No option to walk? you should speak to your political representatives and get pedestrian walkways put in either side of the road. Even sub-Saharan African countries can afford to do this (see page 27) - it doesn't have to be expensive - so I guess your country needs to think about its priorities on spending. Which country are you writing from?
SO why do you think the USA keeps subsidies for farmers? open question, I am from the UK so don't know. Our farmers get subsidies as far as I understand because its claimed that if they didn't get them they'd either be unable to compete with imports from other countries, or shift to more profitable crops.
Indeed. Chop the subsidies and some farms will go out of business, and you'll import more food from where it can be grown for less. Pretty simple. Farmers in India probably get paid a lot less for growing rice than those in the USA so at some point even factoring in shipping costs it would be cheaper to buy from them. Currently subsidies artificial raise the prices for farmers from other countries to compete with farmers in your country.
You are 'importing' already from further than your back yard, it's just that you consider a 3000 mile region to be part of an internal market, "your country" rather than "foreign country".
"So.. it costs like 5-10$ to fill a single scuba tank" Is that the price in India, USA, UK, or where? As these cars are going to be set up for India, I am interested to know the Indian cost. Is this what you were referring to?
"Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology is a repository of significant, full-length articles describing original experimental or theoretical research work pertaining to the scientific aspects of contaminants in the environment. It provides a place for the publication of detailed, definitive, complete, credible reports concerning advances and discoveries in the fields of air, water, and soil contamination and pollution, human health aspects, and in disciplines concerned with the introduction, presence, and effects of deleterious substances in the total environment. Acceptable manuscripts for the Archives are the ones that deal with some aspects of environmental contaminants, including those that lie in the domains of analytical chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, agricultural, air, water, and soil chemistry.
All manuscripts are subject to review by workers in the field for significance, credibility and accuracy, as well as for proper arrangement (format, style, language, etc.) Review articles, abstracts, short communications or notes will not be accepted for publication. Where appropriate, these will be referred to Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, or Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. "
Backpacked on a round the world ticket November 2001 - Feb 2002: UK-India-Singapore-Cambodia-Thailand-Australia-New Zealand-USA-UK
1. Don't take anything you mind losing, feel too precious about. If you take stuff that is really valuable to you, you will be a slave to the technology rather than it helping you have a better time. You'll be turning down possibly exciting, wonderous adventures because you're scared your tech might not survive the adventure / get stolen etc. Do you really want to get home and say you turned down the chance of a lifetime because you were scared your laptop would get stolen?
2. Coolest things I took: a camera, and an audio recording device. Snapshots of all those lovely places. Half of which I lost when I dropped my bag when I was ill in Oz - so there's a lesson. The minidisc recorder with an expensive but small mike was amazing. BAck home now a few years later, sitting down in the evening with my eyes closed playing back the sound track of busking musicians in a Cambodian ruined temple, the sound of the surf off a Thai island, American redneck radio stations, traffic noises in Delhi - these are as evocative to me as my photos.
3. Handy thing: handheld GPS. When you wake up in a new town, set the hotel as your base station, and go for a wonderful big walk knowing that eventually you'll find your way back! Really came in useful in Delhi. Just went for big walks and when I was tired I'd unobtrusively check it and start ambling back in the approximate direction, check again a while later, and I'd zigzag my way back home. Some places don't have as good A-Z street maps as London.
4. Really useful tech. My clasp knife. Old British Marines ex-MOD knife, super handy multipurpose tool.
Providing parallel services to the public sector - now that's interesting. I wonder if one day it will become the de facto public bus service? Like the ones you guys used to have until the big oil companies put pressure on them to get you all into individual autos?
Over in the UK we'd tend to say that students tend to be more left wing or socialist in their outlook. Here socialist / left wing is one of the two parties that ever get in to majority power, as in Tony Blair (supposedly). Liberal is traditionally seen as more right wing than that.
