There are eleven million illegal immigrants in the US. That number is falling, and has been for some while. However, you're still talking about deporting more people than live in the state of Georgia. Are you going to pay for that? How do you imagine you would begin rounding people up? Are you going to start demanding citizenship papers from anyone with brown skin? Do you imagine you will be able to do that without mistakes and massive rights violations? Honestly, if that is really a goal of yours, I feel badly for you, because the logistics and legal challenges alone are probably insurmountable. I would also like to point out the inherent contradiction between supporting small government and calling for government action on an unprecedented scale.
Having many people do illegal things is not good for the rule of law. The problem however has gone somewhat outside the reach of the law. Expanding that reach is dangerous and expensive, especially when you consider the cost of removing those 11 million people from the economy. It kinda has a "Final Solution" vibe to it as well, but we'll forgo any direct comparisons.
Now I don't know if you have ever given up your language, your family, your job, and your culture, and tried to make life work in another country, but let me tell you from experience, it is unbelievably difficult. The people who can accomplish it are exceptional. I haven't ever heard of any particularly good reasons to restrict the free flow of labor, trade, ideas, and information. My ancestors came to this country to work and to build a better life, and they were spat on for it, but things have worked out well enough in spite of the fears prevalent at the time. From an economic standpoint it would seem to make more sense to get people registered and paying taxes than housing and transporting them, paperwork being generally cheaper than paperwork and plane tickets. All told, mass deportation sounds like an exceptionally stupid and spiteful move. There may be laws which are worthwhile to take an absolutist position on, where there is no good argument to be made for the opposing view. I'm not particularly interested in ruining our economy and society to pursue this goal of yours, and think your arguments for doing so are pretty poor, even if they are widely shared. However, my consolation is that while the electorate cannot be trusted to make an informed decision on the matter, the politicians are not so stupid. While there is certainly plenty of bluster about the issue (it's seemingly useful to rile people up), I don't believe there has been any actual legislation which attempted to do anything about it, nor do I believe that any will be forthcoming. The question of why conservatives keep voting for people who claim to oppose rights for queers and foreign-born persons, but who have a record of failure to do so, is left as an exercise to the reader.
The stories behind the creation of the Constitution are very fascinating and educational. The wisdom demonstrated is amazing. And most of it still applies today.
There were a few really important things they got wrong. First-past-the-post voting probably counts as a mistake; at the least there was no informed decision on that method. Choosing to place the onus for national defense on the militia fell apart very, very early. The adversarial system of justice made far more sense in an era where police did not exist, and given that people mostly no longer enjoy the right to swear out warrants, we should probably have far stronger standards of evidence for those.
Probably the Founders would be most appalled that we have installed soldiers in every city and given them official blessing to kill civilians at will. In the days of muskets and swords, what peacekeeping forces existed mostly carried wooden clubs. The first "Bobbies" in London carried clubs and wooden rattles to summon other police. Later they switched to whistles. The problems of violence they solved were small, and they were probably an improvement over the existing private security forces.
In the 19th century, there was a saying, "God made man, but Sam Colt made him equal." We, as a society, have yet to deal with the vast expansion of violent means available to the ordinary citizen. That may in itself have been survivable. However, there were no more restrictions on nascent police organizations from owning weaponry than any other citizen. So now we have given people employed by the State [a] guns, [b] inherent permission to use said guns, and [c] immunity from the consequences of using those guns as agents of the State. We've also militarized said force, given them broad surveillance powers, and stacked the justice system against the ordinary citizen, because America sees the limits of both intelligence *and* stupidity as challenges to be overcome.
The Founders considered standing armies to be inherent threats to liberty. Our foreign armies may or may not be a threat to liberty in general, but fortunately they have been little-used against the People. Our police forces on the other hand embody every sin that the Founders feared and then some. We have certainly failed to safeguard our rights, but we also must recognize that the Founders' vision was imperfect, or we will never be able to have a dialogue about fixing the Union.
It would be easy to dismiss your arguments about the Electoral College as an appeal to authority and appeal to tradition. Pretending that the Founders were perfect and that we're doing what they wanted is at the root of a number of huge problems this country is facing. "So shut the fuck up" is your only remaining rhetorical redoubt, but given that we just had an election in which either person winning could have been aptly described as a failure of democracy, maybe it's time you start thinking about what conditions *would* raise your doubts about our democratic traditions. Probably it's best though not to try to shut down discussions of how to make this country better, even if you think things are fine as they are.
I am not sure if we share similar opinions about the subject at hand but I feel this is a fair description of the issues at stake and -- unfortunately -- an insightful solution.
No matter what your political views are, those maps are very interesting. We have something of a culture war going on, and it may be about to escalate. War is the continuation of politics by other means...
Stick around for a minute and explain how this gravity-modification strategy for getting rid of dark matter doesn't suffer from the exact same problems as MOND.
Your post has a sort of reverse-l'esprit de l'escalier feeling to it, like if you had waited an hour or day you would not have written it. Try not to consider yourself too tightly bound by any vows of pique.
I can see how you might see Alaska as a kind of cherry-picking, but I would nevertheless say that glaciers melting in Alaska is unlike talking about one's local winters for a couple reasons. Firstly we're talking about an extremely large area with a wide variety of climate zones. Secondly, this change has been ongoing for centuries and the key observation is not that it is happening per se but the accelerated rate in the last few decades (say, 1970-present). Thirdly, it is a fundamental prediction of AGW that the climate change will be more dramatic at the poles, and all of that aside, again, this is happening to the vast majority of icefields and glaciers all over the globe, not just Alaska.
That H2O has a feedback effect proceeds directly from a few of its properties. Liquid water is superabundant on Earth, it takes very little provocation for it to become part of the atmosphere, it is a powerful greenhouse gas, and air can hold exponentially more water as it heats up. Carbon dioxide isn't needed to have a runaway positive feedback cycle, water will do that all by itself. The real question is why we haven't already had a runaway warming scenario. Basically, we're far enough away from the Sun so that we have a cold stratosphere, so that any water vapor reaching that altitude freezes and precipitates out, and thus we don't see buildup of water vapor in the upper atmosphere. Eventually, the Sun will become brighter and the upper atmosphere warmer, and Earth will enter a phase where the oceans will be slowly boiling off into space.
This feedback effect could probably be demonstrated with a home laboratory setup, since water, air, and a thermometer are pretty easy to find. The additional effect of CO2 should also be trivial to demonstrate. Outside the laboratory the issue with clouds is a little more complex, but as you note, clouds contribute to both cooling and heating. We also can scale down the potential impact of cloud cover for a number of reasons. We're mostly concerned with outgoing long wave IR, not visible light, which clouds don't do as much to stop, but also the troposphere is pretty well saturated with water vapor anyway (it's opaque to IR over the entire globe regardless of cloud cover). Also, the real warming effect is CO2 buildup in the upper atmosphere, so we don't expect water vapor to directly contribute to that issue one way or another. It's also not clear whether we can expect cloud cover to increase or decrease as a result of warming.
