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I recommend to everyone that they read RAND Corp's PDF about 'the firehose of falsehoods'
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
It goes into detail about the asymmetric nature of these kind of mass manipulation techniques.

The effects of asteroid weapons strongly depend on the size class and mass (see appendix C). If they are small enough they can even be tactical rather than strategic. For dinosaur killer sizes (1km+ diameter) nuclear winter would probably be the least of our concerns. Moving such large objects at asteroid belt distances may be difficult. Although presumably you could just let your propulsion system run for years with the object making a closer pass to the earth with each revolution. Using a comet instead might allow starting the diversion much farther from the earth if such close passes are a concern.

Another possibility if you have a long term propulsion system would be accelerating a small iron core meteorite or just a piece of tungsten to relativistic speeds. It might take years or decades, but a relativistic kinetic energy weapon is a strategic weapon even beyond most dinosaur killer sized asteroids. It takes about a year to reach say 0.95c at a constant acceleration of 1g, but probably the propulsion system would be relatively weak and not nearly 1g for a mass large enough to be used as a strategic weapon or planet killer.

The space force is not quite as crazy an idea as it first seems. There is a lot of potential for developing strategic weapons that greatly outclass hydrogen bombs. Almost everyone has hydrogen bombs these days. If the US could demonstrate a practical Relativistic Kill Vehicle by say turning Mercury (the planet) into plasma the US might finally get some respect and would not be made fun of so often by European smarty-pants who think we are all a bunch of retarded redneck religous nutjobs who cannot even speak English properly. We hate being laughed at and we are constantly being laughed at these days. This will show them.

> CA's overall suicide rate is (slightly) higher than the national average. Which would suggest that reduced access to firearms doesn't reduce suicide rate..

Or you could be wrong, Between 1999 and 2009, the suicide rate in California averaged around 9.4 per 100,000 individuals; national averages are around 11.1 per 100,000.

or https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previ...

I wonder what happens when we look at the states with the highest Suicide rate, wonder where they lie in Gun ownership:

1 - Wyoming 5th highest ownership
2- Alaska #1 highest ownership
3- Montana 6th highest
4- NewMexico 7th highest.

Honestly, them being rural states likely contributes more to the suicide rate. California Rural areas are high as well, Guns are obviously not the cause of suicides. But they contribute to the overall success rate.

I should say, I am not in favor of CA gun laws. I definitely couldn't legally move to CA, without selling a few items. I would like to see a more nationalized commonality in requirements in training and requirements on securing firearms from miners and reduced access by those with history of violence or mental issues.

I don't think wikileaks was the only problem here. Half the US media was a parrot for Putin. What about all that infowars alt-right bullshit? You can't tell me there wasn't plenty of that. For fuck sake.. they had interviews with Aleksandr Dugin on their show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... That guy has a large influence on how the Russians view the world and global order and idiotic ideas about Eurasianism. Go read his books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics). This is documented in Rand Corporation's research, though they downplay the crazy.. but the crazy has a big influence on Russia's sense of itself. https://www.rand.org/content/d... And wikileaks was a parrot for Russia? Are you fucking dreaming? What about facebook? What did they do to stop any of this? They're more than happy to let people post their opinions, because that gets them hooked on facebook, so they get more ad revenue! It's very simple. Putin didn't like Hillary because she's a globalist (go read the credits in Kissinger's World Order book - https://www.washingtonpost.com..., or watch Bernie's attack on her over it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...). Putin wants to end Pax Americana, and he achieved it pretty well by fanning the flames of dividing western society by manipulating through agenda setting content. We've been using facebook and all this social media bullshit to re-enforce the echo chambers that's leading to our demise to divide us politically. Once again, go read the foundations of geopolitics. Quote from the wikipedia article on the Foundations of Geopolitics: "Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics." Then you get trump and his slime bucket PR master, Roger Stone, orchestrate the biggest campaign of hate the US has ever seen. Well surely the crazies on the left aren't gonna put up with this.. so their cognitive dissonance goes ballistic because they can't believe that Trump got into power, so now they're in battle stations, pushing their radical left agendas by shaming the public, virtue dropping that basically quells descent from moderate views. Is it not simple enough? It's a mess of our own making, fanned by Russia, political opportunists, opportunistic social networks and our self-interested "It's all about me", materialistic, narcissistic, uncivil society.

