In all fairness, political trends tend to be pursued within the legislative process of most developed nations, and such as been the case for decades. The governments of Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Greece, Spain and Portugal all implemented their own forms of fascism between the 1920s and 1940s. Additionally, the governments of Japan, China, Brazil and Argentina during this era were heavily influenced by Italian fascism and German national-socialism. Most developed nations adopted some form of universal health coverage after the Second World War. National Health Insurance was advocated even in the US from the 1930's through the late 40's, but later derailed as a "socialist" agenda during the rabid McCarthyism of the day. Totalitarian-style communism fell out of favor in many countries during the late 1980's and early 90's. Expansion of copyright protection and anti-piracy legislation is currently making its way around the world's legislatures as I type.
The "human interest" element is something that annoys me the most. I have never seen American Ninja Warrior, but "human interest" seems to dominate 90% of all non-fiction TV programs these days. And even fiction, if you consider shows like "LOST" that when on and on about every characters' past life and only five minutes of action the island. Then the character eventually died without ever resolving the deep personal issues that the show kept exploring. I'm glad I stopped watching LOST somewhere after the first season. I would catch a show two or three times a year, but I couldn't get back into it. I did watch the final, which really made me glad that I didn't invest too much time into the show.
But what annoys me the most is that the History channel, Discovery, and many other cable TV programs used to have documentaries and very interesting and informative programming. Now everything is a reality show that is 90% "human interest". You think you're watching a show about how to fix something, how certain products are made, or how to run a business, but then you come to the realization that the whole show is just about the social interaction of the "reality" characters. Most of the time is spent catching someone in a fit of wage or a camera that follows someone crying after their feelings are hurt. It may be hard to imagine, but I've lived from 2009 to just last month without cable TV, but the crap that is on nowadays makes me wonder if I should just cancel and forget about TV altogether.
If you think the Higgs Boson discovery has lead to a lot of wild crazy ideas, go back to what people were saying when Relativity was discovered by Einstein. Some of the most horrible scifi ever created was based on false notions of what Relativity meant.
I would say that one of the fundamental differences is that when a government tells people to do something, most people just do what the government says without giving much thought to whether the government's demands are good for society, or even moral for that matter. The anarchist will not obey a person or group of people just because that have a badge or a paper that says they have some sort of authority. In the absence of government the anarchist goes on about his life mostly the same as before. If the anarchist sees a blind man starving to death in his alley, knowing there is no government to care for the blind man, the anarchist sees it as his obligation alone to ensure the blind man doesn't die a slow painful and needless death. Maybe his anarchist neighbor doesn't care that the blind man might die, and when asked for help simply refuses. When this same neighbor has a car that won't start and asks the first anarchist for a ride, the first might remind the neighbor of his lack of concern for others and refuse to assist in this minor issue with the intent of teaching the neighbor how to function properly in anarchist society. Anarchists can use the tools of peer pressure and reciprocity to achieve goals of "society" without a need for formal structure, voting, elected officials, bosses or dictators. There may not be any rulers, but leaders would naturally emerge - but by leaders, lets think of heroes who do great things and inspire others to also do great things, not organizational managers. While in anarchist society there would be plenty who would choose to serve only their own needs, the majority would see the value in helping others and cooperating for mutual aid - all achievable without hierarchy. In time, most of the reclusive self-serving hold-outs would see the value in coming together as the benefit of receiving just one day of help during a crisis will often far outweigh the cost of helping others for a few days.
Now, suppose an anarchist sees a child being raped behind his neighbors house. The anarchist may violate his own personal ethic of never trespassing to serve the higher objective of saving the child from harm. The anarchist may find himself fighting or even killing the assailant in order to rescue the child. Over time with enough concerned anarchists in a local community doing the right thing on their own without waiting for government to solve the problem, the community would grow into a safer and more prosperous place to live. A posse could spontaneously form to deal with a threat, and then disband once the threat has been neutralized. All this is technically feasible without the need for an appointed leader to call the shots.
The fundamental nature of anarchy is that it is a heavily localized and the society that emerges will only reflect the values of those who form it. You may very well end up with one community that is composed of members who don't hesitate to use violence to get what they want and are apathetic to the needs of others. Another community might function more like one large extended family with a lot of sharing, giving, and cooperating. The lure of becoming a boss, manager, or ruler or the convenience and safety of following a leader, joining a gang, or voting in a democracy will be a constant threat to the stability of any anarchist society. But if a critical mass of members believe in the value of anarchy they will refuse to participate in and some will proactively disrupt any attempt to enforce a hierarchical government over the people.
All said though, getting anarchy to work in a practical sense would never by easy. There is so much history of humans working through a hierarchical structure that people might not give anarchy a chance, especially with the mental images of rioting mobs and random acts of destruction. Obedience can be much more easily obtained by exploiting the laziness, fear, and greed of others. But if it could be established, anarchy would lead people to pursue the objectives of the super-majority. Strong minoriti
Wasn't this the original intent of the web browser? Rather than connecting your computer to a network of other PCs and running executable files, internet users would be able to set up "webpages" using a markup language that did not execute code on the computers of others who were only viewing the webpage. Drive-by virus downloads were not even possible back in 1995 or 1997 when web browsers actually "browsed" the internet. But browsing endless pages of text, sound, graphics, pictures, GIF animations and even motion video was not enough. Users wanted more interaction. They wanted in-browser games rather than playing stand-alone games in multiplayer mode. They wanted interactive web applications that could perform calculations, not just read back text and pictures like a magazine. Rather than standing against the demands of the uneducated masses due to the risk of anonymous cyber criminals hijacking their machines, HTML was enhanced with JavaScript, Flash and other exotic tools. The browsers made add-ons available and later these functions were buried and integrated deep within the next release of the bare bones browser. Like a boy crying "wolf" the browsers began warning users of the dangers of clicking a hyperlink, allowing cookies, allow scripts, leaving a secure site, certificate missing, etc. while at the same time very few of the websites users needed to see could be accessed without these warnings. Naturally the users began to dismiss most if not all of the automated warning notices. With time the scale and bloat of web browsers increased to surpass that of whole operating systems of old. Plug-ins, pop-ups, location sharing, data mining cookies, and notifications became standard industry practice. The malware hackers had endless fun with the complex, bloated, and vulnerable layers of code that left gaping exploits such that even a benign jpg image could become the carrier for a globally devastating virus. Hackers were even able to add malicious code to legitimate sites. Before long the intrinsically safe browser became the PC users most vulnerable liability.
