He's not "joking around", the rant is like a page and a half long, describing it as vastly more dangerous than Pu-239, with a long line of superlatives for how to describe its incredible "danger".
Either you and I have very different ideas about what Andy Weir wrote, or else your copy of the book is different from mine. Since mine is an ebook, I can search it, and the string "239" has zero hits in my copy of the book.
Here's what my copy says:
...[NASA] never used large RTGs on manned missions until the Ares Program.
Why not? It should be pretty damned obvious why not! They didn't want to put astronauts next to a glowing hot ball of radioactive death!
I'm exaggerating a little. The plutonium is inside a bunch of pellets, each one sealed and insulated to prevent radiation leakage, even if the outer container is breached.
In fairness to your complaint, there is dialog later that goes like this:
"How dangerous is it?" Teddy asked.
"As long as the container's intact, no danger at all. Even if it cracks open, he'll be okay if the pellets inside don't break. But if the pellets break, too, he's a dead man."
Emphasis added by me, not in the original.
From what you have said, it's not nearly that dangerous.
I still say that The Martian is the best "hard" science fiction novel I have read in years, and the "hardest" science fiction novel I have read in years. And I predict that his next novel will have fewer mistakes; this one he wrote and gave away for free, and while he has said that he did go back and rewrite sections when he got feedback that he had screwed something up, I guess nobody told him that the RTG was less dangerous than he thought. On his next novel, he will be able to get stuff fact-checked because he's making new friends everywhere. (In an interview he said people asked him who he knew at NASA and he said nobody... before he wrote it.)
Back to joking around... one of my favorite bits from the book:
Only an idiot would keep [the RTG] near the Hab. So anyway, I brought it back to the Hab.
Either it'll kill me or it won't. A lot of work went into making sure it doesn't break. If I can't trust NASA, who can I trust?
Whatever you think about Andy Weir's safety rants on RTGs, he did have his main character using it just to take a hot bath, and at no point does the main character have any actual trouble with it.
Microwave communications are based on photons, aka chargeless particles, aka no Lorentz force, aka no deflection.
I didn't intend to imply that a magnetic field would stop photons, but rather that the hab canvas might have a layer of something that made the hab into a Faraday cage. Maybe a layer of a low-temperature superconductor or something.
I hadn't actually thought much about the geometry of the superconducting coils that would be needed to make a magnetic shield to deflect charged particles. Now that I think about it, a layer in the Hab's outer skin is unlikely to be the right shape...
I Googled a bit and found this article with diagrams. On the plus side for my theory, if something like that was on the Hab to deflect radiation, I do think it would act as a Faraday cage. On the minus side, the Hab as described in the novel didn't have anything like that.
- space radiation being handwaved away by "Hab is radiation-proof" while it's an inflatable structure.
At least the story is internally consistent: because the Hab is radiation-proof, radio waves don't go through it, which is why Mark Watney has to go outside the Hab just to check his email. (Actually, I think he ought to have strung a network cable; he cheerfully did more difficult tasks than that at various points in the book. But then the plot complication caused by going outside so often might not have occurred.)
When I like a book or movie I tend to try to come up with explanations of anything I wonder about. My explanation of how the Hab is radiation-proof: a superconducting magnetic shield. Only protects against charged particles though...wouldn't stop gamma rays. How common is random gamma radiation on the surface of Mars?
Here's an article about spacecraft using magnetic shields:
P.S. I've also seen reviewers complaining that Mark Watney oversells the dangers of the radiation inside an RTG. In the book at least he is joking around a lot and using imprecise terms such as "box full of radiation" so I don't accept this as a valid complaint.
Thus, a more modern phrasing of this Amendment would be:
Because it's necessary for a free country to have its citizens be competent with militia weapons, the right of the people to own and carry firearms shall not be infringed.
Being stuck with it "because it was expensive" is just a horrible reason to stick with it.
No, we aren't stuck with the F-35 because it cost so much, we are stuck with the F-35 because the old planes are old and we are having increasing trouble and expense to keep them flying. And, if the F-35 fans are right, the battlefields of the future will increasingly have anti-air missiles, and we will want our pilots flying stealthy planes if possible.
So we are stuck with the F-35 because we need a new plane, and it's the only new plane we have available. The Pentagon put all the eggs into one basket. Don't blame me for saying there's only one basket.
Thank you, whoever you are. I wrote my whole long post because I was hoping that a more-informed person would write a follow-up post and I would learn something.
I had read that the Osprey is a success. I was surprised to read your comments. Part of making the "short-deck carrier" idea work, the marines are going to try using Ospreys for mid-air refuelling. Do you have any opinions on how well that would work?
I am not any kind of expert on military stuff, so I could be completely wrong, but isn't the vertical landing capability of an F-35B a lot better for emergency recovery than normal carrier operations? With normal carrier operations, you absolutely have to get each plane off the deck before another plane can land; but with the vertical landing, in a pinch you should be able to land several planes in rapid succession (biggest worry is whether they melt the deck).
Seconded. I'm using a Thinkpad T440s for work, and when I installed Linux Mint on it, everything Just Worked out of the box. Audio, video, network, WiFi, multitouch... everything.
(Well, the fingerprint reader doesn't do anything right out of the box, but I have read that it can be enabled without too much difficulty. I'm going to look into that before the next time I travel with the laptop. It would be great to unlock the screen with a fingerprint.)
Now that the T450s is out, you might be able to find a deal on an older T440s, and if I were spending my own money I'd be happier to get a T440s cheap than to get the only-slightly-better T450s.
I'm interested in the F-35, and I have been reading about it. There is so much noise that it's hard to sift through all of it. It doesn't help that I'm not any sort of military expert.
I have read that the F-35 is disaster piled upon disaster, and I have read that the F-35 is "retiring risks" and converting naysayers into believers. I have read that the F-35 is incredibly expensive to operate, and I have read that it was designed for easy maintenance and that it will save big money in the long run on operating costs. I have read that the design of the F-35 was compromised by the need for a lift fan on the B variant, and I have read that the plane would have been just as wide without the B variant because of the design of the enclosed weapons bay. In short, I keep reading things and then reading the exact opposite from some other source.
Here's what I think I have figured out.
First, the F-35 had better work because at this point we are stuck with it. The old planes are old and getting more expensive to maintain, and in the long run the F-35 is the only reasonable option (but only if it works... if it doesn't do the mission, it is not a "reasonable option"). The Obama administration shut down the F-22 production lines on the theory that we only need a handful of air superiority fighters, and the money would be better spent on the F-35 (and the Growler, according to Wikipedia). It takes forever to make a new plane, and we really don't have a plan B (or "plane B") ready to go. Also, the USA as a strategy would rather spend more money on planes than lose the lives of pilots; it might be cheaper to buy upgraded older planes, but if the "fifth generation fighter" thing works out, and future battlefields increasingly have anti-air missiles, the F-35 might have lower losses in combat than older plane designs.
