It's not like the ACLU run around hindering gun cases. They merely choose not to get involved at all.
People need to stop whining about the cases the ACLU ignores. 'The entire constitution and all amendments except one' is a large scope than any other rights organization. At least, any other organization that actually does anything.
The NRA had a budget that is much much larger, and a single amendment to worry about, and they really can handle it.
Because both Carnivore and Echelon are legal in and of themselves.
Your question is like asking 'Why didn't someone sue when the police bought their guns, instead of when they used them to shoot those innocent people?'.
It is perfectly legal to spy on random non-Americans, hence the NSA's actions during Echelon were legal. Delibrately letting other countries spy on Americans, as long as they turn the info over to us, is technically legal, although it shouldn't be, and by the time anyone found out about that they had stopped.(1)
Carnivore, OTOH, was (is?) perfectly legal, because it is merely the ability to wiretap email, which the government certainly has the right to build.
What they do not have, however, is the right to use it to spy on Americans without a warrant obtained via the courts. Which they are doing. (Although we're not certain if they'd doing it via 'Carnivore' or not.)
1) I think we need a law that says the executive branch much stop any spying by other governments it is aware of on Americans, or, if it cannot, at least alert the victims, unless the executive branch can come up with a damn good reason and present it to the courts. Maybe the standard should be slightly less than a warrant, but there should be some standard.
"All the way" is Slashdot's server's IP log being requisitioned by the government whereby,
They, a) can already do this,/. would be barred by law from telling anyone, thanks to the PATRIOT act, and b) probably don't need to 'requisition' anything thanks to the NSA. They've only admitted to scanning email, but scanning traffic on port 80 looking for a POST is a trivial addition.
shortly after, you and all your family members and friends are nowhere to be found.
They have, indeed, asserted the right to lock people up without charging them with anything, without access to a lawyer, and without telling anyone.
Basically, the different between now and the world you describe is they haven't chosen to do that to you. They do, indeed, claim they have the right.
If there's there are no other destinations, and you pressed 'up' and got the elevator, you can use it to go down.
Of course, in all likelyhood, you would have gotten the same elevator had you pressed down.
Interestingly enough, this appeared to be the sole situtation where this logic makes sense. Let's say there are 15 floors, you are on five. You want down, as do people on floors 3, 6, 7, and 8. There two elevators (It doesn't work with one.), and one just dropped someone off in the lobby, and the other at 15.
If you press down, the elevator at the top will go 8, 7, 6, 5, and 3. Or possibly the one in the lobby will grab 3 and 5.
If you press up, or down and up, the elevator at the top will start grabbing people on the way down, and the elevator at the bottom will come up and get you. At which point you can rocket to the bottom. (Well, you'd grab the person at 3 also.)
So, in theory that worked faster.
In practice, however, if people do this, the person at 6 will also push up and down. Now the elevator comes and gets you, and then goes and gets the person at 6. Meanwhile, he's possibly gotten on the other elevator, or possibly not. Regardless, by the time the doors have closed on the 6, the other elevator has certainly passed you.
Of course, you've managed to slow that other one down, because you pushed the button for 5, and it will stop there. Meanwhile, you'll probably end up getting 3, and you'll hit the bottom at the same time.
If the person on 6 and 7 do it...
Interestingly, looking at the logic, it's not just you you're slowing down. You're also slowing down the other elevators.
Basically, you're screwing up the 'elevator movement reduction' where it's grabbing up people going in the same direction in the same car, and instead trying to get your own car, which does, indeed, work when there's a car to spare, and it doesn't hurt anything too bad. However, when there is not a car to spare, someone else will picked to be placed in your car, and you will go halfway around the world and slow everything around, and it's even more absurd when you realize others get queued in your car by doing the same thing. (In addition to people just legitimately trying to get somewhere.)
Of course, this only works in elevator banks with at least two elevators. It never makes any sense with one, because the elevator will transverse exactly the same path...you just will get in it sooner, and it will stop back at your floor on the way down, wasting time. There is no 'movement reduction' logic in those things, they basically bounce back and forth between the currently highest and currently lowest requested floor.
And people laughed when that guy made SimTower as an elevator simulator. I want an actual elevator simulator now, with programmable people, so I can actually watch all this.
I thought I had already replied to this post, incidentally, but I'm not seeing it. Anyway:
Getting on an elevator going in the wrong direction will, on average, take a good deal more time than one going in the right direction.
However, obviously, if you can't get on one going in the right way, but can on one going the wrong way, you should by all means feel free to do that.
The original comment was about people who pushed buttons in both directions to 'get an elevator faster', despite how illogical that is. Not about people who are trying to go down, sit there and watch two full down elevators pass them, and consciously decide to take a round trip instead of waiting for an empty one. Those people have more than enough elevators in the right direction...they're just all full.
I see people all the time who hit both the down and up buttons on an elevator, just to get the car to come faster.
And what do these people do when they are trying to go down, but get into an up elevator and have to ride up 30 floors before it turns around?
As a funny aside, if there were five people doing this on different floors in a row, and, say, one person going down five floors above them who doesn't do this, along with a person next to them going up, they'd all get on the up elevator, which would slowly collect them all and move upward. Meanwhile, the down elevator goes all the way up and collects people downward...except they already left on the up elevator by the time it gets there..
I can't quite figure out the logic of getting on elevators going in the wrong direction:
If you're the only person using the elevator at all, you can, indeed, direct it wherever you want, but if you're the only person using it, you might as well get it going in the right direction.
If there is heavy use in direction you want, all the elevators will be going that way, and you should punch the correct way.
