The draft is a bad idea . Ppl that do not want to fight make poor soldiers and it usually causes massive unrest.
Actually, if you're interested in making sure that a government can't use its military against its own populace, then a draft is actually a pretty good idea - when a tyrant orders the troops to fire on their families, they're much more likely to shoot the tyrant instead. If you're interested in egalitarianism, it also forces people together who might otherwise never cross social circles (given that the "upperclass" aren't allowed to shirk their duty).
Granted, if the military is forced to take _everyone_, instead of just the people who are interested, then they'll end up having to deal with the whole cross-section of competency of the populace (plus the attitudes of most of the people who don't want to be there). That's not good for general efficiency or competency (although if such a force gets involved in a war to defend its homeland, I suspect the attitudes of the soldiers would be a lot more hardcore).
If that kind of question were actually demonstrating anything about the real world, they'd ask something like: "Measure all of the angles using these several different methods of measurement, and compare the sums of each method with the theoretically-correct answer. What does that tell you?"
Instead, this particular question seems phrased to just test your following-instructions ability.
Personally, I think the system should be reformed to allow a limited number of patent grants per year...should have been done long ago!
Hmmm, how about a variation on that idea? How about allowing only a fixed number of total patents in the system (still subject to prior art & obviousness challenges, of course)?
Anyone who wants to can submit their idea for a patent. People (or companies) can bid auction-style for ownership of the various patents (with all the resultant rights), with the auctions occurring at reasonably frequent intervals (3 years?). The money from whoever wins the auction for a particular patent will be used as a payment to the patent's current owner (who might be the winner of a previous auction for this patent). The current owner of the patent has to compete in the auction with the others in order to maintain control of the patent.
The N top auction bids (where N is the fixed number) will be assigned to their new owners (after they've paid the previous owners, of course). Any bidding on patents which didn't make the top N will cause the issues covered by those patents to become public domain.
I think there are some benefits behind an approach like this - instead of depending on overworked, undertrained examiners, each company has to do due-diligence to decide how much it is worth to try and control a given patent (a patent which can be challenged with prior art or obviousness will obviously end up not being worth much).
Since anyone can submit a patent idea (although they won't necessarily control it), even little guys will end up getting paid for their ideas (and the amount they get paid will be determined by what the market think it's worth). If anyone wants to truly control the idea, then they'll have to treat it as a trade secret.
People will pay top-dollar to grab the new ideas, or to keep control of really important older ideas, but the stuff which isn't important enough relative to the top N ideas will get bumped out into the public domain. (Obviously, if you compete in an auction but it ends up in the public domain, you wouldn't be expected to pay for it anymore. Also, there should be an ultimate "reasonable" lifetime for patents so that a really good/fundamental idea doesn't get taken out of the public domain forever by someone with really deep pockets - who can use the idea to keep having really deep pockets.)
Not entirely sure what to do about the current owners of a patent bidding to keep control of it - obviously, it would be unfair to allow them to pay themselves if they win. Perhaps this "loose" money could channeled into R&D/education?
Yeah. But (putting aside the fact that the labels are the ones getting paid for an artist's work, and try to give as little back to the artist as possible), should they get paid over and over every time their work is distributed, when they only needed to do the work to create the work once?
I don't like the positions he's taking either, but to claim that he is ambivalent to Utah and the nation's fate is wrong. Maybe you should listen to some of his speeches; you may not agree with him, but he does appear to really think he is helping people.
Just because he _says_ he's trying to help people doesn't mean that he really means it. It seems to be a big problem with many of our politicians lately; they think they can say whatever they need to get people on their side, but it's only lip service - then they go off and do what they wanted in the first place without worrying about it matching up with what they were saying. Maybe Machiavelli has gotten back in fashion.
The unfortunate thing is, there might be a few politicians who say _and_ do the right things, but it's really difficult to tell them apart from the liars. All I can fall back on is to ignore what the politicians _say_, and pay attention only to what they've been able to accomplish. I can't even take at face value when they try to do something and fail, since they might've been just grandstanding & _expecting_ their effort to fail - I can only trust the stuff where they actually achieved something.
Windows isn't a decent gaming OS with an awesome selection of games?
