Exactly. Don't involve computers in anyway if you wish to prank, because people are complete morons and think that sending an email with a bogus address is 'hacking'.
OTOH, feel free to cause thousands of dollars worth of physical damages and commit a felony. Seriously, that's not a joke. You can get away with a hell of a lot, as long as it doesn't involve computers.
In fact, you'd have to do that with an outward facing door too, to keep the sand from pouring out when you left the room and rendering you unable to close it.
They mislead a cheerleadering into telling them how it worked.
Then they broke into the cheerleader's hotel room after determining they would be out and stole a single instruction sheet.
Then they printed up fake cards, at great expense, and modified them.
Then they broke back into the hotel room and replaced the card with the fakes.
I have no idea what you mean by 'the code'. The flip cards were operated by hand, based on instruction sheets left on the seats. The misleading was to determine where the cards where and who was in charge of them, not to get some secret password that magically allowed them to change things.
Oh, sure, it sounds absurd, until people realize you have a time machine, and in fact went back in time to start a Norse myth about Surt, linking someone with that name to the moon.
You crack things by breaking them, or part of them. This can be copy protection or security software or DRM. You can even crack into hardware you aren't supposed to be able to open. The metaphor is 'cracking them open' like a coconut.
You hack something by modifying it in a clever way, or using it in a clever way without modifications. The metaphor of 'carving with axes' doesn't really work here.
A hack can be a crack, and crack can be a hack. Witness the X-Box ones that let you run unsigned programs via holes. A hack and a crack.
A hack is not always a crack. In fact, it can be the opposite of one, where a clever modification prevents a crack.
A crack is not always a hack. Sticking a screwdriver into a plastic case and ripping it open with brute-force is a crack, but it not by any means a hack.
The definations are perfectly consistent, and neither requires malicious intent. However, you can hack someone else's stuff in a non-malicious way, but cracking their stuff is almost always malicious, as you're breaking something.
I'm not entirely sure of the legal status of telephone calls in 1941. There was a point in this nation's history where you didn't need a warrant at all to tap them.
However, telegrams have never had an expectation of privacy. At least two other people must see them, the operators at either end. And telegrams were party lines, meaning that maybe a dozen operators along the way could see your message, althought they usually ignored it once they saw it wasn't addressed to them or anyone they would have to relay to. You don't need a search warrant for them to this day, anymore than you need a warrant to spy on semaphore signals, except of course no one uses either of those so that's rather moot.
In fact, I think telephone calls only were determined to have an expectation of privacy when they were fully automated, and you could assume an operator wouldn't and really couldn't jack into your line, and that was certainly after 1941.
So that spying was actually probably legal in 1941. Customs can search anything leaving and entering the country, and listening to phone converstations didn't become a 'search' until it was assumed you had some privacy there. (It's the same principle that says looking at someone is not a search, but looking at someone via x-rays is. It's all about whether or not you should reasonable believe people could see something. If you do, it's not a 'search', it's just the police looking at you.)
But the point was, if it wasn't legal, it was right there in the damn open, and people could challenge it. It certainly wasn't done secretly against the express word of the law.
The predictive modeling is already done. That's the 'myth'.
They then run an experiment to test if the model is correct, if that could actually happen.
Of course, they are testing plausibility, not possiblity. Which is why they use normal construction materials instead, say, steel, and real guns instead of custom stuff. The myths say 'This happened in normal circumstances', not 'You can make this happen'.
I..e., the question isn't 'Is is possible to get someone pregnant from a bullet?', it's 'Could that has possibly happened during the civil war with an accidental shot?'. That was busted, viable genetic material cannot travel on a bullet, the bullet is too hot. It would be possible to figure out some way to do it, but it can't happen accidently during a gun battle.
But they often do calculations in advances, and even simulations with models. (In fact, with the life-threatenings ones, they only do simulations.)
And what they do is exactly science. Disproving theories is as much a part of science as anything else.
Now, the theories are not physical laws, the theories are historical instances and legends, but history is a science, too. Proving 'This ruin was the city of Troy' is as much science as anything, disproving the theory that 'Troy is a myth'.
Well, the phone calls, at least. The mail, and possibly the telegraphs, are legal under the 'border search' exemption, that it is legal to monitor stuff going in and out of the country.
Note 'stuff', not 'converstations'. No one's ever heard it's legal to listen to conversations with Americans because half of parties aren't in the country.
But, regardless of the legality, FDR did it in public view, with apparently full support from the courts, because they ignored him. Despite what some people who disagree with Bush say, I'm fine with the constitution being slightly bent in extreme emergencies in times of war.
Not that this is a 'real' war, but had we honestly needed to bend some rule, okay.
But we didn't need to bend any rule, we have FISA for a reason, and Bush not only broke the constitution, he broke the easy-to-follow law, and didn't even try to get his rubber stamp congress in 2002 to change the law.
This case isn't about 'slightly' doing the wrong thing, in the open, to save the country. It is about getting the legal right to do the wrong thing, in secret, with no control from either of the other branch of government, because of this half-assed nonsensical war on terror that Bush is making worse.
