There's a great deal of concern about having people who you wouldn't trust on a bicycle flying these things - perhaps it would be required to have these things fly themselves (you punch in the address and away you go)?
You might even make this kind of thing into a taxi service - ask for a pickup on your wireless PDA (or watch), the thing will come flying down to a sidewalk nearby, you strap yourself in & punch in the destination address, and away you go!
There could also be a central traffic management system to keep track of all the air-taxies, plus some default behavior in case of loss of communication.
As far as people learning to trust the things, I'd anticipate that once a decent number of people were flying around in these things with a very low percentage of accidents, then people would gradually start trusting them (just like they learned to accept cars going faster than 40mph...)
Actually, there's a pretty high volume of "fan fiction", both on USENET & on the web, which is essentially non-paid writing.
Granted, most of the stuff isn't very good:), and it's usually based on a universe created by somebody else, but some of it is quite readable & engaging. My only real complaint might be that some of the good stuff doesn't get finished:(, which drives me nuts.
I don't think that many of these people are expecting remuneration for their work (and, in fact, usually pathetically beg not to be sued by the original character creators), but they still keep churning it out.
It's not a useful COMMERCIAL model, but for those people who have creativity oozing from their fingertips, it's certainly one way to get a bit of name recognition for their work.
Actually, if "legalese" were TRULY like a computer language, then you wouldn't have argue about the ambiguities inherent in so many of the laws!
I thought it would be quite fascinating if it was required to write the laws in an unambiguous language, designed to be interpreted by a machine.
Legislators could feed new laws in a massive population models, to try and get an idea of how their laws were going to affect the society. They could also use "legal validation" techniques to find out if their new laws conflict with any old ones, and perhaps to give them ideas on how to consolidate the laws they are trying to pass with ones that already exist (to try and reduce complexity).
Court cases would be handled by modeling having the prosecution & defence come up with models of their case (with the human judge/jury existing to make decisions about model conflicts), feed it all into the "did the defendant break the law?" legal testing machine, and yet a guilty/not guilty, perhaps with an acceptable range of punishments.
A non-binding version of this judgement-machine could be used so that individuals & organizations could try and model types of behaviors that they want to pursue, and see whether it is illegal or not.
It goes almost without saying, of course, that all the laws should be Open Sourced:)
Maybe the big bang is a cyclic process, sometimes it forms a universe that isn't stable, so it just collapses and reforms with a new set of contants.
I thought that part of the point of this article, was that the Big Bang actually could form MANY different universes, each with different sets of constants, but scattered through multiple dimensions so that they don't interact with each other. And ours just happened to have the right sets of constants to make an environment where we could come into being.
I can only imagine what it would be like if one of those other universes "touched" ours - would we briefly see into the other universe through a "hole" in our space, before some kind of really violent reaction occurred due to the fundamental incompatibilities between the constants of the two universes? Or maybe, if the constants of the two universes were too different, then they would "bounce" off each other like water & oil, and couldn't merge.
I'm pretty sure that it has been documented as possible for a human with excellent hunting skills & health (which, admittedly, does exclude most of the current world's population:) to run a herbivore like a horse or deer to death, over the period of multiple days.
I'm not sure I can find a web reference though, so you can call me an idiot and feel pretty comfortable about not being proven wrong:)
Dunno how dissecting grasshoppers came into a topic where it sounds like somebody was just watching them & came up with an engineering idea, but whatever...
The only reason you have the luxury of being a vegetarian is because "modern" society has the means of bringing you the selection of vegetables from all over the world that you need to maintain your dietary needs. If you were part of a hunter/gatherer tribe, you'd eat meat or die of malnutrition.
Meat represents CONCENTRATED nutrition - nutrition which has been gathered, refined & stored in a high-calorie, high-protein form through biology - if humans didn't eat meat, there isn't a chance in hell that humans would have made it out of the tree-swinging stage.
It's fairly well-known that it is possible for a human in very good shape to run down (and kill from exhaustion) a horse, over some period of time (I think it was at least a few days). The _reason_ that a human can do that, is because they can scarf down in a couple minutes the same calories & nutrients (relative to body size) that it takes the horse HOURS to eat. And the human is NOT getting that energy by scarfing down lettuce!
