Yep yep.

As a US citizen now thoroughly ashamed of my society's behavior (esp. regulatory capture, as well as the all-classes corruption of the housing bubble), this news is the first time in my entire life that European society has seemed superior.

It is quite a moment for me, coming as it is at the tail end of twenty years of staunch libertarian patriotism.

Yeah, THAT will sure attract new talent to their space program! Alex, I'll take Perverse Incentives for 500 rubles, please!

And never mind the equally important point that the current team at least learned something and won't repeat this particular mistake again. Can't say that for the new team.

I am amused to report that they couldn't even handle that. Laika was accidentally killed very very early in the flight. The rest of her time aboard the capsule, and the gentle story of her demise, was all fiction.

I taught my two sons to program. Only one of them liked it, but they both got an astonishing side benefit from it: it taught them to see their own brains as software... with algorithms and bugs. In the context of a broader parent-child discussion of recognizing and dealing with personality bugs, programming seems to make it real, in a way that no amount of lecture can.

Haven't you noticed how few people are introspective, how few are even capable of thinking that their thoughts and feelings may be incorrect?

Look, I with agree you, but your arguments still need work. The right to control your body does not obviously follow from right to feed yourself. Nor does self-ownership obviously follow from ownership. Nor does total ownership obviously follow from partial ownership (think your use of a laptop provided by your company).

Your rights derive from MY self-interest, because your rights morally bind me in some way. I can make the argument, perhaps persuasively, that it is obviously right for me to allow you to feed yourself, and even to get ahead, but to disallow you from ruining your life with heroine. From my point of view, I must deny you full self-ownership because my self-interest requires me to defend society from addictive destructive substances.

Or imagine you are arguing with a Roman, who believes he has all rights to the dozen slaves he captured in Lydia. Can you explain to him why his arranement is automatically wrong for all of the players? Remember, the only reason the Roman economy could support such a large empire (i.e. so much border to guard) was via slaves captured on conquests.

Hint: if you enter a philosophical discussion with an insult, and then pepper the rest of your post with additional ad hominem, then your own philosophy still needs work.

Quite a lot of work.

Those concepts are not axiomatic. I can easily conceive of the existence of slavery, in which most aspects of a person are controlled by various means.

Sensible, maybe, but not axiomatic. It may also be impossible to hold together a social pattern without at least some degree of state control over what people do with their bodies. Just look at what the (de facto) freedom to use opium did to China for a century.

Agreed; by then, Germany had really run off the rails. I also feel we did right by Japan, when we rebooted their society after the war and turned them into a Western-style state that is vastly more free and efficient than it was.

Very good. Now tell us *why* all humans possess those rights.

The definition doesn't help, either... a political right is defined as "A behavior which you may practice, and anyone who tries to stop you is automatically wrong." No information there about where the right springs from.

The answer, that most people will not agree with, is: rights are the those behaviors that humans must practice if they seek to establish a pro-human society, where 'pro-human' means a society whose primary goal is the long-term production of safety, comfort, and pleasure. Any other society is automatically wrong, in the sense of "illogical for humans to seek".

I used "regulatory capture" because it points to a solution, at least in principle. Whereas for the more general problem of "corruption", no one has any idea how to fix it. Religion used to be the answer ("The invisible old man in the sky who loves you will torture you forever!!!11!"), but that has lost all credibility these days. And with the college curriculum passionately certain that certainty is impossible (i.e. Skepticism), there is no alternative in sight.

Yep. Not to mention all of the banana republics in South America, who had their approximately-democratic governments violently toppled by the CIA acting on behalf of American produce companies.

America has never been The Good Guy, it has just been a typical state out to get ahead at any cost... any cost, that is, short of allowing its citizens to discover that it is not The Good Guy.

That's why the diplomatic cable leaks are such a Big Deal, and the reason why Bradley Manning will get no popular sympathy. His revelations cause American citizens to feel cognitive dissonance ("We aren't the Good Guy? Really?")... and people deeply hate those who cause them cognitive dissonance.

I'm an American citizen and I feel ashamed about the degree to which my country has fallen to regulatory capture.

Yep, it launched my entire career. C64 handed down from my brother, wrote my first horrible games... then a Tandy 1000TL (XT286 clone from Radio Shack) handed down from my father, ran my first BBS... then Pascal in High School CS, and you know the rest. Wow. I wish I could shake the hands of the C64's designers.

I still have mine, it's in the attic now, but it still works.

Have you looked at the inductive charging pads? There are several brands out there, and you can place pads on each of your desks plus one on your car dashboard. You could even contrive one inside the driver's seat of your car where it will press against your phone while it is in your pocket.

The handset's transmit power is regulated by the tower, based on how well the tower can hear the handset. Most handsets can do up to 0.6W of transmit power if so requested... but naturally they will use less power whenever possible.

Remember back when cellphones used a frequency that caused dit-dit-dit-daaaaaa-dit-dit interference on your car stereo? Ever noticed that sometimes the dits were really loud, other times very faint? That variance was the handset using different power levels, under orders from the tower.

So, the bottom line is, if you want to reduce handset power consumption, you need more towers (i.e. smaller cells) and/or more sensitive tower receivers. Yes, I realize that greater sensitivity will at some point require going below the noise floor... but that can be accompli$hed.