When we use the word "democracy" in the US and throughout the Western world, many of us don't really think about what it means. Like I said, I don't think democracy means or should mean tyranny of the majority. Democracy, in its modern form, encompasses a compromise between individual rights and freedoms and the collective right of society to guide its direction based on shared value and principles.
I think the US, without the Bill of Rights and the strong judiciary, and the system of checks and balances composed of elected officials and appointed intellectuals, would be just a tyranny that turned over control every few years, or rather, no different from having an elected monarch. So I support democracy, but not the right for uneducated masses to "choose" any government they want that may, in a Utilitarian sense, impact negatively on their own rights or on the rights and wellbeing of the world around them. Many of the people of Afghanistan may have loved the Taliban, but it doesn't matter to me - they victimized a portion of their population, didn't respect individual rights and freedoms, and presented a threat that they lived up to to the rest of the world - in short, they were "Bad" in the Utilitarian sense.
So, that's the basic crux of why I don't describe myself as a supporter of democracy, or a democrat (little d, not the political party). I am a supporter of logical, intelligent rule by the well-educated citizenry. We don't quite have this in the US, but at least we sorta try, and what we have is somewhat better than what many people have elsewhere. Unfortunately, we have the special interest effect and a rather uneducated voting base to deal with, which are eminently addressable problems that nobody seems to want to face.
I'll throw in a good word for the Biostar IDEQ 200N. I purchased one of them recently - my desktop has gone from a mess of wires with a big annoying tower underneath to a sleek, modern looking area with plenty of leg room, much less noise and less clutter. I realized that you can be a power user and you don't necessarily need 10 PCI slots and 5 5.25" drives. One DVD/CD-R/RW drive does the trick nicely.
The IDEQ has nicely situation USB ports (2 in the front, and 2 or more in the rear - I don't even remember, more than I need). SP/DIF optical audio out, firewire out, again ports in front and rear. Everything you need is integrated, ethernet, pretty decent audio, even dual head-capable GeForce 4MX (I have an AGP GeForce4 Ti4200 card in here myself, since I do some real 3D work, and some gaming).
It's worth giving a thought to. Will you really miss all that other stuff? If you live in a city apartment where your floor space costs hundreds of dollars a square foot like I do, and your desk size is limited by your small apartment, going SFF is definitely worth consideration. If you have a big house, lotsa room, or need to swap in and out hard drives and are the kinda person who leaves your case open for easy access, then it's probably the wrong move, since it's quite crowded in a little SFF case.
While I appreciate your position, and I think what the CIA/US government did in Chile was probably the wrong approach, I can see why even a "democratically elected" socialist was seen as a sufficient threat to global stability to warrant such action _in the context of the time_. The fear was that a Socialist, whether governing initially with the consent of his people by election or not, would turn into a Soviet pawn and Communist tyrant. "Socialism", at the time, was seen as a thin veil of acceptability over Marxist revolutionary rhetoric, a la Castro.
At the time, the thought of Communism enveloping the entire South American continent was surely a reality and scary as hell. Don't think that the Soviet Union wasn't wielding an equally Machiavellian hand in affairs too, to make sure they generally went their way. It's terrible that at times the US government sacrificed the very values that make us different from the old communist Soviet government in the name of defeating communism, but then again, it's hard for me to judge in the context of that era.
I look at Turkey today as the closest analogy - the majority in Turkey very well might elect an Islamist government - literally, they would be voting away their basic rights and freedom as protected by their secular constitution. The military in Turkey acts as a tool of the educated upper classes to prevent the uneducated masses from voting away everybody's rights. And while the way the government there has treated the Kurds has been reprehensible, the way they handle fundamentally non-democratic Islamists is basically on target.
You can't let stupid people vote away everybody's rights in the name of uneducated religious fervor - that's why we don't have pure democracy in the US either. Tyrany by the masses is sometimes no better than tyrany by a dictator. If you think of Chile in this same light and see that Socialism represented the same sort of fear and threat (i.e. a threat to millions of lives and to our fundamental Western values) as radical Islam does today, you'll see perhaps the thinking behind what happened in Chile and understand why it may have seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
Re:Thats the problem with americans...