I can just imagine one these things bouncing around, suddenly disappearing into a cave, a 30 foot deep dustbowl, or a 2-mile deep canyon.
There had better be a LOT of these things in each package to justify the overall cost of getting them to the surface of another planet and be willing to lose a few!
As far as fuel is concerned, would combustion be the best? Maybe a slightly slower process, each little guy would slowly charge a big capacitor with solar panels, then use up the stored charge in a big burst for a jump at a time.
As far as I can tell, there's no fundamental physical problem with our current state of material science which would prevent us from creating small colonies scattered through the solar system - except for the massive resource requirements it would take to get everything going in the beginning.
Are you referring to the use of nanotechnology to reduce this initial cost?
Destruction by nanotech is yet another reason (besides stuff like asteroid strike, plague, world war, etc.) to get enough samples of our life forms off planet to make sure we survive.
I figure that we'll come up with some new "journaling" file system that never overwrites ANY old information, and basically keeps ALL versions of any given file (and maybe redundant copies to boot). Why bother erasing anything if you'll never run out of any room?
Then again, each person might end up with their own sugar cube storage & environment recording system which records their entire environment (at least audio/visual) from their own viewpoint 24/7 for their entire life. Encrypted, of course, and backed up wirelessly to a remote sugar cube, so that it won't be used against you.
(Now that I think about it, people will probably figure out ways to use up just about any form of memory that anybody can come up with...)
What you say here is part of a standard conservative critique of the welfare state: it hasn't worked, it doesn't work, it won't work, it can't work, and therefore we need to abandon the welfare state.
Actually, this is the attitude that I understood YOU to be saying in your previous messages, that the welfare state isn't working and should be abolished. *My* point was that if the system aint working, you need to fix it. And from a government's viewpoint, the goal to keep in mind while fixing such a system is the longterm health of the society as a whole.
My point was this: why is a poor man poor, and why does he stay that way? He may be poor because he makes bad decisions. If that is the case, why should anyone give him ANY form of help other than to assist him in making better choices? If you give him money, he'll just blow it making more bad choices.
Common sense, and fits with what I've been saying about choosing a different strategy if the current one isn't working. It doesn't address the fact that you're going to have to use up SOME sort of resource to "educate" such people as to the society-friendly way to do things, and it's going to be the people who HAVE those resources who are going to have to pay for it. And it might be better for the longterm benefit of the society if government takes it from them, even if they don't want to give it. They probably won't be happy about it, but from a governmental viewpoint, their "happiness" does not trump the goal of the longterm health of the society.
Finally, there are those who are poor through no one's fault: they have simply had bad breaks. It is these people who should be helped by private charity, and they are a tiny, tiny fraction of those who are actually poor
You seem to be fixated on the idea that private is always better than public service. Get over it - it limits your solutions. The goal of any government is SUPPOSED to be the health of the society as a whole, which is not necessarily (and not likely) the goal of private institutions, whether or not they have labeled themselves as "charities".
As far as the number of people of who truly poor through no fault of their own - I'm sure it is to your benefit to think that there are only a very tiny number of these people, and that they should should be properly grateful that you deigned to give them some of your hardearned income. Of course, if they don't happen to do the proper bootlicking or don't quite agree with your way of looking at things - then why the hell should you help them out? Huh - maybe that's what a properly functioning government is for, to take care of health of the society as a whole, even if it inconveniences or annoys some of the individuals.
When the feds put a gun to my head and say "Help the poor!" that ceases to be charity and becomes tyranny.
You still keep thinking that your "rights" trump those of the society as a whole. I'll keep on saying it, the government's responsibility is maintaining the longterm health of the society as a whole, not catering to the whims of individuals. What YOU want isn't necessarily what's best for the society as a whole, so the government doesn't have any obligation - and in fact would be abrogating its responsbility - to support your needs & desires over that of the rest of the society.
