...that 'government doesn't work' and 'government causes more problems than it solves'.
Or, at least, that applies to their government.
If I worked in the FBI, I'd be pissed. An agent go to all the work to collect evidence and get a real warrant for wiretapping and start it up and run the recordings every few days and suddenly, they discover that the wiretap has been cut off and not got anything for two days, and I bet it takes it a week to get back turned on.
Not because of any law, they're used to laws protecting rights and are trained how to work within the system of 'probable cause'. Not because the higher-ups have decided the investigation is a waste of time and the resources are better spent elsewhere, which is very annoying but understandable, and usually has a schedule: Get something by this date or it's over.
No, their investigation is derailed because the people running the FBI, the DOJ, and the rest of the executive branch can't pay their bills on time. Because they're incompetent buffoons. (I am aware Robert Mueller seems rather competent, but I'm assuming the failure was elsewhere...he's surely not in charge of paying bills.)
Ironically, the first word in the FBI motto is 'Fidelity', one meaning of which is 'careful and exact discharge of obligations'. (Hence financial services using it as a name.)
Failing to follow a requirement means that other requirements will 'trickle down' and means that you're following more requirements.
They're probably following 20 or 25 requirements, but you rule-of-law liberals with your simplistic views of 'mathematics' want to requirement us to death, without releasing that 'implementing less requirements'='following more requirements'.
If it works in economics, it works in math, right?
Specialized greenhouse? That'd reach 120C? Yeah, right. You do realize that your 'greenhouse' would be filled with steam, as any water would quickly boil away, don't you? Unless it's pressurized, of course.
I'm not entirely sure why there'd be water in there at all. Perhaps you misunderstood 'greenhouse' to mean 'thing you use to grow plants in', whereas I was using it to mean 'thing that light can get into but heat cannot get out of it'. (What is, somewhat incorrectly, assumed to be the 'greenhouse effect' of how the earth works.) I was thinking tiny domes on poles or roofs. Like solar panels now. Make them like transparent thermoses, with a vacuum layer.
And you do realize that photovoltiacs use light to generate power, not heat, right?
That was my point. Use photovoltaics inside the greenhouse to generate power, and, incidentally, get warmed up and turn into heat. I.e., instead of pure thermal energy generation, where light hits inert dark objects, you generate energy from the inefficiency of photovoltaics. (OTOH, that would result in less heat, so maybe not.)
Bit of a difference, isn't it? Your 10C difference in your house would be a mere 3% efficient. In a theoretically perfect system, not a realworld.
Let me see if if understand this: If we were trying to, say, heat a house, via electrical heating, at magical 100% efficiency, from 10C to 20C, and we had a heatsink in to the ground, we'd have to transfer enough heat from the ground and dump it into the outside air to heat up 33 times more than house's volume of air? (Which obviously would not work, as we'd be unable to suck that much heat from a single point underground. And, just as obviously, in the real world we'd use a heat pump, which are more than 100% efficient in 'generating heat', because they steal heat instead of generating it. But anyway.)
I.e., for every 33 ergs of heat transfered past, you'd get 1 erg of electricity? Under perfect conditions?
Damn, that's not usable at all. That's like the suckiest waterwheel in existence.
Better to just hook the damn underground pole to the heat pump, which would at least save energy by not trying to suck heat from 10C air.
They had some pictures taken of them which might have demonstrated that did not honor that, or might have shown them drinking ginger ale, so they're being punished.
Are the school principals technical enough to do digital image forensics? Is there even an appeals process? If you were falsely accused, would you have ANY way to clear your name? Is there even a "trial" or do they simply hit Print and go directly to the sentencing, life-ruining judgements against these kids?
Of course there isn't. Schools are totalitarian from the very start. They don't even give the pretense of any sort of trial.
The supreme court was clear when they made the ruling that minor students didn't have first amendment rights while public schools were in session and the minor was on school grounds that those same rights couldn't be restricted by the school off school grounds.
The Supreme Court said nothing of the sort. It has explicitly confirmed that students have first amendment rights on school grounds, as long as they do not 'disrupt class'. Granted, schools like to stretch what is 'disrupting class', but still.
