Energy independence isn't about having every single resource needed to produce all of our energy, it's about having options. Currently, it would be impossible to move from oil to a different fuel source for transportation, even ethanol won't work in the majority of cars on the road.
If we move to electric vehicles and Bolivia decides to stop mining lithium, we simply need to find a different medium for our batteries, or use fuel cells, or develop larger super-capacitors, or use radio-thermal-isotope generators (heh, that would be awesome, if ludicrously dangerous). The point is that there are options, if Bolivia stopped shipping batteries, we could find ways to do without them.
That would assume that taking out the power grid would in fact do those things. Hospitals have generators, as do ATC systems. Banks I'm sure would be able to keep working behind the scenes, even if they couldn't open their doors to customers.
The way I see it, we should use cyber warfare as a life saving measure. Basically, don't use cyber attacks unless you would use an equivalent military strike to get the same effect if the cyber option wasn't available. There are times when destroying or disabling a power grid is a legitimate military tactic. If, in one of those times, it is possible to do so without risking civilian or soldier's lives, why not do it? It would probably also leave open the possibility of re-enabling the power grid and besides, with the US's air superiority its not like you couldn't bomb it later if need be.
2. being a Democrat will prevent the Dems from offering up a more progressive candidate to oppose him had he stayed Republican.
First, as has been pointed out by others, this is hardly a bad thing. Second, there is nothing to stop someone running against him in the primary. In fact, thats why he switched, he expected to lose the next Republican primary.
Well, to be fair, he has always described himself as a moderate republican; elected in the 80's when the 'Big Tent' philosophy was strong in the Republican party. If 200,000 people left the Republican party for the Democratic party, you can bet that it was the moderates that were leaving, shifting the party farther to the right and making it impossible for him to win the primary as a self described moderate.
If he is more likely to win the primary in the democratic party than the republican party, he is almost by definition a democrat. If he isn't a democrat, he will lose badly in his first primary and everything will be exactly as it would be if he had stayed as a republican.
Am I the only one who has no idea who or what Phorm is?
For everyone else like me, a quick google search tells me that it is a company that makes advertising software that borders on spyware. I think the UK's argument that Phorm is okay since it can be used in a legal is entertaining. Sounds like the exact opposite argument that the same politicians probably used to shutdown P2P services.
Ahhh, corruption. Where would democracy be without it?
3. Dictate my history and physical for transcription. 4. Wait several hours for the dictation to show up in the EMR. Until which time all other doctors and nurses must refer to my hand written notes. 5. Heaven forbid I have to call in a consultation from cardiology, GI, or some other specialty in the hospital. If I do, then we use our text-based pagers to figure out when the hand-written note has been dropped off because every specialty has to go through steps 1-4. As they follow these patients, they too have to physically recheck the chart since dictated H&Ps and progress notes take time to show up.
I'm sorry but I just have to say this. Couldn't all these issues be cleared up by simply typing the notes into the record yourself? Properly trained, a person can type as fast or faster than they can comfortably speak so it wouldn't be losing much if any time at that step. It would save the hospital the cost of the transcription service. Notes would be instantly available in the system because you would be the one submitting them.
If the only thing stopping the system from working is the Doctors's pride ("I'm went to school too long and get paid too much to type the notes in myself") then it isn't the system that is broken.
Politics is, of course, the answer to your question; specifically the fear caused by the cold war. The cold war was going full swing and the space race was about much more than just bragging rights. I don't know how accurate it is, but I've had it explained to me that getting a person into space meant you could put a nuke anywhere within 5000 miles of territory you control. Putting a man into orbit was equivalent to being able to drop a nuke onto the heartland of you enemy, not necessarily accurately. But putting a man on the moon meant you could aim the nuke to any city in the world.
