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This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For
New submitter fractalVisionz writes "The White House has officially responded to the petition to secure resources and funding to begin Death Star construction by 2016, as previously discussed on Slashdot. With costs estimated over $850,000,000,000,000,000 (that's $850 quadrillion), and a firm policy stating 'The Administration does not support blowing up planets,' the U.S. government will obviously decline. However, that is not to say we don't already have a Death Star of our own, floating approximately 120 miles above the earth's surface. The response ends with a call to those interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields of study: 'If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star's power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.'"
A surprisingly good response. Perhaps they decided to answer this question to at least give one good answer on a petition no one took serious.
So: Thanks for the nice answer: Now please answer the serious petitions!
Why go through the expense of blowing up planets when you can kill civilians, citizens even, without any due process.
"His name was James Damore."
'The Administration does not support blowing up planets' that we are on.
rewriting history since 2109
"The Administration does not support blowing up planets"
Unless, of course, said planet was populated with opponents of Israel and/or in a position to disrupt status quo in hydrocarbon trade and acquisition.
Or tried to kill my daddy.
...blowing up planets, unless the MPAA, RIAA, or BSA tell us to.
FTA "Even though the United States doesn't have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs..."
Parsec is a unit of length!
Z
/wooooooooooooooooosh
Funny how they want to engage with the public when it is free and does not upset the interests of any multinationals.
My little Linux and tech blog
You're on Slashdot and you don't recognize this line?
Besides, the use of distance instead of time has been widely explained:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Parsec
Or, the put it in terrestrial terms, imagine that the Kessel Run has to cross a sea with a giant whirlpool vortex - a more capable ship (or a risk taking captain) can skirt closer to the whilrpool, so a captain could boast that he did the Kessel Run in only 12 leagues while others take the longer way around.
I, for one, applaud a little light-heared humor from the Machine that is the Government.
- Ubique, Tom Termini www.bluedog.net - WebObjects / J2EE SOA / iPhone solutions for knowledge workers
"Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Apparently some dumb fucking fantasy is way more important than stopping the rape of children.
Is that what your petition is going to say "stop all the child rape"??? Perhaps you'd do more good in this world with less attitude and more plan...
Another one coming up the pipeline:
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/289919/news/world/white-house-petitioned-to-build-trek-starship-enterprise
Pundits, get your pens ready...
Or maybe Paul Shawcross did this in his spare time or break time? While I don't overwhelmingly approve of the speed, thoroughness, or appropriateness of many white house responses, you can't simply assume this response means that other duties were being shirked.
Wow, look at all 96 of those memes....
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/responses
how exactly did you want them to respond to a petition that by their own rules forces them to respond if given enough votes?
But think of it as stimulus!
You can always inflate your way out of debt - or else blow your creditors to smithereens!
Given the existence of the Jedi religion, the White House's statement that the Force is powerful is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. *folds arms*
You're saying it could be done, right?
Where do I sign up?
Well, this seems quite the hokey explanation. Am I wrong to intuitively think that skirting closer to a blackhole and trying to maintain speed would take exponentially more power/fuel? Or would it be truly a linear increase?
Z
Although I find it unlikely that the US really has anything that could navigate the black holes of the Maw and cut the distance that much, their denial has to make you wonder. Why would they need to point that out?
It would take exponentially more time.
That the US will not consider building a Death Star is great. Imagine the cost overruns and time delays involved in a project that large when Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc. bid on this project.
With all the red tape it's no surprise that such a large flaw as the thermal exhaust port was overlooked. No P-trap instead of a straight shot to the reactor core?
Classic arrogance on the part of underestimating a small counter-force (insurgency) due to planning against a more conventional war. Thus, why the Death Star didn't launch it's full complement of 7,000 TIE Fighters and instead only Vader and those under his command knew the deal.
Whether you think it's a good thing or a bad thing, the U.S. is an Empire of sorts but we'd be better off using those quadrillions to invest in our people. There are people in powerful positions who think otherwise though as the profits and promise of destruction are too much to resist.
It would *APPEAR* to take exponentially more time to an *OUTSIDE OBSERVER*.
When dealing with ships capable of going the speed of light, things would almost never be as they appear. At least not until some time after they slow down.
It's no worse than the President ending speeches with "God bless America", or opening sessions of Congress with group prayer, so it's unlikely to get spanked by the SC even if the author was serious.
[Although I'd love to see a bunch of right-wing cable TV anger monkeys getting their back up over the establishment clause if a non-Christian fringe-religion President started dropping references to his own wacky New Age religion everywhere. May the Earth-mother praise him.]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Well, this seems quite the hokey explanation. Am I wrong to intuitively think that skirting closer to a blackhole and trying to maintain speed would take exponentially more power/fuel? Or would it be truly a linear increase?