Last I checked the "free market" slowly ended between the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, and that's just fine with me. As far as letting the Chinese government hoard or restrict the sale of rare earths, that is clearly a government restriction of free trade, as there are no private companies independently choosing to do so. And in China, the notion of an independent company becomes muddied by the fact that the Chinese government is the principal shareholder of all "private" Chinese companies.
Of course the US does it as well, such as the stockpiling of the Strategic Oil Reserve, $11 billion of gold held by the US Treasury, and the massive tracts of public land that the government strategically leases for logging, mining, and grazing in accordance to its objectives to stabilize [manipulate] the commodities market.
I was going to mention the stockpiling of Helium, but it looks like the US has depleted an/or privatized it's National Helium Reserve. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
Again, to remind of what a few have already posted, China's domination of rare earths is not limited to Chinese soil. Chinese corporations are buying up mines and plantations around the world, especially in Africa and South America. Rare earths are in high demand right now, and the limited number of mines plus the high cost of operating means that China (and for those who are less informed, the Chinese government is the principal shareholder of all "private" Chinese corporations) can have an immediate impact on supply. Soon China will also be able to dictate the global price for timber, base metals, and even petroleum, as they are drilling as far away as our own backyard - the Gulf of Mexico. This is what happens when the world's formerly largest industrial superpower decides it doesn't need manufacturing anymore and can sustain growth based on a service economy. They just didn't tell us that our children's generation was going to inherit the service of polishing the shoes of Chinese businessmen.
Even worse for China Inc. is if the US aired speeches from Mao Zedung and dropped photos of capitalist pigs living in the lap of luxury on China's coast. The greatest threat to China's regime today is a communist uprising of the peasant class.
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As long as the US still has military bases in Germany it would be a relatively simple operation to pick him up off the street, throw him in a van with diplomatic plates, put him in a crate marked "diplomatic cargo", and fly him to one of many secret US prisons around the world (there's probably one on Rammstein, so he wouldn't even have to leave Germany). Since he's not a US citizen, he has no rights under the US Constitution, and America doesn't give a crap about the sovereignty of other "so called" nations that it defeated in WWII.
All Google has to do is suggest that this young "hacker" is a "cyber terrorist" acting against the interests of American corporations, which doesn't seem like much of a challenge given how our government always goes along with anything a corporate lobbyist tells them.
...Gates uses his foundation's leverage to direct other charitable funds into projects that support his personal world view. Instead of being chosen by their public merits, the projects are determined by the influence of Gates, and those projects get money from more than just the Gates foundation.
The monopoly that some churches want to have over the distribution of charitable funds is perhaps one of the reasons why so many evangelical Christians are conservative Republicans that oppose all forms of government provided welfare programs, including medicare, medicaid, and social security. Such government programs do not require aid recipients to sit through a sermon before receiving the aid, which pulls the rug out from under many of the churches programs for recruitment.
The fact that Gates wants to pursue his own philanthropic endeavors without the direction of a priest or a preacher is perhaps a good thing.
"I just wish they would make an exception for pharmaceuticals, because withholding the fruits of someone else's humanitarian efforts is a moral issue."
There, fixed that for you.
Before I went to college I had an interest in medicine and biomedical engineering because I wanted to earn a modest living helping people with medical needs. I have special needs children of my own, so going overseas to volunteer for an aid organization wasn't an option for me. I came to realize that the system was rigged. No amount of labor on my part to develop treatments or artificial limbs was going to help the most needy as long as the companies I worked for were most interested in first lining their own pockets. My interests shifted to renewable energy because at least I could still be contributing to making the world a better place and corporate profit motivations were less likely to stand in the way. I'm proud of what I've worked with thus far, as I've been involved in projects in the USA, Europe, and also developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. Projects that deliver power to remote villages, hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, etc. If I had stuck with the biomedical field my impact would likely have been only to those with the ability to pay (ie wealthy Americans).
What's really sad is that I believe that the vast majority of scientists researching for Big Pharma want their intellectual output to benefit all humanity but it is rationed as though it were a scarce resource by non-scientist, non-contributing business executives, salespeople, and investment bankers.
Google Search was originally developed and hosted by Stanford University. Google benefited from a Federal grant and was allowed to maintain the rights (via licensing from Stanford) to the intellectual property, but only because the Bayh-Dole Act made an allowance for this. Without Bayh-Dole, this wouldn't have been possible, as the intellectual property created by the grant would have been property of the Federal government. So as for the Google example, Google Inc., in actuality, never really invented anything. Ever.
So much for the GOP argument that only private enterprise can successfully raise capital and develop new innovations. On the contrary, most of the technology we take for granted today would have never been funded if left to free markets alone.
