I wonder if our overlords would consume rocket fuel? Are they inherently as corrosive as peroxide normally is to metals? It would be ironic to discover the beginnings of life there only to find that it would be a major barrier to visiting the planet.
I saw it in the theater when I was six years old. Pretty heavy stuff at that age...the living bodyless heads were especially striking. My parents expected something entirely different.
It might have been heavy stuff as compared the Wizard of Oz movie, but in the books Dorothy or Ozma were quite regularly in serious danger and dealing with bizarre perhaps horrific things. I don't really see why your parents were suprised. Then again if you made a movie based on most fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm it would have to be rated "R" for violence. But most parents just assume that stories for kids of 80 years ago are going to be just fine with their modern ideas of how to raise a child.
"Too complicted a situation for you to grasp, perhaps??? "
I grasp the situation just fine. But then I'm not the one with 19 question marks in an 11 sentence paragraph. Let me break it down for you. Shira Law spreads on it's own accord. Obviously it spreads more easily to weak fractured nations, but that does not mean that the weakening or fracturing of a nation is the cause of the spread of Shira Law. When I said that the way the war was being run was criminal, it was the pitiful condition of Iraq that was foremost in my mind. Bush fails more miserably as a Commander in Chief than he did as an Oil Industry CEO, he is not the right man for the job and his incompetence has been catastrophic. But that does not mean that he was wrong when he saw that a Democracy based on Rule of Law and Separation of Church and State, could no longer peacefully coexist in a world with Shira Law, with it's special police and judges spanning nations and controlled by the edicts of radical religious leaders. The name he put to this was "terrorism" because that was how the Shira World attempted to punish our infidel ways. While that may have been politically expedient in late 2001, it has had us fighting the symptoms of the problem instead of fighting the problem itself.
"Huh???? What war??? You can't even articulate what you are not actually against??? It is an illegal occupation.
Every war in history has been at very least the attempt at "illegal occupation" according to one side or the other.
How many gallons of gas would you have to save before a solar panel roof paid for itself? If the solar panel roof gives you even one extra MPG it would pay for itself in one hundred gallons. I think the real trick of making a solar panel roof work would be having your car know that it was OK to run the battery down on you way to work, so that it had somewhere to store the solar recharge. Maybe a switch/sensor connected to the clock and the current output of the solar panel would do the trick.
there are a lot of legitimate reasons for the operators of a secure facility to have a way to coordinate and even cooperate with protest groups.
Unfortunately one of the reasons is to render the protest invisible. When protesters are relocated into "first amendment zones" they are most often out of sight of the political figures they are trying to make aware of their outrage, and the protesters are out of sight of the press covering the political event being protested. The entire point of a protest is to disrupt an event or the regular flow of life. If UN delegates cannot get into the UN because of the thousands of protesters around it, that sends a message to the world. If those same thousands of protesters are herded into a park half a mile away, there is no message(other than a big "go fuck yourself" to the protesters) With things like first amendment zones and hate crime (punishing the intent not the actions) and seperating suspected terrorists from the Geneva Convention rights (again punishing intent) and databasing protest groups right along with with terrorist groups, we are rapidly criminalizing certain thoughts and ideals. We are well along the path towards outlawing any passionate dissent in our country. What is freedom if not the right to passionately and vocally disagree with the established powers?
I am not actually against the War in Iraq, I don't want the spread of Shira law and I think it is right for free nations to fight it. But I do think the way this war has been run is criminal, and many of the actions taken in the name of "The War on Terror" are treason. If I want to express this patriotism and thus end up on a database/watchlist created to protect the government from "threats". What does this say about the legitimacy of any protester tracking program?
