Bah, since when are politicians logical, scientifically minded people? This is not exactly the age of Realpolitik (in its original meaning of practical, realistic, and effective; rather than it's more recent meaning of coercive, heavy handed, and amoral). The choices of our governments are based on religion, ideology, and vote pandering; much more so than they are based on what will actually accomplish our goals.
As an example, it has been shown several times that handing out needles to IV drug users not only reduces disease but also, in the long run, reduces the number of addicts (since the users are meeting with trained counselors on a weekly basic to get their needles). Its even been shown to save money, since these users don't end up in the hospital later unable to pay their bills. Yet, any area that tries to start a program of supplying needles is denigrated and attacked. People say they are 'enabling' the users, when in fact their course of action has been shown effective in reducing drug use.
It's an artifact of evolution. A tribe that sends all its women into battle (where some x% of them get killed) will reproduce much more slowly than a tribe that sends its men. A tribe with one woman and ten men can only make one baby a year. A tribe with one man and ten women could make ten babies a year. Which is why we instinctually have men fight wars, hunt, crab fish, etc... the cost of a male life is (on a societal level) less than a females.
SpaceX's technology is ITAR controlled, they cannot sell it to the Chinese or anyone else without going through an approval process that they would not be able to navigate given the nature of their technology.
And I love the attitude: congress cuts NASA funding; therefore *Obama* is trying to kill science. Congress (with Obama's backing) increases NASA funding, Obama is handing out money to his cronies. Not saying the same thing didn't happen during the Bush years, I just wish there was some consistency in people's complaints.
False dichotomy. Doing nothing and banning her from the campus aren't the only options. Perhaps if they had taken the time to meet with her, maybe even have her sit down with a therapist, they could have determined whether or not she actually was a threat to herself or others. Of course, it's much easier to just kick her out; because if she really were unstable and about to kill someone, I'm sure a good stern 'and stay out' is going to keep her from doing it.
Just to be difficult, I'd like to point out that you'd see the same correlation of voting records to contributions if the system were working exactly as intended. That is, companies are more likely to support politicians whose views are in line with their business interests. People often assume that the correlation automatically implies causation the other way, that contributions buy votes, but that isn't *necessarily* the case. I'm not saying that it never is the case, just that the correlation can lead to more than one conclusion which are both equally valid. The exception to this argument is when a new issue comes up and companies dump money into campaign funds and the congress-critters suddenly see the other side of the issue. It's that kind of behavior that we should be watching for and it;s shocking to me that it isn't pointed out during the campaigns (probably because 'everyone' does it, so don't rock the boat).
As for your plan of getting rid of corporate and union contributions, they are already significantly limited. These limitations are worked around by setting up Political Action Committees, which employees/members are 'encouraged' to donate money to. And in theory it makes sense, a person often wants to support politicians that will help the company they work for succeed, but in reality it ends up being the same old system that was in place before they had limitations on corporate contributions.
...that BetaNet is a patent troll... But given the letter of the law, it's not that simple.
Being a patent troll isn't about the letter of the law, it's about taking advantage of the law in such a way that stifles innovation in order to maximize your profit. Specifically, it is about getting patents and never exercising them and, even more so, not suing when infringement becomes obvious but rather waiting until you can get the biggest payday possible. Basically it is being a tech company that profits through the legal system rather than through technology. It is the antithesis of what patent law is suposed to do, patent law is suposed to be a shield, not a sword.
Google doesn't want to be in the phone business or the mobile carrier business, so this must be about something else, and that's the advertising business, since Google is in the business of selling ads.
This is just my guess, and I'm not highly paid analyst, but isn't it possible that Google understands that it is in their best interests to have a more open cell phone market. I thought from the start that it was obvious that that was the purpose; originally they were going to do it by strong arming the bandwidth auctions but that fell through and they weren't prepared to actually bid and implement the system themselves. Now they've moved on to working within the system, opening what is arguably one of the best mobile OS's to any manufacturer that wants it, provided they play by certain rules including a minumum level of openness.
Are you actually suggesting that given the choice between an explosion 10 times larger than all the worlds nuclear arsenal combined or the possibility that maybe defusing it would cause a problem thousands or millions of years down the road, you would actually choose the civilization ending explosion? Ok, maybe not civilization ending, but it's surely going to kill a good half billion people almost instantly, and another 4 billion on top of that due to food shortages, tidal waves, and warfare (limited resources will always lead to fighting). So yeah, lets worry about soil quality a few million years from now and light it up. By this logic, we should just kill all humans right away, since our negative impact is almost definately greater than a super volcanoes positive one.
