It's not the House, or the Senate, that's really doing either of those. It's the Executive, which apparently has discovered a brand new power which never existed before this point...when signing bills into law, he's decided he can remove parts of them he doesn't like, via 'signing statements'.
Yes, other presidents have had signing statements, but they only were directives to his underlings in the executive branch, for example, if a bill said 'Here's X million dollars to maintain bridges and ferries however needed', he might say 'Spend roughly Y of that on bridges and Z of that on ferries', which is entirely within his rights as the person in charge of the executive branch. He could have just as easily sent them a memo directing them to do that, but if he puts it with the bill it gets to everyone.
Bush, OTOH, thinks it's reasonable for Congress to send him a bill saying 'It's illegal for anyone to do X', and he write 'Unless I decide it's important' and sign that. (Instead of, you know, not signing it, which would be correct way for it to not become law.)
We entered a constitutional crisis the very first time Bush decided that his completely-made-up-power to protect the country trumped actually passed laws. (Seriously. Someone explain to me where the President got the Constitutional 'power' to protect this country from enemies? Obviously, all the government should do that, but I see no specific abilities with the President in that respect.)
Everyone who is going to vote for a bill has to read it, out loud, at the same time. They only have to do this once, if they bill hasn't changed they don't have to bother, and if it's been changed via amendments, they merely have to read the amendments out loud.
Bill Clinton didn't do that, a bunch of faux fight-the-system-outrage (Over crap the Republicans have managed to do 50 times worse, aka, Abramoff), hot-button issue (Hey, good job doing something about that flag burning), broken promises (Where'd those voluntary term-limits go?) and brilliant unified campaigning did that.
Bill Clinton did not lose the 94 Congressional election, the Republicans won it. They'd probably won it no matter who had won in 92. If the voters were distancing themselves from Clinton, he wouldn't have won in 96.
I...have no idea what's you're talking about. You appear to be talking about 'wheelies' that happen during a jump.
And you appear to be agreeing with me while thinking you're disagreeing. The reason a car rotates in flight is mainly due to the position of the engine and the misbalanced center of gravity.
However, I was just pointing out that assuming a perfectly balanced car, you'd get a 'perfectly balanced' jump, which would result in the front wheels hitting exactly as earlier as the rear wheels as they left the ramp, which wouldn't be 'level' at all and seriously harm the car. And that's assuming it hits at the top of ramp level...by the time it reaches the bottom and 'the ground', it has continued its rotation front-downward even more.
Basically, imagine the car a second after the rear wheels leave the ramp. Now flip the car's direction and momentum where it's about to go speeding down the ramp. Pretending it was perfectly balanced, it would be at exactly that position near the end of the jump. Now remove the ramp and imagine the angle at which it's about to hit the ground. Now rotate it an extra 20% downward for engine weight.
In other words, physics-wise, you can't actually land level from a non-rigged jump up into the air. (A flat Speed-type jump is another thing. The landing impact can hurt the vehicle, but the angle itself won't, assuming the vehicle's going at any reasonable speed.) If you jump at a small enough angle, you can drive away, but almost none of the Duke jumps were at those angles, because those angles don't let you jump that far. The closer you get to 45 degrees, the farther you can jump. They didn't go quite that far, but they went well past the angle at which a car can safely hit the ground.
There has to be some point (or points) where the car is exactly horizontal. It might never be at the same elevation as the bottom (or even the top) of the ramp, but it has to exist.
Hence my qualification of 'a jump like that'. You cannot place a car with a large amount of weight in the front (Or in the back!) and jump up a ramp and land at the original level you started with all the wheels on the ground. You could, in theory, balance the car with exactly slightly more weight in the back than the front, but have fun getting that right.
I know that 'more weight in the back' seems wrong, but it's not just the weight that turns the car's front downward. By the time the rear wheels leave the ramp, the front wheels have already edged down below the angle of the ramp at least a little, and thus even a perfectly balanced car would get frontward spin. If you think of the wheels as a parabolic arc, you can imagine what I'm talking about. The rear wheels pass through the point the front wheels were a second earlier, and thus the front wheels always hit first. If the place they're jumping to is exactly level with the top of the ramp, the rear wheels will hit after the front wheels exactly the same amount of time between the sets of wheels leaving the ramp.
The only point the wheels are level is exactly at the top of the arc, and that, rather obviously, is not where most jumps end. (It'd actually be impossible for them to end exactly at the top, because, duh, the car was moving upwards a second before that, thus the wheels couldn't be directly over anything unless they can pass through solid matter. But they could end really really close after the top.) Most of them end at the bottom of ramp level.
That's assuming a perfectly balanced car, which no car is. It's also assuming there's no acceleration after the front wheels have left the ramp, which will make the rear wheels not exactly follow the front. (Honestly, I have no idea which direction it would alter things.)
Now, you could, as I said, slightly overbalance the back (Or, hey, try to accelerate during the jump, maybe, if it works that direction.) and try to get the back of the car downward before the end of the jump, but if you put something the weight of a car engine in the rear of a car (Or almost the weight of one in the front of a car, for Volkswagons and other 'backwards' cars.), you're going to really shorten your jumping distance.
Also, I have seen cars capable of performing a wheelie. Those, under proper acceleration, can take off with the rear wheels generating such force as to have the rotation be in the opposite direction. Since that is possible, there must be some intermediate force which could have the car land flat at any elevation.
I don't see how having more power would help anything. The wheelie isn't because of the power of the rotation of the wheels, it's because of the momentum of the body and the center of gravity of it. The wheels move forward so fast that the car body is left behind, and, because it is rigid, it can't just bend and thus it has to go the only way it can go to get out of the way of the wheels...up. You could generate the same effect by hooking the rear axles up to two chains and yanking really really fast, with no wheel rotation at all.
If you're thinking of having the wheels act as a gyroscope, causing the car to spin in the opposite direction, well, I'm just not seeing that. That's certainly not why they pop wheelies. If that was possible, the car would also rotate in the opposite direction of the direction the engine was turning, because the engine weighs a lot more than the wheels. This is usually sideways, so you'd have the car spiraling through the air like a football. And you'd have that happen every time they red-lined the engine, not just when it was mid-air. It'd be much more likely to go up on two side wheels than pop a wheelie.