And, what's worse, this isn't the first time. Jose Padilla ring any bells? Heaven forbid we give him a few hours in court.
And, in fact, the same issue came up with torture. If the absurd 'ticking time bomb' situtation ever happened, torturing someone who does actually know is fine...and it should continue to be illegal. That's why we have juries instead of a machine. The court system will, in fact, cut people, including the president slack, if they honestly needed to break that law. (This is where the right to self-defense comes from, although that is now an actual law.)
Hell, the president has two places he can be cut slack, impeachment and the actual trial, and these happen by the House, which is supposed to be the closest representation of 'The People of the US' that we posses.
Bush, however, wants a declaration that he, and the executive branch, and the military, are not bound by any law at all. Or the courts. Or the constitution.
The president does have authority to obtain foreign intelligence information. You see the important word there?
No court has ever held that anyone has the authority to warrantless searches on Americans. NOot executive, not legistlative. Period, full stop, no exceptions at all. This includes conversations that are only halfway including Americans.
I.e., if Osama called me up today, it would be illegal to listen to the conversation without a warrant.
This is why FISA was created. It allowed people to spy now in the case of emergencies, and get a warrant retroactively. If they can't get the warrant, they have to throw the info away.
And, Mr. Complete Dumbass, the permission to invade Afghanistan authorized the use of military force. And Congress can't authorize the President to violate the constitution no matter what, so all you're actually arguing there is that his constitutional violation is not a felony.
Which doesn't fly anyway. To revoke a law, you have to explicitly override it. If you don't, the more specific law applies. The President can't go and commit tax fraud to fund the War on Terror, and he can't violate FISA. When a law says 'you can do X', it means 'you can do X in a manner consistent with all other laws', unless it explicictly says you can disgard other laws.
This is a rather obvious principle of the law. Otherwise, the fact I am authorized to stop the credit bureau from selling my info would me I am authorized to bomb them to get them to stop. Or the fact I have a driver's license would allow me to drive through private property and buildings, and run over whoever I want. After all the government said I could drive, and this obviously overrides all other laws.
FISA, OTOH, does explicitly say it overrides all other laws WRT to wiretapping. And there is no constitutional principle that lets the executive branch spy on citizens without warrants. (Or even any non-citizens in the US legally.)
The only thing that should actually scare girls off is that girls get too much personal attention from attention-starved guys.
And this is entirely a problem of female making. If women avoid nerds, than the few women who venture close to nerds are going to have to put up with a disproportional amount of attention.
A solution is simple: Nerdy women need to start helping nerdy guys hook up with other women.
True, but rockets that launch payloads to LEO or GTO for the forseeable future (100 years) will be chemically fueled. The best fuels that we can practically use for the forseeable future are H2 and O2 or Kerosene and O2. There is no easy way around it. What are your alternatives?
No one on this planet can make predictions about what technology we won't have in 100 years, unless that technology is impossible, and even then it's risky. I'll admit we won't have anything better in ten years, but that's simply because we don't have a commerical space industry. Once we do have one, expect new ideas.
As for what I think? I have no idea. Let's check in a decade or two where commerical space travel is a fifty billion dollar industry, and 90% of the costs are fuel, and let's see if they aren't doing, I dunno, some sort of research into that.
Actually, I do have an obvious suggestion: Use the O2 in the air until we get too high. (I know we don't have a way to do that right now, but it's certainly possible.)
Amusing. And what would that stuff be? Air (and fuel!) get you to about 100,000 ft and Mach 3, but I'll agree it has a high Isp. What about the other 22 mach? Do you use magic pixie dust or warp power?
I have no idea why you think that is the fastest you can reach by pushing air.
So you want to use dirt as the working fluid of an ion engine? It is not as easy to ionize as conventional fluids like Xenon. Electric power onboard an accending rocket is pretty scarce for what you are suggesting
Electrical power is exactly as scarce as batteries are powerful and compact. And we've made astonishing breakthoughs in that area recently.
The Earth's rotation is about 1,100 mph. That leaves only 16,500 mph to be obtained from the rocket lauched eastward from the equator. Low latitude launches are efficient, but they don't help that much.
There is that pesky 'space elevator' again. Well, after all, this is slashdot.
OTOH, the idea of 'tethers' to help change orbits cheaply makes some sense.
Virgin Galactic is conducting suborbital flights. They will require orders of magnitude more energy to reach orbit.
Just like the first air flight required orders of magnitudes of improvement to become transcontinential, or the first trains required orders of magnitudes of improvement to haul people cross-country.
Everyone knows this is an absurdly expensive undertaking at this point, suitable for the eccentric daredevils, and not in any way useful. There is almost zero reason to move people to orbit at all.
Just like every other means of transport ever invented started out, all the way back to the first person to sit on a log and try to cross the river on it, the first person catch a horse and ride it, the first person to build a box with wheels and attached it to a horse and stand on it, or the first person to put a smoke-spewing stream engine on that box and try to move it without a horse. All of them were dangerous, most of them cost too much, and every one of them had people saying 'Pfft, that's a silly idea.'.