I think you mean capitalism (mostly the same thing, but sure). You know, the whole, priced to what the market will bear nonesense that is the fundemental underpinnings of our economy. In this case, the cost of batteries for garden tools is lower because NiCa and other technologies are still viable alternatives, whereas in the laptop segment they are not. In other words, there are more competitors and a higher supply in one market segment than another.
That's because people that have never had broadband access literally don't know what they are missing. The opportunities for education, entertainment, communication, and economics are limitless. I sit on my couch with access to more information than was available to the greatest scholars in the world 50 years ago. I save hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars a year by price shopping online, and hundreds more by reading informed reviews on products before I buy them. I can look up my symptoms if I'm feeling ill. I can look for a new job, and upon finding a prospect I can research the company to make sure they are legitimate and a good place to work. I can determine what kind of salary I should expect and how much I should pay for repairs on my car.
People that have never had a consistent, high speed internet connection don't understand these things. I would much rather give up my phone than give up my internet connection because an internet connection does communication and so much more; yet a phone connection is garaunteed in rural areas, while a broadband connection is not. Despite the fact that it is cheaper to install, includes phone line functionality, and is arguably more important to being a functional member of modern society.
And yet every country in western Europe has these things so why cant every state in the US have them? It isn't as though cost and complexity go up exponentially with the size of your project (in fact, they should go down relative to size). Even if the cost spiralled out of control for large projects it would be trivial (compared to the other problems that we, as a nation, have dealt with over the years). Divide the effort into several small projects integrated together, probably similar to how it is done in Europe.
There are procedures in place when it comes to releasing classified or confidential documents, not following the procedures will get you into serious trouble regardless of whether you did it on purpose or not. My basic point was that if the document is confidential or classified, it was released improperly and the people who made the mistake face consequences.
Even if the document is marked top secret, the good people at wikileaks are (I believe and someone else has backed me up) not liable unless they hold a security clearance (not to mention the fact the wikileaks isn't hosted in the US, but I digress). If the document isn't marked as classified or confidential, then the situation is even more clear cut in favor of Wikileaks, since it is going to be very difficult to say what law they could possibly be breaking.
Considering most other forms of theoretical space propulsion are accomplished with either controlled explosions (the bigger the better) or exceedingly large lasers, this seems relatively safe. Besides, sending something up to.99c still takes an extreme amount of energy, even if the system were 100% efficient (which I highly doubt) getting any sizable object up to that speed is going to take a massive power supply; massive enough that it could probably have been used more directly if you wanted a weapon.
I really am interested in why would they be called liberals.
Basically because he would prefer a world where everyone equated liberal to bad (or even better, evil). There are two reasons someone would want to do this; to label the opposing party as evil, and to distance politicians he disagrees with from the party he supports. The former goes like this: all democrats are liberal, all evil politicians are 'liberal'. Therefore, all democrats are evil politicians. And as for the Republicans he doesn't agree with, they are all secretly liberal, not real republicans at all. He and he alone defines what makes a liberal/conservative, democrat/republican which makes it much easier to blindly continue forward without being forced to reevaluate decisions made long ago, like which political party is 'right' (as if there is such a thing).
Despite what some would have you believe, there are other (and more important) laws than copyright laws. If the document in question is appropriately labeled confidential, secret, or top secret, it's possible that those who leaked the document inappropriately could face serious consequences, and I'm not even sure that it is so labeled in this case. As to those who received and posted the documents for the world to see, unless they have a security clearance themselves (and have been appropriately briefed) I don't believe they are liable (obviously IANAL) so I don't see what exactly the congress-critters are asking for in this case.
To me, it sounds like they are saying "B- B- But they're doing something wrong, surely we can lock them up or something". In other words, "I don't know what law they're breaking, but I don't like what they're doing so find one that applies and enforce it." And that, even to someone who doesn't really buy into all the police state fears that go on around here, is a bit scary.
You're missing the point, denying the Japanese access to steal and other resources during wartime was, for all intents and purposes, and act of war. Without those resources, Japan wouldn't have been able to hold the ground they had already taken, let alone continue advancing. When the US cut off access to critical war resources, Japan had only two choices: End the war almost immediately and retreat back to Japan proper, or take control of the resources by force. For political and ideological reason, the former option wasn't much of an option at all.
Imagine if the US were fighting a major war (against a powerful, conventional enemy) and OPEC said "No more oil exports for a while". You don't think the US govt would see that as an act of war?
Not that I disagree with your sentiment (as a general rule you shouldn't try to label entire societies as good or evil) but how exactly is modernization, science, and literature 'not evil' by definition. Not to Godwin the discusion, but NAZI germany advanced the fields of human biology and engineering; so much so that their research is still used today (because it can't be ethically repeated).