If there is heavy use in the other direction, you certainly will get an elevator faster...and you certainly will have to go way out of your way, too.
Have these people not realized that if you get into an up elevator, and punch a direction that is down, it will do the upward stuff first? I mean, it seems like it would be pretty obvious.
I just throught of an example. Who here has a d20?
Roll to get a number. Seriously, do it.
Now...I pick number 5.
Now you tell me 18 numbers you didn't pick. You cannot tell me 5, and you cannot tell me the number you picked. (If those are the same number, of course, you will be leaving off a random number from the list.)
Now, take the numbers 1-20, and remove the numbers you told me. And remove 5.
Is that your number?
Wow, it's an amazing magic trick! It works 19/20 times!
It's just really obvious when you get into the large numbers, but it works all the way down to 3. Unless you're really unlucky and pick the 'right' number first, you win. (At 2, of course, it still 'works' if they open all doors but one and the one you picked, but that is exactly no doors, and you just switch 1/2 odds for...1/2 odds.)
Exactly where in that entire post did I even vaguely suggest Lucy Lawless was the slightest bit hot?
Exactly where in that entire post did I even vaguely suggest Jessica Alba wasn't the hottest person in the entire history of the universe?
Not that I personally believe those things, but I'm just wondering where, at any point, I made any comment on how hot any actress was. The closest I came to calling anyone 'hot' was to compliment Gabrielle's outfits, which actually sounds rather gay now that I reread it.:)
And Jessica Alba, does, indeed, keep appearing in movies because she is very hot. Often in revealing outfits to show off her hotness, or even lacking traditional parts of an outfit, like a shirt.
Whether or not this is a good thing depends, I suppose, on whether or not people are aware they can buy magazines filled entirely with pictures of completely-naked hot women. And movies with that, too. It is called 'pornography'.
Once they are aware of this, they will usually stop watching movies due solely due to the half-naked hot women in them (What's the point of half-naked when you can see entirely naked women?), and start expecting the women to have 'acting ability' and the movie to have 'a plot'.
Yes, it is better, always, to switch, because Monty is required to open a door that has nothing behind it.(1)
If there are 99 doors that are wrong, and one that is right, and he's opened 98 wrong ones, you still have the 1/100 chance the door you originally picked was the right one. It doesn't magically change as other doors are revealed. If the door you picked, at odds of 1/100 is not correct, the other door must be the right one, and thus has odds of 99/100.
That's what people are missing. When you are given the chance to switch, you know have information you did not have before...you know one door of the two you did not pick does not have anything behind it.
Your door still have a 1/3 probility, and those two doors together still have an 2/3, but now that entire 2/3 is in one door.
And your example of switching back makes no sense. He can't open another door, because you've only got two, and he can't be sure of having one without the prize behind it. And, if he did have that, you'd have no doors to switch to!
1) Actually, even if he wasn't required to do that, the odds would be the same. If he opened the door with the prize, though, you'd just be screwed no matter what you did.
The assertation was the Area 51's runway was, absurdly, 'painted on', and, hence, didn't count as a real runway. (Why they would paint the whole runway area, even the shoulders, instead of just the ends, like they did on the two runways that are actually painted on, is beyond me.)
You agree it's not, and, what's more, you agree with my 'crappy concrete' theory, except you claim it's the base that's crappy instead. The concrete is also clearly a different color, and, hence I suspect it also made of different materials, but that's not really important.
The important thing is that it does, in fact, have the longest (concrete) runway in the world. It might not work for experimental crafts, but I rather suspect most of the other contenders for that position would not either.
Do not insult Xena by bringing it up while talking about Dark Angel.
And I don't know where you got that Xena was a 'lesbo fantasy'. I suspect if they had wanted that they would have, you know, actually come out and stated that Gabby and Xena were in that kind of relationship.
Yes, once the rumors started they'd drop little hints and whatnot, but that's mainly because they never took themselves seriously in the first place. They didn't start the whole 'subtext' thing, and they didn't cash in on it, they just left a few ambigious lines in.
And I suspect there would have been rather more revealing costumes. Have you ever looked at what Xena wore? It's like three layers of clothing! She's wearing a leather shirt under her armor, and she's wearing a cloth shirt under that!
Gabby, admittedly, had some rather nice outfits after she stopped wearing a full-length skirt the whole time, but they weren't by any stretch of the imagination 'revealing', unless Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie was past 'revealing' into 'nudity'.
Anyway, Dark Angel was an absurd attempt by Fox to cash in on Buffy by throwing money, tits, and asses at the viewers. (Buffy was owned by Fox, but the WB was making all the money.)
Buffy, of course, only was given a chance because of Xena.
That chance of logic is probably the only time Dark Angel and Xena should be mentioned anywhere near each other.
The only secret Jerrod was trying to figure out is who his parents were and what happened to them, and that's completely unrelated to his abilities, which is basically just incredible acting talent combined with very good problem solving.
The two series may look superficially the same, but Jerrod part of The Pretender was actually much more like Quantum Leap. Show up, pretend to be someone, solve problems with your superior skills and knowledge, leave. Although Jerrod focused on crimes and Sam on future problems.
The Center part of the shows, however...I can't offhandedly think of an analog of that, although I'm sure it's existed. Basically, people unravelling the vast web of lies and deception around them. I suspect Twin Peaks would qualify, although I have not seen that, and The Center never even appeared normal.
