And on "general welfare", its co-author James Madison explicitly explained that the phrase does not mean what you're reading it to mean. In fact, the idea that it could be misread that way was something he took as a sign of paranoia among Anti-Federalists. See Federalist Paper #41. Short version: "If we'd meant to give the federal government a power to do whatever is good for the country, we wouldn't have worded it in such an obscure way, followed it in the same sentence with a list of specific granted powers, [and then added an amendment spelling out that the federal government lacks unlimited power]." I don't think you can point to a single person in the Founders' generation who, before ratification (Hamilton changed his tune later), claimed there was an open-ended "general welfare" power and didn't oppose the Constitution on that ground.
You need to amend the Constitution if you think it's not well-suited to today's situation.
Under Bush and a Republican Congress, we had a specific plan to get back to the Moon and on to Mars. Now under Obama and a Democratic Congress, we don't. It wasn't a very good plan, but there's still a difference.
Before rolling out revolutionary new products, Asus should work on its product quality and service. I'm writing this on the replacement eeePC they sent me after around five months and four service trips for the lemon they sold me.
AI researcher and music buff Douglas Hofstadter (of "Godel, Escher, Bach" and "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies") wrote a paper about his experience with another researcher's music program, EMI. Hofstadter made the same argument that truly great music depends on human emotion, and that a music composer AI would only imitate superficial things like frequently-used note patterns. He came away troubled, though, because EMI was able to copy deeper patterns and produce fairly decent imitations of dead composers' style. His AI research has focused on basic aspects of creativity and how to avoid ELIZA-like shallowness, so the thought of a composer producing worthwhile music without human-like experiences raises the disturbing question of whether music is really something "wrung from the depths of the soul" or something more formulaic and simplistic.
As explained by the likes of John Locke, the idea of fundamental human rights stems from the idea that you are your own sole master -- or in a religious wording, that nobody can claim ownership over you but God. Therefore, if anyone kills you, or enslaves you, or forces you to work for their benefit, they've infringed on this ownership. This idea of life, liberty and property stands in sharp contrast to ideas like a "right to health care", because the modern "rights" necessarily involve using force to violate other people's lives, liberty or property. To grant your right to live -- that is, to not have anyone take your life by force -- all I have to do is not murder you. To grant your supposed right to health care, I have to work and let you take the product of my labor by force. Meaning that you claim partial ownership over my labor and my thoughts, independent of the practical argument that we must tax people to protect their rights against each other's aggression. To turn a "right to life" into a "right to take anything you need to live" has the same problem of innately violating other people's rights.
The fact that Americans are now divided by whether they accept what I (and our Founders) said is why we might, unfortunately, be headed for civil war.
Several US states wrote a right of secession into the documents by which they formally ratified the Constitution. Virginia's for instance says "that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression". And the first Congress didn't order them to go back and take that bit out...
"The American Revolution was not complete until 1865."
You mean, when we established by violence that the government does not "derive its just powers from the consent of the governed", and people do not have the right to separate their state/colony from a larger empire?
The movie version started with a voice-over prologue, which is a bad sign. Generally, if you feel you need to include one, you could be introducing the story's concepts in a clearer way, or your story is too complicated, or it's starting in the wrong place. That movie doesn't even get the characters to Dune for over half an hour!
And should the state violently force* its own people to submit to having their children indoctrinated into believing what you think they should believe?
The New World came pretty close to "uninhabitable" for white men for a while. For years, the Jamestown colony took in massive waves of immigrants, yet its population hardly increased.
Today the challenge is greater, but so is our technology. Surviving with 1600s European tech in the New World was very hard, and unprofitable for many years; surviving with 2000s American tech on Mars would be hard and unprofitable for many years. Not impossible in either case. Harder in some ways, obviously, but easier in others due to factors like lack of native diseases (or, presumably, hostile natives).
By the way, there's been successful research on growing plants in space. You could do it more easily in a Martian greenhouse.
Actually, those are directly related. Part of the reason NASA doesn't have the cash to boldly go, is that they're busy maintaining the ISS, a giant metal albatross. And when one person says "drop the thing and move on," another says "oh, it'd be a shame to waste it just as we're finishing construction".
Wow, Apple managed to invent the netbook only a couple years late for several hundred bucks more! Jobs' comments said that he wanted to establish a new class of device between smartphones and laptops. It's as though he was unaware that there's been such a category for years, and that it costs a lot less than $500, and that it doesn't lock you into one manufacturer's control so hard you can't even change the battery yourself.
The parent comment is right in that a lot of people will probably buy the thing, 'cause it's new and shiny and Apple made it. But it's an obviously inferior device as I see it.
(Now if only Asus will replace my $320 lemon eeePC now that I've mailed it in for repair for the fourth time...)
