Interplanetary travel is quite well understood. It'd take some months but hardly out of reach. [...] Even the most theoretical scenarios I've seen [for interstellar probes] using ungodly amounts of antimatter as fuel takes about 20 years.
You're still thinking about moving chunks of mass around, not "travel".
Yes, with an enormous effort, you can move a small habitation module and a couple of occupants to Mars (might as well make it a one-way trip, since they're going to be sick anyway). But that's not the same as "interplanetary travel" in the sense that Star Trek fans are thinking of. With current technology, every single manned interplanetary trip is going to be a huge, multi-nation effort; unlike Game Boys or PCs, it doesn't get much cheaper because you make more of it. In order to have anything resembling manned travel requires new physics: new power, new shielding, etc.
Sending a small interstellar probe is also going to be a huge multi-nation effort. The antimatter generation would be hugely expensive, and there would still be a lot of engineering to be done. But such an effort wouldn't claim to be anything other than a one-time expensive science experiment--it's not about travel, mining, or colonization, it's about knowledge.
Yeah, I know about Goodwin's law, but I still think it is pretty telling that it is Germany of all countries that is among the first to choose very disproportionate penalties for this kind of behavior.
What Germany is saying is "if you don't conform to proper, legal behavior, then we can do with you whatever we want" and "trust the state, we can determine perfectly whether you have violated a law". There is no sense or debate in the government that this may have a chilling effect on free speech or be used for selective enforcement. There is no debate over the ethics of copyright and copyright violations. And, make no mistake about it, while in the US, laws like this may be on the books as a deterrent and rarely enforced or even effectively invalidated by the courts, the German legal system will enforce them regularly.
I'm glad the German military has been defanged to the point where that nation can't impose its blind sense of order and trust in authority on other nations. Unfortunately, the legal precedent that this sets will probably still harm people in other nations.
Must be nice have enough moral bankrupcty to rip off people when you feel like it.
Copyright isn't in the same class as life, liberty, or property. Copyright exists in a democracy only only because the voters grant it as a practical means of encouraging the creation of useful content; it's not a property right. And if the voters don't feel like copyright is useful anymore, they can take it away if they choose.
In fact, what I consider "morally bankrupt" is that the recording industry isn't holding up their part of the bargain: the deal under which they got copyright is that they get it in return for benefitting the public and eventually contributing to the public domain. They have renegged on their side of the deal. What's worse, they are imposing hundreds of billions of dollars on costs on tax payers for enforcement; at least, let them pay for their own enforcement--bill them for every policeman, wiretap, search, court costs, and incarceration related to copyright infringement.
As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing immoral about ripping off the recording industry or movie producers in any way that people choose. It is, however, illegal, which is why I personally don't do it. But you can bet that if there is a legal way of harming content producers, I will pursue it. The best way of doing that, I found, is to not buy their stuff; fortunately, there is lots of legal free music on the Internet.
Actually, "underwater ships" already existed by the time Jules Verne wrote his story.
As for traveling to the moon, that's just not comparable. The physics for going to the moon were well understood and within reach; that was just a question of technology and engineering.
For manned interplanetary and interstellar travel, it's not so much that we can make a reasoned argument against it, we don't even have a hint of the physics needed to make it work; current reactor, propulsion, and shielding technologies are many orders of magnitude away from what they would need to be for manned travel. And the technology being developed by SpaceX is completely irrelevant; it's a commercial launch vehicle, and an inefficient one at that--it has nothing to do with interplanetary or interstellar travel.
It's a different thing for unmanned interstellar travel: technologically, if we devote enough resources to it, we can probably send a small interstellar probe to a neighboring star system within the next century--it would be hugely expensive, but feasible.
Actually, I think the most likely path to manned space exploration is to reengineer people: radiation hardening, hibernation, vacuum resistance, and changes to the skeletal system, among others. If you do that well, you could send people in small pods and they might be able to work when they arrive. But I give it a century before people overcome their squeamishness to permit genetic engineering with people, and another century to do it. But you and I are never going to set foot on another planet.