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Here in New York we self-deprecating humor about Americans all the time. The thing is we're generally good spirited about it. The problem is when the angry, enraged Europeans emerge on Slashdot and say things that are definitely not just in good fun. It really seems there is a contingent of ultra-liberal Euro Slashdotters who really believe that ALL Americans are ignorant of the history and culture of every other country, don't speak foreign languages, are raging, unthinking chest-thumping conservatives who aren't capable of and have never thought through a nuanced argument in their lives. It's just as wrong to hate all Americans because our President is a fucking moron as to say we should kill all the dirty Arabs because Osama bin Laden is a bad guy.1
It's one thing to make light of stereotypes, it's another to take them seriously, and go around frothing at the mouth about how awful and evil Americans are. I know all Europeans aren't complete gutless self-hating liberals. You should know that all Americans aren't like Dubya.
So, since it's impossible to consider ALL sides of an issue, we should just give up on any sort of balance in our consideration. There's no hope at considering EVERY human being's viewpoint, so it's meaningless to represent any variety in our viewpoint.
That sounds like something Fox News might say justifying their self-appellation as "Fair and Balanced". Nobody represents ALL points of view, but you'd have to be a moron to think that Fox News is "Fair and Balanced" when they present right wing propaganda as news and regularly have right wing bash-fests onto which they invite one meek, idiotic liberal to serve as a whipping boy.
For parallel's sake, you might want to consider the Palestinian refugee and a child whose parents were killed in a bus bombing in Jerusalem. Does that mean that "everything is relative"? I don't know, that phrase is fairly devoid of meaning to me. Many statements are laden with opinion, and some are statements of fact, subject only to disagreement about definition, as the folks discussing above who the first president of the United States is (which depends on which entity you consider to define the "United States").
Miguel, I respect you as an intelligent person, but I noticed your big link to electronicintifada.net on your home page. While I have no problem with your linking to them, you make it sound like you think that's the source for unbiased information on the Middle East. It's pretty clear to an educated person who reads that site that the information contained therein represents only one side of the argument. They go on and on about how the Geneva Accord is wrong, but they don't bother looking at what's RIGHT about it from the perspective of both sides. They attack CNN and the BBC (the most shockingly liberal pro-Palestinian Western media outlet I know of) over mis-estimation of the length and cost of the wall the Israelis are building and they rant about it for pages and pages like it's some great conspiracy.
I'm not saying the views presented at electronicintifada.net are invalid - there is some validity to some of their points, but I would expect an intelligent thinking man to be able to recognize propaganda and distinguish it from analysis.
I've seen these exact same misconceptions occurring all the time in the world of closed source software (well, less so the autoconf/automake problem, usually people know in advance what platforms they are targetting and don't care fuckall about anything else).
In fact, I have seen (3) quite often - people think throwing shitty programmers into a codebase that uses threading is appropriate - ouch. The results are often disastrous, especially when a carefully crafted set of mutexes and locks gets fucked with and rearranged by somebody who doesn't really understand the codebase resulting in all sorts of intermittent failure madness.
Yes, but the word "Sun" doesn't have a common meaning in the context of computers or in the context of dishwashers. The only common meaning of Sun is the big firey globe in the sky.
The problem with "Windows" is not the common meaning, a hole in your wall with glass over it. The problem is that prior to "Windows" the GUI OS environment, there were lots of other GUI OS environments that featured "windows". The word "windows" has a specific common meaning in the context of computer operating systems that predates the trademarked OS made by Microsoft.
Nonetheless, if I were going to pick a point to attack Microsoft on, this would probably be the last point on my list - I don't find trademark law to be too offensive, and I think strong trademark law is important to business in general. And in all honesty, Microsoft aren't twits about their trademark name most of the time - Michael Robertson is trying to see how far he can push the beast here before it tries to snap his neck.
That's not the way I remember the scene. I seem to recall that he said something to her or aloud when the old lady asked him what her number was. He definitely said something, I clearly remember that, and I clearly remember him telling her the number.
