"The process of creating the sensor involves printing carbon nanotubes on paper or "paper-like" materials, such as the plastic polyethylene terephthalate. The ink consists of silver nanoparticles held in an emulsion that can be passed through an ink-jet printer at a temperature of only 212 F (100 C). This ink is treated with ultrasonic waves in a process known as sonification, which alters the viscosity and makes the ink more homogeneous for greater effectiveness. As it sets, the ink forms into nanoscale cylinders called nanotubes. These are only one-billionth of a meter in diameter-about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. When these nanotubes are coated with a conductive polymer that attracts ammonia it becomes an effective explosives sensor capable of detecting trace amounts of ammonia as low as five parts per million. With different coatings, the nanotubes can detect other gases."
Yeah, nothing more interesting than a variant of the old copper circuit board in this article.
Good point. I have no mod points, but I can loan my karma.
My first thought was that it was some disturbance in the air between the photographer and the clouds causing diffraction that made the cloud appear to warp, but the ice crystal explanation seems to fit the picture better. It does remind me of pictures I've seen of ice halos - but I never heard they could "move" like that.
In other words, "Just world fallacy FTMFW bitches!"
I keep hearing the phrase "just world fallacy" lately. Is it possible there's an "injust world fallacy" out there as well? Or maybe just on slashdot? Everything I hear here seems to be about how horrible and unjust things are everywhere.
Because the majority of us would rather be allowed to make our own way in the world and don't want to be subsidized by the rich. Some of us accept that there will be people who are capable of more and have more stuff in their lives even though we are not in that position. We want to have the ability to become filthy rich ourselves and don't have any ill will against those who were capable of doing so.
I've heard this sermon before. I don't subscribe to the smooth garden path of deserving. It goes hand in hand with evolution denial. In order for complexity on the scale of life to arise from a hot, uncaring universe, you need a mechanism of symmetry breaking--there has to be some detour on the rapid descent to maximum entropy.
Once you accept that symmetry breaking is a powerful force in the universe, it becomes easier to understand the diffuse relationship between merit and prosperity. Of those who try equally hard and well, the lucky marbles go up, the rest go down; tiny ratchets of winner-take-all determine the distribution of mass and money in the known universe.
Many wealthy people will concede that their spectacular success once hung by a thin thread of caprice.
Warren Buffet distinguished himself though his feats of acumen (and petty monopoly), but none so great as to surmount having parents of Eritrean nationality. If you put two ants on an elastic string heading left to right and then pull the ends apart with equal motion, the determined ant on the left for all his local progress still falls backward.
How much is the ant and how much the elastic? There's more to this story than virtuous ant sermons.
While we're all impressed at your use of big words, I don't think GP was implying that the current distribution of wealth was 100% based on merit. I don't think it's 100% luck either, tho. Warren Buffet's wealth doesn't make me poorer. There are finite resources in the world, but for the most part wealth is created, and it isn't created by sitting around collecting unemployment (no offense to those who do so - I understand people are unavoidably put in that situation sometimes)
Apparently, they define wealth as basically net worth - assets minus liabilities. Well, how much of the 99% actually has a NEGATIVE net worth, and does that drag down the numbers?
Well, how the hell ELSE would you define wealth? Is your point that people with a negative net worth shouldn't count? Of course, everyone is pretty rich... as long as you exclude everyone who's, you know, not rich.
It may be that by this measure the top 50% has more wealth than the whole country put together. Be outraged! You're part of the 100% that has less money than the top 50%!
WTF does this even mean?
Dude, seriously, think before you post. I know, this is Slashdot, I must be new here, etc.
My point was that some (I suspect most) of the debt in this country is voluntary. I had a student loan at one point in my life, but I made sure it was relatively small because the terms sucked. I paid it off quickly after graduating. I sympathize with people who are not able to pay theirs off as quickly, but that is a risk you take in getting a loan. I believe most Americans could live just fine without getting mortgages and loans and incurring credit card interest. I even believe most people would EVENTUALLY have a better standard of living by doing so - they just have to accept a lower standard of living up front. I include myself in this - I hope I don't sound like I'm talking down. I also know I would be healthier in the long run if I ate less and exercised more.
Regarding my math, I'll try to explain what I mean. I'm not suggesting they define wealth differently, I'm just trying to interpret the numbers. When I drive down the road and hear that 1% of people own 50% of the wealth, I look around and think... they surely don't own 50% of the cars. 50% of the land? 50% of the money in banks? It just doesn't sound very plausible. I don't have the data from the study but yes, I would like to know how the numbers come out if they count negative net worth as zero because including negative numbers can give weird results.