Much as I enjoy Star Trek as fiction, here's a hint: it's not real. Warp drive isn't in the cards. In fact, even manned space travel beyond the moon isn't in the cards any time soon. Even once we manage to put people on other planets, colonization is centuries off.
We're stuck on this rock for the foreseeable future; deal with it.
You are supporting my point: the "home page" has been replaced by other services, which incidentally also generate an externally visible page. The people who still attempt to create a classical home page generate something that's ugly and obsolete.
Does anybody actually still just edit static web pages? And does anybody still edit navigational structures by hand instead of using a CMS for maintaining the navigational elements?
It seems to me that a home page site should, at a minimum, support static pages, blogs, a gallery, calendar, comments, and a file archive under a common navigational structure.
So, this seems like a neat tour-de-force in AJAX, but I think it's missing where the world has been moving over the last few years.
The trouble with that approach is that, when it comes to software, more isn't better; the quality of a piece of software goes up dramatically the more it manages to achieve its desired function with fewer and fewer features.
You think it's a good principle that someone should be able to deliberately harm someone else, purely out of malice, and face no consequences?
That's not what I said. Please read my statement.
my position on this issue is a pragmatic one
No, I think your position is completely out of touch with reality. You cannot keep people from making anonymous statements on the Internet. My position is the pragmatic one, because it's the one we already have: people can generally make anonymous statements, but if they start behaving too outrageously, then the police machinery kicks in and attempts to track them down. It's a simple, pragmatic balance.
In any case, take a look at this week's news over here in the UK: some of our largest political parties grossly abused the electoral rules at the general election, by taking secret loans to fund campaigns with the lenders remaining anonymous at the time. They promptly offered peerages (not just an honour, but a significant and potentially life-long role in our legislature) to several of the lenders! Did keeping the lenders anonymous at the time really help democracy here?
I fail to see what political corruption and a flawed political system in the UK have to do with anonymous free speech on the Internet; in fact, I'm not even convinced that the UK should be fully counted as a democracy.
In any case, if you want to convince me that all financial transactions (including donations) should be open, then I might agree; in fact, I am already convinced that all property tax and income tax records should be open to the public. But that position has nothing to do with whether people should be able to speak anonymously on the Internet.
FWIW, some nations actually have attempted to enforce non-anonymity on the Internet, and it has been laughably ineffective.
The public won't like carrying around several cards, the costs incurred in issuing them and keeping them up to date would be higher,
Actually, multi-card authentication is already the norm: you carry around at least one card form every institution, and people understand what "could you please also show me your driver's license" means. A multi-smartcard approach would not increase the number of cards, it would simply get rid of the paper and make the identification card itself more secure than it is now.
In any case, it's already happening: driver's licenses are getting smarter, and medical and banking institutions are moving to smartcards.
A mechanism by which individuals can review which specific information they allow to be read from their card before permitting the read would perhaps be more reasonable
I think that would be a usability nightmare.
Having a global identifier becomes a temptation to use that identifier to have a single clearinghouse of information even on individuals not suspected
Don't kid yourself: these people are using your SSN as a global identifier, or, worse, your name. And they don't give a damn if your name happens to collide with a known terrorist, or if your SSN was mistyped.
Global identifiers are here and they are unavoidable. All we can do is make them work better.
having the correlations which could be made by such a system be reliable (as opposed to the system which has resulted in the TSA's publicly visible goofs) makes such abuse that much more inviting.
I doubt the TSA has stopped doing what they were doing because of "visible goofs". And identity thiefs don't give a damn at all. I have been a victim of identity theft because of the current bogus ID system--I want better identifiers!
I'm sorry you fail to grasp the concept that one can simultaneously (1) consider a law unethical, and (2) still act in accordance to that law, either out of ethical or out of practical considerations.
Personally, I consider current copyright and patent law to be unethical, but I still obey them.
Radiation in space essentially makes manned space travel beyond the moon impossible right now. Furthermore, there aren't even any good proposals for how to create viable shields.
