The oranges. The oranges. The oranges. Didn't believe this story at all. Thought it was an Onion farce gone viral. A deep fake.

It's still hard to believe. Why wouldn't anyone teach him another word for oranges? Like genies, sourest, or emergency of the story?

Almost like, no one cares if the President comes off looking dumb.

My main point is not that the genie could only be played by Robin Williams, but that Will Smith is a terrible fit for this role. Will Smith can act if he is forced to by the director, Ali proved that. But if you just hire him because you wanted a comedian to play a role, you are going to get Will Smith acting as Will Smith.

That can work sometimes, IE MIB, but in other roles it is going to distract the audience from the scenes the actor is in (Suicide Squad).

There we many other actors that could have slid into this part and done it better. I'll wait for the movie, but I suspect that Smith is going to ruin the character for me.

The simple point is that as soon as we realized the capability of the Zero we easily and quickly designed a plane(s) capable of combating it.

The Yak-3 didn't enter the war until 1944, at which point the war had massively turned in Western Theatre. For the bulk of the conflict, they were using the Yak-1.

The Mig 25 and Mig 31 are both interceptors, they are designed to fire from distance and evade. The Su 35 is designed for Air Superiority. We have held the edge in our capabilities for years compared to them.

Every expert I know of is skeptical of China's claimed Railgun weapon. As to why they would bother mounting it and making claims, why not? It is brinkmanship, making us think they have more capabilities than they do.

The laser rifle is a crowd deterrent weapon. It would serve almost no purpose in infantry combat because it cannot kill. Yes, it can burn things and cause pain, but that is all. Again, this was claimed to be far more effective than experts think during our diplomatic arguments over China's use of blinding lasers on aircraft. We have no hard evidence of it's capability.

Yes, Russia could sell such a missile to our enemies versus using it directly against us. The problem is that as soon as they do so, the genie is out of the bottle. It will be reverse engineered quickly and could be USED AGAINST THEM. No country gives or sells away it's absolute top level weaponry except to it's most trusted allies. Allies which, for all intents and purposes, know that using such a weapon against another nation state risks full out retaliation against not only them but the country that sold it to them.

Our carriers are excellent mobile platforms, but they are not our only way of mounting air strikes. If we were somehow in a conventional war situation, we could easily fly over and base our aircraft in allied countries for combat. Most of our nuclear capable aircraft are not carrier launched anyway. Even if somehow all of our carriers were taken out and somehow our SAC bombers were destroyed as well, we would still have more than enough land launched and submarine launched nuclear warheads to easily blanket our enemies.

My points remain:

1. It is in the greatest interest of our enemies to boast about weapon capabilities even if they are not effective yet.

2. Most well regarded experts consider many of these weapons to either be still in the research stage, early production stage (IE not available for years), or they are wildly over hyped.

3. There is no logical reason for our enemies to use these weapons or proliferate them to their closest allies unless the weapons can prevent a nuclear response. Merely mentioning a weapon that would have such a capability creates a situation that could lead to nuclear war, like SDI did. I don't know if you recall, but I do clearly, how massively freaked out the Soviets got over our SDI claims. For two years they started threatening nuclear war as being inevitable if we continued on the path we were, all the while aggressively trying to destabilize our relations with our allies. 1983 to 1985 was pretty fucking tense, not Cuban missile crisis level maybe, but damn scary. Putin has acted similarly over our attempts to set up a missile barrier in former satellite states of Russia, although we still haven't got to the SHTF level of the early 80's.

This is the paradox of modern politics.

These people are fucking morons of the highest order. They're poorly educated idiots spouting complete nonsense that has zero basis in reality.

In a sane world, we'd ignore them as lunatic outliers. They're not new; they've been here forever, they just change the nonsense.

The problem is that we now live in a world where the most powerful man in the world actively encourages these people, if not explicitly, then at least implicitly with his own brand of deranged paranoia.

The fundamental issue is that internet is great at connecting people, and it doesn't discriminate between connecting Bronies, small-town homosexuals, fans of William Shatner's music, political dissidents in oppressed countries or people who indulge in insane conspiracy theories.

There's no putting that technological genie back in the bottle (and even if we could, the cost would be too great IMO).

So what to do about that?

If we ignore them, they thrive underground and if we give them "airtime" their ranks are bolstered.

I really don't have an answer for this.

One thing I do agree with that annoying douchebag on, is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. If 3D printer gun models are out there (and I don’t doubt they are) it’s going to be very difficult to stop that information for spreading.

I remember when I used to create artwork for punk, indie & rock acts and the guy that sat across from me used to play electronica with Mckenna talking over it. I heard it a lot and for years I thought he was annoying & insane [both Mckenna and the kid that sat across from me lol), yapping about drugs and aliens... it seemed absolutely absurd.