IMightB inquired:

Do people not remember the origin of "The Internet"? It started as a Defense Project to ensure communications in the event of a nuclear war... They opened it up to universities, and then to the public. Back then they did a fairly decent job of being hand-off. It wasn't until they turned over to private corps, that it started to go downhill.

As it turns out, that's a common belief - and it's wrong.

While it's true that a 1962 RAND Corporation white paper authored by Paul Baran theorized that a packet-switched data network could allow military communications to survive a general nuclear war, that was entirely a thought experiment. The Department of Defense filed it away and largely forgot about it.

It wasn't until 1965, after accepting a position at DARPA, that an electrical engineer named Robert W. Taylor first got the idea for what would eventually become first the DARPAnet, then the ARPAnet, and finally the Internet.

As a condition of the DARPA grants that helped fund their experiments, research teams at three different major research centers were required to install remote terminals at DARPA for their - entirely separate and self-contained - multi-user mainframe systems. These were the first computers to operate interactively, rather than in what mainframers call "batch mode", and support multiple, concurrent user sessions via dumb terminals with line printers as their "displays". One of Taylor's assignments was to monitor and liase with the scientists who built and ran this trio of individual experimental systems, and he quickly noticed that something very like what we would think of as newsgroups spontaneously appeared on all three systems. (That is to say that computer scientists who had accounts on all three, separate, not interconnected in any way systems had each decided that something very much like a computer BBS or Usenet-style messaging system would be a useful addition, and had - again, independently - hacked such a tool together for the users of each of these systems to communicate with each other in a way that had some degree of persistence and which was accessible to the entire user community of that particular machine.)

The fact that users on each system had more-or-less-simultaneously decided such a tool was desireable, and had developed code to create it - and we're talking three different sets of code here - without ever communicating with the other two teams greatly interested and excited Taylor. He immediately wondered what would happen if all three systems were physically connected together in a way that would allow their users to communicate not only with each other, but with users on the other two systems, as well. He took that idea to his supervisor, one Charles Herzfeld, who thought it might have merit. Herszfeld asked Taylor to draw up a formal proposal, and committed, sight unseen, to fund it to the tune of a million dollars (which was real money in 1965).

So Taylor wrote a proposal, and with a million bucks to spend on it approached the managers of the three, separate multiuser systems with his idea to interconnect their systems. All three turned him down flat.

Robert W. Taylor was from Texas, where they grow 'em stubborn, so he persisted in pitching his idea to the three managers of different, multiuser mainframe systems, despite their continued objections that each saw no merit in his proposal, and each considered it a potentially major distraction from the purposes for which each of their disparate systems had been created. Eventually, over the course of time, he wore them down to the point where he got two of them to agree to at least test the idea. It took nearly two years from then before all the ducks were duly aligned, the necessary equipment designed and built, and the long-distance, dedicated telephone lines contracted for.

At 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969, the first two nodes of what was dub

Very Wrong. Have fun with your toy rifles while the artillery rains down.

1: Forcing their beliefs on others is inherent to Islam. Only a complete idiot could think their very presence is not a threat to Western civilization.

Waitaminite. I think it's important to listen to how Muslims themselves feel about that.

2: The real question is, does the presence of trans people hinder the cohesion and combat efficiency of the troops in any way? If so, they don't belong there.

And the answer to that question ... is no.