Having struggled with the DirectX interface occasionally, I'd have to say that the good games that are available for the Windows platform isn't because Windows is a good gaming OS - it's because Windows has so much market share, that the PC game manufacturers are willing to go through almost any kind of coding contortions to make games work for their customers.
I've tried to switch multiple times and I still cannot stand Mozilla's UI at all.
Really? At least for the latest versions of Mozilla, I can't stand going back to the IE UI - I find it really clunky. What kinds of things do you like about IE, or don't like about the Mozilla/Firefox UI?
Yes. Here is an article about his war record (in the context of rebutting various bits of misinformation about it). There is another link called "The Long War of John Kerry" on the 2nd page of the article which has a few statements about what the various medals mean (the Purple Hearts mean that he was injured in battle).
A tape drive simply cannot cause that same critical failure. Worst case, you replace the tape drive, and you carry on as before, probably with the loss of the tape currently in the drive.
Completely ignoring the probability of losing the TAPE, of course - which case everything you said about losing TWO drives occurs. Except that, unless you're paying a lot of money for a secure environment to store your tapes, I think it's much more likely to wipe out your backup tapes than it is to lose two drives at once.
(Imagine some idiot's toddler being brought to work & discovering how much fun it is to pull the tape out of the cartridge case, or a disgruntled employee running a big speaker magnet along the racks of tapes.)
Are you seriously trying to say that Al-Queda could not perform a repeat of the 9/11 attacks today?
I believe it would be impossible for anyone to hijack a passenger plane nowadays, unless it was by both of the legitimate pilots (after they locked the "reinforced" cockpit doors). The passengers have had the results of 9/11 drummed into their brains for so long, they'd dogpile the would-be hijackers no matter what kind of weapon the hijackers had.
I _am_ a bit worried about the possibility of a cargo plane being hijacked (like for UPS or the Post Office) - in those cases, the crew is a lot smaller & could be overpowered. On the other hand, if one of those planes _did_ get hijacked, I'm sure the Air Force would hesitate less about shooting it down than for a passenger plane.
You're not kidding - as an American tourist in London, I was thrilled to visit Trafalgar Square & feed the pigeons (who were ridiculously aggressive) - until I realized how much pigeon crap I was getting all over my clothes (I was trying not to think about what might be in my hair). Return immediately to hotel for shower & laundry.
That kind of thing really brings you back to earth.
Wow. I'm guessing that most liberals don't have to fear personal retribution from their ideologues.
I consider myself a liberal, but I have to disagree with you on this one - God (or Goddess) help you if you violate the canons of Political Correctness in the presence of the wrong sort of "liberal".
What do you think will happen when humans have practically nothing else to do?
Have you seen the Animatrix?:-S
Re:How does this differ from other efforts?
on
Linux in Iraq
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· Score: 1
How about we assist Iraqis trained in construction, etc. in doing the rebulding themselves, get their "free market" rolling, putting some wealth into the hands of the regular Iraqi, rather than to American corporations, big or small, who will go home at the end of the day, taking that money with them.
Sorry, this violates Bush & Co's principles of trickle-down economics - giving most of the money to the rich people at the top who don't really need it, on the assumption that some of it might trickle down to the peons who really make the economy go.
What do you do with a large group of innocents that you want to control? You make them criminals. You pass so many ridiculous and confusing laws that it's impossible for one to lead any kind of reasonable life on the good side of the law.
I always thought that it should be a constitutional right to allow every able-minded person to vote, even if they had been convicted of serious crimes (unlike the usual attitude of preventing felons from voting).
My reasoning goes like this: if your society is healthy, and the laws are common sense rules which everyone tends to follow, then you'll have only a small number of criminals, and their votes won't usually have much effect on any important decisions.
On the other hand, if you get a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks in charge of writing & enforcing the laws, and they're criminalizing _everything_ (and then using selective enforcement to keep their "enemies" from getting uppity), then as the ranks of "criminals" swells, their votes will provide an ever-increasing negative feedback against the small group of people who want to control everyone else's lives.
As it is today, it seems to be pretty easy to disenfranchise anyone who doesn't agree with your political or social philosophy by making sure that they are made into criminals when they don't toe your line (assuming you're in charge, of course).
