It seems far more people starve to death rather than go in for direct canibalism and there are few notable exceptions.
As for the younger generation here, I sometimes wonder if the libs screwed up the food supply, whether they'd wind up on the menu. I use the word 'if' because it's not a foregone conclusion that they will succeed. Of course if they do, people will eventually starve and/or resort to canibalism.
While I find your comments on the fuel cells to be on the money, you miss the point on the h2.
H2 can be acquired one of two ways. First, invest lots of energy into dissassociating h2o where the h2 is merely an energy storage means. The other is to 'crack' hydrocarbons to get it from. This second method is a source of energy, not just a storage means. There has been some work on making small 'crackers' in order to use transported hydrocarbons. I'm not sure if these small units have to use methane or if they could use gasoline - but with one that can use gasoline, there is no new massive infrastructure with this. The ultimate goal would be - fill up with regular, crack it, run the fuel cell. I'm not sure how good the efficiency could get but I think the air pollution would be reduced to just about nothing.
The tie-in you were seeking to the oil industry is here which benefits by continued production of energy and by its distribution. Note that this is actually not a bad thing because for the most part, these are good efficient companies. Also note that gallon of gas you use has about 8-12 cents profit to the oil company, about 40 cents taxes and the rest is costs that pay for an entire industry (not just a half dozen oil companies).
I saw a photo of a suit-case fuel cell, enough to run a small communications station as long as there was available hydrogen. It supposedly lasted for 5 years before needing replacement - at only about$5-$8 thousand dollars. It would seem that something only 10-20 times this might be able to run a small vehicle - assuming a 'cracking' unit can be made small enough. Gee, that's only about $50k to $100k for a fuel cell replacement and maybe only every 8 years or so.
My favorite was the california mandate that 10% of vehicles sold were to be electric - back just before it was discovered that there was already a serious shortage of electric power in the state. I guess the those new cars were supposed to suck electricity out of the air.
Now I'm awaiting the new standards from the EPA that demand my lawnmower exhaust be cleaner than the incoming air - already devoid of manmade pollution. That almost happened in the houston TX area. It seems about 10 yrs ago that the EPA was demanding ozone limits which were less than that which naturally occurred in the region. Unfortunately for the EPA, they were so restrictive that total evacuations of all human beings and the removal of all human activities from the area would not have resulted in the achievement of the mandate - so the EPA had to revise them to something more reasonable.
Possible correction of headline. It will likely turn out to be Giant Rabbits to Feed ON North Korea
While genetic technology has vastly come around since that grade F scifi movie Night of The Lepas, where 50 ft tall carnivorous rabbits got loose eating people, cattle and everything else in its path, I doubt what occurs will be eating north koreans. However, early great experiments with introducing non native critters (and sometimes plants) has been fraught with disasters.
If there are no natural predators for 30 + pound rabbits in N. korea, it might be only a matter of time before enough get loose to start multiplying in the wild. And, not much multiplies like rabbits. Just imagine food crops being decimated (that's roughly 'reduced by 10%' for those who don't know the difference between decimated and devastated) by wild rabbits. A country as poor as n. korea might not have the resources to combat such a plague.
Since communist dictators have been known to use food as a weapon of control, it's possible though that the project may be only to feed the ruling class and not the peasants. In that case, decimation of the peasants food source is probably not that important to the rulers.
I do not like ad hom attacks and consider them to be one of the few methods leftists use to try to stay in the debate. However, the stupidity and ignorance of your post leaves me confounded as where to possibly begin to explain the foolishness of the dellusions you hold concerning economics, society, corporations and everything else mentioned there. If you believe any of that, recognize that you must be a moron who has been utterly deluded and taken as a fool, far worse than someone selling you the brooklyn bridge with free transportation to your new ocean front property in Arizona.
Starting at the beginning, you assume that megacorps require patents. This is not true. The false nature of the statement can be easily shown by noting the fact that there are large corporations which do not require patents at all, nor do they need or have high technology development.
A corporation is a ficticious creation of the state. Around the world there are many types of governments. The ones most ressembling corporations are those socialist workers paradises where the slaves are treated more as problems than as something of value.
In reality, a corporation is merely a piece of paper with writing on it. A large functional corporation is a piece of paper with a myriad of owners, some directly with investment, others, indirectly as part of a retirement plan or of a bundle of stocks (a fund). The investors (with votes equal to the amount of investment or number of shares of stock) select the board of directors who oversee the running of the corporation. They hire the executives or chief executive who is responsible for the operation of the company and pretty much the hiring of everyone else. The board of directors and the chief executive officer may or may not own substantial amounts of stock in the company. It's usually found that those who have a vested interest tend to do a better job of running things than those without.
If you want to create a company - you can - for rather little. Of course, if you desire it to be more than a sheet of paper, you'll need money to operate, either from investors or stockholders or from loans on credit. Even if you're rich and can fund it to some level, going beyond that level requires obtaining more money. If you create the company and decide to give away your products for free, that's up to you. Bear in mind though that you will need lodging, food and probably transportation and all those other things associated with earning money after you've finally left home and ceased being a slug sucking up money from your parents - unless you already inherited the money. To obtain these things you will have to exchange something and all you have is your time to barter - it's called work.
The free market, usually misabled capitalism by those who are clueless is actually human interaction in a society. The alternative is to return to the hunter gatherer mode of existance, one that you are doubtlessly totally unsuited for, except possibly in the role of hunted. Long ago societies were formed to permit a division of labor with specializations which permitted man to advance. Now it even allows you to have a computer. Sorry, but I doubt you'd be able to construct one starting by collecting silicon.
When you mention pyramid schemes, that has a particular meaning. Your missuse of it trying to apply it to something it is not doesn't change its meaning. If you want an example of a pyramid scheme - try looking at social security - it's a classic one. Unless than they are done by the gov. pyramid schemes are illegal and the perps can be prosecuted.
In the US, we live under the derivative of british common law. Corporations, not coperations, don't live under laws other than under the governmental laws of where they operate. The gov. is essentially a corporation which is a monopoly and which enforces its rule by force - the barrel of a gun. Beyond that, governments vary dramatically, from dictatorships to democracies and, in our case, a constitutional l
Patents aren't worth much unless you've got the resources to defend them in court. What they do is give one a legitimate reason to go to court. This concept predates the more modern version of court lawsuits that permit ostensibly poor people to sue ostensibly rich people/companies just because the people/company was in the general area when a wrong was done and well heck - the wrong doer didn't have enough resources to pay the lawyer and make the victim rich.
Patent are necessary to have any standing in court when another company attempts to steal the efforts and ideas of that which you worked and invested in to offer the world. Patents exist ultimately for the benefit of society so that those ideas developed are not kept locked in a vault and protected as trade secrets to be potentially lost for a thousand years like some inventions have been. Note this is about real innovation not variations on a theme of the one minute manager book.
The patent is a temporary monopoly granted its owner by the government (instigator of all true monopolies) to reward the owner for sharing the information with the world rather than keeping it secret. The US patent office has issued only a few million since the founding of the nation.
At present, it needs reform to cater more to the lone inventor than the foreign megacorporation. As I stated, without a patent, there is no protection for an invention in court and there is no way that investors will risk money in startup ventures without the prospect of protection. Just imagine if there were no trade mark protection what you might wind up with at the local store while trying to by an Apple i-pod.
Also, there is no guarantee that a patent applies to something that works or is of value. They're pretty good at kicking out the outrageous stuff like perpetual motion machines and 200mpg carburators for Mack 18 wheelers but beyond that it's rather difficult to analyze. Hey, that $50,000 nonreusable mouse trap might work really well and even avoiding existing product's disadvantages like disposal of the mouse or smells because it instantly incinerates the critter in a phaser blast, but, it's never going to make it in the marketplace.
H-1BS - who needs it. I've encountered illegals doing software development from two countries. Hint, they were on vacation, touring the turing machine so to say.
While there actually may be a real shortage of programmers - definitely a shortage of good programmers in the US- the reason is simply that there is a huge effort to minimize development costs. Much of the time this is false economy, leading to less sells due to inferior software products and less sales and profit due to more expensive and poorer quality hardware products. Going with domestic development doesn't guarantee quality either - look at mickiesoft for an example.