Is there any evidence that anyone has attempted or intends to do this? As far as I can tell, this is essentially a conservative urban legend. And when RAND did a study on the costs of including transgender individuals they seem to have concluded that this was not at all likely https://www.rand.org/news/press/2016/06/30.html.

you're pulling excuses out of your butt. the military has already done studies and determined that trans folk in the military are not a problem. they are probably more familiar with the situation than you, random slashdot guy. http://www.rand.org/content/da...

trans folks have been serving in the military for years already. if a particular person is a problem, they can be removed for their specific actions that are problematic. a blanket ban on all trans folks, however, is an entirely different matter. he's just scapegoating.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea... would be a good start.

If you want a complete analysis of the effectiveness of armies with high equality versus those with non-mission aligned structures, that's the domain of military history. Reading about the French army before and after the revolution would be a good place to start, or try the Vietnam, or try the Israelis.

It's basically a non-issue.

http://www.rand.org/content/da...

disproving bullshit is a waste of time because nobody is meant to believe it.

Okay, but why does it continue to work so well? I think lots of people do believe it, or believe it "might" be true. I run into the believers and semi-believers often when I'm otherwise happily commenting around the internet. As a typical example consider this comment ranked 5 from Anonymous Coward:

Newsflash - the intelligence agencies of the United States have a documented history of breaking the law.

Any claims based on the assertion that they behave lawfully is flawed and not to be considered credible.

This style of thinking - and there's a lot of it - allows any layman to use a chain of reasoning like this: "so what if Trump's a bullshit artist? So is everyone else, therefore we can't tell who's right, therefore Trump may be right and I'm going to continue to stand by him."

Such arguments help establish the Russian model of propaganda in the U.S. Now, while the tactic of sewing doubt about what's true and false is well known as a Russian strategy ("therefore Putin may be right and I'm going to continue to stand by him"), I think in the U.S. the dominant cause is that the conservative media waged a war on the credibility of the mainstream media and won - as described by this conservative publication.

SpaceX is based on materials science that doesn't exist and risks payloads as long as they don't have to pay for them, all based on ignoring all contrary evidence. Read to the end of the abstract. Tesla will never be safer than regular cars, and it will never even be as safe as regular cars. It is statistically impossible.

The election is over, so Trump will do what he wants, doesn't matter how many protests, how many negative news stories there are. And logic, or even enlightened self-interest, doesn't work either.

Also, some of the things Trump is doing need doing. For example, even if it costs consumers more, manufacturing (even automated manufacturing) needs to be brought back on-shore, or when it comes to a pissing contest, China can just stop shipping critical components (or even just threaten to) and crater the American and global economies as well as make it impossible to maintain existing infrastructure.

Russia isn't the big threat now - it's China, and they're feeling their oats over Taiwan and, indirectly, Japan, plus the rest of Asia. Either those two countries get nukes and delivery systems or they're goners.

MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) works. Right now the Russians have an advantage - they could take over NATO members Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia in less than 60 hours (RAND Corporation report) and there's nothing NATO can do about it - but Putin doesn't. He knows the end result will be nuking the Kremlin. Russia has sufficient land that there's no population pressure - whereas China is severely over-populated, and losing a chunk of the population would almost be an acceptable trade-off ... indeed, if it gave them territory to expand into, it would be seen as more than worth it if push comes to shove.

China wants to expand - into Asia, and into Africa. Not just economically either.

But neither of us is going to be able to do anything about any of this. Even if we were to produce a mathematically 100% provable solution to all the world's problems, it won't change anything. You'd need to change people - and unfortunately, only they can change themselves. So it's a waste of time, mental masturbation exercise, whatever, but nothing either of us says will have any effect.

This is a disingenuous argument, so let me do you a solid and explain why so you can stop embarassing yourself. Bush had already decided to invade Iraq and the CIA report was cherry-picked to seem to legitimize his bias. SRC: http://www.rand.org/content/da...

Okay, that was some grade A class nonsense.