So we know how water vapor works, and we know that clouds won't cancel that out since water vapor is far more prevalent. CO2 doesn't have clouds and doesn't precipitate, and atmospheric carbon and H2O don't really react with each other, so the levels of the one wouldn't have anything to do with the other except that CO2 blocks IR in the upper atmosphere, which results in surface warming, which raises the amount of moisture in the air (etc). This is why CO2 is often referred to as the "control knob" on the climate. It does more or less nothing by itself, but there's this existing massive H2O feedback effect that happens to be sensitive to small changes in the energy equilibrium.
Just as an aside, the issue with Apollo 1 was not the oxygen per se. Pure oxygen is somewhat toxic, but it doesn't react with itself whether or not you introduce a spark. The issue with oxygen is that it reacts with nearly every other element in existence. Exothermically, natch. So the lethal combination is spark+oxidizer+fuel.
The science says that doubling the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere results in 3.7 W/m^2 of additional atmospheric forcing. This is generally held to equate to a 1 degree difference in global temperature. Water vapor is known to be an excellent greenhouse gas, and warmer air can hold an exponentially larger amount of water. There are vast reservoirs of liquid water on this planet. The feedback cycle is complicated but strongly positive. There are a number of other obvious feedbacks connected with melting ice.
You can talk about models and trust all day. People argued about Einstein too. His theories were even more controversial and less well-supported. You don't need rhetoric, you need facts. We've been looking for facts that would disprove AGW for about a century, and we haven't found them because they don't exist. Disputing global warming is very much like disputing gravity; you're inherently proposing wholesale violation of known physical laws.
Now, there is some room to argue about severity, but not much. Arrhenius calculated about a six degree increase per doubling of CO2, and a significant part of work of the last hundred years has been improving on that estimate. We know that the sensitivity cannot be less than 1 degree, and there are a bunch of really obvious reasons why H2O would magnify the effect. So now we've blown past 400ppm and show no signs of stopping. We don't need a model to figure out what's going to happen here. The model is to figure out how quickly this is going to happen. We're already seeing lots of melting glaciers. I grew up in Alaska, and even in the span of my life the change has been dramatic. When you're standing on the spot where several cubic miles of ice has been for the last few millennia, and that ice has completely vanished to the point where the glacier is no longer even visible, and that change happened in ten years, it becomes very hard to dispute that the world is changing dramatically. The entire state of Alaska is melting, particularly on the tidewater and low alpine glaciers which are more accessible and noticeable. The same thing is happening with damn near every glaciated area in the world.
It is not enough to suggest the models are inaccurate. You are in need of some fact which shows they are wrong. Then you can start trying to reconcile the observed warming with your theory. Alternately you could examine the published research to find out whether improvements could be made to the models. You know, like all the rest of those climate scientists. Your trust issues are the result of your choices. You have chosen to elevate your own doubt over empirical fact. So now you have put yourself in the position of picking and choosing what parts of the world to believe in. Personally I try not to get into arguments with reality, but if you do then being labeled a "denier" is probably the least of your problems.
By making solar a competitive solution, the US has encouraged a competitive market for solar manufacturers, who are coming up with innovative products. Mass adoption can be trusted to drive down costs due to economies of scale. If you think that solar will eventually be viable, what is the problem with investing in it now?
In the longest term, solar power seems like an inevitable necessity. The Sun supplies too much energy for it not to be a major component of our energy production. From that perspective, insisting on this technology spending another few decades as a laboratory curiosity (like fusion) seems a little shortsighted. Development is going to come faster if there's money to be made doing so. If that's the future we want, and we can afford the subsidy, we should continue to subsidize solar power.
Honestly, the source is pretty irrelevant. If they didn't get that from Google they would find some other way. Really it sounds more like Schmidt has a "disrupt the market" idea of organizing a political campaign like a software startup. Probably there are about three ways that one could accomplish such a thing: using techniques adapted from those in use at Google, using techniques adapted from the Democrats' campaigns in 2008 and 2012, and of course they could always invent new code and techniques for the purpose.
At some point these attempts to ferret out our collective political opinions raise questions about our Democracy, but so far I don't think there have been too many people suggesting that advertising eliminates personal agency. Also, political opinions may be different from a privacy perspective in that they are less useful if they are not expressed, so there is a lower downside to disclosure. As a society we seem to accept some sort of (optional) affiliation disclosure in the form of voter registration. It must also be stressed that while Google can be presumed to have a pretty complete dataset on American voters, they are far from the only people with that capability. However, it's also not clear how much additional value this brings over such facts as your age, residence, gender, and ethnicity which we consider to be public knowledge.
There are legitimate questions to be asked about political machines and their role in our democracy. There is a lot of nuance to be considered. Manic ranting about how Google is evil is great to engage voters' emotions while leaving their intellects disengaged, but it's a complete distraction from the real issues. And for what it's worth, the Republican party does the exact same thing, they're just not quite as adept at it.
Really I think that the idea of preventing people from compiling large voter datasets is naive, and possibly even foolish. To my mind the country would be greatly improved by setting up voting rules which encourage a multitude of political parties, and I believe our first change there should be to ditch "first past the post" voting. The issues of power and control are magnified by the size of the political party, while at the same time real choice is diminished.
If all you are interested in is a Two Minutes Hate against a prominent corporate entity, then I suppose your ilk have the floor. I think there are more important issues at stake, however.
I have two systems at home, one running Mint and one running Debian with the Cinnamon desktop. Unless there are some specific PPA repositories you are interested in, I would probably prefer Debian+Cinnamon over Mint. The Mint devs have proven to be a little more flaky than they should be. Notably, their site was hacked, they introduced some stupid package name conflicts, and their LMDE project has been a complete mess -- I think at one point it was going to be a rolling release based on Debian Unstable, but they were forced to go back to a normal release schedule. Cinnamon isn't bad, it just seems like the Mint management guys have flubbed it on occasion, and I really want the people I'm pulling packages from to have their stuff together.
Another consideration might be Arch Linux, which has the best documentation of any Linux community. It is actually the best documentation on Linux that exists, as 90% of what it describes is applicable to other distros.
But just a tip, if you're going to get into using Wine at all, use PlayOnLinux to manage your app installations. It saves much time and expenditure of sanity.
Everyone is talking about this as if Eric Schmidt's involvement in this was somehow equivalent to Google being involved. Yes, Google is an ad company, and whatever else it may be, running for President is an ad campaign. I would hope Schmidt had some good experience with that. From what I can see the plan doesn't look appreciably different than what the Democrats fielded in 2012. Perhaps it's a little heavier on the profiling aspects, but there's no reason to believe they were talking about acquiring that data illicitly, or that anything actually happened as a result of this proposal. It looks like it would be an effective strategy. Maybe it's too effective or too intrusive to the point where we need some law prohibiting the mass collection of data, and maybe that would even be possible. At the moment however, there seems to be little reason to froth about this.