If I were in that professor's class, I'd get the local student union on the case. Here in Quebec, student unions are actually accredited unions (like labour unions), so they have more power here than they do elsewhere.
Oh, get a life. Different professors teach differently; if she doesn't like laptops, just don't use one--maybe you'll even discover that she is right. Be happy that she cares enough about the class to think about such issues at all.
Right now, you may have a motivated professor that doesn't like laptops. Once you get the "student union" on her case, you're going to have a grumpy professor that gets irritated by staring at laptops during her lecture. You can then type notes into your laptop, but you may not want to anymore.
Probably less than you think. All the schools I went to only got a small fraction of their budget from tuition--most came from endowments, donations, and overhead (from research grants).
And universities do have admission requirements, so if they let go of a student with a bad personality, someone with slightly lower SAT scores but probably a better personality is going to replace them.
That's because you appear to view "speech" as some sort of easily verifiable, factual statements. But that's not how speech works: speech may be difficult to verify, ambiguous, spontaneous, and emotional.
It does, however, mean that if I start spreading unfounded rumours with the intent of embarrassing a member of the administration out of office through trial-by-media, then that person has the same right as anyone else to set the record straight by calling me before a court to defend my actions.
The solution to that is much simpler: people should stop paying attention to anonymous statements, unless they can independently verify them.
In any case, this debate isn't new, it goes back to the founding fathers, and the ability to speak and criticize anonymously (look under "pamphleteering") is an important part of our democracy.
Note also that the ability of public figures to sue people for defamation is very limited in the US; if you are a public figure, there are many circumstances under which I can make false statements about you that are harmful to you without suffering consequences. I think this is a good principle.
No, I think a better solution is to disallow permanent archiving of speech unless you have permission of the copyright holder. That would still permit anonymous speech, but it would protect both authors (who may have made stupid mistakes) and people who have been wronged by the speech of others (by limiting the time that the false information hangs around).
I guess you also believe that because it's called a "luxury accomodation", it's actually luxurious, or because it's called "a fuel efficient SUV" it's actually fuel efficient.
What XML is called doesn't matter; what matters is what the effect of Microsoft adding proprietary extensions to Office XML would be, and the effect wouldn't be good.
Well, given that Vista has been stripped essentially down to an XP service pack by now, it may be "feature complete", but perhaps it shouldn't be called a "new release"...
What are you proposing, specifically? A smart card containing information about an individual (digitally signed to prevent forgeries)
Yes, a smart cards would be an important component. The smart cards can hold information that otherwise would have to be stored centrally. That's the key point and the way in which a good smart card system can greatly reduce the need for centralized databases.
but with support for selective reads (such that the minimum necessary information -- and only that information -- can be retrieved)?
I think putting everything into a single card is a bad idea; the safest way of keeping information apart is to keep it in separate cards.
but without a common identifier usable for correlating between databases?
I think it's pretty clear that you cannot prevent the creation of common identifiers; attempts to do so just result in companies and the government using substitute identifiers that are less secure and less reliable. That's pretty much the system we have right now, and it isn't working. I believe all you can do is create a system that reduces the need for centralized databases, while at the same time creating strong legislation that limits and in many cases outlaws the creation of such centralized databases. A good national ID system and legislation could accomplish that.
Both Sun and Microsoft have been busy trying to compete with open source by attempting to redefine the meanings of terms like "open" and "free". The Microsoft Office XML formats are not open, because in order to use them, you need a license from Microsoft. The same is true for crucial pieces of the Sun Java language and libraries.
It's important not to let these companies get away with such sleazy tactics and to make sure that both customers and users understand that if they agree to terms of companies like Sun and Microsoft, they accept similar risks to when they buy proprietary, closed source software.
That's my point: Native Americans were less destructive to the environment than Europeans not because they knew any better or were any "wiser", but simply because they weren't advanced enough.
It is us in the 21st century who have both the means to destroy and the knowledge to keep ourselves from destroying the environment. That places a responsibility on us that neither Native Americans nor Europeans of past centuries had.