Second, the F-35 may not be horribly expensive. Right now I don't care about sunk costs... cancelling the F-35 won't get the sunk costs back. All that really matters is the "fly-away cost", the cost to build and equip a new plane, and the F-35 doesn't seem completely unreasonable there (it's now under $100 million for the A variant and trending down). One of the remaining risks is whether production can scale up enough to make F-35s as fast as everyone wants them made, but if that scale-up happens costs will fall further. Again, the big question mark is operating expenses and reliability. If the F-35 needs so much maintenance that it can't fly very often, then it was a bad idea. (And by the way, next time the Pentagon wants to make a new weapons system, then I will be very interested in the sunk costs of this one.)
Third, I'm a cautious believer in the ability of the F-35 to do the missions as long as it's not in the hangar being repaired. It can't win a dogfight with an F-16, but that was never its mission (send an F-22 for that). It basically needs to be able to carry sensors, computers, radios, and missiles, fly long distances, and be a little bit stealthy. I think it can do those things; and once you have the plane, you can upgrade it by improving subsystems. I know, half a century ago, the end of dogfighting was prematurely announced, but with modern missiles and with the stealth features, I think the F-35 will be able to defend itself.
Fourth, I'm not completely certain that the F-35 will be useless for close-air support. The fans of the F-35 claim that the A-10 can't be used effectively against people with any anti-air missiles including shoulder-fired ones; that much of the time in recent years, the A-10 was required to operate from high altitude to avoid being shot down by missiles. The F-35 is not going to fly low and slow over a battlefield and shoot things with a gun, but it could fly past and fire off precision guided munitions, which should work. One thing is for sure: the alleged upcoming test between A-10 and F-35 for close-air support will include simulated anti-air missiles, because if it didn't the A-10 would totally win.
The fine article contains some speculation as to whether it was really intended to be a clock, because it's a poor design for a clock:
It's awful hard to see the clock with the case closed. On the other hand, with the case open, it's awful dangerous to have an exposed power transformer sitting near the snooze button
Well, that makes me wonder if the kid who made the clock mounted the display to be viewed with the case open, or if he cut a hole in the side of the pencil box and mounted the display to be viewed the other way.
Someone familiar with how LED clock displays look from the front and from the back: can you tell which way the clock display was mounted? Was it in fact mounted such that you can't read the time without opening the case?
If you really can't read the clock without opening the case, then it really is an odd design for a clock. If form follows function, then what indeed was the intended function?
I'm wondering how often the kid brought other projects to school, and what the other projects were. I can well imagine a kid that age making a fake bomb to troll everyone, but I can also imagine someone who is just a hobbyist, so I am not going to draw any conclusions here at all.
I have worked at Microsoft, and they are all about eating their own dog food. Everyone at Microsoft uses Microsoft products for everything.
And, let me remind you of the fiasco where Microsoft bought Hotmail and switched its servers from UNIX (FreeBSD on front-end servers and some Solaris database servers) to Windows. They had to throw more hardware at the operation and still had problems, but they did it, and they knew going in that they would have more problems with Windows.
But now we are talking about Azure. Microsoft is seriously going for market share in cloud hosting, and most of the customers they are trying to win over are already running their stuff on Linux. So it's not really that embarrassing for Azure to run on Linux... I attended the Linuxfest Northwest conference this year, and Microsoft Azure had a booth in the vendor room where they had signs saying "Microsoft <heart> Linux".
Also, Microsoft is going after the Docker market. They are whipping together something like Docker for running Windows server apps in the cloud, but meanwhile they are all in on supporting Linux Docker apps for Azure. They have ported the Docker admin tools to run on a Windows machine, so that people can control Docker from a Windows machine (while the Docker is still running on Linux, you understand).
Give me a break, this has embarrassing U-turn written all over it.
I disagree about the "embarrassing" part. Microsoft has, in the past, acted like it could control the industry. One reason it acted that way was that it used to succeed more often than not in actually controlling the industry. But it's far too late for Microsoft to kill Linux; they are going to have to co-exist with Linux forever now, and it's not embarrassing for them to act like it.
I remember, about seven years ago, seeing a video at Microsoft that showed a skinny kid on a skateboard as a visual metaphor for Linux. I was amused... did they really think they could convince IT guys to choose Windows over Linux just by sneering at Linux in a marketing video? The Microsoft that made that video could never make its own distro.
In recent years, Microsoft has not shown much ability to adapt. Look at how horrible their strategy was with portable music players and then with mobile devices. But now, the Azure guys are just doing whatever makes the most sense for them, and it is politically possible at Microsoft? That's actually a good omen for Microsoft's future; at least they are not denying reality as much as they used to.
It's possible for a gun to kill the person it shoots. Therefore common gun safety says one may not point a gun at a person unless that person represents a threat that justifies lethal force. Cooper's Second Law of firearms safety: Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy.
If some bad guy is a threat, but not a lethal threat, the police office may not point a gun at the bad guy, let alone fire. If that bad guy is a lethal threat, then the police officer should be firing real bullets to end the threat.
In short there are no circumstances under which I would endorse pointing a lethal weapon at someone with the intent to use it non-lethally. Better to have two different weapons, one of which is considered to be guaranteed non-lethal. Oh look, we have tasers for that purpose.
Now, all that said, there are plenty of police officers out there who know better than me. Why, they are trained police officers and they don't need to abide by basic gun safety rules because they know what they are doing. I once had the dubious privilege of having MP5 muzzles pointed in my direction... I was in a room when a SWAT team showed how they do a dynamic entry. I gently chided the senior guy later about pointing real guns at people and he said "eh, they aren't loaded." (Cooper's First Law: All guns are always loaded.)
I read a first-person account from a guy who was erroneously reported to be "squatting" in an apartment. There was a problem with his apartment so the building superintendent told him he could sleep in an unused apartment temporarily. He woke up to find police pointing guns at him. This is unacceptable... they had total situational dominance, he was asleep and had no weapons, so they were not justified in pointing real guns at him. So again, Cooper's Four Laws may not be obeyed all the time in real life by real police. They should be, though.
P.S. I never thought about it this way before, but the phasers in Star Trek are dubious with respect to basic safety. If one failed to correctly set for stun, one might end up disintegrating someone by mistake. This would be fine for a military weapon: if most of the time you plan to use it to kill people, it's a mercy if it has another mode that is less-lethal. But for police and peaceful explorers, it's problematic to have a weapon that combines lethal and non-lethal functions.
I guess it would be okay for phasers to have dual modes if it took a special action to set a phaser into lethal mode, like holding down two red buttons with your off hand while firing. But per canon it was just a thumbwheel setting to switch between "stun" and "lethal" and Kirk was always reminding people to make sure they were set on stun.
Wikipedia says the server is "freemium" so I guess it's free but you can buy upgrades. There are apps for iOS and Android; the apps aren't free either. And there is some kind of cloud account you can get, and use for syncing your content across the Internet.