Right, no MAJOR laws of physics. Having contrails on the missles so that they are more visible when in real space, the contrails would likely insta-vanish is not a violation of a major law of physics, it's a liberty taken for the purpose of playing better visually on screen so you can see the damn missles on their inevitable path to hit the ships.... This kind of liberty most of us can deal with as part of "suspension of disbelief". Admittedly, for many ultra-dorks, they need to dissect absolutely everything. For me, it's enough to feel "realistic" enough that I can get into the story and really believe that characters are acting in a way that is plausible, that I can empathize with, that the rules of their world are similar enough that it doesn't trigger some sort of snorting disbelief response that kills the whole effect and drops me out of the storyline.
Actually, Baltar is quite complex. Why did the writers have him tell the blind(ish) woman that she had the number instead of lying and using her number to get himself off the planet before it blew up? He only got picked up as an afterthought, and prior to that, he would have thought he was about to die with the rest of them.
I still don't quite understand that, since it's out of character - presumably he must actually have experienced guilt over his complicity in the destruction of their planet, even though we are told by Number Six that he is too selfish to feel guilt, and at other times he appears downright selfish-to-evil (though strangely, his most evil act, of turning the PR guy into a scapegoat turns out to have been correct, though Baltar didn't know Number Six was pointing out an ACTUAL Cylon).
I actually think the music was probably the best part of the miniseries. It successfully guided the emotions without being bullshit overbearing New Star Wars Movie crap. It was intense at the right times, and added drama to some otherwise mediocre scenes.
I also disagree about the characters. I found that I did identify with several of them - definitely with the President, who was empathetic, and Commander Adama who is admirable but human. Sure, some of them weren't as strong as you might want, but there's a lot of story to tell there, and they definitely succeed at jerking your emotions around. I don't remember the last time a sci-fi miniseries got me teary-eyed at least twice.
On the other hand, I felt like some of the stuff was a bit heavy handed - the President's personal struggle with cancer, the death of the little girl and the part of the fleet that was left behind, the killing of the baby, etc. But it did elicit emotional response, which was clearly the intent, though perhaps went a bit too far with it (one or two of those scenes might have been enough...).
Yes, but the reference to 12 tribes of Israel was pretty obvious in the BSG miniseries. 12 "colonies" and the "13th lost colony, presumed by many to be mythical"....
Many of us have the images from abs.net sitting around. They will resurface in other, albeit more underground forums. Presumably this is either the result of a shakeup at Tivo, third party companies forcing action, or the fact that recent unification of Tivo drive images has resulted in more people fucking around with images and doing dumb-shit that screws up the server-side systems, toasterizes Tivo units, or other such things, costing Tivo, Inc. too much money to allow it to continue.
I think it's probably the sad result of Tivo hacking becoming too widespread - too many people not qualified or willing to take responsibility or be sufficiently cautious futzing with the internals of their machines, then expecting support for the process. It's also the fault of Tivo Inc. for the fact that they've recently made certain changes to their software that apparently make it too easy to wreak havoc with their own system (if you can install a unified drive image on any S1 Tivo, you can imagine you might confuse something somewhere along the line). Ah well, I have an abs.net Philips HDR212 image sitting here so I can always restore if something goes wrong for me.
I am not misinformed, you seem to have trouble reading - I realize that heart disease is the number one killer among women. Simple logic, my man - A->B does not mean B->A, right? So I agree the lifestyle choices often imply the effects, but the effects certainly do not imply the lifestyle choices, and any scientist would agree with me. Don't assume because somebody has cancer that they made a choice that caused it.
Also, some forms of cardiovascular disease are much more preventable then others. Additionally, among women who are not naturally predisposed to these, the recent changes in statistics are certainly due to preventable disease. Does that mean that if you meet a woman who suffered a stroke, she must have caused it? Of course not, and no scientist in their right mind would ever accept that we have sufficient data to make such a claim.
