I have to disagree about women fighting over the alpha males. Not all women are that attractive, so in a free-for-all society, the most desirable people of both sexes are probably going to want to spend their time with each other. Why would the alpha males want to run around banging every homely chick who asks? So those women will be forced to start looking at alternatives unless they want to be celibate.

It is also an excellent way to enforce the equality that is so important to large ant like societies. To sustain a large ant like society we need ways to turn individuals into cogs, I would hazard that marriage does this.

Well given that monogamous marriage has mostly failed these days for various reasons, do you have any thoughts about how future society needs to develop?

"Monoblock" or "the primordial monoblock" is a term for the presumed state of the presumed material comprising the presumed universe just before it presumably exploded. Everything, no exceptions, including space itself, all in one tiny... something, (tiny with respect to... something), that did.... something, and then [waves hands] Big Bang! Try this google search.

Science can trace the expansion of the universe backwards quite a ways, within the bounds of our understanding of physics as it stands and it makes sense, albeit some very strange and difficult to swallow sense. But go back far enough, and a point is reached where our physics simply do not serve to describe the previous state. At all.

I liken it to tracing a pitched ball backwards, not having been around to witness the pitch, but analyzing the arc of its trajectory and theorizing that the ball erupted spontaneously from the ground in order to arrive where it is. We can't account for such a spontaneous emission, but after all, hey, there's the ball, right? The immediate and obvious objection is that "but physics tells us that can't happen"... well, physics tells us the exact same thing about the big bang. That's why I consider the comparison apt.

I'm not saying the big bang theory is wrong; I'm just saying it is definitely unproven, and that there are severe and fundamental problems with attempts to prove it at this time. Tomorrow, we have new physics, and that may resolve everything very nicely. But until or unless that happens -- until someone shows how the "ball could erupt from the dirt, spontaneously or otherwise" -- personally, I'm reserving BB theory acceptance.

I guess we'll see on that. If these expansionist cultures make the Earth's surface uninhabitable somehow in a century or two (whether from pollution/climate change or nuclear war), then I think that would prove that the expansionist cultures were actually a failure.

I am not trying to argue that monogamy is good, but why it came about and for what reasons.

Sorry, I guess I read some implications in there that you didn't intend.

Also, historically divorce rates were at 0%. Does this prove that monogamy is good? No, it is just a single unrelated fact.

It's not unrelated, but it is debatable how it affects things. My contention is that divorce rates were 0% (or very low, after that) because women in previous centuries and generations were second-class citizens and couldn't leave bad marriages (and the same also went for men, but to a lesser degree; society frowned so much on divorce that it just wasn't done). The rates are much higher now because women have equal rights, and are able to have their own careers, so they don't need men to be meal tickets any more, so people don't stay in unhappy marriages like they used to. All this points to the idea that monogamy and life-long marriages are simply a bad and unworkable idea for most people. In fact, in centuries past, love wasn't even a factor in marriages, only convenience and politics.

the proven method of living like animals in small tribal units.

The problem here is this doesn't work so well with modern society. However, there are more and more people joining up into polyamorous groupings, which do resemble tribes, and have as one component resource-sharing. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future. It's not at all unlike Robert Heinlein's "line marriages". In generations past, people used to rely on their extended families a lot. These days, people are more mobile, and also frequently don't really like their extended families, but with polyamorous groupings, people only associate out of freewill and interest, not because of blood relations.

But beyond that, I would argue that the family unit incentives and protects the post-fertile woman more than the tribal sharing society of old did.

I disagree. Some people are luckier than others and have better or bigger families. I know lots of people whose families don't give a shit about them. Tribes don't have this problem so much.

The problem with old tribal societies, of course, is that they don't really work in larger societies that were enabled by the development of agriculture.

You seem to be rather refuting your own arguments here. Was agriculture capable of providing more food or was it less food?

I think it depends on what exactly you're comparing. If you compare early agriculture to hunter-gatherer societies in their peak, it's probably less. Think about it: why would you expend so much effort sowing seeds and tilling dirt when you can just run around and pick plentiful naturally-growing stuff? The problem is that, as human populations grew, there wasn't enough naturally-growing food (flora or fauna) to support those populations, so people invented agriculture. Modern agriculture, of course, can provide enormous amounts of food.

The other problem is that agriculture doesn't provide a very good diversity of food; that's why people lost a foot of height when they switched (there's archaeological studies about this). These days, however, we've made up for it thanks to large-scale trade and transportation, so obviously a modern grocery store has an enormous variety of foods from all over the world. But in 2000BCE this wasn't the case, and in fact it's only been recently that people have gotten tall again.

I would argue that agriculture was the worst thing to ever happened to humans and the entire planet but that is mostly a personal preference not a fact.

That's definitely personal preference. Today's large societies are also why we have computers, the internet, smartphones, space travel, etc. Small societies simply cannot develop these technologies, nor can they develop medical technologies and knowledge which allow people to routinely live to 100 and not die of common infections.