Yes, it is. It is shallow and depraved because the people who exercise this ethic believe that they know better than the common man how the common man ought to live. It is shallow and depraved because its advocates believe that they have the right -- even the duty -- to impose their will upon others. It is shallow and depraved because there is no standard beneath it: it amounts to nothing more than what seems to have utility now, which betrays the fact that it has nothing to do with what is right or wrong.
Oooooo - nice emotional rhetoric. Too bad it doesn't have any useful substance. Not to mention that you still don't have a clue what that "utilitarian ethic" really means (or maybe you do but just don't like the way it contradicts what YOU believe).
The people who "exercise" this kind of ethic are pragmatists. Their goal and _standard_ is the LONGTERM health of the society. They know that what's beneficial for the society as a whole, isn't necessarily going to be beneficial for some of the individuals. On the other hand, they'll understand that stomping all over too many individual liberties isn't going to help the health of the society either (given that the "health" of the society is some function of the health of the individuals).
This standard is a helluva lot deeper & rooted in reality than your so-called "standard" of right and wrong (which is probably defined by people who think like YOU, right?). Shallow-and-depraved pretty much describes people who define "right" and "wrong" to be for their own benefit, then use those definitions as a tool for excusing the harm that they inflict on society.
If the poor are poor because they're oppressed, what they need is freedom from oppression, not a stupid handout from the government, which by means of its handout is arguably the worst oppressor: because by it they sap from the poor man the incentive to go out and make something of himself.
If the poor stay poor even if they ARE getting resources from the government, then obviously this is not contributing to the overall "health" of the society and the strategy needs to be changed.
Whether that involves using propaganda & incentives to excite motivation, or merely making opportunities in the form of education available, is a matter of experimentation & implementation. The goal is still the same: improving the health of the society as a whole.
Like everyone else, the poor are typically more than happy to blame their problems on everyone else. Until they stop this blameshifting and take responsibility for themselves, they will never get out of poverty.
What a bunch of bullshit. The TRULY poor don't have the resources to do anything but try and survive. Without help or a lucky break, they don't have a chance in hell of changing their circumstances by themselves, whether or not they "take responsibility" for themselves.
What I find really hypocritical are those people who like to think that the poor cause and can always take care of their own problems, and that the rest of the society has no obligation to help them out. Oh wait, that's somebody just like YOU - huh, imagine that.
A utilitarian ethic is a shallow, depraved thing.
A utilitarian ethic based on the health of the overall society is a shallow, depraved thing? Is this kind of like the shallow, depraved attitude of abandoning the poor because you believe they're all selfish greedy bastards who should be allowed to starve to death so that you don't have to pay any taxes to help them out?
Heh - maybe there'll be an evolutionary mutation which will allow our bodies to ABSORB all this radiation and transform it into energy that our cells can use, so we can stay energized in a high EM field without eating any calories.
On the other hand, this is much more likely to happen for bacteria first, so that's probably not such a good idea...unless we figure out the genes necessary to do it to ourselves first:)
Another idea of Tesla's was the idea of using the Earth's rotation and magnetic field to generate electricity. You could set up giant coil towers that would be dragged through the magnetic field via the Earth's rotation.
Would this really work? I thought that the magnetic field was more-or-less also fixed to the Earth's rotation (ignoring its ordinary non-rotationally related fluctuations)? Wouldn't coils attached to the Earth be stationary relative to the Earth's magnetic field?
This isn't about "needs"; it's about justice. And it is unjust for the wealthiest to be taxed at higher rates than those who have less. The rates should be the same for everyone without exception. THAT is what is just.
That's a very comforting rationale - for everyone who's making a comfortable living. I'm sure that many poor young black men, in their vicious cycle of poverty & discrimination, are completely satisfied with your definition of "justice".
Government SHOULD exist to maximize the health of the society AS A WHOLE - and if the so-called "rights" of the extremely-minority privileged get a little bent, well that's too bad (as long as it's in a way that doesn't come back to bite the society as a whole in the long run).
Why should I be forced at gunpoint to pay to educate your children? THAT is a big loss in my book.