I've never heard of this before, but it seems worth checking out if you don't already have a media center solution.
I have the original Nexus 7, and a Nexus 10, and I just got a Nexus 9.
I like to buy things when they are no longer new and the price drops. I got a Nexus 9 with 32 GB of storage and with LTE cellular data, for $365. Last November I should have had to pay $600 fit the same device.
It is smaller and lighter than the Nexus 10 so I like it better for carrying around, yet the screen works for reading O'Reilly books. The 3:2 screen ratio works better for reading books with tables than the 16:9 screen on the Nexus 7, but the tablet isn't really much bigger. And it's fast... it's a pleasure to surf the web on the thing.
I didn't get the key folio case; I got the inexpensive, thin, and light case. I have a Perixx Bluetooth keyboard for typing.
I am completely happy with my Nexus 9 and II recommend it.
Because Hillary was given special training on being a Original Classification Authority, as much of her work was automatically classified as Top Secret or higher.
I don't know very much about how classified information is handled. You seem to at least know enough to know some lingo pertaining to it.
If you would, please answer a question for me: who do you think Sullivan meant when he said "ops"?
I immediately assumed the worst, that Hillary had a team copying secured emails to her unsecured server ("ops" seemed to me that it likely meant "the people operating Hillary's server"); but Slashdot user "Obfuscant" argues that "ops" must mean an official group that releases sanitized versions of confidential messages in its official capacity.
Is there any official government group that releases previously-secured messages that anyone refers to as "ops"?
Hillary made a joke there that seems to have gone over your head. I'd bet my life that Hillary knows enough about the details of computer security that she made that statement as a form of humor, rather than an expression of her understanding of cybersecurity.
First, I agree with you: she understands computer security enough that she knows what "wipe a server" means. IMHO the subtext of that joke is "I'm not going to cooperate with you, you get no straight answer out of me, I'm mocking you instead of answering the question."
But that was a screwup; she's not as good at lying as her husband, the mask slipped and she let her contempt shine through for a moment.
The rest of her comments were to the effect of "I don't know anything about servers".
Here, for your benefit, I transcribed the back-and-forth. Here's the YouTube link so you can check whether my transcription is correct:
at about 2:45 in the video, Ed Henry starts pressing her:
EH: Did you try to wipe the server?
HC: I don't, I have no idea, that's why we turned it over...
EH (interrupting): But you were in charge of it, you were the official in charge, did you wipe the server?
HC: What, like with a cloth or something? [**makes a wiping motion with one hand, and grins**]
EH: I don't know; you know how it works, digitally... did you try to wipe the whole server?
HC: I don't know how it works digitally, at all. I do not have any...
EH: So you didn't try, you did not try?
HC: Ed, I know you want to make a point, and I can just repeat what I have said.
EH: It's a simple... [**unintelligable**]
HC: In order, in order to be as cooperative as possible, we have turned over the server. They can do whatever they want to, with the server, to figure out what's there or what's not there. That's for the people investigating it to try to figure out...
The grin after she said "What, like with a cloth?" suggests that she was joking, but she was not joking when she said "I don't know how it works digitally, at all."
Hillary Clinton is not stupid, and she's a lawyer. Before anyone is given access to classified information, my understanding is that they have to take a class in how to manage classified information and they have to sign an agreement saying they will abide by the rules governing classified information.
Now Hillary Clinton is saying that she doesn't really understand all this confusing stuff. "Wipe the server.. you mean with a cloth?" Oh sure, Mrs. Clinton.
About a week before the news broke about her private server, Hillary Clinton was on a talk show and she said: "So I have an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a Blackberry." Then she said that the reason she set up a private server was so she could carry a single device. Now she's saying she was so busy saving the world that she didn't have time to think about what kind of server to use... which is why she didn't just use the server provided for her to use, but took steps to set up her own server and get everyone to use it?
I'm not buying it. The obvious reason why someone in her position would set up her own server, under her control, is to make sure that she would have control over which of her emails could be unearthed (e.g. by a Freedom of Information Act request). Notice that when she was finally forced to turn over emails, she picked and chose which emails to turn over, and then wiped the server to make sure nobody could ever get anything else.
Also, we can't be sure that her private server wasn't compromised. If her admins didn't get every security patch applied fast enough, someone could have 0wned it over the Internet; and if it wasn't guarded 24/7 someone could have gained physical access to the server in the middle of the night. Secretary of State is a high-profile job with access to a whole bunch of secrets; I think China and Russia probably both have copies of all her emails from her time as Secretary of State. (Whereas the USA only has the ones she turned over, printed on paper.)
And we just found out about a really bad smoking gun. Hillary Clinton has claimed that no classified emails were on her server, but we have evidence that she had one or more people systematically copying messages from a secured system and sending them to Hillary's server. Details here. The key quote:
The subject line of the February 10, 2010, e-mail exchange is "Insulza." The exchange is about a speech, apparently by a foreign official. Perhaps the subject line refers to Jose Miguel Insulza, a Chilean politician who has been secretary general of the Organization of American States since 2005. In any event, the U.S. government's internal reporting on the speech has clearly been classified (not surprising in light of what Shannen Coffin and yours truly explained earlier: foreign government information is presumptively classified). This is clearly very irritating to Secretary Clinton, who is anxious to read the speech. In the first e-mail, Clinton curtly instructs Sullivan, "It's a public statement. Just email it." Minutes later, Sullivan responds, "Trust me, I share your exasperation. But until ops converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can't even access it."
So some group known as "ops" is going to "convert" a message from the classified message system to "the unclassified email system"? That's go-to-prison stuff right there.
If you are a fan of Hillary Clinton... are you okay with a
Any particular reason you'd recommend MATE over Cinnamon, incidentally?
Basically, I want either Cinnamon or MATE and until recently, Cinnamon was kind of half-baked.
The GNOME 2.x desktop has man-decades of work in it, and it has a level of smooth polish that I like. All the things I want to do are possible. To change the way things are laid out, you pretty much just click and drag. When Cinnamon was first released it was really rough around the edges, especially in comparison.
Since Cinnamon is getting nicely polished, it may be time for me to switch. While I am not a fan of the GNOME Shell GUI, everything I read here on Slashdot says that GNOME 3.x is a solid, well-engineered system; so with Cinnamon layered on top of that, it should have a bright future.
On the other hand, there aren't any apps yet that I care about that don't work under MATE so I'm not in a hurry to switch.
Windows 10 is looking to be fairly popular at this point, and contrary to a lot of concerns, you can actually turn off all of the privacy-intrusive features.
Are there any good articles about that? The stuff I have read has made me leery of Windows 10. I wish that ReactOS was in shape to run my Windows games; I would probably switch to that instead of Windows 10. (For now I'm staying on Windows 7.)