Now, if you put a very big gyroscope in a car, that could, in theory, ke
A living being won't be able to "heat themself" anymore than a dead one.
Um, why not? People normally heat themselves just fine. Or are you one of those cold-blooded humans?
Considering the most important requirement for space suits is getting rid of heat, I think it's entirely possible that humans would generate enough heat to keep themselves entirely warm. I don't think it's likely, I have a feeling too much would radiate, but their body's heating would, in fact, slow the process down.
So, the end result is that if you are some amazing person that can survive the extremly low pressure and lack of oxygen of a vaccuum, you will die in half an hour from low body temperature, and your body will reach the freezing point in 3.5 hours. This is still a far cry from some movies where they instantly turn to ice pillars, and is also much slower than if you just step outside naked in the winter (where I'm from).
What's really dumb is that people can survive longer, temperature-wise, in any environment for longer than it would take to run out of air. You can be dumped into below-zero salt water and you'll drown before you'll freeze to death, and that transfers energy much better than a vacuum, so the entire idea is silly. I know we're talking about someone with an air supply, but in movies, they almost always don't have one, and yet 'freezing' is the danger.
I understand it's Georgia policy to place random dirt "jumpin' ramps" at old bridges, beside tall buildings, across from overpasses, near turnoffs on dirt roads, etc.
We're paving them now.
However, I'm not the least surprised that someone managed to drive off the road. I love how they say 'the driver apparently mistook the exit lane for part of the carpool lane and continued over the side of the overpass.'. This sounds really stupid, but in actual fact the stupid people are the state DOT.
I don't know anything about this incident or this location, but I've driven down non-existent roads twice in Georgia, and seen many others do the same. The roads looked like turn-offs or actual roads, but, um, didn't actually continue, and I found myself driving on dirt or almost crashing into road-closed signs. In one notable instance, I was sitting at what used to be a road interesting another road in a T, but one of the arms of the T had been closed, thus diverting all traffic down the T. I sat there at a stop sign for the bottom part of the T, (God knows why I had a stop sign, considering I wasn't crossing traffic.) and watched someone round the corner going about 45 (The speed limit) and smash full speed right into the road-closed sign. I checked later, by measuring how long it took me...they had about a six second view of that sign. There was a sign warning something about 'traffic patterns changing' before the curve, but who knows what that means, and it wasn't in a very good location.
The Georgia DOT apparently doesn't bother actually marking the closed roads at the start, preferring instead that you swing onto it or turn a corner and then immediately realize there is actually no road there. I've seen uncompleted off-ramps (On I-75, come to think of it) that you couldn't tell ended in mid-air from the entrance point, blocked solely by five or six cones at the turn off and a road-closed sign at the end.
I'm surprised more people don't have fatal accidents here because the DOT didn't bother to inform them not to drive on what looked like a perfectly reasonable road.
Unless, of course, there is some sort of incline for a takeoff (ever notice how the Duke boys always manage to find that conveniently placed incline?)
The Duke's of Hazard jumps weren't 'special effects', just 'stunts'. They actually had cars do those jumps, and thus were constrained with the actual laws of physics.
Of course, those jumps also completely trashed the cars, as it's impossible to land a car flat from a jump like that. So either there's a lot of work on the car, evening out the weight and installing special shocks and framework, or the car isn't going to be able to drive away.
Smash cuts don't exist in real-life, either. Yet we don't complain about those. Slow motion is an entirely artistic thing, and is not related to the physics of the situation. At all.
Yeah, that complaint was just dumb. We might as well ask what sort of vehicle can smoothly go from miles up in space right up to the action with no reentry problems, for those long pan-ins. Or what allows the camera to teleport from location to location, sometimes even backwards and forward in time, and what sort of fairies put up those location descriptions at the bottom of the screen or why they do that. Or how the camera manages to go through walls and people's bodies and stuff.
The camera does not obey the laws of physics, because, duh, the camera does not exist in the movie universe, neither does how it alters our perception of the action exist in the movie universe, barring some fourth-wall and meta-narrative comedies. (There are plenty of interact-with-the-camera moments in comedy, but I'm also thinking of the 'running in slow motion' gag in one of the Scary Movie movies.)
Slow motion isn't the only issue here. Think about the camera effects in Traffic, where different 'worlds' had deliberately different 'camera styles', or cartoons where camera glare is added in. A whole movie could be displayed upside down or back to front and that won't alter the physics of the movie universe, although it would be very confusing. There are conventions film makers follow, just like people who write books often use 'chapters', but that has nothing to do with the world the work of art is describing.
Both those can happen, although not in the comical way they do it on TV.
Becoming part of a large enough electrical current can burn you enough to cause charring, although if it does so you're not going to be standing there smoking. You'll be laying-there-dead smoking. Run a large enough current through an organic substance and it will, indeed, smoke as it carbonizes.
And your hair standing on can happen just in the presence of strong electrical fields. Although they're confused static electricity with become part of a current, it's not impossible it could happen in those situations too.
a 70Kg person will drop to the freezing point from 305K in less than 3 and a half hours.
No they wouldn't. If we're talking about someone in a vacuum, they will soon freeze to death and stop heating themselves. (Well, first they'll probably go into shock/dive reflex and stop heating anything but their brain, and then they'll die and stop heating anything. OTOH, who knows if that works in space?)
That's assuming they have some sort of air, of course. Like a scuba tank or something.
And your '305K' is goofy. At that temperature, someone would already be dead. You can't walk around with a body temperature that low.
Starting with 310K, how long would it take for them to drop to, oh, 305K to die, and then how long would it take a dead person to drop to 2.7K?
Oh, I see where you got 305K, as the skin temperature. That is useful for knowing the amount of radiation a normal living person exchanges with the environment on earth, but not that applicable to space, where a dead body's temperature would quickly average itself out over the entire thing.
I'm not saying you should insulate children as they get older from the harsh realities of the world, but I do believe there is a balance.
Ah, don't confuse 'They must never be exposed to X,Y, and Z', where those are some sort of evil ideas and concept, with the opposite of 'Let's create a hypercompetive world with constant activity and constant judging of everything the child does.'.
In fact, it's entirely possible to do both those things at the same time, or, even better, neither.