I do agree we have a population problem at present, but it's because we don't use our resources well and we don't manage ourselves well; we still have to coexist with our natural environment, and we're screwing that up badly. We should be able to develop the knowledge and technology to coexist better with the environment, and later perhaps build our own habitats (including in space) instead of taxing the natural one here so badly, but for now we're acting like it's 1500 even though our population is far, far larger and our technologies far more polluting.

There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.

"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"

"Well," he'd begin.

"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."

You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.

But I'd still be nervous, near the nozzle like that.

His family has requested that donations be made in his memory to one of the following charities

Everychild Foundation http://everychildfoundation.or...
P.O. Box 1808
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Foundation http://www.copdfoundation.org/
20 F Street NW, Suite 200-A
Washington, D.C. 20001

Beit T’Shuvah Treatment Center http://www.beittshuvah.org/tre...
8831 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Bay-Nimoy Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel of Hollywood http://www.tiohnurseryschool.o...
7300 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Source: http://www.startrek.com/articl...

You seem to be arguing that monogamy is a good thing, which it is not. A 50+% divorce rate proves this.

In primitive communities, old women didn't need "one and only one man" to provide for her. The whole village provided for everyone. What you contend is an advantage is only so in Randian societies where people don't look out for each other, and everyone is out for himself.

Your comment also has a bit of very obvious misogyny in it.

Also, agriculture was a giant detriment to human societies at first. It didn't give people leisure time at all; they had to toil endlessly making crops grow. Before this, they just went into the wild and picked naturally-growing fruits and seeds and hunted animals. The only reason people stopped being hunter-gatherers was because their populations grew too large for their environment, and agriculture made it possible to sustain much larger populations. In addition, people lost a foot of height when they switched to agriculture, because hunter-gatherer lifestyles were far more healthy and nutritious. It took millennia for people to reach the average heights they had before the invention of agriculture.

Is this the first time we've gotten documentation of actual full take occurring? It's the first one I recall; if it's not, does anyone have a link to past reports?

Because Europeans were sexually frustrated and channeled their energy into conquering, while the Hawaiians sat around in a paradise (Hawaii is warm and fertile year-round, unlike Europe and most other places) having orgies and generally being happy and not feeling any need to go steal other peoples' land and resources?

Societies expect various things of adults that involve resisting animal instincts.

And how exactly do you know that these primitive societies are the ones expecting things which resist animal instincts, and that other societies (with men hoarding women and restricting their sexuality) are the ones which aren't? How do you know you don't have it backwards?

Or maybe both societies are resisting animal instincts: maybe the pro-sex societies are resisting mens' instincts, while the anti-sex, pro-monogamy societies are the ones resisting womens' instincts.

How it was initially deployed is known only to its makers, but Stuxnet was designed to enter an isolated facility on a USB drive. Once on the LAN it would propagate to other computers, and potentially to other networks via an infected laptop, which is how it ended upon the Internet.

You can use your imagination as to how they got the USB into the target facility. It might have been as simple as dropping the USB stick in the parking lot of a vendor, but given the resources needed to create the worm itself you can't rule out some kind of black bag job or human asset.

I really don't see that as a the most vulnerable point. Not by a long shot. Tapping a digital fiber link wouldn't be like US submarines tapping Soviet analog telephone cables. The data on the link can be encrypted and authenticated at either end such that it's not really practical to modify or impersonate without the kind of assets in the organization that would make an inside job a lot simpler.

The real problem is human factors. Air-gapping sensitive systems is a sound idea in principle but in practice it often fails because it's too cumbersome for users who then undermine the system. And Stuxnet showed that it's possible for a sufficiently advanced opponent to target systems of the far side of an air gap.

So the problem is with the notion that separate parallel systems separated from the outside world are a "simple" solution. They're a potential solution, but if you want to have confidence in that solution there's a lot of work analyzing and policing the behavior of the people who use, maintain, and produce the equipment.

Oh bullshit. *Most* cops are evil. Any time a cop does something evil, and his fellow cops defend him, don't testify against him, lie in testifying against him, or refuse to take a stand against him in any way, that makes *all* off them (in that department) evil.

This "small percentage" bullshit is just that, and I'm sick and tired of morons like you spouting that crap. A few bad apples spoils the entire bunch, and that's what's happened with cops. Departments which don't make sure to keep their ranks clean of the bad ones become departments full of bad cops, and that's how most police departments are in the US. There might be a few good one out there (which you never hear about because they don't have any problems), but they're a minority of the population of cops, since all the worst police departments are the ones in big cities, especially the LAPD and NYPD (which is trying to claim that murders in NYC are up because of marijuana legalization in Colorado).

This has nothing to do with races. Races of people are not governmental, hierarchal organizations. There is no "chief" in charge of all black people, but there is a police chief in charge of every police department.