My Linux experience has historically been to attempt to install and use some Linux distro every five years or so, only to be rebuffed by some serious issue
I've been using Linux by preference since the late 90's. When I started, it was hard to get a lot of stuff working... I remember buying PCI Ethernet cards since I couldn't get motherboard Ethernet working for certain chipsets, and buying a USB WiFi dongle because it was so hard to get the internal WiFi chipset working on a laptop.
But these days, pretty much it all Just Works. You can still have trouble with sleep/hibernate, and I think that power management isn't quite as good in general, but things like Ethernet, audio, and WiFi all pretty much just work.
I'm still using Linux Mint MATE edition (64-bit) as my primary desktop Linux. IMHO, the Gnome 2.x desktop is the best thing ever; it ripped off the things I like from the Mac GUI and from the Windows GUI, and it's polished.
Linux Mint Cinnamon has come a long way though and you might want to go with that. MATE is kind of a dead end, and someday there might actually be apps I care about that run under Cinnamon but not under MATE.
Also, you could try setting up VirtualBox on one of your Windows machines, and running Linux inside the VirtualBox. The virtual hardware inside VirtualBox is well-understood by Linux, so you should be able to stop worrying about hardware and focus on learning your way around Linux and doing stuff with it.
modern militaries have leaps and bounds better weapons than anything civilians could possess.
That's true. I would say that in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, our soldiers had "leaps and bounds" better weapons than anything their enemies did possess. However, the enemies still managed to hurt and kill our soldiers.
Air power, armored vehicles, missiles... there are all kinds of overwhelming weapons that civilians are not going to have that the military has. And if the military ever used those on the civilians, all the civilians could do would be to get under cover or go somewhere else. But it's impossible to use those sorts of weapons as an "occupying" force, and the more-lightly-armed civilians would inflict losses on the occupying soldiers.
even worse, this operates on the premise that the only way to have civilization is through constant fear of one another.
There is an old saying: "If you would have peace, prepare for war."
It shouldn't be necessary to live in "constant fear" but equally it should be possible to be prepared for the worst case.
I'm going to turn your statement around: you would have us arrange things so that if the government ever did go off the rails, the civilians would know that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. Is that really better?
Governments can do things wholesale, and when government starts killing people, it does so wholesale. Nazi Germany got really organized about killing Jews... and I don't believe that the German people were innately evil or really completely unlike the people in my own country. Likewise, under Stalin, the Soviet Union got really organized about "purging" people; and look up "the killing fields" in Cambodia sometime. These events are history. They happened. It's not impossible for such things to happen again, and if you want to claim "it can't happen here" you had better explain why.
My answer: it can't happen here because armed citizens would fight the government, and would have effective weapons with which to do it.
The top two rights in the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, and the right to own and carry effective weapons. These were intended by the authors of the Bill of Rights to be checks on government power.
Nobody wants to see the citizens of our country needing to use firearms to fight our own government. But the fact that they could, if necessary, makes it less likely that they ever will need to do so.
We should also let the market decide if the military and the police are worth paying for.
There are a few people who believe that we don't need a government; that the free market can solve all problems up to and including national defense. These people are called anarcho-capitalists.
Other people believe that government should handle things for people that the people cannot handle for themselves, and military and police fall into the latter category. I am in this camp; I consider myself a minarchist.
Still other people believe that government should be really big and do lots of stuff; not just the core functions like military and police, but government should feed people, provide medical care for people, etc.
Your joke about making military and police optional is kind of funny, but actually conflating military and police with renewable energy policy is fuzzy thinking.
The big problem with anarcho-capitalism, IMHO, is the free rider problem. If 90% of the people make their voluntary contributions to the national defense, and 10% don't, it is not possible for the defense to allow attacks on the 10%. National defense is either effective for everyone or effective for nobody.
On the other hand, privatized fire departments actually work. Not only have they been tried, they actually are in current operation in the USA. It's simple: if you don't pay for fire protection, the fire department doesn't save your house; they watch it burn down (and make sure the fire doesn't spread to paid-up neighbors' homes). No free-rider problem.
So while I don't actually believe that privatized police and military would work, other things like power generation and fire departments could work. Then it becomes a political question of what the majority of people prefer. (I don't expect ever to see the government get as small as the imaginary minarchist model would propose; I'd be happy just to see it get smaller. Most people like public fire departments and would vote to keep them, and I'm not such a hard-core frothing-at-the-mouth minarchist that I have a real problem with this. Overall, public fire departments are working okay.)
The cost of solar has fallen dramatically, so lots of people will build solar even if the government doesn't do anything.
The government could best encourage solar by streamlining regulations, and possibly with some sort of low-interest loan program to help people get past the initial cost. If solar makes sense, people could save enough money on their electricity to pay back the loans.
My big fear though is that if the government tries to force this, it will turn out like the similar program in Germany. Because of the lack of practical grid-scale energy storage, Germany has simultaneously managed to produce huge amounts of free renewable power while making the German citizens pay far more than ever for power and while burning more coal than ever. (Germany is shutting down nuclear power plants; solar and wind aren't dependable enough; result, more coal burned.)
President Obama's administration has implemented new rules to reduce coal burning, but the example of Germany shows that this shall really cause a dramatic increase in prices so it will not be politically possible for that plan to be fully implemented. It's easy to talk about it now, but it will be hard for politicians to say "your electricity cost will necessarily skyrocket and you just need to deal with it, and vote for me." (The plan contains "escape hatches" that will allow the utilities to keep producing power with coal if the plan doesn't work out.)
I think that all we really need is practical grid-level energy storage, and the "green energy" solution will take off like a rocket with no government intervention needed. I have hopes for liquid metal batteries but any high-density storage solution would solve the problem.
If we get grid-level storage in the near future, solar and wind power will become much more economically attractive and we will get more of it. Then politicians will claim the credit and the coal-burning reductions will actually happen. If solar and wind power remain economically problematic and government forces us to use more, we will all pay more for power, and politicians will say there is nothing they can do.
Either nobody likes my sense of humor or whoosh. Or both I guess.
I'll just spell it out:
After they pass this law, they should also make it illegal to commit murder. Think of all the lives that will be saved when murders stop happening!
Translation: you can pass a law banning something, but the law can't magically remove that something from the world. Murder is already illegal yet we still have murders. If a law is passed requiring web sites to memory-hole things that under-18 people posted when those people turn 18, that doesn't mean that the memory-holed things will be gone from the Internet.
The Internet is forever. Once something has been posted, it's not possible to undo that.
For those of you who didn't click the link, this was a reference to the "Streisand Effect", where demanding that something be removed from the Internet results in more attention and fame for the removed materials. Nobody really cared about the photo of Streisand's house until she tried to have the photo suppressed; after she tried that, hundreds of thousands of people looked at the photo.
Thus, not only is it impossible to remove things from the Internet, but the attempt is likely to backfire and make things worse.
P.S. Slashdot needs a "-1, Not funny" moderation. I presume that's what the "overrated" meant on my post.