I agreed with all your other points about the unhealthfulness of lethargy and being overweight the first time around, just not your logic about blame since it reverses causality, and takes what you know very well to be a modest statistical association between any one factor and try to claim it is THE cause.
The roadmap has implied for some time that 1.4 was the last unified (XPFE) Mozilla-based release. 1.5-1.6 was supposed to be the Firebird transition period, during which Mozilla-the-unified-browser was supplanted by Thunderbird and Firebird. Perhaps that was too ambitious, and they've changed their mind, but the roadmap (here)still indicates otherwise.
What's the deal? It really looks like the new roadmap is "build in all the features people REALLY bitch about into XPFE Mozilla, then once Firebird/Thunderbird is more stable, we'll transition to those". I'm fine with that, but shouldn't they just come out and say it?
Sorry, man, but suggesting that heart disease and breast cancer are preventable is fairly insulting, even if you throw in "to a certain extent". You can reduce your risk factors an awful lot, but I've heard of plenty of extremely fit, athletic people who end up with cardiovascular problems, sometimes from genetic high cholesterol (non-responsive to dietary change and only modestly responsive to drugs), or other, unknown factors. Likewise with cancer - I know people who have never smoked, drank only in moderation, ate fairly well, and exercised like maniacs, and still developed cancer in early middle age (not breast cancer in this case).
You realize the links between diet, etc. and cancer are there, but they are definitely nowhere near statistically significant enough to be labeled as "causes" - they are risk factors, that's it. Smoking - now that causes lung disease and lung cancer, that's pretty plain, and rather different. And being overweight is definitely a big risk factor for several kinds of diseases, and people should do everything they can to avoid that, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a cause of disease, though it's pretty clearly causally related to cardiovascular problems, and to a much lesser extent, cancer.
Some diseases are mostly or partially preventable, and we should all make a damned good effort to take good care of ourselves and reduce all the risk factors, but please don't try to make it sound like people who suffer from cancer are to blame for their own conditions.
You do realize that more and more people are being born all the time, and land is one of the few resources that's pretty much guaranteed to eventually end up worth more than where it started, presuming people still want to live in the area you're in.
The only way I can imagine a species naturally evolving to use radio frequency would be if they were many miles in size, or needed, for evolutionary reasons, to coordinate communication over massive distances. Otherwise, it's far more efficient to use higher frequency EM spectra that can discern useful details observationally and be used effectively for local communication, hunting, agriculture, and other evolutionary imperitives.
It's not just that it's a big seller unit-wise, it's that their margins are fucking awesome. Why? They can sell no-name OEM units with mediocre features sets and sell that at more-than-name-brand prices. Why? Well, I guess their audience is people who are too dumb to know that a computer is something you buy from Dell, Gateway, or Compaq, and don't know the difference between bullshit upsells and real features on a PC. They aren't even discerning PC shoppers like my mother who will line up PCs and compare feature checkboxes.
No, these are the lazy idiots who will buy exactly what's spoon fed to them. They are good for one thing - buying shit I spoon-feed to them.
It's based on our assumptions about the rate of progress of technology. If we assume that nanotechnology is 50-100 years off from practical usage, then we can reasonably state that for our culture and society, the gap between developing radio signals strong enough to send to space in detectable amounts and developing nanotechnology is only about 150-200 years worth of technological development. Assuming that other species rate of technological progress is similar to ours, we can assume that their gap between development of radio wave transmission and nanotechnology is similar, perhaps 200 years worth of technological development.
The argument from there relies on the fact that 200 years is a drop in the bucket in cosmological time - just because we happen to be at this particular point in time developmentally doesn't really imply that other species and cultures would be at anywhere near the same point. So it's far more likely they'd either be too primitive to send radio waves, or advanced enough that they have viable nanotechnology.
Obviously, this argument assumes that nanotechnology is practicable and will be successfully developed in the next 100 years.:)
128-bit encryption generally refers to key size in symmetric encryption algorithms, like 3DES, IDEA, etc. These encryption methods generally are broken by brute force searching a 128-bit space of keys - that means you have to check on the order of 2^128 different keys until you know if you've found the right one (obviously, this assumes that there are no fundamental cryptographic weaknesses in the algorithm, known-plaintext attacks or other stuff like that).