It's like researchers discovered a gun powder fired internal combustion engine. We've long suspected that such a thing is theoretically possible, some people even speculate that the first ICE's invented were gun powder fired, but no one has ever seen one working in real life. Furthermore, it's massively innefficient by todays standards so what uses it may have are hard to see.
I recently told my wife that I was going to teach our (future) children to not be afraid of strangers; needless to say she was appalled. I pointed out that if our 3 year old got seperated from us at the mall and went up to the first person they saw and said "I lost my parents, can you help me?" the odds are 99.9999% that the situation would end favorably. If our kid was so terrified that they went and hid from everyone it would be orders of magnitude harder to find them.
Teach your kids how to solve problems because they won't be able to avoid them (or hide behind you) forever. And if you teach your kids how to solve even the simplest of problems (getting lost at the mall) you'll find that they are more capable of solving the big problems later in life.
Best case would be if she could get off on a technicality
What!? No. The best case would be that the judge should throw the case out as frivolous (perhaps on the condition that the video is deleted or edited to remove the copyrighted material) and the lawmakers should finally get their heads out of their asses and revise the laws to make sense (filming 5 minutes of anything shouldn't ruin your life more thuroughly armed robbery).
If, when this technology has become sufficiently advanced, will a heart that is produced be, in fact, a living organ?
Yes it will be living. Life is just a big, complex chemical reaction (well, system of interacting chemical reactions, but still). There is nothing mysterious or supernatural about something being alive or dead. Besides, they're building the tissues using living cells grown in culture; the printer just arranges them to form a tissue.
No, it's a privately owned public place. That's why a mall owner can't have a No Pants Day at the mall (show up with no pants and get 10% off!). It's also why a mall owner can't (legally) restrict you from taking photographs inside the mall; just because it's privately owned doesn't make it private.
And what strikes me as even more silly is that Google has a privacy policy for the service that says all logs are deleted after 48 hours and aren't linked back to other Google services whereas I have no privacy statement at all about DNS from my ISP (since they slipped it in silently about 4 months ago).
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, since when are politicians logical, scientifically minded people? This is not exactly the age of Realpolitik (in its original meaning of practical, realistic, and effective; rather than it's more recent meaning of coercive, heavy handed, and amoral). The choices of our governments are based on religion, ideology, and vote pandering; much more so than they are based on what will actually accomplish our goals.
As an example, it has been shown several times that handing out needles to IV drug users not only reduces disease but also, in the long run, reduces the number of addicts (since the users are meeting with trained counselors on a weekly basic to get their needles). Its even been shown to save money, since these users don't end up in the hospital later unable to pay their bills. Yet, any area that tries to start a program of supplying needles is denigrated and attacked. People say they are 'enabling' the users, when in fact their course of action has been shown effective in reducing drug use.
Unless of course you want to do something that Google/T-Mobile don't want you to do...
I think you meant, "Unless of course you want to do something that you agreed not to do when you signed up for service..."
It's an artifact of evolution. A tribe that sends all its women into battle (where some x% of them get killed) will reproduce much more slowly than a tribe that sends its men. A tribe with one woman and ten men can only make one baby a year. A tribe with one man and ten women could make ten babies a year. Which is why we instinctually have men fight wars, hunt, crab fish, etc... the cost of a male life is (on a societal level) less than a females.
SpaceX's technology is ITAR controlled, they cannot sell it to the Chinese or anyone else without going through an approval process that they would not be able to navigate given the nature of their technology.
And I love the attitude: congress cuts NASA funding; therefore *Obama* is trying to kill science. Congress (with Obama's backing) increases NASA funding, Obama is handing out money to his cronies. Not saying the same thing didn't happen during the Bush years, I just wish there was some consistency in people's complaints.
False dichotomy. Doing nothing and banning her from the campus aren't the only options. Perhaps if they had taken the time to meet with her, maybe even have her sit down with a therapist, they could have determined whether or not she actually was a threat to herself or others. Of course, it's much easier to just kick her out; because if she really were unstable and about to kill someone, I'm sure a good stern 'and stay out' is going to keep her from doing it.
Just to be difficult, I'd like to point out that you'd see the same correlation of voting records to contributions if the system were working exactly as intended. That is, companies are more likely to support politicians whose views are in line with their business interests. People often assume that the correlation automatically implies causation the other way, that contributions buy votes, but that isn't *necessarily* the case. I'm not saying that it never is the case, just that the correlation can lead to more than one conclusion which are both equally valid. The exception to this argument is when a new issue comes up and companies dump money into campaign funds and the congress-critters suddenly see the other side of the issue. It's that kind of behavior that we should be watching for and it;s shocking to me that it isn't pointed out during the campaigns (probably because 'everyone' does it, so don't rock the boat).