As gas prices creep ever higher and coal plants become less and less desirable a partial conversion to solar power starts to become a very possible reality. Adding just one kilowatt worth of solar power to each of America's 116 million homes would reduce the power consumption almost 1/3rd. http://www.frugalfun.com/solarfest.html The system to get "off the grid" discussed my link costs a fair amount of money, and even a 1 KW system costs $10,000 right now, but if the solar panels can suddenly cost 60% less (by being more efficient) then the price of a 1 KW system could reasonably drop to $5000. Not a huge cost when you are talking about much of todays housing market. Five grand is less than the price difference between a Prius (22K) and a Ford Focus (15K). Solar might well become widespread after all, not because it is efficient, but because everything else is slowly rising to match solar power's high initial cost.
So do you think the police will have the ability to turn the system off in an area to "safeguard their tactics" or "silently approach" or will there consistantly be evidence of police bullying and and choosing to look the other way. Because just in the same way that police are (in some places) having to pay for running redlights when they are not on an emergency call because of redlight cameras, this technology could be just as useful a tool for the citizens to monitor the police as it would be for the police to monitor the citizens.
we paid for the fiber network, but we don't actually have it.
Why do the congress critters need to hold the telcos responsible when we the customers can. As you pointed out, we paid for a service that was not delivered. That sounds like a giant class action lawsuit to me. Now if it were an individual person I think that it would qualify as fraud, and that person would face prison, but in this case the criminal is a corporation with corporate personhood. So how do you jail a corporation? Well jail is basically the loss of you freedoms to the state, so that is what we should do here and in other cases of corporate criminal activity, take away control from the those in control and give it to the state for the duration of the sentence. That would mean the stock shares are frozen and cannot vote, the upper management/board of directors is not paid or allowed accept new employment, and a state Warden will run the company with the sole goal of maximizing the public good through the companies line of business, shareholder profits or losses are not considered in state Wardens decision making process, only the maximum quality at best possible cost to the existing customers. Yes the executives and the shareholders will get screwed in this scenario, but they are the ones who's greed and poor decisions lead to the fraud in the first place.
As good or better than a gun when you are talking about taking over a plane. Don't forget that the 9/11 hijacking were done with knives. You can incite much more terror and pain with some well placed cuts than with a gun. The only way that a handful of people ever take over a plane filled with over a hundred passengers is through psychological control. If they really internalised that the only way they would live would be to overcome the hijacker, then they would overcome the hijacker by sheer numbers, even if it meant attacking until the ammo ran out. But that will almost never be the case, just given the faintest promise of being let go if they coopperate will subdue most people, even making some passengers stop any attempt to over power the hijackers. As most authority today is ultimately achieved through threats and force, people are well conditioned to submit when confronted with a non-choice like "Open the cockpit door or I will have to cut this young lady. Don't make me have to cut her." From and outside objective view we can say that it doesn't matter if they are all going to die anyhow, and the only one making the hijacker hurt the young lady is the hijacker. But the people actually inside the plane are going to turn to appeasing the violent forces in hopes of survival. If offered something that looks like a choice, people will try to appease violence rather than combat it, it's been demonstrated thousands of times through out human history.
Beat cops and homicide cops often have somewhat amicable relationships with drug gangs so that they have informants when violent crimes happen.
Wow. Do their badges read "Not My Job" instead of "To Protect and Serve"? Maybe this new software will the police see the link between small time drug gangs and increased violent crime. Or do the homicide detectives just view allowing such an environment to persist as job security?
"Eight years later, there isn't a single authorized music service that can compete with the original Napster. "
Since you brought up revenue sources, every most every current online music service seriously out performs Napster on the "bringing in revenue to the record company" front.
but it takes a college degree to get any sort of decent job. Our freedom is incredibly restricted,
So all of those illegal immigrants I keep hearing about are sneaking into the US are college graduates fleeing the authoritarian Mexican government? Oh, wait you mean decent job that includes a big screen TV and new car. If you think the US is an oppressive place, you need to spend a few months in India or China or Brazil, that's where the majority of the worlds population lives and so you can get a better sense of what most people consider a decent job or quality of life. All of those countries are industrialized and rapidly improving but they should give you some idea about how much better the "poor" here in American have it as compared to the rest of the world.