Yes, but in the real world polls are statistically valid indicators of public opinion, and politicians' views are strongly correlated with poll results. They are not perfectly correlated, but that's one of the reasons we have a republic, not a direct democracy. If your fundamental argument is that our democracy has failed then I suppose you have some boxes you can use. I would caution you that challenging the rules of the game after it's clear you're losing is likely to result in universal censure.
You're right. The press should be all for him, because he sells papers. Now if he would stop reacting to any hint of negative press like a stung bull, they might be able to see the financial angle. However, at the rate at which Trump's attacks on the media continue to escalate, are you really surprised he's not getting better press coverage?
Trump so far has not had to worry about what the media thinks of him, and vice versa. Now he has picked a fight with the men who buy ink by the barrel, and in point of fact, he has threatened all of them. I'm sure he would make wonderful headlines -- and he has promised to sue over every one of them. I can't imagine why he's not more popular.
By definition, Trump can either have extreme opinions or he can represent the majority view, but he can't do both. Getting elected is the art of getting lots of people from the middle of the political spectrum to agree with you.
Getting nominated of course is a different matter. To get nominated you just have to get a plurality of a subset of voters, and ones predisposed to agree with you at that. News organizations were also predisposed to like Trump. He sells a lot of newspapers, and drives a lot of pageviews. However, he seems to have mistaken "getting attention" for "getting votes", and even if everything else were going his way, what drives the media out of his corner is his decision to attack them for anything resembling negative coverage. Threatening lawsuits is probably not a good move there. Saying that as President you would push for more expansive libel laws is flat-out stupid.
Trump is socially pretty extreme. That's why people know who he is. It's possible to be socially outré as a politician (Churchill comes to mind), but pretty difficult. His politics are also pretty extreme, and that puts him at a mathematical disadvantage with the electorate. However, if there is a media conspiracy against him, [1] they don't have much work to do, given the above, and [2] he should probably have gone for a strategy of appeasement rather than aggression. There is an appropriate phrase here: "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel." Given that Trump continues to ramp-up his anti-media rhetoric, are you really surprised that the media is less inclined to support him?
You did not understand what I wrote, evidently. Rights, at least by your definition, are inalienable. They only exist because people agree they do. You can argue that they are "real world", but that is not a particularly meaningful term as you have used it. They are absolutely not empirical -- you cannot measure your right to free speech, for example. And yet there is an empirical analogue which you may be said to possess, which can be taken away, granted, or restored. The appropriate word for this is likely 'freedom'.
It is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with the idea that rights are independent of the real world, or with suggesting that they only have a notional existence: the same may be said for love, or morality, and all products of rational thought, including mathematics. Empiricism is also not without its flaws, though you'll pardon me if I encourage you to read more on the subject of epistemology rather than explain more fully. The point is that we must distinguish between these two types of truths, or you're likely to spend a lot of time arguing irreconcilable positions. Similarly, the difference in how truth is determined is the source of probably every argument of science vs. religion.
If arguing the undecidable is your entertainment, of course, by all means keep on as you are; one imagines a healthy level of ignorance would even help that endeavor. Even in that case, however, you may want to retain the idea that when two people are offering incompatible definitions of a concept, the chances are excellent they are not talking about the same thing.
You're arguing about rights as if they are some sort of Platonic ideal. It's important to reason about rights in this way, because they are part and parcel with our ideas of morality, and morality is not generally held to be subject to empirical revision. However, there is a difference between these absolute concepts and the actual real-world freedom to do something. Personally, I don't prefer rationalism or logic to empirical evidence. The concept of "inalienable rights" is simply not useful, since they are clearly violated wholesale, daily and globally. It would be nice if we could deceive ourselves to believe that we are progressing towards any of these ideals, but there is no evidence of that.
Your concept of Rights cannot be wholly dismissed. Still, while in my more honest moments I can't find a very sound basis to compare logical or moral truths with empirical ones, if your concept of the world conflicts with the world as measured and experienced, you should certainly recognize that you are not describing a real-world concept, and it could be argued that you are ipso facto wrong. Either way though, neither of you can win this argument because you're arguing about not only different truths, but different ways of determining what is true. Yet another argument that could be avoided by an undergraduate course in epistemology.
Full BS. If I create some content, it belongs me and not you, plain and simple. Just as if you buy a car, it belongs to you, not someone else. The only role government plays is ensuring, the content owner retains ownership. It's not legal fiction.
You clearly have no idea what copyright is. You would have a stronger claim if you suggested some sort of inherent right to attribution, but in the words of Jefferson:
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
If you create a physical work, you are more than welcome to sell or trade that specific book or image. You cannot physically control the idea itself, even with the aid of the government. The term "legal fiction" is therefore justly warranted. What copyright actually does is provide an exclusive right to monetize a particular idea. It could be argued that this is not necessary, since humanity in general and the arts specifically carried on very well without any such invention for many centuries. However, I feel that some form of copyright is probably a better idea than e.g. patronage for allocating resources to content creators.
Running a quick check using humans and software is not impossible. YouTube generates billions in revenue. I can't believe they can't hire people to police content, at least random checks, if 100% checking of all videos is too expensive.
You have yet to establish any sort of argument for why they should do any such thing, even assuming it were possible, which I do not grant -- the issue of whether a work is infringing is a legal problem, not a technical one. Not only does Google not have the obligation to determine the legal status of a work, they also do not have the right to do so, absent a specific agreement from the content owner. It is not to say that no part of the legal system may be automated away, but this particular problem is not remotely tractable.
Again, legally this is all very clear-cut, and no one is considering changing any of the laws here, or even pursuing any other service providers. Not only would there be wild outrage about introducing liability for infringement for service providers, but actually jeopardizing YouTube's existence would eliminate a billion dollar revenue stream that the content creators don't have to pay overhead costs for. We are not hearing cries for new laws, we are not hearing cries for the Department of Justice to investigate, we are not hearing cries for YouTube to be shut down. We are hearing cries about Google's profits. You yourself are only complaining about the monetary issues. This is a shakedown.
You are wrong. I don't really care if you like copyright or not, but they are responsible for serving copyrighted content. "Centuries of jurisprudence" is a joke.
Presumably you meant "infringing content". Despite your eloquent and well researched rebuttal, it's very clear you have a motivated misunderstanding of copyright. Given your passion for this argument and your inability to support it, I would advise you to keep arguing in the exact same way: you're doing wonderful work for the opposite side.
Google has absolutely no obligation to police any other party's copyrights, and the web would be a poorer place if they did.
A copyright is your own private monopoly on a piece of content. It is a granted right, and something of a legal fiction: we have collectively agreed to treat this non-scarce good as if it were scarce, to serve an economic purpose. We, collectively and severally, have no further obligations to you. Neither Google nor any other third party is responsible for your private property, absent a specific agreement to that effect. The DMCA makes no provisions that Google do anything more to protect your property than [a] not to block tools used to detect infringement and [b] to respond expeditiously to takedown requests. ContentID is a wholly voluntary program, whose primary purpose is to reduce the number of DMCA requests they have to process.