As for your plan of getting rid of corporate and union contributions, they are already significantly limited. These limitations are worked around by setting up Political Action Committees, which employees/members are 'encouraged' to donate money to. And in theory it makes sense, a person often wants to support politicians that will help the company they work for succeed, but in reality it ends up being the same old system that was in place before they had limitations on corporate contributions.
...that BetaNet is a patent troll... But given the letter of the law, it's not that simple.
Being a patent troll isn't about the letter of the law, it's about taking advantage of the law in such a way that stifles innovation in order to maximize your profit. Specifically, it is about getting patents and never exercising them and, even more so, not suing when infringement becomes obvious but rather waiting until you can get the biggest payday possible. Basically it is being a tech company that profits through the legal system rather than through technology. It is the antithesis of what patent law is suposed to do, patent law is suposed to be a shield, not a sword.
Google doesn't want to be in the phone business or the mobile carrier business, so this must be about something else, and that's the advertising business, since Google is in the business of selling ads.
This is just my guess, and I'm not highly paid analyst, but isn't it possible that Google understands that it is in their best interests to have a more open cell phone market. I thought from the start that it was obvious that that was the purpose; originally they were going to do it by strong arming the bandwidth auctions but that fell through and they weren't prepared to actually bid and implement the system themselves. Now they've moved on to working within the system, opening what is arguably one of the best mobile OS's to any manufacturer that wants it, provided they play by certain rules including a minumum level of openness.
Nice of them to hit the Submit button for you though, though it does seem to defeat the purpose of killing you for trying to send it.
Are you actually suggesting that given the choice between an explosion 10 times larger than all the worlds nuclear arsenal combined or the possibility that maybe defusing it would cause a problem thousands or millions of years down the road, you would actually choose the civilization ending explosion? Ok, maybe not civilization ending, but it's surely going to kill a good half billion people almost instantly, and another 4 billion on top of that due to food shortages, tidal waves, and warfare (limited resources will always lead to fighting). So yeah, lets worry about soil quality a few million years from now and light it up. By this logic, we should just kill all humans right away, since our negative impact is almost definately greater than a super volcanoes positive one.
I think you mean capitalism (mostly the same thing, but sure). You know, the whole, priced to what the market will bear nonesense that is the fundemental underpinnings of our economy. In this case, the cost of batteries for garden tools is lower because NiCa and other technologies are still viable alternatives, whereas in the laptop segment they are not. In other words, there are more competitors and a higher supply in one market segment than another.
That's because people that have never had broadband access literally don't know what they are missing. The opportunities for education, entertainment, communication, and economics are limitless. I sit on my couch with access to more information than was available to the greatest scholars in the world 50 years ago. I save hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars a year by price shopping online, and hundreds more by reading informed reviews on products before I buy them. I can look up my symptoms if I'm feeling ill. I can look for a new job, and upon finding a prospect I can research the company to make sure they are legitimate and a good place to work. I can determine what kind of salary I should expect and how much I should pay for repairs on my car.
People that have never had a consistent, high speed internet connection don't understand these things. I would much rather give up my phone than give up my internet connection because an internet connection does communication and so much more; yet a phone connection is garaunteed in rural areas, while a broadband connection is not. Despite the fact that it is cheaper to install, includes phone line functionality, and is arguably more important to being a functional member of modern society.
And yet every country in western Europe has these things so why cant every state in the US have them? It isn't as though cost and complexity go up exponentially with the size of your project (in fact, they should go down relative to size). Even if the cost spiralled out of control for large projects it would be trivial (compared to the other problems that we, as a nation, have dealt with over the years). Divide the effort into several small projects integrated together, probably similar to how it is done in Europe.
There are procedures in place when it comes to releasing classified or confidential documents, not following the procedures will get you into serious trouble regardless of whether you did it on purpose or not. My basic point was that if the document is confidential or classified, it was released improperly and the people who made the mistake face consequences.
Even if the document is marked top secret, the good people at wikileaks are (I believe and someone else has backed me up) not liable unless they hold a security clearance (not to mention the fact the wikileaks isn't hosted in the US, but I digress). If the document isn't marked as classified or confidential, then the situation is even more clear cut in favor of Wikileaks, since it is going to be very difficult to say what law they could possibly be breaking.