And, although people rarely caught on, they were two completely seperate TV shows that happened to inhabit the same hour. Seriously, about 1% of the airtime required you actually knowing about both 'shows'. You could have watched just Jarrod, and known some mysterious people were after him, or just watched Ms. Parker and company, and known her overall goal was to catch someone, but she always failed, but the amount of crossover between the plots was almost nothing. An editor could sit down and slice them apart to make 'Jerrod' show or 'The Center' show, and almost no footage would be in both.
I can't think of any TV show that's done that.
As for John Doe, the real analog would be Nowhere Man or, indirectly, The Prisoner, or even something like Strange Luck.
Actually, you want to know where the story was ultimate going? It did have an overall premise behind John Doe, which was revealed after the show to be:
Basically, when you die, God, or something, tells you everything that happened, every single known thing. Basically, it's nethack's 'Do you you want your possessions identified?'
Somehow, those Phoenix people figured this out (probably someone else in history did it), and figured out a way to get a guy, whoever John Doe was, to this point without him actually being dead, and bring him back. (Or maybe, with him actually being dead.)
This appears to have been quite a bit more involved than 'Flatliners', and seemed to involve him physically reappearing in the world.
Hence, he became 'The Phoenix'.
What is with the memory loss is unknown, as is whether or not he left behind a corpse when he 'died'.
Actually, that cliffhanger was the show's fault. (Not that I give fox any slack for canceling the series.)
The revelation of the guy at the end (I'm trying not to spoil it.) was not intended to be that guy. They apparently were going to cast and bring in someone, playing that guy, as the villian of the next season.
They literally threw it in at the last minute when they realized the show was canceled, basically to confuse the hell out of people.
Hell, if you've got to go out, go out with a bang, right? Or at least go out with something that will make people go 'Huh?' and watch all the episodes again.
Yes, I know quite a lot of places will claim the show was cancelled after the last episode was filmed. The shows producers, however, claim they knew.
They have to accept it if you owe them money, unless they told you in advance.
Nothing requires anyone to accept anything in exchange for anything, though.
Normally, at gas stations, you pump first, so you owe them the money, so they'd have to take whatever legal tender you wanted to use (Unless they said otherwise in advance.), but his example rather read like that wasn't true, that he was paying in advance, at which point they can legally require payment in his own urine produced while reciting the alphabet backwards and standing on his head.
I don't know where people here are coming from, but you do, indeed, own your own body, legally.
This is why, when you die, it passes into your estate. Otherwise it'd just be, I dunno, litter or abandoned property or something.
If you don't believe me, look at slavery. It requires the premise that a body can be owned. (as could any children.) When slavery was outlawed, it outlawing by, essentially, outlawing ownership of a living body by a different person.
Don't get confused by the fact we have laws about treatments of corpses and selling of organs (If you didn't own your body, how could you sell part of it, anyway?) and even the selling of your whole body. The reason we have those is that bodies are property, but property we have unique rules about the transfer of, like nuclear materials.
Trivial example. I think I should have the right to control who uses the personal information that is my email address. I would absolutely deny that permission to spammers.
That actually doesn't follow. Just because someone has information about you does not mean they have the right to cause harm to you using that information.
Not that I disagree with you in principle, but that example is liek arguing that knowledge of a person's location should belong to that person, because others could use that information to punch that person in the face. While there's good reasons to disallow tracking, that's not one of them. If someone is going to harm you in violation of the law, they will be perfectly willing to illegally use the knowledge you 'own' to do so.
Cracks, expansion joints, runway lights, bots dots, are all much smaller than 1 or two meters wide.
So, your assertation is...I'm hallucinating? Or have you still not looked at it Google Earth, as opposed to Google Maps, where you indeed cannot see enough detail?
Incidentally, if you go and look at the parking area at 37o14'27.22 115o49'00.75 (The one with three tractor trailers in it.), you will not only notice it's exactly the same color as the entension to the runway, which is a weird coincidence, but they have exactly the same type of lines visible, because, yes, it is cracks. This is because the 'extra' part of the runway was, indeed, paved, although apparently with crappy parking pavement instead of real stuff. Go north of that over some buildings and you'll see the same 25 foot square concrete slabs used at the touchdown place.
However, I'm not even going to respond to you until you've actually demonstrated that you have looked at it in Google Earth, and have answered the simple question: Roughly how long are the painted dashes on the runway? Because the only way you could be answering like you are is if you haven't looked at it via that.
The size of the blocks means NOTHING re it being a runway:
What is your point here? The question was 'Is it paved?'. We know it's a runway, unless they've set up some sort of dragstrip at area 51, or just like building roads that don't go anywhere. (In fact, the long one stops short of access road by maybe 70 feet, so it would be a spectularly pointless 2 mile long drive.)
Yes, I can quite clearly see it is paved. How? Well, the starting of the landing area is made of square slabs that look to be about 25 feet across. Rather an odd way to paint, but exactly what you'd do if you wanted to make a touchdown point that is stronger than the rest of the pavement.
And, more to the point, the rest of the concrete is in crappy condition, with cracks all over it, cracks that are not reflected in the lakebed. Ah, but you say, that's merely the lakebed cracking up.
Not so fast. The cracks follow the line of the concrete, or are perpendicular to it, exactly like real concrete cracks. If you head back to our friend the landing pad, and backwards up the unused part of the runway, you can see a crack right down the middle of the runway that runs for 3000 feet within a foot or two of the painted center line. It even zigs a few feet in places due to other cracks and gets back on course. That is, frankly, an astonishing coincidence, or it's that the damn peak of the road has cracked, exactly like what happens to every other poorly-paved road. (Remember, this is the unused part.)