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He's not "joking around", the rant is like a page and a half long, describing it as vastly more dangerous than Pu-239, with a long line of superlatives for how to describe its incredible "danger".
Either you and I have very different ideas about what Andy Weir wrote, or else your copy of the book is different from mine. Since mine is an ebook, I can search it, and the string "239" has zero hits in my copy of the book.
Here's what my copy says:
In fairness to your complaint, there is dialog later that goes like this:
Emphasis added by me, not in the original.
From what you have said, it's not nearly that dangerous.
I still say that The Martian is the best "hard" science fiction novel I have read in years, and the "hardest" science fiction novel I have read in years. And I predict that his next novel will have fewer mistakes; this one he wrote and gave away for free, and while he has said that he did go back and rewrite sections when he got feedback that he had screwed something up, I guess nobody told him that the RTG was less dangerous than he thought. On his next novel, he will be able to get stuff fact-checked because he's making new friends everywhere. (In an interview he said people asked him who he knew at NASA and he said nobody... before he wrote it.)
Back to joking around... one of my favorite bits from the book:
Whatever you think about Andy Weir's safety rants on RTGs, he did have his main character using it just to take a hot bath, and at no point does the main character have any actual trouble with it.
Microwave communications are based on photons, aka chargeless particles, aka no Lorentz force, aka no deflection.
I didn't intend to imply that a magnetic field would stop photons, but rather that the hab canvas might have a layer of something that made the hab into a Faraday cage. Maybe a layer of a low-temperature superconductor or something.
I hadn't actually thought much about the geometry of the superconducting coils that would be needed to make a magnetic shield to deflect charged particles. Now that I think about it, a layer in the Hab's outer skin is unlikely to be the right shape...
I Googled a bit and found this article with diagrams. On the plus side for my theory, if something like that was on the Hab to deflect radiation, I do think it would act as a Faraday cage. On the minus side, the Hab as described in the novel didn't have anything like that.
http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/news/shields-manned-space-exploration
By the way, I also had to Google for GCR. You know more about this stuff than I do. GCR == "Galactic Cosmic Rays"
So how common are stray gamma rays, and since you brought them up, stray neutrons on the surface of Mars?
Also, there is an old trope from science fiction about burying an exploration base to provide it with thermal and radiation shielding. If some
- space radiation being handwaved away by "Hab is radiation-proof" while it's an inflatable structure.
At least the story is internally consistent: because the Hab is radiation-proof, radio waves don't go through it, which is why Mark Watney has to go outside the Hab just to check his email. (Actually, I think he ought to have strung a network cable; he cheerfully did more difficult tasks than that at various points in the book. But then the plot complication caused by going outside so often might not have occurred.)
When I like a book or movie I tend to try to come up with explanations of anything I wonder about. My explanation of how the Hab is radiation-proof: a superconducting magnetic shield. Only protects against charged particles though...wouldn't stop gamma rays. How common is random gamma radiation on the surface of Mars?
Here's an article about spacecraft using magnetic shields:
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/08/superconducting-shield-astronauts
P.S. I've also seen reviewers complaining that Mark Watney oversells the dangers of the radiation inside an RTG. In the book at least he is joking around a lot and using imprecise terms such as "box full of radiation" so I don't accept this as a valid complaint.
and what about the "well regulated Militia" part?
"well regulated" meant "in good order" at the time, not "covered by many laws".
http://www.constitution.org/cons/wellregu.htm
"militia" meant all male citizens of adult age.
Thus, a more modern phrasing of this Amendment would be:
Because it's necessary for a free country to have its citizens be competent with militia weapons, the right of the people to own and carry firearms shall not be infringed.
Being stuck with it "because it was expensive" is just a horrible reason to stick with it.
No, we aren't stuck with the F-35 because it cost so much, we are stuck with the F-35 because the old planes are old and we are having increasing trouble and expense to keep them flying. And, if the F-35 fans are right, the battlefields of the future will increasingly have anti-air missiles, and we will want our pilots flying stealthy planes if possible.
So we are stuck with the F-35 because we need a new plane, and it's the only new plane we have available. The Pentagon put all the eggs into one basket. Don't blame me for saying there's only one basket.
Thank you, whoever you are. I wrote my whole long post because I was hoping that a more-informed person would write a follow-up post and I would learn something.
I had read that the Osprey is a success. I was surprised to read your comments. Part of making the "short-deck carrier" idea work, the marines are going to try using Ospreys for mid-air refuelling. Do you have any opinions on how well that would work?
http://news.usni.org/2015/07/29/davis-v-22-aerial-refueling-system-should-be-ready-for-early-f-35-operations-despite-1-year-delay#more-14106
I am not any kind of expert on military stuff, so I could be completely wrong, but isn't the vertical landing capability of an F-35B a lot better for emergency recovery than normal carrier operations? With normal carrier operations, you absolutely have to get each plane off the deck before another plane can land; but with the vertical landing, in a pinch you should be able to land several planes in rapid succession (biggest worry is whether they melt the deck).
Seconded. I'm using a Thinkpad T440s for work, and when I installed Linux Mint on it, everything Just Worked out of the box. Audio, video, network, WiFi, multitouch... everything.
(Well, the fingerprint reader doesn't do anything right out of the box, but I have read that it can be enabled without too much difficulty. I'm going to look into that before the next time I travel with the laptop. It would be great to unlock the screen with a fingerprint.)
Now that the T450s is out, you might be able to find a deal on an older T440s, and if I were spending my own money I'd be happier to get a T440s cheap than to get the only-slightly-better T450s.
Good work, Mr $hill. At least you can write some prose.
Wow, for whom am I shilling? Nobody has paid me yet, so I must be doing it wrong. :-(
I'm interested in the F-35, and I have been reading about it. There is so much noise that it's hard to sift through all of it. It doesn't help that I'm not any sort of military expert.
I have read that the F-35 is disaster piled upon disaster, and I have read that the F-35 is "retiring risks" and converting naysayers into believers. I have read that the F-35 is incredibly expensive to operate, and I have read that it was designed for easy maintenance and that it will save big money in the long run on operating costs. I have read that the design of the F-35 was compromised by the need for a lift fan on the B variant, and I have read that the plane would have been just as wide without the B variant because of the design of the enclosed weapons bay. In short, I keep reading things and then reading the exact opposite from some other source.
Here's what I think I have figured out.
First, the F-35 had better work because at this point we are stuck with it. The old planes are old and getting more expensive to maintain, and in the long run the F-35 is the only reasonable option (but only if it works... if it doesn't do the mission, it is not a "reasonable option"). The Obama administration shut down the F-22 production lines on the theory that we only need a handful of air superiority fighters, and the money would be better spent on the F-35 (and the Growler, according to Wikipedia). It takes forever to make a new plane, and we really don't have a plan B (or "plane B") ready to go. Also, the USA as a strategy would rather spend more money on planes than lose the lives of pilots; it might be cheaper to buy upgraded older planes, but if the "fifth generation fighter" thing works out, and future battlefields increasingly have anti-air missiles, the F-35 might have lower losses in combat than older plane designs.