For example, let's say your wealth is $900,000 and mine is $100,000. Between the two of us, then, you have $900k/($900k+$100) = 90% of the wealth. But if you have $900k and I have negative $100k, I *could* say you have $900k/($900k - $100k) = 112.5% of the wealth, but to me it would make more sense to just say you have 100%. They do a similar thing when calculating Gini coefficient - they throw out negative incomes.
Now in the 1% study, maybe they did zero out negative wealth. I don't know for sure one way or the other (If anyone knows for sure, I'd like to hear).
There, I took some more time to think and as a result I'm posting later in the day and probably no one will ever read this.
The way to cut the head off the snake is to only fund degrees useful to society and let hobbyists find money for their amusements.
I don't agree that only science, technology, engineering and math are useful to society. Take law for example, as much as we love to hate lawyers, they are a necessary part of society. I might argue that a law degree is more useful to society than a math degree. I love math, but it's the application of math to science and technology that is generally useful. As far as I know, we haven't found any practical application for Noetherian rings yet. Even if we all did agree on what degrees were most useful, I would disagree with having the government pay for those degrees.
Also, I don't get your metaphor. What exactly is this "snake" that needs it's head cut off?
Some quotes from the article that stood out to me:
Giving validation to Occupy Wall Street protests over the increasing burdens of student debt, a new report indicates that the total amount of outstanding student loans this year will exceed $1 trillion for the first time.
I’ve ruined my family because I tried to rise above my class
I was very skeptical of this "1% of the population owns over half the wealth" claim, so I read a little about the study that came from. Apparently, they define wealth as basically net worth - assets minus liabilities. Well, how much of the 99% actually has a NEGATIVE net worth, and does that drag down the numbers? It may be that by this measure the top 50% has more wealth than the whole country put together. Be outraged! You're part of the 100% that has less money than the top 50%!
Like all govt interference in the free market, the colleges will all raise their prices by $8000 in response
This inference is so stupid I gave up my mod points in this article just to point out that the inference you are making is COLOSALLY stupid. Like most glibertarian shibboleths, it has zero basis in fact.
You may disagree, but I think vim is right about that cause and effect - if a significant percentage of college entrants have subsidies, the price of tuition will tend to increase. Colleges are going to tend to charge as much as they can get away with, and that's not necessarily a bad thing - they want good salaries to attract good teachers and have good lab equipment. It's not "glib" to point out these tradeoffs. Most debated issues involve tradeoffs.
It's exactly that, a necessity. I'm not sure why you are comparing it to the death penalty..well that's not true, I do know. It's because you're an ignorant ass.
If you want people to participate in society, then they need communication tools. And since rural area aren't profitable enough to corporation, the government gives them money specifically so rural area can participate.
I live in a rural area and the best speed I can get is 1.5mbps dsl. I used to get wdsl from a local provider but it was very unreliable. I have much slower speeds than people in town, but it's my choice. It doesn't keep me from "participating in society". We have several computers/devices in the house and the biggest hardship we have is that we can only have one video stream going at a time. I feel like I'm fully participating in the internet society - I bank online, buy stuff online, watch netflix, my children create videos and game levels and share them. I just don't see the need for a subsidy. If I weren't into gaming, and could live with a the lag, I might have gone with satellite, which offers comparable speeds to what I have now. There may still be places that can't get DSL, but as far as I know, there is nowhere in the country where you can't get satellite.
You know, every time I hear various parties say "get government out of business" and all that, I think "okay... maybe... but some regulation is needed because when there isn't, big business ends up raping the country." But then again, I never heard parties say "we need government to stop giving subsidies to business..."
I think the next time I see the argument "keep government out of business" I will ask what their position is on subsidies to business is.
As it turns out, there are far more subsidies going on than any of us are collectively aware of. I am well aware of corn subsidies and the like, but telephone subsidies? That's news. Seems the phone business is a huge public rapist and they are getting subsidies too?
Yeah, it's time to stop paying the rapists.
You make a good point, and many conservatives would agree with you. Subsidies aren't free market. If you subsidize something, that will tend to cause more production than the free market would dictate. The consumers will buy more and pay a lower price, while the producers sell more at a higher price. It almost sounds good except that the subsidy has to come out of the consumers' pockets in some way, so they (as a group) are actually paying more than they would have for something they wouldn't have wanted (or wanted that much of) at that price. It will typically work out to income redistribution. The people who pay more taxes are funding the lower prices for everyone and the increased profits for the subsidized businesses.