It's worth pointing out that only a moron would submit a request to the FISC phrased in such a way to cause them to turn it down. I believe that I can count the number of times that they have turned down a surveillance request on both my hands - even after the huge mushrooming of the number of requests after 9/11.
Remember, after Reagan's tax cut revenues to the government DOUBLED. The surge in the economy caused by the tax cuts caused MORE money to be available, not less.
This statement is misleading, and not really a viable argument for tax cuts. See this analysis. There are plenty others with similar statements from Google.
Plus, you can't really evaluate the net effect of the tax cuts on the economy unless you also simultaneously evaluate the effect of the resultant debt that Reagan & Bush's "borrow & spend" policies have imposed on the U.S.
That doesn't mean that I disagree with you about being more careful about where that money is spent - I just think that "tax cuts = more revenue" is far too simplistic a mantra for national policy decisions, and tends to be used more as a means to trick people into going along with corrupt agendas.
I like the Star Trek universe, but the whole Starfleet thing has been totally done to death. What _I_ want to see is a story about a non-Starfleet ship. For instance, one living on the fringes of Federation society (perhaps doing a little smuggling on the edges of Federation space).
You want character defects? How 'bout the captain being a female Klingon (in disgrace from the Empire?) who gets drunk all the time & tries to bed any decently strong-looking humanoid male (and all of the males who know her try to avoid her like the plague when she's in the mood, since they usually end up in the infirmary when it's all done).
You can have the engineer being Scottish, but make him only a mediocre engineer (who is already freqently drunk), and make sure that the ship isn't in very good shape, but he keeps it barely running with makeshift repairs & the future-equivalent of duct tape. The ship is pretty small & cramped, so you don't have hundreds of meters of corridors to run through.
The medic is an ex-war veteran who really only knows battlefield medicine (what the hell do you need anesthetic for?), and you don't have the nice replicators so you have to have a real cook (but who can't cook very well, and who has a tendency to spit in the food of the people who piss him off).
You have a rough-and-tumble crew of miscellaneous deadbeats & losers who take every opportunity to stab each other in the back (thereby providing a good reason to keep turning over actors until you find some that people like).
Every now & then, you can have them interact with a Starfleet ship, perhaps some of the known characters (perhaps they get "pulled over" by the Enterprise to be searched for contraband), whereupon there is plenty of mutual disgust to go around.
Heck, a situation like that could be the basis for a Star Trek "sitcom":-) I'd watch it, for at least a few episodes...
Although statistically speaking, you would get 1 baby per month (barring any defects) - and if you stagger the conceptions 1 month apart, then once production began, you could have a sustainable 1 baby/month after the initial 9 month waiting period).
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Actually, if you're interested in making sure that a government can't use its military against its own populace, then a draft is actually a pretty good idea - when a tyrant orders the troops to fire on their families, they're much more likely to shoot the tyrant instead. If you're interested in egalitarianism, it also forces people together who might otherwise never cross social circles (given that the "upperclass" aren't allowed to shirk their duty).
Granted, if the military is forced to take _everyone_, instead of just the people who are interested, then they'll end up having to deal with the whole cross-section of competency of the populace (plus the attitudes of most of the people who don't want to be there). That's not good for general efficiency or competency (although if such a force gets involved in a war to defend its homeland, I suspect the attitudes of the soldiers would be a lot more hardcore).
If that kind of question were actually demonstrating anything about the real world, they'd ask something like: "Measure all of the angles using these several different methods of measurement, and compare the sums of each method with the theoretically-correct answer. What does that tell you?"
Instead, this particular question seems phrased to just test your following-instructions ability.
How 'bout this idea, or a variation thereof? (Yeah, yeah, I'm linking to my own message...)
Hmmm, how about a variation on that idea? How about allowing only a fixed number of total patents in the system (still subject to prior art & obviousness challenges, of course)?
Anyone who wants to can submit their idea for a patent. People (or companies) can bid auction-style for ownership of the various patents (with all the resultant rights), with the auctions occurring at reasonably frequent intervals (3 years?). The money from whoever wins the auction for a particular patent will be used as a payment to the patent's current owner (who might be the winner of a previous auction for this patent). The current owner of the patent has to compete in the auction with the others in order to maintain control of the patent.
