Though illegal immigration is definitely a verboten subject in American politics, it's not the biggest reason why it is not discussed in connection with overpopulation. The government needs a populous continually infused with younger workers, and it frankly doesn't care where they come from or about the long term impact of overpopulation when compared against the immediate problem of an aging population. Who's going to pay for the retiree benefits of social security and medicare? Who's going to actually take care of all the old people in hospitals and nursing homes? The younger workers!
Every time I go through the airport, and regrettably my job has recently involved a fair amount of travel, I'm struck my how pointless the whole security drama is. They're seizing closed soda cans, sealed bottles of water, women are removing flip flops with like 1/4" soles, they're hassling a 90 year old guy over a bottle of eyedrops because he doesn't have it in a quart sandwich bag. Did someone somewhere tell them that the bigger dicks they are, the more pointless inconvenience they create, the more people are going to believe they're safer? Not that it's possible, but I find myself wondering how an airline that advertised itself has having zero security checks would do. It would be an interesting indicator of just how big a terrorist target the average person believes a plane to be.
I agree with you completely, but if there's some mechanism to produce such change I don't see it. Just to take an example with which I'm familiar, say you're a large defense contractor and you want to sell something to Saudi Arabia. That's absolutely going to require a little something to their defense minister to even get your proposal in the door. You don't want to pay to play? Fine - Raytheon/BAE Systems/Lockheed/Kollsman/Northrop/etc etc etc are all perfectly willing to take your place. Enforcement of the rules is spotty at best. For every company that gets caught, a dozen more just did business, and the US doesn't necessarily even want to catch you. Oh, on paper they do, but in reality you're talking billions of dollars of taxable income, and if it doesn't go to a US contractor, China/Russia/India/Japan/etc etc etc are more than willing to fill the void. Unless you suddenly create a worldwide attack of conscience and morals, I'm not even certain how change can begin to happen.
And it's naive to think otherwise. You want to do serious governmental business in Saudi Arabia/Egypt/Jordan? Some shiek/prince/royal family member is going to get some quid pro quo. And quite frankly it's more or less true in America as well. You think those Congressional reelection campaign coffers are going to fill themselves?
My nephew was given a computer by his school. What he uses it for is to play games - in class, at home - and his grades have never been more abysmal. It's the squarely the fault of my sister that he's not getting his homework done, but people are kidding themselves if they think that computers are going to magically make underperforming students into powerhouses of scholarship. A laptop may make a good student great, but it will likely not make a poor student measurably better.
I just went through an audit, thank you very much, originally flagged because of an error by some IRS data entry clerk in San Diego. When I pointed out their error (with literally quintuplicate notarized documentaton to back it up), they decided to go on a fishing expedition for the previous seven years - thank the lords of Kobol that I'm anal about keeping every scrap of tax related paperwork. Oh, and FYI, I'm squeakly clean. Let's see a few members of our esteemed leadership go through that.
Why is this modded funny? It's just about the only solution that makes any real sense. Close social security, and people who really need it end up on welfare instead. How would that be any different from "means testing" which is what is almost certain to happen anyway? The alternative seems to be to (a) tax present workers to death, virtually guarenteeing that they'll need SS when they retire, and then wash, rinse, and repeat with the next generation or (b) prop up SS by printing more fake government money and let the next generation figure out how to repay the debt (hint: see (a)).
Free seems to me to still be too expensive to deal with M$ latest bug laden release (at least up until the first or second serious patch comes along). I didn't move from 98 to XP for my machine until SP1 came out. I wonder if they'd be willing to pay me to live through their forced release growing pains.
It's been something like 20 years, but I did Rydberg atom work (using Helium atoms) back in graduate school (another student was running the vacuum rig, and I was providing the lasers for excitation and containment). As the previous poster wrote, a Rydberg atom has a single electron up in an energy state so high that it is almost unrelated to the atom which (weakly) holds it. The creation of a Rydberg molecule allows for the confirmation of a number of quantum mechanical oddities - things that were predicted by theory but couldn't be measured in a lab. It can also allow some real insight into the nature of shared bonds between atoms in a molecule and studies of weak electromagnetic forces. The Rydberg atoms themselves allowed for interactions involving electrons that were essentially at a zero kinetic energy state, teetering on the edge of a relatively enormous potential well (which is why they tend to last such a short period of time before de-excitation to some lower state).