I have two special needs children, and I was able to take advantage of the child tax credit, child care deduction, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. That said, the tax savings were not spectacular compared to what I have had to pay above and beyond what a typical middle-class family has to pay to cover their essential living expenses. I would much rather pay a simple tax without deductions and such. Even a flat tax wouldn't be a bad tradeoff to avoid the hassle and potential criminal liability in making a mistake doing ones own taxes. The tax deductions seem to either encourage a particular behavior, like buying energy efficient appliances or owning a home, or they make a politician look like they're helping people with high medical bills or child-care expenses. For what it's worth, I would rather pay simple income tax and have a government that properly regulated banks, insurance companies, and hospitals.
It would also be good if there was one agency that oversaw all of the governments "social safety nets." Today there are so many state and federal government agencies, waiting lists, applications, etc. for every possible need or condition. Some are available only to families living below the poverty line, while others help families with a specific balance of income and savings, while some others provide assistance without regard to income or assets. But the confusion created by all of these agencies means that many families will miss out on programs that were designed to help them, not to mention the countless hours that can be wasted researching, applying for, and being denied for one reason or another. I'm still "discovering" laws and programs that could help my special needs kids, but more often than not I'm discovering why my insurance company doesn't have to pay and why certain providers are allowed to charge me more, all while the state laws mandate that I provide for the medical and other basic needs of my family. So while we're simplifying the tax code, why not simplify a few other laws and close a few other loopholes. We could start by making it law that any company that claims to insure or cover medical expenses must pay for all bills submitted by a licensed medical doctor (or dentist, or therapist, etc.) If care is not "medically necessary" then the healthcare provider must provide a written disclosure to be signed before services are rendered (which would be limited to cosmetic, performance enhancing treatments, and other care that does not treat an actual problem). In the law physicians who are "in network" with an insurance company would have to provide a written disclosure any time they refer your treatment to service providers that are "out of network". With today's lack of regulation physicians can legally do the following in many states:
1. Claim to be in-network when their facility is not in-network, not disclose this fact, and charge exorbitant facility expenses (tens of thousands of dollars for one procedure). 2. Take specimens from you and send them off to an out-of-network 3rd party lab without your consent (and you are still liable) 3. Allow out-of-network providers to participate in your treatment without your knowledge or consent (Anesthesiologist, Neonatologist, etc.) "Participating" in your treatment can be as simple as coming into the room, observing you, and leaving (as in leaving you a bill for $2,000.00). 4. Schedule treatment then have an alternate out-of-network provider perform the treatment in his absence. (and invoicing multitudes higher than any insurance company would agree to pay)
Most people who don't think reform is needed have not yet been a victim of these practices. According to today's law, it is the patient's responsibility to find out all of the details of what is covered and what is not, and the patients responsibility to refuse treatment from uncovered providers or for uncovered services. That sounds very reasonable on the surface, but when you're stuck in an exam room or surgery room, in pain, partially medicated, we
Remember, when arguing with a creationist, that the "possibility" of their argument is all that matters, not the "probability". The creationist counter-argument is: 1. A light-year is a unit of distance, not time, so does not prove age older than 6,000 years. 2. God created "light" as a separate creation event, so the light from the star is just the illumination of God-created light. If you deny that God created the light, then you have to presume that the light traveled for millions of years from the apparent source. An analogy is if you see an arrow in a tree, you might reasonably presume that someone recently used a bow to shoot it, but reality might be that I just jabbed it into the wall with my hand. The point supposedly being that unless you know the whole story [as revealed in the Bible] your deductive reasoning is going to fall short.
Even with the many variations from selective breeding, the housecat as a species is still not much different from the small bobcats in the wild near where I live in Texas. Most cats, if released into the wild, interbreed with the wild cats and their offspring just tend to merge back into what a wild cat should look like after being re-introduced back into its original gene pool. Most domesticated animals become feral very quickly, such as dogs, hogs, ducks, gold fish, etc. Selective breeding is not evolution and I'm not aware of any unique mutation that has been introduced from such selective inbreeding. Genuine evolution is a result of changes in the environment that favor mutations that would ordinarily have a neutral or detrimental effect on the organism, thus most often filtered from the gene pool. To expect a mutation to allow an organism to have a competitive advantage in its present environment - well, I'm sure that does happen, but the odds of such mutation are not as high when compared to the effect of environmental changes quickly reducing the gene pool and filtering out those genes which are not fit for the new environment.
And I should point out that we're only talking about one million years. There are fossils of species many many millions of years old that don't appear to be much different than the present day species. Even the pre-human discoveries that date back two million years still appear to be a species that is more human than chimp, walking upright, having a large brain, and no way to rule out if they used tools or built fire.
As long as humans prefer to keep cats as pets, the housecat is not likely to evolve outside of genetic engineering. While it's hard to predict the future, I have a hard time imagining that humans will expect more from housecats than to lounge around the house and eat industrially prepare food. The sheltered life of a housecat does not bring on any environmental stresses that will wipe out unfit genes or favor unusual mutations. Too much selective inbreeding may produce new varieties, but with an increased chance of genetic defects that affect the health of the species, quite the opposite of natural selection, which is how most define "evolution."
Given that taking every word spoken as its literal meaning is a common trait of autism, what does that say about those who advocate such a "literal" all-or-nothing interpretation of the Bible?
Agnosticism is a step in the right direction -- wisdom _begins_ when you realize you know nothing. Only the mystic has Truth (due to experience.)
Interesting, because the early church actually accepted faith in more humble and agnostic terms than the agenda-driven Christianity we are used to seeing today: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism
I don't have anything against people practicing a particular religion. I do have problems with advocates of a particular religion latching onto an urban legend (or rural legend, in the case of Loch Ness), suggesting there is evidence to support such a myth which can then be referenced to support their own agenda for the origins of species and the universe, all the while dismissing mountains beyond mountains of evidence that could possibly conflict with their own view of creation.