However, I submit that the positive economic impact of the effort such people put into the system to accrue such resources as to be able to enjoy a reasonable standard of living in retirement outweighs the later drag.
Sure, that's the way the system ought to be working. But we're soncerned with a more subtle question, namely whether the particular handling of the $10k of social security tax is overall beneficial. That is, does giving everybody the extra $10k of social security tax for private investment in retirement funds encourage enough extra productivity in order to make up for the costs arising from millions of people who weren't smart enough to make proper private investments?
I don't see centralization as being an improvement on the patchwork.
I don't see why a national ID system needs to result in centralization. In fact, quite to the contrary, a good national ID system could be used to enforce de-centralization, for example through the use of smartcards.
I'm sure there are many designs for national ID systems to which I would object on the same grounds as you, but a properly designed national ID system could greatly enhance both privacy and security compared to the current system.
Whether something is moral or otherwise obviously depends on the perspective of the viewer
Well, I think Republicans would have a field day with that statement ("moral relativism" and all that). However, let's assume that it's true; we can then still ask what most people think about an issue. And when it comes to Social Darwinism, this discussion was raging roughly a century ago and people generally found it to be incompatible with their views of just and moral behavior. I don't think that belief has fundamentally changed; when people favor policies that amount to Social Darwinism, it's usually because the policy has been carefully dressed up to hide its consequences.
Let me put it differently: would you really want to have a 75 year old little old lady starve on the street because she couldn't figure out how to privately invest her retirement funds when she was younger? Or would you want to keep her alive using non-social security funds? Because that's the choice you are faced with when you get rid of social security.
I fully agree that Washington politics on the environment sucks. But why bring Native Americans into this? Like pretty much all other societies, they caused extinctions, destroyed the environment, and didn't keep their population in check (at least not by choice).
Native American sayings are not a good guideline for modern policies. Tackling issues of sustainability will require science and technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Interplanetary travel is quite well understood. It'd take some months but hardly out of reach. [...] Even the most theoretical scenarios I've seen [for interstellar probes] using ungodly amounts of antimatter as fuel takes about 20 years.
You're still thinking about moving chunks of mass around, not "travel".
Yes, with an enormous effort, you can move a small habitation module and a couple of occupants to Mars (might as well make it a one-way trip, since they're going to be sick anyway). But that's not the same as "interplanetary travel" in the sense that Star Trek fans are thinking of. With current technology, every single manned interplanetary trip is going to be a huge, multi-nation effort; unlike Game Boys or PCs, it doesn't get much cheaper because you make more of it. In order to have anything resembling manned travel requires new physics: new power, new shielding, etc.
Sending a small interstellar probe is also going to be a huge multi-nation effort. The antimatter generation would be hugely expensive, and there would still be a lot of engineering to be done. But such an effort wouldn't claim to be anything other than a one-time expensive science experiment--it's not about travel, mining, or colonization, it's about knowledge.
Yeah, I know about Goodwin's law, but I still think it is pretty telling that it is Germany of all countries that is among the first to choose very disproportionate penalties for this kind of behavior.
What Germany is saying is "if you don't conform to proper, legal behavior, then we can do with you whatever we want" and "trust the state, we can determine perfectly whether you have violated a law". There is no sense or debate in the government that this may have a chilling effect on free speech or be used for selective enforcement. There is no debate over the ethics of copyright and copyright violations. And, make no mistake about it, while in the US, laws like this may be on the books as a deterrent and rarely enforced or even effectively invalidated by the courts, the German legal system will enforce them regularly.
I'm glad the German military has been defanged to the point where that nation can't impose its blind sense of order and trust in authority on other nations. Unfortunately, the legal precedent that this sets will probably still harm people in other nations.
Must be nice have enough moral bankrupcty to rip off people when you feel like it.
Copyright isn't in the same class as life, liberty, or property. Copyright exists in a democracy only only because the voters grant it as a practical means of encouraging the creation of useful content; it's not a property right. And if the voters don't feel like copyright is useful anymore, they can take it away if they choose.