This is certainly the first instance of Xray production from an FEL, but it's a far cry from the first Xray laser. While it's true that the SDI lasers were self-destructive, sub-10nm lasers have been produced from a number of modified atomic plasmas in sustainable laser formats http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/reports/1996-1997/pdf/16.pdf. Sorry about the pdf.
No doubt I'm hundred of times less savvy about computers than many people here, but couldn't he have just done this from an internet cafe or a public library or a wireless spot in a hotel lobby or $tarbucks and avoided all these problems? To me it seems like a kidnapper who demands the ransom be delivered to his actual home address.
No they wouldn't. Google has an estimated $15.85B cash on hand, at least as of Dec 31, 2008. (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=Goog) At a rate of $2M a day, they have enough cash to last them more than 21 years, and that's if they don't bring in a single dollar in the meantime.
For the past seven or eight years I've been running three computers at my house each with Windows XP. When one dies, I buy parts and build myself another one and move XP to it. I've had no incentive to buy a new copy of XP or even try Vista, and I suspect the same will be true of 7 as well.
Is that right? I honestly don't know. If I buy music through iTunes and put it on my ipod, can I turn around, buy another ipod, put that music on that ipod, and give it away? Or are you saying that he bought music, put it on that ipod, gave the ipod to the Queen, and then deleted it from his system? Because I think that's the only way that what he did could be legal (provided we're talking about not free music here). I believe that you buy a license for a song for your exclusive use - I cannot make copies in any medium (ipod, burn a CD, whatever) and give it away. Or does that fall under some kind of fair use, like mix tapes used to? Is he limited to some number of copies that he can give away? If he and Michelle both have that music on their ipods, can he still give it to the Queen, or is even that the same question because they're married? At this point the law seems to me, a complete layman, to be so convoluted that I no longer know when I'm breaking the law. Does someone who has a greater grasp of these billion shades of gray care to enlighten me?
Hmmm. Is there a copyright issue here (assuming that all the music on the ipod was not open source)? Can I legally hook an ipod to my computer, load it with music from my iTunes, and give the ipod away? How is that any different from making copies of CDs that I own and giving those copies away?
As a first responder to a car accident one of the first things I do is shut the car off - almost always the car is still in gear, and the last thing I need is to have that car move while I'm tending to a patient. Now I've got to, what, find their RFID and throw it out the window? What if, because of the way their body is positioned I can't get into their pockets without moving them? What if they keep it on a string attached to their cell phone and in the accident it flew down the floorboards somewhere? "Convenience" of the operator aside, give me a key any day.
This is the first post I've seen that mentions the fact that she didn't tell them to fuck off. I'm certain that as a 13 year old I would have opened my backpack, turned out my pockets, and perhaps if I were in a particularly charital mood pulled my shirt out of my pants. That's it. Otherwise I would have walked out, and if detained, would have called 911. Her search reads as a slightly less distasteful version of the rape from Clockwork Orange. How did a child come to decide it was acceptable to have anyone short of a doctor performing a medical exam strip her naked? Are children so cowed by authority now? The downside of course being that if the court sides with the school, then I guess she was right and she had no recourse, or, apparently, the right to her own body either.
Ever since the Kelso verdict I've come to the conclusion that the Supreme Court is just another tool of the power structure - of course they're going to side with the government, they're signing their paychecks and funding their pensions! Sure, on paper they're on the court for life, but I bet in reality significant pressure can be brought to bear on a justice who makes a number of "incorrect" decisions. What is really needed is a court made up of a combination of government and private members to decide cases where governmental restrictions clash with civil liberties. I don't know what you do in the case of a tie, though. Take a Mulligan?
I'm already paying the bill - to my cable company, something like $100/month for a collection of channels, perhaps 10% of which I actually want to get and the rest of which come "in the package." But I digress. Perhaps you're too young to remember, or maybe you just forgot, but I recall as a kid in NY that we got a cable system that was commercial free (Wometco Home Theater) - the cable bill was supposed to be a substitute for the commercials. Now I'm pay the cable bill and getting the commercials - and let me say, I don't see it as an improvement.