It's incredibly cliche to say 'Let kids be kids', and I'm all in favor of actual outside activity instead of constant TV and video games, but it'd probably better for them to do that than the insanely frantic life some parents have created for them. Better be slightly overweight than snap in half. (The modern American is moderately lazy. Deal with it.)
If more than half of a child's waking non-school life is scheduled for 'their benefit', something is seriously wrong. You want them to spend more time ouside, sign them up for little league and boy scouts, but don't expect them to exceed in either. Who the hell cares how good they do? That's about the maximum level of activities a child should be involved in. Replace little league with piano or ballet if they actually like those things, but, again, don't expect anything.
You sound like an ideal teacher. I'm suspicious.;)
But, seriously, you're right. Homework is not for teaching, and it is not for memorization. If students need to memorize things in a class, the class is either second-grade math with memorizing multiplication tables, it's a history or other 'knowledge' class, and memorizing certain facts isn't going to help with the other facts that are on the test, or the class is structured wrong. Practice!=Memorization
Homework is for students and teachers to know if the students grasp the concepts.
Ideally, it would be entirely up to the student, who would attempt the problem, realize they cannot do it, and ask for help the next day, but in reality, many students are no responsible enough to do that.
I liked what a math teacher did when we switched over to block scheduling on all our classes the last year of high school, with ~80 minute classes. We showed up, he handled questions from the minimal amount of homework. Let's call that ten minutes. He then taught us some new stuff for some time, probably about 40 minutes. Then he gave us a few specific problem, and asked us to do them, giving us maybe 20 minutes. We'd sit and do them, and if we finished we could start on that night's homework. If someone immediately had problem and came to him, he'd often interrupt the classwork time to explain it in a different way. If no one appeared to have problems, he'd just tell us the answers to the classwork near the end. (I actually think he did something like this before we switched to block scheduling, but I didn't have him then.)
Sometimes it was two shorter sessions of teaching and two shorter classwork times. Sometimes it was 'Okay, everyone work on this single problem for a minute, and see if you can figure out what to do.'.
Basically, it was: Here's the stuff. You guys try it. If you have any questions ask me. Here's some more stuff to try at home, if you have any questions ask them in class the next day.
The classwork didn't count. The homework technically counted, although you got points for just attempting it, but he would put bonus questions on the tests for those who really grasped the material that made up for the homework if they were, like me, completely lazy people who just turned in whatever amount of homework they managed to finish in class but actually knew the material. (And, of course, I started work directly on the homework instead of the classwork, which tripped me up a few times when I actually didn't understand it. Or when I hit the homework from the 'second session' that he hadn't taught yet.)
Granted, this didn't work for everyone. Many people apparently didn't ever bother informing him of their problems, which I think was the sole reason he made us do homework and turn it in. So he'd explain something, assign homework, wait for questions the next day with the homwork, get none, go home and grade the homework, and then realize that parts of the class didn't understand, so have to go back to it.
This guy wasn't actually the ideal teacher, he apparently operated this way because he wasn't that great at explaining things in the first place. The students who figured it out would often jump in to explain it in a better way. OTOH, a teacher who realizes his job to is teach instead of to grade is already a step above everyone else.
No shit. We don't need more 'idea people', most of them are idiots and the ones that aren't will end up coming up with good ideas regardless of training. (And I personally find it hilarious that there are so many people getting degrees in 'management'.)
And don't get me started on real estate agents. 0.6% of the entire labor market is a real estate agent. WTF? That entire industry does nothing, and only exist because they control the regional for-sale home listings.
And we don't need more minimum wage people, we already have way too many of them. (In fact, we should cut back on them by having less people in the country illegally who are doing the jobs, which we could reduce by enforcing minimum wage law. But that's a whole nother problem.)
But we need plumbers, we need auto-body detailers. We need teachers. The first two are so rare as to drive the prices up to a rather absurd amount, and the last is what happens when you keep increasing the stress and lowering the wages.
Based on the state of the industry though, adventure games are considered "dead"...Here's to hoping that they (adventure games and classic adventure games) make a comeback.
They made a comeback already. There are literally dozens of great adventure games released since 2000, many of which came back with sequels.
They're just not talked about anywhere near as much as other games, and have trouble finding shelf space.
Successful series: The Longest Journey, Runaway, The Broken Sword, and Benoît Sokal's games.
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Heh. I do over-use bold, because I don't really give it the emphasis that other people do. I wish we had underline.
Anyway, you're probably right. Filtering does kind of suck, and it doesn't really seem to do much good. I just hate cleaning up after some trojan, virus, or worm gets loose in our systems, and I know that most employees here have no clue about safe browsing habits.
That's when you threaten them with Linux.:)
Network security is the one useful use of filtering I can see, but that's near impossible with web-filters. People who want to spread malware tend to be rather fly-by-night, so by the time they're in the system, it's too late.
But while network security is sometime a useful side-effect of filtering, it's almost always an accidental one. If they actually cared about security, the workstations would be locked down tight, as policy, with documents stored on servers and the ability to instantly reset all workstations to their default configuration. No need for 'cleaning' at all. This would actually cost less money than doing it the traditional, IT-always-running-around-fixing-broken-things way.
No, I'm almost certain the filtering is aimed at certain content and to 'increase productivity', neither of which works or makes any sense, and just cause all sorts of hassles.
So, you're using the fact that most women are at risk during high school to...um...argue against them being given a vaccine before that point? That's interesting logic.
I like how you, while you mentioned how easy it was to spread during sex, you totally ignored my point that, unlike actual STDs, it's trivial to spread without any sort of sex. It's spread skin-to-skin, not via sexual fluids, so isn't technically an 'STD' at all. (You can get chicken pox during sex, but it's not an STD.) It just usually infects the genitals, but touch them and then touch the bathroom stall handle, and, hey, next person in can get it.
In fact, there's argument in the medical community about how much sex is even a factor in the spreading of it. Because it's so common, it can never show any visible signs, if it does they can take quite a while to show up, and even then most people don't seek medical attention, it's very hard to track the spread of it. People who have sex with someone who already have it have a high chance of getting it, but there have been plenty of mystery cases where that almost certainly wasn't the cause. OTOH, most people apparently don't have it before puberty. (Although there are people suggesting immunizations at one or so instead of whenever they're wanting to give this one.)