Ah, but maybe the paint is merely very crappy. Well, no, paint doesn't crack enough that you can see it from orbit., and if we saw through the paint we'd be seeing white lake bed not dark areas. And, just as oddly, there are places where markings are clearly painted over the cracks.
I'll willing to admit I can't prove there aren't cracks on the lake bed we can't see, but the pattern of the cracks is the pattern of cracking concrete.
Seriously. Either you are arguing because you haven't looked at it, or you're arguing just to be arguing. No one can possibly look at that and think it's paint.
Of course, this is area 51 we're talking about. They could just be painting the cracks in.
Yes, and yet they weren't presented to a special committee.
They, in fact, were presented to only certain members of that special committee under such classification that said members could not actually bring up the fact in the special committee
Anyone who thinks that's normal behavior for intelligence handling is sadly confused.
Frankly, I think it's fucking absurd that there even is a way for the administration to gag Congressentities. Everything the executive branch does should be open to at least one special committee to just waltz in and find out, and they should have the right to vote to call a closed session of their chamber and tell everyone.
Before anyone talks about 'seperation of powers', I have to point out the executive branch is supposed to executing the laws created by the executive branch, and only those laws. The executive branch shouldn't be doing anything not authorized by Congress.
(Of course, there is a balance of power fact where the executive branch can basically decided to ignore people breaking certain laws, which along with the veto power gives us the idea that the executive branch doesn't have to enforce the law, but there is a difference between saying 'We will not enforce that law.' and 'We will enforce this new thing we made up that we have decided to call a law'. And if the executive branch itself breaks the law, the legislative can step in.)
I don't like wasting money, I don't like pointless power grabs... but I also like knowing that, when guys on the ground in northern Pakistan sieze a laptop from a local Al Queda franchise office, that we can be - in very short order - listening in on the calls to/from the phone numbers that were stored that same day in someone's cheesily encrypted ZIPped jihaddi speed-dial spreadsheet that includes Long Island zip codes.
Just FYI, you appear to have fallen for the FISA-doesn't-allow-that lie.
FISA allows 72 hours worth of wiretaps for no reason at all. You then, at that point, have to make a request to the FISA court, which is designed for speed.
All complaints about how 'the process' is slow have actually been talking about filling out the paper. The court is wicked fast, and you can, in fact, keep tapping until they get around to your case anyway. A slow FISA court would mean more wiretapping allowed.(1)
Some blogs have been completely ignoring this ability under FISA for the last two weeks, claiming Bush needs to break FISA to do exactly what he can do under FISA.
To set the record straight: If the government finds phone numbers in a laptop of an apparent agent, it can just go ahead and listen...it just, also, has to file the paper work with the FISA court. Unless and until they are told to stop by the court because there is clearly no reason they should be listening to these people, or unless the 72 hour deadline passes without them bothering to hand in paperwork, they can keep doing it.
Bush claims he does not need to do this, either because of the authorization of the war in Afganistan, or because in the time of war the president has whatever powers he needs to execute said war.
And before someone mods me down, please try to figure out exactly where I stated an opinion in there. Those are the facts of the FISA law, and what Bush says about his admitted failure to follow it.
1) And I will state an opinion here, because complaining that paperwork the executive branch does for the judical branch is 'a lot' is fucking absurd. The interaction between the judical and executive branch is almost entirely realms and realms of pointless paperwork where the executive branch wants something, and the judical branch has to okay it. That's why we hire clerks to fill out paperwork! Whinging about about a dozen wiretap forms for the entire government every day is absurd, especially when you presumably are having to pay people listen to the wiretaps and transcribe them, others to translate, others deciding who to tap, and others to check for coded message, etc. Each wrong wiretap probably sucks at least a man-week of skilled work at 50 dollars an hour minimum just to determine it's pointless, and complaining about an hour it takes an unskilled worker to fill out a form at 15 dollars an hour is craziness indeed.
Yes yes, in this case, they need classified clearances. So? The intelligence community is full of clerks with classified clearances.
See, the 'Give me liberty or give me death!' meme is a false dichotomy. People think it means you pick one, but in reality it merely means you have chosen to operate in a universe where liberty is important, and you are willing have the risk of death.
But without liberty, you do not risk death, so you can trivially choose enslavement and not have any risk of death at all!
And, like Bush said, they hate us for our freedoms, so if we get rid of those, we'll be fine.
Unless, for some inexplicable reason, after we sign our freedoms back over the government, they fail to protect us. But I'm sure they're picking competent people to protect us, like Michael Brown and Julie Myers, who was just appointed to run Immigration and Customs, despite having no experience at all either in that field or managing a large organization. But, she's married to a friend of Bush's, and, seriously, how important is it to keep certain people and things out of the country?
And I'm sure the decision not to provide protective gear to our military, or set up a government in Iraq that not only is almost certain to be opposed to our interests, like the one we got rid of, but allied with our other enemies, unlike the one we got rid of, were mistakes we've all learned from and won't happen again.
And I'm sure when we stop putting our rights ahead of national security, the Administration will stop putting its own concerns ahead of national security, like in the past when it outed Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, one of the few people that any intelligence service had inside al-Queda, because, hey, Bush was up for re-election.
Because, you see, giving up your rights is a legit choice. (Not taking them from people unilaterally, as this government has basically done, but having the people decide.) However, you should damn sure the people who're handing your rights over to can actually protect you, and actually have your best interests at heart.
Area 51 has the longest runways in the world. Well, perhaps, if you count a dry lake bed as a runway. Many other places have longer concrete runways
You know, for someone who knows you can look at it from above, you appear to never have actually done so.