All this BS seems to be oriented towards a desired globalistic society agenda, the mother of all bureaucratic and incompetent oppressive nightmares.
"The fact that we haven't found any artificial signals from space yet doesn't mean there's nobody out there."
And it won't in the future. Scanning earth just over a century ago would have resulted in nothing. And how many years from now will it be before radio and tv are primarily fiber optics or low power highly directed satellite tv/radio beams pointed back to earth? My guess is very few decades will pass before we become a much quieter place in the radio spectrum again. Then again, there may be some mechanism that replaces radio altogether when it comes to off world activities, something that utilzes one or more of the quantum wierdnesses we seem to have observed (or have yet to observe) that could remove the long delays present in long distance EM waves.
Then again, what are the real odds that even if there is highly evolved advanced life out there, that it is even intellegent. It's curious that on this mudball, man is the only species that developed technological intellegence and did it over a very short time, despite being a very young species compared to many, if not most others. Even after being around munching salad and on each other, the dinosaurs failed to develop any intellegence, only bigger claws and bigger teeth.
Hey, the stuff is there. It just depends on how many dollars you're willing to spend for a gallon of water.
Actually, our air conditioner produces a fair amount of h2o.
As for those towers, I'm thinking they're at least twice as tall as any manmade structure ever built. I'd think that costs/efficiency considerations would probably trash the whole plan when compared to plain old wind generation and they're still a bit more expensive than more traditional means despite the absence of paying for fuel.
Economics always controls progress. And, it's the total package, cost of production of the capital equipment, maintenance and longevity of the capital equipment, fuel costs, costs to society (pollution), unintended consequences and time to break even on operation.
Also, considering that short term climate change (not necessarily global) can also affect such things. What might be effective at an average 50% humidity (for h2o extraction) might be unworkable at 45% average humidity.
When an idea is developed by those who are enamoured of the idea rather than by the goal of what was the end result to accomplish can result in a failure of the design evolution to adapt to new information and new conditions (a fatal darwinian flaw in an otherwise intellegent design approach).
That towah' of powah' appears like it might suffer from this problem. It requires building a 3000 ft tall chimney to heat up air with solar energy so it rises and turns a couple of generators when the sun heats up the chimney. That is a lot of structure (hence capital equipment cost) there to extract what is essentially a man-made breeze.
Rather than a new worlds record for a structure, why not take those two generators and put them horizontally out somewhere that is breezy. One could probably do 6 or 8 generators a couple of hundred feet up for the price of two in the tower and probably producing 2 to 4 times the energy - if not 16 times the energy of the chimney. All of a sudden, it's a totally different idea, most likely a far better idea. Best guess is that the windfarm is probably still several percent more expensive - but tax incentives can help bridge the difference.
The one question that should always be asked of such alternative approaches is why hasn't someone else done it already to get rich off of the profit. Even if the answer is as simple as no one else ever thought of it (very unlikely), it still can bring one through the process of anaylizing the hidden costs and technological problems associated with it. Perhaps with some new technology, it can be a viable idea. Then again, perhaps it's BS with inferior capabilities and higher expenses.
For every Einstein, there's a thousand academic slugs, sliming things up, sucking up air and occupying office space. Without sensationalism, they're doomed to a life of pathetic obscurity training more dullards to be as unimaginative as themselves. Bucking orthodoxy is such a sin, that many times it's the outsider who makes the discoveries - sometimes of what should be obvious.
Besides, back in 1975, I don't think we knew the resiliancy of life on this planet much less just how different life could be on others, even if it is of common origin. It seems very likely now that life may suffer from the not invented here syndrome. It's entirely possible our fungus is related to martian fungus. They may be cousins, 10^21 times removed.
If they discover life that is closely related to earth life - then there is severe problems with the decision of whether it's martian life or viking contamination. Actually, some scientists will try to get rich and famous supporting that it is and some scientists will try to get rich and famous supporting that it's contamination. Such is the nature of science.
Perhaps mars can be made more habitable for man and current life forms - especially as the sun heats up more and more, making earth less habitable.
Ultimately, we might wind up in the outskirts of the solar system (assuming we last that long) which is perhaps where life began, assuming it started within our solar system.
Nice in theory but.... First off, my father in law came through Ellis Island when it was operational as a legal immigrant. He came to America for freedom and opportunity and contributed to the country for the rest of his life. I live and have always lived fairly close to the southern border and am fairly cognizent of what is going on and it's a travesty.
Once, there were programs for migrant workers to come work here. However, some companies (those with political connections) wanted cheaper labor, the type that can only be acquired by exploiting illegals. These are the operations which will never be targeted like Swift was because they are connected. This may be some of the reasons why the guest worker programs were cancelled and they didn't necessarily offer sufficient advantage over domestic workers.
There is no typical illegal. Some are here to work and intend on returning home. Some are here to work and live and participate in the american dream. Some are here only to sign up for free giveaways via identity theft and laxness. Some are here for crime. There are thousands of MS13 gang members from central america now in the US. Some are even here for the reconquistador movement to steal the american west. Yet others are terrorists and infiltrators.
Most of the illegals are poorly educated and poorly trained. Many are capable of doing skilled manual labor such as in the construction industry - and oftimes make significantly above minimum wage (although not quite at the former wage scale for the type of work they do) which totally negates some of the arguments about only filling jobs that americans won't do - even at the going price. Much of the rest (as shown by Swift) seems to be more a matter of an attempt at wage suppression. Of course, once one company competes with very cheap labor, their competition has to do something to remain competitive lest they become a new wholly owned subsidiary of that first company.
Also, people seem benefit some from slightly cheaper housing costs (the difference between the additional profit taken and the reduced labor expenses). But that can rectified by the added expenses in taxes needed to educate the kids of the illegals and no one pays sufficient taxes to cover their own kid's public school expenses during the time they are in school. By the time one has to go to the hospital for a week, that savings in construction costs is long gone due to the cost shifting. By the time one pays their 80/20 20% of the bill, they've probably paid what the medical care should have cost in the first place and the insurance premiums - well that was just part of the costs.
One problem with illegals is we don't know who they are or what diseases they are carrying and some are definitely sick. Some are bringing in diseases like TB that we eradicated in this country to the extent that most people now never even had a vaccination for it. Some of the new TB brought in is even drug resistant and those bringing it in are too ignorant to know how to keep down its spread or just how sick they might be.
Also, with 20 million illegals, even 1% being undesirables (criminals, loafers looking for handouts, infectious) amounts to 200,000 people. In general, there are higher percentages than just 1%.
As for the educated innovators, they have not been preferred by the system to the extent they probably should be. After all, we have far more domestic illiterates running around loose than most industrialized nations already.
The biggest problems with domestic engineers and scientists has been the draw of more lucrative incomes for other disciplines siphoning off the best and brightest into things like medicine or worst of all, lawyers and politicians. Heck, even accountants tend to make more than engineers. As such, we have always drawn these people from elsewhere. Note that the very best tend to come from all over but are a tiny tiny fraction of the populace. Einstein was one of many of that era even though he was the most noted. In t
Curious that the scientific society would be making political statements. The key to that one's credibility is that they imputed a motive to exxon ($$$) as a reason for doing what they're doing. While one might assume that to be the case, it is not a fact in evidence and it calls into question the rest of the statement (specifically the reference to perverting science rather than funding science). Attributing the motive is perverting science because there are other alternatives - such as the desire of a corporation to be a good citizen - hence - it is not a foregone conclusion that this money was spent only to make more money.
Also, science is never a perversion unless it isn't science. Just because one study disagrees with another doesn't mean there's been a perversion of science. In fact, it's normal. Actually, there really isn't much of anything that remains rock solid and unchallenged for any really long period of time. While things may not change, our perceptions of them are forever changing. What's worse, usually the answering of a question raises several new questions.
There are perversions of science going on - usually associated with political agendas (and global warming advocacy has a big political agenda associated with it). These perversions can even include deliberate use of fraudulent data. Reasons can range from political idealism on the societal scale to mere personal greed for more grants or fame & fortune (or petty politics (or even competition) on the competitive scientific/academic scale). It's the facts of life and they do pervert and distort science and research.