The real joke here is, if anyone remembers the 80s (I barely do), there was a huge hunt for a hypothetical virus that causes cancer, with an eye toward eliminating it. I just laugh at what they'd think now that we actually found one and can eliminte it, that morons don't want to.
Yes, and those people should feel free to, as they always have, opt out.
Now, show me the outrage over the Rubella vaccine. Come on. Where is it? Where are the groups dedicated to getting rid of requiring that?
There are those who object to all vaccines for religious reasons, and those who object because fucking morons continue to include mercury in them. (I'm kinda with them, but a simpler solution would simply to make it illegal to preserve medication with mercury-based things.) These people are an incredibly small proportion of the population, and haven't managed to make any dent at all. It's got about the same amount of fringe support that not having a social security number has. We're talking about maybe a ten thousand people.
In addition to those people, who don't really give a damn if an additional vaccine is required, this vaccine has extra opposition. The entire right-wing spin machine has gotten behind objecting to the HPV vaccine, because they've managed to lie their way into claiming HPV is an STD and that evil liberals want to give it to 12 year-old girls so they'll be encouraged to have sex.
This spin machine has gotten literally millions of people who couldn't care less about Rubella or other vaccines suddenly screaming about vaccines, because they're such fucking fascists that, in their universe, it's okay to give children cancer for disobeying 'God'.
Don't confuse us, people objecting to the fascist assholes trying to threaten their children with cancer, with people objecting to people who don't want any vaccines, or even those who sit down and make a different risk analysis than governments WRT various diseases vs. vaccine risks.
For instance, I had problems installing jabber on our servers because of a blanket ban on "IM" related sites. But I had access the next day.
not counting down time due to legitimate websites being blocked, and time spent unblocking them, which probably also isn't as much as you make it out to be.
I don't think I need to add anything to this. How much money did that little detour cost, do you think? Remember to calculate hours of your salary and the hours that someone in IT spent to unblock.
And at no point have I asserted that you were personally at fault for any of that, so I have no idea where you're getting that from.
First, we have limited bandwidth. People watching YouTube would seriously impact productivity.
If someone watching a video slows you down that much, then you don't need to be giving internet access out to everyone, which is a much more sane solution, and, hey, free. (For example, I have no idea why guards would need internet access. I also have no idea why you'd need guards.)
Second, the state being as it is, trying to discipline people for excessive usage would cost more than simply blocking access.
And how much does unfiltering cost when you need to do that? How much time does that waste? What happens when you need to access some kid's myspace page to see if they really did get that suspicious injury while riding their bike. (I'm somewhat at a loss to know what you guys actually use net access for.) How long does that take?
And it takes trained experts their 9-5 dealing-with-kids time instead of some IT guy glancing over the bandwidth logs once a week and realize that Workstation 424 used over nine hundred megs this week. At least with excessive usage, you can investigate that asyncronously, instead of someone having to spend thirty minutes on the phone getting something unblocked long enough to look at it. (And you have to watch those logs anyway.)
Third, we deal with children. Having counselors downloading porn would look... bad.
Blocking people from downloading porn is a great way to have them download porn from places you didn't block. More to the point, it's pretty easy to catch people at that.
Fourth, we do not allow people to bring in novels to read during work hours, why should they be able to browse the web?
I dunno, you're the one saying they should be able to. If you think it would be better for them to have no net access, or only email, well, that's pretty easy to setup.
And how on earth do you disallow bringing in novels? More to the point, why? Are you really so understaffed that people work all the time? And you have no way to track how much work people actually do, so the only way to judge that is how busy they look?
I always imagined that sort of job as consisting of a bunch of data entry people, along with a few dozen field agents that leap into action at possible wrong-doing and a bunch of counselors. Along with the system for temporarily taking care of kids. (Although your reference to 'guards' has confused me.)
Fifth, some of our employees were at one point in time our clients. They are still kids, and not very well socialized kids. They need boundaries.
Building walls is not setting boundaries. Boundaries, with regard to people, are things they keep themselves within, not things they are actually incapable of crossing.
Finally, why are you so angry? You're not that guy who has a beef against all child protection agencies everywhere because one took his kids away, are you?
No, I don't have any kids, I don't know any taken away by social services, and in fact, my grandmother worked for DFCS, Georgia's Division of Family and Children Services until she retired. I'm 'angry' because you're spending my money doing non-useful things instead of actually helping people. More to the point, you're spending in a way that doesn't actually work, giving it to companies that consistently lie about their abilities to filter.
No, it's more than that. You don't, at any point, have to give explicit instructions to commit illegal acts. You are expected to maintain a level of control over your employees and keep them within the law. If you hire a bodyguard, and they assault someone while working for you, you're in a hell of a lot of trouble. You can probably plead down from assault, but it's going to be really really fun for a while, and you will probably spend some time in jail, unless you can show they explicitly ignored your instructions and you didn't give them 'hints' that they should do so and that you didn't realize what they had done until too late and that you then fired them and alerted the police.
Of course, corporations don't have to go to jail. They just keep paying fines, it's a probability game.
If a human gets their employees to commits 100 illegal acts that bring in 1,000,000 dollars, and get caught at, say, three of them, they lose 30,000 dollars, with maybe a 100,000 dollar fine, and six months in jail. This, in most people's book, is coming out a loser.
If a corporation gets their employees to do that, they lose 30,000 dollars, with a 300,000 dollar fine, and no jail time. (The employees may go to jail, but what the hell do they care?) This is coming out a winner.
Why should I go to jail because I invested money in a company, and some of the people employed by it do something illegal? I should be held accountable for my own actions, not for somebody else's.
Um, is that a trick question? If someone in your employ commits criminal acts to advance your interests, damn right you go to jail, or at least will be investigated very closely for your level for involvement.
If someone in a limited liability business you own (via stock) commits crimes to advance your interests (raise the stock price), you are assumed not to be a criminal, because the company is actually operated by others.
That's not actually why it's called a LLC, it's called that because you can't be held financially liable for the company. If you own 2% of a company that defrauds investors out of 10,000,000 dollars, they can't come after you for $200,000.
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It's not the House, or the Senate, that's really doing either of those. It's the Executive, which apparently has discovered a brand new power which never existed before this point...when signing bills into law, he's decided he can remove parts of them he doesn't like, via 'signing statements'.