It quite clearly has a concrete runway extending across that dried lake bed. There are even lines painted on it, and there are X's painted on it at 1000 foot intervals.
According to Google Earth, that length of concrete is slightly more than 24,000 feet, with 13,000 of it paved on normal ground and 11,000 paved on the lake bed.
However, looking that the markings of the arrow, and the fact the X's mark off 1000 feet from the arrow, and the fact there is sand that has blown over the edge at one end, it looks like only the 18,000 feet past the arrow are used, about 11,000 feet on normal ground and 7000 feet on the lake bed. Which still beats everything else. (And, on top of that, it has an unpaved 2500 foot area that is clearly for planes that go off the end.)
Now, there are two other runways of 10,000 and 11,000 feet, respectively, that are merely outlines on a lakebed. And there is a 14,000 foot runway on normal groud, and something that's 7500 feet that might be a runway, or might just be a taxiway, I can't tell. (There's a plane parked there on Google Earth! It looks like a standard airplane, but has something weird going on with a wing.)
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, I mostly support the ACLU and the NRA, and there are a lot of us out there.
People need to stop whining about the cases the ACLU ignores. 'The entire constitution and all amendments except one' is a large scope than any other rights organization. At least, any other organization that actually does anything.
The NRA had a budget that is much much larger, and a single amendment to worry about, and they really can handle it.
Your question is like asking 'Why didn't someone sue when the police bought their guns, instead of when they used them to shoot those innocent people?'.
It is perfectly legal to spy on random non-Americans, hence the NSA's actions during Echelon were legal. Delibrately letting other countries spy on Americans, as long as they turn the info over to us, is technically legal, although it shouldn't be, and by the time anyone found out about that they had stopped.(1)
Carnivore, OTOH, was (is?) perfectly legal, because it is merely the ability to wiretap email, which the government certainly has the right to build.
What they do not have, however, is the right to use it to spy on Americans without a warrant obtained via the courts. Which they are doing. (Although we're not certain if they'd doing it via 'Carnivore' or not.)
1) I think we need a law that says the executive branch much stop any spying by other governments it is aware of on Americans, or, if it cannot, at least alert the victims, unless the executive branch can come up with a damn good reason and present it to the courts. Maybe the standard should be slightly less than a warrant, but there should be some standard.
They, a) can already do this, /. would be barred by law from telling anyone, thanks to the PATRIOT act, and b) probably don't need to 'requisition' anything thanks to the NSA. They've only admitted to scanning email, but scanning traffic on port 80 looking for a POST is a trivial addition.
shortly after, you and all your family members and friends are nowhere to be found.
They have, indeed, asserted the right to lock people up without charging them with anything, without access to a lawyer, and without telling anyone.
Basically, the different between now and the world you describe is they haven't chosen to do that to you. They do, indeed, claim they have the right.
Of course, in all likelyhood, you would have gotten the same elevator had you pressed down.
Interestingly enough, this appeared to be the sole situtation where this logic makes sense. Let's say there are 15 floors, you are on five. You want down, as do people on floors 3, 6, 7, and 8. There two elevators (It doesn't work with one.), and one just dropped someone off in the lobby, and the other at 15.
If you press down, the elevator at the top will go 8, 7, 6, 5, and 3. Or possibly the one in the lobby will grab 3 and 5.
If you press up, or down and up, the elevator at the top will start grabbing people on the way down, and the elevator at the bottom will come up and get you. At which point you can rocket to the bottom. (Well, you'd grab the person at 3 also.)
So, in theory that worked faster.
In practice, however, if people do this, the person at 6 will also push up and down. Now the elevator comes and gets you, and then goes and gets the person at 6. Meanwhile, he's possibly gotten on the other elevator, or possibly not. Regardless, by the time the doors have closed on the 6, the other elevator has certainly passed you.
Of course, you've managed to slow that other one down, because you pushed the button for 5, and it will stop there. Meanwhile, you'll probably end up getting 3, and you'll hit the bottom at the same time.
If the person on 6 and 7 do it...
Interestingly, looking at the logic, it's not just you you're slowing down. You're also slowing down the other elevators.
Basically, you're screwing up the 'elevator movement reduction' where it's grabbing up people going in the same direction in the same car, and instead trying to get your own car, which does, indeed, work when there's a car to spare, and it doesn't hurt anything too bad. However, when there is not a car to spare, someone else will picked to be placed in your car, and you will go halfway around the world and slow everything around, and it's even more absurd when you realize others get queued in your car by doing the same thing. (In addition to people just legitimately trying to get somewhere.)
Of course, this only works in elevator banks with at least two elevators. It never makes any sense with one, because the elevator will transverse exactly the same path...you just will get in it sooner, and it will stop back at your floor on the way down, wasting time. There is no 'movement reduction' logic in those things, they basically bounce back and forth between the currently highest and currently lowest requested floor.
And people laughed when that guy made SimTower as an elevator simulator. I want an actual elevator simulator now, with programmable people, so I can actually watch all this.
Getting on an elevator going in the wrong direction will, on average, take a good deal more time than one going in the right direction.
However, obviously, if you can't get on one going in the right way, but can on one going the wrong way, you should by all means feel free to do that.
The original comment was about people who pushed buttons in both directions to 'get an elevator faster', despite how illogical that is. Not about people who are trying to go down, sit there and watch two full down elevators pass them, and consciously decide to take a round trip instead of waiting for an empty one. Those people have more than enough elevators in the right direction...they're just all full.
And what do these people do when they are trying to go down, but get into an up elevator and have to ride up 30 floors before it turns around?