Assymmetric encryption algorithms, like RSA, rely on a hard problem with two parts needed to reconstruct the solution. In the case of RSA, those two parts are a large composite number with precisely two prime factors, and one of the prime factors (without one of the prime factors, finding out the other prime factor is deucedly difficult). Basically to "crack" RSA you have to factor the large composite number into its two prime factors. With RSA, the keysize refers to the size, in bits, of the composite and prime numbers you're working with. The thing is that you don't have to search an entire 512-bit keyspace to crack a 512-bit RSA key, you just have to try every reasonably possible _prime_ number that might be a factor of that 512-bit composite. And actually, you don't even really have to do that, since there are substantially better techniques for factoring numbers than brute force, requiring less computational effort.
So that, my friend, is why comparing "128-bit" encryption to "512-bit" or "1024-bit" RSA or other assymmetric encryption techniques (which are similar but rely on numerical problems other than factoring large numbers) isn't terribly meaningful.
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I think the US, without the Bill of Rights and the strong judiciary, and the system of checks and balances composed of elected officials and appointed intellectuals, would be just a tyranny that turned over control every few years, or rather, no different from having an elected monarch. So I support democracy, but not the right for uneducated masses to "choose" any government they want that may, in a Utilitarian sense, impact negatively on their own rights or on the rights and wellbeing of the world around them. Many of the people of Afghanistan may have loved the Taliban, but it doesn't matter to me - they victimized a portion of their population, didn't respect individual rights and freedoms, and presented a threat that they lived up to to the rest of the world - in short, they were "Bad" in the Utilitarian sense.
So, that's the basic crux of why I don't describe myself as a supporter of democracy, or a democrat (little d, not the political party). I am a supporter of logical, intelligent rule by the well-educated citizenry. We don't quite have this in the US, but at least we sorta try, and what we have is somewhat better than what many people have elsewhere. Unfortunately, we have the special interest effect and a rather uneducated voting base to deal with, which are eminently addressable problems that nobody seems to want to face.
The IDEQ has nicely situation USB ports (2 in the front, and 2 or more in the rear - I don't even remember, more than I need). SP/DIF optical audio out, firewire out, again ports in front and rear. Everything you need is integrated, ethernet, pretty decent audio, even dual head-capable GeForce 4MX (I have an AGP GeForce4 Ti4200 card in here myself, since I do some real 3D work, and some gaming).
It's worth giving a thought to. Will you really miss all that other stuff? If you live in a city apartment where your floor space costs hundreds of dollars a square foot like I do, and your desk size is limited by your small apartment, going SFF is definitely worth consideration. If you have a big house, lotsa room, or need to swap in and out hard drives and are the kinda person who leaves your case open for easy access, then it's probably the wrong move, since it's quite crowded in a little SFF case.
At the time, the thought of Communism enveloping the entire South American continent was surely a reality and scary as hell. Don't think that the Soviet Union wasn't wielding an equally Machiavellian hand in affairs too, to make sure they generally went their way. It's terrible that at times the US government sacrificed the very values that make us different from the old communist Soviet government in the name of defeating communism, but then again, it's hard for me to judge in the context of that era.
I look at Turkey today as the closest analogy - the majority in Turkey very well might elect an Islamist government - literally, they would be voting away their basic rights and freedom as protected by their secular constitution. The military in Turkey acts as a tool of the educated upper classes to prevent the uneducated masses from voting away everybody's rights. And while the way the government there has treated the Kurds has been reprehensible, the way they handle fundamentally non-democratic Islamists is basically on target.
You can't let stupid people vote away everybody's rights in the name of uneducated religious fervor - that's why we don't have pure democracy in the US either. Tyrany by the masses is sometimes no better than tyrany by a dictator. If you think of Chile in this same light and see that Socialism represented the same sort of fear and threat (i.e. a threat to millions of lives and to our fundamental Western values) as radical Islam does today, you'll see perhaps the thinking behind what happened in Chile and understand why it may have seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
It's one thing to make light of stereotypes, it's another to take them seriously, and go around frothing at the mouth about how awful and evil Americans are. I know all Europeans aren't complete gutless self-hating liberals. You should know that all Americans aren't like Dubya.