It's the only situation where our nation would except spending such a massive amount (relative to GDP) on the space program. It's also the only situation where NASA would launch expecting only a 1/3 chance of the astronauts surviving. Today, that is absolutely unexceptionable. They have contingency plans on top of contingency plans for if the shuttle gets hit by debris while fixing Hubble, something that is only estimated at 1 in 200 chances. Those plans include having a shuttle on the launchpad ready to go, just in case. I don't know how much that costs but I bet it isn't cheap; the least they could do is have a mission planned to use the rescue shuttle if it isn't needed.
Piracy is a crime and should be treated as such. If there's a rash of break-ins in your hometown you don't recommend that every home owner goes out and buys a gun, you track down the criminals responsible and put them to justice.
It's well known that the pirates are getting inside information on ship locations and cargoes from associates in Europe. Feed a false tip into the system and arrest the pirates that come calling. Don't try to arm civilians to fight off what could be a relatively well trained and well armed fighting force, you'll just piss of the criminals and they'll be that much more likely to start killing people.
If someone has physical access to your computer, you've already lost. That's been the general rule for decades now. Even with a fully encrypted harddrive someone could install an inline usb key-logger and you would probably never notice it. Sensitive information should never go on a laptop and desktops should be physically secured. Anything else is 100% defeatable.
Actually, wouldn't the correct term be 'least massive'? Heavy and light are measurements of weight generally and are pretty meaningless for objects that are in orbit. Unless it's considered kosher to use lightest/heaviest in this situation, sometimes I think English drifts faster than the average person can keep up with it.
I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Labs. They have a similar setup; using accelerated electrons to produce x-rays, the real achievement here is the coherency part. I wonder how this effects high speed x-ray crystallography, is it easier to decode the scatter if the light is coherent? Will we be getting real time videos of enzymes in action? If so I can only imagine what that will do for chemical and pharmaceutical research.
Better yet, if you live in Sweden move your Internet connection over to his ISP. This is a very rare chance to financially support someone who is trying to protect your privacy while having little net cost for yourself.
I believe they suspended his Amazon account because he had returned several purchases made on Amazon.com, not because he wanted to return eBooks. Since his Amazon account also serves as his Kindle account, he was then locked out of purchasing books for his Kindle.
Poor policy on their part but if you are really worried about this you could always just set up a separate account for your Kindle. If you never use it to make regular purchases I don't think you would ever have to touch it except to update your payment information when necessary.
Well, with this, my taxes will go up, and my family makes under $250,000/yr
But you aren't legally required to pay a dime more with this law than you were legally required to pay before the law existed. By that logic, increased funding for IRS audits also increases the taxes you pay because it would be riskier for you to try to cheat on your income taxes. There is no change other than enforcement.
The fact is, you were getting away with violating the law before, now you won't be able to. Get over it.
Second, this isn't really a tax increase at all since you're supposed to be paying taxes on online purchase as it is. It's called a Use Tax and just because you haven't been paying it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Besides, there is no reason why purchases made online should be tax free other than it is difficult to enforce. I would even say that it gives online vendors an unfair advantage over local stores.
I'm originally from WI too and I'm going to have to disagree. Little known fact, WI has more golf courses than almost any other state, it has the largest water parks, and a ton of recreational lakes for fishing and/or skiing. Keep in mind that most of those activities can only be done for 4 or 5 months out of the year. Then there's all the winter activities for the rest of the year. People in WI just know how to get out and have fun.
Oh... and WI is also the drunkest state per capita. That might have something to do with it too.
Or they could come up with a sane progressive billing system.
Say $2 a month for each mbs so that if I wanted a 10mbs connection my base bill would be $20. Then offer pricing that actually coincides with costs. I highly doubt that TW is paying 1$ per gb to transfer data through the big pipes. I don't know the actual cost because that information isn't readily accessible to the consumers but I can't imagine it's more than 10 cents per gb. Whatever the cost is, bump it up by 50% and pass it on to me. Let me decide how much data I want to use and don't try to force some ridiculous low/medium/high tiering system on me.
Time Warner gets $20 + 50% of whatever my download costs are to opperate and take their profit; they even get to charge the 'abusers' more as they use more bandwidth. Meanwhile, Grandma who checks her email once a week can get internet for $10 a month, the average user would see their costs drop significantly also, and the people that actually are running up costs get to pay a bigger share.