Forcing Google to police all content submitted would not only be contrary to centuries of jurisprudence, but it would probably kill off user-submitted content entirely. In point of fact, there's not been any clear ideas proposed on how exactly to do so, because the content industry knows very well that their position is legally indefensible. It's not like they have had any issues buying favorable legislation before, after all. This is a public campaign and not a K street one because they don't want a change in law, they just want more money. This is a shakedown, pure and simple.
I think your comments about the Constitutional aspects of this issue are spot on, but not quite the whole picture. I have elaborated on my concerns here, perhaps you could gratify me with your further opinion? In particular, I should like to note that there is no Constitutional justification for the police to bear arms (aside from the 2nd Amendment), that such was not envisioned by the Founders, and that in their capacity as war officers (as you adroitly term them) they fulfill all the fears that our Founders had relating to the tyrannies of a standing army. I do believe this now constitutes a Constitutional crisis, but of slightly different scope than you have identified.
The founders of this nation distrusted standing armies, viewing them as inherent threats to liberty. The Second Amendment was primarily established as a way to secure the ability of the People to defend their Nation. The burning of the Capitol in 1814 might well have heralded the death of the civilian militia: the defenders, though vastly more numerous, were unarmed or poorly armed, and completely failed to impede the British Army. Even before the War of 1812, with the purchase of the original six frigates of the United States Navy, we turned away from the path of the citizen militia, and since then we have gone so far away from the ideals of our founding as to have amassed the largest and most expensive defensive force that the world has ever seen.
There have been a handful of examples where the U.S. Military has been used against its own citizens, but overall the threat to (domestic) liberty has been negligible, although the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII could be an important exception to the rule. The Founders' fears of standing armies were completely mistaken -- or were they?
Until the middle of the 19th Century, guns were expensive, time-consuming to maintain and to fire, and police forces when they existed at all were armed with swords and clubs. During the middle of the 19th Century, however, we see a great shift in American society and culture. The Civil War spread both arms and conflict, and men like Samuel Colt both popularized and enabled gun ownership on a wide scale. It was (as far as I am aware) during this era that police forces were instituted -- and armed.
Today we have a national crisis. The country resounds with gunfire, and daily we hear of new atrocities, of acts of brutality, and of ever-greater police powers. I believe that we have taken the idea of the citizen soldier to its ultimate bloody conclusion, and that we must disband this hostile Army which has set itself over us. I believe we also have a duty to disband the Gun Culture or perhaps even to disarm ourselves as well, given the failure of the purpose of the 2nd Amendment and the examples of other countries around the globe. We have badly strayed from our founding principles. We have a new Civil War which is escalating daily. We need to drastically revise our society, starting with our Police.
So do you also agree with the Founders that standing armies are inherent threats to liberty? How are you on the Swiss military/militia? How would you feel about disbanding the Army and Navy?
The second Amendment was intended to protect the ability of the People to defend their nation. It can certainly be argued that it also includes a guarantee of personal safety, but if you're going to argue Constitutional integrity, then you should be prepared to reconcile the vast difference between our current society and that document intended. Personally, I see a trained, professional cadre of soldiers as being an absolute necessity, and consequently would look favorably on either some variant of the Swiss system, or a far greater restriction on gun ownership. Either way, I'm fine with taking an empirical approach to the situation, and since this seems to be a national issue the CDC seems well situated to conduct such studies. If you would like to take issue with empirical findings, do your own study. If your position is that this is a moral or rational issue not subject to empirical findings, then again, you are forced to reconcile past intentions with present conditions.
This isn't a huge issue with me. I'm from Alaska and know my way around a hunting rifle, and don't see any reason for those to be particularly restricted. While the military has at times been employed against the People, generally it hasn't been the huge issue that our Founders thought, at least in terms of domestic freedom, and most of the incidents of military violence against citizens have involved the National Guard, which at least approximates a militia. With the current conflict of personal safety versus national safety versus the strict adherence to the Constitution and the Founder's intentions, I think the most likely scenario is that the Constitutional right to bear arms will be further eroded and restricted, or preferably but less likely it will be amended to make explicit that we have turned aside from the path of the citizen soldier.
We as a nation need to have a talk about these issues. We have a lot of dead citizens, a huge standing army, and we are not being true to our founding principles in any sense. Something needs to give. Taking the empirical approach may in fact not be the correct path to a solution, but we do have a problem and we do need to solve it somehow.
It is not up to YouTube to police your copyrights. The ad-revenue goes to the content owner — the uploader, until proven otherwise. Feel free to sue them for it.
It was a neat trick whenever the recording industry got the FBI to investigate copyright claims. I understand it's a lot of work to try to insist that a certain set of bits are yours. I even understand that there are valid economic reasons why we try to pretend non-scarce goods are scarce. Trying to alter the law to force private third parties to police your copyrights is an exceptionally stupid move that will either force YouTube to make legal judgments about content ownership, or more likely to destroy user-submitted content entirely. It would also fly in the face of centuries of jurisprudence, which I interpret to mean that it has little chance of happening.
Lawyer up. If you think Google is not responding expeditiously to take down infringing material, sue them. It's your work, and your responsibility. The reason why this petition is not a class action lawsuit is because Google is operating entirely within the law. That the law is inconvenient to you is no one else's problem.
Then lets call it a force, man are you nitpicking.
We are not nitpicking. There has not been any force or thrust detected.
Actually we don't agree:D I'm kind of scientist. At least I had a very scientific school and university education. Error bars were once mentioned in a side note and we certainly understand something different than most on/. do. I'm meanwhile convinced that americans learn something different in school about "error bars" hence the strange posts regarding AGW etc.
Your education was incomplete. Quantification of error is fundamental to science, it's why physicists talk about "five sigma" or "six sigma" results -- there is always the chance that an observation is a measurement error, and unless you take steps to minimize that error, and determine how much error is in your measurement, you do not know whether you have measured anything at all. You may not have read any scientific publication which talked about error bars, but I'm willing to bet you've never read a scientific publication that did not discuss p-values, which is the same subject.
In my eyes it does not violate that law. You throw something out one way and get a reaction the other way. We only need to figure what the "something" is.
In this case it's slightly more subtle in that the claim is more energy (momentum) out than energy in, and no fuel expended. There really isn't any way this could be true without throwing most of physics out the window. I would be just as happy as you I'm sure if there was a halfway plausible theoretical explanation as well as the (very dubious) experimental results. Suffice to say that is not the case. At this point, not only is the evidence pointing the other way, but also if it works, it would be pretty trivial to construct an infinite energy device using the same principles. That unfortunately would cause more problems than it would solve, and not just theoretically. Honestly, it's fairly conclusive, at least until either there's a workable theory or credible experiments.