Dude, you should be a mathematician pornographer.
That sounds like something Fox News might say justifying their self-appellation as "Fair and Balanced". Nobody represents ALL points of view, but you'd have to be a moron to think that Fox News is "Fair and Balanced" when they present right wing propaganda as news and regularly have right wing bash-fests onto which they invite one meek, idiotic liberal to serve as a whipping boy.
For parallel's sake, you might want to consider the Palestinian refugee and a child whose parents were killed in a bus bombing in Jerusalem. Does that mean that "everything is relative"? I don't know, that phrase is fairly devoid of meaning to me. Many statements are laden with opinion, and some are statements of fact, subject only to disagreement about definition, as the folks discussing above who the first president of the United States is (which depends on which entity you consider to define the "United States").
Miguel, I respect you as an intelligent person, but I noticed your big link to electronicintifada.net on your home page. While I have no problem with your linking to them, you make it sound like you think that's the source for unbiased information on the Middle East. It's pretty clear to an educated person who reads that site that the information contained therein represents only one side of the argument. They go on and on about how the Geneva Accord is wrong, but they don't bother looking at what's RIGHT about it from the perspective of both sides. They attack CNN and the BBC (the most shockingly liberal pro-Palestinian Western media outlet I know of) over mis-estimation of the length and cost of the wall the Israelis are building and they rant about it for pages and pages like it's some great conspiracy.
I'm not saying the views presented at electronicintifada.net are invalid - there is some validity to some of their points, but I would expect an intelligent thinking man to be able to recognize propaganda and distinguish it from analysis.
In fact, I have seen (3) quite often - people think throwing shitty programmers into a codebase that uses threading is appropriate - ouch. The results are often disastrous, especially when a carefully crafted set of mutexes and locks gets fucked with and rearranged by somebody who doesn't really understand the codebase resulting in all sorts of intermittent failure madness.
The problem with "Windows" is not the common meaning, a hole in your wall with glass over it. The problem is that prior to "Windows" the GUI OS environment, there were lots of other GUI OS environments that featured "windows". The word "windows" has a specific common meaning in the context of computer operating systems that predates the trademarked OS made by Microsoft.
Nonetheless, if I were going to pick a point to attack Microsoft on, this would probably be the last point on my list - I don't find trademark law to be too offensive, and I think strong trademark law is important to business in general. And in all honesty, Microsoft aren't twits about their trademark name most of the time - Michael Robertson is trying to see how far he can push the beast here before it tries to snap his neck.
Is my memory faulty on this scene?
I didn't know that - very cool factoid, thanks!
But that's just me.
I still don't quite understand that, since it's out of character - presumably he must actually have experienced guilt over his complicity in the destruction of their planet, even though we are told by Number Six that he is too selfish to feel guilt, and at other times he appears downright selfish-to-evil (though strangely, his most evil act, of turning the PR guy into a scapegoat turns out to have been correct, though Baltar didn't know Number Six was pointing out an ACTUAL Cylon).
I also disagree about the characters. I found that I did identify with several of them - definitely with the President, who was empathetic, and Commander Adama who is admirable but human. Sure, some of them weren't as strong as you might want, but there's a lot of story to tell there, and they definitely succeed at jerking your emotions around. I don't remember the last time a sci-fi miniseries got me teary-eyed at least twice.
On the other hand, I felt like some of the stuff was a bit heavy handed - the President's personal struggle with cancer, the death of the little girl and the part of the fleet that was left behind, the killing of the baby, etc. But it did elicit emotional response, which was clearly the intent, though perhaps went a bit too far with it (one or two of those scenes might have been enough...).
Yes, but the reference to 12 tribes of Israel was pretty obvious in the BSG miniseries. 12 "colonies" and the "13th lost colony, presumed by many to be mythical"....
