The problem is section B.

You could have all sorts of entities refusing to provides serves unless you consented for them to access your data. Imagine insurance companies requiring access to these boxes in the event of an accident. Don't want to provide it? Then you're not covered. They'll put it in their contract.

Also, I have had a few occasions where a police officer has pulled me over on some charge, "Sir, you were going 71 mph in a 70 mph speed zone," and then wanted to search my car for contraband. Of course, if you allow them to search, they don't give you the ticket. If you tell them no, they hit you hard with as many as they think they can get away with. (Because you really are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent beyond a reasonable doubt.)

So it's not a leap of imagination to see the police asking for your "consent" to read your box. You can not give it to them, of course.

Lots of problems with the "consent" issue because of coercion to give consent, and contractual terms to give consent.

Hold on, let me put on my tin foil hat.

Okay.

Obviously, it's a government plot to seed the clouds over Africa with chemicals to sterilize the population. It's one of the uses of chemtrails. We don't have the problems over here so much because drink water that's been treated, and most of us either drink bottled water or have a filter on the tap. The chemicals they use are not transdermal, so the little bit that's in our tap water doesn't affect most people from showering, laundry, brushing theeth, etc.

Exactly! I may not understand the problem, but if they have working copies of XP, why not set up a VM for VMWare Player, install it on the clients, then copy the VM over.

Seems like a hell of a lot easier than trying to automate changes to hard drive partitions. (Which is an interesting thing to do, though.)

Actually, that's just the current paradigm. It's certainly not the only paradigm.

Science begets technology which begets economic growth. If scientists wanted to make money, they wouldn't have any problems... they'd just have to start doing things differently. A lot of research is done by grants that end up being public knowledge that is published in peer-reviewed journals and it's all academia. If they wanted to privatize and get out of the academic world, it would probably be bad for society as a whole, but pretty damn good for scientists.

It's basically the idea of peace on earth, goodwill to all men, and that kind of thing. Pretty much our whole economic engine has been created by scientists. They should really be lauded as heroes for all that they do and how little they do it for.

I'd rather have people getting methadone from a clinic rather than dealing with the drug market -- even if they NEVER got over their addiction.

Ideally, an addict could very gradually get off methadone. At least at the clinic, there is an entry point for getting some real, professional help. A dealer has a great disincentive to help a customer get clean.

Sometimes, we have to pick the lesser of two evils, and make the best of it until we come up with a better solution. Maybe one day we'll have solved the chemistry involved, and have a treatment to administer to get a person clean overnight. Until then, I support the clinics.

Interestingly, my home state of Tennessee is dealing with this issue right now:
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120217/OPINION03/302170054/Methadone-cuts-will-create-problem

I was going to argue that it didn't start out that way, but then I realized that in some ways it did, and that you said "modern" capitalism.

I have to disagree with you. Very few people choose their religious beliefs. They are born into them and brainwashed as children. That kind of programming is extremely difficult to overcome, especially when there are massive effort being taken to reinforce it. I hate to say this, but your average joe-evangelical is a victim.

Sir, I suggest, then, that you direct great ire toward the pentagon and to the men (and women, unless Santorum is elected) in uniform. You as a taxpayer have bought their guns from a private corporation, for reasons deemed useful by the state.

And of course, now I see I've posted this twice. Haha. My bad!

Oh well, my karma is excellent, I don't need to be modded up, I guess. :D1

I just wrote a long post explaining it, and somehow I wasn't logged in, it got posted as AC, and now it's not here anymore. I am very frustrated because I spent about 20 minutes doing calculations.

Here's the gist of what I had put:

The 10-to-1 figure is for energy, not volume.

A barrel of crude is 42 gallons and has 1.7 MWh of energy. Current market price is $105 per barrel. That's 40.5 kWh/gal. Corn oil has 94 kWh/gal. (Calculated from 120 kcal/tbsp.)

That would mean you could make 1.8 gal of corn oil from a barrel of crude, and corn oil should cost $56.66/gal, but you're saying you can get it for $4, I assume in bulk. So what's the problem? Consider how corn oil is produced: You extract the oil from the germ of the kernel. The remainder of the corn is not useful for oil. That's the part your missing. Here's the calculations on that:

According to wikipedia, a bushel of corn yiels 1.55 lbs of corn oil. Corn oil has a density of 77lbs/gal. So in other words you need 50 bushels of corn to make one gallon of corn oil! A bushel is 8 dry gallons. Raw corn has 132 kcal/cup. That means that 50 bushels of corn has 844,800 kcal of energy, or 982.5 kWh.

So there's your answer: it takes 982.5 kWh of corn to make 94 kWh of corn OIL. A factor of 10.5. Pretty close to the 10-to-1 figure. Divide our $56.66 cost by 10.5, and you get a much more reasonable $5.40/gal. Figure in some government agriculture subsidies and oil subsidies, some market economics between the two goods, sales of corn byproduct (they don't just discard the portions not used for oil) and you have something very close to your supermarket price on vegetable oil. The 10-to-1 number is just an estimate, but it's a pretty darn good one.

Adjust your tin foil hat. :)

Not all knowledge we have comes from the scientific method. Some of it is just our best guess. A lot of history is like that. When we dig up bones or old writings, and try to reconstruct what a society was like back-when, then we are using science, but we are not creating a strictly falsifiable hypothesis. In the event we DO uncover something new that throws a wrench in our conclusions, we'll rework the theory to satisfy the new data. It's occam's razor.

There is a lot of stuff we suspect, but can't actually test. Even atomic structure is just inference. We haven't actually seen it. Then there are things like the uncertainty principle, where you actually CANNOT know both position and momentum! A lot of stuff is just inferences like that. But it's science. It works. It's real. I don't know why god needs a more rigorous proof than that.

For me, a lot of comes down to the fact that technology works. It's not omnipotent, but it does what it is designed to do. (Of course, sometimes a faulty design fails, but that's not common.) If I were to believe there were a god, I'd have to believe that he... doesn't do anything at all. Except maybe keep the natural order of things going as they are. That's not really a "god" as most religions would have it. It's deism at best.

Atheists don't believe there is no god. They know there is no proof for a god, therefore, it is only reasonable to assume he does not exist. It is not a belief. It is a rational conclusion based on observation. This is different from belief.

Atheism is not faith. It's not "faith" in the same way to saying you don't think there's a magic pink unicorn or flying spaghetti monster is not faith. You don't need faith when you have evidence, or are relying on evidence to make a decisions about something.

This DOES happen in America, though. Look at religious zealots vs. abortion clinics.

Atheism is not a religion, not even when you use "quotes". Atheism is relying empirical evidence rather than superstition. Atheism asks "why?" and doesn't accept "because god says" as an answer. It's hard to accept "we don't fully know yet", but it's a much better answer than "god". Once you write down "god" as an answer for something, you stop looking at the problem, or worse, it becomes taboo to look at the problem. That's a very bad place to be, because, god or not, I don't see anyone solving any human problems except for other humans.