There is a difference between having faith in what you don't fully understand and just closing your eyes, putting your hands over your years and saying over and over "your wrong! your wrong! I know 100% what I believe is true. All evidence to the contrary is fabricated by Satan. I will not be deceived by your vile lies."
I have to take small "acts of faith" every day. I presume that the dollars I earned this week will still be worth about the same by the time I get the chance to use them. I trust that when my doctor asks for my social security number that he or his staff isn't going to steal my identity. I could be wrong about any of these presumptions, but you have to weigh the risks against the rewards. I don't fault a person for fearing his or her own mortality and living a life based on the faith that if their religion is true they will enjoy an afterlife. Those who desire a better afterlife so much that they ignore the problems of this world, or crash planes into buildings - I do have a problem with that.
As for myself, I actually attended one of these fundamentalist type schools during middle- and high-school. It took several years after leaving to un-warp my mind. Textbooks in the early 90's also had a small paragraph along with a picture of the dead thing pulled up by the Japanese fishing boat. My favorite was a sketch explaining how "evolutionists" used circular reasoning:
Student: "how do you know how old that fossil is?"
Scientist: "because I found it in a particular geologic layer"
Student: "how did you know how old the geologic layer was?"
Scientist: "because of the fossils we found in it"
I doubt there will be any trace of that housecat in one million years, unless somebody buries it in concrete, and even that is not a guarantee. Also, given what we know about how organisms evolve, I doubt that the descendants of today's housecats will be much different in one million years, unless there is a catastrophic change in the housecats' environment.
I'd also like to point out that mankind may be having a detrimental effect on evolution. There are too many efforts lead by humans to rescue species that have been slated for extinction. Who knows, in just a few decades there may be a system in place to protect the earth from asteroids, cosmic radiation, super-volcanoes, global warming, global cooling, apocalyptic epidemics, and other evolution inducing phenomenon. Such meddling could severely limit the speed of evolution, which takes enough millions of years already!
I think that terms like "sales engineer", "applications engineer", and "software engineer" are legitimate when the roles and responsibilities match with what other "engineers" such as civil, mechanical, electrical, etc actually do. I see no problem with someone who constantly develops mathematical models in MATLAB, participates or at least has access to/understands/and utilizes academic research, and then applies those models to real-time securities trading calling himself a "financial engineer".
I expect that a "software engineer" should understand not only the language he is coding in, basic common elements of mathematics and programming techniques, and the hardware that will run his programs, but he should also be very familiar with the application he is coding for. A programmer with a physics or mechanical engineering degree (or equivalent knowledge and/or experience) who writes software that can graphically display realistic 3D physics in a game or simulation would fit my definition of a "software engineer". A programmer that has to have a physicist explain what the software needs to do and needs a manager or architect to break down a flow chart for him is just a programmer (and there's nothing wrong with that). For this reason I tend to expect "software engineers" to be involved with embedded systems, industrial controls, or other real-world applications where knowledge beyond coding is required. Now when the application is specifically within the realm of computer science, such as appling general engineering techniques to the design, development, and maintenance of a database application, then who am I to say he's not an engineer. But at the some token, just because you can develop customized spreadsheets and use some VBA code in Excel, I don't think you qualify as "software engineer".
Some of the boundaries of engineering, even in the physical world, can be blurry. I've seen examples of two individuals, one is titled "electrical test technician" and the other "electrical test engineer", but other than the fact that one had an engineering degree, both of them were equally capable of developing and executing test procedures, designing and building test fixtures, and calibrating and using all sorts of test equipment. Both the technician and the engineer worked under the supervision of the same manager.
As for "sales engineer", this should be a person who, if they do not possess and engineering degree or PE license, should have at least worked for a considerable length of time developing, testing, and troubleshooting the type of product they end up selling. In many companies a sales manager or account executive with a business background might visit a customer with a sales engineer who can provide more detailed technical detail, answer questions, and provide technical support for a technical product. With highly technical products the customer often doesn't know what he really needs or how to use it once he gets it - ergo, the need for the sales engineer. Often times there is no additional need for the "business" orientated sales person and the sales engineer is the only sales person required to sell and support the product. Being able to identify problems in the field that need to be addressed by the engineers at the factory is very important, and having the technical background also means that they won't waste customer or factory time on a problem that can be fixed in the field. Many products have certain features that can or need to be "engineered" in the field specific to the customer's needs. The sales engineer in this case is both product sales person and implementation consultant. They tend to bypass business oriented purchasing managers and work and communicate directly with the senior engineering staff of their customers, and the sales engineers tend to build rapport with the customer's engineers in a way that many business-orientated sales people cannot. One of the paybacks to companies that have sales engineers is that they can often convince a customer's engineers to c
Just because you won't have a 2.5 terabit connection for your laptop or cell phone doesn't make this any bit less cool. There are many applications where point-to-point line-of-sight communication is useful. As some have already suggested, this might help boost the speed of fiber optic networks. This could be useful for more secure networks, such as between military aircraft and satellites. Depending on cost, power requirements, and how well the signal propagates through the atmosphere, this could become an alternative to digging trenches and burying cable. Image a network of repeater towers that could increase the speed of communication across cities or even across continents without the hassle of digging trenches or hanging lines on telephone poles.