A major political figure completely reversing his stance a subject and is able to provide straightforward and logical explanations for the change? Maybe I'm used to the previous administrations policy of "what we say goes, no matter what" but, yeah, this does kind of surprise me.
Say what you will about clean coal, but he is right about one thing. China is going to keep burning coal until there's no coal left to burn or something cheaper is found. Why not research the hell out of the subject and sell it to them in 10 years when they realize that they're killing their population with pollution? And if they somehow work out a way to have truly clean coal (burning coal with no particulates and no release of CO2) then why shouldn't we use it here at home?
Personally, I like nuclear, solar, and wind for our energy needs. But I think we should be researching every possibility, including clean coal and biofuels. Having a diverse set of energy sources means that when when resource becomes scarce we can more easily shift our focus and continue on.
This is more like if you were the only one in town that owned a rifle and someone was shot and killed with a rifle. Obviously the police would look at you as a suspect.
The kid is accused of several things, including harassment which network logs show was done by a computer running Ubuntu. Since there were literally only 3 people in the dorm running Ubuntu, and the accused was the only one who knew the victem, it made him a logical suspect. Further investigation into the logs showed that both computers used in the harassment were registered to the accused kid. Questioning the victim and aquantances of the accused led to allegations of hacking into the schools grading system as well as illegal filesharing.
This isn't just "OMG he uses Linux! Arrest him!" like the summary would lead you to believe.
Please tell me that someone else here actually read the full warrant. The kid is accused of harassment, theft, and copyright infringement. His use of Linux is tied only to claims that he encrypts people's hard drives for them so that copyrighted material can't be easily scanned for (which, as far as I know, isn't illegal).
There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence for these claims, especially the harassment claims. Two of the accused computer's were used (according to network logs) to send the harassing email. The only computer on the entire campus network to access the site used to set up the harassment was registered on the network as belonging to the accused. Is it enough to convict someone? Probably not by itself. Is it enough to get a warrant? I would say so.
developed the world's first flying micro-robot capable of manipulating objects for micro-scale applications, which include micro-assembly of mechanical components, handling of biological samples and even microsurgery.
We get it, it's small, you can stop saying micro now.
Even Nader would have pissed you off eventually, there are too many big decisions that go down in an administration for a president to agree with every one of your ideals every single time.
Besides, by the time any ballots were cast, the race was down to Barack and Hillary on one side, and a handful of Republicans on the other; it's just the way the system in the US works. For me, all the Republicans except McCain were out the second they said it was acceptable to torture terror suspects. McCain gradually lost my respect with his misleading attack ads and the nail in the coffin was his choice of running mate.
Is Obama going to agree with everything I think about how our government should run? No, of course not. Is this a huge issue that would affect my vote? Yes, but none of the viable alternatives felt differently on the subject.
You are correct about one thing though, anyone who feels betrayed by this didn't pay enough attention to the things that matter during the campaign. Obama's votes made it pretty clear about his attitude toward the wiretaps and he never made any promises to do anything different after he was elected.
While I completely agree with you about it not being able to film the story as is, it should be possible to add elements while still keeping the themes alive. It'll end up being ham-handed and over the top, but it is possible.
I'm thinking something along the lines of having a colossus actually save the main character somehow, only to have the main character viciously kill the colossus seconds later. Or a colossus willingly sacrifice itself to save the girl. A movie format also gives plenty of opportunity for a good actor to show regret for his actions, even doubt over whether he should continue.
All that being said, this is a horrible, horrible idea which can only end in a movie that is either wildly different from the game or a truly pointless movie.
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Energy independence isn't about having every single resource needed to produce all of our energy, it's about having options. Currently, it would be impossible to move from oil to a different fuel source for transportation, even ethanol won't work in the majority of cars on the road.