I think it's probably the sad result of Tivo hacking becoming too widespread - too many people not qualified or willing to take responsibility or be sufficiently cautious futzing with the internals of their machines, then expecting support for the process. It's also the fault of Tivo Inc. for the fact that they've recently made certain changes to their software that apparently make it too easy to wreak havoc with their own system (if you can install a unified drive image on any S1 Tivo, you can imagine you might confuse something somewhere along the line). Ah well, I have an abs.net Philips HDR212 image sitting here so I can always restore if something goes wrong for me.
Also, some forms of cardiovascular disease are much more preventable then others. Additionally, among women who are not naturally predisposed to these, the recent changes in statistics are certainly due to preventable disease. Does that mean that if you meet a woman who suffered a stroke, she must have caused it? Of course not, and no scientist in their right mind would ever accept that we have sufficient data to make such a claim.
I agreed with all your other points about the unhealthfulness of lethargy and being overweight the first time around, just not your logic about blame since it reverses causality, and takes what you know very well to be a modest statistical association between any one factor and try to claim it is THE cause.
What's the deal? It really looks like the new roadmap is "build in all the features people REALLY bitch about into XPFE Mozilla, then once Firebird/Thunderbird is more stable, we'll transition to those". I'm fine with that, but shouldn't they just come out and say it?
You realize the links between diet, etc. and cancer are there, but they are definitely nowhere near statistically significant enough to be labeled as "causes" - they are risk factors, that's it. Smoking - now that causes lung disease and lung cancer, that's pretty plain, and rather different. And being overweight is definitely a big risk factor for several kinds of diseases, and people should do everything they can to avoid that, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a cause of disease, though it's pretty clearly causally related to cardiovascular problems, and to a much lesser extent, cancer.
Some diseases are mostly or partially preventable, and we should all make a damned good effort to take good care of ourselves and reduce all the risk factors, but please don't try to make it sound like people who suffer from cancer are to blame for their own conditions.
You do realize that more and more people are being born all the time, and land is one of the few resources that's pretty much guaranteed to eventually end up worth more than where it started, presuming people still want to live in the area you're in.
Well, I'm working on it. Ask me again in about 12 months and we'll see if I'm any closer.
The only way I can imagine a species naturally evolving to use radio frequency would be if they were many miles in size, or needed, for evolutionary reasons, to coordinate communication over massive distances. Otherwise, it's far more efficient to use higher frequency EM spectra that can discern useful details observationally and be used effectively for local communication, hunting, agriculture, and other evolutionary imperitives.
No, these are the lazy idiots who will buy exactly what's spoon fed to them. They are good for one thing - buying shit I spoon-feed to them.
The argument from there relies on the fact that 200 years is a drop in the bucket in cosmological time - just because we happen to be at this particular point in time developmentally doesn't really imply that other species and cultures would be at anywhere near the same point. So it's far more likely they'd either be too primitive to send radio waves, or advanced enough that they have viable nanotechnology.
Obviously, this argument assumes that nanotechnology is practicable and will be successfully developed in the next 100 years.
Assymmetric encryption algorithms, like RSA, rely on a hard problem with two parts needed to reconstruct the solution. In the case of RSA, those two parts are a large composite number with precisely two prime factors, and one of the prime factors (without one of the prime factors, finding out the other prime factor is deucedly difficult). Basically to "crack" RSA you have to factor the large composite number into its two prime factors. With RSA, the keysize refers to the size, in bits, of the composite and prime numbers you're working with. The thing is that you don't have to search an entire 512-bit keyspace to crack a 512-bit RSA key, you just have to try every reasonably possible _prime_ number that might be a factor of that 512-bit composite. And actually, you don't even really have to do that, since there are substantially better techniques for factoring numbers than brute force, requiring less computational effort.
So that, my friend, is why comparing "128-bit" encryption to "512-bit" or "1024-bit" RSA or other assymmetric encryption techniques (which are similar but rely on numerical problems other than factoring large numbers) isn't terribly meaningful.