In fact, what I consider "morally bankrupt" is that the recording industry isn't holding up their part of the bargain: the deal under which they got copyright is that they get it in return for benefitting the public and eventually contributing to the public domain. They have renegged on their side of the deal. What's worse, they are imposing hundreds of billions of dollars on costs on tax payers for enforcement; at least, let them pay for their own enforcement--bill them for every policeman, wiretap, search, court costs, and incarceration related to copyright infringement.
As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing immoral about ripping off the recording industry or movie producers in any way that people choose. It is, however, illegal, which is why I personally don't do it. But you can bet that if there is a legal way of harming content producers, I will pursue it. The best way of doing that, I found, is to not buy their stuff; fortunately, there is lots of legal free music on the Internet.
Actually, "underwater ships" already existed by the time Jules Verne wrote his story.
As for traveling to the moon, that's just not comparable. The physics for going to the moon were well understood and within reach; that was just a question of technology and engineering.
For manned interplanetary and interstellar travel, it's not so much that we can make a reasoned argument against it, we don't even have a hint of the physics needed to make it work; current reactor, propulsion, and shielding technologies are many orders of magnitude away from what they would need to be for manned travel. And the technology being developed by SpaceX is completely irrelevant; it's a commercial launch vehicle, and an inefficient one at that--it has nothing to do with interplanetary or interstellar travel.
It's a different thing for unmanned interstellar travel: technologically, if we devote enough resources to it, we can probably send a small interstellar probe to a neighboring star system within the next century--it would be hugely expensive, but feasible.
Actually, I think the most likely path to manned space exploration is to reengineer people: radiation hardening, hibernation, vacuum resistance, and changes to the skeletal system, among others. If you do that well, you could send people in small pods and they might be able to work when they arrive. But I give it a century before people overcome their squeamishness to permit genetic engineering with people, and another century to do it. But you and I are never going to set foot on another planet.
Much as I enjoy Star Trek as fiction, here's a hint: it's not real. Warp drive isn't in the cards. In fact, even manned space travel beyond the moon isn't in the cards any time soon. Even once we manage to put people on other planets, colonization is centuries off.
We're stuck on this rock for the foreseeable future; deal with it.
CMS's generate "no frills static HTML", so that's not an argument.
You are supporting my point: the "home page" has been replaced by other services, which incidentally also generate an externally visible page. The people who still attempt to create a classical home page generate something that's ugly and obsolete.
Does anybody actually still just edit static web pages? And does anybody still edit navigational structures by hand instead of using a CMS for maintaining the navigational elements?
It seems to me that a home page site should, at a minimum, support static pages, blogs, a gallery, calendar, comments, and a file archive under a common navigational structure.
So, this seems like a neat tour-de-force in AJAX, but I think it's missing where the world has been moving over the last few years.
The trouble with that approach is that, when it comes to software, more isn't better; the quality of a piece of software goes up dramatically the more it manages to achieve its desired function with fewer and fewer features.
You think it's a good principle that someone should be able to deliberately harm someone else, purely out of malice, and face no consequences?
That's not what I said. Please read my statement.
my position on this issue is a pragmatic one
No, I think your position is completely out of touch with reality. You cannot keep people from making anonymous statements on the Internet. My position is the pragmatic one, because it's the one we already have: people can generally make anonymous statements, but if they start behaving too outrageously, then the police machinery kicks in and attempts to track them down. It's a simple, pragmatic balance.
In any case, take a look at this week's news over here in the UK: some of our largest political parties grossly abused the electoral rules at the general election, by taking secret loans to fund campaigns with the lenders remaining anonymous at the time. They promptly offered peerages (not just an honour, but a significant and potentially life-long role in our legislature) to several of the lenders! Did keeping the lenders anonymous at the time really help democracy here?
I fail to see what political corruption and a flawed political system in the UK have to do with anonymous free speech on the Internet; in fact, I'm not even convinced that the UK should be fully counted as a democracy.