'cause if the cost-benefit analysis says that the net gain of the society is more than your loss, then it's the right thing to do - for the society.
Of course, if the mechanisms of government have been hijacked for the benefit of a minority of society, rather than the whole, then you can start talking about "injustice" and actually mean something rational.
They both sounded like typical script-fed corporate clone dolts.
I'd be intensely interested in getting into a private conversation with any of these public figures, in an environment where they can be assured that they can speak freely without worrying about it being reported to anyone else. It seems like the effort necessary to predigest EVERYTHING they have to say for popular consumption makes them seem like they have no thoughts (or brains) of their own.
My personal hope, although I have no evidence to support this, is that most of these people are a lot more intelligent than they portray themselves on camera, and that a private conversation with them would be very stimulating.
On the other hand, it may turn out that they are actually much less interesting in person than they are in public, and they only appear to have some answers in public because they are parrotting their handler's answers. That would be very depressing.
I would imagine that you could have different types of robots with different sorts of weapons (for instance, I could imagine trying to entangle the Mauler with some kind of Kevlar net).
Oh God, I just realized - this reminds me of POKEMON! *AAAAIEEEEEEE*
I remember reading that one of the reasons for sleep, was so that the glial cells in the brain could recharge their stores of energy (the brain uses more energy than can be supplied to it by the bloodstream, so the glial cells provide the extra energy required).
Perhaps the reason that the REM sleep is postponed until later in the sleep cycle, is to give those glial cells a chance to recharge (since I would imagine that the REM sleep probably burns a fair amount of energy in at least parts of the brain).
Actually, you're quite wrong - all it takes to issue more stock certificates is a vote at the board of directors meeting.
The only reason that they HAVEN'T diluted the hell out of the value of their company is because greed-blinded investors keep grabbing as many shares as the laser copiers can churn out, at almost any price/share, so the growth in capitalization of the company has been keeping up with the dilution of the stock.
Well, I have no real economics training, but I seem to do as well predicting the direction of the economy by pulling numbers out of my ass as any of the so-called "expert" economists, so pardon me if I think your degree is as worthless as the quotes you used. Your government-can-do-no-good attitude just highlights your irrational bias. I prefer to treat the subject as a massive systems-analysis-and-design problem, where money is just an extremely potent resource for whatever elements of that system which happen to have it.
Your so-called criticism of the US education system is primarily an indictment of those elements of US society who DON'T WANT the general populace to be highly educated (mass-marketers, demagogues, social-conservatives and yes, bureaucrats, for example). Highly-educated people tend to think about what they're being told before accepting it (or worse yet, take the initiative to solve problems). That's highly annoying when you just want a bunch of followers who you can lead around by their noses, or expect them to keep out of trouble when you don't have anything for them to do.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably wise to check the source code for changes, but what they REALLY need to check is their compilers!!
There's a great deal of concern about having people who you wouldn't trust on a bicycle flying these things - perhaps it would be required to have these things fly themselves (you punch in the address and away you go)?
You might even make this kind of thing into a taxi service - ask for a pickup on your wireless PDA (or watch), the thing will come flying down to a sidewalk nearby, you strap yourself in & punch in the destination address, and away you go!
There could also be a central traffic management system to keep track of all the air-taxies, plus some default behavior in case of loss of communication.
As far as people learning to trust the things, I'd anticipate that once a decent number of people were flying around in these things with a very low percentage of accidents, then people would gradually start trusting them (just like they learned to accept cars going faster than 40mph...)
Re: books
:), and it's usually based on a universe created by somebody else, but some of it is quite readable & engaging. My only real complaint might be that some of the good stuff doesn't get finished :(, which drives me nuts.
Actually, there's a pretty high volume of "fan fiction", both on USENET & on the web, which is essentially non-paid writing.
Granted, most of the stuff isn't very good
I don't think that many of these people are expecting remuneration for their work (and, in fact, usually pathetically beg not to be sued by the original character creators), but they still keep churning it out.
It's not a useful COMMERCIAL model, but for those people who have creativity oozing from their fingertips, it's certainly one way to get a bit of name recognition for their work.