Yes, other presidents have had signing statements, but they only were directives to his underlings in the executive branch, for example, if a bill said 'Here's X million dollars to maintain bridges and ferries however needed', he might say 'Spend roughly Y of that on bridges and Z of that on ferries', which is entirely within his rights as the person in charge of the executive branch. He could have just as easily sent them a memo directing them to do that, but if he puts it with the bill it gets to everyone.
Bush, OTOH, thinks it's reasonable for Congress to send him a bill saying 'It's illegal for anyone to do X', and he write 'Unless I decide it's important' and sign that. (Instead of, you know, not signing it, which would be correct way for it to not become law.)
We entered a constitutional crisis the very first time Bush decided that his completely-made-up-power to protect the country trumped actually passed laws. (Seriously. Someone explain to me where the President got the Constitutional 'power' to protect this country from enemies? Obviously, all the government should do that, but I see no specific abilities with the President in that respect.)
That is a fucking brilliant idea.
Everyone who is going to vote for a bill has to read it, out loud, at the same time. They only have to do this once, if they bill hasn't changed they don't have to bother, and if it's been changed via amendments, they merely have to read the amendments out loud.
Bill Clinton didn't do that, a bunch of faux fight-the-system-outrage (Over crap the Republicans have managed to do 50 times worse, aka, Abramoff), hot-button issue (Hey, good job doing something about that flag burning), broken promises (Where'd those voluntary term-limits go?) and brilliant unified campaigning did that.
Bill Clinton did not lose the 94 Congressional election, the Republicans won it. They'd probably won it no matter who had won in 92. If the voters were distancing themselves from Clinton, he wouldn't have won in 96.
I...have no idea what's you're talking about. You appear to be talking about 'wheelies' that happen during a jump.
And you appear to be agreeing with me while thinking you're disagreeing. The reason a car rotates in flight is mainly due to the position of the engine and the misbalanced center of gravity.
However, I was just pointing out that assuming a perfectly balanced car, you'd get a 'perfectly balanced' jump, which would result in the front wheels hitting exactly as earlier as the rear wheels as they left the ramp, which wouldn't be 'level' at all and seriously harm the car. And that's assuming it hits at the top of ramp level...by the time it reaches the bottom and 'the ground', it has continued its rotation front-downward even more.
Basically, imagine the car a second after the rear wheels leave the ramp. Now flip the car's direction and momentum where it's about to go speeding down the ramp. Pretending it was perfectly balanced, it would be at exactly that position near the end of the jump. Now remove the ramp and imagine the angle at which it's about to hit the ground. Now rotate it an extra 20% downward for engine weight.
In other words, physics-wise, you can't actually land level from a non-rigged jump up into the air. (A flat Speed-type jump is another thing. The landing impact can hurt the vehicle, but the angle itself won't, assuming the vehicle's going at any reasonable speed.) If you jump at a small enough angle, you can drive away, but almost none of the Duke jumps were at those angles, because those angles don't let you jump that far. The closer you get to 45 degrees, the farther you can jump. They didn't go quite that far, but they went well past the angle at which a car can safely hit the ground.
There has to be some point (or points) where the car is exactly horizontal. It might never be at the same elevation as the bottom (or even the top) of the ramp, but it has to exist.
Hence my qualification of 'a jump like that'. You cannot place a car with a large amount of weight in the front (Or in the back!) and jump up a ramp and land at the original level you started with all the wheels on the ground. You could, in theory, balance the car with exactly slightly more weight in the back than the front, but have fun getting that right.
I know that 'more weight in the back' seems wrong, but it's not just the weight that turns the car's front downward. By the time the rear wheels leave the ramp, the front wheels have already edged down below the angle of the ramp at least a little, and thus even a perfectly balanced car would get frontward spin. If you think of the wheels as a parabolic arc, you can imagine what I'm talking about. The rear wheels pass through the point the front wheels were a second earlier, and thus the front wheels always hit first. If the place they're jumping to is exactly level with the top of the ramp, the rear wheels will hit after the front wheels exactly the same amount of time between the sets of wheels leaving the ramp.
The only point the wheels are level is exactly at the top of the arc, and that, rather obviously, is not where most jumps end. (It'd actually be impossible for them to end exactly at the top, because, duh, the car was moving upwards a second before that, thus the wheels couldn't be directly over anything unless they can pass through solid matter. But they could end really really close after the top.) Most of them end at the bottom of ramp level.
That's assuming a perfectly balanced car, which no car is. It's also assuming there's no acceleration after the front wheels have left the ramp, which will make the rear wheels not exactly follow the front. (Honestly, I have no idea which direction it would alter things.)
Now, you could, as I said, slightly overbalance the back (Or, hey, try to accelerate during the jump, maybe, if it works that direction.) and try to get the back of the car downward before the end of the jump, but if you put something the weight of a car engine in the rear of a car (Or almost the weight of one in the front of a car, for Volkswagons and other 'backwards' cars.), you're going to really shorten your jumping distance.
Also, I have seen cars capable of performing a wheelie. Those, under proper acceleration, can take off with the rear wheels generating such force as to have the rotation be in the opposite direction. Since that is possible, there must be some intermediate force which could have the car land flat at any elevation.
I don't see how having more power would help anything. The wheelie isn't because of the power of the rotation of the wheels, it's because of the momentum of the body and the center of gravity of it. The wheels move forward so fast that the car body is left behind, and, because it is rigid, it can't just bend and thus it has to go the only way it can go to get out of the way of the wheels...up. You could generate the same effect by hooking the rear axles up to two chains and yanking really really fast, with no wheel rotation at all.
If you're thinking of having the wheels act as a gyroscope, causing the car to spin in the opposite direction, well, I'm just not seeing that. That's certainly not why they pop wheelies. If that was possible, the car would also rotate in the opposite direction of the direction the engine was turning, because the engine weighs a lot more than the wheels. This is usually sideways, so you'd have the car spiraling through the air like a football. And you'd have that happen every time they red-lined the engine, not just when it was mid-air. It'd be much more likely to go up on two side wheels than pop a wheelie.
Now, if you put a very big gyroscope in a car, that could, in theory, ke
A living being won't be able to "heat themself" anymore than a dead one.
Um, why not? People normally heat themselves just fine. Or are you one of those cold-blooded humans?