"Liberal" is traditionally the middle party in terms of left to right. Used to be that our Conservative Party was a bit like your Democrats, your Republicans were more right wing than anything mainstream we'd got (maybe the UKIP people now?), our Liberal Democrats (seen as the fluffy liberals and less right wing farmers) were to the left of your Democrats, and our Labour party to the left of our Liberals , probably making them "goddamned commies" in your country.
These days the LibDems are probably in the same place but Tony Blair is desperate to be vice pres. of the USA (or state governor of the 51st state, aka the UK) so he's pushed his party over so they are indistinguishable from the Tories (right wingers, a bit like your Democrats).
Sorry, we recently spent a load of our money fighting a bunch of chaps who *definitely* had weapons of mass destruction. Still spending on tidying up the chaos. Turns out they didn't have any in the first place. Plus we need to spend the rest of our money investing in a new generation of weapons of mass destruction for us, buying them off the Americans, you know. Because *we* need weapons of mass destruction apparently. So not much money left over I am afraid. We've got a healthy pop music industry though so if your REM chaps want to come over and record some songs we'll be happy to help them with that.
Read all my posting chap. First part referred to money and it's a real issue for businesses when they consider converting from one platform to another. In business, time is money.
But as for the rest of my posting, which I think you neglected....
At home, for many people, time in front of a computer means time not spent with loved ones, or keeping sane doing a hobby like gardening, sports, walking the dog. I'm sitting here finishing off my PhD looking glancing at a picture of the adorable little nieces whom I am proud to be an uncle of. I wish I could spend more time with them than sat here in front of a computer writing up. Would I give up a weekend to rebuild a computer instead of spending time with them? No way, not on my priority list.
I have to pick up on one of your points:
It's a sad, pathetic excuse for a human being who has no free time
Get out and see the world pal. You are in a lucky minority. A lot of the world is surviving on a dollar a day and working every hour just to survive. Rich arrogant idiots like yourself are the problem with the world.
Very difficult to measure in teaching situations - how are you going to measure "performance"? - that's probably the tricky question. Your thoughts please.
The one thing it can't be is "how many students pass an exam" or how many of your students reach any other arbitary point. If you do this, you end up with a system where teachers start gaming the system to get the brightest students and dump the bad ones as fast as possible. Who wants to teach the average and slower students if their pay is based on exam passes? You don't want to create a system where a significant percentage of the kids in every discipline are treated like crap by their teachers.
I'd say if you are going to measure by performance then it is a relative measure, amount of progress made, but this is going to require a lot of work to measure and continue to monitor, and teachers are probably better of just teaching...
OS changing is too complicated for most people
on
30 Days With Ubuntu Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Frankly, I'm perplexed that anyone would pass on the opportunity to try out a free (as in beer) OS. "
Changing OS is too complicated for most people, and there's not enough payback. If it works, why break it? If you can send email, and look at the web, and write a letter, and it took a lot of pain to get that far, why change the system you use and have to learn all over again, maybe losing your old files? That's how most people see it.
Changing OS may cost nothing financially, but for many people, their time isn't free. The time required to install the new software, get up to speed using the new tools and assuring yourself that you can access your old files and all your other hardware (printer, digital camera, internet connection, etc) is either lost business time (=costs money) or lost personal time (=time away from more pleasant use of leisure time). It's only "free" if you were going to spend that time messing around with a computer anyway. For many people that's not the case.
"I was about to say this is a good thing because frankly the problem is that teachers don't freaking teach anything in class anymore."
-- I think you're making a generalisation. I call BS until you tell us what your point of reference and experience is. Are you working within the school system?
"Al Qaida is more a "franchise" used by small groups [and used by the media to scare people] rather than a real well organised corporation"
Interesting thought, nice one. Hadn't thought of that before. But maybe to extend it further, Al Quaeda is more like an unofficial sports fans club, more like "the Boston Manchester United FC Fan Club" than the local branch of McDonalds? Franchises involve one or more people contacting the big central place, paying some money, being told the rules and how to present themselves. It doesn't sound like there's a head office of AQ sorting this out and running the database. Unofficial fan clubs set themselves up independently, note their desired affiliation with a a central group, work independently but hope to be seen as part of a bigger family. Seems that's more like what's going on.