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There are eleven million illegal immigrants in the US. That number is falling, and has been for some while. However, you're still talking about deporting more people than live in the state of Georgia. Are you going to pay for that? How do you imagine you would begin rounding people up? Are you going to start demanding citizenship papers from anyone with brown skin? Do you imagine you will be able to do that without mistakes and massive rights violations? Honestly, if that is really a goal of yours, I feel badly for you, because the logistics and legal challenges alone are probably insurmountable. I would also like to point out the inherent contradiction between supporting small government and calling for government action on an unprecedented scale.
Having many people do illegal things is not good for the rule of law. The problem however has gone somewhat outside the reach of the law. Expanding that reach is dangerous and expensive, especially when you consider the cost of removing those 11 million people from the economy. It kinda has a "Final Solution" vibe to it as well, but we'll forgo any direct comparisons.
Now I don't know if you have ever given up your language, your family, your job, and your culture, and tried to make life work in another country, but let me tell you from experience, it is unbelievably difficult. The people who can accomplish it are exceptional. I haven't ever heard of any particularly good reasons to restrict the free flow of labor, trade, ideas, and information. My ancestors came to this country to work and to build a better life, and they were spat on for it, but things have worked out well enough in spite of the fears prevalent at the time. From an economic standpoint it would seem to make more sense to get people registered and paying taxes than housing and transporting them, paperwork being generally cheaper than paperwork and plane tickets. All told, mass deportation sounds like an exceptionally stupid and spiteful move. There may be laws which are worthwhile to take an absolutist position on, where there is no good argument to be made for the opposing view. I'm not particularly interested in ruining our economy and society to pursue this goal of yours, and think your arguments for doing so are pretty poor, even if they are widely shared. However, my consolation is that while the electorate cannot be trusted to make an informed decision on the matter, the politicians are not so stupid. While there is certainly plenty of bluster about the issue (it's seemingly useful to rile people up), I don't believe there has been any actual legislation which attempted to do anything about it, nor do I believe that any will be forthcoming. The question of why conservatives keep voting for people who claim to oppose rights for queers and foreign-born persons, but who have a record of failure to do so, is left as an exercise to the reader.
The stories behind the creation of the Constitution are very fascinating and educational. The wisdom demonstrated is amazing. And most of it still applies today.
There were a few really important things they got wrong. First-past-the-post voting probably counts as a mistake; at the least there was no informed decision on that method. Choosing to place the onus for national defense on the militia fell apart very, very early. The adversarial system of justice made far more sense in an era where police did not exist, and given that people mostly no longer enjoy the right to swear out warrants, we should probably have far stronger standards of evidence for those.
Probably the Founders would be most appalled that we have installed soldiers in every city and given them official blessing to kill civilians at will. In the days of muskets and swords, what peacekeeping forces existed mostly carried wooden clubs. The first "Bobbies" in London carried clubs and wooden rattles to summon other police. Later they switched to whistles. The problems of violence they solved were small, and they were probably an improvement over the existing private security forces.
In the 19th century, there was a saying, "God made man, but Sam Colt made him equal." We, as a society, have yet to deal with the vast expansion of violent means available to the ordinary citizen. That may in itself have been survivable. However, there were no more restrictions on nascent police organizations from owning weaponry than any other citizen. So now we have given people employed by the State [a] guns, [b] inherent permission to use said guns, and [c] immunity from the consequences of using those guns as agents of the State. We've also militarized said force, given them broad surveillance powers, and stacked the justice system against the ordinary citizen, because America sees the limits of both intelligence *and* stupidity as challenges to be overcome.
The Founders considered standing armies to be inherent threats to liberty. Our foreign armies may or may not be a threat to liberty in general, but fortunately they have been little-used against the People. Our police forces on the other hand embody every sin that the Founders feared and then some. We have certainly failed to safeguard our rights, but we also must recognize that the Founders' vision was imperfect, or we will never be able to have a dialogue about fixing the Union.
It would be easy to dismiss your arguments about the Electoral College as an appeal to authority and appeal to tradition. Pretending that the Founders were perfect and that we're doing what they wanted is at the root of a number of huge problems this country is facing. "So shut the fuck up" is your only remaining rhetorical redoubt, but given that we just had an election in which either person winning could have been aptly described as a failure of democracy, maybe it's time you start thinking about what conditions *would* raise your doubts about our democratic traditions. Probably it's best though not to try to shut down discussions of how to make this country better, even if you think things are fine as they are.
I am not sure if we share similar opinions about the subject at hand but I feel this is a fair description of the issues at stake and -- unfortunately -- an insightful solution.
No matter what your political views are, those maps are very interesting. We have something of a culture war going on, and it may be about to escalate. War is the continuation of politics by other means...
Stick around for a minute and explain how this gravity-modification strategy for getting rid of dark matter doesn't suffer from the exact same problems as MOND.
Your post has a sort of reverse-l'esprit de l'escalier feeling to it, like if you had waited an hour or day you would not have written it. Try not to consider yourself too tightly bound by any vows of pique.
I can see how you might see Alaska as a kind of cherry-picking, but I would nevertheless say that glaciers melting in Alaska is unlike talking about one's local winters for a couple reasons. Firstly we're talking about an extremely large area with a wide variety of climate zones. Secondly, this change has been ongoing for centuries and the key observation is not that it is happening per se but the accelerated rate in the last few decades (say, 1970-present). Thirdly, it is a fundamental prediction of AGW that the climate change will be more dramatic at the poles, and all of that aside, again, this is happening to the vast majority of icefields and glaciers all over the globe, not just Alaska.
That H2O has a feedback effect proceeds directly from a few of its properties. Liquid water is superabundant on Earth, it takes very little provocation for it to become part of the atmosphere, it is a powerful greenhouse gas, and air can hold exponentially more water as it heats up. Carbon dioxide isn't needed to have a runaway positive feedback cycle, water will do that all by itself. The real question is why we haven't already had a runaway warming scenario. Basically, we're far enough away from the Sun so that we have a cold stratosphere, so that any water vapor reaching that altitude freezes and precipitates out, and thus we don't see buildup of water vapor in the upper atmosphere. Eventually, the Sun will become brighter and the upper atmosphere warmer, and Earth will enter a phase where the oceans will be slowly boiling off into space.
This feedback effect could probably be demonstrated with a home laboratory setup, since water, air, and a thermometer are pretty easy to find. The additional effect of CO2 should also be trivial to demonstrate. Outside the laboratory the issue with clouds is a little more complex, but as you note, clouds contribute to both cooling and heating. We also can scale down the potential impact of cloud cover for a number of reasons. We're mostly concerned with outgoing long wave IR, not visible light, which clouds don't do as much to stop, but also the troposphere is pretty well saturated with water vapor anyway (it's opaque to IR over the entire globe regardless of cloud cover). Also, the real warming effect is CO2 buildup in the upper atmosphere, so we don't expect water vapor to directly contribute to that issue one way or another. It's also not clear whether we can expect cloud cover to increase or decrease as a result of warming.