Considering the most important requirement for space suits is getting rid of heat, I think it's entirely possible that humans would generate enough heat to keep themselves entirely warm. I don't think it's likely, I have a feeling too much would radiate, but their body's heating would, in fact, slow the process down.
So, the end result is that if you are some amazing person that can survive the extremly low pressure and lack of oxygen of a vaccuum, you will die in half an hour from low body temperature, and your body will reach the freezing point in 3.5 hours. This is still a far cry from some movies where they instantly turn to ice pillars, and is also much slower than if you just step outside naked in the winter (where I'm from).
What's really dumb is that people can survive longer, temperature-wise, in any environment for longer than it would take to run out of air. You can be dumped into below-zero salt water and you'll drown before you'll freeze to death, and that transfers energy much better than a vacuum, so the entire idea is silly. I know we're talking about someone with an air supply, but in movies, they almost always don't have one, and yet 'freezing' is the danger.
I understand it's Georgia policy to place random dirt "jumpin' ramps" at old bridges, beside tall buildings, across from overpasses, near turnoffs on dirt roads, etc.
We're paving them now.
However, I'm not the least surprised that someone managed to drive off the road. I love how they say 'the driver apparently mistook the exit lane for part of the carpool lane and continued over the side of the overpass.'. This sounds really stupid, but in actual fact the stupid people are the state DOT.
I don't know anything about this incident or this location, but I've driven down non-existent roads twice in Georgia, and seen many others do the same. The roads looked like turn-offs or actual roads, but, um, didn't actually continue, and I found myself driving on dirt or almost crashing into road-closed signs. In one notable instance, I was sitting at what used to be a road interesting another road in a T, but one of the arms of the T had been closed, thus diverting all traffic down the T. I sat there at a stop sign for the bottom part of the T, (God knows why I had a stop sign, considering I wasn't crossing traffic.) and watched someone round the corner going about 45 (The speed limit) and smash full speed right into the road-closed sign. I checked later, by measuring how long it took me...they had about a six second view of that sign. There was a sign warning something about 'traffic patterns changing' before the curve, but who knows what that means, and it wasn't in a very good location.
The Georgia DOT apparently doesn't bother actually marking the closed roads at the start, preferring instead that you swing onto it or turn a corner and then immediately realize there is actually no road there. I've seen uncompleted off-ramps (On I-75, come to think of it) that you couldn't tell ended in mid-air from the entrance point, blocked solely by five or six cones at the turn off and a road-closed sign at the end.
I'm surprised more people don't have fatal accidents here because the DOT didn't bother to inform them not to drive on what looked like a perfectly reasonable road.
Unless, of course, there is some sort of incline for a takeoff (ever notice how the Duke boys always manage to find that conveniently placed incline?)
The Duke's of Hazard jumps weren't 'special effects', just 'stunts'. They actually had cars do those jumps, and thus were constrained with the actual laws of physics.
Of course, those jumps also completely trashed the cars, as it's impossible to land a car flat from a jump like that. So either there's a lot of work on the car, evening out the weight and installing special shocks and framework, or the car isn't going to be able to drive away.
Smash cuts don't exist in real-life, either. Yet we don't complain about those. Slow motion is an entirely artistic thing, and is not related to the physics of the situation. At all.
Yeah, that complaint was just dumb. We might as well ask what sort of vehicle can smoothly go from miles up in space right up to the action with no reentry problems, for those long pan-ins. Or what allows the camera to teleport from location to location, sometimes even backwards and forward in time, and what sort of fairies put up those location descriptions at the bottom of the screen or why they do that. Or how the camera manages to go through walls and people's bodies and stuff.
The camera does not obey the laws of physics, because, duh, the camera does not exist in the movie universe, neither does how it alters our perception of the action exist in the movie universe, barring some fourth-wall and meta-narrative comedies. (There are plenty of interact-with-the-camera moments in comedy, but I'm also thinking of the 'running in slow motion' gag in one of the Scary Movie movies.)
Slow motion isn't the only issue here. Think about the camera effects in Traffic, where different 'worlds' had deliberately different 'camera styles', or cartoons where camera glare is added in. A whole movie could be displayed upside down or back to front and that won't alter the physics of the movie universe, although it would be very confusing. There are conventions film makers follow, just like people who write books often use 'chapters', but that has nothing to do with the world the work of art is describing.
Both those can happen, although not in the comical way they do it on TV.
Becoming part of a large enough electrical current can burn you enough to cause charring, although if it does so you're not going to be standing there smoking. You'll be laying-there-dead smoking. Run a large enough current through an organic substance and it will, indeed, smoke as it carbonizes.
And your hair standing on can happen just in the presence of strong electrical fields. Although they're confused static electricity with become part of a current, it's not impossible it could happen in those situations too.
a 70Kg person will drop to the freezing point from 305K in less than 3 and a half hours.
No they wouldn't. If we're talking about someone in a vacuum, they will soon freeze to death and stop heating themselves. (Well, first they'll probably go into shock/dive reflex and stop heating anything but their brain, and then they'll die and stop heating anything. OTOH, who knows if that works in space?)
That's assuming they have some sort of air, of course. Like a scuba tank or something.
And your '305K' is goofy. At that temperature, someone would already be dead. You can't walk around with a body temperature that low.
Starting with 310K, how long would it take for them to drop to, oh, 305K to die, and then how long would it take a dead person to drop to 2.7K?
Oh, I see where you got 305K, as the skin temperature. That is useful for knowing the amount of radiation a normal living person exchanges with the environment on earth, but not that applicable to space, where a dead body's temperature would quickly average itself out over the entire thing.
I'm not saying you should insulate children as they get older from the harsh realities of the world, but I do believe there is a balance.
Ah, don't confuse 'They must never be exposed to X,Y, and Z', where those are some sort of evil ideas and concept, with the opposite of 'Let's create a hypercompetive world with constant activity and constant judging of everything the child does.'.
In fact, it's entirely possible to do both those things at the same time, or, even better, neither.
It's incredibly cliche to say 'Let kids be kids', and I'm all in favor of actual outside activity instead of constant TV and video games, but it'd probably better for them to do that than the insanely frantic life some parents have created for them. Better be slightly overweight than snap in half. (The modern American is moderately lazy. Deal with it.)