Slashdot Mirror
In all fairness, political trends tend to be pursued within the legislative process of most developed nations, and such as been the case for decades. The governments of Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Greece, Spain and Portugal all implemented their own forms of fascism between the 1920s and 1940s. Additionally, the governments of Japan, China, Brazil and Argentina during this era were heavily influenced by Italian fascism and German national-socialism. Most developed nations adopted some form of universal health coverage after the Second World War. National Health Insurance was advocated even in the US from the 1930's through the late 40's, but later derailed as a "socialist" agenda during the rabid McCarthyism of the day. Totalitarian-style communism fell out of favor in many countries during the late 1980's and early 90's. Expansion of copyright protection and anti-piracy legislation is currently making its way around the world's legislatures as I type.
All who like France, please raise your hand. If you are French, please raise both hands.
The "human interest" element is something that annoys me the most. I have never seen American Ninja Warrior, but "human interest" seems to dominate 90% of all non-fiction TV programs these days. And even fiction, if you consider shows like "LOST" that when on and on about every characters' past life and only five minutes of action the island. Then the character eventually died without ever resolving the deep personal issues that the show kept exploring. I'm glad I stopped watching LOST somewhere after the first season. I would catch a show two or three times a year, but I couldn't get back into it. I did watch the final, which really made me glad that I didn't invest too much time into the show.
But what annoys me the most is that the History channel, Discovery, and many other cable TV programs used to have documentaries and very interesting and informative programming. Now everything is a reality show that is 90% "human interest". You think you're watching a show about how to fix something, how certain products are made, or how to run a business, but then you come to the realization that the whole show is just about the social interaction of the "reality" characters. Most of the time is spent catching someone in a fit of wage or a camera that follows someone crying after their feelings are hurt. It may be hard to imagine, but I've lived from 2009 to just last month without cable TV, but the crap that is on nowadays makes me wonder if I should just cancel and forget about TV altogether.
If you think the Higgs Boson discovery has lead to a lot of wild crazy ideas, go back to what people were saying when Relativity was discovered by Einstein. Some of the most horrible scifi ever created was based on false notions of what Relativity meant.
I would say that one of the fundamental differences is that when a government tells people to do something, most people just do what the government says without giving much thought to whether the government's demands are good for society, or even moral for that matter. The anarchist will not obey a person or group of people just because that have a badge or a paper that says they have some sort of authority. In the absence of government the anarchist goes on about his life mostly the same as before. If the anarchist sees a blind man starving to death in his alley, knowing there is no government to care for the blind man, the anarchist sees it as his obligation alone to ensure the blind man doesn't die a slow painful and needless death. Maybe his anarchist neighbor doesn't care that the blind man might die, and when asked for help simply refuses. When this same neighbor has a car that won't start and asks the first anarchist for a ride, the first might remind the neighbor of his lack of concern for others and refuse to assist in this minor issue with the intent of teaching the neighbor how to function properly in anarchist society. Anarchists can use the tools of peer pressure and reciprocity to achieve goals of "society" without a need for formal structure, voting, elected officials, bosses or dictators. There may not be any rulers, but leaders would naturally emerge - but by leaders, lets think of heroes who do great things and inspire others to also do great things, not organizational managers. While in anarchist society there would be plenty who would choose to serve only their own needs, the majority would see the value in helping others and cooperating for mutual aid - all achievable without hierarchy. In time, most of the reclusive self-serving hold-outs would see the value in coming together as the benefit of receiving just one day of help during a crisis will often far outweigh the cost of helping others for a few days.
Now, suppose an anarchist sees a child being raped behind his neighbors house. The anarchist may violate his own personal ethic of never trespassing to serve the higher objective of saving the child from harm. The anarchist may find himself fighting or even killing the assailant in order to rescue the child. Over time with enough concerned anarchists in a local community doing the right thing on their own without waiting for government to solve the problem, the community would grow into a safer and more prosperous place to live. A posse could spontaneously form to deal with a threat, and then disband once the threat has been neutralized. All this is technically feasible without the need for an appointed leader to call the shots.
The fundamental nature of anarchy is that it is a heavily localized and the society that emerges will only reflect the values of those who form it. You may very well end up with one community that is composed of members who don't hesitate to use violence to get what they want and are apathetic to the needs of others. Another community might function more like one large extended family with a lot of sharing, giving, and cooperating. The lure of becoming a boss, manager, or ruler or the convenience and safety of following a leader, joining a gang, or voting in a democracy will be a constant threat to the stability of any anarchist society. But if a critical mass of members believe in the value of anarchy they will refuse to participate in and some will proactively disrupt any attempt to enforce a hierarchical government over the people.
All said though, getting anarchy to work in a practical sense would never by easy. There is so much history of humans working through a hierarchical structure that people might not give anarchy a chance, especially with the mental images of rioting mobs and random acts of destruction. Obedience can be much more easily obtained by exploiting the laziness, fear, and greed of others. But if it could be established, anarchy would lead people to pursue the objectives of the super-majority. Strong minoriti
Wasn't this the original intent of the web browser? Rather than connecting your computer to a network of other PCs and running executable files, internet users would be able to set up "webpages" using a markup language that did not execute code on the computers of others who were only viewing the webpage. Drive-by virus downloads were not even possible back in 1995 or 1997 when web browsers actually "browsed" the internet. But browsing endless pages of text, sound, graphics, pictures, GIF animations and even motion video was not enough. Users wanted more interaction. They wanted in-browser games rather than playing stand-alone games in multiplayer mode. They wanted interactive web applications that could perform calculations, not just read back text and pictures like a magazine. Rather than standing against the demands of the uneducated masses due to the risk of anonymous cyber criminals hijacking their machines, HTML was enhanced with JavaScript, Flash and other exotic tools. The browsers made add-ons available and later these functions were buried and integrated deep within the next release of the bare bones browser. Like a boy crying "wolf" the browsers began warning users of the dangers of clicking a hyperlink, allowing cookies, allow scripts, leaving a secure site, certificate missing, etc. while at the same time very few of the websites users needed to see could be accessed without these warnings. Naturally the users began to dismiss most if not all of the automated warning notices. With time the scale and bloat of web browsers increased to surpass that of whole operating systems of old. Plug-ins, pop-ups, location sharing, data mining cookies, and notifications became standard industry practice. The malware hackers had endless fun with the complex, bloated, and vulnerable layers of code that left gaping exploits such that even a benign jpg image could become the carrier for a globally devastating virus. Hackers were even able to add malicious code to legitimate sites. Before long the intrinsically safe browser became the PC users most vulnerable liability.