As a funny aside, if there were five people doing this on different floors in a row, and, say, one person going down five floors above them who doesn't do this, along with a person next to them going up, they'd all get on the up elevator, which would slowly collect them all and move upward. Meanwhile, the down elevator goes all the way up and collects people downward...except they already left on the up elevator by the time it gets there..
I can't quite figure out the logic of getting on elevators going in the wrong direction:
If you're the only person using the elevator at all, you can, indeed, direct it wherever you want, but if you're the only person using it, you might as well get it going in the right direction.
If there is heavy use in direction you want, all the elevators will be going that way, and you should punch the correct way.
If there is heavy use in the other direction, you certainly will get an elevator faster...and you certainly will have to go way out of your way, too.
Have these people not realized that if you get into an up elevator, and punch a direction that is down, it will do the upward stuff first? I mean, it seems like it would be pretty obvious.
Roll to get a number. Seriously, do it.
Now...I pick number 5.
Now you tell me 18 numbers you didn't pick. You cannot tell me 5, and you cannot tell me the number you picked. (If those are the same number, of course, you will be leaving off a random number from the list.)
Now, take the numbers 1-20, and remove the numbers you told me. And remove 5.
Is that your number?
Wow, it's an amazing magic trick! It works 19/20 times!
It's just really obvious when you get into the large numbers, but it works all the way down to 3. Unless you're really unlucky and pick the 'right' number first, you win. (At 2, of course, it still 'works' if they open all doors but one and the one you picked, but that is exactly no doors, and you just switch 1/2 odds for...1/2 odds.)
Exactly where in that entire post did I even vaguely suggest Jessica Alba wasn't the hottest person in the entire history of the universe?
Not that I personally believe those things, but I'm just wondering where, at any point, I made any comment on how hot any actress was. The closest I came to calling anyone 'hot' was to compliment Gabrielle's outfits, which actually sounds rather gay now that I reread it. :)
And Jessica Alba, does, indeed, keep appearing in movies because she is very hot. Often in revealing outfits to show off her hotness, or even lacking traditional parts of an outfit, like a shirt.
Whether or not this is a good thing depends, I suppose, on whether or not people are aware they can buy magazines filled entirely with pictures of completely-naked hot women. And movies with that, too. It is called 'pornography'.
Once they are aware of this, they will usually stop watching movies due solely due to the half-naked hot women in them (What's the point of half-naked when you can see entirely naked women?), and start expecting the women to have 'acting ability' and the movie to have 'a plot'.
If there are 99 doors that are wrong, and one that is right, and he's opened 98 wrong ones, you still have the 1/100 chance the door you originally picked was the right one. It doesn't magically change as other doors are revealed. If the door you picked, at odds of 1/100 is not correct, the other door must be the right one, and thus has odds of 99/100.
That's what people are missing. When you are given the chance to switch, you know have information you did not have before...you know one door of the two you did not pick does not have anything behind it.
Your door still have a 1/3 probility, and those two doors together still have an 2/3, but now that entire 2/3 is in one door.
And your example of switching back makes no sense. He can't open another door, because you've only got two, and he can't be sure of having one without the prize behind it. And, if he did have that, you'd have no doors to switch to!
1) Actually, even if he wasn't required to do that, the odds would be the same. If he opened the door with the prize, though, you'd just be screwed no matter what you did.
The assertation was the Area 51's runway was, absurdly, 'painted on', and, hence, didn't count as a real runway. (Why they would paint the whole runway area, even the shoulders, instead of just the ends, like they did on the two runways that are actually painted on, is beyond me.)
You agree it's not, and, what's more, you agree with my 'crappy concrete' theory, except you claim it's the base that's crappy instead. The concrete is also clearly a different color, and, hence I suspect it also made of different materials, but that's not really important.
The important thing is that it does, in fact, have the longest (concrete) runway in the world. It might not work for experimental crafts, but I rather suspect most of the other contenders for that position would not either.
And I don't know where you got that Xena was a 'lesbo fantasy'. I suspect if they had wanted that they would have, you know, actually come out and stated that Gabby and Xena were in that kind of relationship.
Yes, once the rumors started they'd drop little hints and whatnot, but that's mainly because they never took themselves seriously in the first place. They didn't start the whole 'subtext' thing, and they didn't cash in on it, they just left a few ambigious lines in.
And I suspect there would have been rather more revealing costumes. Have you ever looked at what Xena wore? It's like three layers of clothing! She's wearing a leather shirt under her armor, and she's wearing a cloth shirt under that!
Gabby, admittedly, had some rather nice outfits after she stopped wearing a full-length skirt the whole time, but they weren't by any stretch of the imagination 'revealing', unless Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie was past 'revealing' into 'nudity'.
Anyway, Dark Angel was an absurd attempt by Fox to cash in on Buffy by throwing money, tits, and asses at the viewers. (Buffy was owned by Fox, but the WB was making all the money.)
Buffy, of course, only was given a chance because of Xena.
That chance of logic is probably the only time Dark Angel and Xena should be mentioned anywhere near each other.
The only secret Jerrod was trying to figure out is who his parents were and what happened to them, and that's completely unrelated to his abilities, which is basically just incredible acting talent combined with very good problem solving.
The two series may look superficially the same, but Jerrod part of The Pretender was actually much more like Quantum Leap. Show up, pretend to be someone, solve problems with your superior skills and knowledge, leave. Although Jerrod focused on crimes and Sam on future problems.
The Center part of the shows, however...I can't offhandedly think of an analog of that, although I'm sure it's existed. Basically, people unravelling the vast web of lies and deception around them. I suspect Twin Peaks would qualify, although I have not seen that, and The Center never even appeared normal.