Couple of radical kids fed up with the state in some backwater hick town blow up a car or burn something out, take a couple of potshots, the local cops sort it out, locals just think they are disaffected youth and idiots, maybe sympathise with your views on the local mayor. But call yourselves Al Quaeda and suddenly you're getting respect, you're big shots... and on the flipside, if you can define a couple of local idiots as Al Quaeda suddenly you can call in resources, scare the people, all the rest of it...
No. I've got a few friends who use monitors for their film and video work and one's even been visited by the licence people to check. Bottom line seems to be that if you've got it plugged into an antenna, you're probably watching tv so you need a licence. But the emphasis in law is on them proving that you were watching tv, rather than you proving you were not. They can't fine you (for not having a licence) until they can prove you were watching tv (detector van outside your house). It's a known dodge in squats just to unplug the antenna and if they do get permission to check you out (court order) then to sit there and say "prove it, look you can see the games console/VCR is plugged into it, that all I do with it".
One of the arguments people make is that it's unfair for people who never watch the BBC (only commercial channels) to have to pay a licence fee but I've never met anybody who never watches the beeb. Being able to watch a film all the way through or an hour long documentary without commercial breaks every 20 or 30 minutes is worth it I reckon....
me a totally non maths person - what kind of charge would you get? I cycle 8 miles into work (same again back, obviously! maybe a diversion to the shops to add on another mile or so)- takes me about 50 minutes to an hour depending on how I am feeling (hills, across footpaths etc, not just a straight run on a big road). Feasible for getting a significant amount of charge this way from a bike dynamo? or would I just end up charging an AAA battery once a week if I was lucky?
Apparently we've got to buy some more nuclear missiles from the USA to replace our old ones (or is that hire from some US company, I can never remember).
>Not a treaty as such, but a decree titled "US National Space Policy" claiming space for the US. IOW, the Bush administration claims the right to deny US adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to its national interests.
cheers
>> We all know the number one reason any nation tries to get a satellite into orbit is so the rest of the world knows that they can drop a bomb onto anybody else's doorstep
>You're kidding, right? Number one reason? Any nation? Yeah, you're either kidding or you're.. what's the next step after paranoia? Ah, that would be hysteria, I guess.
Ok maybe a little fast and loose with language on a Sunday afternoon:-) but I stick to my belief that the military leaders in each country with a space programme aren't that upset if their altruistic scientists manage to find a means of getting half a tonne or more of scientific equipment circling the earth.
I'd suggest that while scientists may be motivated by purely worthy scientific goals, the funding of such highly expensive rockets/missiles would have to be justified through a rigourous process. The fact that such a worthy technological achievement would have the by-product of extending that country's military capacity to a global reach would in most countries not go unnoticed, and probably be received favourably. In the world of global geo-politics, this might tip the balance in getting such a project funded, and given a purely scientific tool that has a global reach, I'd be surprised if the military forces didn't explore the possibilities of turning such a device into a weapon system and considered its likely effectiveness against potential aggressors...:-)
Serious question. Is there an international treaty that says they don't have the right to attempt to get a satellite up into space?
Mind you I think we need to wait for independent confirmation, could just be political bluffing. The Iranian government knows that if they can get something into orbit and a successful nuclear weapons test done then the USA will back away from hawkish talk of using 'whatever means necessary' and suddenly become all friendly and overlook any issues to get round a table and trade for future oil supplies.
We all know the number one reason any nation tries to get a satellite into orbit is so the rest of the world knows that they can drop a bomb onto anybody else's doorstep / president's country retreat if they feel they need to.
>Are they one of those shared societal tasks which just need to get done?
ahhh... nice and complex. I'd say I'm not sure of what you're asking. But wars should be avoided where possible. Wars are stupid and expensive.
>How about paying for agribusiness to produce goods which nobody wants?
No.
>How about reducing oil companies taxes to below the levels of other businesses?