All spaceships operate via 'mass drivers', in that they operate by driving mass, although not via the linear induction method of traditional 'mass drivers'. They push mass out the back. They are reaction drives.
That fact alone should give you some pause about what 'never' can happen.
Existing spaceships use the explosive properties of the fuel and a space that the explosion does not fit into, so it spews out the back.
This is nowhere near the only way to 'move things backwards'. It is, right now, the most energy dense way of doing so, and that is very important in space flight.
No, wait. That's not true. Atomic bombs are much more energy dense, and can lift a spaceship into orbit trivially. Sadly, atomic bombs have features that cause us not to want to use them, at least not on the same planet we live on, and they have to be 'constructed' instead of just poured into a tank.
As for the dirt/electricity, that was just an example. And we are nowhere near the maximum energy density for storing electricity, which is what I was talking about instead of the absurd idea of sending a nuclear reactor with a spaceship. If we come up with some sort of 'ideal battery' that can store a huge amount of electrons, some sort of static charge 'repeal dirt out the back' drive might work.
And there is always the 'airplane' means of travel within the atmosphere...simply accelerate the air via some means, and use that as the reaction mass. You could even store it for manuvering use in orbit, although obviously you're going to need some other reaction mass to get all the way up. But if it takes you 50% of the way, you can cut out 80% of the other fuel.
An X-port is where X connects to the land, where people stop using traditional land vehicles and start using X vehicles. A seaport connect the sea to the land, an airport connects the air to the land, and a spaceport connects space to the land.
A carport even works this way, although it is where walking people connect to the road system and thus would be better called a roadport.
Comparing the evolution of travel technology to consumer electronics is a laughable analogy. With steam engines you are running up against a little thing called fuel mass fraction. It takes a whole train car of coal to go 100 miles. There is no way around that, even for Sadi Carno.
While how much 'fuel' it takes to get to the moon may be a physical law, there is absolutely nothing in physics that says how much the fuel must cost, or what form it might take.
And it's not a physical law in the way you claim it.
While you do, indeed, have to push X amount of stuff downward to move upward, nothing says that has to be 'fuel', as in, the stuff powering the pushing does not have to be the same stuff that you are throwing out the back. Maybe it's air you merely accelerated, at least for the first part of the trip, maybe it's a load of highly compressed dirt you fling downward using electrity. Dirt is free, and electricity is cheap.
Or maybe you use a launcher on earth that gives you a lot of momentum 'for free' (by 'pushing' the earth), or maybe you use a space elevator that gives you it all for free.
And no matter what you throw out the back, space travel can't help but get cheaper, because spacehips are getting cheaper and lighter. 200,000 is how much it costs to put people and their part of the ship into orbit, and their part of the ship weighs a lot more than they do.
People who operate via the scientific method often run into confusion helping people with something who don't apply the scientific method to it. (I don't know how how correct it is to call it 'the scientific method'. It's more the precursor to it. But you get the point.)
The first thing I do in every single problem is 'attempt to replicate it'. (You know that joke about the computer scientist and the brake failure? So true.)
I will admit that often times it's pointless, you technically should probably recheck your work and then try again, but it always amazes me when someone has a problem and then goes and involves someone else before trying it a few more times.
The next step is 'change a few minor things and try again'. Again, it always trips me up when 'The printer doesn't work' and no one's tried to reseat the cable, or turn it off and back on. I do that shit automatically.
The problem isn't people who think like this, it is school systems and offices where no one understands technology, and thus grants technology some sort of mystical 'Don't ever do anything unless you know exactly what you're doing' field.
These people get exposed to this attitude for a decade and they are scared to death to push any button they do not understand, even if it's obviously the right one. You've basically turned their problem solving ability off WRT to those things.
You sit them down in their car, and if it fails to start, they try again, and be able to tell you if it's a dead battery or no fuel. You hand them their cellphone on the wrong screen and they're sunk.
Most people on here have not been exposed to, or ignored when exposed to, that field. And thus we can do trivial things without even realizing it that solves this problem. Don't congratulate yourself too much, however, because a man from the 1500s could do basically the same thing once he understood the concept, just like I can figure out basic problems with a water pump...our problem solving ability is turn on.
As for why this field exists? The basic principle that people do not know how incompetant they are. Somewhere, at every institution, there really is someone who should not, under any circumstances, touch any computer in any way, because they will probably cause a nuclear meltdown. (I don't understand it! There wasn't any nuclear material in the truck!) At some point, they did touch one, and from them, everyone has learned to never touch a computer.
And this is why it is okay to kill incompetant people.
Also it's why you should never start drinking in the middle of a post.
Don't blame the failure of cable TV on anyone. The model simply didn't work.
There are two kinds of cable channels: Those that the cable company gets to rebroadcast for free, and the kind they have to pay for. (Well, and the kind the customer has to pay for, but that kind is not relevant here.)
When cable first started, the theory was that every kind of cable channel would be the second. Hence there would be no 'point' in commericals.