And, although people rarely caught on, they were two completely seperate TV shows that happened to inhabit the same hour. Seriously, about 1% of the airtime required you actually knowing about both 'shows'. You could have watched just Jarrod, and known some mysterious people were after him, or just watched Ms. Parker and company, and known her overall goal was to catch someone, but she always failed, but the amount of crossover between the plots was almost nothing. An editor could sit down and slice them apart to make 'Jerrod' show or 'The Center' show, and almost no footage would be in both.
I can't think of any TV show that's done that.
As for John Doe, the real analog would be Nowhere Man or, indirectly, The Prisoner, or even something like Strange Luck.
Basically, when you die, God, or something, tells you everything that happened, every single known thing. Basically, it's nethack's 'Do you you want your possessions identified?'
Somehow, those Phoenix people figured this out (probably someone else in history did it), and figured out a way to get a guy, whoever John Doe was, to this point without him actually being dead, and bring him back. (Or maybe, with him actually being dead.)
This appears to have been quite a bit more involved than 'Flatliners', and seemed to involve him physically reappearing in the world.
Hence, he became 'The Phoenix'.
What is with the memory loss is unknown, as is whether or not he left behind a corpse when he 'died'.
The revelation of the guy at the end (I'm trying not to spoil it.) was not intended to be that guy. They apparently were going to cast and bring in someone, playing that guy, as the villian of the next season.
They literally threw it in at the last minute when they realized the show was canceled, basically to confuse the hell out of people.
Hell, if you've got to go out, go out with a bang, right? Or at least go out with something that will make people go 'Huh?' and watch all the episodes again.
Yes, I know quite a lot of places will claim the show was cancelled after the last episode was filmed. The shows producers, however, claim they knew.
And, unlike
You've confused the NSA with the real threat, the R
Nothing requires anyone to accept anything in exchange for anything, though.
Normally, at gas stations, you pump first, so you owe them the money, so they'd have to take whatever legal tender you wanted to use (Unless they said otherwise in advance.), but his example rather read like that wasn't true, that he was paying in advance, at which point they can legally require payment in his own urine produced while reciting the alphabet backwards and standing on his head.
This is why, when you die, it passes into your estate. Otherwise it'd just be, I dunno, litter or abandoned property or something.
If you don't believe me, look at slavery. It requires the premise that a body can be owned. (as could any children.) When slavery was outlawed, it outlawing by, essentially, outlawing ownership of a living body by a different person.
Don't get confused by the fact we have laws about treatments of corpses and selling of organs (If you didn't own your body, how could you sell part of it, anyway?) and even the selling of your whole body. The reason we have those is that bodies are property, but property we have unique rules about the transfer of, like nuclear materials.
That actually doesn't follow. Just because someone has information about you does not mean they have the right to cause harm to you using that information.
Not that I disagree with you in principle, but that example is liek arguing that knowledge of a person's location should belong to that person, because others could use that information to punch that person in the face. While there's good reasons to disallow tracking, that's not one of them. If someone is going to harm you in violation of the law, they will be perfectly willing to illegally use the knowledge you 'own' to do so.
So, your assertation is...I'm hallucinating? Or have you still not looked at it Google Earth, as opposed to Google Maps, where you indeed cannot see enough detail?
Incidentally, if you go and look at the parking area at 37o14'27.22 115o49'00.75 (The one with three tractor trailers in it.), you will not only notice it's exactly the same color as the entension to the runway, which is a weird coincidence, but they have exactly the same type of lines visible, because, yes, it is cracks. This is because the 'extra' part of the runway was, indeed, paved, although apparently with crappy parking pavement instead of real stuff. Go north of that over some buildings and you'll see the same 25 foot square concrete slabs used at the touchdown place.
However, I'm not even going to respond to you until you've actually demonstrated that you have looked at it in Google Earth, and have answered the simple question: Roughly how long are the painted dashes on the runway? Because the only way you could be answering like you are is if you haven't looked at it via that.
The size of the blocks means NOTHING re it being a runway:
What is your point here? The question was 'Is it paved?'. We know it's a runway, unless they've set up some sort of dragstrip at area 51, or just like building roads that don't go anywhere. (In fact, the long one stops short of access road by maybe 70 feet, so it would be a spectularly pointless 2 mile long drive.)
And, more to the point, the rest of the concrete is in crappy condition, with cracks all over it, cracks that are not reflected in the lakebed. Ah, but you say, that's merely the lakebed cracking up.
Not so fast. The cracks follow the line of the concrete, or are perpendicular to it, exactly like real concrete cracks. If you head back to our friend the landing pad, and backwards up the unused part of the runway, you can see a crack right down the middle of the runway that runs for 3000 feet within a foot or two of the painted center line. It even zigs a few feet in places due to other cracks and gets back on course. That is, frankly, an astonishing coincidence, or it's that the damn peak of the road has cracked, exactly like what happens to every other poorly-paved road. (Remember, this is the unused part.)
Ah, but maybe the paint is merely very crappy. Well, no, paint doesn't crack enough that you can see it from orbit., and if we saw through the paint we'd be seeing white lake bed not dark areas. And, just as oddly, there are places where markings are clearly painted over the cracks.
I'll willing to admit I can't prove there aren't cracks on the lake bed we can't see, but the pattern of the cracks is the pattern of cracking concrete.
Seriously. Either you are arguing because you haven't looked at it, or you're arguing just to be arguing. No one can possibly look at that and think it's paint.