So we know how water vapor works, and we know that clouds won't cancel that out since water vapor is far more prevalent. CO2 doesn't have clouds and doesn't precipitate, and atmospheric carbon and H2O don't really react with each other, so the levels of the one wouldn't have anything to do with the other except that CO2 blocks IR in the upper atmosphere, which results in surface warming, which raises the amount of moisture in the air (etc). This is why CO2 is often referred to as the "control knob" on the climate. It does more or less nothing by itself, but there's this existing massive H2O feedback effect that happens to be sensitive to small changes in the energy equilibrium.
Just as an aside, the issue with Apollo 1 was not the oxygen per se. Pure oxygen is somewhat toxic, but it doesn't react with itself whether or not you introduce a spark. The issue with oxygen is that it reacts with nearly every other element in existence. Exothermically, natch. So the lethal combination is spark+oxidizer+fuel.
The science says that doubling the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere results in 3.7 W/m^2 of additional atmospheric forcing. This is generally held to equate to a 1 degree difference in global temperature. Water vapor is known to be an excellent greenhouse gas, and warmer air can hold an exponentially larger amount of water. There are vast reservoirs of liquid water on this planet. The feedback cycle is complicated but strongly positive. There are a number of other obvious feedbacks connected with melting ice.
You can talk about models and trust all day. People argued about Einstein too. His theories were even more controversial and less well-supported. You don't need rhetoric, you need facts. We've been looking for facts that would disprove AGW for about a century, and we haven't found them because they don't exist. Disputing global warming is very much like disputing gravity; you're inherently proposing wholesale violation of known physical laws.
Now, there is some room to argue about severity, but not much. Arrhenius calculated about a six degree increase per doubling of CO2, and a significant part of work of the last hundred years has been improving on that estimate. We know that the sensitivity cannot be less than 1 degree, and there are a bunch of really obvious reasons why H2O would magnify the effect. So now we've blown past 400ppm and show no signs of stopping. We don't need a model to figure out what's going to happen here. The model is to figure out how quickly this is going to happen. We're already seeing lots of melting glaciers. I grew up in Alaska, and even in the span of my life the change has been dramatic. When you're standing on the spot where several cubic miles of ice has been for the last few millennia, and that ice has completely vanished to the point where the glacier is no longer even visible, and that change happened in ten years, it becomes very hard to dispute that the world is changing dramatically. The entire state of Alaska is melting, particularly on the tidewater and low alpine glaciers which are more accessible and noticeable. The same thing is happening with damn near every glaciated area in the world.
It is not enough to suggest the models are inaccurate. You are in need of some fact which shows they are wrong. Then you can start trying to reconcile the observed warming with your theory. Alternately you could examine the published research to find out whether improvements could be made to the models. You know, like all the rest of those climate scientists. Your trust issues are the result of your choices. You have chosen to elevate your own doubt over empirical fact. So now you have put yourself in the position of picking and choosing what parts of the world to believe in. Personally I try not to get into arguments with reality, but if you do then being labeled a "denier" is probably the least of your problems.
By making solar a competitive solution, the US has encouraged a competitive market for solar manufacturers, who are coming up with innovative products. Mass adoption can be trusted to drive down costs due to economies of scale. If you think that solar will eventually be viable, what is the problem with investing in it now?
In the longest term, solar power seems like an inevitable necessity. The Sun supplies too much energy for it not to be a major component of our energy production. From that perspective, insisting on this technology spending another few decades as a laboratory curiosity (like fusion) seems a little shortsighted. Development is going to come faster if there's money to be made doing so. If that's the future we want, and we can afford the subsidy, we should continue to subsidize solar power.
Honestly, the source is pretty irrelevant. If they didn't get that from Google they would find some other way. Really it sounds more like Schmidt has a "disrupt the market" idea of organizing a political campaign like a software startup. Probably there are about three ways that one could accomplish such a thing: using techniques adapted from those in use at Google, using techniques adapted from the Democrats' campaigns in 2008 and 2012, and of course they could always invent new code and techniques for the purpose.
At some point these attempts to ferret out our collective political opinions raise questions about our Democracy, but so far I don't think there have been too many people suggesting that advertising eliminates personal agency. Also, political opinions may be different from a privacy perspective in that they are less useful if they are not expressed, so there is a lower downside to disclosure. As a society we seem to accept some sort of (optional) affiliation disclosure in the form of voter registration. It must also be stressed that while Google can be presumed to have a pretty complete dataset on American voters, they are far from the only people with that capability. However, it's also not clear how much additional value this brings over such facts as your age, residence, gender, and ethnicity which we consider to be public knowledge.
There are legitimate questions to be asked about political machines and their role in our democracy. There is a lot of nuance to be considered. Manic ranting about how Google is evil is great to engage voters' emotions while leaving their intellects disengaged, but it's a complete distraction from the real issues. And for what it's worth, the Republican party does the exact same thing, they're just not quite as adept at it.
Really I think that the idea of preventing people from compiling large voter datasets is naive, and possibly even foolish. To my mind the country would be greatly improved by setting up voting rules which encourage a multitude of political parties, and I believe our first change there should be to ditch "first past the post" voting. The issues of power and control are magnified by the size of the political party, while at the same time real choice is diminished.
If all you are interested in is a Two Minutes Hate against a prominent corporate entity, then I suppose your ilk have the floor. I think there are more important issues at stake, however.
I have two systems at home, one running Mint and one running Debian with the Cinnamon desktop. Unless there are some specific PPA repositories you are interested in, I would probably prefer Debian+Cinnamon over Mint. The Mint devs have proven to be a little more flaky than they should be. Notably, their site was hacked, they introduced some stupid package name conflicts, and their LMDE project has been a complete mess -- I think at one point it was going to be a rolling release based on Debian Unstable, but they were forced to go back to a normal release schedule. Cinnamon isn't bad, it just seems like the Mint management guys have flubbed it on occasion, and I really want the people I'm pulling packages from to have their stuff together.
Another consideration might be Arch Linux, which has the best documentation of any Linux community. It is actually the best documentation on Linux that exists, as 90% of what it describes is applicable to other distros.
But just a tip, if you're going to get into using Wine at all, use PlayOnLinux to manage your app installations. It saves much time and expenditure of sanity.
Everyone is talking about this as if Eric Schmidt's involvement in this was somehow equivalent to Google being involved. Yes, Google is an ad company, and whatever else it may be, running for President is an ad campaign. I would hope Schmidt had some good experience with that. From what I can see the plan doesn't look appreciably different than what the Democrats fielded in 2012. Perhaps it's a little heavier on the profiling aspects, but there's no reason to believe they were talking about acquiring that data illicitly, or that anything actually happened as a result of this proposal. It looks like it would be an effective strategy. Maybe it's too effective or too intrusive to the point where we need some law prohibiting the mass collection of data, and maybe that would even be possible. At the moment however, there seems to be little reason to froth about this.