Sadly, this would have also made cable cost like two-thousand dollars a year with all the channels we get now, but that's not important.
What is important is that customers don't care enough about commericals. So let's say there is one of each type in a market. The first one shows ads, and is free for the cable company, and the second doesn't, and isn't.
Which will the cable company carry? Well, they will carry the first, period. There's no reason not to. They might, or might not, carry the second. But with the first, there is much less demand for the second, and hence paying for it is a losing proposition.
At least, until the second lowers its price a lot. (And hence has to start having ads.)
Then, of course, once it gets popular, the first is going to raise their prices some, and you will end up where we basically are. Some 'genres' of channels tend to be free (Ones that cable companies would just drop if they had to pay, like Home and Garden and the golf station.), and the popular genres tend to cost, like news channels, because people will not accept cable without them.
Cable TV was based on a hypothetical 'People will pay more for no ads.' This is simply not true of the general population. Offer them ABC for free, and ABC-adless for 20 dollars a month, and they will take ABC. They will pay the.25 cents per episode that ads make to see a certain one for free, but not as a bulk payment, and, even if they would, the cable-TV watching community as a whole will not.
The failure of cable TV to be ad-free is completely the fault of the viewers, who would not pay the extra money required to make them ad-free.
As for the a la carte pricing, I think that some in the cable industry do get it, and are poised to move when it does change everything. A la carte actually lets them do what they wanted to do in the first place, letting them carry every channel as a 'Showtime', and letting them carry really unpopular channels if just a few people want them.
I think, if this 'a la carte' works out, that within a few years, we might see a 'Fox Premium Channel' and 'Paramount Premium Channel', where they show the original programming from their other networks, without ads, in basically random order designed to be Tivo'd, a few hours before they normally air.
Of course, the local affiliates will have an aneurysm. I'm not sure what's going to happen there. (Althoughy note that more and more original programming is not intended to air first on a broadcast station.)
That kind of CGI is the cheapest there is, so the costs wouldn't be important.
In fact, that kind of effect has been happening before it was computers generating the images. Although a can can twist, and the image needs to rotate, so it would be hard without computers. (I guess they'd put a dot on the green can to show which way it's facing?)
And with computers, of course, you'd be able to get the shading right. But replacing a known-in-advance green object with another object should be trivial.
Hell, 'The Invisible Man' managed, on a super-cheap budget, to render the invisiblity effect three or four times a show, even with him moving in the middle of a room with other people. Expensive CGI is a fully CGI spaceship battle with actors sitting in cockpits. Replacing a can is nothing.
And you only need to calculate the replacement pixels and shading once, and then store them. Apply those to a can skin and wrap it around and you can put new ones in on the fly.
Now that would be interesting. View the movie on a 'dumb TV' and you get whatever image was in it when broadcast. View the movie on a 'smart TV', and the TV could go out and get a new can skin two minutes in advance, and render it, and replace those pixels in real time, which is a lot less complicated than what 3D computer games do, and only has to be done to a tiny part of the image.
Speaking of annoy FX behavior, FX picked up the first reruns of Buffy a few years ago. They ran two eps every weekday.
At every commerical break, they ran the most annoying ad for 'The Shield' imaginable. One of those 'let's have loud noises to jar people into looking at the TV' and 'lets say something shocking so people will starting paying attention to see if we really said that', in the same ad. Over and over and over. Apparently, they didn't quite understand that people watch whole shows, and they really only need such an ad once.
For people who had missed the first few seasons of Buffy and were watching every day to catch up, the repeated ads, about 10 in the two hour span of the reruns, were enough to drive them homicially insane, and I'm surprised no one at FX actually got killed.
This was in addition to the noise-making popups for The Shield they ran during the episodes themseves.
Actually, 'fire in a crowd theater', while said as part of an Supreme Court opinion, was given on a decision that said that a certain, unrelated restriction on speech was not allowed.
While 'false speech leading to a panic' might render you as liable to a lawsuit as libel or slander, it's never actually reached the Supreme Court.
And there is a school of thought that says it wouldn't hold up, as, unlike slander and libel, your speech did not do the harm, other people did it.
The other school points out that it is illegal to point at someone and say to someone holding a gun 'Kill that person' with the knowledge they will do so. While it is legal to encourage people to break the law in general, it is illegal to stand there and actively ask them to specifically break a certain law right now, it makes you an accessory.
My best guess: Purposely causing a panic for no reason, resulting in people getting harmed, probably would be good grounds for a lawsuit against you. It isn't 'illegal' simply because there aren't any laws against it.
You can't compare extra hours. Teachers do a lot of work outside hours, too.
The standard required amount for 9-5 is seven hours. Yes, some jobs may require more, some jobs might not 'require' it but expect it if you want to get your work done, and obviously not getting your work done will get you fired.
But I've also seen teachers come in at 6:30 and leave at 4:30 in the afternoon. Or get there at a normal time, but have meetings with teachers at 7, and stay there until then. Or have meetings until 5 every single monday. (They got rid of that principal quick, the teachers wouldn't put up with it.)
