The mailing list is public, go and check it. Alternately, this site was put together as a summary of the various positions and options. If I can characterize it, there was a strong desire to move away from sysvinit due to lack of features, bugs, and difficulty of maintenance. Systemd at the time was seen as the best of the alternatives, offering more features and easier maintenance, at the cost of compatibility with non-Linux systems.
Not that I have any great insight into the minds of developers, but I suspect that the decision might have gone otherwise if it were re-held today. I think there would be a stronger consensus against sysvinit, as even fewer people are interested in maintaining those scripts. OpenRC has had more time to mature, and as far as I know Upstart development has basically ended. Interestingly, OpenRC and systemd share a number of features, particularly in their heavy use of C libraries, for which OpenRC receives no criticism and systemd no end to criticism. Either way it looks like that, dependency resolution, cgroup support, and parallel startup have made everybody's minimum feature list. I'm sure it would have been an even more different story if cgroups/process tracking had been a part of sysvinit/POSIX to begin with, but as I understand they were mostly codifying existing practices rather than trying to actually create a good standard.
In any case, Debian moving away from sysvinit wasn't any more influenced by Red Hat than it was by Canonical. All options were on the table, and each of them had their proponents. There was somewhat more backlash against systemd than other options, but I don't think politics played much of a hand in the decision -- politics didn't have to maintain the code afterwards. And despite the popular clamor for sysvinit, most everyone else seems to have dropped it happily, so ignoring the populace seems to have been the right decision in that respect.
I believe that you're misstating the case. The merchants of Peak Oil doom were not arguing that there would be no new oil discoveries, but that the rate of new discoveries would not keep pace with increasing consumption. I was finding it hard to find good/recent graphs, but it seems like while consumption is flat or declining in the developed world, global oil consumption is still rising due to developing nations. What's the situation with discoveries?
You say the price of oil is rising, which allows for new methods of production. The current (frankly bizarre) glut in production aside, most people seem to agree that oil prices will rise in the future. To what degree are our economies dependent on cheap oil? How easy do you see the transition to a post-oil economy being? Are we at an end to "wars for oil" and the "petrodollar"?
The "conspiracy" part of these financial conspiracies is the silly/unnecessary element. It doesn't require collusion for one rich and powerful person to enact some change which will help other rich and powerful men, merely self-interest. It's generally substantially easier to get laws enacted which benefit a class to which you belong than laws which enrich yourself personally. Postulating a conspiracy generally adds little or no explanatory power, especially in the (typical) case where you conspire to do what you would have done anyway.
As far as the gold-based currencies are concerned, they seem to have been dropped repeatedly during war-time. Governments needed lots more money, but couldn't dig up a bunch of gold in a hurry. Going back to a gold standard would have lost a vital element of monetary control, and indeed, of sovereignty.
As an aside, Panama uses the US dollar as their currency. Technically it's the Balboa, and it's just pegged to the dollar, but they only mint Balboa coins; all their banknotes come from the US. Many Panamanians resent the past and current US influence in their country's affairs, and take this out on tourists. In my experience, when an irate Panameño is telling you to "Get out of my country!", digging a greenback out of your wallet and looking at it in an astonished manner is very communicative but still a bad idea.
It is actually a completely unreasonable position. No government will ever return to using commodity money. Some discussions of the issue here, here, and here. Probably any number of textbooks cover the issue as well.
Generally, just being subject to (large) volatility having nothing to do with the actual need for money for exchanges is a bad enough trait to disqualify it, without getting into any other issues. Anyone who is willing to ignore the problems with commodity money is put into the position of needing some alternate explanation for its abandonment by one and all. A conspiracy theory of some sort is a requirement; the exact form is immaterial. Lizard men are only slightly sillier than Rothschilds (Rothschildren?), Illuminati, Bilderbergs, Jews, or whichever other group our gold bug decides to blame: a difference of degree, not character.
All other justifications aside, I sure as shit don't need to pander to any given worldview in the context of a joke.
I'm sorry, are you suggesting that there is an infinite amount of oil, or that the production (biogenesis) of oil is greater than or equal to demand? Because otherwise, isn't "peak oil" a mathematical certainty? Or am I missing something?
That is not true. They're illegal because they skipped the entire immigration process. They cut the line. There's tons of immigrants that would love to come to this country legally, and they wait their turn while going through the process. Which is the only way it can be, unless you advocate having no immigration process whatsoever.