If we move to electric vehicles and Bolivia decides to stop mining lithium, we simply need to find a different medium for our batteries, or use fuel cells, or develop larger super-capacitors, or use radio-thermal-isotope generators (heh, that would be awesome, if ludicrously dangerous). The point is that there are options, if Bolivia stopped shipping batteries, we could find ways to do without them.
That would assume that taking out the power grid would in fact do those things. Hospitals have generators, as do ATC systems. Banks I'm sure would be able to keep working behind the scenes, even if they couldn't open their doors to customers.
The way I see it, we should use cyber warfare as a life saving measure. Basically, don't use cyber attacks unless you would use an equivalent military strike to get the same effect if the cyber option wasn't available. There are times when destroying or disabling a power grid is a legitimate military tactic. If, in one of those times, it is possible to do so without risking civilian or soldier's lives, why not do it? It would probably also leave open the possibility of re-enabling the power grid and besides, with the US's air superiority its not like you couldn't bomb it later if need be.
2. being a Democrat will prevent the Dems from offering up a more progressive candidate to oppose him had he stayed Republican.
First, as has been pointed out by others, this is hardly a bad thing. Second, there is nothing to stop someone running against him in the primary. In fact, thats why he switched, he expected to lose the next Republican primary.
Well, to be fair, he has always described himself as a moderate republican; elected in the 80's when the 'Big Tent' philosophy was strong in the Republican party. If 200,000 people left the Republican party for the Democratic party, you can bet that it was the moderates that were leaving, shifting the party farther to the right and making it impossible for him to win the primary as a self described moderate.
If he is more likely to win the primary in the democratic party than the republican party, he is almost by definition a democrat. If he isn't a democrat, he will lose badly in his first primary and everything will be exactly as it would be if he had stayed as a republican.
Am I the only one who has no idea who or what Phorm is?
For everyone else like me, a quick google search tells me that it is a company that makes advertising software that borders on spyware. I think the UK's argument that Phorm is okay since it can be used in a legal is entertaining. Sounds like the exact opposite argument that the same politicians probably used to shutdown P2P services.
Ahhh, corruption. Where would democracy be without it?
3. Dictate my history and physical for transcription.
4. Wait several hours for the dictation to show up in the EMR. Until which time all other doctors and nurses must refer to my hand written notes.
5. Heaven forbid I have to call in a consultation from cardiology, GI, or some other specialty in the hospital. If I do, then we use our text-based pagers to figure out when the hand-written note has been dropped off because every specialty has to go through steps 1-4. As they follow these patients, they too have to physically recheck the chart since dictated H&Ps and progress notes take time to show up.
I'm sorry but I just have to say this. Couldn't all these issues be cleared up by simply typing the notes into the record yourself? Properly trained, a person can type as fast or faster than they can comfortably speak so it wouldn't be losing much if any time at that step. It would save the hospital the cost of the transcription service. Notes would be instantly available in the system because you would be the one submitting them.
If the only thing stopping the system from working is the Doctors's pride ("I'm went to school too long and get paid too much to type the notes in myself") then it isn't the system that is broken.
Politics is, of course, the answer to your question; specifically the fear caused by the cold war. The cold war was going full swing and the space race was about much more than just bragging rights. I don't know how accurate it is, but I've had it explained to me that getting a person into space meant you could put a nuke anywhere within 5000 miles of territory you control. Putting a man into orbit was equivalent to being able to drop a nuke onto the heartland of you enemy, not necessarily accurately. But putting a man on the moon meant you could aim the nuke to any city in the world.
It's the only situation where our nation would except spending such a massive amount (relative to GDP) on the space program. It's also the only situation where NASA would launch expecting only a 1/3 chance of the astronauts surviving. Today, that is absolutely unexceptionable. They have contingency plans on top of contingency plans for if the shuttle gets hit by debris while fixing Hubble, something that is only estimated at 1 in 200 chances. Those plans include having a shuttle on the launchpad ready to go, just in case. I don't know how much that costs but I bet it isn't cheap; the least they could do is have a mission planned to use the rescue shuttle if it isn't needed.