1) Solar panels *do* drastically reduce power output on cloudy days.
2) Clouds do *not* only block visible spectrum light "and a bit of IR". They're highly effective blockers of IR and UV as well. They do block IR and visible light better than UV (and there are relatively rare situations where they can actually enhance UV light via reflections), but they absolutely block all three, and do so well. See chart c in figure S1 / figure 6.
3) Only 3-5% of the sun's energy at Earth's surface is UV. IR is 52-55% and visible 42-43%.
4) Standard solar panels can't use infrared (too low photon energy), and are very wasteful with UV (still just one electron per photon regardless of photon energy) if they can use it at all (glass coated panels = UV blocking).

Literally everything you wrote was wrong.

Tesla is actually still worse, Musk's claims otherwise aren't valid. Look here.

You're wrong. Claiming it and demonstrating it with power are different things. Marketing is not statistics. Read this and the report and understand.

You're wrong. Claiming it and demonstrating it with power are different things. Marketing is not statistics. Read this and the report and understand.

NATO doesn't want it either. Russia would defeat NATO in 2-1/2 days.

A Department of Defense official has backed the Rand Corporation think tank's claim that the Russian military could defeat NATO forces in the Baltics in 36 to 60 hours. The statement is the latest in a string of warnings that the Atlantic Alliance is too weak to mount a defense of the baltic states.

RAND Corp explains their study results

Read this: http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea... - there is no statistical power to any of the claims that "self-driving" is safer, or even as safe as human driven cars. Mercedes-Benz is painting a target on itself for claims it didn't need to make - the function in these situations is to stop the car and nothing else.

Not really, when you cherry-pick the kind of miles driven, the age of vehicles in the sample, and all other factors required to actually compare Tesla models to other cars that are their actual contemporaries in terms of manufacturing and usage they don't. RAND produced a great paper on this fact: http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea...

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
-- Benjamin Franklin

As far as nobody being able to tell Obama what to do, Putin put the lie to that with the annexation of the Crimea and the bombings in Syria. So did Assad. So did Kim Un whateverhisname, and China's leadership. They all know he won't pull the ultimate trigger, so the nuclear threat is a paper tiger, and the US is too far away to efficiently project conventional force in sufficient numbers over an extended period, so even the NATO commitments are doubtful.

The problem with using nukes in Europe is that you'll also get your allies as collateral damage. Russia has no similar problems with nuking North America in an all-out war. And Russia would win in less than 3 days Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all now NATO members, would be overrun.

There has already been research on this.
To prove with 95% confidence that auto pilot is as safe as humans (not safer) you need to run 275 million miles without accident.
They failed at 130 million. If they want to find out how safe it is now, they need a lot more miles under their belt.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea...

It's all marketing hype and mere armchair statistics.

Fortune doesn't know how to do the math, I don't know how to do the math, Musk doesn't know how to do the math, but perhaps a few readers of this comment could do the math.

It would take 275 million miles of autonomous driving to have any confidence at all that an autonomous car is safer than a human driver.

Ars Technica reported on it, and if you want to see the math, the RAND corporation, who are kind of experts at the math, have a detailed report available, which explains the math.

Basically, while the marketing engine can claim that autonomous driving is safer, it's not even possible to have any proof of it within any reasonable level of statistical confidence.

I mean, sure, we try to make driving safer, and assisted driving may help, but please, let's be realistic about where we're at.

When you find yourself defending the VA, it's time to stop talking. Seriously.

Actually, I do find that the VA is such a punching bag, that when I see somebody screaming about it, I usually figure it's probably worth tuning them out.

I think it's just too convenient to have somebody to blame for whatever things are wrong with it today for anybody to want to actually fix, and any problems are exaggerated to the point of unreliability.

Not that other entities, both public and private, are immune to such problems, mind you.

The US fought TWO wars in Iraq costing many hundreds of billions of dollars (maybe a trillion...I'm not up on the exact figures)

Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq cost the U.S. $2+ TRILLION and that does not include the ongoing costs to pay for the medical expenses of the thousands of soldiers who were injured.