Strategic and tactical placement of resources to maximize effect without resorting to profiling or harassing citizens is a good thing.
What about cops walking a beat? That's right, walking down the same streets over and over everyday. Walking a beat means getting to know the locals and the particulars of a neighborhood in a way that doesn't happen in a squad car. Gangs don't hang out on a corner if once an hour a cops walks by a says hello, but the neighborhood kids still can hangout and could even end up viewing that cop as part of their neighborhood. From a squad car, no relationship is established and any stationary pack of teens can look like a gang to a biased eye. You don't have to profile when you actually know the people you see, but if you are just cruising along looking at a sea of nameless faces, then ethnicity and clothing style are about all you have to go on. Profiling is almost inevitable without establishing officers with good personal knowledge/relationship with the locals.
Funny but also kinda true. Math is a gateway to Critical Thinking or Logic. The kind of accuracy and clarity you get with math isn't something that most modern governments really want to encourage in the populace. Not the math itself, but the kinds of thinking you learn by way of math. It's much easier to sway them with a convincing soundbite than to actually have to have a through and logical understanding of an issue. Factoring a polynomial teaches you break things down into clear components in a much different way than you will get if you are only ever exposed to literature,history,and civics. A well educated thinking man is going to be a politicians toughest constituent.
Science did fine for thousands of years before the creation of atom weapons, space bombers, and killer drones.
While I do agree with your sentiment, I'm afraid that science and war have been hand in hand for the vast majority of history. "Archimedes has also been credited with improving the power and accuracy of the catapult, and with inventing the odometer during the First Punic War."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Disco veries_and_inventions "In 1595-1598, Galileo devised and improved a Geometric and Military Compass suitable for use by gunners and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments designed by Niccolò Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Gal ilei#Physics And of course we know well what happened to the inventions and insights of Noble and Einstein. Science and the waging of war feed each other back and forth. Militaries are always eager to use new technologies and scientists are usually eager to for the kind of resources and funding that militaries have access to.
You want it to be able to get above 60mph and do that in a reasonably small amount of time (say, less than 20 seconds?).
Maybe less than 20 seconds, but it doesn't need to be less than 15 seconds. Most modern cars could probably do just fine with 1/2 the horsepower they currently have. 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle could go 0-60 in 19 seconds, it had 60hp and had a curb weight of 2400 lbs. We have no need to accelerate faster, just our addiction to bigger, better, faster. What ever happened to "moderation in all things"?
However, I have yet to come across a DVD player that overrides the chapter/title/whatever's ban on skipping or seeking.
Cheap import DVD players are your best bet there. They have rather bare bones software that often doesn't include such "features" as overiding your abailty to skip chapter to chapter.
The "demand" half of the supply and the demand concept could always be viewed as greed. Why should a new Lambrogini cost ten times what a new Audi costs? An Aerial Atom is a handmade high performance car, but it costs about the same as a new Audi. Am I to believe that a Lambrogini actually costs ten times as much to make? Maybe three times as much to make, as they are hand made and use more exotic materials, but everything beyond that is mark-up based on demand. Skilled workers make more per hour that unskilled workers for the same reason. Maybe it could be considered greed that any one person should make more per hour that any other person, but as demand and reputation do play a role in the pricing of most everything, it is a bit anomalous that this wouldn't hold true for online music.
And those that complain that $Friend bought $Song for $PriceA but now its up to $PriceC and its not fair that they have to pay more than $Friend for the exact same item
Why shouldn't this apply to music the same way it applies to something like real estate? If I had been able to buy a 2 bedroom apartment in my current neighborhood 10 years ago it would have cost about 80K, currently a two bedroom costs around 400K. That might not be "fair" but it certainly is reality.
The more people who buy your song, the cheaper it should be.