Piracy is a crime and should be treated as such. If there's a rash of break-ins in your hometown you don't recommend that every home owner goes out and buys a gun, you track down the criminals responsible and put them to justice.
It's well known that the pirates are getting inside information on ship locations and cargoes from associates in Europe. Feed a false tip into the system and arrest the pirates that come calling. Don't try to arm civilians to fight off what could be a relatively well trained and well armed fighting force, you'll just piss of the criminals and they'll be that much more likely to start killing people.
If someone has physical access to your computer, you've already lost. That's been the general rule for decades now. Even with a fully encrypted harddrive someone could install an inline usb key-logger and you would probably never notice it. Sensitive information should never go on a laptop and desktops should be physically secured. Anything else is 100% defeatable.
Actually, wouldn't the correct term be 'least massive'? Heavy and light are measurements of weight generally and are pretty meaningless for objects that are in orbit. Unless it's considered kosher to use lightest/heaviest in this situation, sometimes I think English drifts faster than the average person can keep up with it.
I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Labs. They have a similar setup; using accelerated electrons to produce x-rays, the real achievement here is the coherency part. I wonder how this effects high speed x-ray crystallography, is it easier to decode the scatter if the light is coherent? Will we be getting real time videos of enzymes in action? If so I can only imagine what that will do for chemical and pharmaceutical research.
Better yet, if you live in Sweden move your Internet connection over to his ISP. This is a very rare chance to financially support someone who is trying to protect your privacy while having little net cost for yourself.
I believe they suspended his Amazon account because he had returned several purchases made on Amazon.com, not because he wanted to return eBooks. Since his Amazon account also serves as his Kindle account, he was then locked out of purchasing books for his Kindle.
Poor policy on their part but if you are really worried about this you could always just set up a separate account for your Kindle. If you never use it to make regular purchases I don't think you would ever have to touch it except to update your payment information when necessary.
I think you mean
Internal politics and poor leadership in [almost every business] are the cause of almost every single problem in [almost every business].
From GM to AIG, from the US Senate to the government of Zimbabwa; that statement works for almost everything.
Well, with this, my taxes will go up, and my family makes under $250,000/yr
But you aren't legally required to pay a dime more with this law than you were legally required to pay before the law existed. By that logic, increased funding for IRS audits also increases the taxes you pay because it would be riskier for you to try to cheat on your income taxes. There is no change other than enforcement.
The fact is, you were getting away with violating the law before, now you won't be able to. Get over it.
First, taken in context it's pretty clear that he was talking about taxes coming out of your paycheck. Even politifact agrees with that sentiment (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/promise/515/no-family-making-less-250000-will-see-any-form-tax/)
Second, this isn't really a tax increase at all since you're supposed to be paying taxes on online purchase as it is. It's called a Use Tax and just because you haven't been paying it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Besides, there is no reason why purchases made online should be tax free other than it is difficult to enforce. I would even say that it gives online vendors an unfair advantage over local stores.
I'm originally from WI too and I'm going to have to disagree. Little known fact, WI has more golf courses than almost any other state, it has the largest water parks, and a ton of recreational lakes for fishing and/or skiing. Keep in mind that most of those activities can only be done for 4 or 5 months out of the year. Then there's all the winter activities for the rest of the year. People in WI just know how to get out and have fun.
Oh... and WI is also the drunkest state per capita. That might have something to do with it too.
Or they could come up with a sane progressive billing system.
Say $2 a month for each mbs so that if I wanted a 10mbs connection my base bill would be $20. Then offer pricing that actually coincides with costs. I highly doubt that TW is paying 1$ per gb to transfer data through the big pipes. I don't know the actual cost because that information isn't readily accessible to the consumers but I can't imagine it's more than 10 cents per gb. Whatever the cost is, bump it up by 50% and pass it on to me. Let me decide how much data I want to use and don't try to force some ridiculous low/medium/high tiering system on me.