Here is the most comprehensive terrorism database in the world. Why dont you use it and enlighten yourself. Islamic terrorism kills more people than any other type.

Rand Terrorism Database

Or you can just rely on the huffington post.

75% of these so-called refugees are military age men.

I'll bet about 75% of Slashdot readers are military age men.

Makes you think.

This assertion needs data.
Perhaps a /. poll. But first define military age.

"As a last ditch effort to stave off defeat in October 1944, all males aged 16 to 60 were required to join the Volkssturm, or Home Guard."
http://histclo.com/essay/war/w...
The implication here is that 25% are over 60 and under 16 and this is just conscription.

In the US enlistment has bounds but once in service age can be as old as
they wish as long as they can meet standards. One reserve unit doctor is 66.
http://dopma-ropma.rand.org/re...
" Mandatory retirement age is age 62 for all officers other than general or flag officers. Service Secretaries may defer the retirement of health professional officers and chaplains until the age of 68."
So 68 is a US military upper bound ... and I assert less than 25% of /. is over 68 but I could be wrong.

citations needed for your statistical claims, because the Rand Corporation does not agree with you.

no, the most certain way to kill yourself is to be born. Smoking comes pretty far down the list. You're six times more likely to die from CVD than cancer (Mayo Clinic). Sturm and Wells of the Rand Corporation conducted a statistical study and concluded that obesity is the most common cause of terminal CVD, by over 40% risk factor - smoking increased the risk of terminal CVD by only 23%, obesity by nearly 70%. 23% of Americans were obese at the time of the report, which means that obesity-related CVD is the single biggest killer in the United States.

Don't let the report convince you against something you've already decided as your world truth, go right on ahead and call me an ignorant cunt.

I'd argue those statistical outcomes are extremely broad-based lifestyle outcomes, not specifically tied to "marriage" per se and I would also bet a lot of those lifestyle outcomes grow out of child bearing, not just child rearing.

You can argue whatever you want. The published, peer-reviewed research says otherwise. If you have some data that disputes these findings, write it up and submit it to a journal. Otherwise, your argument means two things: jack and shit.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea...

While this sounds like a terrific idea, I don't think it will work.

Your first scenario is not permissible (the "Do it" part is proscribed); a cop can't have sex to make an arrest, nor could the department legally require officers to have sex as part of their job.

The second scenario is plausible except that you assume that the LEOs have as much or more "firepower" than the gangs. In fact some kinds of crime pay so well that law enforcement is way over their heads trying to fight back. Maybe not so bad as what's going on in Mexico but bad enough. For example, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9770.html suggests that the combined spending on the four drugs {marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine} is about $100 billion USD per year; more than half that figure remains even if you remove marijuana from the list. Compare that to the total federal law enforcement budget of about $28 billion https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/justice.pdf which covers the whole gamut of criminality, not just drug sales. OK, stop the "war on drugs" and the cost will drop to zero. Organized crime (gangs) will just move on to a different lucrative area, whatever brings in the cash.

New York City's police budget, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Department is $4.8 billion and it covers everything from jaywalking to terrorist bombers. Police Commissioner Bratton can't even get the mayor to hire an additional 1,000 cops because the money just isn't in the budget.

Furthermore, LEO has to "play by the rules" when going after criminals; the gangs don't have to play fair, so they don't have to waste their resources doing things that don't benefit their illegal activities.

It would make a cool movie though :-)

According to this study reentry speeds are up to 9.5km/s so keeping relative speed to something in that range should not be hard at all.

A 2km spherical asteroid of average composition will have a mass of ~1.3 x 10^13kg, the energy of the B53 is ~3.8 × 10^16 Joules which for maths purposes we can assume is delivered in 1 second so an an imparted energy of 3.8*10^6N which gives an acceleration away from the blast site of ~2.9m/s^2 which should be easily sufficient to avoid impact if it's delivered with any time lead.