Yes, but in the real world polls are statistically valid indicators of public opinion, and politicians' views are strongly correlated with poll results. They are not perfectly correlated, but that's one of the reasons we have a republic, not a direct democracy. If your fundamental argument is that our democracy has failed then I suppose you have some boxes you can use. I would caution you that challenging the rules of the game after it's clear you're losing is likely to result in universal censure.
You're right. The press should be all for him, because he sells papers. Now if he would stop reacting to any hint of negative press like a stung bull, they might be able to see the financial angle. However, at the rate at which Trump's attacks on the media continue to escalate, are you really surprised he's not getting better press coverage?
Trump so far has not had to worry about what the media thinks of him, and vice versa. Now he has picked a fight with the men who buy ink by the barrel, and in point of fact, he has threatened all of them. I'm sure he would make wonderful headlines -- and he has promised to sue over every one of them. I can't imagine why he's not more popular.
By definition, Trump can either have extreme opinions or he can represent the majority view, but he can't do both. Getting elected is the art of getting lots of people from the middle of the political spectrum to agree with you.
Getting nominated of course is a different matter. To get nominated you just have to get a plurality of a subset of voters, and ones predisposed to agree with you at that. News organizations were also predisposed to like Trump. He sells a lot of newspapers, and drives a lot of pageviews. However, he seems to have mistaken "getting attention" for "getting votes", and even if everything else were going his way, what drives the media out of his corner is his decision to attack them for anything resembling negative coverage. Threatening lawsuits is probably not a good move there. Saying that as President you would push for more expansive libel laws is flat-out stupid.
Trump is socially pretty extreme. That's why people know who he is. It's possible to be socially outré as a politician (Churchill comes to mind), but pretty difficult. His politics are also pretty extreme, and that puts him at a mathematical disadvantage with the electorate. However, if there is a media conspiracy against him, [1] they don't have much work to do, given the above, and [2] he should probably have gone for a strategy of appeasement rather than aggression. There is an appropriate phrase here: "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel." Given that Trump continues to ramp-up his anti-media rhetoric, are you really surprised that the media is less inclined to support him?
Databases are rarely accepted as legal documents for some reason.
You did not understand what I wrote, evidently. Rights, at least by your definition, are inalienable. They only exist because people agree they do. You can argue that they are "real world", but that is not a particularly meaningful term as you have used it. They are absolutely not empirical -- you cannot measure your right to free speech, for example. And yet there is an empirical analogue which you may be said to possess, which can be taken away, granted, or restored. The appropriate word for this is likely 'freedom'.
It is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with the idea that rights are independent of the real world, or with suggesting that they only have a notional existence: the same may be said for love, or morality, and all products of rational thought, including mathematics. Empiricism is also not without its flaws, though you'll pardon me if I encourage you to read more on the subject of epistemology rather than explain more fully. The point is that we must distinguish between these two types of truths, or you're likely to spend a lot of time arguing irreconcilable positions. Similarly, the difference in how truth is determined is the source of probably every argument of science vs. religion.
If arguing the undecidable is your entertainment, of course, by all means keep on as you are; one imagines a healthy level of ignorance would even help that endeavor. Even in that case, however, you may want to retain the idea that when two people are offering incompatible definitions of a concept, the chances are excellent they are not talking about the same thing.
You're arguing about rights as if they are some sort of Platonic ideal. It's important to reason about rights in this way, because they are part and parcel with our ideas of morality, and morality is not generally held to be subject to empirical revision. However, there is a difference between these absolute concepts and the actual real-world freedom to do something. Personally, I don't prefer rationalism or logic to empirical evidence. The concept of "inalienable rights" is simply not useful, since they are clearly violated wholesale, daily and globally. It would be nice if we could deceive ourselves to believe that we are progressing towards any of these ideals, but there is no evidence of that.
Your concept of Rights cannot be wholly dismissed. Still, while in my more honest moments I can't find a very sound basis to compare logical or moral truths with empirical ones, if your concept of the world conflicts with the world as measured and experienced, you should certainly recognize that you are not describing a real-world concept, and it could be argued that you are ipso facto wrong. Either way though, neither of you can win this argument because you're arguing about not only different truths, but different ways of determining what is true. Yet another argument that could be avoided by an undergraduate course in epistemology.
Full BS. If I create some content, it belongs me and not you, plain and simple. Just as if you buy a car, it belongs to you, not someone else. The only role government plays is ensuring, the content owner retains ownership. It's not legal fiction.
You clearly have no idea what copyright is. You would have a stronger claim if you suggested some sort of inherent right to attribution, but in the words of Jefferson:
If you create a physical work, you are more than welcome to sell or trade that specific book or image. You cannot physically control the idea itself, even with the aid of the government. The term "legal fiction" is therefore justly warranted. What copyright actually does is provide an exclusive right to monetize a particular idea. It could be argued that this is not necessary, since humanity in general and the arts specifically carried on very well without any such invention for many centuries. However, I feel that some form of copyright is probably a better idea than e.g. patronage for allocating resources to content creators.
Running a quick check using humans and software is not impossible. YouTube generates billions in revenue. I can't believe they can't hire people to police content, at least random checks, if 100% checking of all videos is too expensive.
You have yet to establish any sort of argument for why they should do any such thing, even assuming it were possible, which I do not grant -- the issue of whether a work is infringing is a legal problem, not a technical one. Not only does Google not have the obligation to determine the legal status of a work, they also do not have the right to do so, absent a specific agreement from the content owner. It is not to say that no part of the legal system may be automated away, but this particular problem is not remotely tractable.
Again, legally this is all very clear-cut, and no one is considering changing any of the laws here, or even pursuing any other service providers. Not only would there be wild outrage about introducing liability for infringement for service providers, but actually jeopardizing YouTube's existence would eliminate a billion dollar revenue stream that the content creators don't have to pay overhead costs for. We are not hearing cries for new laws, we are not hearing cries for the Department of Justice to investigate, we are not hearing cries for YouTube to be shut down. We are hearing cries about Google's profits. You yourself are only complaining about the monetary issues. This is a shakedown.
You are wrong. I don't really care if you like copyright or not, but they are responsible for serving copyrighted content. "Centuries of jurisprudence" is a joke.
Presumably you meant "infringing content". Despite your eloquent and well researched rebuttal, it's very clear you have a motivated misunderstanding of copyright. Given your passion for this argument and your inability to support it, I would advise you to keep arguing in the exact same way: you're doing wonderful work for the opposite side.
Google has absolutely no obligation to police any other party's copyrights, and the web would be a poorer place if they did.
A copyright is your own private monopoly on a piece of content. It is a granted right, and something of a legal fiction: we have collectively agreed to treat this non-scarce good as if it were scarce, to serve an economic purpose. We, collectively and severally, have no further obligations to you. Neither Google nor any other third party is responsible for your private property, absent a specific agreement to that effect. The DMCA makes no provisions that Google do anything more to protect your property than [a] not to block tools used to detect infringement and [b] to respond expeditiously to takedown requests. ContentID is a wholly voluntary program, whose primary purpose is to reduce the number of DMCA requests they have to process.