I am talking about, in theory, how much people must work. The assertation was that 'teachers work 30% less', which was just absurd...the amount of time their job requires is basically the same, and that is what we are paying them for, at least if the 'of course, you have to add an extra 30% to their salary because they don't work as much' claim is to make any sense.
I personally think this claim would be absurd even if true, because, like I said, teachers live all 12 months a year, and can't really go out and get jobs for the extra few months, especially as they are directly competing with schoolkids, except they have a lot more expenses.
I was just demonstrating that the claim is not true in the first place, as they are required to work longer days, and it really averages out. I can't do math for how long people 'really' have to work, I suspect that not only does that vary by school, it only varies from business to business. I just assume all salaried workers are being screwed roughly equally.
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, feel free to cause thousands of dollars worth of physical damages and commit a felony. Seriously, that's not a joke. You can get away with a hell of a lot, as long as it doesn't involve computers.
Unless you left by the window, I guess.
They mislead a cheerleadering into telling them how it worked.
Then they broke into the cheerleader's hotel room after determining they would be out and stole a single instruction sheet.
Then they printed up fake cards, at great expense, and modified them.
Then they broke back into the hotel room and replaced the card with the fakes.
I have no idea what you mean by 'the code'. The flip cards were operated by hand, based on instruction sheets left on the seats. The misleading was to determine where the cards where and who was in charge of them, not to get some secret password that magically allowed them to change things.
You fell for the 'wallet inspector' gag, didn't you?
Oh, sure, it sounds absurd, until people realize you have a time machine, and in fact went back in time to start a Norse myth about Surt, linking someone with that name to the moon.
You crack things by breaking them, or part of them. This can be copy protection or security software or DRM. You can even crack into hardware you aren't supposed to be able to open. The metaphor is 'cracking them open' like a coconut.
You hack something by modifying it in a clever way, or using it in a clever way without modifications. The metaphor of 'carving with axes' doesn't really work here.
A hack can be a crack, and crack can be a hack. Witness the X-Box ones that let you run unsigned programs via holes. A hack and a crack.
A hack is not always a crack. In fact, it can be the opposite of one, where a clever modification prevents a crack.
A crack is not always a hack. Sticking a screwdriver into a plastic case and ripping it open with brute-force is a crack, but it not by any means a hack.
The definations are perfectly consistent, and neither requires malicious intent. However, you can hack someone else's stuff in a non-malicious way, but cracking their stuff is almost always malicious, as you're breaking something.
However, telegrams have never had an expectation of privacy. At least two other people must see them, the operators at either end. And telegrams were party lines, meaning that maybe a dozen operators along the way could see your message, althought they usually ignored it once they saw it wasn't addressed to them or anyone they would have to relay to. You don't need a search warrant for them to this day, anymore than you need a warrant to spy on semaphore signals, except of course no one uses either of those so that's rather moot.
In fact, I think telephone calls only were determined to have an expectation of privacy when they were fully automated, and you could assume an operator wouldn't and really couldn't jack into your line, and that was certainly after 1941.
So that spying was actually probably legal in 1941. Customs can search anything leaving and entering the country, and listening to phone converstations didn't become a 'search' until it was assumed you had some privacy there. (It's the same principle that says looking at someone is not a search, but looking at someone via x-rays is. It's all about whether or not you should reasonable believe people could see something. If you do, it's not a 'search', it's just the police looking at you.)
But the point was, if it wasn't legal, it was right there in the damn open, and people could challenge it. It certainly wasn't done secretly against the express word of the law.
They then run an experiment to test if the model is correct, if that could actually happen.
Of course, they are testing plausibility, not possiblity. Which is why they use normal construction materials instead, say, steel, and real guns instead of custom stuff. The myths say 'This happened in normal circumstances', not 'You can make this happen'.
I..e., the question isn't 'Is is possible to get someone pregnant from a bullet?', it's 'Could that has possibly happened during the civil war with an accidental shot?'. That was busted, viable genetic material cannot travel on a bullet, the bullet is too hot. It would be possible to figure out some way to do it, but it can't happen accidently during a gun battle.
But they often do calculations in advances, and even simulations with models. (In fact, with the life-threatenings ones, they only do simulations.)
And what they do is exactly science. Disproving theories is as much a part of science as anything else.
Now, the theories are not physical laws, the theories are historical instances and legends, but history is a science, too. Proving 'This ruin was the city of Troy' is as much science as anything, disproving the theory that 'Troy is a myth'.
Well, the phone calls, at least. The mail, and possibly the telegraphs, are legal under the 'border search' exemption, that it is legal to monitor stuff going in and out of the country.
Note 'stuff', not 'converstations'. No one's ever heard it's legal to listen to conversations with Americans because half of parties aren't in the country.
But, regardless of the legality, FDR did it in public view, with apparently full support from the courts, because they ignored him. Despite what some people who disagree with Bush say, I'm fine with the constitution being slightly bent in extreme emergencies in times of war.
Not that this is a 'real' war, but had we honestly needed to bend some rule, okay.