It's called White Guilt. Google it.

Also, a corollary according to Jerry Pournelle: "Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide."

The interesting thing here is that the majority of US "foreign aid" is in fact military aid; little to do with "White Guilt" and more to do with US dominance. Liberalism, the philosophy of Free Market Economics and Laissez-faire economics and the deregulation that follow from it are very relevant in this case since it's very much these things which have caused the problems which need foreign aid to deal with.

With a little bit less ignorance we could discuss, besides the moral reasons, the real practical reasons for foreign aid which, for the USA for example, would incluide:

• avoiding potential disasters like Ebola which could easily affect us all
• building up "soft power and influence"
• avoiding Chinese foreign aid becoming dominant

If you think that the Chinese are giving foreign aid entirely from the goodness of their hearts and due to Chinese "White Guilt" then you have a different level of stupid. Study the RAND report (it is not an accident that a defence organisation is involved in reporting on foreign aid) and you may begin to understand a little more of the world.

That's only because marriage rates are on the decline. In terms of percentages of marriages that end in divorce, it's as high as ever.

Marriage is the #1 cause of divorce.

Studies such as this one report a higher level of feelings of commitment between recently married couples than those cohabitating for a long period, which just goes to show that marriage tends to give people a false sense of commitment, given the high divorce rate. Feelings change.

Not being married makes it much easier to kick the cheat (of either sex) to the curb. There's no "OMG the marriage is over."

Of course, if you had civilized laws that didn't make adultery a criminal offense (it's not in Canada; the only grounds for divorce where I live are the desire of one of the parties to exit the relationship) you wouldn't have so much need for people spying on each other. It's bad enough when facebook and google and the government do it.

Other important questions: how many of those 7.1 million have actually paid for the policies, and how many just went through the web site? Also, how many of these policies are insuring the previously uninsured, and how many are insuring people who lost their previous insurance due to the ACA?

I don't have those numbers. Nobody seems to have those numbers... Kathleen Sebelius has said "we don't know that" (see YouTube link below).

I have a suspicion that if the numbers were good, somehow they would have the numbers.

The DailyMail article says that a RAND Corporation study estimates that the number of previously uninsured people who have actually paid for their policies is: 858,000 (well under a million!). I haven't found a source for this. I believe they computed this number themselves, by reading the RAND report and by using the percentages in that report.

Avik Roy read the same report, and reports the number as 1.4 million +/- 0.7 million, i.e. 700,000 people to 2.1 million people, 95% confidence.

I believe this is the RAND Corporation study being discussed: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR600/RR656/RAND_RR656.pdf

References:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2594309/President-plans-victory-lap-strong-Obamacare-enrollment-Sebelius-faces-unpopular-law-blank-stare-tough-questions-remain-whos-signing-up.html

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/30/news/economy/obamacare-premiums/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXDdmRaJy2c

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/04/09/rand-comes-clean-obamacares-exchanges-enrolled-only-1-4-million-previously-uninsured-individuals/

"The cryptographic features have not yet been reviewed by those well-versed in the secrecy business and responsible for determining the acceptability of the proposed generalized secrecy arrangements. The analyses made on secrecy have been limited to information found in the open literature (plus a little common sense). (ODC-IX)" source: http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea... and ODC-IX: http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea...

"The cryptographic features have not yet been reviewed by those well-versed in the secrecy business and responsible for determining the acceptability of the proposed generalized secrecy arrangements. The analyses made on secrecy have been limited to information found in the open literature (plus a little common sense). (ODC-IX)" source: http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea... and ODC-IX: http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea...