It's probably worth nothing that underaged smoking is not usually illegal.
Sell, purchasing, or providing cigarettes to someone underage that is not your child is illegal, but in many places it's perfectly legal for parents to purchase cigarettes for their children and the children to smoke them wherever. (Sometimes they have to be over 15 or 16, sometimes it's limited to their own property or when they are with their parents.)
It is, in fact, illegal for you to punish people for committing crimes, you fucktard. The school didn't stop a crime in question, they were handed what could have been evidence of illegal behavior, and punished people for that instead of operating within the legal system. That is vigilantism, not crime stopping.
Whether or not it is legal for them to do it is debatable, but your analogy is amazingly stupid. If you were handed evidence that someone had committed a crime, and you wandered over and punished them...well, I urge you to try that some day and see what happens. Their only defense is they are acting in loco parentis.
And if you think that going to the police to report possible illegal activities is the wrong course of action then law enforcement and the legal system is what needs to be fixed.
Except what would happen here if the school went to the police is exactly the correct behavior, the police would laugh and say:
What kind of idiots are you? We can't charge people with crimes because you have unsourced pictures that looks like they might be some sort of criminal activity. That's not enough to get my boss to even open an investigation up and spend the manpower on it.
And, incidentally, even if these were legitimate evidence of a crime, and the police somehow could prove that was alcohol, they still couldn't do anything, as the government cannot charge people with 'underaged drinking of alcohol at some unknown time under unknown circumstances'...criminal charges have to be more specific then that. I can show up in court and swear under oath I killed a man, and even sign a confession, but I can't be charged with murder if they don't know who I'm talking about or when it happened. You can't just vaguely have violated the law, you have to specifically violated it in known circumstances to be charged with anything.
And schools attempting to punish students for violations of the law need to be punished, period. It is slander to assert that people have violated the law, especially if you assert you have evidence but have failed to turn it over to the police.
I was told when I graduated high school, as I got older, I'd see the 'wisdom' of letting those fucktards dish out punishment however they wanted. Well, it's been a decade, and they're still as goddamn stupid as ever.
I'm no expert on this, but it seems like it would be possible to get a 100C difference without complicated heat generating systems, or even mirrors. Drive a pole into the ground, where it's about 20C if you go down far enough, and use a specially designed greenhouse on the top.
Or maybe you wouldn't even need a 'specially designed' one...black asphalt gets about halfway there by itself. If you were really clever, you could use a photovoltaic system to absorb the heat, while you were at it.)
If you can get rid of the need to have vastly complicated sun-tracking mirrors to get the heat 'high enough', thermal electrical generation could be used all over the place. It is, indeed, the problem that it needs to get insanely hot, and then we get nice large amounts of power out of it...if someone could invent something that only requires an eighth of the temp difference and gave an eighth, or even a tenth, of the power, it would be a lot more usable.
Actually, better would be something that only requires at twentieth of the difference and gave off a twentieth of the electricity. Or a fortieth. Cheap. You could build houses with two of them...one between the outside and the ground, and one between the attic and the ground, and in the winter run the outside one off the 10C difference, and in the summer run the attic one off the 10C difference. Wouldn't be enough to power the house, but it couldn't hurt.
It's all not ideal, of course....I'd honestly prefer that neither party can record willy-nilly
Really? Because the biggest problem I see here is that ALL interactions with the police are not recorded, audio and video. Especially interrogations in a police station.
Except, you moron, his 'illegal methods to maximize the amount of spam that could be sent while evading spam-blocking devices' involved hijacking other people's computers. 'His SMTP servers' do not exist.
So the odds of a terrorist (or likely a collection of terrorists) taking that firearm onto a plane to randomly murder are very high. 5 or 6 dudes taking out half a plane before anyone realizes what's going on is a great way to get attention. Sure, they'll die in the process, but living life is not their #1 objective anyway.
You're a fool. Why on earth would they bother with an airplane when they could walk into a mall and take out an entire crowded escalator? (The panic injuries alone would probably kill as many as the actual shooting, especially if they had someone at both ends so both ends ran towards the middle.) Or position a person at each exit in a movie theater?