Z
Well yeah, that's kind of the point of the bragging - he never said that it saves fuel, or even time. But if an Imperial Star Cruiser is chasing you, a stunt like that might help you get away.
Of course, in a universe where faster than light travel is possible, who knows what their fuel/propulsion constraints are.
I am sure that your government will agree to not support rape of children.
So, what you're saying is, "you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." Einstein was a jedi!
LOL! Simply, I like this. It's good to see some good humour from a Government in answering in the spirit of the petition. What I want to know is when will they make a start on warp, gravitic or inertialess drives ...
J Williamson
how exactly did you want them to respond to a petition that by their own rules forces them to respond if given enough votes?
When their own 'rules' gives them an absolute out, forcing them to respond means little. See the Chris Dodd bribery petition.
Terms of Participation from https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/how-why/terms-participation
"To avoid the appearance of improper influence, the White House may decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or agencies, federal courts, or state and local government in its response to a petition."
The USA can't afford $471?
Forget Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc. I found it on Amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Star-Wars-Death-10188/dp/B002EEP3NO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358010617&sr=8-1&keywords=death+star
Place nail here >+
So is a website set up by the white house to vet petitions from the public.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
You're on Slashdot and you don't recognize this line?
That was from Star Trek, right?
It's no worse than the President ending speeches with "God bless America", or opening sessions of Congress with group prayer, ...
.. which the Democrats do because they can't win elections without paying lip service to Christianity. That's why, for example, Nancy Pelosi calls herself a "good Catholic girl" even though she supports legalizing late term abortion, and it's why liberals like Bill Maher know that Obama is probably a "secular humanist" despite his various protestations that he's Christian. (Of a church that he attended for 20 years without, apparently, hearing any sermons or discussing them, etc.)
There is, for liberals, no higher principle than holding elected office. And their constituents are quite happy to be lied to and go along with the charade.
Just fund it by minting a special "Death Star" platinum coin... Also what is so different between blowing up planets and dropping bombs on people with drones?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You're on /. and you think "exponentially" means a whole lot?
The petition was insane, and so is the Administration's policy that it will respond to all petitions having a certain amount of signatures. It gives the U.S. citizen the illusion that this is a right (see the wording of the Constitution, fx, "to petition the government"); however, the right is easily exercised in other manners. More importantly, it deceives the citizen into believing that the White House is the primary and appropriate channel, and perhaps the very source of fiscal, policy and legislative matters. This deceit can be exploited against the citizen. Observe.
tldr: It is a political tactic used to influence citizens to vote straight ticket and under erroneous beliefs about the function of the President. This is not anti-Obama or anti-DNC.
(1) A President signs a bill into law, and assumes sole credit for its positive outcomes, because the people already assume the President was the source of power.
The rammifications here are (a) Voters for a presidential candidate or party line are obtained by campaign promises from the candidate which really should only be achieved by legislative or judicial action. (b) The candidate can focus his campaign around those false promises (What he will do) and not around the realities: What he will sign into law, if Congress gets the bill to his desk. (c) It allows the candidate to neglect the more important function of the President which is what he will not sign into law.
(2) It directs attention away from our legislative representatives. They are first and foremost responsible to the voters. They are the ones to be petitioned. They are the ones to introduce bills to Congress. All this petitioning the President distracts the citizen from the fact that ultimately a handful of committee members are determining the course of the country. This petition policy of the White House discourages people to spend their time and effort by calling upon their state or district reps. The White House prefers us to think the demands of 100,000 people from 50 different states is how decisions ought to be made, not 500 people from a single district (the way it has been done until now). I.e. it's majority rule, no state lines, no representative in the equation, except the President.
(3) It encourages the President to blame Congress when he cannot mandate a petition the administration perhaps does accept. In other words, "Yes, we like your petition. Now balance Congress to my party line, voter, and it may or may not happen." (It doesn't mean the petition will ever enter consideration by the House, but that message can have a strong effect at the polls) It turns ordinary voters into single issue, straight ticket voters whether they realize it or not.
(4) It is a waste of resources, man hours, and staff time. It's just bad business. But apparently it is amazing marketing, I mean politics. It's not like even 1% the voting population will realize what I've said above.
As crazy as it sounds, someone will file a lawsuit against the USA for separation of church and state because of the White House pushing the Jedi religion in their response.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Well, this seems quite the hokey explanation.