Reminds me of Doom 3. I was looking forward to trying it out just for the stunning visuals, but after reading the reviews, I think I'll wait 6 mo and see if the price goes down. Id is good at making engines, but they aren't the only ones who can. I don't think a lot of people used id tech 4. I wonder, have we reached a point where the graphics are just "good enough", and people care more about gameplay than rendering improvements?
I should thank you for giving me the opportunity to brag about myself a bit....
My point was basically to be humble enough to question yourself. There's an old joke that someone with a B.S. degree thinks they know everything, someone with a M.S. knows they don't know anything, and someone with a Ph.D. knows they don't know anything -- but neither does anyone else. You may write me off as a "useless twit", but I am a good programmer, and I am good at learning foreign languages (and BTW, I suspect those two skills are related).
Try deleting one of the other and seeing whether the statement still holds.
Okay: "Organizations like to pretend they are the font of moral wisdom, but history simply doesn't bear that truth out. That stance is merely a pretense to control their flock, to get them to do what they want them to do".
Yup, sounds good to me.
You don't need to have religion to think you are a font of moral wisdom, as evidenced by about half the posts in this thread.
On the Abraham story, there's a few important details that often get left out. First of all, recall that when Isaac was conceived Abraham was 99 years old and his wife was 90. Previously they were unable to conceive and his wife laughed when an angel told her she would have a son. The only reason they had that child at all was due to a miracle. Later in the Bible it was pointed out that Abraham saw a kind of resurrection regarding his and his wife's reproductive abilities. So through that experience Abraham knew that by extension God had the ability to raise the dead.
Secondly, God had promised Abraham that his family would grow to a huge number and that it would be through that same son Isaac that it would happen.
This only explains that Abraham had reason to believe his son would be raised up if he did kill him as God commanded. But it doesn't excuse the abhorrence of the command that was given.
The third part, which is very crucial is that the story is intended to offend. It's in the Bible for a very good reason, not to teach us "Kill your kids for God" but to make you think "That's terrible! I would never kill my kid for anyone!" Because you're supposed to feel that, you're supposed to be angry and then you're supposed to learn that Abraham and Isaac foreshadowed Jesus' sacrifice when his father sent him down to earth knowing exactly how it would end.
It's supposed to teach us a little bit of empathy and have an appreciation that it wasn't an easy thing for even God himself to do. That's why immediately after Jesus died there were earthquakes that threw the dead out of their graves, the sun blacked out and the huge curtain in the temple was ripped in half. He was actually holding back but letting us know that "Yes I felt that".
So Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son but didn't have to go through with it. God was willing to sacrifice his son for us, and did go through with it. That's the lesson.
People tend to look at the Bible stories as all having a moral and as if all actions of the "good guys" are sanctioned by default if they are not explicitly condemned. I believe many of the stories are just intended to be records of events. The point isn't that you *should* be willing to kill if God tells you to, but that Abraham *was* willing to give up his own son for God, and for Christians it ties into the fact that God *did* give up his son for humanity in general. It is also relevant to Abraham's character, and the story in general, that in other cultures at the time people would sacrifice their children to appease gods, so in historical context the request is not as shocking and the fact that God stops the sacrifice shows him as being a different God than people were used to at the time.
A future economy which has essentially eliminated the scarcity and/or labor cost of material needs requires full scale automation of agriculture and manufacturing. This is at odds with two shibboleths of society: the family farm and unions. The former can't afford to automate (and it would ruin their bucolic romanticism if they did), and the latter is fundamentally opposed to it on the grounds that it would be outside of the immediate best interests of their constituency and their own organizational existence.
The other aspect that people don't want to have to face is... whither stupidity? If we automate all the labor-intensive work that fuels the essential material needs of civilization, what are we going to do with all the janitors and nut-tighteners? Is it truly optimal to create a future economy where perhaps less than 30% of people do useful work and more than 70% of people who are too dumb for anything else simply wander around between bread and circuses provided by their robot slaves?
There are solutions to the problem, but not ones that people are likely to accept (anymore than they would the transition). We are rapidly approaching a point where we could genetically engineer a more intelligent baseline and institute controls on having unmodified children, but the masses would scream "eugenics!" and out would come the pitchforks. (Being a libertarian I too would be opposed to an imposition on the right of private persons to have children on their own terms.)