Summarized the article just says, "SF is good because it helps us think about stuff -- but not that icky lowbrow SF like Star Trek; that's practically porn."
That's not a fair distinction. The author dismisses Trek, which in the 60s had some ham-fisted attempts at an Important Message (mainly re: race), and puts "Avatar" in that category even though it has a (stupid, hypocritical) moral message too. So it's not having A Message that makes for the kind of SF the author likes. The article's more like a guide to making movies that will get whipped in profits by the latest Star Trek. For good or ill, I hear some people were deeply affected by "Avatar", so that sort of movie is capable of being deep and meaningful in some people's eyes.
I wrote an SF novel recently. There was supposed to be a Message in it. I'd read enough SF to know that making the Important Message blatant and heavy-handed is a way to ruin an otherwise decent story; famous example "Atlas Shrugged". What I found to be a good solution is to focus on being entertaining first, with plot and character being much more important than the Deep Philosophical Implications. The same group of characters could've been used to tell a story with a different message, if the character development had gone a different way ("This cause isn't worth killing over!"), and that's a good thing.
So, if anyone wants to apply the article's advice, they should interpret it as, "Write stories with meaningful takes on the possible future -- but they should be stories first."
(One bit of snootiness: I've got a theory that a way to describe character growth is a two-axis method. One axis is, "Can the hero find the strength to do what he's trying to do?" and the other, harder-to-write one is, "Is the hero questioning what he should do?" Simpler stories tend not to bother much with the second one, but overusing it gets angsty and annoying quickly.)
Interesting concept. Would it be plausible to have a nano-arm physically ripping the C off of CO2 molecules or doing some similar useful function? Obviously you'd need energy input... Just the other month there was that report of nano-scale imaging of a single molecule of pentene or a similar hydrocarbon, showing that the atoms really do sit around in something like the toy models chemists build. But (1) how would the arm grasp an atom -- with more atoms or some kind of electric field? And (2) could it just physically yank the atom away? I suspect the answer to (2) is yes, because that's basically what heat (random vibration of atoms) does, right? As for (1), that'd probably be a pain, because you can't exactly have the atoms touch the way that plastic-ball models can, and because you'd need different kinds of pincers/fields/whatever for different materials, to prevent them from bonding chemically to the arm.
During that "disasterous" period, DARPA made progress on the "Proto 1" and "Proto 2" cyborg arms, and the military (not sure if DARPA specifically) funded Bussard's "Polywell" fusion project.
Sounds like the premise of Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". Revolutionaries on the Moon take control of a mass driver and start flinging multi-ton barges at Earth, with just enough remote-control maneuvering that the shooters can call up Earth afterward and ask if they'd like to surrender.
Why? Because it's possible -- not saying it's true yet, mind you -- that just maybe the guards thought Watts was dangerous. And by Watts' own admission he first broke protocol for dealing with border guards (by getting out of the car), then violated a direct order by a law enforcement officer. So to leap without further evidence to the conclusion that the officers were being "gigantic dicks given excessive amounts of power" requires that you don't care what the guards thought was happening.
It's interesting to compare this incident to the "flying imams" event a few years back. I've read the police report of that, citing multiple passengers' and crewmembers' testimony. Should we have heard early articles saying "a couple of Muslims were thrown off a plane!" and said no more evidence is necessary; it's clearly the work of abusive, racist, anti-Muslim guards? (And no, I don't have reason to think Watts was nearly as alarming as the imams.)
My point is: would you accept at face value, without even needing to hear Homeland Security's side, the account of a guy who is known for being particularly vocal about the evils of Homeland Security?
The opposite hasty generalization? A couple posts upstream someone said, "I think I'd like to hear both sides of the story before I decide." Is that the same as, "He must've deserved it"?
It sounds like the facts aren't all in yet, so let's not leap to conclusions. We're hearing the account of Cory Doctorow -- who in his novel "Little Brother" had an obvious axe to grind against Homeland Security and law enforcement, to the point of suggesting "9/11 was an inside job". (Says one of the leaflets dropped by the novel's heroic protesters.) We're also hearing second-hand from Watts and the other people in the car. We're not yet hearing the guards' account. Maybe Doctorow et. al. are completely right, but let's not assume so right off the bat, eh?
The Doctorow account quotes Watts saying that he got out of his car when questioned (mistake #1), then refused the order to get back in (mistake #2). No, of course that doesn't justify a beating. It just suggests we don't have the whole story.
Wait, eInk has screen savers? I thought part of the point was that it required no charge to maintain an image. Does an eInk screen suffer from burn-in like a CRT?
In fact, part of the information allegedly taken from these researchers is source code, and it's revealing. It helps reveal the significance of an e-mail about a "trick" done with the data.