Considering most other forms of theoretical space propulsion are accomplished with either controlled explosions (the bigger the better) or exceedingly large lasers, this seems relatively safe. Besides, sending something up to .99c still takes an extreme amount of energy, even if the system were 100% efficient (which I highly doubt) getting any sizable object up to that speed is going to take a massive power supply; massive enough that it could probably have been used more directly if you wanted a weapon.
I really am interested in why would they be called liberals.
Basically because he would prefer a world where everyone equated liberal to bad (or even better, evil). There are two reasons someone would want to do this; to label the opposing party as evil, and to distance politicians he disagrees with from the party he supports. The former goes like this: all democrats are liberal, all evil politicians are 'liberal'. Therefore, all democrats are evil politicians. And as for the Republicans he doesn't agree with, they are all secretly liberal, not real republicans at all. He and he alone defines what makes a liberal/conservative, democrat/republican which makes it much easier to blindly continue forward without being forced to reevaluate decisions made long ago, like which political party is 'right' (as if there is such a thing).
Despite what some would have you believe, there are other (and more important) laws than copyright laws. If the document in question is appropriately labeled confidential, secret, or top secret, it's possible that those who leaked the document inappropriately could face serious consequences, and I'm not even sure that it is so labeled in this case. As to those who received and posted the documents for the world to see, unless they have a security clearance themselves (and have been appropriately briefed) I don't believe they are liable (obviously IANAL) so I don't see what exactly the congress-critters are asking for in this case.
To me, it sounds like they are saying "B- B- But they're doing something wrong, surely we can lock them up or something". In other words, "I don't know what law they're breaking, but I don't like what they're doing so find one that applies and enforce it." And that, even to someone who doesn't really buy into all the police state fears that go on around here, is a bit scary.
You're missing the point, denying the Japanese access to steal and other resources during wartime was, for all intents and purposes, and act of war. Without those resources, Japan wouldn't have been able to hold the ground they had already taken, let alone continue advancing. When the US cut off access to critical war resources, Japan had only two choices: End the war almost immediately and retreat back to Japan proper, or take control of the resources by force. For political and ideological reason, the former option wasn't much of an option at all.
Imagine if the US were fighting a major war (against a powerful, conventional enemy) and OPEC said "No more oil exports for a while". You don't think the US govt would see that as an act of war?
Not that I disagree with your sentiment (as a general rule you shouldn't try to label entire societies as good or evil) but how exactly is modernization, science, and literature 'not evil' by definition. Not to Godwin the discusion, but NAZI germany advanced the fields of human biology and engineering; so much so that their research is still used today (because it can't be ethically repeated).
It's like researchers discovered a gun powder fired internal combustion engine. We've long suspected that such a thing is theoretically possible, some people even speculate that the first ICE's invented were gun powder fired, but no one has ever seen one working in real life. Furthermore, it's massively innefficient by todays standards so what uses it may have are hard to see.
I recently told my wife that I was going to teach our (future) children to not be afraid of strangers; needless to say she was appalled. I pointed out that if our 3 year old got seperated from us at the mall and went up to the first person they saw and said "I lost my parents, can you help me?" the odds are 99.9999% that the situation would end favorably. If our kid was so terrified that they went and hid from everyone it would be orders of magnitude harder to find them.
Teach your kids how to solve problems because they won't be able to avoid them (or hide behind you) forever. And if you teach your kids how to solve even the simplest of problems (getting lost at the mall) you'll find that they are more capable of solving the big problems later in life.
Best case would be if she could get off on a technicality
What!? No. The best case would be that the judge should throw the case out as frivolous (perhaps on the condition that the video is deleted or edited to remove the copyrighted material) and the lawmakers should finally get their heads out of their asses and revise the laws to make sense (filming 5 minutes of anything shouldn't ruin your life more thuroughly armed robbery).
If, when this technology has become sufficiently advanced, will a heart that is produced be, in fact, a living organ?
Yes it will be living. Life is just a big, complex chemical reaction (well, system of interacting chemical reactions, but still). There is nothing mysterious or supernatural about something being alive or dead. Besides, they're building the tissues using living cells grown in culture; the printer just arranges them to form a tissue.
No, it's a privately owned public place. That's why a mall owner can't have a No Pants Day at the mall (show up with no pants and get 10% off!). It's also why a mall owner can't (legally) restrict you from taking photographs inside the mall; just because it's privately owned doesn't make it private.
And what strikes me as even more silly is that Google has a privacy policy for the service that says all logs are deleted after 48 hours and aren't linked back to other Google services whereas I have no privacy statement at all about DNS from my ISP (since they slipped it in silently about 4 months ago).