So your utopian economy is more or less impossible in the current social reality. Maybe a few generations after the singularity when people are more used to the positive aspects of genetic modification it might be possible.
RE: whither stupidity... I encourage people when they talk about "the average Joe", "the general populace", "the sheeple", or more derogatory terms I often see in this forum -- take an honest look at yourself and ask how sure are you that you're not one of them. Are you sure you're not just in a smaller flock? Case in point - if all society's needs are taken care of by technology you ask what do we do with the "stupid" people? You should also consider, how many engineers would we need ongoing? Who is going to pay you to invent when we already have everything we need? You may be in a worse spot than the people tightening nuts on all the machines.
No, nothing so extreme in the other direction either. How about, oh say putting up a non-troll image that represents Windows. Say the four color window icon.
Have you seen the windows topic icon? It's not much better.
How do they draw this conclusion from a single fossil? Couldn't it have been a deformed human? There are still humans born with the occasional pre-humanoid traits, like tails.
FTA:
But palaeontologists are not all agreed on precisely what the new analysis is telling us - or, indeed, whether it is telling us anything definitive at all.
"I do not think that these findings add anything new to our view," said Prof Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, who was not connected to the study.
Please don't mod me informative just for quoting the original article.
I would imagine the rate will speed up exponentially. IANAA (I am not an astronomer), but as the mass of the exoplanet decreases, so does the gravitational hold on its material. So, I hypothesize that a continuous rate of mass stripping will increase over time the amount of mass that gets removed. I guess you can think of it like a piece of melting ice: under a continuous amount of heat, which will melt at a faster rate, an ice cube or a small ice chip?
OTOH, as the size of the planet decreases there is less surface area being hit by x rays. But really how much do the astronomers even know about what IS happening now? They can measure the x-ray intensity of the star, they can probably measure the orbit of the planet (from the period) and the mass (from the effect on the star), but I would assume they have to guess at the size and composition of the planet, and I would think those would be relevant in determining the effect the xrays would have.
Slashdot Mirror
"The process of creating the sensor involves printing carbon nanotubes on paper or "paper-like" materials, such as the plastic polyethylene terephthalate. The ink consists of silver nanoparticles held in an emulsion that can be passed through an ink-jet printer at a temperature of only 212 F (100 C). This ink is treated with ultrasonic waves in a process known as sonification, which alters the viscosity and makes the ink more homogeneous for greater effectiveness. As it sets, the ink forms into nanoscale cylinders called nanotubes. These are only one-billionth of a meter in diameter-about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. When these nanotubes are coated with a conductive polymer that attracts ammonia it becomes an effective explosives sensor capable of detecting trace amounts of ammonia as low as five parts per million. With different coatings, the nanotubes can detect other gases."
Yeah, nothing more interesting than a variant of the old copper circuit board in this article.
Good point. I have no mod points, but I can loan my karma.
My first thought was that it was some disturbance in the air between the photographer and the clouds causing diffraction that made the cloud appear to warp, but the ice crystal explanation seems to fit the picture better. It does remind me of pictures I've seen of ice halos - but I never heard they could "move" like that.
In other words, "Just world fallacy FTMFW bitches!"
I keep hearing the phrase "just world fallacy" lately. Is it possible there's an "injust world fallacy" out there as well? Or maybe just on slashdot? Everything I hear here seems to be about how horrible and unjust things are everywhere.
I've heard this sermon before. I don't subscribe to the smooth garden path of deserving. It goes hand in hand with evolution denial. In order for complexity on the scale of life to arise from a hot, uncaring universe, you need a mechanism of symmetry breaking--there has to be some detour on the rapid descent to maximum entropy.
Once you accept that symmetry breaking is a powerful force in the universe, it becomes easier to understand the diffuse relationship between merit and prosperity. Of those who try equally hard and well, the lucky marbles go up, the rest go down; tiny ratchets of winner-take-all determine the distribution of mass and money in the known universe.
Many wealthy people will concede that their spectacular success once hung by a thin thread of caprice.
Warren Buffet distinguished himself though his feats of acumen (and petty monopoly), but none so great as to surmount having parents of Eritrean nationality. If you put two ants on an elastic string heading left to right and then pull the ends apart with equal motion, the determined ant on the left for all his local progress still falls backward.