... Almost a decade later I took a couple of puffs of the real magical adventure and I've listened to Mckenna probably a few times a week for years

Those puffs of the real magic dragon, the real genie in the bottle, the real portal to other dimensions will make a person sensitive to petty monkey human judgements and though I have forgiven myself for being judgemental of Mckenna, I will always remember that I had been. Be gone monkey judgements!

*ban
Genie West
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=setw1ZMPgYM

I read an article the other day that points out how unscientific and flawed the original blog is. But the genie is out of the bottle, people easily believe those "everything you thought you knew is wrong" articles and this will now be treated as fact. Critical thinking can be a conversation killer but it's preferable to believing stupid shit like this.

This "scientific" study was done by randomly picking 250 pictures that people had chosen to upload on the Internet. And then based the conclusion on the fleeting looks that any camera will capture from anybody's face and body position. Hardly can be classified as a scientific study, reviewed by peers, etc. But now there are articles saying "science shows dogs don't like to be hugged".

I'm sure some dogs certainly do not like to be hugged. But my 100 pound buddy climbs up on my lap on the couch, elbow in my crotch, and demands to be hugged.

That's a Meeseeks. They're kinda like a low-level genie...

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

To use the released video to promote your full story instead of trying to squash it everywhere. It's shitty that someone did this, and it's not right that they took it from your computer. But now that it's happened, you'll have a hard time stuffing the genie back in the bottle.

Best of luck, it's a neat concept.

@mram wasn't arguing for border control in the states. (s)he was saying that gun control in a specific area is meaningless if you can trivially circumvent it by driving for half an hour.

To be honest, I really don't know what the solution is. I genuinely think the problem in the USA is not so much guns, but your attitude to them.

In the developed world, plenty of other countries have lots of guns, but only in the states does this cowboy attitude with guns prevail. I have plenty of friends with guns, but none of them have them for "home defense". The very idea that I'd need a gun to protect myself is alien to me. It's the 21st century, not the wild west.

Possibly the genie is out of the bottle in the US. The argument of "gun control just means that only criminals have guns" might well be true. But if that is the case, how is it that countries like Ireland or New Zealand where even the police force don't carry guns* have lower firearm homicide rates (~1/10th the rate of the US). Surely we should have been overrun by lawless gangs of armed criminals while the police stand helplessly by?

*NZ Police do have access to firearms, but they don't carry them as a rule.

@Sniper007

Colonisation of other planets, if it happens, will not ease overpopulation on Earth. Assuming it's actually done with humans rather than, say bacteria which are so much easier to transport; it must involve small seed populations of colonists, not firing billions of people off into space. Where do you imagine the energy required would come from? As it stands in 2014 we can barely move a handful of people into low earth orbit, a few hundred kilometres away.

Think about the logistics of transporting and housing all these billions of colonists in a hostile environment. Making the environment itself habitable is an even greater challenge; we can't even seem to fix the one we have on Earth, the one we spent billions of years evolving to suit.

The expansion of the universe, meanwhile, is always giving us less material to work with and perpetually moving it further away.

@SDGundamX

Relying on technology to solve overpopulation is like refusing to stop smoking because by the time you get cancer science will have found a cure.

Scientific advancement is not a given. It doesn't progress at a guaranteed rate and it isn't a genie that will automatically offer a salve to every need. Or, to coin a cliche, "Where's my jetpack?"

Luckily however, in the instant case scientists have offered an easy solution to overpopulation: Stop having so many children.

@RedSky

Poverty reduction without population reduction - reduction, not stabilisation - is catastrophic. The current global population of ~7.2 billion is only survivable, never mind sustainable, because most of those billions are impoverished peasants who barely consume any resources at all. Elevating the poor to a rich, westernesque lifestyle multiplies the effects of overpopulation tremendously, even if it slightly slows population growth in absolute terms.

Rosling doesn't seem to understand the actual problem, and his predictions are at any rate, horrifyingly optimistic.

We need to be shooting for a global population in the range of 100 million - 1 billion. Any substantially higher number than that is an apocalypse waiting to happen.

If you're actually curious about the origin of the surname and don't just want to insult Jewish people, this seems like a well researched site:

http://www.geni.com/surnames/hyman



Alternate response: 'Christ, what an asshole.'

Yeah, I was surprised at how ignorant Bill was on this too, although it wouldn't be the first time Maher ignored the facts to suit his own preconceptions (vaccines, anyone?)

At this point, it becomes increasingly difficult from a technological standpoint to put the genie back in the bottle. The internet, as a technology stack from browser to OS to network layer to hardware to comms protocols is now a hugely complex device. There are multiple attack points where malicious entities can insert "back doors" to access supposedly private communications. And governments are just one group of spies. There's also criminals and even scarier, corporations.

The only way I can possibly imagine it ever being truly secure is an end to end open technology stack that is peer-reviewed for potential issues constantly, but that would essentially mean tearing down all existing infrastructure, so it's just not going to happen.