Sisyphus

"Leftists?" What the hell are you talking about? This is PURELY a free-market issue. They stopped selling it (or apparently, according to Pangloss, just renamed some items) because of bad press. Nobody made them.

Pro and con compared to what?

I very much doubt there has ever been a terrestrial vertebrate species whose range rivaled ours. And in a geological timeframe, we have only been so "dominant" for an extremely short period. So it's too early to say if humanity's rise is a stable shift, or if it's just a freak population explosion that dies off as quickly as it multiplied. Thinking of it as an explosion is actually apt in other ways, now that I think about it. Our unprecedented reign has also coincided with a mass extinction of other species at a rate exceeding even the greatest mass extinctions of the past, like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

No. The big one is that he's an elected leader. So no WMDs means they're not a threat, no sponsorship for terrorism means they're not a hostile nation, and the fact that they already have elections means there's nobody to "liberate," because the government they have now IS the one they want. Yet Pat Robertson types can't understand why we don't send somebody down there to assassinate Chavez. (BTW, I'm not disputing your basic premise is right about liberals being hypocritical in the stuff they let slide just because he's a "liberal," too.)

I hope your implication is that it's Sean Penn and not I who find it "perfectly acceptable." I don't like him and I imagine he would probably like to be a de facto dictator, but he's still in power directly because of his continuing popularity, and they do have elections which obviously are not rigged. So I do consider him a legitimate leader, which is why the far right mutterings of assassination or regime change are more disturbing to me than the far left's admiration.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I'm not saying it can't happen, but we simply don't know enough about what intelligence really is and how it works to predict how easy or difficult "exponential increases" would actually be, or even whether the phrase has meaning. Personally, I think crazy intelligence enhancement is a lot like the flying car: always right around the corner...

I know there have been experiments detecting the effects of GR on the scale of ~10km. I don't know whether there have been any more precise than that.

Hopefully it will also shut up those claiming Venezuelan elections are illegitimate, a la Saddam Hussein's 2002 "reelection." Chavez is a shameless populist who's managed to consolidate far too much power, but it's still a democracy and he's not a dictator. Take that, Bill O'Reilly, you freaking moron.

This thread is rapidly de-evolving.

Yes, yes, we've been sending our weak down to Miami for decades now. It's considered more humane then leaving them to die of exposure, Spartan style.

Sorry, what lies, exactly?

So wait, Obama is proposing delaying one particular (albeit prominent) NASA program by five years. Is that all?

You should favor clarity over seeming profundity in your questions. I really don't know what you mean by "we are collecting ourselves," nor by "applicable to physics." I also don't know what the statement that we hear vibrations has to do with anything. However, if I had to guess what you mean (and I shouldn't have to), then I would suppose you are asking about living beings' process of taking in outside matter and incorporating it into ourselves, and how much of the metabolic functions of life can be broadly characterized by "holding everything together." IF that is the case, then there is a "physicsy" description of that in the concept of entropy. A living being, basically, is a localized pocket of negative entropy, albeit necessarily causing positive entropy in its environment. It actively maintains and replicates an unstable configuration of matter, a steady temperature despite its varying differentials, etc.

Also, since when is wood construction not everywhere already?

I'd say it's inevitable that group mentality wins out, just because of the principle of "might is right." Pretty much any individual's power ultimately derives from the consent of a large group of people, and so on some level all power is achieved by persuading groups. Some, like elected officials, make this more obvious, and some, like military leadership, are less so, but I think the principle still holds, albeit removed a couple steps. Why do underlings obey the general? That's why it does happen, I think, but luckily it happens to usually be a good thing. "Mob mentality" is the dark side, but consensus is a crucial part of all sorts of endeavors, as many eyes watching and many minds independently considering the same subject means the bad is less likely to slip through, and the good can be synthesized together. Peer-review science journals harness this principle, for example. Wikipedia demonstrates its effectiveness in its purest and least controlled state.

I dunno, not ALL writers make that much money, you know. Some depend very much on residuals for survival. Also, is whether they need the money relevant to whether or not they deserve it? BTW, I'm undecided about this whole thing, since both sides make a very good case. Incidentally, Conan O'Brien is paying his show's production staff their full salaries out of his own pocket for the duration of the strike. It's not relevant to discussion, but I think he deserves as much credit for being a class act as possible.

And yet we have a far lower crime rate than just about any other big city in the United States. "New York City Behavior" works very well for New York City. It's tough and alert, but also the most "live and let live" attitude you'll find anywhere, which is really the only way you can stay sane in a place as dense, fast-paced, unpredictable, and diverse (in every sense) as New York. But I guess it's our role to be misunderstood and judged from afar by Floridians and such who like to simultaneously complain about how we look down on them. Jerk.

The stupefyingly influential Oprah has endorsed Barak Obama, saying, among other things, that he is the best choice for feminists. I'm beginning to think he's the candidate to beat now, replacing Clinton. NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/us/politics/02women.html?hp http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/fashion/02oprah.html?hp

The OP, paraphrased: We don't A, therefore we shouldn't A. So why do we A? Huh?

Seconded YT's and Severian's objections. Also, who the hell thinks the astronauts on the moon were weightless?

I'd just like to point out that ANY velocity that's less than escape velocity can be orbital velocity, if you don't specify anything else. I have noticed, however, that most people get annoyed when their orbits intersect the surface. Will that be a problem for you, as well?

Events probably would have unfolded exactly the same, but I'd give Gandalf major credit for staying calm (deadpan, even) under fire.

What ways might those be?

Because putting a man on the moon is much easier than curing the common cold?

They're all true! Of course, I was actually there, so your answers will be different.