No.
>Classical liberals (not the bastardized version you have in the US)
I'm from the UK.
>...and libertarians generally believe that governmental influence is a bad thing rather than a good one.
I'm aware of this. As a layman (not an expert political scientist) I prefer social democracy models. That's my bias. The strong will always look after themselves, I think we should judge a society on how well it looks after the weak.
>Most advocate minimising government rather than complete anarchy.
Indeed I am aware of this. Most seem pretty happy with external bodies to their communities providing roads, complex industrial production, nuclear weapons systems, coca-cola, etc.;-)
I like taxes. Not everything has to be taxed but I am happy to pay some. I like working with computers in a university job and having a bit of time to myself. I'm really happy not to have to be a part time police officer, fireman, social worker, sewage worker, nurse, builder of roads, and all those other jobs that I really appreciate getting done around me and make my life better as a result. I pick the voluntary work I want to do (community gardening). Happy to pay a percentage of my income so those other jobs get done.
As another poster noted, it all comes down to political theory and your preference for how society is set up. My preference is public servants carrying out the shared societal tasks, well paid enough that they don't have to take bribes to feed their families. I'm happy to financially contribute to that system.
But when I've been in the USA, people only drive cars with automatic gearboxes! how will the astronauts cope with a gear stick (stick shift)? Will they need to pass another spaceship driving test? Will they need to employ more European astronauts as drivers? Will the Russian spaceships leak oil and break down every few kilometres and need roadside rescue? (umm can't think of a suitable Lada joke right now)
Slashdot Mirror
No option to walk? you should speak to your political representatives and get pedestrian walkways put in either side of the road. Even sub-Saharan African countries can afford to do this (see page 27) - it doesn't have to be expensive - so I guess your country needs to think about its priorities on spending. Which country are you writing from?
SO why do you think the USA keeps subsidies for farmers? open question, I am from the UK so don't know. Our farmers get subsidies as far as I understand because its claimed that if they didn't get them they'd either be unable to compete with imports from other countries, or shift to more profitable crops.
Those yanks. They roll over and surrender at the first whiff of fine cheese :-)
Indeed. Chop the subsidies and some farms will go out of business, and you'll import more food from where it can be grown for less. Pretty simple. Farmers in India probably get paid a lot less for growing rice than those in the USA so at some point even factoring in shipping costs it would be cheaper to buy from them. Currently subsidies artificial raise the prices for farmers from other countries to compete with farmers in your country.
You are 'importing' already from further than your back yard, it's just that you consider a 3000 mile region to be part of an internal market, "your country" rather than "foreign country".
"So.. it costs like 5-10$ to fill a single scuba tank"
Is that the price in India, USA, UK, or where? As these cars are going to be set up for India, I am interested to know the Indian cost. Is this what you were referring to?
"NutraIngredients USA isn't exactly a reputable journal..."
n ger/00244/index.asp
RTFA. The peer reviewed journal noted is "Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology" published by Springer. http://www.environmental-expert.com/magazine/spri
Looks a proper journal to me.
"Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology is a repository of significant, full-length articles describing original experimental or theoretical research work pertaining to the scientific aspects of contaminants in the environment. It provides a place for the publication of detailed, definitive, complete, credible reports concerning advances and discoveries in the fields of air, water, and soil contamination and pollution, human health aspects, and in disciplines concerned with the introduction, presence, and effects of deleterious substances in the total environment. Acceptable manuscripts for the Archives are the ones that deal with some aspects of environmental contaminants, including those that lie in the domains of analytical chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, agricultural, air, water, and soil chemistry.
All manuscripts are subject to review by workers in the field for significance, credibility and accuracy, as well as for proper arrangement (format, style, language, etc.) Review articles, abstracts, short communications or notes will not be accepted for publication. Where appropriate, these will be referred to Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, or Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. "
Backpacked on a round the world ticket November 2001 - Feb 2002: UK-India-Singapore-Cambodia-Thailand-Australia-New Zealand-USA-UK
1. Don't take anything you mind losing, feel too precious about. If you take stuff that is really valuable to you, you will be a slave to the technology rather than it helping you have a better time. You'll be turning down possibly exciting, wonderous adventures because you're scared your tech might not survive the adventure / get stolen etc. Do you really want to get home and say you turned down the chance of a lifetime because you were scared your laptop would get stolen?