Of course, this is area 51 we're talking about. They could just be painting the cracks in.
They, in fact, were presented to only certain members of that special committee under such classification that said members could not actually bring up the fact in the special committee
Anyone who thinks that's normal behavior for intelligence handling is sadly confused.
Frankly, I think it's fucking absurd that there even is a way for the administration to gag Congressentities. Everything the executive branch does should be open to at least one special committee to just waltz in and find out, and they should have the right to vote to call a closed session of their chamber and tell everyone.
Before anyone talks about 'seperation of powers', I have to point out the executive branch is supposed to executing the laws created by the executive branch, and only those laws. The executive branch shouldn't be doing anything not authorized by Congress.
(Of course, there is a balance of power fact where the executive branch can basically decided to ignore people breaking certain laws, which along with the veto power gives us the idea that the executive branch doesn't have to enforce the law, but there is a difference between saying 'We will not enforce that law.' and 'We will enforce this new thing we made up that we have decided to call a law'. And if the executive branch itself breaks the law, the legislative can step in.)
Just FYI, you appear to have fallen for the FISA-doesn't-allow-that lie.
FISA allows 72 hours worth of wiretaps for no reason at all. You then, at that point, have to make a request to the FISA court, which is designed for speed.
All complaints about how 'the process' is slow have actually been talking about filling out the paper. The court is wicked fast, and you can, in fact, keep tapping until they get around to your case anyway. A slow FISA court would mean more wiretapping allowed.(1)
Some blogs have been completely ignoring this ability under FISA for the last two weeks, claiming Bush needs to break FISA to do exactly what he can do under FISA.
To set the record straight: If the government finds phone numbers in a laptop of an apparent agent, it can just go ahead and listen...it just, also, has to file the paper work with the FISA court. Unless and until they are told to stop by the court because there is clearly no reason they should be listening to these people, or unless the 72 hour deadline passes without them bothering to hand in paperwork, they can keep doing it.
Bush claims he does not need to do this, either because of the authorization of the war in Afganistan, or because in the time of war the president has whatever powers he needs to execute said war.
And before someone mods me down, please try to figure out exactly where I stated an opinion in there. Those are the facts of the FISA law, and what Bush says about his admitted failure to follow it.
1) And I will state an opinion here, because complaining that paperwork the executive branch does for the judical branch is 'a lot' is fucking absurd. The interaction between the judical and executive branch is almost entirely realms and realms of pointless paperwork where the executive branch wants something, and the judical branch has to okay it. That's why we hire clerks to fill out paperwork! Whinging about about a dozen wiretap forms for the entire government every day is absurd, especially when you presumably are having to pay people listen to the wiretaps and transcribe them, others to translate, others deciding who to tap, and others to check for coded message, etc. Each wrong wiretap probably sucks at least a man-week of skilled work at 50 dollars an hour minimum just to determine it's pointless, and complaining about an hour it takes an unskilled worker to fill out a form at 15 dollars an hour is craziness indeed.
Yes yes, in this case, they need classified clearances. So? The intelligence community is full of clerks with classified clearances.
See, the 'Give me liberty or give me death!' meme is a false dichotomy. People think it means you pick one, but in reality it merely means you have chosen to operate in a universe where liberty is important, and you are willing have the risk of death.
But without liberty, you do not risk death, so you can trivially choose enslavement and not have any risk of death at all!
And, like Bush said, they hate us for our freedoms, so if we get rid of those, we'll be fine.
Unless, for some inexplicable reason, after we sign our freedoms back over the government, they fail to protect us. But I'm sure they're picking competent people to protect us, like Michael Brown and Julie Myers, who was just appointed to run Immigration and Customs, despite having no experience at all either in that field or managing a large organization. But, she's married to a friend of Bush's, and, seriously, how important is it to keep certain people and things out of the country?
And I'm sure the decision not to provide protective gear to our military, or set up a government in Iraq that not only is almost certain to be opposed to our interests, like the one we got rid of, but allied with our other enemies, unlike the one we got rid of, were mistakes we've all learned from and won't happen again.
And I'm sure when we stop putting our rights ahead of national security, the Administration will stop putting its own concerns ahead of national security, like in the past when it outed Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, one of the few people that any intelligence service had inside al-Queda, because, hey, Bush was up for re-election.
Because, you see, giving up your rights is a legit choice. (Not taking them from people unilaterally, as this government has basically done, but having the people decide.) However, you should damn sure the people who're handing your rights over to can actually protect you, and actually have your best interests at heart.
You know, for someone who knows you can look at it from above, you appear to never have actually done so.
It quite clearly has a concrete runway extending across that dried lake bed. There are even lines painted on it, and there are X's painted on it at 1000 foot intervals.
According to Google Earth, that length of concrete is slightly more than 24,000 feet, with 13,000 of it paved on normal ground and 11,000 paved on the lake bed.
However, looking that the markings of the arrow, and the fact the X's mark off 1000 feet from the arrow, and the fact there is sand that has blown over the edge at one end, it looks like only the 18,000 feet past the arrow are used, about 11,000 feet on normal ground and 7000 feet on the lake bed. Which still beats everything else. (And, on top of that, it has an unpaved 2500 foot area that is clearly for planes that go off the end.)
Now, there are two other runways of 10,000 and 11,000 feet, respectively, that are merely outlines on a lakebed. And there is a 14,000 foot runway on normal groud, and something that's 7500 feet that might be a runway, or might just be a taxiway, I can't tell. (There's a plane parked there on Google Earth! It looks like a standard airplane, but has something weird going on with a wing.)