Agreed, it's a bit hokey. I think a better explanation/rationalization would be: given that a hyperspace drive works not by traversing through space more quickly, but rather by warping spacetime so that the space between start-point and end-point doesn't have to be traversed at all (cue analogy of an ant on a folded piece of paper here), then Han's customized, more powerful/efficient hyperspace drive would be able to "fold more space" than a regular one. Therefore Han can complete the Kessel Run while traversing only 12 parsecs of actual space, while other, inferior ships have to travel farther.
But then again, it's George Lucas, so this particular crime against common sense is only the tip of the iceberg compared to his subsequent atrocities. :^P
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Have gnu, will travel.
In the original script Obi-Wan was supposed to react skeptically. The first explanation would be that Han was bullshitting him.
Any comments made by the owner of this signature should be disregarded as irrelevant, uninformed, and idiotic.
My guess is that time dilation doesn't apply to travel in hyperspace.
So what? I bet they also don't support genocide, but they still have the nuclear weapon arsenal. Just in case. You never know when you might need to blow up a planet, to "liberate them".
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
If protecting victims of childhood sexual abuse is a priority for you, you might want to give this petition a look...
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
I don't think there is any reason to believe that it does that at all, and plenty of reasons to believe that it does the opposite. It certainly redirects the existing and long-standing tendency of people to direct requests on matters of policy to the White House individually and in a mechanism that is not publicly visible into a manner which draws more attention to the issues and responses while requiring less total government effort to address, but it doesn't do anything to "deceive the citizen" into believing the White House is more central than it is (if anything, by making the responses which underline why this is not the case more public than would have been the case with traditional model of request-response to an elected officials office, it does the opposite.
The responses often involve explanations of exactly why the issue is one on which the White House is not the "very source of fiscal, policy and legislative matters". See, for instance, the response on marijuana, which quotes the President saying:
Of course the obvious answer is that no one who worked on the script had the slightest fucking idea that a "parsec" wasn't a unit of time, they probably just looked up some scientific sounding terms to spread through the script and thats all she wrote.
Explanations after the fact are all fine and dandy but I suspect this one is complete bullshit to cover a very glaring error.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
No. Well, yes I am on /. but no, I do not think "exponentially" means a whole lot. Are you saying the time dilation a ship experiences as it nears the event horizon of black hole will not result in an increase in travel time* that can be described using an exponent? If so, I'm happy to hear your explanation. All I actually said, in response to someone who asked whether it would take exponentially more power and fuel as one traveled nearer a black hole**, was that it would take exponentially more time.*
Neither what I said or the question that was asked can be read such that "exponentially" means "a whole lot". In both cases it was meant to indicate a geometric growth in the need for energy or time* to get past the black hole. If I am mistaken in what I actually said, I have missed something, or you have a proper answer to znanue's question, please enlighten me--always happy to learn something new. If, on the other hand, the comment was merely passive aggressive banter, then please repeat to yourself, "It's just a show."
*Relative to frames of reference further away from a black hole's event horizon, i.e. where the ship started its journey, with apologies to tmosley who quite rightly noted that I neglected to mention this condition explicitly earlier.
**Here is a variable you might have missed.
The ron paul "libertarians" love to portray their leader as some great benevolent prophet who should be given unlimited power to do whatever he wants, for as long as he wants. This seems like exactly the right throne for unlimited power, a place from which he could threaten entire solar systems who dared not agree with his belief system. Price be damned, once all income taxes are corporate regulations are revoked, clearly the benevolent hand of the free market will enable production of something like this for no more than 5 pounds of pure gold.
Of course the obvious answer is that no one who worked on the script had the slightest fucking idea that a "parsec" wasn't a unit of time, they probably just looked up some scientific sounding terms to spread through the script and thats all she wrote.
Explanations after the fact are all fine and dandy but I suspect this one is complete bullshit to cover a very glaring error.
And of course, the obvious counter answer is: Why nitpick the scientific accuracy of a space soap opera? It's not a documentary and never even implied that it's subject to the same laws of physics that govern our world. If you're going to blame something on a scriptwriting mistake, then you open the argument up to pointing out that it's just a script, not a historical document decribing true events that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
If you really meant geometric growth, OK, sorry about that...but it didn't look that way from here. It's a heavily abused term.
NP. We all have our pet peeves.
we're going to have to wait for China to build it.
The number is based on the ammount of steel required to build a ship of that size, the reply has a link to some obscure university blog site where some economics students apparently worked it out.
null
you read, and understand what that statement you C&P means, right?
Exploited by a one man starship?!
NO!
DEFEATED by a one man starship!
FFS!
If Disney opened up a Death Star, I expect we'd all have to spend at least 2 years there.