It's more or less supply and demand, but with MP3s the supply basically unlimited and almost free beyond the first copy, so cost can only fluctuate based on the demand. As demand rises so does the price. In durable goods you get a price reduction with a popular product because mass production will raise the supply and lower the manufacturing cost per unit. The amount and cost of supply and distribution can be a major factor in the consumer price of physical objects like furniture or automobiles. Supply is sort of a non-factor with digital media and so there are no production advantages to large number of units sold..
Not that marriage and babies go together 100%, but babies are seriously expensive. I would think the unmarried/purposefully childless would be less expensive to insure.
For example, if you had an object of infinite mass with no gravity, would it be possible for us to exist alongside this infinite object?
Yes. Because for there to be an infinite object that would necessitate that the Universe be infinite. Now I am aware that the infinite object should completely fill the infinite universe. However infinite + 1 = infinite. So in that "+ 1" there is room for me. It could be argued that there should also be an infinite amount of empty space left over in the infinite universe, but once we get there in the discussion, I start to think that, outside of a philosophical context, any use of infinity is a placeholder for a very high value that we are ignorant of. We need a new term for that, how about: "plenitudinous"
If there are lifeforms out there that are a few thousand years more advanced than us, why would they want to let us know they are there? Wouldn't it be safe to assume that if they are thousands of years ahead in technology, that they would also be thousand of years ahead in social justice and personal philosophy? By comparison, we are a crude and war prone species, we have some good ideas about how to be a more harmonious species but we show very few signs of actually attempting to implement those ideas. Why don't they just come explain universal harmony to us? Maybe those are lessons that can only be learned through experience. Try to look at our world from the perspective of an advanced alien, why would you want visit? The only reason I can see to come visit us would be to either enslave us or take our planet, at this point we have very little to offer to any interstellar community.
Slashdot Mirror
our hydrogen-peroxide breathing overlords
I wonder if our overlords would consume rocket fuel? Are they inherently as corrosive as peroxide normally is to metals? It would be ironic to discover the beginnings of life there only to find that it would be a major barrier to visiting the planet.
I saw it in the theater when I was six years old. Pretty heavy stuff at that age...the living bodyless heads were especially striking. My parents expected something entirely different.
It might have been heavy stuff as compared the Wizard of Oz movie, but in the books Dorothy or Ozma were quite regularly in serious danger and dealing with bizarre perhaps horrific things. I don't really see why your parents were suprised. Then again if you made a movie based on most fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm it would have to be rated "R" for violence. But most parents just assume that stories for kids of 80 years ago are going to be just fine with their modern ideas of how to raise a child.
"Too complicted a situation for you to grasp, perhaps??? "
I grasp the situation just fine. But then I'm not the one with 19 question marks in an 11 sentence paragraph. Let me break it down for you. Shira Law spreads on it's own accord. Obviously it spreads more easily to weak fractured nations, but that does not mean that the weakening or fracturing of a nation is the cause of the spread of Shira Law. When I said that the way the war was being run was criminal, it was the pitiful condition of Iraq that was foremost in my mind. Bush fails more miserably as a Commander in Chief than he did as an Oil Industry CEO, he is not the right man for the job and his incompetence has been catastrophic. But that does not mean that he was wrong when he saw that a Democracy based on Rule of Law and Separation of Church and State, could no longer peacefully coexist in a world with Shira Law, with it's special police and judges spanning nations and controlled by the edicts of radical religious leaders. The name he put to this was "terrorism" because that was how the Shira World attempted to punish our infidel ways. While that may have been politically expedient in late 2001, it has had us fighting the symptoms of the problem instead of fighting the problem itself.
"Huh???? What war??? You can't even articulate what you are not actually against??? It is an illegal occupation.
Every war in history has been at very least the attempt at "illegal occupation" according to one side or the other.