Last I checked the "free market" slowly ended between the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, and that's just fine with me. As far as letting the Chinese government hoard or restrict the sale of rare earths, that is clearly a government restriction of free trade, as there are no private companies independently choosing to do so. And in China, the notion of an independent company becomes muddied by the fact that the Chinese government is the principal shareholder of all "private" Chinese companies.
Of course the US does it as well, such as the stockpiling of the Strategic Oil Reserve, $11 billion of gold held by the US Treasury, and the massive tracts of public land that the government strategically leases for logging, mining, and grazing in accordance to its objectives to stabilize [manipulate] the commodities market.
www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/
fms.treas.gov/gold/current.html
http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en.html
I was going to mention the stockpiling of Helium, but it looks like the US has depleted an/or privatized it's National Helium Reserve.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
Again, to remind of what a few have already posted, China's domination of rare earths is not limited to Chinese soil. Chinese corporations are buying up mines and plantations around the world, especially in Africa and South America. Rare earths are in high demand right now, and the limited number of mines plus the high cost of operating means that China (and for those who are less informed, the Chinese government is the principal shareholder of all "private" Chinese corporations) can have an immediate impact on supply. Soon China will also be able to dictate the global price for timber, base metals, and even petroleum, as they are drilling as far away as our own backyard - the Gulf of Mexico. This is what happens when the world's formerly largest industrial superpower decides it doesn't need manufacturing anymore and can sustain growth based on a service economy. They just didn't tell us that our children's generation was going to inherit the service of polishing the shoes of Chinese businessmen.
www.sjel.org/vol2/feeding-the-dragon
http://espacepolitique.revues.org/index2151.html
articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/22/business/fi-china-oil22
Even worse for China Inc. is if the US aired speeches from Mao Zedung and dropped photos of capitalist pigs living in the lap of luxury on China's coast. The greatest threat to China's regime today is a communist uprising of the peasant class.
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Your friend,
The RIAA.
As long as the US still has military bases in Germany it would be a relatively simple operation to pick him up off the street, throw him in a van with diplomatic plates, put him in a crate marked "diplomatic cargo", and fly him to one of many secret US prisons around the world (there's probably one on Rammstein, so he wouldn't even have to leave Germany). Since he's not a US citizen, he has no rights under the US Constitution, and America doesn't give a crap about the sovereignty of other "so called" nations that it defeated in WWII.
All Google has to do is suggest that this young "hacker" is a "cyber terrorist" acting against the interests of American corporations, which doesn't seem like much of a challenge given how our government always goes along with anything a corporate lobbyist tells them.
...Gates uses his foundation's leverage to direct other charitable funds into projects that support his personal world view. Instead of being chosen by their public merits, the projects are determined by the influence of Gates, and those projects get money from more than just the Gates foundation.
So instead of a foundation, Gates should have started his own church instead, qualified for faith-based government funding, pursued projects that support his own personal view, and no one would have anything bad to say about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Office_of_Faith-Based_and_Neighborhood_Partnerships
The monopoly that some churches want to have over the distribution of charitable funds is perhaps one of the reasons why so many evangelical Christians are conservative Republicans that oppose all forms of government provided welfare programs, including medicare, medicaid, and social security. Such government programs do not require aid recipients to sit through a sermon before receiving the aid, which pulls the rug out from under many of the churches programs for recruitment.
The fact that Gates wants to pursue his own philanthropic endeavors without the direction of a priest or a preacher is perhaps a good thing.
"I just wish they would make an exception for pharmaceuticals, because withholding the fruits of someone else's humanitarian efforts is a moral issue."
There, fixed that for you.
Before I went to college I had an interest in medicine and biomedical engineering because I wanted to earn a modest living helping people with medical needs. I have special needs children of my own, so going overseas to volunteer for an aid organization wasn't an option for me. I came to realize that the system was rigged. No amount of labor on my part to develop treatments or artificial limbs was going to help the most needy as long as the companies I worked for were most interested in first lining their own pockets. My interests shifted to renewable energy because at least I could still be contributing to making the world a better place and corporate profit motivations were less likely to stand in the way. I'm proud of what I've worked with thus far, as I've been involved in projects in the USA, Europe, and also developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. Projects that deliver power to remote villages, hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, etc. If I had stuck with the biomedical field my impact would likely have been only to those with the ability to pay (ie wealthy Americans).
What's really sad is that I believe that the vast majority of scientists researching for Big Pharma want their intellectual output to benefit all humanity but it is rationed as though it were a scarce resource by non-scientist, non-contributing business executives, salespeople, and investment bankers.
Google Search was originally developed and hosted by Stanford University. Google benefited from a Federal grant and was allowed to maintain the rights (via licensing from Stanford) to the intellectual property, but only because the Bayh-Dole Act made an allowance for this. Without Bayh-Dole, this wouldn't have been possible, as the intellectual property created by the grant would have been property of the Federal government. So as for the Google example, Google Inc., in actuality, never really invented anything. Ever.
So much for the GOP argument that only private enterprise can successfully raise capital and develop new innovations. On the contrary, most of the technology we take for granted today would have never been funded if left to free markets alone.