But we didn't need to bend any rule, we have FISA for a reason, and Bush not only broke the constitution, he broke the easy-to-follow law, and didn't even try to get his rubber stamp congress in 2002 to change the law.
This case isn't about 'slightly' doing the wrong thing, in the open, to save the country. It is about getting the legal right to do the wrong thing, in secret, with no control from either of the other branch of government, because of this half-assed nonsensical war on terror that Bush is making worse.
And, what's worse, this isn't the first time. Jose Padilla ring any bells? Heaven forbid we give him a few hours in court.
And, in fact, the same issue came up with torture. If the absurd 'ticking time bomb' situtation ever happened, torturing someone who does actually know is fine...and it should continue to be illegal. That's why we have juries instead of a machine. The court system will, in fact, cut people, including the president slack, if they honestly needed to break that law. (This is where the right to self-defense comes from, although that is now an actual law.)
Hell, the president has two places he can be cut slack, impeachment and the actual trial, and these happen by the House, which is supposed to be the closest representation of 'The People of the US' that we posses.
Bush, however, wants a declaration that he, and the executive branch, and the military, are not bound by any law at all. Or the courts. Or the constitution.
The president does have authority to obtain foreign intelligence information. You see the important word there?
No court has ever held that anyone has the authority to warrantless searches on Americans. NOot executive, not legistlative. Period, full stop, no exceptions at all. This includes conversations that are only halfway including Americans.
I.e., if Osama called me up today, it would be illegal to listen to the conversation without a warrant.
This is why FISA was created. It allowed people to spy now in the case of emergencies, and get a warrant retroactively. If they can't get the warrant, they have to throw the info away.
And, Mr. Complete Dumbass, the permission to invade Afghanistan authorized the use of military force. And Congress can't authorize the President to violate the constitution no matter what, so all you're actually arguing there is that his constitutional violation is not a felony.
Which doesn't fly anyway. To revoke a law, you have to explicitly override it. If you don't, the more specific law applies. The President can't go and commit tax fraud to fund the War on Terror, and he can't violate FISA. When a law says 'you can do X', it means 'you can do X in a manner consistent with all other laws', unless it explicictly says you can disgard other laws.
This is a rather obvious principle of the law. Otherwise, the fact I am authorized to stop the credit bureau from selling my info would me I am authorized to bomb them to get them to stop. Or the fact I have a driver's license would allow me to drive through private property and buildings, and run over whoever I want. After all the government said I could drive, and this obviously overrides all other laws.
FISA, OTOH, does explicitly say it overrides all other laws WRT to wiretapping. And there is no constitutional principle that lets the executive branch spy on citizens without warrants. (Or even any non-citizens in the US legally.)
And this is entirely a problem of female making. If women avoid nerds, than the few women who venture close to nerds are going to have to put up with a disproportional amount of attention.
A solution is simple: Nerdy women need to start helping nerdy guys hook up with other women.
If you look carefully during a full moon, the sun is more grayish.
And they are tallied on, tada, Diebold counters.
You need to go outside and look closely at it. It's clearly yellow.
Yeah, this is idiotic. Raise the damn gas tax 1 cent or something. Silently sucking fuel effiency is craziness.
No one on this planet can make predictions about what technology we won't have in 100 years, unless that technology is impossible, and even then it's risky. I'll admit we won't have anything better in ten years, but that's simply because we don't have a commerical space industry. Once we do have one, expect new ideas.
As for what I think? I have no idea. Let's check in a decade or two where commerical space travel is a fifty billion dollar industry, and 90% of the costs are fuel, and let's see if they aren't doing, I dunno, some sort of research into that.
Actually, I do have an obvious suggestion: Use the O2 in the air until we get too high. (I know we don't have a way to do that right now, but it's certainly possible.)
Amusing. And what would that stuff be? Air (and fuel!) get you to about 100,000 ft and Mach 3, but I'll agree it has a high Isp. What about the other 22 mach? Do you use magic pixie dust or warp power?
I have no idea why you think that is the fastest you can reach by pushing air.
So you want to use dirt as the working fluid of an ion engine? It is not as easy to ionize as conventional fluids like Xenon. Electric power onboard an accending rocket is pretty scarce for what you are suggesting
Electrical power is exactly as scarce as batteries are powerful and compact. And we've made astonishing breakthoughs in that area recently.
The Earth's rotation is about 1,100 mph. That leaves only 16,500 mph to be obtained from the rocket lauched eastward from the equator. Low latitude launches are efficient, but they don't help that much.
There is that pesky 'space elevator' again. Well, after all, this is slashdot.
OTOH, the idea of 'tethers' to help change orbits cheaply makes some sense.
Virgin Galactic is conducting suborbital flights. They will require orders of magnitude more energy to reach orbit.
Just like the first air flight required orders of magnitudes of improvement to become transcontinential, or the first trains required orders of magnitudes of improvement to haul people cross-country.
Everyone knows this is an absurdly expensive undertaking at this point, suitable for the eccentric daredevils, and not in any way useful. There is almost zero reason to move people to orbit at all.