The N top auction bids (where N is the fixed number) will be assigned to their new owners (after they've paid the previous owners, of course). Any bidding on patents which didn't make the top N will cause the issues covered by those patents to become public domain.
I think there are some benefits behind an approach like this - instead of depending on overworked, undertrained examiners, each company has to do due-diligence to decide how much it is worth to try and control a given patent (a patent which can be challenged with prior art or obviousness will obviously end up not being worth much).
Since anyone can submit a patent idea (although they won't necessarily control it), even little guys will end up getting paid for their ideas (and the amount they get paid will be determined by what the market think it's worth). If anyone wants to truly control the idea, then they'll have to treat it as a trade secret.
People will pay top-dollar to grab the new ideas, or to keep control of really important older ideas, but the stuff which isn't important enough relative to the top N ideas will get bumped out into the public domain. (Obviously, if you compete in an auction but it ends up in the public domain, you wouldn't be expected to pay for it anymore. Also, there should be an ultimate "reasonable" lifetime for patents so that a really good/fundamental idea doesn't get taken out of the public domain forever by someone with really deep pockets - who can use the idea to keep having really deep pockets.)
Not entirely sure what to do about the current owners of a patent bidding to keep control of it - obviously, it would be unfair to allow them to pay themselves if they win. Perhaps this "loose" money could channeled into R&D/education?
Well, it's one poor way at self-regulating population control.
Yeah. But (putting aside the fact that the labels are the ones getting paid for an artist's work, and try to give as little back to the artist as possible), should they get paid over and over every time their work is distributed, when they only needed to do the work to create the work once?
Just because he _says_ he's trying to help people doesn't mean that he really means it. It seems to be a big problem with many of our politicians lately; they think they can say whatever they need to get people on their side, but it's only lip service - then they go off and do what they wanted in the first place without worrying about it matching up with what they were saying. Maybe Machiavelli has gotten back in fashion.
The unfortunate thing is, there might be a few politicians who say _and_ do the right things, but it's really difficult to tell them apart from the liars. All I can fall back on is to ignore what the politicians _say_, and pay attention only to what they've been able to accomplish. I can't even take at face value when they try to do something and fail, since they might've been just grandstanding & _expecting_ their effort to fail - I can only trust the stuff where they actually achieved something.
Having struggled with the DirectX interface occasionally, I'd have to say that the good games that are available for the Windows platform isn't because Windows is a good gaming OS - it's because Windows has so much market share, that the PC game manufacturers are willing to go through almost any kind of coding contortions to make games work for their customers.
Really? At least for the latest versions of Mozilla, I can't stand going back to the IE UI - I find it really clunky. What kinds of things do you like about IE, or don't like about the Mozilla/Firefox UI?
Yes. Here is an article about his war record (in the context of rebutting various bits of misinformation about it). There is another link called "The Long War of John Kerry" on the 2nd page of the article which has a few statements about what the various medals mean (the Purple Hearts mean that he was injured in battle).
Completely ignoring the probability of losing the TAPE, of course - which case everything you said about losing TWO drives occurs. Except that, unless you're paying a lot of money for a secure environment to store your tapes, I think it's much more likely to wipe out your backup tapes than it is to lose two drives at once.
(Imagine some idiot's toddler being brought to work & discovering how much fun it is to pull the tape out of the cartridge case, or a disgruntled employee running a big speaker magnet along the racks of tapes.)
I believe it would be impossible for anyone to hijack a passenger plane nowadays, unless it was by both of the legitimate pilots (after they locked the "reinforced" cockpit doors). The passengers have had the results of 9/11 drummed into their brains for so long, they'd dogpile the would-be hijackers no matter what kind of weapon the hijackers had.
I _am_ a bit worried about the possibility of a cargo plane being hijacked (like for UPS or the Post Office) - in those cases, the crew is a lot smaller & could be overpowered. On the other hand, if one of those planes _did_ get hijacked, I'm sure the Air Force would hesitate less about shooting it down than for a passenger plane.
That actually sounds like an interesting source of energy, if you can figure out how to harness it.