It's not just greenies. My favorite is the expose' done by the cato institute years ago following the money trail for the ozone hole scam. It seems that dupont's patent on freon was expiring and they had no better alternative to offer (the replacement being corrosive, carcenogenic and having poorer carnot cycle performance qualities than the original) so they invested millions - pardon me - donated millions - to the ozone hole disaster parrots and managed to get the old freon shut down in the US, replaced by their inferior new stuff (with new patents).
The greenie environmental industry has to be one of the highest profit ones in existance. They provide neither service nor product, require few paid employees and get to control and manipulate millions. Note I'm assuming the trial lawyers are part of the industry rather than actually being the customers when I say provides no service.
Fossil fuels are called that because they are created by living things. It's an ongoing process so on some time scale, they are renewable. Also, it means that the carbon in fossil fuels came from CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place and burning them merely restores the CO2.
As for alternative fuels, those which have economic advantage tend to be used.
Note that the latest discovery in global warming is that cows emit methane to the extent that this contribution to green house gases exceeds that of co2 emissions in transportation or so we are now being told. Golly gee by golly, there's a new major factor that was missing from the climate simulation games right there - and probably still is missing. Believe it or not, there are low tech. applications of extracting and burning this methane which have been in use for years - providing cooking gas. Allowing methane to escape into the atmosphere without burning it and making co2 has far more serious consequences for greenhouse gas effects.
Without history and context, you are totally lost.
Until you can recognize blatant media bias by comparison with what was being done during prior administrations and what is going on now, then you will continue to have no clue.
I have no intention of presenting any facts on that as you've been trained - whether you know it or not - to discount them. What can break the hold is when you finally get two contradictory facts that you actually believe in - in your head at the same time - creating a bit of a cognitive dissonance. If you don't immediately sluff off one of them - the realization could be terrifying. Note that for leftist 'facts' there's plenty of erroneous ones to choose from. Offhand, it looks like your diebold exec quote might be one although it's probably not a suitable one to achieve that cognitive dissonance.
I leave it to you to go research the nature of reality. However, you're nowhere close to it at present and your trusted sources shouldn't be. Just a reccomendation - look for the media bias - when you see it big as life - you've started.
Well, I think it's more that a president of questionable legitimacy secured an unhealthy stranglehold over all three branches of government, then used this lack of opposition to take the country on a war of invasion against someone who posed no threat to the country, for since-provably trumped-up charges.
Bush won the election despite massive opposition efforts to sabotage the win, including election fraud, attempts to keep overseas military from voting and to contest the election. It's the height of stupidity to think that republicans were the ones screwing up the votes in those democrat controlled counties.
As for bush's reasons, it was the democrats who hyped the WMD reasons. The invaision was justified primarily by failure to comply with the UN directives and didn't need a WMD excuse. However, since sadam had been providing 'rewards' for the families of suicide bombers for years and had attempted dialog with al queda and others, it's obvious there were growing ties.
Attempting to take over the middle east oil reserves obviously posed no threat to the US or the civilized world. Neither did sadam's first attempt at a nuclear weapon. We can presume his super canon designed by Dr. Bull was merely for show and that his biowarfare program was targeted only at Semites.
IF the bush administration were anything like you assume it is, they would have found plenty of WMDs, even if they had to be imported.
No, in the 18 months of bush's rush to war, there was plenty of time for sadam to hide, destroy or move his arsenal. As for bioweapons, he could have had a suitcase containing all research details along with seed stock and even enough to unleash some serious plagues.
As for the prowess of the bush administration to handle things with the media, they have been one of the most incompetent that I can remember seeing. As for the press fawning all over them, that's total BS and any press conference in the last 6 years proves it.
THe media's power isn't so much the ability to hide the truth but rather to obfuscate it and more importantly to categorize its importance. Reporting an important story once and spending weeks hyping something irrelevent places an importance to both. The fact that it works so well is evident in your posts.
After all, those cheese eating surrender monkies might have been doing a preemptive surrender strike.
Well, at least thermonuclear weapons are pretty good at sterilizing large areas.
Unfortunately, whether or not man develops biowarfare agents, we'll still most likely lose the battle with the bug. Already our minor 20th century victories are leading to our reduced natural fighting abilities and have contributed to strengthening those of the 'bugs'. However, those promoting biowarfare development appear to be traitors to the human race and should be dealt with like their allies.
The x86 architecture has its roots all the way back to the 8008 and 8080 8 bit processors. Speed wise, the 8088 (ibm's choice for their pc) was inferior to existing 8 bit processors at the time. There were some beautiful architectures out there when the 8088 was new. DEC's pdp11 was one of the nicest while TI's 9900 was really nice as well - although very flawed (and subsequently very limited) in fundamental concept.
The x86 architecture did offer massive amounts of memory addressing and some potentially useful OS feature support. Later, the battle between CISC and RISC heated up with the x86 being slightly on the CISC side of the beam scale. As silicon processing became more effective, the RISC concept started to win out. Since the x86 was barely on the CISC side of the balance, it didn't suffer much from this loss and was able to benefit significantly from improved processing.
At the same time, programming was migrating heavily towards intermediate to higher level languages and away from assembly. Attempts at creating software based virtual machine languages suffered from speed problems relative to 'going native' and essentially never became predominant.
Ultimately, compatibility is probably the biggest culprit in keeping the x86 around. That and intels ability to keep the x86 speed up to the level where another better and faster competing architecture cannot simulate the x86 machine code at a faster pace.
There are losses of compatibility in hardware and software going on regularly. Adding enhancements that change the nature of the x86 occur as well. However, compatibility with other than intel products means that most get ignored. Assembly language is virtually insignificant for almost all now so architectures don't matter to the end user and hardly matter for most developers.
The basic x86 architeture is rather simple (but not RISC) so it's not that challenging to make good use of it in compilers and development tools, the area where architetures still matters.
All in all, it's a cruddy architeture but it exists and has a massive developer base. I expect it to evolve and adapt, even as demands and requirements change. There are limits where one central processing unit approaches will run out of ooomph. Perhaps we will be beyond the x86 architecture approach with the advent of parallelism or whatever replaces it.
If there is a legitimate reason, it's to get ballots counted as fast and accurately as possible. Remember, this is politicos, bureaucrats and government employees involved so THINKING is oftimes NOT even an option. Hence, there is no such thing as thinking outside of the box. Add in lots of attention and goodies from lobbyiests and in the case of some, a desire to make the public happy - and there were many unhappy people over the florida debacle that was so hyped in the media and you have the opportunity to spend lots of money - what more could these people want?
Most mass voting fraud is associated with voting machines as they are the easiest to tamper with. The simpler the machine, the harder it is to tamper with. Those dimpled chads in FL, at least those associated with votes, were generally caused by stuffing several ballots in the machine at once due to the shortage of time available for such activities. Tampering with simpler paper ballots is even more difficult and time consuming. That even requires the culprits to show up at the courthouse after everyone else is gone so they can manipulate ballots and records. While enough to swing a close statewide election, it's rather difficult to do so. LBJ's first senate bid required creating a whole new ballot box, ballot box 13 in duval county TX to pull off.
Of course voting fraud isn't limited to officials. THere are many who go vote multiple times by claiming to be their friends, acquaintances, relatives and neighbors. It's rather common place and can be found almost anywhere one decides to look.
Maybe there's still a chance for a new company in the voting machine market, especially one with the name Assured Outcomes.
I prefer my #2 pencil and paper ballot because I can at least tell the votes were correctly entered and it made it into the mass storage (box). Also, I expect that this system is less capable of large fraud than just about any other.
First off, you assume I like bush and am a republican. In fact, neither is the case. I swallowed nothing hook line and sensor because my views are based on my own observations. The fact that the opposition party has chosen to play politics with a war violates the historical situation which dictated that domestic politics ended at the waters edge. I grew tired long ago of the brainless bush bashers parroting the bs from leftists in the mainstream media. Bush has severe problems though probably not as much widespread as carter or clinton or bush 1 for that matter but very bad never the less.
Wilson misrepresented what he saw in an effort to get in on the opposition party's next presidential campaign. What's more, I'm not sure if he ever even formally reported anything back to the administration.