The only reason an airplane was used before is that a) previously, people had only hijacked airplanes to escape to some other country, and b) no one knew what was going on. No one is ever going to hijack an airplane for that purpose again.
I've always thought depressurizing the cabin of an airplane is actually a pretty useful way to foil attempted hijackers. It's hard to break into the cockpit when you can't leave your oxygen mask any amount of time. (The problem, of course, is that the pressure drop can kill people, so it's not 'safe', although it's certainly safer than being hijacked.)
Of course, I'm the guy that thinks everyone over the age of 18 should be handed a pocketknife upon boarding. Assuming we can actually keep firearms off the plane, that means that everyone will be equally armed...and a five people with knives can't hold off four dozen people with knifes.
Or, alternately, drop the knifes from the ceiling (Obviously in some sort of padding), like oxygen masks do now. That makes it much harder to 'take the knifes away' if they're just strewn semi-randomly all over the floor and anyone could have stuck one or two in their shoe.
In actuality, no one's attempting to hijack planes, so all this security is somewhat stupid, especially attempt to stop knifes from coming on board, as anything with a shape edge is a 'knife'. But whatever.
Yeah, the idea that you can undo a domain registration is stupid, and clearly a scam so that favored people can 'taste' names. People can get names dirt cheap. (So cheap that if the domain company made a mistake and registered the wrong name and still billed you, you'd have to sue them in small claims court as it's less then 20 dollars.)
We'd have a lot less misuse of the system if people had to actually pay fully for each name.
What makes sexual offenders so much worse than violent nonsexual offenders (who are allowed internet access)?
There are a fair number of sexual offenders who aren't actually violent.
Yeah, I have to question this, too, and even the ones that are violent. A lot of people are talking about how many people get the 'sex offender' label when it doesn't apply, but even when it does apply, it often seems stupid to restrict them in the ways politicians insist we should.
For example, let's take a rapist. A real, honest-to-God rapist, who rapes a adult woman.
He gets arrested, locked up, serves his times, and get released.
Is it really more unsafe for him to live near a school than, say, a drug dealer who served his time for selling to children? What about a deranged women who tried to steal stole someone else's child to raise it as her own and served time for that? Neither of them are sex offender, and both of them seem more dangerous to children than a rapist who rapes adults.
Admittedly, he might still be dangerous to adults, but, duh, he's not forbidden to live near them. And if he so dangerous, what's he doing walking around free?
Terry Pratchett was a nuclear engineer before he was a writer.
The clacks manages to be an analogy to telecom buyouts and mergers and the early IT industry and the OSS community fighting the monopoly provider, and he even gets a few cell phone jokes in here. (People walking around with semaphores and messaging while they're walking, running into other people and annoying the heck out of everyone.)
And, just like instant communications revolutionized trade and politics in the real world, the clacks are doing the same on Discworld.
$140 is not cheap compared to the near identical 'electronic picture frames' that are selling for 1/3rd that price.
Electronic picture frame: Reads SD cards. Can parse image files and display them. Has a 5.6 inch color LCD. Has a few controls. Does not have a battery. Has speakers for some reason. $50
Ebook reader: Reads SD cards. Can parse text files and display them. Has a 5.5 inch B&W LCD. Has a few controls. Has a battery. $140
You seeing my problem now?
Now, that's being unfair to the ebookwise people. They also have a modem built in, but, more to the point, the reason it's so damn expensive is that they are incredibly old. I have nothing against them. If it wasn't for them the damn market would be completely empty.
The problem is that no one actually appears willing to actually manufacture a new device, which with modern engineering should cost about 60 dollars. (The added expense being the battery system. OTOH, B&W LCDs might cancel that out.)
I was disagreeing with the concept they do not have the right to make enriched uranium only if they can't purchase it. They have the right under the NPT to do almost anything they want except actually build a nuclear weapon.
They are supposed to do it in front of UN inspectors, but considering the US had threatened to bomb their enrichment sites, it's hard to argue they don't have to right to not tell people where they are.
...are the cheap ebook readers? It's a damn LCD+SD reader+battery, you can get them as 'electronic picture frames' for 50 bucks (Except they don't display text.), but 'ebook readers' all cost 200 dollars.