Difficult when the damn EULA is printed on an insert INSIDE of the package (and in some cases, inside of the damn CD case which has its OWN seal...)
Actually, if "legalese" were TRULY like a computer language, then you wouldn't have argue about the ambiguities inherent in so many of the laws!
:)
I thought it would be quite fascinating if it was required to write the laws in an unambiguous language, designed to be interpreted by a machine.
Legislators could feed new laws in a massive population models, to try and get an idea of how their laws were going to affect the society. They could also use "legal validation" techniques to find out if their new laws conflict with any old ones, and perhaps to give them ideas on how to consolidate the laws they are trying to pass with ones that already exist (to try and reduce complexity).
Court cases would be handled by modeling having the prosecution & defence come up with models of their case (with the human judge/jury existing to make decisions about model conflicts), feed it all into the "did the defendant break the law?" legal testing machine, and yet a guilty/not guilty, perhaps with an acceptable range of punishments.
A non-binding version of this judgement-machine could be used so that individuals & organizations could try and model types of behaviors that they want to pursue, and see whether it is illegal or not.
It goes almost without saying, of course, that all the laws should be Open Sourced
I thought that part of the point of this article, was that the Big Bang actually could form MANY different universes, each with different sets of constants, but scattered through multiple dimensions so that they don't interact with each other. And ours just happened to have the right sets of constants to make an environment where we could come into being.
I can only imagine what it would be like if one of those other universes "touched" ours - would we briefly see into the other universe through a "hole" in our space, before some kind of really violent reaction occurred due to the fundamental incompatibilities between the constants of the two universes? Or maybe, if the constants of the two universes were too different, then they would "bounce" off each other like water & oil, and couldn't merge.
I'm pretty sure that it has been documented as possible for a human with excellent hunting skills & health (which, admittedly, does exclude most of the current world's population :) to run a herbivore like a horse or deer to death, over the period of multiple days.
:)
I'm not sure I can find a web reference though, so you can call me an idiot and feel pretty comfortable about not being proven wrong
Hmmm...this could be quite a popular sport-hunting event, even more so than shooting those dumb clay "pigeons".
Dunno how dissecting grasshoppers came into a topic where it sounds like somebody was just watching them & came up with an engineering idea, but whatever...
The only reason you have the luxury of being a vegetarian is because "modern" society has the means of bringing you the selection of vegetables from all over the world that you need to maintain your dietary needs. If you were part of a hunter/gatherer tribe, you'd eat meat or die of malnutrition.
Meat represents CONCENTRATED nutrition - nutrition which has been gathered, refined & stored in a high-calorie, high-protein form through biology - if humans didn't eat meat, there isn't a chance in hell that humans would have made it out of the tree-swinging stage.
It's fairly well-known that it is possible for a human in very good shape to run down (and kill from exhaustion) a horse, over some period of time (I think it was at least a few days). The _reason_ that a human can do that, is because they can scarf down in a couple minutes the same calories & nutrients (relative to body size) that it takes the horse HOURS to eat. And the human is NOT getting that energy by scarfing down lettuce!
I can just imagine one these things bouncing around, suddenly disappearing into a cave, a 30 foot deep dustbowl, or a 2-mile deep canyon.
There had better be a LOT of these things in each package to justify the overall cost of getting them to the surface of another planet and be willing to lose a few!
As far as fuel is concerned, would combustion be the best? Maybe a slightly slower process, each little guy would slowly charge a big capacitor with solar panels, then use up the stored charge in a big burst for a jump at a time.
What do you mean?
As far as I can tell, there's no fundamental physical problem with our current state of material science which would prevent us from creating small colonies scattered through the solar system - except for the massive resource requirements it would take to get everything going in the beginning.
Are you referring to the use of nanotechnology to reduce this initial cost?
Destruction by nanotech is yet another reason (besides stuff like asteroid strike, plague, world war, etc.) to get enough samples of our life forms off planet to make sure we survive.
I figure that we'll come up with some new "journaling" file system that never overwrites ANY old information, and basically keeps ALL versions of any given file (and maybe redundant copies to boot). Why bother erasing anything if you'll never run out of any room?