Time Warner gets $20 + 50% of whatever my download costs are to opperate and take their profit; they even get to charge the 'abusers' more as they use more bandwidth. Meanwhile, Grandma who checks her email once a week can get internet for $10 a month, the average user would see their costs drop significantly also, and the people that actually are running up costs get to pay a bigger share.
A major political figure completely reversing his stance a subject and is able to provide straightforward and logical explanations for the change? Maybe I'm used to the previous administrations policy of "what we say goes, no matter what" but, yeah, this does kind of surprise me.
Say what you will about clean coal, but he is right about one thing. China is going to keep burning coal until there's no coal left to burn or something cheaper is found. Why not research the hell out of the subject and sell it to them in 10 years when they realize that they're killing their population with pollution? And if they somehow work out a way to have truly clean coal (burning coal with no particulates and no release of CO2) then why shouldn't we use it here at home?
Personally, I like nuclear, solar, and wind for our energy needs. But I think we should be researching every possibility, including clean coal and biofuels. Having a diverse set of energy sources means that when when resource becomes scarce we can more easily shift our focus and continue on.
This is more like if you were the only one in town that owned a rifle and someone was shot and killed with a rifle. Obviously the police would look at you as a suspect.
The kid is accused of several things, including harassment which network logs show was done by a computer running Ubuntu. Since there were literally only 3 people in the dorm running Ubuntu, and the accused was the only one who knew the victem, it made him a logical suspect. Further investigation into the logs showed that both computers used in the harassment were registered to the accused kid. Questioning the victim and aquantances of the accused led to allegations of hacking into the schools grading system as well as illegal filesharing.
This isn't just "OMG he uses Linux! Arrest him!" like the summary would lead you to believe.
Please tell me that someone else here actually read the full warrant. The kid is accused of harassment, theft, and copyright infringement. His use of Linux is tied only to claims that he encrypts people's hard drives for them so that copyrighted material can't be easily scanned for (which, as far as I know, isn't illegal).
There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence for these claims, especially the harassment claims. Two of the accused computer's were used (according to network logs) to send the harassing email. The only computer on the entire campus network to access the site used to set up the harassment was registered on the network as belonging to the accused. Is it enough to convict someone? Probably not by itself. Is it enough to get a warrant? I would say so.
Is it still obligatory if it's a comic that doesn't get linked very often?
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0135.html/
But maybe I shouldn't link to them, their servers are notoriously slow.
developed the world's first flying micro-robot capable of manipulating objects for micro-scale applications, which include micro-assembly of mechanical components, handling of biological samples and even microsurgery.
We get it, it's small, you can stop saying micro now.
Even Nader would have pissed you off eventually, there are too many big decisions that go down in an administration for a president to agree with every one of your ideals every single time.
Besides, by the time any ballots were cast, the race was down to Barack and Hillary on one side, and a handful of Republicans on the other; it's just the way the system in the US works. For me, all the Republicans except McCain were out the second they said it was acceptable to torture terror suspects. McCain gradually lost my respect with his misleading attack ads and the nail in the coffin was his choice of running mate.
Is Obama going to agree with everything I think about how our government should run? No, of course not. Is this a huge issue that would affect my vote? Yes, but none of the viable alternatives felt differently on the subject.
You are correct about one thing though, anyone who feels betrayed by this didn't pay enough attention to the things that matter during the campaign. Obama's votes made it pretty clear about his attitude toward the wiretaps and he never made any promises to do anything different after he was elected.
While I completely agree with you about it not being able to film the story as is, it should be possible to add elements while still keeping the themes alive. It'll end up being ham-handed and over the top, but it is possible.
I'm thinking something along the lines of having a colossus actually save the main character somehow, only to have the main character viciously kill the colossus seconds later. Or a colossus willingly sacrifice itself to save the girl. A movie format also gives plenty of opportunity for a good actor to show regret for his actions, even doubt over whether he should continue.
All that being said, this is a horrible, horrible idea which can only end in a movie that is either wildly different from the game or a truly pointless movie.