If more than half of a child's waking non-school life is scheduled for 'their benefit', something is seriously wrong. You want them to spend more time ouside, sign them up for little league and boy scouts, but don't expect them to exceed in either. Who the hell cares how good they do? That's about the maximum level of activities a child should be involved in. Replace little league with piano or ballet if they actually like those things, but, again, don't expect anything.
You sound like an ideal teacher. I'm suspicious. ;)
But, seriously, you're right. Homework is not for teaching, and it is not for memorization. If students need to memorize things in a class, the class is either second-grade math with memorizing multiplication tables, it's a history or other 'knowledge' class, and memorizing certain facts isn't going to help with the other facts that are on the test, or the class is structured wrong. Practice!=Memorization
Homework is for students and teachers to know if the students grasp the concepts.
Ideally, it would be entirely up to the student, who would attempt the problem, realize they cannot do it, and ask for help the next day, but in reality, many students are no responsible enough to do that.
I liked what a math teacher did when we switched over to block scheduling on all our classes the last year of high school, with ~80 minute classes. We showed up, he handled questions from the minimal amount of homework. Let's call that ten minutes. He then taught us some new stuff for some time, probably about 40 minutes. Then he gave us a few specific problem, and asked us to do them, giving us maybe 20 minutes. We'd sit and do them, and if we finished we could start on that night's homework. If someone immediately had problem and came to him, he'd often interrupt the classwork time to explain it in a different way. If no one appeared to have problems, he'd just tell us the answers to the classwork near the end. (I actually think he did something like this before we switched to block scheduling, but I didn't have him then.)
Sometimes it was two shorter sessions of teaching and two shorter classwork times. Sometimes it was 'Okay, everyone work on this single problem for a minute, and see if you can figure out what to do.'.
Basically, it was: Here's the stuff. You guys try it. If you have any questions ask me. Here's some more stuff to try at home, if you have any questions ask them in class the next day.
The classwork didn't count. The homework technically counted, although you got points for just attempting it, but he would put bonus questions on the tests for those who really grasped the material that made up for the homework if they were, like me, completely lazy people who just turned in whatever amount of homework they managed to finish in class but actually knew the material. (And, of course, I started work directly on the homework instead of the classwork, which tripped me up a few times when I actually didn't understand it. Or when I hit the homework from the 'second session' that he hadn't taught yet.)
Granted, this didn't work for everyone. Many people apparently didn't ever bother informing him of their problems, which I think was the sole reason he made us do homework and turn it in. So he'd explain something, assign homework, wait for questions the next day with the homwork, get none, go home and grade the homework, and then realize that parts of the class didn't understand, so have to go back to it.
This guy wasn't actually the ideal teacher, he apparently operated this way because he wasn't that great at explaining things in the first place. The students who figured it out would often jump in to explain it in a better way. OTOH, a teacher who realizes his job to is teach instead of to grade is already a step above everyone else.
No shit. We don't need more 'idea people', most of them are idiots and the ones that aren't will end up coming up with good ideas regardless of training. (And I personally find it hilarious that there are so many people getting degrees in 'management'.)
And don't get me started on real estate agents. 0.6% of the entire labor market is a real estate agent. WTF? That entire industry does nothing, and only exist because they control the regional for-sale home listings.
And we don't need more minimum wage people, we already have way too many of them. (In fact, we should cut back on them by having less people in the country illegally who are doing the jobs, which we could reduce by enforcing minimum wage law. But that's a whole nother problem.)
But we need plumbers, we need auto-body detailers. We need teachers. The first two are so rare as to drive the prices up to a rather absurd amount, and the last is what happens when you keep increasing the stress and lowering the wages.
Based on the state of the industry though, adventure games are considered "dead"...Here's to hoping that they (adventure games and classic adventure games) make a comeback.
They made a comeback already. There are literally dozens of great adventure games released since 2000, many of which came back with sequels.
They're just not talked about anywhere near as much as other games, and have trouble finding shelf space.
Successful series: The Longest Journey, Runaway, The Broken Sword, and Benoît Sokal's games.
10: I must be free. No questions about it.
<rapid voice>One free Anonymous Coward per customer please. Limited time offer. First come first serve. Open to legal US residents 18 and older.</rapid voice>
think it's all the bold. Bold scares me. ;-)
Heh. I do over-use bold, because I don't really give it the emphasis that other people do. I wish we had underline.
Anyway, you're probably right. Filtering does kind of suck, and it doesn't really seem to do much good. I just hate cleaning up after some trojan, virus, or worm gets loose in our systems, and I know that most employees here have no clue about safe browsing habits.
That's when you threaten them with Linux. :)
Network security is the one useful use of filtering I can see, but that's near impossible with web-filters. People who want to spread malware tend to be rather fly-by-night, so by the time they're in the system, it's too late.
But while network security is sometime a useful side-effect of filtering, it's almost always an accidental one. If they actually cared about security, the workstations would be locked down tight, as policy, with documents stored on servers and the ability to instantly reset all workstations to their default configuration. No need for 'cleaning' at all. This would actually cost less money than doing it the traditional, IT-always-running-around-fixing-broken-things way.
No, I'm almost certain the filtering is aimed at certain content and to 'increase productivity', neither of which works or makes any sense, and just cause all sorts of hassles.
So, you're using the fact that most women are at risk during high school to...um...argue against them being given a vaccine before that point? That's interesting logic.
I like how you, while you mentioned how easy it was to spread during sex, you totally ignored my point that, unlike actual STDs, it's trivial to spread without any sort of sex. It's spread skin-to-skin, not via sexual fluids, so isn't technically an 'STD' at all. (You can get chicken pox during sex, but it's not an STD.) It just usually infects the genitals, but touch them and then touch the bathroom stall handle, and, hey, next person in can get it.
In fact, there's argument in the medical community about how much sex is even a factor in the spreading of it. Because it's so common, it can never show any visible signs, if it does they can take quite a while to show up, and even then most people don't seek medical attention, it's very hard to track the spread of it. People who have sex with someone who already have it have a high chance of getting it, but there have been plenty of mystery cases where that almost certainly wasn't the cause. OTOH, most people apparently don't have it before puberty. (Although there are people suggesting immunizations at one or so instead of whenever they're wanting to give this one.)
The real joke here is, if anyone remembers the 80s (I barely do), there was a huge hunt for a hypothetical virus that causes cancer, with an eye toward eliminating it. I just laugh at what they'd think now that we actually found one and can eliminte it, that morons don't want to.