Just like every other means of transport ever invented started out, all the way back to the first person to sit on a log and try to cross the river on it, the first person catch a horse and ride it, the first person to build a box with wheels and attached it to a horse and stand on it, or the first person to put a smoke-spewing stream engine on that box and try to move it without a horse. All of them were dangerous, most of them cost too much, and every one of them had people saying 'Pfft, that's a silly idea.'.
That fact alone should give you some pause about what 'never' can happen.
Existing spaceships use the explosive properties of the fuel and a space that the explosion does not fit into, so it spews out the back.
This is nowhere near the only way to 'move things backwards'. It is, right now, the most energy dense way of doing so, and that is very important in space flight.
No, wait. That's not true. Atomic bombs are much more energy dense, and can lift a spaceship into orbit trivially. Sadly, atomic bombs have features that cause us not to want to use them, at least not on the same planet we live on, and they have to be 'constructed' instead of just poured into a tank.
As for the dirt/electricity, that was just an example. And we are nowhere near the maximum energy density for storing electricity, which is what I was talking about instead of the absurd idea of sending a nuclear reactor with a spaceship. If we come up with some sort of 'ideal battery' that can store a huge amount of electrons, some sort of static charge 'repeal dirt out the back' drive might work.
And there is always the 'airplane' means of travel within the atmosphere...simply accelerate the air via some means, and use that as the reaction mass. You could even store it for manuvering use in orbit, although obviously you're going to need some other reaction mass to get all the way up. But if it takes you 50% of the way, you can cut out 80% of the other fuel.
An X-port is where X connects to the land, where people stop using traditional land vehicles and start using X vehicles. A seaport connect the sea to the land, an airport connects the air to the land, and a spaceport connects space to the land.
A carport even works this way, although it is where walking people connect to the road system and thus would be better called a roadport.
While how much 'fuel' it takes to get to the moon may be a physical law, there is absolutely nothing in physics that says how much the fuel must cost, or what form it might take.
And it's not a physical law in the way you claim it.
While you do, indeed, have to push X amount of stuff downward to move upward, nothing says that has to be 'fuel', as in, the stuff powering the pushing does not have to be the same stuff that you are throwing out the back. Maybe it's air you merely accelerated, at least for the first part of the trip, maybe it's a load of highly compressed dirt you fling downward using electrity. Dirt is free, and electricity is cheap.
Or maybe you use a launcher on earth that gives you a lot of momentum 'for free' (by 'pushing' the earth), or maybe you use a space elevator that gives you it all for free.
And no matter what you throw out the back, space travel can't help but get cheaper, because spacehips are getting cheaper and lighter. 200,000 is how much it costs to put people and their part of the ship into orbit, and their part of the ship weighs a lot more than they do.
The first thing I do in every single problem is 'attempt to replicate it'. (You know that joke about the computer scientist and the brake failure? So true.)
I will admit that often times it's pointless, you technically should probably recheck your work and then try again, but it always amazes me when someone has a problem and then goes and involves someone else before trying it a few more times.
The next step is 'change a few minor things and try again'. Again, it always trips me up when 'The printer doesn't work' and no one's tried to reseat the cable, or turn it off and back on. I do that shit automatically.
The problem isn't people who think like this, it is school systems and offices where no one understands technology, and thus grants technology some sort of mystical 'Don't ever do anything unless you know exactly what you're doing' field.
These people get exposed to this attitude for a decade and they are scared to death to push any button they do not understand, even if it's obviously the right one. You've basically turned their problem solving ability off WRT to those things.
You sit them down in their car, and if it fails to start, they try again, and be able to tell you if it's a dead battery or no fuel. You hand them their cellphone on the wrong screen and they're sunk.
Most people on here have not been exposed to, or ignored when exposed to, that field. And thus we can do trivial things without even realizing it that solves this problem. Don't congratulate yourself too much, however, because a man from the 1500s could do basically the same thing once he understood the concept, just like I can figure out basic problems with a water pump...our problem solving ability is turn on.
As for why this field exists? The basic principle that people do not know how incompetant they are. Somewhere, at every institution, there really is someone who should not, under any circumstances, touch any computer in any way, because they will probably cause a nuclear meltdown. (I don't understand it! There wasn't any nuclear material in the truck!) At some point, they did touch one, and from them, everyone has learned to never touch a computer.
And this is why it is okay to kill incompetant people.
Also it's why you should never start drinking in the middle of a post.
There are two kinds of cable channels: Those that the cable company gets to rebroadcast for free, and the kind they have to pay for. (Well, and the kind the customer has to pay for, but that kind is not relevant here.)
When cable first started, the theory was that every kind of cable channel would be the second. Hence there would be no 'point' in commericals.
Sadly, this would have also made cable cost like two-thousand dollars a year with all the channels we get now, but that's not important.
What is important is that customers don't care enough about commericals. So let's say there is one of each type in a market. The first one shows ads, and is free for the cable company, and the second doesn't, and isn't.