Forcing Google to police all content submitted would not only be contrary to centuries of jurisprudence, but it would probably kill off user-submitted content entirely. In point of fact, there's not been any clear ideas proposed on how exactly to do so, because the content industry knows very well that their position is legally indefensible. It's not like they have had any issues buying favorable legislation before, after all. This is a public campaign and not a K street one because they don't want a change in law, they just want more money. This is a shakedown, pure and simple.
I think your comments about the Constitutional aspects of this issue are spot on, but not quite the whole picture. I have elaborated on my concerns here, perhaps you could gratify me with your further opinion? In particular, I should like to note that there is no Constitutional justification for the police to bear arms (aside from the 2nd Amendment), that such was not envisioned by the Founders, and that in their capacity as war officers (as you adroitly term them) they fulfill all the fears that our Founders had relating to the tyrannies of a standing army. I do believe this now constitutes a Constitutional crisis, but of slightly different scope than you have identified.
The founders of this nation distrusted standing armies, viewing them as inherent threats to liberty. The Second Amendment was primarily established as a way to secure the ability of the People to defend their Nation. The burning of the Capitol in 1814 might well have heralded the death of the civilian militia: the defenders, though vastly more numerous, were unarmed or poorly armed, and completely failed to impede the British Army. Even before the War of 1812, with the purchase of the original six frigates of the United States Navy, we turned away from the path of the citizen militia, and since then we have gone so far away from the ideals of our founding as to have amassed the largest and most expensive defensive force that the world has ever seen.
There have been a handful of examples where the U.S. Military has been used against its own citizens, but overall the threat to (domestic) liberty has been negligible, although the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII could be an important exception to the rule. The Founders' fears of standing armies were completely mistaken -- or were they?
Until the middle of the 19th Century, guns were expensive, time-consuming to maintain and to fire, and police forces when they existed at all were armed with swords and clubs. During the middle of the 19th Century, however, we see a great shift in American society and culture. The Civil War spread both arms and conflict, and men like Samuel Colt both popularized and enabled gun ownership on a wide scale. It was (as far as I am aware) during this era that police forces were instituted -- and armed.
Today we have a national crisis. The country resounds with gunfire, and daily we hear of new atrocities, of acts of brutality, and of ever-greater police powers. I believe that we have taken the idea of the citizen soldier to its ultimate bloody conclusion, and that we must disband this hostile Army which has set itself over us. I believe we also have a duty to disband the Gun Culture or perhaps even to disarm ourselves as well, given the failure of the purpose of the 2nd Amendment and the examples of other countries around the globe. We have badly strayed from our founding principles. We have a new Civil War which is escalating daily. We need to drastically revise our society, starting with our Police.
So do you also agree with the Founders that standing armies are inherent threats to liberty? How are you on the Swiss military/militia? How would you feel about disbanding the Army and Navy?
The second Amendment was intended to protect the ability of the People to defend their nation. It can certainly be argued that it also includes a guarantee of personal safety, but if you're going to argue Constitutional integrity, then you should be prepared to reconcile the vast difference between our current society and that document intended. Personally, I see a trained, professional cadre of soldiers as being an absolute necessity, and consequently would look favorably on either some variant of the Swiss system, or a far greater restriction on gun ownership. Either way, I'm fine with taking an empirical approach to the situation, and since this seems to be a national issue the CDC seems well situated to conduct such studies. If you would like to take issue with empirical findings, do your own study. If your position is that this is a moral or rational issue not subject to empirical findings, then again, you are forced to reconcile past intentions with present conditions.
This isn't a huge issue with me. I'm from Alaska and know my way around a hunting rifle, and don't see any reason for those to be particularly restricted. While the military has at times been employed against the People, generally it hasn't been the huge issue that our Founders thought, at least in terms of domestic freedom, and most of the incidents of military violence against citizens have involved the National Guard, which at least approximates a militia. With the current conflict of personal safety versus national safety versus the strict adherence to the Constitution and the Founder's intentions, I think the most likely scenario is that the Constitutional right to bear arms will be further eroded and restricted, or preferably but less likely it will be amended to make explicit that we have turned aside from the path of the citizen soldier.
We as a nation need to have a talk about these issues. We have a lot of dead citizens, a huge standing army, and we are not being true to our founding principles in any sense. Something needs to give. Taking the empirical approach may in fact not be the correct path to a solution, but we do have a problem and we do need to solve it somehow.
It is not up to YouTube to police your copyrights. The ad-revenue goes to the content owner — the uploader, until proven otherwise. Feel free to sue them for it.
It was a neat trick whenever the recording industry got the FBI to investigate copyright claims. I understand it's a lot of work to try to insist that a certain set of bits are yours. I even understand that there are valid economic reasons why we try to pretend non-scarce goods are scarce. Trying to alter the law to force private third parties to police your copyrights is an exceptionally stupid move that will either force YouTube to make legal judgments about content ownership, or more likely to destroy user-submitted content entirely. It would also fly in the face of centuries of jurisprudence, which I interpret to mean that it has little chance of happening.
Lawyer up. If you think Google is not responding expeditiously to take down infringing material, sue them. It's your work, and your responsibility. The reason why this petition is not a class action lawsuit is because Google is operating entirely within the law. That the law is inconvenient to you is no one else's problem.
Then lets call it a force, man are you nitpicking.
We are not nitpicking. There has not been any force or thrust detected.
Actually we don't agree :D I'm kind of scientist. At least I had a very scientific school and university education. Error bars were once mentioned in a side note and we certainly understand something different than most on /. do. I'm meanwhile convinced that americans learn something different in school about "error bars" hence the strange posts regarding AGW etc.
Your education was incomplete. Quantification of error is fundamental to science, it's why physicists talk about "five sigma" or "six sigma" results -- there is always the chance that an observation is a measurement error, and unless you take steps to minimize that error, and determine how much error is in your measurement, you do not know whether you have measured anything at all. You may not have read any scientific publication which talked about error bars, but I'm willing to bet you've never read a scientific publication that did not discuss p-values, which is the same subject.
In my eyes it does not violate that law. You throw something out one way and get a reaction the other way. We only need to figure what the "something" is.
In this case it's slightly more subtle in that the claim is more energy (momentum) out than energy in, and no fuel expended. There really isn't any way this could be true without throwing most of physics out the window. I would be just as happy as you I'm sure if there was a halfway plausible theoretical explanation as well as the (very dubious) experimental results. Suffice to say that is not the case. At this point, not only is the evidence pointing the other way, but also if it works, it would be pretty trivial to construct an infinite energy device using the same principles. That unfortunately would cause more problems than it would solve, and not just theoretically. Honestly, it's fairly conclusive, at least until either there's a workable theory or credible experiments.