Slashdot Mirror
And on "general welfare", its co-author James Madison explicitly explained that the phrase does not mean what you're reading it to mean. In fact, the idea that it could be misread that way was something he took as a sign of paranoia among Anti-Federalists. See Federalist Paper #41. Short version: "If we'd meant to give the federal government a power to do whatever is good for the country, we wouldn't have worded it in such an obscure way, followed it in the same sentence with a list of specific granted powers, [and then added an amendment spelling out that the federal government lacks unlimited power]." I don't think you can point to a single person in the Founders' generation who, before ratification (Hamilton changed his tune later), claimed there was an open-ended "general welfare" power and didn't oppose the Constitution on that ground.
You need to amend the Constitution if you think it's not well-suited to today's situation.
That's based on the assumption that the whole point is to do science, while we stay at home and watch it on TV.
Under Bush and a Republican Congress, we had a specific plan to get back to the Moon and on to Mars. Now under Obama and a Democratic Congress, we don't. It wasn't a very good plan, but there's still a difference.
Before rolling out revolutionary new products, Asus should work on its product quality and service. I'm writing this on the replacement eeePC they sent me after around five months and four service trips for the lemon they sold me.
AI researcher and music buff Douglas Hofstadter (of "Godel, Escher, Bach" and "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies") wrote a paper about his experience with another researcher's music program, EMI. Hofstadter made the same argument that truly great music depends on human emotion, and that a music composer AI would only imitate superficial things like frequently-used note patterns. He came away troubled, though, because EMI was able to copy deeper patterns and produce fairly decent imitations of dead composers' style. His AI research has focused on basic aspects of creativity and how to avoid ELIZA-like shallowness, so the thought of a composer producing worthwhile music without human-like experiences raises the disturbing question of whether music is really something "wrung from the depths of the soul" or something more formulaic and simplistic.
Wouldn't it be possible to set up a server on the user's own machine, and just have the game connect to 127.0.0.1?
As explained by the likes of John Locke, the idea of fundamental human rights stems from the idea that you are your own sole master -- or in a religious wording, that nobody can claim ownership over you but God. Therefore, if anyone kills you, or enslaves you, or forces you to work for their benefit, they've infringed on this ownership. This idea of life, liberty and property stands in sharp contrast to ideas like a "right to health care", because the modern "rights" necessarily involve using force to violate other people's lives, liberty or property. To grant your right to live -- that is, to not have anyone take your life by force -- all I have to do is not murder you. To grant your supposed right to health care, I have to work and let you take the product of my labor by force. Meaning that you claim partial ownership over my labor and my thoughts, independent of the practical argument that we must tax people to protect their rights against each other's aggression. To turn a "right to life" into a "right to take anything you need to live" has the same problem of innately violating other people's rights.
The fact that Americans are now divided by whether they accept what I (and our Founders) said is why we might, unfortunately, be headed for civil war.
Several US states wrote a right of secession into the documents by which they formally ratified the Constitution. Virginia's for instance says "that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression". And the first Congress didn't order them to go back and take that bit out...
The point of the post was that it's ultimately the 2nd Amendment that helps protect the rest.
"The American Revolution was not complete until 1865."
You mean, when we established by violence that the government does not "derive its just powers from the consent of the governed", and people do not have the right to separate their state/colony from a larger empire?
The movie version started with a voice-over prologue, which is a bad sign. Generally, if you feel you need to include one, you could be introducing the story's concepts in a clearer way, or your story is too complicated, or it's starting in the wrong place. That movie doesn't even get the characters to Dune for over half an hour!
And should the state violently force* its own people to submit to having their children indoctrinated into believing what you think they should believe?
*("police to escort them to classes")
The New World came pretty close to "uninhabitable" for white men for a while. For years, the Jamestown colony took in massive waves of immigrants, yet its population hardly increased.
Today the challenge is greater, but so is our technology. Surviving with 1600s European tech in the New World was very hard, and unprofitable for many years; surviving with 2000s American tech on Mars would be hard and unprofitable for many years. Not impossible in either case. Harder in some ways, obviously, but easier in others due to factors like lack of native diseases (or, presumably, hostile natives).
By the way, there's been successful research on growing plants in space. You could do it more easily in a Martian greenhouse.
Actually, those are directly related. Part of the reason NASA doesn't have the cash to boldly go, is that they're busy maintaining the ISS, a giant metal albatross. And when one person says "drop the thing and move on," another says "oh, it'd be a shame to waste it just as we're finishing construction".
Wow, Apple managed to invent the netbook only a couple years late for several hundred bucks more! Jobs' comments said that he wanted to establish a new class of device between smartphones and laptops. It's as though he was unaware that there's been such a category for years, and that it costs a lot less than $500, and that it doesn't lock you into one manufacturer's control so hard you can't even change the battery yourself.
The parent comment is right in that a lot of people will probably buy the thing, 'cause it's new and shiny and Apple made it. But it's an obviously inferior device as I see it.