2. Coolest things I took: a camera, and an audio recording device. Snapshots of all those lovely places. Half of which I lost when I dropped my bag when I was ill in Oz - so there's a lesson. The minidisc recorder with an expensive but small mike was amazing. BAck home now a few years later, sitting down in the evening with my eyes closed playing back the sound track of busking musicians in a Cambodian ruined temple, the sound of the surf off a Thai island, American redneck radio stations, traffic noises in Delhi - these are as evocative to me as my photos.
3. Handy thing: handheld GPS. When you wake up in a new town, set the hotel as your base station, and go for a wonderful big walk knowing that eventually you'll find your way back! Really came in useful in Delhi. Just went for big walks and when I was tired I'd unobtrusively check it and start ambling back in the approximate direction, check again a while later, and I'd zigzag my way back home. Some places don't have as good A-Z street maps as London.
4. Really useful tech. My clasp knife. Old British Marines ex-MOD knife, super handy multipurpose tool.
Providing parallel services to the public sector - now that's interesting. I wonder if one day it will become the de facto public bus service? Like the ones you guys used to have until the big oil companies put pressure on them to get you all into individual autos?
"what irritates me is that current policy just makes Landlords rich doing basically nothing, it does not seems fair at all to me"
:-)
You've never rented a property in real life, right?
How is this is different from real life?
Welcome to free market capitalism. You got something other people want, you shunt the price as high as you can.
"college students tend to be more liberal"
Over in the UK we'd tend to say that students tend to be more left wing or socialist in their outlook. Here socialist / left wing is one of the two parties that ever get in to majority power, as in Tony Blair (supposedly). Liberal is traditionally seen as more right wing than that.
"Liberal" is traditionally the middle party in terms of left to right. Used to be that our Conservative Party was a bit like your Democrats, your Republicans were more right wing than anything mainstream we'd got (maybe the UKIP people now?), our Liberal Democrats (seen as the fluffy liberals and less right wing farmers) were to the left of your Democrats, and our Labour party to the left of our Liberals , probably making them "goddamned commies" in your country.
These days the LibDems are probably in the same place but Tony Blair is desperate to be vice pres. of the USA (or state governor of the 51st state, aka the UK) so he's pushed his party over so they are indistinguishable from the Tories (right wingers, a bit like your Democrats).
"The new drives are like hybrid cars"
w00t! Petrol fueled hard drives! but ecologically sound!
oh. you didn't mean that. You just meant that you wanted people who didn't know what "hybrid" meant to have point of reference.
Actually you meant "They are a bit like Pear Trees". As in, a hybrid...
hmmm...
Sorry, we recently spent a load of our money fighting a bunch of chaps who *definitely* had weapons of mass destruction. Still spending on tidying up the chaos. Turns out they didn't have any in the first place. Plus we need to spend the rest of our money investing in a new generation of weapons of mass destruction for us, buying them off the Americans, you know. Because *we* need weapons of mass destruction apparently. So not much money left over I am afraid. We've got a healthy pop music industry though so if your REM chaps want to come over and record some songs we'll be happy to help them with that.
Read all my posting chap. First part referred to money and it's a real issue for businesses when they consider converting from one platform to another. In business, time is money.
But as for the rest of my posting, which I think you neglected....
At home, for many people, time in front of a computer means time not spent with loved ones, or keeping sane doing a hobby like gardening, sports, walking the dog. I'm sitting here finishing off my PhD looking glancing at a picture of the adorable little nieces whom I am proud to be an uncle of. I wish I could spend more time with them than sat here in front of a computer writing up. Would I give up a weekend to rebuild a computer instead of spending time with them? No way, not on my priority list.