What happened to the yellow cake sadam had? Some was shown live early in the iraq war. It was being dumped in the sand because looters were stealing the barrels it was in. I don't know why I've never seen that fretting reporter all worried about the people stealing those barrel in any repeats or best of programming. That doesn't mean it came from Niger but we do know that sadam was attempting for a second time to develop a bomb - Pollard is still in the clink for releasing the information that allowed the Israelis to bomb the hell out of the first effort years ago.
There's usually a practical solution for many an impractical problem.
Besides, we are so far from understanding wants, a programmer would have to use a random number generator as the basis for that attribute. Just ask yourself what you really want as opposed to what you think you want.
About the only way we'd get to that level is by inserting the consciousness (copy) of people into robots. That could be a mess. Otherwise, it's probably going to be too complex for some whacko anarchist to create the 'wwant' virus and to add it at the factory would be far too expensive to consider, as well as being detrimental to the end product.
I do think there will be robot-rights kooks out there talking to their pet video game and demanding rights for it. Unfortunately, it's possible that the simple criteria of extending rights only to those capable of recognizing and abiding by the equivalent rights of others might not be capable of being used.
Animals cannot have rights because they cannot recognize and respect the rights of others. A robot could probably be created to exceed this limitation. Hence prevention is the ounce that saves hundreds of tons of cure.
While I agree with much of what you wrote and consider the holy-wood hs dropouts to be the least competent people in society to present anything of importance or consequence to society. After all, their true expertise is pretending to be other people.
I don't agree with your notion of scientists as spokespeople either. By the very nature of things, scientists are highly focused in their area(s) of expertise, oftimes to the exclusion of many or most of life's distractions. While there is usually a very limited area in which they know the fundamentals to the point of not having to take anything on faith, that doesn't extend very far and, like the rest of society, at that point they must take things on faith as provided by others.
Since there are many factors and facets involved in the complexities of societies, problems tend to involve multiple disciplines and this sort of stuff doesn't really lend itself to specialization, much less extreme specialization.
Something as simple as raising the minimum wage - which will probably occur within the next 2 months has ramifications beyond what anyone can fully quantify. The net result is a distortion of the market where those people it purportedly intends to help will in fact be those who are hurt the worst. It does provide a nice payoff for the political activities of the unions who will benefit from an undeserved pay raise due to their contracts. However, the rest of us will suffer double because our pay will not be increased and there will be inflation since there was an increase in costs without an increase in productivity. Since most minimum wage earners are members of households with significantly higher standards of living, those who can still get a job will make a bit more. Those in most need are the ones who are not yet productive enough to make more income and another bottom rung of the ladder will be sawed off, condemning some of them to unemployment and welfare - which along with reward for the unions is the real agenda of those pushing for higher minimum wage.
Net result for analysis of problems without including the full scope of the problem can lead to erroneous conclusions. Of course the scientist will offer far more input to the analysis of a problem than will a thug felon rap star but sometimes simple straight forward approaches can elude the most enlightened while appear obvious to the virtually oblivious. More than one computer based system has been brought down by someone randomly banging on the keyboard after testing was concluded by the programmers and pronouned to be solid as a rock.
Personally, I think it's the business of a private business as to whether they have cameras or not. For the gov. to blanket the place with cameras doesn't give me any warm and fuzzy feelings nor does the notion that my killer will possibly be caught because big brother was watching my murder. Also, the state of video and photo imaging technology is such that it can be faked rather well already. Instead, I would prefer the ability to deter the would be killer preferably in a very hostile and permanent fashion so as to eliminate the risk to others and to help reduce expenses in the law enforcement and judicial areas.
Anyone who thinks capitalism is evil should work for free and give away all their posessions - including their clothes. It's hunter gatherer time! Oops, can't hunt, don't wanna hurt the poor lil animals. Any Veggie Rights activists out there?
I'm going to have to go look at wally world's lightbulb offerings. About 1/3 of our light fixtures that we use regularly are CFL but they were purchased from the big home improvement store. I find the CFLs to be somewhat dimmer and sometimes a bit disturbing on the color temperature. However, in the three years or four since we started using them, I haven't had to replace any and they seem to run on about 50-60% less power than incandescents (for about the same amount of lighting).
I guess kudos for wally world for offering another product at a good price. As for any of you envirowhacko global warming promoting government worshippers, if you waited to change to CFLs until their price dropped, SHAME on you.
Companies offer to sell that which is desired to be purchased. Some take the opportunity to hype and offer features that appeal to their potential customers - like 'environmentally friendly' - whether it really is or not. It's called product differentiation and helps keep it from becoming an almost profitless commodity - like gasoline - where the gov. gets 4 to 5 times the profit that the company taking the risks to provide it gets. For those wonderful politicians pushing for more taxes on the oil companies now, either they are too stupid and ignorant to be good leaders or they are too corrupt and evil to be good leaders. In either case, they're trying to screw you and me.
Re:Aliens, ghosts, and gods never leave evidence .
on
UFOs In the News
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Aliens are more a proof of some people's need for a god than anything else. To assume God needs magic merely points out the failure of conceptualism to realize that God is not a part of the universe but rather the author of its rules. As for magic, it has its place - mostly in quantum theory these days along with the elves, smoke and mirrors. Hey, what could be more magical than a synthetic material where light is measured leaving the right edge as it enters the left edge and a pulse is detected going backwards left to right?
UFOs are often associated with physical phenomenon, sometimes that which is ill understood or perhaps not even known. Probably most often it's associated with phenomenon that is well known - except to the observer.
It took years of 'hassle' for some of these unknowns to ever be investigated. These 'discoveries' include ball lightning, sprites and jets - all storm phenomenon that officially exists and is being studied. As it turns out, sprites and jets were far more observed and common than first believed since many professionals (pilots) didn't report them.
Hopefully some of the myriad of french reports of venus in the early morning and the moon behind a cloud bank might yield yet something else in the way of unusual things although with the prevelence of too much wine, indigestion from cheese and offactory fatigue from BO, the reports might be more about lit cigarettes and distant car headlights.
As for ET, Frank Drake's equation was created in a time when astronomy was the study of a rather static universe, at least relative to the life time of the ones studying it. Solar flares were merely little glitches on the sun's surface and coronal mass ejections were not well understood. Gamma ray bursts were things that happened every now and then because the vela satellites picked up something that wasn't a nuclear explosion, either inside or outside of our galaxy, but probably inside. Supernovae were one time events by certain sized stars which had little effect beyond the local area. Times have changed.
While it seems plausible that the universe is teaming with life, it's within the realm of comprehension that we might actually be just about the only ones around capable of realizing that we're alive. It's turning out that the universe is very good at sterilizing rather large areas on a fairly regular basis and that probably doesn't include any of the causes which has precipitated mass extinctions several times here on earth.
If we are to avoid extinction, we will have to defend earth against asteroids and comets and we will have to eventually move out from the sun because earth is eventually going to suffer the mother of all global warming events, one where it evaporates totally as its enveloped by an aging sun. Long before then, there will be many global warming events cooking off the oceans and baking whats left because the sun will gradually heat up as it ages.
Mr Spock is most likely to be a small blob of fungus.
The good news is that man's technology at worst is a tertiary effect in global warming while primary effects are not well understood and there are probably quite a number of even undiscovered secondary effects. It's only just come out that bovine flatulence contributes more gh gases than does man's transportation system. Of course man and bovine are far more insignificant in the arena of biomasses than are bacteria, insects, even termites. What that means is that instantly totally eradicating cattle and man from the face of the earth is not going to change the fact that the earth will get warmer and cooler in exactly the same fashion as it would have if man never existed. If man actually has an effect on the planet, it will be more to delay (or speed up) such climatactic events by minutes or days rather than delaying or speeding them up by years.
Of course, eventually, the earth will be totally evaporated by the sun as it heats up in the future. Hopefully, it won't produce any of thosse solar flares as observed elsewhere in the galaxy - like the one that was aboutg 100 million times the typical size of what we experience. Global warming or cooling becomes a moot point almost instantly in that circumstance - sorta like an asteroid the size of mars crashing into the earth at a 130,000 feet per second (like what appears to have happened around 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago when the moon was formed out of some of the debris).
Here's hoping the resources and technology are available to detect and deflect the next asteroid bigger than a football stadium with enough time (years) for the deflection effort to work.
The good news is that adult stem cell research seems to be producing results. The bad news is that apparently the only thing embryonic stems cells offer is to create more cancers.