How much is the ant and how much the elastic? There's more to this story than virtuous ant sermons.
While we're all impressed at your use of big words, I don't think GP was implying that the current distribution of wealth was 100% based on merit. I don't think it's 100% luck either, tho. Warren Buffet's wealth doesn't make me poorer. There are finite resources in the world, but for the most part wealth is created, and it isn't created by sitting around collecting unemployment (no offense to those who do so - I understand people are unavoidably put in that situation sometimes)
... on Slashdot, and that's saying something.
Well, how the hell ELSE would you define wealth? Is your point that people with a negative net worth shouldn't count? Of course, everyone is pretty rich... as long as you exclude everyone who's, you know, not rich.
WTF does this even mean?
Dude, seriously, think before you post. I know, this is Slashdot, I must be new here, etc.
My point was that some (I suspect most) of the debt in this country is voluntary. I had a student loan at one point in my life, but I made sure it was relatively small because the terms sucked. I paid it off quickly after graduating. I sympathize with people who are not able to pay theirs off as quickly, but that is a risk you take in getting a loan. I believe most Americans could live just fine without getting mortgages and loans and incurring credit card interest. I even believe most people would EVENTUALLY have a better standard of living by doing so - they just have to accept a lower standard of living up front. I include myself in this - I hope I don't sound like I'm talking down. I also know I would be healthier in the long run if I ate less and exercised more.
Regarding my math, I'll try to explain what I mean. I'm not suggesting they define wealth differently, I'm just trying to interpret the numbers. When I drive down the road and hear that 1% of people own 50% of the wealth, I look around and think ... they surely don't own 50% of the cars. 50% of the land? 50% of the money in banks? It just doesn't sound very plausible. I don't have the data from the study but yes, I would like to know how the numbers come out if they count negative net worth as zero because including negative numbers can give weird results.
For example, let's say your wealth is $900,000 and mine is $100,000. Between the two of us, then, you have $900k/($900k+$100) = 90% of the wealth. But if you have $900k and I have negative $100k, I *could* say you have $900k/($900k - $100k) = 112.5% of the wealth, but to me it would make more sense to just say you have 100%. They do a similar thing when calculating Gini coefficient - they throw out negative incomes.
Now in the 1% study, maybe they did zero out negative wealth. I don't know for sure one way or the other (If anyone knows for sure, I'd like to hear).
There, I took some more time to think and as a result I'm posting later in the day and probably no one will ever read this.
The way to cut the head off the snake is to only fund degrees useful to society and let hobbyists find money for their amusements.
I don't agree that only science, technology, engineering and math are useful to society. Take law for example, as much as we love to hate lawyers, they are a necessary part of society. I might argue that a law degree is more useful to society than a math degree. I love math, but it's the application of math to science and technology that is generally useful. As far as I know, we haven't found any practical application for Noetherian rings yet. Even if we all did agree on what degrees were most useful, I would disagree with having the government pay for those degrees.
Also, I don't get your metaphor. What exactly is this "snake" that needs it's head cut off?
Some quotes from the article that stood out to me:
Giving validation to Occupy Wall Street protests over the increasing burdens of student debt, a new report indicates that the total amount of outstanding student loans this year will exceed $1 trillion for the first time.
I’ve ruined my family because I tried to rise above my class
I was very skeptical of this "1% of the population owns over half the wealth" claim, so I read a little about the study that came from. Apparently, they define wealth as basically net worth - assets minus liabilities. Well, how much of the 99% actually has a NEGATIVE net worth, and does that drag down the numbers? It may be that by this measure the top 50% has more wealth than the whole country put together. Be outraged! You're part of the 100% that has less money than the top 50%!
Inter-continental Ballistic Monkey
"I C what you did there." plus thinking objectively he had class
You're thinking of Stroustrup.
This inference is so stupid I gave up my mod points in this article just to point out that the inference you are making is COLOSALLY stupid. Like most glibertarian shibboleths, it has zero basis in fact.
You may disagree, but I think vim is right about that cause and effect - if a significant percentage of college entrants have subsidies, the price of tuition will tend to increase. Colleges are going to tend to charge as much as they can get away with, and that's not necessarily a bad thing - they want good salaries to attract good teachers and have good lab equipment. It's not "glib" to point out these tradeoffs. Most debated issues involve tradeoffs.
It's exactly that, a necessity. I'm not sure why you are comparing it to the death penalty..well that's not true, I do know. It's because you're an ignorant ass.