Yes, and those people should feel free to, as they always have, opt out.
Now, show me the outrage over the Rubella vaccine. Come on. Where is it? Where are the groups dedicated to getting rid of requiring that?
There are those who object to all vaccines for religious reasons, and those who object because fucking morons continue to include mercury in them. (I'm kinda with them, but a simpler solution would simply to make it illegal to preserve medication with mercury-based things.) These people are an incredibly small proportion of the population, and haven't managed to make any dent at all. It's got about the same amount of fringe support that not having a social security number has. We're talking about maybe a ten thousand people.
In addition to those people, who don't really give a damn if an additional vaccine is required, this vaccine has extra opposition. The entire right-wing spin machine has gotten behind objecting to the HPV vaccine, because they've managed to lie their way into claiming HPV is an STD and that evil liberals want to give it to 12 year-old girls so they'll be encouraged to have sex.
This spin machine has gotten literally millions of people who couldn't care less about Rubella or other vaccines suddenly screaming about vaccines, because they're such fucking fascists that, in their universe, it's okay to give children cancer for disobeying 'God'.
Don't confuse us, people objecting to the fascist assholes trying to threaten their children with cancer, with people objecting to people who don't want any vaccines, or even those who sit down and make a different risk analysis than governments WRT various diseases vs. vaccine risks.
For instance, I had problems installing jabber on our servers because of a blanket ban on "IM" related sites. But I had access the next day.
not counting down time due to legitimate websites being blocked, and time spent unblocking them, which probably also isn't as much as you make it out to be.
I don't think I need to add anything to this. How much money did that little detour cost, do you think? Remember to calculate hours of your salary and the hours that someone in IT spent to unblock.
And at no point have I asserted that you were personally at fault for any of that, so I have no idea where you're getting that from.
Or from people who just dont want the state dictating their kids medical care!
I feel the same way. What right do they have to charge me with child abuse when I made my kids go to school walking on a broken leg?!
First, we have limited bandwidth. People watching YouTube would seriously impact productivity.
If someone watching a video slows you down that much, then you don't need to be giving internet access out to everyone, which is a much more sane solution, and, hey, free. (For example, I have no idea why guards would need internet access. I also have no idea why you'd need guards.)
Second, the state being as it is, trying to discipline people for excessive usage would cost more than simply blocking access.
And how much does unfiltering cost when you need to do that? How much time does that waste? What happens when you need to access some kid's myspace page to see if they really did get that suspicious injury while riding their bike. (I'm somewhat at a loss to know what you guys actually use net access for.) How long does that take?
And it takes trained experts their 9-5 dealing-with-kids time instead of some IT guy glancing over the bandwidth logs once a week and realize that Workstation 424 used over nine hundred megs this week. At least with excessive usage, you can investigate that asyncronously, instead of someone having to spend thirty minutes on the phone getting something unblocked long enough to look at it. (And you have to watch those logs anyway.)
Third, we deal with children. Having counselors downloading porn would look... bad.
Blocking people from downloading porn is a great way to have them download porn from places you didn't block. More to the point, it's pretty easy to catch people at that.
Fourth, we do not allow people to bring in novels to read during work hours, why should they be able to browse the web?
I dunno, you're the one saying they should be able to. If you think it would be better for them to have no net access, or only email, well, that's pretty easy to setup.
And how on earth do you disallow bringing in novels? More to the point, why? Are you really so understaffed that people work all the time? And you have no way to track how much work people actually do, so the only way to judge that is how busy they look?
I always imagined that sort of job as consisting of a bunch of data entry people, along with a few dozen field agents that leap into action at possible wrong-doing and a bunch of counselors. Along with the system for temporarily taking care of kids. (Although your reference to 'guards' has confused me.)
Fifth, some of our employees were at one point in time our clients. They are still kids, and not very well socialized kids. They need boundaries.
Building walls is not setting boundaries. Boundaries, with regard to people, are things they keep themselves within, not things they are actually incapable of crossing.
Finally, why are you so angry? You're not that guy who has a beef against all child protection agencies everywhere because one took his kids away, are you?
No, I don't have any kids, I don't know any taken away by social services, and in fact, my grandmother worked for DFCS, Georgia's Division of Family and Children Services until she retired. I'm 'angry' because you're spending my money doing non-useful things instead of actually helping people. More to the point, you're spending in a way that doesn't actually work, giving it to companies that consistently lie about their abilities to filter.
No, it's more than that. You don't, at any point, have to give explicit instructions to commit illegal acts. You are expected to maintain a level of control over your employees and keep them within the law. If you hire a bodyguard, and they assault someone while working for you, you're in a hell of a lot of trouble. You can probably plead down from assault, but it's going to be really really fun for a while, and you will probably spend some time in jail, unless you can show they explicitly ignored your instructions and you didn't give them 'hints' that they should do so and that you didn't realize what they had done until too late and that you then fired them and alerted the police.
Of course, corporations don't have to go to jail. They just keep paying fines, it's a probability game.
If a human gets their employees to commits 100 illegal acts that bring in 1,000,000 dollars, and get caught at, say, three of them, they lose 30,000 dollars, with maybe a 100,000 dollar fine, and six months in jail. This, in most people's book, is coming out a loser.
If a corporation gets their employees to do that, they lose 30,000 dollars, with a 300,000 dollar fine, and no jail time. (The employees may go to jail, but what the hell do they care?) This is coming out a winner.
Which, incidentally, has resulting in an...interesting amount of people let go when they're 39 in the tech industry.
Why should I go to jail because I invested money in a company, and some of the people employed by it do something illegal? I should be held accountable for my own actions, not for somebody else's.
Um, is that a trick question? If someone in your employ commits criminal acts to advance your interests, damn right you go to jail, or at least will be investigated very closely for your level for involvement.
If someone in a limited liability business you own (via stock) commits crimes to advance your interests (raise the stock price), you are assumed not to be a criminal, because the company is actually operated by others.
That's not actually why it's called a LLC, it's called that because you can't be held financially liable for the company. If you own 2% of a company that defrauds investors out of 10,000,000 dollars, they can't come after you for $200,000.
Not illegal at all.
Age discrimination against the old is illegal. Age discrimination against the young is completely legal, unless there's some state law.