Slashdot Mirror
Too boney and tough I guess.
It seems far more people starve to death rather than go in for direct canibalism and there are few notable exceptions.
As for the younger generation here, I sometimes wonder if the libs screwed up the food supply, whether they'd wind up on the menu. I use the word 'if' because it's not a foregone conclusion that they will succeed. Of course if they do, people will eventually starve and/or resort to canibalism.
While I find your comments on the fuel cells to be on the money, you miss the point on the h2.
H2 can be acquired one of two ways. First, invest lots of energy into dissassociating h2o where the h2 is merely an energy storage means. The other is to 'crack' hydrocarbons to get it from. This second method is a source of energy, not just a storage means. There has been some work on making small 'crackers' in order to use transported hydrocarbons. I'm not sure if these small units have to use methane or if they could use gasoline - but with one that can use gasoline, there is no new massive infrastructure with this. The ultimate goal would be - fill up with regular, crack it, run the fuel cell. I'm not sure how good the efficiency could get but I think the air pollution would be reduced to just about nothing.
The tie-in you were seeking to the oil industry is here which benefits by continued production of energy and by its distribution. Note that this is actually not a bad thing because for the most part, these are good efficient companies. Also note that gallon of gas you use has about 8-12 cents profit to the oil company, about 40 cents taxes and the rest is costs that pay for an entire industry (not just a half dozen oil companies).
I saw a photo of a suit-case fuel cell, enough to run a small communications station as long as there was available hydrogen. It supposedly lasted for 5 years before needing replacement - at only about$5-$8 thousand dollars. It would seem that something only 10-20 times this might be able to run a small vehicle - assuming a 'cracking' unit can be made small enough. Gee, that's only about $50k to $100k for a fuel cell replacement and maybe only every 8 years or so.
My favorite was the california mandate that 10% of vehicles sold were to be electric - back just before it was discovered that there was already a serious shortage of electric power in the state. I guess the those new cars were supposed to suck electricity out of the air.
Now I'm awaiting the new standards from the EPA that demand my lawnmower exhaust be cleaner than the incoming air - already devoid of manmade pollution. That almost happened in the houston TX area. It seems about 10 yrs ago that the EPA was demanding ozone limits which were less than that which naturally occurred in the region. Unfortunately for the EPA, they were so restrictive that total evacuations of all human beings and the removal of all human activities from the area would not have resulted in the achievement of the mandate - so the EPA had to revise them to something more reasonable.
Possible correction of headline.
It will likely turn out to be
Giant Rabbits to Feed ON North Korea
While genetic technology has vastly come around since that grade F scifi movie Night of The Lepas, where 50 ft tall carnivorous rabbits got loose eating people, cattle and everything else in its path, I doubt what occurs will be eating north koreans. However, early great experiments with introducing non native critters (and sometimes plants) has been fraught with disasters.
If there are no natural predators for 30 + pound rabbits in N. korea, it might be only a matter of time before enough get loose to start multiplying in the wild. And, not much multiplies like rabbits. Just imagine food crops being decimated (that's roughly 'reduced by 10%' for those who don't know the difference between decimated and devastated) by wild rabbits. A country as poor as n. korea might not have the resources to combat such a plague.
Since communist dictators have been known to use food as a weapon of control, it's possible though that the project may be only to feed the ruling class and not the peasants. In that case, decimation of the peasants food source is probably not that important to the rulers.
I do not like ad hom attacks and consider them to be one of the few methods leftists use to try to stay in the debate. However, the stupidity and ignorance of your post leaves me confounded as where to possibly begin to explain the foolishness of the dellusions you hold concerning economics, society, corporations and everything else mentioned there. If you believe any of that, recognize that you must be a moron who has been utterly deluded and taken as a fool, far worse than someone selling you the brooklyn bridge with free transportation to your new ocean front property in Arizona.
Starting at the beginning, you assume that megacorps require patents. This is not true. The false nature of the statement can be easily shown by noting the fact that there are large corporations which do not require patents at all, nor do they need or have high technology development.
A corporation is a ficticious creation of the state. Around the world there are many types of governments. The ones most ressembling corporations are those socialist workers paradises where the slaves are treated more as problems than as something of value.
In reality, a corporation is merely a piece of paper with writing on it. A large functional corporation is a piece of paper with a myriad of owners, some directly with investment, others, indirectly as part of a retirement plan or of a bundle of stocks (a fund). The investors (with votes equal to the amount of investment or number of shares of stock) select the board of directors who oversee the running of the corporation. They hire the executives or chief executive who is responsible for the operation of the company and pretty much the hiring of everyone else. The board of directors and the chief executive officer may or may not own substantial amounts of stock in the company. It's usually found that those who have a vested interest tend to do a better job of running things than those without.
If you want to create a company - you can - for rather little. Of course, if you desire it to be more than a sheet of paper, you'll need money to operate, either from investors or stockholders or from loans on credit. Even if you're rich and can fund it to some level, going beyond that level requires obtaining more money. If you create the company and decide to give away your products for free, that's up to you. Bear in mind though that you will need lodging, food and probably transportation and all those other things associated with earning money after you've finally left home and ceased being a slug sucking up money from your parents - unless you already inherited the money. To obtain these things you will have to exchange something and all you have is your time to barter - it's called work.
The free market, usually misabled capitalism by those who are clueless is actually human interaction in a society. The alternative is to return to the hunter gatherer mode of existance, one that you are doubtlessly totally unsuited for, except possibly in the role of hunted. Long ago societies were formed to permit a division of labor with specializations which permitted man to advance. Now it even allows you to have a computer. Sorry, but I doubt you'd be able to construct one starting by collecting silicon.
When you mention pyramid schemes, that has a particular meaning. Your missuse of it trying to apply it to something it is not doesn't change its meaning. If you want an example of a pyramid scheme - try looking at social security - it's a classic one. Unless than they are done by the gov. pyramid schemes are illegal and the perps can be prosecuted.
In the US, we live under the derivative of british common law. Corporations, not coperations, don't live under laws other than under the governmental laws of where they operate. The gov. is essentially a corporation which is a monopoly and which enforces its rule by force - the barrel of a gun. Beyond that, governments vary dramatically, from dictatorships to democracies and, in our case, a constitutional l
Patents aren't worth much unless you've got the resources to defend them in court. What they do is give one a legitimate reason to go to court. This concept predates the more modern version of court lawsuits that permit ostensibly poor people to sue ostensibly rich people/companies just because the people/company was in the general area when a wrong was done and well heck - the wrong doer didn't have enough resources to pay the lawyer and make the victim rich.
Patent are necessary to have any standing in court when another company attempts to steal the efforts and ideas of that which you worked and invested in to offer the world. Patents exist ultimately for the benefit of society so that those ideas developed are not kept locked in a vault and protected as trade secrets to be potentially lost for a thousand years like some inventions have been. Note this is about real innovation not variations on a theme of the one minute manager book.
The patent is a temporary monopoly granted its owner by the government (instigator of all true monopolies) to reward the owner for sharing the information with the world rather than keeping it secret. The US patent office has issued only a few million since the founding of the nation.
At present, it needs reform to cater more to the lone inventor than the foreign megacorporation. As I stated, without a patent, there is no protection for an invention in court and there is no way that investors will risk money in startup ventures without the prospect of protection. Just imagine if there were no trade mark protection what you might wind up with at the local store while trying to by an Apple i-pod.
Also, there is no guarantee that a patent applies to something that works or is of value. They're pretty good at kicking out the outrageous stuff like perpetual motion machines and 200mpg carburators for Mack 18 wheelers but beyond that it's rather difficult to analyze. Hey, that $50,000 nonreusable mouse trap might work really well and even avoiding existing product's disadvantages like disposal of the mouse or smells because it instantly incinerates the critter in a phaser blast, but, it's never going to make it in the marketplace.
H-1BS - who needs it. I've encountered illegals doing software development from two countries. Hint, they were on vacation, touring the turing machine so to say.
While there actually may be a real shortage of programmers - definitely a shortage of good programmers in the US- the reason is simply that there is a huge effort to minimize development costs. Much of the time this is false economy, leading to less sells due to inferior software products and less sales and profit due to more expensive and poorer quality hardware products. Going with domestic development doesn't guarantee quality either - look at mickiesoft for an example.
