combining symptoms is now substitute for a doctors experience.
Personally, I think that the responsible thing for WebMD and the like to do is to disallow searching by symptom. That way if you know about the disease you can research it, but if your shakrahs are just out of alignment and you need to figure out whats wrong with you its more difficult.
Could we make 'em fight? You know to the death? I'd install the buddy and resurect clippy if I could see that.
I think its a toss up
Lets compare
...dieeee!
*Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, 4Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, 6and Jesse the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife, 7Solomon the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa, 8Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram, Jehoram the father of Uzziah, 9Uzziah the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, 10Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amon, Amon the father of Josiah, 11and Josiah the father of Jeconiah[a] and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon. 12After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, 13Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, Abiud the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, 14Azor the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akim, Akim the father of Eliud, 15Eliud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, 16and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.
or
*JAR JAR: Oh, noooooooooo!
Hey, help me! Help me!!
QUI-GON:
Let go!
JAR JAR
Oyi, mooie-mooie! I luv yous!
QUI-GON
Are you brainless? You almost got us killed!
JAR JAR
I spake.
QUI-GON
The ability to speak does not make
you intelligent. Now get outta here!
QUI-GON starts to move off, and JAR JAR follows.
JAR JAR
No...no! Mesa stay...Mesa yous humble
servaunt.
QUI-GON
That wont be necessary.
JAR JAR
Oh boot tis! Tis demunded byda guds. Tis a live debett, tis. Mesa culled Jaja Binkss.
QUI-GON
I have no time for this now...
JAR JAR
Say what?
Oh, nooooo! Weesa ganna....
QUI-GON
Stay down!
JAR JAR
OBI-WAN
Sorry, Master, the water fried my weapon.
QUI-GON
You forgot to turn your power off again, didn't you?
QUI-GON
It won't take long to recharge, but this is a lesson I hope you've learned, my young Padawan.
OBI-WAN
Yes, Master.
JAR JAR
Yousa sav-ed my again, hey?
OBI-WAN
What's this?
QUI-GON
A local. Let's go, before more of those droids show up.
JAR JAR
Mure? Mure did you spake??!?
JAR JAR
Ex-squeeze me, but da moto grande safe place would be Otoh Gunga. Tis where I grew up...Tis safe city.
QUI-GON
A city! Can you take us there?
JAR JAR
Ahhh, will...on second taut...no, not willy.
QUI-GO
No??!
JAR JAR
Iss embarrissing, boot... My afrai my've bean banished. My forgoten der Bosses would do terrible tings to my. Terrible tings if my goen back dare.
QUI-GON
You hear that?
QUI-GON
That's the sound of a thousand terrible things heading this way...
OBI-WAN
When they find us, they will crush us, grind us into little pieces, then blast us into oblivion!
JAR JAR
Oh! Yousa point is well seen. Dis way! Hurry!
Something like convincing 2.1 billion people 2000 years later that Jesus was the Son of God?
Yes! I can see it now. All we need to do is simultaneously fuse 119 deuterium atoms together into one super-atom. If we use tritium we cut that down to 79.33 atoms. (plus tritium sounds more sinister.) Rinse and repeat and we can form the worlds largest supply of wepons grade nuclear material! I knew those damn Frenchies were up to something, and those sneeky Japanese still want payback.
u rg_and_zmc-2_in_hangar_1.jpg
Alternately they could be developing a secret "Hydrogen Bomb" that looks something like this http://www.nlhs.com/images/hindenburg/big_hindenb
Ok, I'm re-reading this thread this morning, any you seem to be making two points, feel free to correct me if I'm misrepresenting you.
1.) The political spectrum is silly, because its too simplified.
2.) Everyone is free, because they chose to be a member of their particular society. If they don't like it they are free to leave.
Of course I'm just arguing for the hell of it too. I feel that expresing my opinions and gaining feedback helps me strengthen my arguments,and codify by beliefs...