Then again, each person might end up with their own sugar cube storage & environment recording system which records their entire environment (at least audio/visual) from their own viewpoint 24/7 for their entire life. Encrypted, of course, and backed up wirelessly to a remote sugar cube, so that it won't be used against you.
(Now that I think about it, people will probably figure out ways to use up just about any form of memory that anybody can come up with...)
Actually, this is the attitude that I understood YOU to be saying in your previous messages, that the welfare state isn't working and should be abolished. *My* point was that if the system aint working, you need to fix it. And from a government's viewpoint, the goal to keep in mind while fixing such a system is the longterm health of the society as a whole.
Common sense, and fits with what I've been saying about choosing a different strategy if the current one isn't working. It doesn't address the fact that you're going to have to use up SOME sort of resource to "educate" such people as to the society-friendly way to do things, and it's going to be the people who HAVE those resources who are going to have to pay for it. And it might be better for the longterm benefit of the society if government takes it from them, even if they don't want to give it. They probably won't be happy about it, but from a governmental viewpoint, their "happiness" does not trump the goal of the longterm health of the society.
You seem to be fixated on the idea that private is always better than public service. Get over it - it limits your solutions. The goal of any government is SUPPOSED to be the health of the society as a whole, which is not necessarily (and not likely) the goal of private institutions, whether or not they have labeled themselves as "charities".
As far as the number of people of who truly poor through no fault of their own - I'm sure it is to your benefit to think that there are only a very tiny number of these people, and that they should should be properly grateful that you deigned to give them some of your hardearned income. Of course, if they don't happen to do the proper bootlicking or don't quite agree with your way of looking at things - then why the hell should you help them out? Huh - maybe that's what a properly functioning government is for, to take care of health of the society as a whole, even if it inconveniences or annoys some of the individuals.
You still keep thinking that your "rights" trump those of the society as a whole. I'll keep on saying it, the government's responsibility is maintaining the longterm health of the society as a whole, not catering to the whims of individuals. What YOU want isn't necessarily what's best for the society as a whole, so the government doesn't have any obligation - and in fact would be abrogating its responsbility - to support your needs & desires over that of the rest of the society.
Oooooo - nice emotional rhetoric. Too bad it doesn't have any useful substance. Not to mention that you still don't have a clue what that "utilitarian ethic" really means (or maybe you do but just don't like the way it contradicts what YOU believe).
The people who "exercise" this kind of ethic are pragmatists. Their goal and _standard_ is the LONGTERM health of the society. They know that what's beneficial for the society as a whole, isn't necessarily going to be beneficial for some of the individuals. On the other hand, they'll understand that stomping all over too many individual liberties isn't going to help the health of the society either (given that the "health" of the society is some function of the health of the individuals).
This standard is a helluva lot deeper & rooted in reality than your so-called "standard" of right and wrong (which is probably defined by people who think like YOU, right?). Shallow-and-depraved pretty much describes people who define "right" and "wrong" to be for their own benefit, then use those definitions as a tool for excusing the harm that they inflict on society.
If the poor stay poor even if they ARE getting resources from the government, then obviously this is not contributing to the overall "health" of the society and the strategy needs to be changed.
Whether that involves using propaganda & incentives to excite motivation, or merely making opportunities in the form of education available, is a matter of experimentation & implementation. The goal is still the same: improving the health of the society as a whole.
What a bunch of bullshit. The TRULY poor don't have the resources to do anything but try and survive. Without help or a lucky break, they don't have a chance in hell of changing their circumstances by themselves, whether or not they "take responsibility" for themselves.
What I find really hypocritical are those people who like to think that the poor cause and can always take care of their own problems, and that the rest of the society has no obligation to help them out. Oh wait, that's somebody just like YOU - huh, imagine that.
A utilitarian ethic based on the health of the overall society is a shallow, depraved thing? Is this kind of like the shallow, depraved attitude of abandoning the poor because you believe they're all selfish greedy bastards who should be allowed to starve to death so that you don't have to pay any taxes to help them out?