If you want people to participate in society, then they need communication tools. And since rural area aren't profitable enough to corporation, the government gives them money specifically so rural area can participate.
I live in a rural area and the best speed I can get is 1.5mbps dsl. I used to get wdsl from a local provider but it was very unreliable. I have much slower speeds than people in town, but it's my choice. It doesn't keep me from "participating in society". We have several computers/devices in the house and the biggest hardship we have is that we can only have one video stream going at a time. I feel like I'm fully participating in the internet society - I bank online, buy stuff online, watch netflix, my children create videos and game levels and share them. I just don't see the need for a subsidy. If I weren't into gaming, and could live with a the lag, I might have gone with satellite, which offers comparable speeds to what I have now. There may still be places that can't get DSL, but as far as I know, there is nowhere in the country where you can't get satellite.
You know, every time I hear various parties say "get government out of business" and all that, I think "okay... maybe... but some regulation is needed because when there isn't, big business ends up raping the country." But then again, I never heard parties say "we need government to stop giving subsidies to business..."
I think the next time I see the argument "keep government out of business" I will ask what their position is on subsidies to business is.
As it turns out, there are far more subsidies going on than any of us are collectively aware of. I am well aware of corn subsidies and the like, but telephone subsidies? That's news. Seems the phone business is a huge public rapist and they are getting subsidies too?
Yeah, it's time to stop paying the rapists.
You make a good point, and many conservatives would agree with you. Subsidies aren't free market. If you subsidize something, that will tend to cause more production than the free market would dictate. The consumers will buy more and pay a lower price, while the producers sell more at a higher price. It almost sounds good except that the subsidy has to come out of the consumers' pockets in some way, so they (as a group) are actually paying more than they would have for something they wouldn't have wanted (or wanted that much of) at that price. It will typically work out to income redistribution. The people who pay more taxes are funding the lower prices for everyone and the increased profits for the subsidized businesses.
... this proves that the ozone problem is bipolar.
Reminds me of Doom 3. I was looking forward to trying it out just for the stunning visuals, but after reading the reviews, I think I'll wait 6 mo and see if the price goes down. Id is good at making engines, but they aren't the only ones who can. I don't think a lot of people used id tech 4. I wonder, have we reached a point where the graphics are just "good enough", and people care more about gameplay than rendering improvements?
I should thank you for giving me the opportunity to brag about myself a bit. ...
My point was basically to be humble enough to question yourself. There's an old joke that someone with a B.S. degree thinks they know everything, someone with a M.S. knows they don't know anything, and someone with a Ph.D. knows they don't know anything -- but neither does anyone else. You may write me off as a "useless twit", but I am a good programmer, and I am good at learning foreign languages (and BTW, I suspect those two skills are related).
Let's just say they are exactly the same except for the differences, and leave it at that.
No, it's "religion".
Try deleting one of the other and seeing whether the statement still holds.
Okay: "Organizations like to pretend they are the font of moral wisdom, but history simply doesn't bear that truth out. That stance is merely a pretense to control their flock, to get them to do what they want them to do".
Yup, sounds good to me.
You don't need to have religion to think you are a font of moral wisdom, as evidenced by about half the posts in this thread.
On the Abraham story, there's a few important details that often get left out. First of all, recall that when Isaac was conceived Abraham was 99 years old and his wife was 90. Previously they were unable to conceive and his wife laughed when an angel told her she would have a son. The only reason they had that child at all was due to a miracle. Later in the Bible it was pointed out that Abraham saw a kind of resurrection regarding his and his wife's reproductive abilities. So through that experience Abraham knew that by extension God had the ability to raise the dead.
Secondly, God had promised Abraham that his family would grow to a huge number and that it would be through that same son Isaac that it would happen.
This only explains that Abraham had reason to believe his son would be raised up if he did kill him as God commanded. But it doesn't excuse the abhorrence of the command that was given.
The third part, which is very crucial is that the story is intended to offend. It's in the Bible for a very good reason, not to teach us "Kill your kids for God" but to make you think "That's terrible! I would never kill my kid for anyone!" Because you're supposed to feel that, you're supposed to be angry and then you're supposed to learn that Abraham and Isaac foreshadowed Jesus' sacrifice when his father sent him down to earth knowing exactly how it would end.