Actually, it's even harder to get a file off a classified network than that. At least where I work, any CD or DVD burned off a classified network is automatically classified at the same level as the network it came from. If you want to move a file to an unclassified network from a classified one, that process is known as a downgrade and requires the entire file to inspected as PLAIN TEXT. What about.doc or.ppt files you ask? It can't be done - there's no approved process for it. Actually, that's not 100% true - you (meaning someone with proper permissions) can print the file in it's entirety, read it over, and scan it onto an unclassified network using an optical scanner.
Call me a neanderthal, but I like newspapers. I'm unhappy at the thought that the day will come, and it will come, when I no longer get a Sunday newspaper, but something like a Sunday pdf that I look at on my laptop or my Kindle or whatever. My wife an I like flipping through the Sunday paper over pancakes, handing sections back and forth, pointing out stories to each other, she likes cutting coupons, flipping through the sales circulars. I just don't think all that works as well in E-form.
I'm not even sure there is a man in the loop on these things. The computer calculates the charges and the bill is mailed. When I was in college the guy in the room next door to be got a phone bill that arrived UPS - it was something like 11,000 pages long and totaled many tens of thousands of dollars. This was in the days when you had phone access numbers, and clearly his had been pirated as calls were registered literally every minute for almost the entire month. Certainly there isn't some drone somewhere who would look at such a bill and think to himself "let's just send it and see if he pays it."
I'm sick of the attitude "we've got stuff to pay for and we need to figure out how to raise revenue to do it" regardless of how they choose to raise it. Here's a novel approach to government: we've got X dollars, how can we spend it to maximize the quality of life of our citizens? I don't get to randomly pull in more money from secondary sources if I decide I want a bigger TV this year, so why should the government?
Well, I'm working with statistics of one incident (and I'm not in his head in any case), but I believe in that particular instance the boy in question wasn't learning the material (though tutoring was available free of charge after school hours), and he preferred to look like he didn't care and play the clown when the alternative was looking stupid in front of his classmates. He's still responding to peer pressure (better to look cool than stupid) but just in a different way.
Slashdot Mirror
Though illegal immigration is definitely a verboten subject in American politics, it's not the biggest reason why it is not discussed in connection with overpopulation. The government needs a populous continually infused with younger workers, and it frankly doesn't care where they come from or about the long term impact of overpopulation when compared against the immediate problem of an aging population. Who's going to pay for the retiree benefits of social security and medicare? Who's going to actually take care of all the old people in hospitals and nursing homes? The younger workers!
Every time I go through the airport, and regrettably my job has recently involved a fair amount of travel, I'm struck my how pointless the whole security drama is. They're seizing closed soda cans, sealed bottles of water, women are removing flip flops with like 1/4" soles, they're hassling a 90 year old guy over a bottle of eyedrops because he doesn't have it in a quart sandwich bag. Did someone somewhere tell them that the bigger dicks they are, the more pointless inconvenience they create, the more people are going to believe they're safer? Not that it's possible, but I find myself wondering how an airline that advertised itself has having zero security checks would do. It would be an interesting indicator of just how big a terrorist target the average person believes a plane to be.
Oblig: Why did you blow up the building? Because you made a phone call!
I agree with you completely, but if there's some mechanism to produce such change I don't see it. Just to take an example with which I'm familiar, say you're a large defense contractor and you want to sell something to Saudi Arabia. That's absolutely going to require a little something to their defense minister to even get your proposal in the door. You don't want to pay to play? Fine - Raytheon/BAE Systems/Lockheed/Kollsman/Northrop/etc etc etc are all perfectly willing to take your place. Enforcement of the rules is spotty at best. For every company that gets caught, a dozen more just did business, and the US doesn't necessarily even want to catch you. Oh, on paper they do, but in reality you're talking billions of dollars of taxable income, and if it doesn't go to a US contractor, China/Russia/India/Japan/etc etc etc are more than willing to fill the void. Unless you suddenly create a worldwide attack of conscience and morals, I'm not even certain how change can begin to happen.
And it's naive to think otherwise. You want to do serious governmental business in Saudi Arabia/Egypt/Jordan? Some shiek/prince/royal family member is going to get some quid pro quo. And quite frankly it's more or less true in America as well. You think those Congressional reelection campaign coffers are going to fill themselves?