All this BS seems to be oriented towards a desired globalistic society agenda, the mother of all bureaucratic and incompetent oppressive nightmares.
"The fact that we haven't found any artificial signals from space yet doesn't mean there's nobody out there."
And it won't in the future. Scanning earth just over a century ago would have resulted in nothing. And how many years from now will it be before radio and tv are primarily fiber optics or low power highly directed satellite tv/radio beams pointed back to earth? My guess is very few decades will pass before we become a much quieter place in the radio spectrum again. Then again, there may be some mechanism that replaces radio altogether when it comes to off world activities, something that utilzes one or more of the quantum wierdnesses we seem to have observed (or have yet to observe) that could remove the long delays present in long distance EM waves.
Then again, what are the real odds that even if there is highly evolved advanced life out there, that it is even intellegent. It's curious that on this mudball, man is the only species that developed technological intellegence and did it over a very short time, despite being a very young species compared to many, if not most others. Even after being around munching salad and on each other, the dinosaurs failed to develop any intellegence, only bigger claws and bigger teeth.
Hey, the stuff is there. It just depends on how many dollars you're willing to spend for a gallon of water.
Actually, our air conditioner produces a fair amount of h2o.
As for those towers, I'm thinking they're at least twice as tall as any manmade structure ever built. I'd think that costs/efficiency considerations would probably trash the whole plan when compared to plain old wind generation and they're still a bit more expensive than more traditional means despite the absence of paying for fuel.
Economics always controls progress. And, it's the total package, cost of production of the capital equipment, maintenance and longevity of the capital equipment, fuel costs, costs to society (pollution), unintended consequences and time to break even on operation.
Also, considering that short term climate change (not necessarily global) can also affect such things. What might be effective at an average 50% humidity (for h2o extraction) might be unworkable at 45% average humidity.
When an idea is developed by those who are enamoured of the idea rather than by the goal of what was the end result to accomplish can result in a failure of the design evolution to adapt to new information and new conditions (a fatal darwinian flaw in an otherwise intellegent design approach).
That towah' of powah' appears like it might suffer from this problem. It requires building a 3000 ft tall chimney to heat up air with solar energy so it rises and turns a couple of generators when the sun heats up the chimney. That is a lot of structure (hence capital equipment cost) there to extract what is essentially a man-made breeze.
Rather than a new worlds record for a structure, why not take those two generators and put them horizontally out somewhere that is breezy. One could probably do 6 or 8 generators a couple of hundred feet up for the price of two in the tower and probably producing 2 to 4 times the energy - if not 16 times the energy of the chimney. All of a sudden, it's a totally different idea, most likely a far better idea. Best guess is that the windfarm is probably still several percent more expensive - but tax incentives can help bridge the difference.
The one question that should always be asked of such alternative approaches is why hasn't someone else done it already to get rich off of the profit. Even if the answer is as simple as no one else ever thought of it (very unlikely), it still can bring one through the process of anaylizing the hidden costs and technological problems associated with it. Perhaps with some new technology, it can be a viable idea. Then again, perhaps it's BS with inferior capabilities and higher expenses.
For every Einstein, there's a thousand academic slugs, sliming things up, sucking up air and occupying office space. Without sensationalism, they're doomed to a life of pathetic obscurity training more dullards to be as unimaginative as themselves. Bucking orthodoxy is such a sin, that many times it's the outsider who makes the discoveries - sometimes of what should be obvious.
Besides, back in 1975, I don't think we knew the resiliancy of life on this planet much less just how different life could be on others, even if it is of common origin. It seems very likely now that life may suffer from the not invented here syndrome. It's entirely possible our fungus is related to martian fungus. They may be cousins, 10^21 times removed.
If they discover life that is closely related to earth life - then there is severe problems with the decision of whether it's martian life or viking contamination. Actually, some scientists will try to get rich and famous supporting that it is and some scientists will try to get rich and famous supporting that it's contamination. Such is the nature of science.
Perhaps mars can be made more habitable for man and current life forms - especially as the sun heats up more and more, making earth less habitable.
Ultimately, we might wind up in the outskirts of the solar system (assuming we last that long) which is perhaps where life began, assuming it started within our solar system.
Nice in theory but.... First off, my father in law came through Ellis Island when it was operational as a legal immigrant. He came to America for freedom and opportunity and contributed to the country for the rest of his life. I live and have always lived fairly close to the southern border and am fairly cognizent of what is going on and it's a travesty.
Once, there were programs for migrant workers to come work here. However, some companies (those with political connections) wanted cheaper labor, the type that can only be acquired by exploiting illegals. These are the operations which will never be targeted like Swift was because they are connected. This may be some of the reasons why the guest worker programs were cancelled and they didn't necessarily offer sufficient advantage over domestic workers.
There is no typical illegal. Some are here to work and intend on returning home. Some are here to work and live and participate in the american dream. Some are here only to sign up for free giveaways via identity theft and laxness. Some are here for crime. There are thousands of MS13 gang members from central america now in the US. Some are even here for the reconquistador movement to steal the american west. Yet others are terrorists and infiltrators.
Most of the illegals are poorly educated and poorly trained. Many are capable of doing skilled manual labor such as in the construction industry - and oftimes make significantly above minimum wage (although not quite at the former wage scale for the type of work they do) which totally negates some of the arguments about only filling jobs that americans won't do - even at the going price. Much of the rest (as shown by Swift) seems to be more a matter of an attempt at wage suppression. Of course, once one company competes with very cheap labor, their competition has to do something to remain competitive lest they become a new wholly owned subsidiary of that first company.
Also, people seem benefit some from slightly cheaper housing costs (the difference between the additional profit taken and the reduced labor expenses). But that can rectified by the added expenses in taxes needed to educate the kids of the illegals and no one pays sufficient taxes to cover their own kid's public school expenses during the time they are in school. By the time one has to go to the hospital for a week, that savings in construction costs is long gone due to the cost shifting. By the time one pays their 80/20 20% of the bill, they've probably paid what the medical care should have cost in the first place and the insurance premiums - well that was just part of the costs.
One problem with illegals is we don't know who they are or what diseases they are carrying and some are definitely sick. Some are bringing in diseases like TB that we eradicated in this country to the extent that most people now never even had a vaccination for it. Some of the new TB brought in is even drug resistant and those bringing it in are too ignorant to know how to keep down its spread or just how sick they might be.
Also, with 20 million illegals, even 1% being undesirables (criminals, loafers looking for handouts, infectious) amounts to 200,000 people. In general, there are higher percentages than just 1%.
As for the educated innovators, they have not been preferred by the system to the extent they probably should be. After all, we have far more domestic illiterates running around loose than most industrialized nations already.
The biggest problems with domestic engineers and scientists has been the draw of more lucrative incomes for other disciplines siphoning off the best and brightest into things like medicine or worst of all, lawyers and politicians. Heck, even accountants tend to make more than engineers. As such, we have always drawn these people from elsewhere. Note that the very best tend to come from all over but are a tiny tiny fraction of the populace. Einstein was one of many of that era even though he was the most noted. In t
Curious that the scientific society would be making political statements. The key to that one's credibility is that they imputed a motive to exxon ($$$) as a reason for doing what they're doing. While one might assume that to be the case, it is not a fact in evidence and it calls into question the rest of the statement (specifically the reference to perverting science rather than funding science). Attributing the motive is perverting science because there are other alternatives - such as the desire of a corporation to be a good citizen - hence - it is not a foregone conclusion that this money was spent only to make more money.
Also, science is never a perversion unless it isn't science. Just because one study disagrees with another doesn't mean there's been a perversion of science. In fact, it's normal. Actually, there really isn't much of anything that remains rock solid and unchallenged for any really long period of time. While things may not change, our perceptions of them are forever changing. What's worse, usually the answering of a question raises several new questions.
There are perversions of science going on - usually associated with political agendas (and global warming advocacy has a big political agenda associated with it). These perversions can even include deliberate use of fraudulent data. Reasons can range from political idealism on the societal scale to mere personal greed for more grants or fame & fortune (or petty politics (or even competition) on the competitive scientific/academic scale). It's the facts of life and they do pervert and distort science and research.