As for the political spectrum, I think it is exceedingly useful to group single ideas, and slightly less useful to group people who likely have some rightist and some leftist ideas. Personally when I think of the spectrum I picture it as a horseshoe, rather than a straight line. The right capped with despotic facism, and the left capped with communism (maybe anarcy, but no sane person even pretends anything like that will ever be realised). I think the horseshoe image is useful because Mussolini's and Stalin's societies were more similar than either of them would admit, and what do you know on a horseshoe the right and left ends are pretty close together...
As far as freedom is concerned, while it is true that we can all technically do whatever we want, some of our freedom can be removed by threat of harm. I think this is the main distinction between practical and absolute freedom. Since we are all animals we will do alot of things that go against our principles (i.e. things we don't want to do) for the sake so self-preservation.
Since there is no society on earth, and rather no plausible society which could ever impliment unmitigated absolute freedom I say such a beast does not exist (except of course in a metaphysical sense so that we can talk about it like we are doing now.) As soon as the primordial society told Ugg he couldn't eat Grogg's mammoth burger we left the realm of absolute freedom for good.
As such I think we should be talking about degrees of practical freedom, and this is where the two points tie together, since IMHO the best way to talk about degrees of practical freedom is by with the political spectrum.
I would love to see somethign like this ahppen. If they guy made some money maybe the RIAA and MPAA could STFU about how P2P is killing there buisness.
Of course I wouldn't actually expect them to stop bitching, but at least we'd have somethign to point to that shows how P2P can help buisness.
I don't particularly want to argue semantics, but if we tak about absolute freedom, and practical freedom I think that we eliminate some of the problems. If ideal freedom is the ability to do whatever one wants, and practical freedom implies consequences I think we get closer to the mark.
Of course there are some always going to be problems with any definition. In this case Absolute freedom doesn't exists, because even if you live on an island with absolutely no human interaction you are still forced to feed yourself and drink. Since dying would be a consequence of failing to nurish yourself everything would fall under practical freedom, so the distinction loses meaning.
The point being that saying everything is ultimately free is the same as saying that nothing is free. At some point we need to draw a destinction between free and not free. It is convinient to define practical freedom as the ability to do whatever you want, so long as it does not effect my ability to do the same.
This of course tends to draw a fuzzy line, but it is better than calling everything free. It is also of practical importance to be able to speak in degrees of freedom (e.g. China is more free than it was, France is more free than Iran, etc.)
The only non-free state then is one which is predetermined. Christianity is rather unique in declaring that humans have free will. Jews ignore the question, and Muslims deny that free will exists. Since you were raised in a Christian society (even though you're not religious yourself) your default position is that we are able to choose. Christians have wrestled with this question ever since there was a Christian church. Of particular interest is that if God imposes anything we are not free. Even if that something is free will we did not have a choice in whether or not to be free, so we are not free to be not free.
Therefore, if we can talk about practical freedom, rather than absolute freedom then the political spectrum has meaning. The extreme right prefers facism, and the extreme left communism. Any two, competeing items in between, that contain an aspect of freedom, can be charactersied as right and left.
abaci
So we can't call something what it is until a court okays it?
It wasn't theft because they never found the guy who took the stuff from my garage.
So confused...
Ok I get the point that they're similar, in fact I agree with you, but only in the sense that they're similar in liking certain things and disliking others, and that both groups want to enforce thier idea of right and wrong. i.e they're similar in that they both seek control
Just because someone is a power hungry dictator doesn't mean their not an idealistic power hungry dictator. Infact interpreting your Godwin filter You seem to be saying that while Hitler was clearly only embracing facism to gain power, it apears at least that Mao and Stalin had at least some attachment to their causes. I would tend to argue that oposite. Hitler was not intelligent enough to rise to power without fully embracing the ideals of the major minority. He was only charismatic because he believed the stuff he was spouting. Stalin, who was clearly more intelligent, and maybe even Mao (whos particular history I'm less familiar with) could be considered capable of doublethink, and leveraging Machiavelian principles to control their populations.