Which will the cable company carry? Well, they will carry the first, period. There's no reason not to. They might, or might not, carry the second. But with the first, there is much less demand for the second, and hence paying for it is a losing proposition.
At least, until the second lowers its price a lot. (And hence has to start having ads.)
Then, of course, once it gets popular, the first is going to raise their prices some, and you will end up where we basically are. Some 'genres' of channels tend to be free (Ones that cable companies would just drop if they had to pay, like Home and Garden and the golf station.), and the popular genres tend to cost, like news channels, because people will not accept cable without them.
Cable TV was based on a hypothetical 'People will pay more for no ads.' This is simply not true of the general population. Offer them ABC for free, and ABC-adless for 20 dollars a month, and they will take ABC. They will pay the .25 cents per episode that ads make to see a certain one for free, but not as a bulk payment, and, even if they would, the cable-TV watching community as a whole will not.
The failure of cable TV to be ad-free is completely the fault of the viewers, who would not pay the extra money required to make them ad-free.
As for the a la carte pricing, I think that some in the cable industry do get it, and are poised to move when it does change everything. A la carte actually lets them do what they wanted to do in the first place, letting them carry every channel as a 'Showtime', and letting them carry really unpopular channels if just a few people want them.
I think, if this 'a la carte' works out, that within a few years, we might see a 'Fox Premium Channel' and 'Paramount Premium Channel', where they show the original programming from their other networks, without ads, in basically random order designed to be Tivo'd, a few hours before they normally air.
Of course, the local affiliates will have an aneurysm. I'm not sure what's going to happen there. (Althoughy note that more and more original programming is not intended to air first on a broadcast station.)
In fact, that kind of effect has been happening before it was computers generating the images. Although a can can twist, and the image needs to rotate, so it would be hard without computers. (I guess they'd put a dot on the green can to show which way it's facing?)
And with computers, of course, you'd be able to get the shading right. But replacing a known-in-advance green object with another object should be trivial.
Hell, 'The Invisible Man' managed, on a super-cheap budget, to render the invisiblity effect three or four times a show, even with him moving in the middle of a room with other people. Expensive CGI is a fully CGI spaceship battle with actors sitting in cockpits. Replacing a can is nothing.
And you only need to calculate the replacement pixels and shading once, and then store them. Apply those to a can skin and wrap it around and you can put new ones in on the fly.
Now that would be interesting. View the movie on a 'dumb TV' and you get whatever image was in it when broadcast. View the movie on a 'smart TV', and the TV could go out and get a new can skin two minutes in advance, and render it, and replace those pixels in real time, which is a lot less complicated than what 3D computer games do, and only has to be done to a tiny part of the image.
At every commerical break, they ran the most annoying ad for 'The Shield' imaginable. One of those 'let's have loud noises to jar people into looking at the TV' and 'lets say something shocking so people will starting paying attention to see if we really said that', in the same ad. Over and over and over. Apparently, they didn't quite understand that people watch whole shows, and they really only need such an ad once.
For people who had missed the first few seasons of Buffy and were watching every day to catch up, the repeated ads, about 10 in the two hour span of the reruns, were enough to drive them homicially insane, and I'm surprised no one at FX actually got killed.
This was in addition to the noise-making popups for The Shield they ran during the episodes themseves.
While 'false speech leading to a panic' might render you as liable to a lawsuit as libel or slander, it's never actually reached the Supreme Court.
And there is a school of thought that says it wouldn't hold up, as, unlike slander and libel, your speech did not do the harm, other people did it.
The other school points out that it is illegal to point at someone and say to someone holding a gun 'Kill that person' with the knowledge they will do so. While it is legal to encourage people to break the law in general, it is illegal to stand there and actively ask them to specifically break a certain law right now, it makes you an accessory.
My best guess: Purposely causing a panic for no reason, resulting in people getting harmed, probably would be good grounds for a lawsuit against you. It isn't 'illegal' simply because there aren't any laws against it.
But I'm not an expert.
The standard required amount for 9-5 is seven hours. Yes, some jobs may require more, some jobs might not 'require' it but expect it if you want to get your work done, and obviously not getting your work done will get you fired.
But I've also seen teachers come in at 6:30 and leave at 4:30 in the afternoon. Or get there at a normal time, but have meetings with teachers at 7, and stay there until then. Or have meetings until 5 every single monday. (They got rid of that principal quick, the teachers wouldn't put up with it.)
I am talking about, in theory, how much people must work. The assertation was that 'teachers work 30% less', which was just absurd...the amount of time their job requires is basically the same, and that is what we are paying them for, at least if the 'of course, you have to add an extra 30% to their salary because they don't work as much' claim is to make any sense.
I personally think this claim would be absurd even if true, because, like I said, teachers live all 12 months a year, and can't really go out and get jobs for the extra few months, especially as they are directly competing with schoolkids, except they have a lot more expenses.
I was just demonstrating that the claim is not true in the first place, as they are required to work longer days, and it really averages out. I can't do math for how long people 'really' have to work, I suspect that not only does that vary by school, it only varies from business to business. I just assume all salaried workers are being screwed roughly equally.