It's not just greenies. My favorite is the expose' done by the cato institute years ago following the money trail for the ozone hole scam. It seems that dupont's patent on freon was expiring and they had no better alternative to offer (the replacement being corrosive, carcenogenic and having poorer carnot cycle performance qualities than the original) so they invested millions - pardon me - donated millions - to the ozone hole disaster parrots and managed to get the old freon shut down in the US, replaced by their inferior new stuff (with new patents).
The greenie environmental industry has to be one of the highest profit ones in existance. They provide neither service nor product, require few paid employees and get to control and manipulate millions. Note I'm assuming the trial lawyers are part of the industry rather than actually being the customers when I say provides no service.
Fossil fuels are called that because they are created by living things. It's an ongoing process so on some time scale, they are renewable. Also, it means that the carbon in fossil fuels came from CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place and burning them merely restores the CO2.
As for alternative fuels, those which have economic advantage tend to be used.
Note that the latest discovery in global warming is that cows emit methane to the extent that this contribution to green house gases exceeds that of co2 emissions in transportation or so we are now being told. Golly gee by golly, there's a new major factor that was missing from the climate simulation games right there - and probably still is missing. Believe it or not, there are low tech. applications of extracting and burning this methane which have been in use for years - providing cooking gas. Allowing methane to escape into the atmosphere without burning it and making co2 has far more serious consequences for greenhouse gas effects.
Without history and context, you are totally lost.
Until you can recognize blatant media bias by comparison with what was being done during prior administrations and what is going on now, then you will continue to have no clue.
I have no intention of presenting any facts on that as you've been trained - whether you know it or not - to discount them. What can break the hold is when you finally get two contradictory facts that you actually believe in - in your head at the same time - creating a bit of a cognitive dissonance. If you don't immediately sluff off one of them - the realization could be terrifying. Note that for leftist 'facts' there's plenty of erroneous ones to choose from. Offhand, it looks like your diebold exec quote might be one although it's probably not a suitable one to achieve that cognitive dissonance.
I leave it to you to go research the nature of reality. However, you're nowhere close to it at present and your trusted sources shouldn't be. Just a reccomendation - look for the media bias - when you see it big as life - you've started.
Well, I think it's more that a president of questionable legitimacy secured an unhealthy stranglehold over all three branches of government, then used this lack of opposition to take the country on a war of invasion against someone who posed no threat to the country, for since-provably trumped-up charges.
Bush won the election despite massive opposition efforts to sabotage the win, including election fraud, attempts to keep overseas military from voting and to contest the election. It's the height of stupidity to think that republicans were the ones screwing up the votes in those democrat controlled counties.
As for bush's reasons, it was the democrats who hyped the WMD reasons. The invaision was justified primarily by failure to comply with the UN directives and didn't need a WMD excuse. However, since sadam had been providing 'rewards' for the families of suicide bombers for years and had attempted dialog with al queda and others, it's obvious there were growing ties.
Attempting to take over the middle east oil reserves obviously posed no threat to the US or the civilized world. Neither did sadam's first attempt at a nuclear weapon. We can presume his super canon designed by Dr. Bull was merely for show and that his biowarfare program was targeted only at Semites.
IF the bush administration were anything like you assume it is, they would have found plenty of WMDs, even if they had to be imported.
No, in the 18 months of bush's rush to war, there was plenty of time for sadam to hide, destroy or move his arsenal. As for bioweapons, he could have had a suitcase containing all research details along with seed stock and even enough to unleash some serious plagues.
As for the prowess of the bush administration to handle things with the media, they have been one of the most incompetent that I can remember seeing. As for the press fawning all over them, that's total BS and any press conference in the last 6 years proves it.
THe media's power isn't so much the ability to hide the truth but rather to obfuscate it and more importantly to categorize its importance. Reporting an important story once and spending weeks hyping something irrelevent places an importance to both. The fact that it works so well is evident in your posts.
Are you sure you read it right?
After all, those cheese eating surrender monkies might have been doing a preemptive surrender strike.
Well, at least thermonuclear weapons are pretty good at sterilizing large areas.
Unfortunately, whether or not man develops biowarfare agents, we'll still most likely lose the battle with the bug. Already our minor 20th century victories are leading to our reduced natural fighting abilities and have contributed to strengthening those of the 'bugs'. However, those promoting biowarfare development appear to be traitors to the human race and should be dealt with like their allies.
The x86 architecture has its roots all the way back to the 8008 and 8080 8 bit processors. Speed wise, the 8088 (ibm's choice for their pc) was inferior to existing 8 bit processors at the time. There were some beautiful architectures out there when the 8088 was new. DEC's pdp11 was one of the nicest while TI's 9900 was really nice as well - although very flawed (and subsequently very limited) in fundamental concept.
The x86 architecture did offer massive amounts of memory addressing and some potentially useful OS feature support. Later, the battle between CISC and RISC heated up with the x86 being slightly on the CISC side of the beam scale. As silicon processing became more effective, the RISC concept started to win out. Since the x86 was barely on the CISC side of the balance, it didn't suffer much from this loss and was able to benefit significantly from improved processing.
At the same time, programming was migrating heavily towards intermediate to higher level languages and away from assembly. Attempts at creating software based virtual machine languages suffered from speed problems relative to 'going native' and essentially never became predominant.
Ultimately, compatibility is probably the biggest culprit in keeping the x86 around. That and intels ability to keep the x86 speed up to the level where another better and faster competing architecture cannot simulate the x86 machine code at a faster pace.
There are losses of compatibility in hardware and software going on regularly. Adding enhancements that change the nature of the x86 occur as well. However, compatibility with other than intel products means that most get ignored. Assembly language is virtually insignificant for almost all now so architectures don't matter to the end user and hardly matter for most developers.
The basic x86 architeture is rather simple (but not RISC) so it's not that challenging to make good use of it in compilers and development tools, the area where architetures still matters.
All in all, it's a cruddy architeture but it exists and has a massive developer base. I expect it to evolve and adapt, even as demands and requirements change. There are limits where one central processing unit approaches will run out of ooomph. Perhaps we will be beyond the x86 architecture approach with the advent of parallelism or whatever replaces it.
If there is a legitimate reason, it's to get ballots counted as fast and accurately as possible. Remember, this is politicos, bureaucrats and government employees involved so THINKING is oftimes NOT even an option. Hence, there is no such thing as thinking outside of the box. Add in lots of attention and goodies from lobbyiests and in the case of some, a desire to make the public happy - and there were many unhappy people over the florida debacle that was so hyped in the media and you have the opportunity to spend lots of money - what more could these people want?
Most mass voting fraud is associated with voting machines as they are the easiest to tamper with. The simpler the machine, the harder it is to tamper with. Those dimpled chads in FL, at least those associated with votes, were generally caused by stuffing several ballots in the machine at once due to the shortage of time available for such activities. Tampering with simpler paper ballots is even more difficult and time consuming. That even requires the culprits to show up at the courthouse after everyone else is gone so they can manipulate ballots and records. While enough to swing a close statewide election, it's rather difficult to do so. LBJ's first senate bid required creating a whole new ballot box, ballot box 13 in duval county TX to pull off.
Of course voting fraud isn't limited to officials. THere are many who go vote multiple times by claiming to be their friends, acquaintances, relatives and neighbors. It's rather common place and can be found almost anywhere one decides to look.
Maybe there's still a chance for a new company in the voting machine market, especially one with the name Assured Outcomes.
I prefer my #2 pencil and paper ballot because I can at least tell the votes were correctly entered and it made it into the mass storage (box). Also, I expect that this system is less capable of large fraud than just about any other.
First off, you assume I like bush and am a republican. In fact, neither is the case. I swallowed nothing hook line and sensor because my views are based on my own observations. The fact that the opposition party has chosen to play politics with a war violates the historical situation which dictated that domestic politics ended at the waters edge. I grew tired long ago of the brainless bush bashers parroting the bs from leftists in the mainstream media. Bush has severe problems though probably not as much widespread as carter or clinton or bush 1 for that matter but very bad never the less.
Wilson misrepresented what he saw in an effort to get in on the opposition party's next presidential campaign. What's more, I'm not sure if he ever even formally reported anything back to the administration.
