This is either the best or worst idea I've seen all day.

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See also this comment

A hazmat suit won't block much radiation, but it will keep the wearer from accumulating condensation or dust in their lungs and on their skin. Their long-term exposure to the radiation is reduced dramatically by wearing a suit, removing the suit safely (not touching the outside) and taking a thorough shower before and after getting out of the suit.

On top of that, while a heavy suit of lead would be impractical, even reducing the radiation exposure by a smaller fraction with a thin layer of shielding is worthwhile as it gives the body more room to repair the damage as it's happening, reducing the peak damage done.

Two hypothetical 9/11inspried scenarios:

1) 3000 people die at the hands of random extremists and nobody makes any jokes.

2) 3000 people die at the hands of random extremists and someone references AYBABTU.

I like the second scenario better. I probably won't laugh if I know a victim, but other people's laughter doesn't hurt me.

Not laughing at tragedy doesn't make it less tragic. Laughing is one of the ways people cope. There is no harm in growing a thicker skin. We can still have feelings and care about life without revering life. Death happens.

Life is for the living. Cry until you laugh, laugh until you can't breath then sleep it off and move on.

At one point or another, the common man needs to set up a state that works for his interests.

I've been thinking that for years, but there's one problem I can't see a way around. The kind of people who can organize a stable government are the kind of people who are already on the winning side. I'm not saying the losers aren't good people or that they're dumb or uncharismatic. I'm saying that anyone who posses all the traits necessary to create a new government probably doesn't see a need to because the current systems benefit them.

My hope is that individuals who posses some of the traits can band together with individuals who posses the other traits and as a group they might succeed.

There's a difference between having the power (or "means" or "capability" or "opportunity") to do something and having the authority to do it.

A mugger has the power to acquire resources through threats or actual violence. The IRS has the authority to do so. When the mugger attacks you they are breaking the law. When the police seize your property to rectify a tax debt, they are enforcing the law.

This is a matter of definitions, not politics. Government is the system a society chooses (or fails to overthrow) as a mechanism to develop and implement the rules of law. Corporations are organizations which exist under those rules. Sometimes corporations break rules just as muggers do. It is within their power to do so, but they do not have the authority. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes they get away with it. That's the nature of reality. But the meaning of the words is such that only a system of government has the ultimate authority to use force to enact its will. Any non-government entity which acquires that authority does so at the behest of the government(s) it serves or operates under (which is usually the same thing).

When a Corporation mis-behaves, it is the job of the Governments who have jurisdiction over those incidents to correct the behavior of the Corporation in question. When a Government mis-behaves, it is the job of the Citizens to correct the behavior of that Government.

The grand-parent post used the word "power" when they should have used the word "authority". It is, by definition, true that "Governments have the authority to deprive you of your life, liberty or property." The circumstances under which various governments have that authority vary from country to country, and from state to state.

If you don't like what corporations due, vote with your dollar and your ballot. If you don't like what your government does, vote with your wallet, ballot and feet. (It looks like voting with bullets doesn't work anymore.)

It seems like a lot of people can't think of a use case for hosts behind firewalls to want to talk to each other.

I want to stream music from my local media server while doing system administration one any of three remote private networks.

My work uses a private network of 10/8, my university uses 172.16/12 and my secret club uses 192.168/16. Which private network should I use at home? It doesn't matter because whatever I pick, I cannot establish a tunnel from home to whichever location uses the same private network without running into a routing conflict. There is no way to tell whether an address is local or remote once I establish that connection. Regardless of the tunneling tricks used, my computer will have no way of knowing which side of the tunnel a host is on if both the source and destination network are the same private network. It could try both, but what if the same IP exists on both sides?

Most VPN software solves this by not allowing the client to access local network resources when attached to the VPN, but that's just dodging the real issue. The way IPv4 works, hosts need to have globally unique addresses to talk to each other easily, and it's not unreasonable to expect hosts on different protected networks to want to talk to each other.

You can have the advantages of NAT without the disadvantages. Get IPv6 and firewalling correctly configured.

Social problem: your family is scattered all over the globe.

That's only a social problem if your family is scattered because they hate each other. In that case your technical solutions won't solve the problem.

When people starve because people with guns lock up the food, that's a social problem. When people starve because of drought, that's a technical problem.

Just because something is a problem for people doesn't mean it's a problem with people.

"there have been many big extinctions, and each allowed some hardier form of live to make it to the next expansion."

That is an inaccurate way of describing the process. Each event changed the environment in which organisms competed and allowed a better-suited form of life to make it to the next expansion. That is, if the environment is one in which hardiness is not advantageous, the _less_ hardy forms of life will flourish.

Evolution is not a process of perfection. It is a process of conforming, as a gas fills a volume.

Imagine mapping every possible genome to a point in space. If a genome could not produce a viable organism, that point in space is solid. If there are no organisms possessing a particular genome, that point is empty. All other points contain a virtual "gas". That gas will expand to fill any empty points adjacent to it. That expansion is half of evolution. It's not seeking complexity or simplicity. It is seeking viability. The way that refinement (the second half of evolution) happens is that the gas interacts with itself through the environment. The existence of certain organisms shapes the "solid" portion of this made-up space. The openness of the "carnivore" portions of the genome space is contingent on an ample supply of "prey". In an environment where "hard" organisms have no advantage over "soft" organisms, the gas will fill the spaces of those competing volumes evenly.

This Ars technica article references an experiment in which "E. coli can end up resistant to ciprofloxacin in about ten hours." This happened because the environment in the experiment was setup so that the survival cost of having that resistance was paid for by an abundance of food. The extra food in the poisoned side of the experimental apparatus reduced the solidness of the resistant-strain portion of the genome-space.

Extinction events don't just test the hardiness of all current organisms. They change the viability of various genetic strategies. The events don't just wipe out the weaker organisms. They create an ecosystem in which a new strategy is favored.

To put it another way: if it were possible to kill 90% of organisms in a stable system without changing the genetic pressures the survivors live under, the system would return to its previous state.

"... they often provide a different and useful set of sensibilities to the community (Alan Turing, ..."

It's true that many great people have also been homosexual, but I don't think their greatness has ever been because of their sexual preferences. The only sphere within which sexual preference could be argued have any relationship to social contribution is in art.

Your point about homosexuality not actually beign a problem is much better than implying that 'fixing' the problem would deprive us of 10% of our geniuses.

"part of what is keeping our country propped up is the inefficiency of bureaucracy and that it allows a lot of otherwise useless people to remain employed"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I don't accept your premise that there are "otherwise useless people" who would be out of a job if government were more efficient. They may not have other skills right now, but there is definitely something else they could be doing.

I agree that losing all this art is tragic, but we should also keep in mind that before 1900 we had no practical way of preserving this kind of art. For that matter, a lot of other art was lost which can now be preserved because of our ability to make copies automatically. Certainly digitizing sculptures, pictures and performances is a lossy first copy, but every copy after that can be lossless if someone is willing to foot the bill.

In 100 years we're going to have the opposite problem: we will have more art than we know what to do with. It's a good problem to have.

In all seriousness, I would totally watch that movie. Sounds like a good time. I wish Michael Crichton was still alive to write it.