Second, the F-35 may not be horribly expensive. Right now I don't care about sunk costs... cancelling the F-35 won't get the sunk costs back. All that really matters is the "fly-away cost", the cost to build and equip a new plane, and the F-35 doesn't seem completely unreasonable there (it's now under $100 million for the A variant and trending down). One of the remaining risks is whether production can scale up enough to make F-35s as fast as everyone wants them made, but if that scale-up happens costs will fall further. Again, the big question mark is operating expenses and reliability. If the F-35 needs so much maintenance that it can't fly very often, then it was a bad idea. (And by the way, next time the Pentagon wants to make a new weapons system, then I will be very interested in the sunk costs of this one.)
Third, I'm a cautious believer in the ability of the F-35 to do the missions as long as it's not in the hangar being repaired. It can't win a dogfight with an F-16, but that was never its mission (send an F-22 for that). It basically needs to be able to carry sensors, computers, radios, and missiles, fly long distances, and be a little bit stealthy. I think it can do those things; and once you have the plane, you can upgrade it by improving subsystems. I know, half a century ago, the end of dogfighting was prematurely announced, but with modern missiles and with the stealth features, I think the F-35 will be able to defend itself.
Fourth, I'm not completely certain that the F-35 will be useless for close-air support. The fans of the F-35 claim that the A-10 can't be used effectively against people with any anti-air missiles including shoulder-fired ones; that much of the time in recent years, the A-10 was required to operate from high altitude to avoid being shot down by missiles. The F-35 is not going to fly low and slow over a battlefield and shoot things with a gun, but it could fly past and fire off precision guided munitions, which should work. One thing is for sure: the alleged upcoming test between A-10 and F-35 for close-air support will include simulated anti-air missiles, because if it didn't the A-10 would totally win.
Fifth, I
The fine article contains some speculation as to whether it was really intended to be a clock, because it's a poor design for a clock:
Well, that makes me wonder if the kid who made the clock mounted the display to be viewed with the case open, or if he cut a hole in the side of the pencil box and mounted the display to be viewed the other way.
Someone familiar with how LED clock displays look from the front and from the back: can you tell which way the clock display was mounted? Was it in fact mounted such that you can't read the time without opening the case?
If you really can't read the clock without opening the case, then it really is an odd design for a clock. If form follows function, then what indeed was the intended function?
I'm wondering how often the kid brought other projects to school, and what the other projects were. I can well imagine a kid that age making a fake bomb to troll everyone, but I can also imagine someone who is just a hobbyist, so I am not going to draw any conclusions here at all.
I have worked at Microsoft, and they are all about eating their own dog food. Everyone at Microsoft uses Microsoft products for everything.
And, let me remind you of the fiasco where Microsoft bought Hotmail and switched its servers from UNIX (FreeBSD on front-end servers and some Solaris database servers) to Windows. They had to throw more hardware at the operation and still had problems, but they did it, and they knew going in that they would have more problems with Windows.
But now we are talking about Azure. Microsoft is seriously going for market share in cloud hosting, and most of the customers they are trying to win over are already running their stuff on Linux. So it's not really that embarrassing for Azure to run on Linux... I attended the Linuxfest Northwest conference this year, and Microsoft Azure had a booth in the vendor room where they had signs saying "Microsoft <heart> Linux".
Also, Microsoft is going after the Docker market. They are whipping together something like Docker for running Windows server apps in the cloud, but meanwhile they are all in on supporting Linux Docker apps for Azure. They have ported the Docker admin tools to run on a Windows machine, so that people can control Docker from a Windows machine (while the Docker is still running on Linux, you understand).
Give me a break, this has embarrassing U-turn written all over it.
I disagree about the "embarrassing" part. Microsoft has, in the past, acted like it could control the industry. One reason it acted that way was that it used to succeed more often than not in actually controlling the industry. But it's far too late for Microsoft to kill Linux; they are going to have to co-exist with Linux forever now, and it's not embarrassing for them to act like it.
I remember, about seven years ago, seeing a video at Microsoft that showed a skinny kid on a skateboard as a visual metaphor for Linux. I was amused... did they really think they could convince IT guys to choose Windows over Linux just by sneering at Linux in a marketing video? The Microsoft that made that video could never make its own distro.
In recent years, Microsoft has not shown much ability to adapt. Look at how horrible their strategy was with portable music players and then with mobile devices. But now, the Azure guys are just doing whatever makes the most sense for them, and it is politically possible at Microsoft? That's actually a good omen for Microsoft's future; at least they are not denying reality as much as they used to.
It's possible for a gun to kill the person it shoots. Therefore common gun safety says one may not point a gun at a person unless that person represents a threat that justifies lethal force. Cooper's Second Law of firearms safety: Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy.
If some bad guy is a threat, but not a lethal threat, the police office may not point a gun at the bad guy, let alone fire. If that bad guy is a lethal threat, then the police officer should be firing real bullets to end the threat.
In short there are no circumstances under which I would endorse pointing a lethal weapon at someone with the intent to use it non-lethally. Better to have two different weapons, one of which is considered to be guaranteed non-lethal. Oh look, we have tasers for that purpose.
Now, all that said, there are plenty of police officers out there who know better than me. Why, they are trained police officers and they don't need to abide by basic gun safety rules because they know what they are doing. I once had the dubious privilege of having MP5 muzzles pointed in my direction... I was in a room when a SWAT team showed how they do a dynamic entry. I gently chided the senior guy later about pointing real guns at people and he said "eh, they aren't loaded." (Cooper's First Law: All guns are always loaded.)
I read a first-person account from a guy who was erroneously reported to be "squatting" in an apartment. There was a problem with his apartment so the building superintendent told him he could sleep in an unused apartment temporarily. He woke up to find police pointing guns at him. This is unacceptable... they had total situational dominance, he was asleep and had no weapons, so they were not justified in pointing real guns at him. So again, Cooper's Four Laws may not be obeyed all the time in real life by real police. They should be, though.
P.S. I never thought about it this way before, but the phasers in Star Trek are dubious with respect to basic safety. If one failed to correctly set for stun, one might end up disintegrating someone by mistake. This would be fine for a military weapon: if most of the time you plan to use it to kill people, it's a mercy if it has another mode that is less-lethal. But for police and peaceful explorers, it's problematic to have a weapon that combines lethal and non-lethal functions.
I guess it would be okay for phasers to have dual modes if it took a special action to set a phaser into lethal mode, like holding down two red buttons with your off hand while firing. But per canon it was just a thumbwheel setting to switch between "stun" and "lethal" and Kirk was always reminding people to make sure they were set on stun.