What happened to the yellow cake sadam had? Some was shown live early in the iraq war. It was being dumped in the sand because looters were stealing the barrels it was in. I don't know why I've never seen that fretting reporter all worried about the people stealing those barrel in any repeats or best of programming. That doesn't mean it came from Niger but we do know that sadam was attempting for a second time to develop a bomb - Pollard is still in the clink for releasing the information that allowed the Israelis to bomb the hell out of the first effort years ago.
There's usually a practical solution for many an impractical problem.
Besides, we are so far from understanding wants, a programmer would have to use a random number generator as the basis for that attribute. Just ask yourself what you really want as opposed to what you think you want.
About the only way we'd get to that level is by inserting the consciousness (copy) of people into robots. That could be a mess. Otherwise, it's probably going to be too complex for some whacko anarchist to create the 'wwant' virus and to add it at the factory would be far too expensive to consider, as well as being detrimental to the end product.
I do think there will be robot-rights kooks out there talking to their pet video game and demanding rights for it. Unfortunately, it's possible that the simple criteria of extending rights only to those capable of recognizing and abiding by the equivalent rights of others might not be capable of being used.
Animals cannot have rights because they cannot recognize and respect the rights of others. A robot could probably be created to exceed this limitation. Hence prevention is the ounce that saves hundreds of tons of cure.
While I agree with much of what you wrote and consider the holy-wood hs dropouts to be the least competent people in society to present anything of importance or consequence to society. After all, their true expertise is pretending to be other people.
I don't agree with your notion of scientists as spokespeople either. By the very nature of things, scientists are highly focused in their area(s) of expertise, oftimes to the exclusion of many or most of life's distractions. While there is usually a very limited area in which they know the fundamentals to the point of not having to take anything on faith, that doesn't extend very far and, like the rest of society, at that point they must take things on faith as provided by others.
Since there are many factors and facets involved in the complexities of societies, problems tend to involve multiple disciplines and this sort of stuff doesn't really lend itself to specialization, much less extreme specialization.
Something as simple as raising the minimum wage - which will probably occur within the next 2 months has ramifications beyond what anyone can fully quantify. The net result is a distortion of the market where those people it purportedly intends to help will in fact be those who are hurt the worst. It does provide a nice payoff for the political activities of the unions who will benefit from an undeserved pay raise due to their contracts. However, the rest of us will suffer double because our pay will not be increased and there will be inflation since there was an increase in costs without an increase in productivity. Since most minimum wage earners are members of households with significantly higher standards of living, those who can still get a job will make a bit more. Those in most need are the ones who are not yet productive enough to make more income and another bottom rung of the ladder will be sawed off, condemning some of them to unemployment and welfare - which along with reward for the unions is the real agenda of those pushing for higher minimum wage.
Net result for analysis of problems without including the full scope of the problem can lead to erroneous conclusions. Of course the scientist will offer far more input to the analysis of a problem than will a thug felon rap star but sometimes simple straight forward approaches can elude the most enlightened while appear obvious to the virtually oblivious. More than one computer based system has been brought down by someone randomly banging on the keyboard after testing was concluded by the programmers and pronouned to be solid as a rock.
Personally, I think it's the business of a private business as to whether they have cameras or not. For the gov. to blanket the place with cameras doesn't give me any warm and fuzzy feelings nor does the notion that my killer will possibly be caught because big brother was watching my murder. Also, the state of video and photo imaging technology is such that it can be faked rather well already. Instead, I would prefer the ability to deter the would be killer preferably in a very hostile and permanent fashion so as to eliminate the risk to others and to help reduce expenses in the law enforcement and judicial areas.
Anyone who thinks capitalism is evil should work for free and give away all their posessions - including their clothes. It's hunter gatherer time! Oops, can't hunt, don't wanna hurt the poor lil animals. Any Veggie Rights activists out there?
I'm going to have to go look at wally world's lightbulb offerings. About 1/3 of our light fixtures that we use regularly are CFL but they were purchased from the big home improvement store. I find the CFLs to be somewhat dimmer and sometimes a bit disturbing on the color temperature. However, in the three years or four since we started using them, I haven't had to replace any and they seem to run on about 50-60% less power than incandescents (for about the same amount of lighting).
I guess kudos for wally world for offering another product at a good price. As for any of you envirowhacko global warming promoting government worshippers, if you waited to change to CFLs until their price dropped, SHAME on you.
Companies offer to sell that which is desired to be purchased. Some take the opportunity to hype and offer features that appeal to their potential customers - like 'environmentally friendly' - whether it really is or not. It's called product differentiation and helps keep it from becoming an almost profitless commodity - like gasoline - where the gov. gets 4 to 5 times the profit that the company taking the risks to provide it gets. For those wonderful politicians pushing for more taxes on the oil companies now, either they are too stupid and ignorant to be good leaders or they are too corrupt and evil to be good leaders. In either case, they're trying to screw you and me.
Aliens are more a proof of some people's need for a god than anything else. To assume God needs magic merely points out the failure of conceptualism to realize that God is not a part of the universe but rather the author of its rules. As for magic, it has its place - mostly in quantum theory these days along with the elves, smoke and mirrors. Hey, what could be more magical than a synthetic material where light is measured leaving the right edge as it enters the left edge and a pulse is detected going backwards left to right?
UFOs are often associated with physical phenomenon, sometimes that which is ill understood or perhaps not even known. Probably most often it's associated with phenomenon that is well known - except to the observer.
It took years of 'hassle' for some of these unknowns to ever be investigated. These 'discoveries' include ball lightning, sprites and jets - all storm phenomenon that officially exists and is being studied. As it turns out, sprites and jets were far more observed and common than first believed since many professionals (pilots) didn't report them.
Hopefully some of the myriad of french reports of venus in the early morning and the moon behind a cloud bank might yield yet something else in the way of unusual things although with the prevelence of too much wine, indigestion from cheese and offactory fatigue from BO, the reports might be more about lit cigarettes and distant car headlights.
As for ET, Frank Drake's equation was created in a time when astronomy was the study of a rather static universe, at least relative to the life time of the ones studying it. Solar flares were merely little glitches on the sun's surface and coronal mass ejections were not well understood. Gamma ray bursts were things that happened every now and then because the vela satellites picked up something that wasn't a nuclear explosion, either inside or outside of our galaxy, but probably inside. Supernovae were one time events by certain sized stars which had little effect beyond the local area. Times have changed.
While it seems plausible that the universe is teaming with life, it's within the realm of comprehension that we might actually be just about the only ones around capable of realizing that we're alive. It's turning out that the universe is very good at sterilizing rather large areas on a fairly regular basis and that probably doesn't include any of the causes which has precipitated mass extinctions several times here on earth.
If we are to avoid extinction, we will have to defend earth against asteroids and comets and we will have to eventually move out from the sun because earth is eventually going to suffer the mother of all global warming events, one where it evaporates totally as its enveloped by an aging sun. Long before then, there will be many global warming events cooking off the oceans and baking whats left because the sun will gradually heat up as it ages.
Mr Spock is most likely to be a small blob of fungus.
The good news is that man's technology at worst is a tertiary effect in global warming while primary effects are not well understood and there are probably quite a number of even undiscovered secondary effects. It's only just come out that bovine flatulence contributes more gh gases than does man's transportation system. Of course man and bovine are far more insignificant in the arena of biomasses than are bacteria, insects, even termites. What that means is that instantly totally eradicating cattle and man from the face of the earth is not going to change the fact that the earth will get warmer and cooler in exactly the same fashion as it would have if man never existed. If man actually has an effect on the planet, it will be more to delay (or speed up) such climatactic events by minutes or days rather than delaying or speeding them up by years.
Of course, eventually, the earth will be totally evaporated by the sun as it heats up in the future. Hopefully, it won't produce any of thosse solar flares as observed elsewhere in the galaxy - like the one that was aboutg 100 million times the typical size of what we experience. Global warming or cooling becomes a moot point almost instantly in that circumstance - sorta like an asteroid the size of mars crashing into the earth at a 130,000 feet per second (like what appears to have happened around 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago when the moon was formed out of some of the debris).
Here's hoping the resources and technology are available to detect and deflect the next asteroid bigger than a football stadium with enough time (years) for the deflection effort to work.
The good news is that adult stem cell research seems to be producing results. The bad news is that apparently the only thing embryonic stems cells offer is to create more cancers.