How many gallons of gas would you have to save before a solar panel roof paid for itself? If the solar panel roof gives you even one extra MPG it would pay for itself in one hundred gallons. I think the real trick of making a solar panel roof work would be having your car know that it was OK to run the battery down on you way to work, so that it had somewhere to store the solar recharge. Maybe a switch/sensor connected to the clock and the current output of the solar panel would do the trick.
there are a lot of legitimate reasons for the operators of a secure facility to have a way to coordinate and even cooperate with protest groups.
Unfortunately one of the reasons is to render the protest invisible. When protesters are relocated into "first amendment zones" they are most often out of sight of the political figures they are trying to make aware of their outrage, and the protesters are out of sight of the press covering the political event being protested. The entire point of a protest is to disrupt an event or the regular flow of life. If UN delegates cannot get into the UN because of the thousands of protesters around it, that sends a message to the world. If those same thousands of protesters are herded into a park half a mile away, there is no message(other than a big "go fuck yourself" to the protesters) With things like first amendment zones and hate crime (punishing the intent not the actions) and seperating suspected terrorists from the Geneva Convention rights (again punishing intent) and databasing protest groups right along with with terrorist groups, we are rapidly criminalizing certain thoughts and ideals. We are well along the path towards outlawing any passionate dissent in our country. What is freedom if not the right to passionately and vocally disagree with the established powers?
I am not actually against the War in Iraq, I don't want the spread of Shira law and I think it is right for free nations to fight it. But I do think the way this war has been run is criminal, and many of the actions taken in the name of "The War on Terror" are treason. If I want to express this patriotism and thus end up on a database/watchlist created to protect the government from "threats". What does this say about the legitimacy of any protester tracking program?
9.6%! Nothing to write home about.
As gas prices creep ever higher and coal plants become less and less desirable a partial conversion to solar power starts to become a very possible reality. Adding just one kilowatt worth of solar power to each of America's 116 million homes would reduce the power consumption almost 1/3rd. http://www.frugalfun.com/solarfest.html The system to get "off the grid" discussed my link costs a fair amount of money, and even a 1 KW system costs $10,000 right now, but if the solar panels can suddenly cost 60% less (by being more efficient) then the price of a 1 KW system could reasonably drop to $5000. Not a huge cost when you are talking about much of todays housing market. Five grand is less than the price difference between a Prius (22K) and a Ford Focus (15K). Solar might well become widespread after all, not because it is efficient, but because everything else is slowly rising to match solar power's high initial cost.
So do you think the police will have the ability to turn the system off in an area to "safeguard their tactics" or "silently approach" or will there consistantly be evidence of police bullying and and choosing to look the other way. Because just in the same way that police are (in some places) having to pay for running redlights when they are not on an emergency call because of redlight cameras, this technology could be just as useful a tool for the citizens to monitor the police as it would be for the police to monitor the citizens.
we paid for the fiber network, but we don't actually have it.
Why do the congress critters need to hold the telcos responsible when we the customers can. As you pointed out, we paid for a service that was not delivered. That sounds like a giant class action lawsuit to me. Now if it were an individual person I think that it would qualify as fraud, and that person would face prison, but in this case the criminal is a corporation with corporate personhood. So how do you jail a corporation? Well jail is basically the loss of you freedoms to the state, so that is what we should do here and in other cases of corporate criminal activity, take away control from the those in control and give it to the state for the duration of the sentence. That would mean the stock shares are frozen and cannot vote, the upper management/board of directors is not paid or allowed accept new employment, and a state Warden will run the company with the sole goal of maximizing the public good through the companies line of business, shareholder profits or losses are not considered in state Wardens decision making process, only the maximum quality at best possible cost to the existing customers. Yes the executives and the shareholders will get screwed in this scenario, but they are the ones who's greed and poor decisions lead to the fraud in the first place.
How do you make a hydrogen fuel cell car move 200 MPH?
I'd rather have a hydrogen fuel cell car that did 200 MPG.
yeah well I dropped a piece of foam on my "evenly-heated cookware" and it left this huge gouge...
What good is a knife?