Yeah, yeah, I know eInk is expensive, but there are no cheap LCD ones either.
Hell, you can buy almost suitable MP3 players for 50 bucks.
The NPT says nothing about the idea that you can only enrich uranium if you can't purchase enriched uranium. There's nothing that can even vaguely be parsed that way.
It does, however, state that nuclear powers have to sell uranium for peaceful purposes. (As Iran does not want to demonstrate this by allowing inspections, the point is somewhat moot, though.)
Iran is in violation of the NPT by not allowing inspections, but the US is in violation of the NPT (and the UN charter, and committing war crimes, threatening other countries is illegal) by threatening to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, so obviously Iran has some justification to not let inspectors in, which would require revealing locations that the US has threatened to bomb. (This is what happened when 'Yee-haw!' is your foreign policy.)
And, of course, it's worth pointing out that the thing that being in violation of the NPT would result in would Iran be being kicked out of it. Which in theory means that signatories to the NPT have agreed not to sell uranium to it, and that's about it for punishment.
Any time someone who's anti-Iran talks about the NPT, I have to wonder, exactly, why they think non-nuclear powers joined it? Why would someone join a treaty that limited what you did and gave you nothing?
The premise of non-nuclear powers joining the NPT is that nuclear powers would help them develop non-weapon technology and supply their nuclear reactor needs, in return for them not developing a bomb. Without nuclear powers doing that, and WRT to the US and Iran, the US hasn't been doing that for years, there's utterly no point in being a non-nuclear signatory.
And all of the pages I'm looking at go away when that one browser crashes. Nice.
And the browser that this doesn't happen in is... ?
What goes away in a crash has nothing to do with how many windows it's in. Anything running in the same process space goes away. As far as I know all IE6 and IE7 windows are within the same process. Same with all Opera windows and all Firefox windows.
Slashdot Mirror
...that 'government doesn't work' and 'government causes more problems than it solves'.
Or, at least, that applies to their government.
If I worked in the FBI, I'd be pissed. An agent go to all the work to collect evidence and get a real warrant for wiretapping and start it up and run the recordings every few days and suddenly, they discover that the wiretap has been cut off and not got anything for two days, and I bet it takes it a week to get back turned on.
Not because of any law, they're used to laws protecting rights and are trained how to work within the system of 'probable cause'. Not because the higher-ups have decided the investigation is a waste of time and the resources are better spent elsewhere, which is very annoying but understandable, and usually has a schedule: Get something by this date or it's over.
No, their investigation is derailed because the people running the FBI, the DOJ, and the rest of the executive branch can't pay their bills on time. Because they're incompetent buffoons. (I am aware Robert Mueller seems rather competent, but I'm assuming the failure was elsewhere...he's surely not in charge of paying bills.)
Ironically, the first word in the FBI motto is 'Fidelity', one meaning of which is 'careful and exact discharge of obligations'. (Hence financial services using it as a name.)
Failing to follow a requirement means that other requirements will 'trickle down' and means that you're following more requirements.
They're probably following 20 or 25 requirements, but you rule-of-law liberals with your simplistic views of 'mathematics' want to requirement us to death, without releasing that 'implementing less requirements'='following more requirements'.
If it works in economics, it works in math, right?
Specialized greenhouse? That'd reach 120C? Yeah, right. You do realize that your 'greenhouse' would be filled with steam, as any water would quickly boil away, don't you? Unless it's pressurized, of course.
I'm not entirely sure why there'd be water in there at all. Perhaps you misunderstood 'greenhouse' to mean 'thing you use to grow plants in', whereas I was using it to mean 'thing that light can get into but heat cannot get out of it'. (What is, somewhat incorrectly, assumed to be the 'greenhouse effect' of how the earth works.) I was thinking tiny domes on poles or roofs. Like solar panels now. Make them like transparent thermoses, with a vacuum layer.
And you do realize that photovoltiacs use light to generate power, not heat, right?
That was my point. Use photovoltaics inside the greenhouse to generate power, and, incidentally, get warmed up and turn into heat. I.e., instead of pure thermal energy generation, where light hits inert dark objects, you generate energy from the inefficiency of photovoltaics. (OTOH, that would result in less heat, so maybe not.)
