Oh I don't disagree that some safes can use batteries in their design, what I meant by requirement is that it isn't some rule written in stone that a safe must use batteries.

The catch with smart gun tech is that I don't see how it can work without some sort of energy storage medium. It's either batteries, long lasting capacitors, or something to store the energy necessary to perform the computation necessary to verify the user and validate their use of the firearm.

The only alternative I could see being a possible alternative to persistent energy storage is kinetic to inductive charging, like those flashlights you shake that charges a capacitor. That said, I don't think having to vigorously shake a firearm before it boots up it's verification circuitry is a good design.

Last year? Don't copyrights last 150 years now?

So your proof that cooling fins won't work is something that doesn't have cooling fins...

Also, did you ever wonder how hot your muffler would be if it wasn't exposed to moving air?

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Old military bases would be great for future industrial development, but using them as the base for a new residential community should come with some extreme reservations.

While a military base built after 1990 and decommissioned might be ok, most of our older bases have severe problems with hazardous materials. It isn't just a case of going through the records, mapping out the locations of old dumps and excavating the contaminated soil, many times there is no record of where the soil has been contaminated, and you often don't know until someone starts excavating a foundataion and pulls up a rusty 55gal drum.

If you are lucky, the drum contains waste oil from the motor pool repair facility. But the point is that there are plenty of 'buried treasures' on old military bases. I'd be very nervous about planning a community on a former base. A new industrial area, or a shopping center? Sure, but not residential.

That's the nice thing about a sample return mission like the one that's been proposed. It'll confirm your above opinion of the evidence. Something that looks like gypsum sand to a rover, may well be. But if it looks like gypsum sand in a lab on Earth, then that's a vastly more definitive piece of evidence.

That's not really necessary as your situation isn't really possible.

Crystals/chemicals/etc don't really have many options to form 'differently'. When they form differently, they aren't the same. Sure you can get some isomers, but even then those don't necessarily have the same properties.

For your premise, that all of those minerals formed via some process other than one that involves water, would require a huge coincidence that the rover could somehow find all of these minerals which happened to form without water even though all of our experience tells us is unlikely.

So, we went from a point of having 0 people, to having 1000 people, with no intermediate stage? Please explain the science of that.

Triplets.

2 + 3 = 5 . There might never have been just 4 people.

They train people to responsibly own and use guns

A lot of schools used to do that here in the US. However, after much pearl clutching by gunphobic parents and political opportunists, these places where children could learn gun safety in controlled environments were systematically dismantled.

A safe is a hell of a lot less complicated than 'smart gun' technology. Safes don't require batteries to work.

More people die on I-35 in Oklahoma in a single year. How much is the economic value of I-35 worth to you? How many deaths per dollar?

Because allowing creators and owners of things to profit frm them is EVIL and a BAD THING.

If profit is used as the only consideration for granting copyright? Then yes, it is a bad thing because it is not neutral and provides no benefit.

One-time-pad-language?

How does transcribing dialogue from a movie, translating it, and publishing the result differ from translating a book and publishing the result?

Not that I agree with the rationale of the person you responded to, but I think that there is some original interpretation that must occur during the transcribe/translate phase.

With a book, typically what is produced is a gramatical and syntatical translation.

I would argue that in the process of translating audio dialog into text and into another language, there is a nontrivial amount of effort that is put into the semantic translation. The text of a book must describe exactly what the author wishes to convey. However there is a lot of unspoken information communicated in an audo/visual medium and that information must be captured and translated itself. Thus in addition to the grammar and syntax, the semantics must be processed in a manner which isn't as simple as a dictionary word or rule switch.

You are not correct. You misunderstand the concept of consent. As a concept, it ceases to exist when applied to non-sentient things. Consent is concept which only exists if the entities involved are considered to be sentient. I like to make a point of this partially from an academic interest, but it is critically important to understand the concept if you are to justify any legal premise which concerns interactions between entities.

Why is it important to realize that you cannot use consent as an argument for/against laws concerning the interaction between a sentient and non-sentient? You use the example that you cannot do something to a plant, because the plant cannot legally consent. Such an argument sounds plausible, but in reality it is nonsense. If imposition of a sentient's will on a non-sentient required consent, then you would never be able to interact with the non-sentient at all. You might argue that consent is only required when the interaction might be harmful, but that would be nonsense as well.

We don't require the consent of wheat to harvest it. We don't even require the consent of animals when we decide to kill them. The reason is that when it comes to property, consent is a concept which simply doesn't exist.

You can argue that something isn't property(the current benchmark is sentience), you can argue that property must be handled in a particular manner (animal cruelty laws for example) but you can't argue that actions taken against property is subject to the concept of consent.

But a boycott isn't censorship or refusal to engage. If someone disagrees with a work's message, they can (a) not buy it, and (b) encourage others not to buy it.

That is true, but I thought that part of the reason this is being discussed is because the message people are trying to boycott isn't in 'Ender's Game'. So you aren't disagreeing with a work's message, you are disagreeing with the politics of the IP owner of the work.

Even though I disagree with Card's politics, I don't think we should be so eager to attach political baggage to creative works unless that creative work is intentionally political.

As a society, that's dangerous because we will end up with publishers favoring one work over another because of the potential loss of profit associated with the politics of the author and not the actual merits of the work itself. There was recently discussion about how the lack of female POV characters in video games is due to publisher fears that it won't maximize the potential market.

Consider the political opinions of George Orwell. Do you think the world would be better if he was unable to get his stories to market because the publishers feared a boycott?

Also don't forget that we don't get enough exercise either!

(Unless they were proposing a national prison on the moon, your point isn't exactly relevant to this discussion)