You're not kidding - as an American tourist in London, I was thrilled to visit Trafalgar Square & feed the pigeons (who were ridiculously aggressive) - until I realized how much pigeon crap I was getting all over my clothes (I was trying not to think about what might be in my hair). Return immediately to hotel for shower & laundry.
That kind of thing really brings you back to earth.
I wonder if they consider "hooking the analog output of the DVD player to a video recorder" as "cracking the disc"?
I consider myself a liberal, but I have to disagree with you on this one - God (or Goddess) help you if you violate the canons of Political Correctness in the presence of the wrong sort of "liberal".
Have you seen the Animatrix? :-S
Sorry, this violates Bush & Co's principles of trickle-down economics - giving most of the money to the rich people at the top who don't really need it, on the assumption that some of it might trickle down to the peons who really make the economy go.
I always thought that it should be a constitutional right to allow every able-minded person to vote, even if they had been convicted of serious crimes (unlike the usual attitude of preventing felons from voting).
My reasoning goes like this: if your society is healthy, and the laws are common sense rules which everyone tends to follow, then you'll have only a small number of criminals, and their votes won't usually have much effect on any important decisions.
On the other hand, if you get a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks in charge of writing & enforcing the laws, and they're criminalizing _everything_ (and then using selective enforcement to keep their "enemies" from getting uppity), then as the ranks of "criminals" swells, their votes will provide an ever-increasing negative feedback against the small group of people who want to control everyone else's lives.
As it is today, it seems to be pretty easy to disenfranchise anyone who doesn't agree with your political or social philosophy by making sure that they are made into criminals when they don't toe your line (assuming you're in charge, of course).
It's worth pointing out that only a moron would submit a request to the FISC phrased in such a way to cause them to turn it down. I believe that I can count the number of times that they have turned down a surveillance request on both my hands - even after the huge mushrooming of the number of requests after 9/11.
This statement is misleading, and not really a viable argument for tax cuts. See this analysis. There are plenty others with similar statements from Google.
Plus, you can't really evaluate the net effect of the tax cuts on the economy unless you also simultaneously evaluate the effect of the resultant debt that Reagan & Bush's "borrow & spend" policies have imposed on the U.S.
That doesn't mean that I disagree with you about being more careful about where that money is spent - I just think that "tax cuts = more revenue" is far too simplistic a mantra for national policy decisions, and tends to be used more as a means to trick people into going along with corrupt agendas.
I like the Star Trek universe, but the whole Starfleet thing has been totally done to death. What _I_ want to see is a story about a non-Starfleet ship. For instance, one living on the fringes of Federation society (perhaps doing a little smuggling on the edges of Federation space).
:-) I'd watch it, for at least a few episodes...
You want character defects? How 'bout the captain being a female Klingon (in disgrace from the Empire?) who gets drunk all the time & tries to bed any decently strong-looking humanoid male (and all of the males who know her try to avoid her like the plague when she's in the mood, since they usually end up in the infirmary when it's all done).
You can have the engineer being Scottish, but make him only a mediocre engineer (who is already freqently drunk), and make sure that the ship isn't in very good shape, but he keeps it barely running with makeshift repairs & the future-equivalent of duct tape. The ship is pretty small & cramped, so you don't have hundreds of meters of corridors to run through.
The medic is an ex-war veteran who really only knows battlefield medicine (what the hell do you need anesthetic for?), and you don't have the nice replicators so you have to have a real cook (but who can't cook very well, and who has a tendency to spit in the food of the people who piss him off).
You have a rough-and-tumble crew of miscellaneous deadbeats & losers who take every opportunity to stab each other in the back (thereby providing a good reason to keep turning over actors until you find some that people like).
Every now & then, you can have them interact with a Starfleet ship, perhaps some of the known characters (perhaps they get "pulled over" by the Enterprise to be searched for contraband), whereupon there is plenty of mutual disgust to go around.
Heck, a situation like that could be the basis for a Star Trek "sitcom"
I think a lot of the soldiers are fighting to stay alive.
Although statistically speaking, you would get 1 baby per month (barring any defects) - and if you stagger the conceptions 1 month apart, then once production began, you could have a sustainable 1 baby/month after the initial 9 month waiting period).
Heh - that's the same way a lot of Americans feel, oddly enough - and _we_ get called anti-American too :-)