Here's where I lose you...
First of all I completely disagree that belief in God -> no external laws. In fact I would state the opposite. If God exists then its easy to postulate absolute morality, to which we are all bound. The athiest view point of morality has to be that morality exists, because its more convinient for everybody. There are no absolutes. This is closer to what I would describe as a blank state.
I follow the first half of your argument that real anarchy cannot exist, and that sociey's rules are created in response to freedom (even if it inhibits freedom). And in this sense I agree that freedom can be thought of as a contradiction. However, I think it is much more useful to actually give the word freedom meaning. My favorite definition (paraphrasing) is that your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.
The thing is we are relasing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhous gas. It is only prudent to try to lessen our impact on the enviornment. We're not talking about trying to cool the earth, we're talking about trying to stop warming it. There is a difference there, there really isn't anything that we can feasably do (short of a space ring) that will actually cool the earth.
I am not entirely convinced that we are fully responsible fot the current warming trend (although I'm leaning that way), but I see no reason to not try to cut our CO2 emmissions.
One other thing that I would like to point out is that CO2 is NOT the most important greenhouse gas. Water vapor is. CO2 is in a distant second (methane is third), we just obsess over that because we can concievably do something about that. Since we can't burn anything non-renewable without increasing amount of greenhouse gasses that likely means reducing our power consumption. This has economic ramifications which is why George W. isn't sure if global warming is real or not.
Enough to power an evil robot army and virtual reality prison, that contains profound philosphical answers?
damnit I alwasy type rations too when i mean ratios, I wonder why that is.
Maybe you just need to embiggen your vocabulary
First of all I certainly don't think that everyone who is in college does drugs, nor do I think that soemone caught with drugs should not have to sufffer some consequences. However, I think that "zero tolerance" policies are crap, and do more damage than good.
There are two facets to the drug problem, one is that people do drugs, the other is that society says you're not allowed to do drugs. Take either of these aspects away, and there is not a drug problem.
I'm not advocating leagilization of all drugs either, but I do think that arresting the user, or the dorm room drug dealer does nothing to help solve the problem. If we really want to crack the supply we need to take away the economic motivation for the growers, and the ring leaders. This is the problem with no easy solution, so its no wonder there is no end in sight. We need to attack the problem from the supply, not the demand. Or at least attack the suply punitively, and combat the demand with rehabilitation.
I also reject your notion that a student who doesn't do drugs is somehow more worth of a college education. Again this is attacking the demand, which will never have an appreciable effect on the drug market, without Big Brotheresque monitoring.
Finally when you combine this with the fact that the entire history of drug legislation and drug prosecution is very much racially biased I submit that the War on Drugs only serves to seperate and alienate the poor minorities only perpetuates the problemDo you know that marajuana, the first drug to be outlawed because of those dangerous mexicans? Opium (and its derivatives) was outlawed because of the dangerous China-men who brought it over when they came to work on the railroads. Now look at the sentancing differences between cocaine and crack. The only reason something gets made illegal is if there's more of them doing it them us.
So destined to fail?
You can't win a war against an intangible, because you can't conquor an ideal. The "War on Drugs" is a PR nightmare, because it hasn't done anything to "improve" the situation in the past 10 years. It would be an even bigger PR headache to call off the war on drugs because then it looks like we've lost.
As far as expulsion goes we already take away their financial aid, which is the same damn thing to most students, and thats working great right? Of course you miss that population that doesn't go to school. Oh and once somone has been expelled that'll teach 'em, they'll never do drugs again.
I don't have the solution, but it seems to me like we ought to be spending a little more money on treatment, and a little less on punishment. Nothing personal to the parent, it just irks me a little when I hear. "All we have to do is..." If the solution were that simple it wouldn't have become the problem it is in the first place.