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2008/04/rare-photos-of-greg-jein-tos-hero-type.html
Plex is a home media server, forked from XBMC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plex_(software)
Wikipedia says the server is "freemium" so I guess it's free but you can buy upgrades. There are apps for iOS and Android; the apps aren't free either. And there is some kind of cloud account you can get, and use for syncing your content across the Internet.
I've never heard of this before, but it seems worth checking out if you don't already have a media center solution.
Plex web site:
https://plex.tv/
Breakdown of what you can get for free vs. what costs:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/202526943-Plex-Free-vs-Paid
Reddit discussion of cost of Plex:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/2f9f0k/what_is_the_true_cost_of_plex/
I wonder if he has also reconsidered his position on driving a nail through his foot?
I have the original Nexus 7, and a Nexus 10, and I just got a Nexus 9.
I like to buy things when they are no longer new and the price drops. I got a Nexus 9 with 32 GB of storage and with LTE cellular data, for $365. Last November I should have had to pay $600 fit the same device.
It is smaller and lighter than the Nexus 10 so I like it better for carrying around, yet the screen works for reading O'Reilly books. The 3:2 screen ratio works better for reading books with tables than the 16:9 screen on the Nexus 7, but the tablet isn't really much bigger. And it's fast... it's a pleasure to surf the web on the thing.
I didn't get the key folio case; I got the inexpensive, thin, and light case. I have a Perixx Bluetooth keyboard for typing.
I am completely happy with my Nexus 9 and II recommend it.
Because Hillary was given special training on being a Original Classification Authority, as much of her work was automatically classified as Top Secret or higher.
I don't know very much about how classified information is handled. You seem to at least know enough to know some lingo pertaining to it.
If you would, please answer a question for me: who do you think Sullivan meant when he said "ops"?
I immediately assumed the worst, that Hillary had a team copying secured emails to her unsecured server ("ops" seemed to me that it likely meant "the people operating Hillary's server"); but Slashdot user "Obfuscant" argues that "ops" must mean an official group that releases sanitized versions of confidential messages in its official capacity.
Is there any official government group that releases previously-secured messages that anyone refers to as "ops"?
You are either a troll or you been trolled.
Nope, neither.
Hillary made a joke there that seems to have gone over your head. I'd bet my life that Hillary knows enough about the details of computer security that she made that statement as a form of humor, rather than an expression of her understanding of cybersecurity.
First, I agree with you: she understands computer security enough that she knows what "wipe a server" means. IMHO the subtext of that joke is "I'm not going to cooperate with you, you get no straight answer out of me, I'm mocking you instead of answering the question."
But that was a screwup; she's not as good at lying as her husband, the mask slipped and she let her contempt shine through for a moment.
The rest of her comments were to the effect of "I don't know anything about servers".
Here, for your benefit, I transcribed the back-and-forth. Here's the YouTube link so you can check whether my transcription is correct:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neCMc-GcAvQ
at about 2:45 in the video, Ed Henry starts pressing her:
The grin after she said "What, like with a cloth?" suggests that she was joking, but she was not joking when she said "I don't know how it works digitally, at all."
Hillary Clinton is not stupid, and she's a lawyer. Before anyone is given access to classified information, my understanding is that they have to take a class in how to manage classified information and they have to sign an agreement saying they will abide by the rules governing classified information.
Now Hillary Clinton is saying that she doesn't really understand all this confusing stuff. "Wipe the server.. you mean with a cloth?" Oh sure, Mrs. Clinton.
About a week before the news broke about her private server, Hillary Clinton was on a talk show and she said: "So I have an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a Blackberry." Then she said that the reason she set up a private server was so she could carry a single device. Now she's saying she was so busy saving the world that she didn't have time to think about what kind of server to use... which is why she didn't just use the server provided for her to use, but took steps to set up her own server and get everyone to use it?
I'm not buying it. The obvious reason why someone in her position would set up her own server, under her control, is to make sure that she would have control over which of her emails could be unearthed (e.g. by a Freedom of Information Act request). Notice that when she was finally forced to turn over emails, she picked and chose which emails to turn over, and then wiped the server to make sure nobody could ever get anything else.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3209380/Former-attorney-general-says-classified-email-scandal-disqualifies-Hillary-Clinton-serving-president-s-prosecuted-breaking-federal-law.html
Also, we can't be sure that her private server wasn't compromised. If her admins didn't get every security patch applied fast enough, someone could have 0wned it over the Internet; and if it wasn't guarded 24/7 someone could have gained physical access to the server in the middle of the night. Secretary of State is a high-profile job with access to a whole bunch of secrets; I think China and Russia probably both have copies of all her emails from her time as Secretary of State. (Whereas the USA only has the ones she turned over, printed on paper.)
And we just found out about a really bad smoking gun. Hillary Clinton has claimed that no classified emails were on her server, but we have evidence that she had one or more people systematically copying messages from a secured system and sending them to Hillary's server. Details here. The key quote:
So some group known as "ops" is going to "convert" a message from the classified message system to "the unclassified email system"? That's go-to-prison stuff right there.
If you are a fan of Hillary Clinton... are you okay with a
Today's grammar lesson: dangling participle
As a cable channel, the FCC has little to no jurisdiction...
Oops... the FCC is not a cable channel. Suggested rewrites:
As a cable channel, HBO is pretty much not under the jurisdiction of the FCC.
As HBO is a cable channel, the FCC has little to no jurisdiction over it.
P.S. I really enjoy a good dangling participle. "Landing at the airport, our car was visible in the parking lot."
Any particular reason you'd recommend MATE over Cinnamon, incidentally?
Basically, I want either Cinnamon or MATE and until recently, Cinnamon was kind of half-baked.
The GNOME 2.x desktop has man-decades of work in it, and it has a level of smooth polish that I like. All the things I want to do are possible. To change the way things are laid out, you pretty much just click and drag. When Cinnamon was first released it was really rough around the edges, especially in comparison.
Since Cinnamon is getting nicely polished, it may be time for me to switch. While I am not a fan of the GNOME Shell GUI, everything I read here on Slashdot says that GNOME 3.x is a solid, well-engineered system; so with Cinnamon layered on top of that, it should have a bright future.
On the other hand, there aren't any apps yet that I care about that don't work under MATE so I'm not in a hurry to switch.
Windows 10 is looking to be fairly popular at this point, and contrary to a lot of concerns, you can actually turn off all of the privacy-intrusive features.
Are there any good articles about that? The stuff I have read has made me leery of Windows 10. I wish that ReactOS was in shape to run my Windows games; I would probably switch to that instead of Windows 10. (For now I'm staying on Windows 7.)
My Linux experience has historically been to attempt to install and use some Linux distro every five years or so, only to be rebuffed by some serious issue
I've been using Linux by preference since the late 90's. When I started, it was hard to get a lot of stuff working... I remember buying PCI Ethernet cards since I couldn't get motherboard Ethernet working for certain chipsets, and buying a USB WiFi dongle because it was so hard to get the internal WiFi chipset working on a laptop.