I have to pick up on one of your points:
It's a sad, pathetic excuse for a human being who has no free time
Get out and see the world pal. You are in a lucky minority. A lot of the world is surviving on a dollar a day and working every hour just to survive. Rich arrogant idiots like yourself are the problem with the world.
Very difficult to measure in teaching situations - how are you going to measure "performance"? - that's probably the tricky question. Your thoughts please.
The one thing it can't be is "how many students pass an exam" or how many of your students reach any other arbitary point. If you do this, you end up with a system where teachers start gaming the system to get the brightest students and dump the bad ones as fast as possible. Who wants to teach the average and slower students if their pay is based on exam passes? You don't want to create a system where a significant percentage of the kids in every discipline are treated like crap by their teachers.
I'd say if you are going to measure by performance then it is a relative measure, amount of progress made, but this is going to require a lot of work to measure and continue to monitor, and teachers are probably better of just teaching...
"Frankly, I'm perplexed that anyone would pass on the opportunity to try out a free (as in beer) OS. "
Changing OS is too complicated for most people, and there's not enough payback. If it works, why break it? If you can send email, and look at the web, and write a letter, and it took a lot of pain to get that far, why change the system you use and have to learn all over again, maybe losing your old files? That's how most people see it.
Changing OS may cost nothing financially, but for many people, their time isn't free. The time required to install the new software, get up to speed using the new tools and assuring yourself that you can access your old files and all your other hardware (printer, digital camera, internet connection, etc) is either lost business time (=costs money) or lost personal time (=time away from more pleasant use of leisure time). It's only "free" if you were going to spend that time messing around with a computer anyway. For many people that's not the case.
"I was about to say this is a good thing because frankly the problem is that teachers don't freaking teach anything in class anymore."
-- I think you're making a generalisation. I call BS until you tell us what your point of reference and experience is. Are you working within the school system?
"Al Qaida is more a "franchise" used by small groups [and used by the media to scare people] rather than a real well organised corporation"
Interesting thought, nice one. Hadn't thought of that before. But maybe to extend it further, Al Quaeda is more like an unofficial sports fans club, more like "the Boston Manchester United FC Fan Club" than the local branch of McDonalds? Franchises involve one or more people contacting the big central place, paying some money, being told the rules and how to present themselves. It doesn't sound like there's a head office of AQ sorting this out and running the database. Unofficial fan clubs set themselves up independently, note their desired affiliation with a a central group, work independently but hope to be seen as part of a bigger family. Seems that's more like what's going on.
Couple of radical kids fed up with the state in some backwater hick town blow up a car or burn something out, take a couple of potshots, the local cops sort it out, locals just think they are disaffected youth and idiots, maybe sympathise with your views on the local mayor. But call yourselves Al Quaeda and suddenly you're getting respect, you're big shots... and on the flipside, if you can define a couple of local idiots as Al Quaeda suddenly you can call in resources, scare the people, all the rest of it...
No. I've got a few friends who use monitors for their film and video work and one's even been visited by the licence people to check. Bottom line seems to be that if you've got it plugged into an antenna, you're probably watching tv so you need a licence. But the emphasis in law is on them proving that you were watching tv, rather than you proving you were not. They can't fine you (for not having a licence) until they can prove you were watching tv (detector van outside your house). It's a known dodge in squats just to unplug the antenna and if they do get permission to check you out (court order) then to sit there and say "prove it, look you can see the games console/VCR is plugged into it, that all I do with it".
One of the arguments people make is that it's unfair for people who never watch the BBC (only commercial channels) to have to pay a licence fee but I've never met anybody who never watches the beeb. Being able to watch a film all the way through or an hour long documentary without commercial breaks every 20 or 30 minutes is worth it I reckon....
me a totally non maths person - what kind of charge would you get? I cycle 8 miles into work (same again back, obviously! maybe a diversion to the shops to add on another mile or so)- takes me about 50 minutes to an hour depending on how I am feeling (hills, across footpaths etc, not just a straight run on a big road). Feasible for getting a significant amount of charge this way from a bike dynamo? or would I just end up charging an AAA battery once a week if I was lucky?