In any case, if you want to convince me that all financial transactions (including donations) should be open, then I might agree; in fact, I am already convinced that all property tax and income tax records should be open to the public. But that position has nothing to do with whether people should be able to speak anonymously on the Internet.
FWIW, some nations actually have attempted to enforce non-anonymity on the Internet, and it has been laughably ineffective.
The public won't like carrying around several cards, the costs incurred in issuing them and keeping them up to date would be higher,
Actually, multi-card authentication is already the norm: you carry around at least one card form every institution, and people understand what "could you please also show me your driver's license" means. A multi-smartcard approach would not increase the number of cards, it would simply get rid of the paper and make the identification card itself more secure than it is now.
In any case, it's already happening: driver's licenses are getting smarter, and medical and banking institutions are moving to smartcards.
A mechanism by which individuals can review which specific information they allow to be read from their card before permitting the read would perhaps be more reasonable
I think that would be a usability nightmare.
Having a global identifier becomes a temptation to use that identifier to have a single clearinghouse of information even on individuals not suspected
Don't kid yourself: these people are using your SSN as a global identifier, or, worse, your name. And they don't give a damn if your name happens to collide with a known terrorist, or if your SSN was mistyped.
Global identifiers are here and they are unavoidable. All we can do is make them work better.
having the correlations which could be made by such a system be reliable (as opposed to the system which has resulted in the TSA's publicly visible goofs) makes such abuse that much more inviting.
I doubt the TSA has stopped doing what they were doing because of "visible goofs". And identity thiefs don't give a damn at all. I have been a victim of identity theft because of the current bogus ID system--I want better identifiers!
I'm sorry you fail to grasp the concept that one can simultaneously (1) consider a law unethical, and (2) still act in accordance to that law, either out of ethical or out of practical considerations.
Personally, I consider current copyright and patent law to be unethical, but I still obey them.
Radiation in space essentially makes manned space travel beyond the moon impossible right now. Furthermore, there aren't even any good proposals for how to create viable shields.
If I were in that professor's class, I'd get the local student union on the case. Here in Quebec, student unions are actually accredited unions (like labour unions), so they have more power here than they do elsewhere.
Oh, get a life. Different professors teach differently; if she doesn't like laptops, just don't use one--maybe you'll even discover that she is right. Be happy that she cares enough about the class to think about such issues at all.
Right now, you may have a motivated professor that doesn't like laptops. Once you get the "student union" on her case, you're going to have a grumpy professor that gets irritated by staring at laptops during her lecture. You can then type notes into your laptop, but you may not want to anymore.
But it does need the students money.
Probably less than you think. All the schools I went to only got a small fraction of their budget from tuition--most came from endowments, donations, and overhead (from research grants).
And universities do have admission requirements, so if they let go of a student with a bad personality, someone with slightly lower SAT scores but probably a better personality is going to replace them.
I don't quite follow this.
That's because you appear to view "speech" as some sort of easily verifiable, factual statements. But that's not how speech works: speech may be difficult to verify, ambiguous, spontaneous, and emotional.
It does, however, mean that if I start spreading unfounded rumours with the intent of embarrassing a member of the administration out of office through trial-by-media, then that person has the same right as anyone else to set the record straight by calling me before a court to defend my actions.
The solution to that is much simpler: people should stop paying attention to anonymous statements, unless they can independently verify them.
In any case, this debate isn't new, it goes back to the founding fathers, and the ability to speak and criticize anonymously (look under "pamphleteering") is an important part of our democracy.
Note also that the ability of public figures to sue people for defamation is very limited in the US; if you are a public figure, there are many circumstances under which I can make false statements about you that are harmful to you without suffering consequences. I think this is a good principle.
No, I think a better solution is to disallow permanent archiving of speech unless you have permission of the copyright holder. That would still permit anonymous speech, but it would protect both authors (who may have made stupid mistakes) and people who have been wronged by the speech of others (by limiting the time that the false information hangs around).
I guess you also believe that because it's called a "luxury accomodation", it's actually luxurious, or because it's called "a fuel efficient SUV" it's actually fuel efficient.