Bit of a difference, isn't it? Your 10C difference in your house would be a mere 3% efficient. In a theoretically perfect system, not a realworld.
Let me see if if understand this: If we were trying to, say, heat a house, via electrical heating, at magical 100% efficiency, from 10C to 20C, and we had a heatsink in to the ground, we'd have to transfer enough heat from the ground and dump it into the outside air to heat up 33 times more than house's volume of air? (Which obviously would not work, as we'd be unable to suck that much heat from a single point underground. And, just as obviously, in the real world we'd use a heat pump, which are more than 100% efficient in 'generating heat', because they steal heat instead of generating it. But anyway.)
I.e., for every 33 ergs of heat transfered past, you'd get 1 erg of electricity? Under perfect conditions?
Damn, that's not usable at all. That's like the suckiest waterwheel in existence.
Better to just hook the damn underground pole to the heat pump, which would at least save energy by not trying to suck heat from 10C air.
They had some pictures taken of them which might have demonstrated that did not honor that, or might have shown them drinking ginger ale, so they're being punished.
There, I fixed that for you.
Are the school principals technical enough to do digital image forensics? Is there even an appeals process? If you were falsely accused, would you have ANY way to clear your name? Is there even a "trial" or do they simply hit Print and go directly to the sentencing, life-ruining judgements against these kids?
Of course there isn't. Schools are totalitarian from the very start. They don't even give the pretense of any sort of trial.
The supreme court was clear when they made the ruling that minor students didn't have first amendment rights while public schools were in session and the minor was on school grounds that those same rights couldn't be restricted by the school off school grounds.
The Supreme Court said nothing of the sort. It has explicitly confirmed that students have first amendment rights on school grounds, as long as they do not 'disrupt class'. Granted, schools like to stretch what is 'disrupting class', but still.
It's probably worth nothing that underaged smoking is not usually illegal.
Sell, purchasing, or providing cigarettes to someone underage that is not your child is illegal, but in many places it's perfectly legal for parents to purchase cigarettes for their children and the children to smoke them wherever. (Sometimes they have to be over 15 or 16, sometimes it's limited to their own property or when they are with their parents.)
It is, in fact, illegal for you to punish people for committing crimes, you fucktard. The school didn't stop a crime in question, they were handed what could have been evidence of illegal behavior, and punished people for that instead of operating within the legal system. That is vigilantism, not crime stopping.
Whether or not it is legal for them to do it is debatable, but your analogy is amazingly stupid. If you were handed evidence that someone had committed a crime, and you wandered over and punished them...well, I urge you to try that some day and see what happens. Their only defense is they are acting in loco parentis.
That's what I'd do if I were at that school.
Except it wouldn't be of other students, it'd be of the teachers and administrators.
Which is just another bullshit way schools can hand out punishment to whoever pisses them off, instead of people who actually commit wrongdoing.
And if you think that going to the police to report possible illegal activities is the wrong course of action then law enforcement and the legal system is what needs to be fixed.
Except what would happen here if the school went to the police is exactly the correct behavior, the police would laugh and say:
What kind of idiots are you? We can't charge people with crimes because you have unsourced pictures that looks like they might be some sort of criminal activity. That's not enough to get my boss to even open an investigation up and spend the manpower on it.
And, incidentally, even if these were legitimate evidence of a crime, and the police somehow could prove that was alcohol, they still couldn't do anything, as the government cannot charge people with 'underaged drinking of alcohol at some unknown time under unknown circumstances'...criminal charges have to be more specific then that. I can show up in court and swear under oath I killed a man, and even sign a confession, but I can't be charged with murder if they don't know who I'm talking about or when it happened. You can't just vaguely have violated the law, you have to specifically violated it in known circumstances to be charged with anything.
And schools attempting to punish students for violations of the law need to be punished, period. It is slander to assert that people have violated the law, especially if you assert you have evidence but have failed to turn it over to the police.
I was told when I graduated high school, as I got older, I'd see the 'wisdom' of letting those fucktards dish out punishment however they wanted. Well, it's been a decade, and they're still as goddamn stupid as ever.