Apparently we've got to buy some more nuclear missiles from the USA to replace our old ones (or is that hire from some US company, I can never remember).
The money's got to come from somewhere!
>Not a treaty as such, but a decree titled "US National Space Policy" claiming space for the US. IOW, the Bush administration claims the right to deny US adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to its national interests.
.. what's the next step after paranoia? Ah, that would be hysteria, I guess.
:-) but I stick to my belief that the military leaders in each country with a space programme aren't that upset if their altruistic scientists manage to find a means of getting half a tonne or more of scientific equipment circling the earth.
:-)
cheers
>> We all know the number one reason any nation tries to get a satellite into orbit is so the rest of the world knows that they can drop a bomb onto anybody else's doorstep
>You're kidding, right? Number one reason? Any nation? Yeah, you're either kidding or you're
Ok maybe a little fast and loose with language on a Sunday afternoon
I'd suggest that while scientists may be motivated by purely worthy scientific goals, the funding of such highly expensive rockets/missiles would have to be justified through a rigourous process. The fact that such a worthy technological achievement would have the by-product of extending that country's military capacity to a global reach would in most countries not go unnoticed, and probably be received favourably. In the world of global geo-politics, this might tip the balance in getting such a project funded, and given a purely scientific tool that has a global reach, I'd be surprised if the military forces didn't explore the possibilities of turning such a device into a weapon system and considered its likely effectiveness against potential aggressors...
Serious question. Is there an international treaty that says they don't have the right to attempt to get a satellite up into space?
Mind you I think we need to wait for independent confirmation, could just be political bluffing. The Iranian government knows that if they can get something into orbit and a successful nuclear weapons test done then the USA will back away from hawkish talk of using 'whatever means necessary' and suddenly become all friendly and overlook any issues to get round a table and trade for future oil supplies.
We all know the number one reason any nation tries to get a satellite into orbit is so the rest of the world knows that they can drop a bomb onto anybody else's doorstep / president's country retreat if they feel they need to.
>Are they one of those shared societal tasks which just need to get done?
;-)
ahhh... nice and complex. I'd say I'm not sure of what you're asking. But wars should be avoided where possible. Wars are stupid and expensive.
>How about paying for agribusiness to produce goods which nobody wants?
No.
>How about reducing oil companies taxes to below the levels of other businesses?
No.
>Classical liberals (not the bastardized version you have in the US)
I'm from the UK.
>...and libertarians generally believe that governmental influence is a bad thing rather than a good one.
I'm aware of this. As a layman (not an expert political scientist) I prefer social democracy models. That's my bias. The strong will always look after themselves, I think we should judge a society on how well it looks after the weak.
>Most advocate minimising government rather than complete anarchy.
Indeed I am aware of this. Most seem pretty happy with external bodies to their communities providing roads, complex industrial production, nuclear weapons systems, coca-cola, etc.
I like taxes. Not everything has to be taxed but I am happy to pay some. I like working with computers in a university job and having a bit of time to myself. I'm really happy not to have to be a part time police officer, fireman, social worker, sewage worker, nurse, builder of roads, and all those other jobs that I really appreciate getting done around me and make my life better as a result. I pick the voluntary work I want to do (community gardening). Happy to pay a percentage of my income so those other jobs get done.
As another poster noted, it all comes down to political theory and your preference for how society is set up. My preference is public servants carrying out the shared societal tasks, well paid enough that they don't have to take bribes to feed their families. I'm happy to financially contribute to that system.
But when I've been in the USA, people only drive cars with automatic gearboxes! how will the astronauts cope with a gear stick (stick shift)? Will they need to pass another spaceship driving test? Will they need to employ more European astronauts as drivers? Will the Russian spaceships leak oil and break down every few kilometres and need roadside rescue? (umm can't think of a suitable Lada joke right now)
(ducks and grins)