As good or better than a gun when you are talking about taking over a plane. Don't forget that the 9/11 hijacking were done with knives. You can incite much more terror and pain with some well placed cuts than with a gun. The only way that a handful of people ever take over a plane filled with over a hundred passengers is through psychological control. If they really internalised that the only way they would live would be to overcome the hijacker, then they would overcome the hijacker by sheer numbers, even if it meant attacking until the ammo ran out. But that will almost never be the case, just given the faintest promise of being let go if they coopperate will subdue most people, even making some passengers stop any attempt to over power the hijackers. As most authority today is ultimately achieved through threats and force, people are well conditioned to submit when confronted with a non-choice like "Open the cockpit door or I will have to cut this young lady. Don't make me have to cut her." From and outside objective view we can say that it doesn't matter if they are all going to die anyhow, and the only one making the hijacker hurt the young lady is the hijacker. But the people actually inside the plane are going to turn to appeasing the violent forces in hopes of survival. If offered something that looks like a choice, people will try to appease violence rather than combat it, it's been demonstrated thousands of times through out human history.
Beat cops and homicide cops often have somewhat amicable relationships with drug gangs so that they have informants when violent crimes happen.
Wow. Do their badges read "Not My Job" instead of "To Protect and Serve"? Maybe this new software will the police see the link between small time drug gangs and increased violent crime. Or do the homicide detectives just view allowing such an environment to persist as job security?
"Eight years later, there isn't a single authorized music service that can compete with the original Napster. "
Since you brought up revenue sources, every most every current online music service seriously out performs Napster on the "bringing in revenue to the record company" front.
but it takes a college degree to get any sort of decent job. Our freedom is incredibly restricted,
So all of those illegal immigrants I keep hearing about are sneaking into the US are college graduates fleeing the authoritarian Mexican government? Oh, wait you mean decent job that includes a big screen TV and new car. If you think the US is an oppressive place, you need to spend a few months in India or China or Brazil, that's where the majority of the worlds population lives and so you can get a better sense of what most people consider a decent job or quality of life. All of those countries are industrialized and rapidly improving but they should give you some idea about how much better the "poor" here in American have it as compared to the rest of the world.
Strategic and tactical placement of resources to maximize effect without resorting to profiling or harassing citizens is a good thing.
What about cops walking a beat? That's right, walking down the same streets over and over everyday. Walking a beat means getting to know the locals and the particulars of a neighborhood in a way that doesn't happen in a squad car. Gangs don't hang out on a corner if once an hour a cops walks by a says hello, but the neighborhood kids still can hangout and could even end up viewing that cop as part of their neighborhood. From a squad car, no relationship is established and any stationary pack of teens can look like a gang to a biased eye. You don't have to profile when you actually know the people you see, but if you are just cruising along looking at a sea of nameless faces, then ethnicity and clothing style are about all you have to go on. Profiling is almost inevitable without establishing officers with good personal knowledge/relationship with the locals.
Stick it to da' man: factor a polynomial!
Funny but also kinda true. Math is a gateway to Critical Thinking or Logic. The kind of accuracy and clarity you get with math isn't something that most modern governments really want to encourage in the populace. Not the math itself, but the kinds of thinking you learn by way of math. It's much easier to sway them with a convincing soundbite than to actually have to have a through and logical understanding of an issue. Factoring a polynomial teaches you break things down into clear components in a much different way than you will get if you are only ever exposed to literature,history,and civics. A well educated thinking man is going to be a politicians toughest constituent.
Science did fine for thousands of years before the creation of atom weapons, space bombers, and killer drones.
o veries_and_inventions l ilei#Physics
While I do agree with your sentiment, I'm afraid that science and war have been hand in hand for the vast majority of history.
