I really don't get the point of tailgating. If you're trying to tell me that I'm going too slow, then you need to fucking deal with the fact that if I'm going too slow, that means the car right in front of me is going too slow, as are all the cars in front of them.
If you're trying to tell me that I'm going too slow, putting me in a situation in which I can hardly use my brakes, hence forcing me to drive more slowly and carefully seems a suboptimal solution.
You'd need to make money to pay for the energy needed to run the replicator and holodeck, assuming money hasn't been eliminated by this point (which in the star trek universe it has been.. although they never really explain how that works.. the whole "people just work for the good of society" thing hasn't worked too well in the real worlds).
Well, if futuristic technology means all the boring or unpleasant jobs which nobody really wants to do can be replaced by automation, it works a lot better.
But then, that level of automation technology would also mean you wouldn't need large numbers of people to crew starships.
The tactics in use by various governments to pursue the rape allegations against Assange are politically motivated.
The rape allegations are true and Assange should be held to account.
It's pretty difficult for two statements like that to be simultaneously true. For it to be right to hold Assange to account, the allegations don't just need to be true (something which is unknowable), they need to be provable beyond reasonable doubt. If various powerful governments want your head and are prepared to use underhanded tactics in order to get it, it's very difficult to maintain that doubt is unreasonable.
My theory would be segregation. The vast majority of chess-players are male, generally. But despite the lack of any obvious reason why men and women shouldn't compete on equal terms, any female chess players who come along get shoved into girl's and then women's tournaments, which means that they don't get to play so much against the vast majority of chess talent, and they're not encouraged to aspire to be better than the world's best players. And strong competition and high aspirations are two important factors in sporting success.
A small talent pool in which to find champions can go quite far in explaining the lack of successful chess-playing women. Having to find rivals in that same small talent pool seems enough to explain the rest. Maybe, instead of generating "women's world chess champions" of no real credibility, the female chess world should ditch its attitude of inferiority, and look to its best player for inspiration.
Financial institutions are still one of the last places where we expect people to put some effort into their appearance. Even geeks like myself who cringe when they have to put on a tie tend to expect the people dealing with our savings to look the part.
Well, if someone's wearing a tie, the part they look to me is the part of 'swindler' or 'con-man'. Someone who's genuinely honest and professional may end up wearing anything. Someone who's pretending to be honest and professional to mask a less attractive nature will always put plenty of effort into appearance.
Several years ago, I was lamenting the almost complete lack of anything worth watching on television. But since I starting watching anime, I've never really been lacking something new and interesting to try. Since most shows run 12-26 episodes and then stop, you don't get problems with things being cancelled half-way through, and while there's a strong studio system, the studios are small, and make most of their money from fans rather than the general public, (plus sourcing many of their stories from one-man or two-man productions), there are plenty of new ideas and experimentation. Even just in terms of the use of moving pictures to convey mood and emotion within the context of a story, the industry has probably advanced beyond what is possible within the limits of live-action in the past decade and a half.
It doesn't make much sense to me to scrabble for scraps of new telefantasy purely within the output of Western TV, where finding anything is rare, and finding something which isn't just a remake or a re-imagining of a decades-old idea is almost impossible, when there are tens of new telefantasy shows being made every year in Japan, and acquisition is no longer a challenge.
and although digital library books (which also aren't supported by the Kindle AFAIK) do come with DRM, I consider the enforcement of a short term, free loan to be a reasonably valid use.
Indeed, since the primary problem with DRM, and the reason why most instances of it are or should be illegal, is that any arrangement involving DRM can only ever be a type of loan, but many companies fraudulently claim to be 'selling' encumbered works, without turning over the full control over the item 'sold' that must be conceded in any purchase.
I don't know if backscatter is optimal for the purpose, but I know it's more effective than taking no action.
Suppose it turns out that these X-rays (which have never been tested on humans for any length of time before) kill more people than terrorists ever could. Should you call it 'more effective' even then?
What's interesting is the question of whether this was inevitable, or whether he could have been a genuine backer of freedom if he didn't have to defend himself against most of the capitalist world.
The West's habit of trying to destroy any system of strong socialism, resulting in a "fight mode" becoming inevitable, makes it impossible to assess the true practicality of it.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"