Heh - it would be pretty funny to see how the dynamics would change IF the taxes were based on assets (talk about encouraging a consumer society!).
Of course, then it would probably become worth it to those with 80% of the assets to pay for an army to overthrow the government...
Heh - maybe there'll be an evolutionary mutation which will allow our bodies to ABSORB all this radiation and transform it into energy that our cells can use, so we can stay energized in a high EM field without eating any calories.
:)
On the other hand, this is much more likely to happen for bacteria first, so that's probably not such a good idea...unless we figure out the genes necessary to do it to ourselves first
Would this really work? I thought that the magnetic field was more-or-less also fixed to the Earth's rotation (ignoring its ordinary non-rotationally related fluctuations)? Wouldn't coils attached to the Earth be stationary relative to the Earth's magnetic field?
That's a very comforting rationale - for everyone who's making a comfortable living. I'm sure that many poor young black men, in their vicious cycle of poverty & discrimination, are completely satisfied with your definition of "justice".
Government SHOULD exist to maximize the health of the society AS A WHOLE - and if the so-called "rights" of the extremely-minority privileged get a little bent, well that's too bad (as long as it's in a way that doesn't come back to bite the society as a whole in the long run).
'cause if the cost-benefit analysis says that the net gain of the society is more than your loss, then it's the right thing to do - for the society.
Of course, if the mechanisms of government have been hijacked for the benefit of a minority of society, rather than the whole, then you can start talking about "injustice" and actually mean something rational.
I'd be intensely interested in getting into a private conversation with any of these public figures, in an environment where they can be assured that they can speak freely without worrying about it being reported to anyone else. It seems like the effort necessary to predigest EVERYTHING they have to say for popular consumption makes them seem like they have no thoughts (or brains) of their own.
My personal hope, although I have no evidence to support this, is that most of these people are a lot more intelligent than they portray themselves on camera, and that a private conversation with them would be very stimulating.
On the other hand, it may turn out that they are actually much less interesting in person than they are in public, and they only appear to have some answers in public because they are parrotting their handler's answers. That would be very depressing.
Does each team only get to field one robot?
I would imagine that you could have different types of robots with different sorts of weapons (for instance, I could imagine trying to entangle the Mauler with some kind of Kevlar net).
Oh God, I just realized - this reminds me of POKEMON! *AAAAIEEEEEEE*
I remember reading that one of the reasons for sleep, was so that the glial cells in the brain could recharge their stores of energy (the brain uses more energy than can be supplied to it by the bloodstream, so the glial cells provide the extra energy required).
Perhaps the reason that the REM sleep is postponed until later in the sleep cycle, is to give those glial cells a chance to recharge (since I would imagine that the REM sleep probably burns a fair amount of energy in at least parts of the brain).
Yeah, those delta isobars are pretty good - I eat one of those after a workout, I'm good to go for hours!
Actually, you're quite wrong - all it takes to issue more stock certificates is a vote at the board of directors meeting.
The only reason that they HAVEN'T diluted the hell out of the value of their company is because greed-blinded investors keep grabbing as many shares as the laser copiers can churn out, at almost any price/share, so the growth in capitalization of the company has been keeping up with the dilution of the stock.
Well, I have no real economics training, but I seem to do as well predicting the direction of the economy by pulling numbers out of my ass as any of the so-called "expert" economists, so pardon me if I think your degree is as worthless as the quotes you used. Your government-can-do-no-good attitude just highlights your irrational bias. I prefer to treat the subject as a massive systems-analysis-and-design problem, where money is just an extremely potent resource for whatever elements of that system which happen to have it.
Your so-called criticism of the US education system is primarily an indictment of those elements of US society who DON'T WANT the general populace to be highly educated (mass-marketers, demagogues, social-conservatives and yes, bureaucrats, for example). Highly-educated people tend to think about what they're being told before accepting it (or worse yet, take the initiative to solve problems). That's highly annoying when you just want a bunch of followers who you can lead around by their noses, or expect them to keep out of trouble when you don't have anything for them to do.