"Archimedes has also been credited with improving the power and accuracy of the catapult, and with inventing the odometer during the First Punic War."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Disc
"In 1595-1598, Galileo devised and improved a Geometric and Military Compass suitable for use by gunners and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments designed by Niccolò Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Ga
And of course we know well what happened to the inventions and insights of Noble and Einstein. Science and the waging of war feed each other back and forth. Militaries are always eager to use new technologies and scientists are usually eager to for the kind of resources and funding that militaries have access to.
You want it to be able to get above 60mph and do that in a reasonably small amount of time (say, less than 20 seconds?).
Maybe less than 20 seconds, but it doesn't need to be less than 15 seconds. Most modern cars could probably do just fine with 1/2 the horsepower they currently have. 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle could go 0-60 in 19 seconds, it had 60hp and had a curb weight of 2400 lbs. We have no need to accelerate faster, just our addiction to bigger, better, faster. What ever happened to "moderation in all things"?
However, I have yet to come across a DVD player that overrides the chapter/title/whatever's ban on skipping or seeking.
Cheap import DVD players are your best bet there. They have rather bare bones software that often doesn't include such "features" as overiding your abailty to skip chapter to chapter.
This is actually what's referred to as greed.
The "demand" half of the supply and the demand concept could always be viewed as greed. Why should a new Lambrogini cost ten times what a new Audi costs? An Aerial Atom is a handmade high performance car, but it costs about the same as a new Audi. Am I to believe that a Lambrogini actually costs ten times as much to make? Maybe three times as much to make, as they are hand made and use more exotic materials, but everything beyond that is mark-up based on demand. Skilled workers make more per hour that unskilled workers for the same reason. Maybe it could be considered greed that any one person should make more per hour that any other person, but as demand and reputation do play a role in the pricing of most everything, it is a bit anomalous that this wouldn't hold true for online music.
And those that complain that $Friend bought $Song for $PriceA but now its up to $PriceC and its not fair that they have to pay more than $Friend for the exact same item
Why shouldn't this apply to music the same way it applies to something like real estate? If I had been able to buy a 2 bedroom apartment in my current neighborhood 10 years ago it would have cost about 80K, currently a two bedroom costs around 400K. That might not be "fair" but it certainly is reality.
The more people who buy your song, the cheaper it should be.
It's more or less supply and demand, but with MP3s the supply basically unlimited and almost free beyond the first copy, so cost can only fluctuate based on the demand. As demand rises so does the price. In durable goods you get a price reduction with a popular product because mass production will raise the supply and lower the manufacturing cost per unit. The amount and cost of supply and distribution can be a major factor in the consumer price of physical objects like furniture or automobiles. Supply is sort of a non-factor with digital media and so there are no production advantages to large number of units sold..
Not that marriage and babies go together 100%, but babies are seriously expensive. I would think the unmarried/purposefully childless would be less expensive to insure.
For example, if you had an object of infinite mass with no gravity, would it be possible for us to exist alongside this infinite object?
Yes. Because for there to be an infinite object that would necessitate that the Universe be infinite. Now I am aware that the infinite object should completely fill the infinite universe.
However infinite + 1 = infinite. So in that "+ 1" there is room for me. It could be argued that there should also be an infinite amount of empty space left over in the infinite universe, but once we get there in the discussion, I start to think that, outside of a philosophical context, any use of infinity is a placeholder for a very high value that we are ignorant of. We need a new term for that, how about: "plenitudinous"
If there are lifeforms out there that are a few thousand years more advanced than us, why would they want to let us know they are there? Wouldn't it be safe to assume that if they are thousands of years ahead in technology, that they would also be thousand of years ahead in social justice and personal philosophy? By comparison, we are a crude and war prone species, we have some good ideas about how to be a more harmonious species but we show very few signs of actually attempting to implement those ideas. Why don't they just come explain universal harmony to us? Maybe those are lessons that can only be learned through experience. Try to look at our world from the perspective of an advanced alien, why would you want visit? The only reason I can see to come visit us would be to either enslave us or take our planet, at this point we have very little to offer to any interstellar community.