But these days, pretty much it all Just Works. You can still have trouble with sleep/hibernate, and I think that power management isn't quite as good in general, but things like Ethernet, audio, and WiFi all pretty much just work.
I'm still using Linux Mint MATE edition (64-bit) as my primary desktop Linux. IMHO, the Gnome 2.x desktop is the best thing ever; it ripped off the things I like from the Mac GUI and from the Windows GUI, and it's polished.
Linux Mint Cinnamon has come a long way though and you might want to go with that. MATE is kind of a dead end, and someday there might actually be apps I care about that run under Cinnamon but not under MATE.
Also, you could try setting up VirtualBox on one of your Windows machines, and running Linux inside the VirtualBox. The virtual hardware inside VirtualBox is well-understood by Linux, so you should be able to stop worrying about hardware and focus on learning your way around Linux and doing stuff with it.
modern militaries have leaps and bounds better weapons than anything civilians could possess.
That's true. I would say that in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, our soldiers had "leaps and bounds" better weapons than anything their enemies did possess. However, the enemies still managed to hurt and kill our soldiers.
Air power, armored vehicles, missiles... there are all kinds of overwhelming weapons that civilians are not going to have that the military has. And if the military ever used those on the civilians, all the civilians could do would be to get under cover or go somewhere else. But it's impossible to use those sorts of weapons as an "occupying" force, and the more-lightly-armed civilians would inflict losses on the occupying soldiers.
even worse, this operates on the premise that the only way to have civilization is through constant fear of one another.
There is an old saying: "If you would have peace, prepare for war."
It shouldn't be necessary to live in "constant fear" but equally it should be possible to be prepared for the worst case.
I'm going to turn your statement around: you would have us arrange things so that if the government ever did go off the rails, the civilians would know that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. Is that really better?
Governments can do things wholesale, and when government starts killing people, it does so wholesale. Nazi Germany got really organized about killing Jews... and I don't believe that the German people were innately evil or really completely unlike the people in my own country. Likewise, under Stalin, the Soviet Union got really organized about "purging" people; and look up "the killing fields" in Cambodia sometime. These events are history. They happened. It's not impossible for such things to happen again, and if you want to claim "it can't happen here" you had better explain why.
My answer: it can't happen here because armed citizens would fight the government, and would have effective weapons with which to do it.
The top two rights in the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, and the right to own and carry effective weapons. These were intended by the authors of the Bill of Rights to be checks on government power.
Nobody wants to see the citizens of our country needing to use firearms to fight our own government. But the fact that they could, if necessary, makes it less likely that they ever will need to do so.
We should also let the market decide if the military and the police are worth paying for.
There are a few people who believe that we don't need a government; that the free market can solve all problems up to and including national defense. These people are called anarcho-capitalists.
Other people believe that government should handle things for people that the people cannot handle for themselves, and military and police fall into the latter category. I am in this camp; I consider myself a minarchist.
Still other people believe that government should be really big and do lots of stuff; not just the core functions like military and police, but government should feed people, provide medical care for people, etc.
Your joke about making military and police optional is kind of funny, but actually conflating military and police with renewable energy policy is fuzzy thinking.
The big problem with anarcho-capitalism, IMHO, is the free rider problem. If 90% of the people make their voluntary contributions to the national defense, and 10% don't, it is not possible for the defense to allow attacks on the 10%. National defense is either effective for everyone or effective for nobody.
On the other hand, privatized fire departments actually work. Not only have they been tried, they actually are in current operation in the USA. It's simple: if you don't pay for fire protection, the fire department doesn't save your house; they watch it burn down (and make sure the fire doesn't spread to paid-up neighbors' homes). No free-rider problem.
So while I don't actually believe that privatized police and military would work, other things like power generation and fire departments could work. Then it becomes a political question of what the majority of people prefer. (I don't expect ever to see the government get as small as the imaginary minarchist model would propose; I'd be happy just to see it get smaller. Most people like public fire departments and would vote to keep them, and I'm not such a hard-core frothing-at-the-mouth minarchist that I have a real problem with this. Overall, public fire departments are working okay.)
The cost of solar has fallen dramatically, so lots of people will build solar even if the government doesn't do anything.
The government could best encourage solar by streamlining regulations, and possibly with some sort of low-interest loan program to help people get past the initial cost. If solar makes sense, people could save enough money on their electricity to pay back the loans.
My big fear though is that if the government tries to force this, it will turn out like the similar program in Germany. Because of the lack of practical grid-scale energy storage, Germany has simultaneously managed to produce huge amounts of free renewable power while making the German citizens pay far more than ever for power and while burning more coal than ever. (Germany is shutting down nuclear power plants; solar and wind aren't dependable enough; result, more coal burned.)
President Obama's administration has implemented new rules to reduce coal burning, but the example of Germany shows that this shall really cause a dramatic increase in prices so it will not be politically possible for that plan to be fully implemented. It's easy to talk about it now, but it will be hard for politicians to say "your electricity cost will necessarily skyrocket and you just need to deal with it, and vote for me." (The plan contains "escape hatches" that will allow the utilities to keep producing power with coal if the plan doesn't work out.)
I think that all we really need is practical grid-level energy storage, and the "green energy" solution will take off like a rocket with no government intervention needed. I have hopes for liquid metal batteries but any high-density storage solution would solve the problem.
If we get grid-level storage in the near future, solar and wind power will become much more economically attractive and we will get more of it. Then politicians will claim the credit and the coal-burning reductions will actually happen. If solar and wind power remain economically problematic and government forces us to use more, we will all pay more for power, and politicians will say there is nothing they can do.
Either nobody likes my sense of humor or whoosh. Or both I guess.
I'll just spell it out:
After they pass this law, they should also make it illegal to commit murder. Think of all the lives that will be saved when murders stop happening!
Translation: you can pass a law banning something, but the law can't magically remove that something from the world. Murder is already illegal yet we still have murders. If a law is passed requiring web sites to memory-hole things that under-18 people posted when those people turn 18, that doesn't mean that the memory-holed things will be gone from the Internet.
The Internet is forever. Once something has been posted, it's not possible to undo that.
Also, they should totally add Barbara Streisand to the law.
For those of you who didn't click the link, this was a reference to the "Streisand Effect", where demanding that something be removed from the Internet results in more attention and fame for the removed materials. Nobody really cared about the photo of Streisand's house until she tried to have the photo suppressed; after she tried that, hundreds of thousands of people looked at the photo.
Thus, not only is it impossible to remove things from the Internet, but the attempt is likely to backfire and make things worse.
P.S. Slashdot needs a "-1, Not funny" moderation. I presume that's what the "overrated" meant on my post.
After they pass this law, they should also make it illegal to commit murder. Think of all the lives that will be saved when murders stop happening!
Also, they should totally add Barbara Streisand to the law. 18-year-old kids, and Barbara Streisand. Yeah.