(Now if only Asus will replace my $320 lemon eeePC now that I've mailed it in for repair for the fourth time...)
Summarized the article just says, "SF is good because it helps us think about stuff -- but not that icky lowbrow SF like Star Trek; that's practically porn."
That's not a fair distinction. The author dismisses Trek, which in the 60s had some ham-fisted attempts at an Important Message (mainly re: race), and puts "Avatar" in that category even though it has a (stupid, hypocritical) moral message too. So it's not having A Message that makes for the kind of SF the author likes. The article's more like a guide to making movies that will get whipped in profits by the latest Star Trek. For good or ill, I hear some people were deeply affected by "Avatar", so that sort of movie is capable of being deep and meaningful in some people's eyes.
I wrote an SF novel recently. There was supposed to be a Message in it. I'd read enough SF to know that making the Important Message blatant and heavy-handed is a way to ruin an otherwise decent story; famous example "Atlas Shrugged". What I found to be a good solution is to focus on being entertaining first, with plot and character being much more important than the Deep Philosophical Implications. The same group of characters could've been used to tell a story with a different message, if the character development had gone a different way ("This cause isn't worth killing over!"), and that's a good thing.
So, if anyone wants to apply the article's advice, they should interpret it as, "Write stories with meaningful takes on the possible future -- but they should be stories first."
(One bit of snootiness: I've got a theory that a way to describe character growth is a two-axis method. One axis is, "Can the hero find the strength to do what he's trying to do?" and the other, harder-to-write one is, "Is the hero questioning what he should do?" Simpler stories tend not to bother much with the second one, but overusing it gets angsty and annoying quickly.)
Interesting concept. Would it be plausible to have a nano-arm physically ripping the C off of CO2 molecules or doing some similar useful function? Obviously you'd need energy input... Just the other month there was that report of nano-scale imaging of a single molecule of pentene or a similar hydrocarbon, showing that the atoms really do sit around in something like the toy models chemists build. But (1) how would the arm grasp an atom -- with more atoms or some kind of electric field? And (2) could it just physically yank the atom away? I suspect the answer to (2) is yes, because that's basically what heat (random vibration of atoms) does, right? As for (1), that'd probably be a pain, because you can't exactly have the atoms touch the way that plastic-ball models can, and because you'd need different kinds of pincers/fields/whatever for different materials, to prevent them from bonding chemically to the arm.
During that "disasterous" period, DARPA made progress on the "Proto 1" and "Proto 2" cyborg arms, and the military (not sure if DARPA specifically) funded Bussard's "Polywell" fusion project.
Sounds like the premise of Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". Revolutionaries on the Moon take control of a mass driver and start flinging multi-ton barges at Earth, with just enough remote-control maneuvering that the shooters can call up Earth afterward and ask if they'd like to surrender.
Why? Because it's possible -- not saying it's true yet, mind you -- that just maybe the guards thought Watts was dangerous. And by Watts' own admission he first broke protocol for dealing with border guards (by getting out of the car), then violated a direct order by a law enforcement officer. So to leap without further evidence to the conclusion that the officers were being "gigantic dicks given excessive amounts of power" requires that you don't care what the guards thought was happening.
It's interesting to compare this incident to the "flying imams" event a few years back. I've read the police report of that, citing multiple passengers' and crewmembers' testimony. Should we have heard early articles saying "a couple of Muslims were thrown off a plane!" and said no more evidence is necessary; it's clearly the work of abusive, racist, anti-Muslim guards? (And no, I don't have reason to think Watts was nearly as alarming as the imams.)
My point is: would you accept at face value, without even needing to hear Homeland Security's side, the account of a guy who is known for being particularly vocal about the evils of Homeland Security?
The opposite hasty generalization? A couple posts upstream someone said, "I think I'd like to hear both sides of the story before I decide." Is that the same as, "He must've deserved it"?
It sounds like the facts aren't all in yet, so let's not leap to conclusions. We're hearing the account of Cory Doctorow -- who in his novel "Little Brother" had an obvious axe to grind against Homeland Security and law enforcement, to the point of suggesting "9/11 was an inside job". (Says one of the leaflets dropped by the novel's heroic protesters.) We're also hearing second-hand from Watts and the other people in the car. We're not yet hearing the guards' account. Maybe Doctorow et. al. are completely right, but let's not assume so right off the bat, eh?
The Doctorow account quotes Watts saying that he got out of his car when questioned (mistake #1), then refused the order to get back in (mistake #2). No, of course that doesn't justify a beating. It just suggests we don't have the whole story.
Wait, eInk has screen savers? I thought part of the point was that it required no charge to maintain an image. Does an eInk screen suffer from burn-in like a CRT?
In fact, part of the information allegedly taken from these researchers is source code, and it's revealing. It helps reveal the significance of an e-mail about a "trick" done with the data.