Thought you might like this from Troubled Lands The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction by D. J. Peterson
http://www.rand.org/pubs/comme...
(Chapter 5)

"For example, in the town of Sillamae in northeastern Estonia, nearly
300 children attending two kindergartens suffered a loss of hair in 1989.
When the story first broke in March of that year, the Soviet press agency,
TASS, reported that specialists initially had suspected the cause to be
natural radioactivity emanating from local shale deposits. Subsequent
tests, however, revealed that background radiation in the town was
normal. After months of speculation and controversy, the former director
of the Baltiets enterprise, a local defense industry, revealed that his com-
pany had dumped radioactive wastes in the town. The two kinder-
gartens were built over the dump, separated from it by only a thin layer
of sand."

You should read the actual report and not just the summary. I have.

Check this out:

click me

Note that California is not listed -- nor do they do Charter by Charter check/comparison. There are Charter schools that are just terrible.

Now read this:

click me, too

Look at page 22.

"Charter schools are not homogeneous. They vary along a number of
dimensions: Thus, there is no single charter school effect. These
differences affect accessibility, achievement, operation, and gover-
nance as our outline below suggests."

I selected the school my children attend. I did the research. They out perform our local K-5 and 6-8. 9-12 also, with the exception of the magnet program within that school.

You dismiss Charter schools based on averages and comparison -- and I see my family picking a school that works well based on a little leg work and research and picking the best.

"Truly awful teachers get canned, no problem. At least here in Colorado. "

Good for Colorado. CA, it's not so easy. LAUSD has taken a lot of flack and last year the sacked something like 100-200 "lemon" teachers. Guess what? The union has sued. And the teachers aren't "really" fired. They're in what's called "teacher jail". They basically collect a paycheck while awaiting the results of an investigation. No teachers have REALLY been fired yet.

How much resources are used to get rid if bad teachers? Our county will end up spending between $100k-over a million in litigation costs per teacher -- with most never being fired. Some will "retire" where we get to spend MORE of our resources paying them for the rest of their lives when they should be fired with cause (like sleeping in class -- can't tell you how many there were of those). Some will end up teaching at some other school in the district and very very few are actually let go.

Again, you talk about tossing more money at the problem. Again, I disagree. The teachers at our school make less than the local average for teachers. Clearly, money is not the primary factor of the discrepancy in performance.

Original 1972 paper here: http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2008/P4874.pdf

This is from the same government that brought us the VA hospital system. I work in HIT myself, and I see nothing good coming of these new technology mandates.

Well, apparently you don't work in medical care quality and outcomes analysis.

"RAND's study, led by Dr. Steven Asch, found that the VA system delivered higher-quality care than the national sample of private hospitals on all measures except acute care (on which the two samples performed comparably). In nearly every other respect, VA patients received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment, and access to follow-up ... Other studies have generated similar findings.." http://www.rand.org/blog/2012/08/socialized-or-not-we-can-learn-from-the-va.html

This isn't a fringe or polarized opinion, it's pretty much accepted in the field; as is the theory that a lot of the credit goes to the VA's electronic records system, which IS interoperable and is heavily used in order to monitor quality, identify problems and intervene, and all the things that you can do to improve quality when you aren't flying blind.

To get off my high horse, though, I can understand why anyone working in Health IT would be sour on the field. Most of what's out there is awful, and there's no news more chilling to a clinician than "We're adopting a new, easy to use electronic record system". But healthcare has been stuck in the 1950s end of the information revolution way too long, long after every other major industry has gotten on top of the horse.

It's something like the auto industry in the 60s, reacting to the government decrees for safety. If you're old enough, you can remember the horrors perpetrated on the public by the manufacturers in their snit over being told what to do; the nonretracting shoulder belts which had to be stored in clips above the door, the passive restraint belts with the little mechanical mouse which whizzed around the doorframe every time it was opened or shut.... but after that phase, look how far we've progressed now. If the industry needs a kick in the ass to get it to move into the present, let alone the future, then so be it.

1) Drones keeping each other informed of their vectors for distributed traffic control.

2) Additional revenue for Internet service provision to wide area near-lines-of-sight of sight to the drones current aloft. This has the added benefit of actually bootstrapping Paul Baran's original intention of packet-switching: route around the damage which, in this case, is damage to the Internet now potentiated by increasing centralization of internet infrastructure.