My nephew was given a computer by his school. What he uses it for is to play games - in class, at home - and his grades have never been more abysmal. It's the squarely the fault of my sister that he's not getting his homework done, but people are kidding themselves if they think that computers are going to magically make underperforming students into powerhouses of scholarship. A laptop may make a good student great, but it will likely not make a poor student measurably better.
I just went through an audit, thank you very much, originally flagged because of an error by some IRS data entry clerk in San Diego. When I pointed out their error (with literally quintuplicate notarized documentaton to back it up), they decided to go on a fishing expedition for the previous seven years - thank the lords of Kobol that I'm anal about keeping every scrap of tax related paperwork. Oh, and FYI, I'm squeakly clean. Let's see a few members of our esteemed leadership go through that.
Why is this modded funny? It's just about the only solution that makes any real sense. Close social security, and people who really need it end up on welfare instead. How would that be any different from "means testing" which is what is almost certain to happen anyway? The alternative seems to be to (a) tax present workers to death, virtually guarenteeing that they'll need SS when they retire, and then wash, rinse, and repeat with the next generation or (b) prop up SS by printing more fake government money and let the next generation figure out how to repay the debt (hint: see (a)).
Free seems to me to still be too expensive to deal with M$ latest bug laden release (at least up until the first or second serious patch comes along). I didn't move from 98 to XP for my machine until SP1 came out. I wonder if they'd be willing to pay me to live through their forced release growing pains.
It's been something like 20 years, but I did Rydberg atom work (using Helium atoms) back in graduate school (another student was running the vacuum rig, and I was providing the lasers for excitation and containment). As the previous poster wrote, a Rydberg atom has a single electron up in an energy state so high that it is almost unrelated to the atom which (weakly) holds it. The creation of a Rydberg molecule allows for the confirmation of a number of quantum mechanical oddities - things that were predicted by theory but couldn't be measured in a lab. It can also allow some real insight into the nature of shared bonds between atoms in a molecule and studies of weak electromagnetic forces. The Rydberg atoms themselves allowed for interactions involving electrons that were essentially at a zero kinetic energy state, teetering on the edge of a relatively enormous potential well (which is why they tend to last such a short period of time before de-excitation to some lower state).
This is certainly the first instance of Xray production from an FEL, but it's a far cry from the first Xray laser. While it's true that the SDI lasers were self-destructive, sub-10nm lasers have been produced from a number of modified atomic plasmas in sustainable laser formats http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/reports/1996-1997/pdf/16.pdf. Sorry about the pdf.
No doubt I'm hundred of times less savvy about computers than many people here, but couldn't he have just done this from an internet cafe or a public library or a wireless spot in a hotel lobby or $tarbucks and avoided all these problems? To me it seems like a kidnapper who demands the ransom be delivered to his actual home address.
No they wouldn't. Google has an estimated $15.85B cash on hand, at least as of Dec 31, 2008. (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=Goog) At a rate of $2M a day, they have enough cash to last them more than 21 years, and that's if they don't bring in a single dollar in the meantime.
For the past seven or eight years I've been running three computers at my house each with Windows XP. When one dies, I buy parts and build myself another one and move XP to it. I've had no incentive to buy a new copy of XP or even try Vista, and I suspect the same will be true of 7 as well.
Is that right? I honestly don't know. If I buy music through iTunes and put it on my ipod, can I turn around, buy another ipod, put that music on that ipod, and give it away? Or are you saying that he bought music, put it on that ipod, gave the ipod to the Queen, and then deleted it from his system? Because I think that's the only way that what he did could be legal (provided we're talking about not free music here). I believe that you buy a license for a song for your exclusive use - I cannot make copies in any medium (ipod, burn a CD, whatever) and give it away. Or does that fall under some kind of fair use, like mix tapes used to? Is he limited to some number of copies that he can give away? If he and Michelle both have that music on their ipods, can he still give it to the Queen, or is even that the same question because they're married? At this point the law seems to me, a complete layman, to be so convoluted that I no longer know when I'm breaking the law. Does someone who has a greater grasp of these billion shades of gray care to enlighten me?