I have two special needs children, and I was able to take advantage of the child tax credit, child care deduction, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. That said, the tax savings were not spectacular compared to what I have had to pay above and beyond what a typical middle-class family has to pay to cover their essential living expenses. I would much rather pay a simple tax without deductions and such. Even a flat tax wouldn't be a bad tradeoff to avoid the hassle and potential criminal liability in making a mistake doing ones own taxes. The tax deductions seem to either encourage a particular behavior, like buying energy efficient appliances or owning a home, or they make a politician look like they're helping people with high medical bills or child-care expenses. For what it's worth, I would rather pay simple income tax and have a government that properly regulated banks, insurance companies, and hospitals.
It would also be good if there was one agency that oversaw all of the governments "social safety nets." Today there are so many state and federal government agencies, waiting lists, applications, etc. for every possible need or condition. Some are available only to families living below the poverty line, while others help families with a specific balance of income and savings, while some others provide assistance without regard to income or assets. But the confusion created by all of these agencies means that many families will miss out on programs that were designed to help them, not to mention the countless hours that can be wasted researching, applying for, and being denied for one reason or another. I'm still "discovering" laws and programs that could help my special needs kids, but more often than not I'm discovering why my insurance company doesn't have to pay and why certain providers are allowed to charge me more, all while the state laws mandate that I provide for the medical and other basic needs of my family. So while we're simplifying the tax code, why not simplify a few other laws and close a few other loopholes. We could start by making it law that any company that claims to insure or cover medical expenses must pay for all bills submitted by a licensed medical doctor (or dentist, or therapist, etc.) If care is not "medically necessary" then the healthcare provider must provide a written disclosure to be signed before services are rendered (which would be limited to cosmetic, performance enhancing treatments, and other care that does not treat an actual problem). In the law physicians who are "in network" with an insurance company would have to provide a written disclosure any time they refer your treatment to service providers that are "out of network". With today's lack of regulation physicians can legally do the following in many states:
1. Claim to be in-network when their facility is not in-network, not disclose this fact, and charge exorbitant facility expenses (tens of thousands of dollars for one procedure).
2. Take specimens from you and send them off to an out-of-network 3rd party lab without your consent (and you are still liable)
3. Allow out-of-network providers to participate in your treatment without your knowledge or consent (Anesthesiologist, Neonatologist, etc.) "Participating" in your treatment can be as simple as coming into the room, observing you, and leaving (as in leaving you a bill for $2,000.00).
4. Schedule treatment then have an alternate out-of-network provider perform the treatment in his absence. (and invoicing multitudes higher than any insurance company would agree to pay)
Most people who don't think reform is needed have not yet been a victim of these practices. According to today's law, it is the patient's responsibility to find out all of the details of what is covered and what is not, and the patients responsibility to refuse treatment from uncovered providers or for uncovered services. That sounds very reasonable on the surface, but when you're stuck in an exam room or surgery room, in pain, partially medicated, we
I'll be damned if one day I wake up inside the fortress of DOOM
Sounds like a reasonable definition of damnation to me.
Remember, when arguing with a creationist, that the "possibility" of their argument is all that matters, not the "probability". The creationist counter-argument is:
1. A light-year is a unit of distance, not time, so does not prove age older than 6,000 years.
2. God created "light" as a separate creation event, so the light from the star is just the illumination of God-created light. If you deny that God created the light, then you have to presume that the light traveled for millions of years from the apparent source. An analogy is if you see an arrow in a tree, you might reasonably presume that someone recently used a bow to shoot it, but reality might be that I just jabbed it into the wall with my hand. The point supposedly being that unless you know the whole story [as revealed in the Bible] your deductive reasoning is going to fall short.
Even with the many variations from selective breeding, the housecat as a species is still not much different from the small bobcats in the wild near where I live in Texas. Most cats, if released into the wild, interbreed with the wild cats and their offspring just tend to merge back into what a wild cat should look like after being re-introduced back into its original gene pool. Most domesticated animals become feral very quickly, such as dogs, hogs, ducks, gold fish, etc. Selective breeding is not evolution and I'm not aware of any unique mutation that has been introduced from such selective inbreeding. Genuine evolution is a result of changes in the environment that favor mutations that would ordinarily have a neutral or detrimental effect on the organism, thus most often filtered from the gene pool. To expect a mutation to allow an organism to have a competitive advantage in its present environment - well, I'm sure that does happen, but the odds of such mutation are not as high when compared to the effect of environmental changes quickly reducing the gene pool and filtering out those genes which are not fit for the new environment.
And I should point out that we're only talking about one million years. There are fossils of species many many millions of years old that don't appear to be much different than the present day species. Even the pre-human discoveries that date back two million years still appear to be a species that is more human than chimp, walking upright, having a large brain, and no way to rule out if they used tools or built fire.
As long as humans prefer to keep cats as pets, the housecat is not likely to evolve outside of genetic engineering. While it's hard to predict the future, I have a hard time imagining that humans will expect more from housecats than to lounge around the house and eat industrially prepare food. The sheltered life of a housecat does not bring on any environmental stresses that will wipe out unfit genes or favor unusual mutations. Too much selective inbreeding may produce new varieties, but with an increased chance of genetic defects that affect the health of the species, quite the opposite of natural selection, which is how most define "evolution."
Given that taking every word spoken as its literal meaning is a common trait of autism, what does that say about those who advocate such a "literal" all-or-nothing interpretation of the Bible?
Agnosticism is a step in the right direction -- wisdom _begins_ when you realize you know nothing. Only the mystic has Truth (due to experience.)