It's supposed to teach us a little bit of empathy and have an appreciation that it wasn't an easy thing for even God himself to do. That's why immediately after Jesus died there were earthquakes that threw the dead out of their graves, the sun blacked out and the huge curtain in the temple was ripped in half. He was actually holding back but letting us know that "Yes I felt that".
So Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son but didn't have to go through with it. God was willing to sacrifice his son for us, and did go through with it. That's the lesson.
People tend to look at the Bible stories as all having a moral and as if all actions of the "good guys" are sanctioned by default if they are not explicitly condemned. I believe many of the stories are just intended to be records of events. The point isn't that you *should* be willing to kill if God tells you to, but that Abraham *was* willing to give up his own son for God, and for Christians it ties into the fact that God *did* give up his son for humanity in general. It is also relevant to Abraham's character, and the story in general, that in other cultures at the time people would sacrifice their children to appease gods, so in historical context the request is not as shocking and the fact that God stops the sacrifice shows him as being a different God than people were used to at the time.
A future economy which has essentially eliminated the scarcity and/or labor cost of material needs requires full scale automation of agriculture and manufacturing. This is at odds with two shibboleths of society: the family farm and unions. The former can't afford to automate (and it would ruin their bucolic romanticism if they did), and the latter is fundamentally opposed to it on the grounds that it would be outside of the immediate best interests of their constituency and their own organizational existence. The other aspect that people don't want to have to face is... whither stupidity? If we automate all the labor-intensive work that fuels the essential material needs of civilization, what are we going to do with all the janitors and nut-tighteners? Is it truly optimal to create a future economy where perhaps less than 30% of people do useful work and more than 70% of people who are too dumb for anything else simply wander around between bread and circuses provided by their robot slaves? There are solutions to the problem, but not ones that people are likely to accept (anymore than they would the transition). We are rapidly approaching a point where we could genetically engineer a more intelligent baseline and institute controls on having unmodified children, but the masses would scream "eugenics!" and out would come the pitchforks. (Being a libertarian I too would be opposed to an imposition on the right of private persons to have children on their own terms.) So your utopian economy is more or less impossible in the current social reality. Maybe a few generations after the singularity when people are more used to the positive aspects of genetic modification it might be possible.
RE: whither stupidity ... I encourage people when they talk about "the average Joe", "the general populace", "the sheeple", or more derogatory terms I often see in this forum -- take an honest look at yourself and ask how sure are you that you're not one of them. Are you sure you're not just in a smaller flock? Case in point - if all society's needs are taken care of by technology you ask what do we do with the "stupid" people? You should also consider, how many engineers would we need ongoing? Who is going to pay you to invent when we already have everything we need? You may be in a worse spot than the people tightening nuts on all the machines.
No, nothing so extreme in the other direction either. How about, oh say putting up a non-troll image that represents Windows. Say the four color window icon.
Have you seen the windows topic icon? It's not much better.
I know haters will hate and Slashdotters love to hate Microsoft, but honestly, what the hell does open source tools have to do with the Borg Face?
That sounds like something the Borg would say.
FTA:
The perfect union between Star Trek and Star Wars would be if Captain Kirk and Princess Leia were to ran off together pursued by Chewbakka.
So in conclusion ... Bill Shatner was high?
I refuse to believe liberals and conservatives can interbreed. If there was a resulting hybrid offspring it would most certainly be sterile.
Arnold Schwartzenegger and Maria Shriver
How do they draw this conclusion from a single fossil? Couldn't it have been a deformed human? There are still humans born with the occasional pre-humanoid traits, like tails.
FTA:
But palaeontologists are not all agreed on precisely what the new analysis is telling us - or, indeed, whether it is telling us anything definitive at all.
"I do not think that these findings add anything new to our view," said Prof Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, who was not connected to the study.
Please don't mod me informative just for quoting the original article.
I would imagine the rate will speed up exponentially. IANAA (I am not an astronomer), but as the mass of the exoplanet decreases, so does the gravitational hold on its material. So, I hypothesize that a continuous rate of mass stripping will increase over time the amount of mass that gets removed. I guess you can think of it like a piece of melting ice: under a continuous amount of heat, which will melt at a faster rate, an ice cube or a small ice chip?
OTOH, as the size of the planet decreases there is less surface area being hit by x rays. But really how much do the astronomers even know about what IS happening now? They can measure the x-ray intensity of the star, they can probably measure the orbit of the planet (from the period) and the mass (from the effect on the star), but I would assume they have to guess at the size and composition of the planet, and I would think those would be relevant in determining the effect the xrays would have.