I'm no expert on this, but it seems like it would be possible to get a 100C difference without complicated heat generating systems, or even mirrors. Drive a pole into the ground, where it's about 20C if you go down far enough, and use a specially designed greenhouse on the top.
Or maybe you wouldn't even need a 'specially designed' one...black asphalt gets about halfway there by itself. If you were really clever, you could use a photovoltaic system to absorb the heat, while you were at it.)
If you can get rid of the need to have vastly complicated sun-tracking mirrors to get the heat 'high enough', thermal electrical generation could be used all over the place. It is, indeed, the problem that it needs to get insanely hot, and then we get nice large amounts of power out of it...if someone could invent something that only requires an eighth of the temp difference and gave an eighth, or even a tenth, of the power, it would be a lot more usable.
Actually, better would be something that only requires at twentieth of the difference and gave off a twentieth of the electricity. Or a fortieth. Cheap. You could build houses with two of them...one between the outside and the ground, and one between the attic and the ground, and in the winter run the outside one off the 10C difference, and in the summer run the attic one off the 10C difference. Wouldn't be enough to power the house, but it couldn't hurt.
It's all not ideal, of course....I'd honestly prefer that neither party can record willy-nilly
Really? Because the biggest problem I see here is that ALL interactions with the police are not recorded, audio and video. Especially interrogations in a police station.
Except, you moron, his 'illegal methods to maximize the amount of spam that could be sent while evading spam-blocking devices' involved hijacking other people's computers. 'His SMTP servers' do not exist.
So the odds of a terrorist (or likely a collection of terrorists) taking that firearm onto a plane to randomly murder are very high. 5 or 6 dudes taking out half a plane before anyone realizes what's going on is a great way to get attention. Sure, they'll die in the process, but living life is not their #1 objective anyway.
You're a fool. Why on earth would they bother with an airplane when they could walk into a mall and take out an entire crowded escalator? (The panic injuries alone would probably kill as many as the actual shooting, especially if they had someone at both ends so both ends ran towards the middle.) Or position a person at each exit in a movie theater?
The only reason an airplane was used before is that a) previously, people had only hijacked airplanes to escape to some other country, and b) no one knew what was going on. No one is ever going to hijack an airplane for that purpose again.
I've always thought depressurizing the cabin of an airplane is actually a pretty useful way to foil attempted hijackers. It's hard to break into the cockpit when you can't leave your oxygen mask any amount of time. (The problem, of course, is that the pressure drop can kill people, so it's not 'safe', although it's certainly safer than being hijacked.)
Of course, I'm the guy that thinks everyone over the age of 18 should be handed a pocketknife upon boarding. Assuming we can actually keep firearms off the plane, that means that everyone will be equally armed...and a five people with knives can't hold off four dozen people with knifes.
Or, alternately, drop the knifes from the ceiling (Obviously in some sort of padding), like oxygen masks do now. That makes it much harder to 'take the knifes away' if they're just strewn semi-randomly all over the floor and anyone could have stuck one or two in their shoe.
In actuality, no one's attempting to hijack planes, so all this security is somewhat stupid, especially attempt to stop knifes from coming on board, as anything with a shape edge is a 'knife'. But whatever.
Yeah, the idea that you can undo a domain registration is stupid, and clearly a scam so that favored people can 'taste' names. People can get names dirt cheap. (So cheap that if the domain company made a mistake and registered the wrong name and still billed you, you'd have to sue them in small claims court as it's less then 20 dollars.)
We'd have a lot less misuse of the system if people had to actually pay fully for each name.
What makes sexual offenders so much worse than violent nonsexual offenders (who are allowed internet access)?
There are a fair number of sexual offenders who aren't actually violent.
Yeah, I have to question this, too, and even the ones that are violent. A lot of people are talking about how many people get the 'sex offender' label when it doesn't apply, but even when it does apply, it often seems stupid to restrict them in the ways politicians insist we should.
For example, let's take a rapist. A real, honest-to-God rapist, who rapes a adult woman.
He gets arrested, locked up, serves his times, and get released.