Interesting, because the early church actually accepted faith in more humble and agnostic terms than the agenda-driven Christianity we are used to seeing today: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism
I don't have anything against people practicing a particular religion. I do have problems with advocates of a particular religion latching onto an urban legend (or rural legend, in the case of Loch Ness), suggesting there is evidence to support such a myth which can then be referenced to support their own agenda for the origins of species and the universe, all the while dismissing mountains beyond mountains of evidence that could possibly conflict with their own view of creation.
There is a difference between having faith in what you don't fully understand and just closing your eyes, putting your hands over your years and saying over and over "your wrong! your wrong! I know 100% what I believe is true. All evidence to the contrary is fabricated by Satan. I will not be deceived by your vile lies."
I have to take small "acts of faith" every day. I presume that the dollars I earned this week will still be worth about the same by the time I get the chance to use them. I trust that when my doctor asks for my social security number that he or his staff isn't going to steal my identity. I could be wrong about any of these presumptions, but you have to weigh the risks against the rewards. I don't fault a person for fearing his or her own mortality and living a life based on the faith that if their religion is true they will enjoy an afterlife. Those who desire a better afterlife so much that they ignore the problems of this world, or crash planes into buildings - I do have a problem with that.
As for myself, I actually attended one of these fundamentalist type schools during middle- and high-school. It took several years after leaving to un-warp my mind. Textbooks in the early 90's also had a small paragraph along with a picture of the dead thing pulled up by the Japanese fishing boat. My favorite was a sketch explaining how "evolutionists" used circular reasoning:
Student: "how do you know how old that fossil is?"
Scientist: "because I found it in a particular geologic layer"
Student: "how did you know how old the geologic layer was?"
Scientist: "because of the fossils we found in it"
I doubt there will be any trace of that housecat in one million years, unless somebody buries it in concrete, and even that is not a guarantee. Also, given what we know about how organisms evolve, I doubt that the descendants of today's housecats will be much different in one million years, unless there is a catastrophic change in the housecats' environment.
I'd also like to point out that mankind may be having a detrimental effect on evolution. There are too many efforts lead by humans to rescue species that have been slated for extinction. Who knows, in just a few decades there may be a system in place to protect the earth from asteroids, cosmic radiation, super-volcanoes, global warming, global cooling, apocalyptic epidemics, and other evolution inducing phenomenon. Such meddling could severely limit the speed of evolution, which takes enough millions of years already!
Yes, you're catching on.
I think that terms like "sales engineer", "applications engineer", and "software engineer" are legitimate when the roles and responsibilities match with what other "engineers" such as civil, mechanical, electrical, etc actually do. I see no problem with someone who constantly develops mathematical models in MATLAB, participates or at least has access to/understands/and utilizes academic research, and then applies those models to real-time securities trading calling himself a "financial engineer".
I expect that a "software engineer" should understand not only the language he is coding in, basic common elements of mathematics and programming techniques, and the hardware that will run his programs, but he should also be very familiar with the application he is coding for. A programmer with a physics or mechanical engineering degree (or equivalent knowledge and/or experience) who writes software that can graphically display realistic 3D physics in a game or simulation would fit my definition of a "software engineer". A programmer that has to have a physicist explain what the software needs to do and needs a manager or architect to break down a flow chart for him is just a programmer (and there's nothing wrong with that). For this reason I tend to expect "software engineers" to be involved with embedded systems, industrial controls, or other real-world applications where knowledge beyond coding is required. Now when the application is specifically within the realm of computer science, such as appling general engineering techniques to the design, development, and maintenance of a database application, then who am I to say he's not an engineer. But at the some token, just because you can develop customized spreadsheets and use some VBA code in Excel, I don't think you qualify as "software engineer".
Some of the boundaries of engineering, even in the physical world, can be blurry. I've seen examples of two individuals, one is titled "electrical test technician" and the other "electrical test engineer", but other than the fact that one had an engineering degree, both of them were equally capable of developing and executing test procedures, designing and building test fixtures, and calibrating and using all sorts of test equipment. Both the technician and the engineer worked under the supervision of the same manager.
As for "sales engineer", this should be a person who, if they do not possess and engineering degree or PE license, should have at least worked for a considerable length of time developing, testing, and troubleshooting the type of product they end up selling. In many companies a sales manager or account executive with a business background might visit a customer with a sales engineer who can provide more detailed technical detail, answer questions, and provide technical support for a technical product. With highly technical products the customer often doesn't know what he really needs or how to use it once he gets it - ergo, the need for the sales engineer. Often times there is no additional need for the "business" orientated sales person and the sales engineer is the only sales person required to sell and support the product. Being able to identify problems in the field that need to be addressed by the engineers at the factory is very important, and having the technical background also means that they won't waste customer or factory time on a problem that can be fixed in the field. Many products have certain features that can or need to be "engineered" in the field specific to the customer's needs. The sales engineer in this case is both product sales person and implementation consultant. They tend to bypass business oriented purchasing managers and work and communicate directly with the senior engineering staff of their customers, and the sales engineers tend to build rapport with the customer's engineers in a way that many business-orientated sales people cannot. One of the paybacks to companies that have sales engineers is that they can often convince a customer's engineers to c
Just because you won't have a 2.5 terabit connection for your laptop or cell phone doesn't make this any bit less cool. There are many applications where point-to-point line-of-sight communication is useful. As some have already suggested, this might help boost the speed of fiber optic networks. This could be useful for more secure networks, such as between military aircraft and satellites. Depending on cost, power requirements, and how well the signal propagates through the atmosphere, this could become an alternative to digging trenches and burying cable. Image a network of repeater towers that could increase the speed of communication across cities or even across continents without the hassle of digging trenches or hanging lines on telephone poles.