Hmmm. Is there a copyright issue here (assuming that all the music on the ipod was not open source)? Can I legally hook an ipod to my computer, load it with music from my iTunes, and give the ipod away? How is that any different from making copies of CDs that I own and giving those copies away?
As a first responder to a car accident one of the first things I do is shut the car off - almost always the car is still in gear, and the last thing I need is to have that car move while I'm tending to a patient. Now I've got to, what, find their RFID and throw it out the window? What if, because of the way their body is positioned I can't get into their pockets without moving them? What if they keep it on a string attached to their cell phone and in the accident it flew down the floorboards somewhere? "Convenience" of the operator aside, give me a key any day.
This is the first post I've seen that mentions the fact that she didn't tell them to fuck off. I'm certain that as a 13 year old I would have opened my backpack, turned out my pockets, and perhaps if I were in a particularly charital mood pulled my shirt out of my pants. That's it. Otherwise I would have walked out, and if detained, would have called 911. Her search reads as a slightly less distasteful version of the rape from Clockwork Orange. How did a child come to decide it was acceptable to have anyone short of a doctor performing a medical exam strip her naked? Are children so cowed by authority now? The downside of course being that if the court sides with the school, then I guess she was right and she had no recourse, or, apparently, the right to her own body either.
Ever since the Kelso verdict I've come to the conclusion that the Supreme Court is just another tool of the power structure - of course they're going to side with the government, they're signing their paychecks and funding their pensions! Sure, on paper they're on the court for life, but I bet in reality significant pressure can be brought to bear on a justice who makes a number of "incorrect" decisions. What is really needed is a court made up of a combination of government and private members to decide cases where governmental restrictions clash with civil liberties. I don't know what you do in the case of a tie, though. Take a Mulligan?
I'm already paying the bill - to my cable company, something like $100/month for a collection of channels, perhaps 10% of which I actually want to get and the rest of which come "in the package." But I digress. Perhaps you're too young to remember, or maybe you just forgot, but I recall as a kid in NY that we got a cable system that was commercial free (Wometco Home Theater) - the cable bill was supposed to be a substitute for the commercials. Now I'm pay the cable bill and getting the commercials - and let me say, I don't see it as an improvement.
Actually, it's even harder to get a file off a classified network than that. At least where I work, any CD or DVD burned off a classified network is automatically classified at the same level as the network it came from. If you want to move a file to an unclassified network from a classified one, that process is known as a downgrade and requires the entire file to inspected as PLAIN TEXT. What about .doc or .ppt files you ask? It can't be done - there's no approved process for it. Actually, that's not 100% true - you (meaning someone with proper permissions) can print the file in it's entirety, read it over, and scan it onto an unclassified network using an optical scanner.
Call me a neanderthal, but I like newspapers. I'm unhappy at the thought that the day will come, and it will come, when I no longer get a Sunday newspaper, but something like a Sunday pdf that I look at on my laptop or my Kindle or whatever. My wife an I like flipping through the Sunday paper over pancakes, handing sections back and forth, pointing out stories to each other, she likes cutting coupons, flipping through the sales circulars. I just don't think all that works as well in E-form.
I'm not even sure there is a man in the loop on these things. The computer calculates the charges and the bill is mailed. When I was in college the guy in the room next door to be got a phone bill that arrived UPS - it was something like 11,000 pages long and totaled many tens of thousands of dollars. This was in the days when you had phone access numbers, and clearly his had been pirated as calls were registered literally every minute for almost the entire month. Certainly there isn't some drone somewhere who would look at such a bill and think to himself "let's just send it and see if he pays it."
I'm sick of the attitude "we've got stuff to pay for and we need to figure out how to raise revenue to do it" regardless of how they choose to raise it. Here's a novel approach to government: we've got X dollars, how can we spend it to maximize the quality of life of our citizens? I don't get to randomly pull in more money from secondary sources if I decide I want a bigger TV this year, so why should the government?
Well, I'm working with statistics of one incident (and I'm not in his head in any case), but I believe in that particular instance the boy in question wasn't learning the material (though tutoring was available free of charge after school hours), and he preferred to look like he didn't care and play the clown when the alternative was looking stupid in front of his classmates. He's still responding to peer pressure (better to look cool than stupid) but just in a different way.