Is it really more unsafe for him to live near a school than, say, a drug dealer who served his time for selling to children? What about a deranged women who tried to steal stole someone else's child to raise it as her own and served time for that? Neither of them are sex offender, and both of them seem more dangerous to children than a rapist who rapes adults.
Admittedly, he might still be dangerous to adults, but, duh, he's not forbidden to live near them. And if he so dangerous, what's he doing walking around free?
Terry Pratchett was a nuclear engineer before he was a writer.
The clacks manages to be an analogy to telecom buyouts and mergers and the early IT industry and the OSS community fighting the monopoly provider, and he even gets a few cell phone jokes in here. (People walking around with semaphores and messaging while they're walking, running into other people and annoying the heck out of everyone.)
And, just like instant communications revolutionized trade and politics in the real world, the clacks are doing the same on Discworld.
$140 is not cheap compared to the near identical 'electronic picture frames' that are selling for 1/3rd that price.
Electronic picture frame: Reads SD cards. Can parse image files and display them. Has a 5.6 inch color LCD. Has a few controls. Does not have a battery. Has speakers for some reason. $50
Ebook reader: Reads SD cards. Can parse text files and display them. Has a 5.5 inch B&W LCD. Has a few controls. Has a battery. $140
You seeing my problem now?
Now, that's being unfair to the ebookwise people. They also have a modem built in, but, more to the point, the reason it's so damn expensive is that they are incredibly old. I have nothing against them. If it wasn't for them the damn market would be completely empty.
The problem is that no one actually appears willing to actually manufacture a new device, which with modern engineering should cost about 60 dollars. (The added expense being the battery system. OTOH, B&W LCDs might cancel that out.)
I was disagreeing with the concept they do not have the right to make enriched uranium only if they can't purchase it. They have the right under the NPT to do almost anything they want except actually build a nuclear weapon.
They are supposed to do it in front of UN inspectors, but considering the US had threatened to bomb their enrichment sites, it's hard to argue they don't have to right to not tell people where they are.
...are the cheap ebook readers? It's a damn LCD+SD reader+battery, you can get them as 'electronic picture frames' for 50 bucks (Except they don't display text.), but 'ebook readers' all cost 200 dollars.
Yeah, yeah, I know eInk is expensive, but there are no cheap LCD ones either.
Hell, you can buy almost suitable MP3 players for 50 bucks.
The NPT says nothing about the idea that you can only enrich uranium if you can't purchase enriched uranium. There's nothing that can even vaguely be parsed that way.
It does, however, state that nuclear powers have to sell uranium for peaceful purposes. (As Iran does not want to demonstrate this by allowing inspections, the point is somewhat moot, though.)
Iran is in violation of the NPT by not allowing inspections, but the US is in violation of the NPT (and the UN charter, and committing war crimes, threatening other countries is illegal) by threatening to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, so obviously Iran has some justification to not let inspectors in, which would require revealing locations that the US has threatened to bomb. (This is what happened when 'Yee-haw!' is your foreign policy.)
And, of course, it's worth pointing out that the thing that being in violation of the NPT would result in would Iran be being kicked out of it. Which in theory means that signatories to the NPT have agreed not to sell uranium to it, and that's about it for punishment.
Any time someone who's anti-Iran talks about the NPT, I have to wonder, exactly, why they think non-nuclear powers joined it? Why would someone join a treaty that limited what you did and gave you nothing?
The premise of non-nuclear powers joining the NPT is that nuclear powers would help them develop non-weapon technology and supply their nuclear reactor needs, in return for them not developing a bomb. Without nuclear powers doing that, and WRT to the US and Iran, the US hasn't been doing that for years, there's utterly no point in being a non-nuclear signatory.
And all of the pages I'm looking at go away when that one browser crashes. Nice.
And the browser that this doesn't happen in is... ?
What goes away in a crash has nothing to do with how many windows it's in. Anything running in the same process space goes away. As far as I know all IE6 and IE7 windows are within the same process. Same with all Opera windows and all Firefox windows.
But the UN has already offered to supply them with all the fuel they need for their reactors, as long as they shut down their enrichment program.
How nice of the UN to offer to do something they're already required to do under the non-proliferation treaty, except with added restrictions.