What XML is called doesn't matter; what matters is what the effect of Microsoft adding proprietary extensions to Office XML would be, and the effect wouldn't be good.
The have patented not just part of the schema, but the whole thing.
Well, given that Vista has been stripped essentially down to an XP service pack by now, it may be "feature complete", but perhaps it shouldn't be called a "new release"...
What are you proposing, specifically? A smart card containing information about an individual (digitally signed to prevent forgeries)
Yes, a smart cards would be an important component. The smart cards can hold information that otherwise would have to be stored centrally. That's the key point and the way in which a good smart card system can greatly reduce the need for centralized databases.
but with support for selective reads (such that the minimum necessary information -- and only that information -- can be retrieved)?
I think putting everything into a single card is a bad idea; the safest way of keeping information apart is to keep it in separate cards.
but without a common identifier usable for correlating between databases?
I think it's pretty clear that you cannot prevent the creation of common identifiers; attempts to do so just result in companies and the government using substitute identifiers that are less secure and less reliable. That's pretty much the system we have right now, and it isn't working. I believe all you can do is create a system that reduces the need for centralized databases, while at the same time creating strong legislation that limits and in many cases outlaws the creation of such centralized databases. A good national ID system and legislation could accomplish that.
Both Sun and Microsoft have been busy trying to compete with open source by attempting to redefine the meanings of terms like "open" and "free". The Microsoft Office XML formats are not open, because in order to use them, you need a license from Microsoft. The same is true for crucial pieces of the Sun Java language and libraries.
It's important not to let these companies get away with such sleazy tactics and to make sure that both customers and users understand that if they agree to terms of companies like Sun and Microsoft, they accept similar risks to when they buy proprietary, closed source software.
That's my point: Native Americans were less destructive to the environment than Europeans not because they knew any better or were any "wiser", but simply because they weren't advanced enough.
It is us in the 21st century who have both the means to destroy and the knowledge to keep ourselves from destroying the environment. That places a responsibility on us that neither Native Americans nor Europeans of past centuries had.
Just an initial word: You make good points.
Thanks. You do, too.
However, I submit that the positive economic impact of the effort such people put into the system to accrue such resources as to be able to enjoy a reasonable standard of living in retirement outweighs the later drag.
Sure, that's the way the system ought to be working. But we're soncerned with a more subtle question, namely whether the particular handling of the $10k of social security tax is overall beneficial. That is, does giving everybody the extra $10k of social security tax for private investment in retirement funds encourage enough extra productivity in order to make up for the costs arising from millions of people who weren't smart enough to make proper private investments?
I don't see centralization as being an improvement on the patchwork.
I don't see why a national ID system needs to result in centralization. In fact, quite to the contrary, a good national ID system could be used to enforce de-centralization, for example through the use of smartcards.
I'm sure there are many designs for national ID systems to which I would object on the same grounds as you, but a properly designed national ID system could greatly enhance both privacy and security compared to the current system.
Whether something is moral or otherwise obviously depends on the perspective of the viewer
Well, I think Republicans would have a field day with that statement ("moral relativism" and all that). However, let's assume that it's true; we can then still ask what most people think about an issue. And when it comes to Social Darwinism, this discussion was raging roughly a century ago and people generally found it to be incompatible with their views of just and moral behavior. I don't think that belief has fundamentally changed; when people favor policies that amount to Social Darwinism, it's usually because the policy has been carefully dressed up to hide its consequences.
Let me put it differently: would you really want to have a 75 year old little old lady starve on the street because she couldn't figure out how to privately invest her retirement funds when she was younger? Or would you want to keep her alive using non-social security funds? Because that's the choice you are faced with when you get rid of social security.
I fully agree that Washington politics on the environment sucks. But why bring Native Americans into this? Like pretty much all other societies, they caused extinctions, destroyed the environment, and didn't keep their population in check (at least not by choice).
Native American sayings are not a good guideline for modern policies. Tackling issues of sustainability will require science and technology.
But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley
:-)
Well, when the imminent scientist actually becomes a real scientist, maybe then people will start listening to him