3) IPv6 offers the potential to finally put into place what I called "the primary discipline of network architecture" when I was designing Knight-Ridder/AT&T's multi-city videotex architecture back in the early 80s: "The terminal is merely the host computer nearest the customer." Getting rid of the client-server paradigm is key to recapturing the internet's potential.

Get in touch with David P. Reed regarding the strategic approach to take for wireless mesh networking in this new regime.

"I'd strongly encourage people today to ignore the IETF, and get focused on mobile, unlicensed wireless, highly reconfigurable and pervasive networking. Pursue overlays and co-existence, and create the next bigger "Internet" - the universal glue for networking things together. "

-- David P. Reed

Open Cobalt's synchronization architecture is a good option for an open peer-to-peer network synchronization standard currently in operation. But, as I said about the wireless mesh standard, contact David P. Reed, as this synchronization standard is based on Reed's PhD thesis, which, with minor modifications, I adopted for videotex architecture clear back in 1982 and it still has no RFC.

I forgot a link. Check out these details on terminal phase ICBM velocities if you want to see how challenging it is ... as of late 1960s technology. Any glance at the charts showing the amount of time you've got to work with should make the problem pretty obvious. The plot of the altitude / range to impact / interceptor flight time is particularly instructive. We're talking crazy high accelerations for the interceptor and crazy short times to intercept.

The military, despite what you may think of it, is interested in stuff that can produce practical results in the foreseeable future, not theoretical research (and never have been).

This is wrong.

There are three levels of DoD scientific funding. 6.1, 6.2, 6.3

6.1 is Basic Research. Systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and/or observable facts without specific applications toward processes or products in mind.

6.2 is Applied Research. Systematic study to gain knowledge or understanding necessary to determine the means by which a recognized and specific need may be met.

6.3 is Advanced Tech. Dev. Includes all efforts that have moved into the development and integration of hardware for field experiments and tests.

It wasn't just Paul Baran, of course, but the main concepts were invented/discovered in his series of papers from RAND at a time before anyone else was talking about such a thing (late 50s, early 60s):

    Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks
        - http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf

    - distributed mesh network of cheap, heterogenous component parts (the topology is analytically derived as optimal for retaining connectivity after possible partition events), supporting wired and wireless links
    - mail-like asynchronous address/packet-based routing of
    - digitally encoded fixed sized data blocks (inspired by "Morse's code"))
    - adaptive topology based on flood-filling neighbor/connectivity information throughout the network.

This was shelved for 5-10 years for being thought a bad idea by the AT&T engineers that DoD listened to at the time (they were designing progressively more monolithic hierarchical networks with very expensive switching equipment requiring very profitable professional administration), and was picked back up in the later 60s, when it was ironed out and then re-invented by many of the names now famous for it:

Here's an excellent discussion about this between Baran and Stewart Brand:

    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html

That's fine, if we are talking about cold, hard, statistical thinking. It's just that... should we really go that route, we have no choice but to eliminate the TSA altogether.

tl;dr: the TSA indirectly costs more in terms of money and loss of life annually than the cumulative costs in money/life due to terrorism back to and including 9/11.

These court ordered blockades are simply seen by the network as damage that the network was designed to be able to work around. If Paul Baran hadn't spearheaded this effort at RAND the original AT&T would most likely still own America with its central office.

Found from the comments of TFA: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1107.pdf page 158

Researchers have estimated that the 9/11 attacks generated nearly 2,200 additional road traffic deaths in the United States through mid-2003 from a relative increase in driving and reduction in flying resulting from fear of additional terrorist attacks and associated reductions in the convenience of flying.

Original source: Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon, “Driving Fatalities After 9/11: A Hidden Cost of Terrorism,” Applied Economics, Vol. 41, No. 14, 2009, pp. 1717–1729.