I would be very much in favor of having no immigration restrictions, as it happens. Free flow of labor is generally considered to be a good thing, as I understand it.
I'm not sure where your numbers are coming from
I googled "cost to deport a person" and clicked the first link. I had been expecting some number in the low five figures; the actual number was something like $28.5k. I've had acquaintances deported (to Bermuda, I believe), there was a substantial amount of time and paperwork involved.
Instead of devoting resources to finding these people and carting them out of the country, you devote resources to removing their reasons for being here and they'll leave of their own accord. Prevent them from getting jobs, or from utilizing government programs. This could be potentially achieved with a national ID system and harsher sentences for businesses using illegal immigrants as labor.
Having removed someone's ability to travel or make money, you imagine that they will be able to leave the country voluntarily? How do you imagine that will happen? And there's always going to be someone willing to employ people under the table -- I have experience to attest to this. The direct method is too expensive, but somehow an indirect method will be less expensive and just as effective? Somehow you're going to get people who are already ignoring the law to pay attention to it, without massively increasing police powers? At what point will more onerous laws simply provide more incentive to evade them? Why are you sure that there is a simple or inexpensive solution to making 11 million persons want to leave?
Secondly, another potential legislative solution would be a path to legalization. But again, this must originate in Congress, not with the President's fiat dictatorial power.
The President, law enforcement officers, and the People all preserve the right to selectively enforce law. This is a well-established principle of jurisprudence, and I believe there are several SCOTUS rulings to support it. As it happens, the program started by Obama does not in any sense confer citizenship or resident alien status, and is actually nothing more than a formal request for the CBP/INS to use their enforcement discretion for persons in that program. In other words, it's slightly better than bumwad as legal protection, and the next President could just as easily ask the INS to dispense with the program. Either way, despite what Republican leaders want you to believe, there is nothing actually illegal about the program. It's not like they're not happy to sue the Federal government given half the chance, and I'm sure they'd be just as willing to impeach Obama and his Cabinet, and his little dog, too. Don't mistake grandstanding for an actual legal challenge.
Frankly I don't think you even believe in conflating legal and moral issues; it's just convenient for you to do so at the moment.
Then you don't know me. I'm a firm believer in the civics process.
So before the Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage, was it immoral to have a gay marriage? Before the 13th Amendment, was it moral to own slaves? I think you're talking yourself into an absurd position. Your firm belief in the civic process apparently only applies to select parts of the civics process and seems to ignore the powers and delegated powers of the other two branches of government. Regardless, I'm not particularly interested in your views on the proper role of government; they aren't applicable to the subject at hand.
Living and working in a country is not typically considered an illegal or harmful action, whereas I believe killing people in the country you're in is typically looked upon with disfavor without much regard for circumstances. Your analogy gives great insight into your mentality, but it is fundamentally unsound. These people are "illegal" immigrants because of administrative policy and nothing more; it is very much not an issue of public safety (as speeding is). I would argue for more open immigration policies no matter the number of persons involved. The last figures I read gave something on the order of $30k to deport one person. Setting aside your hypothetical, that brings the price to remove all the illegal immigrants currently in the US as about $300 billion dollars, which would be on the order of $1000 worth of increased taxes to everyone. That does not change the moral argument, which I submit is still not in your favor, but it certainly puts hard economic limits on our ability to purge undesirables.
Of course there's alternatives. It's called the legislative branch of government. Just because the current executive branch would rather exert its unilateral will rather than find middle ground with the legislative doesn't mean the process doesn't exist.
If the effect of any legislative decision would necessarily be the same, then there should not be anything morally wrong with anticipating their decision and acting accordingly. I have great confidence in Congress' ability to ignore reality, morality, economics, and common human decency, but I am quite sure that anyone proposing $300 billion in new taxes would be lynched by his own party.
Frankly I don't think you even believe in conflating legal and moral issues; it's just convenient for you to do so at the moment. Legalizing or criminalizing drugs, immigration, slavery, or treason shouldn't have any bearing on their morality. If some detail of the law is the only thing distinguishing your position from simple racism then I suggest you find a bigger fig leaf.
I am not arguing that we should do evil in order to do good, I am arguing that violating an unjust law is a universal good, and a law that criminalizes eleven million persons is unjust on its face. I am also arguing that there is no alternative, which you conveniently ignored. Whether Congress decides to authorize treating these people as human beings is not a particularly interesting topic, and certainly has no moral bearing. However, if you were going to regale me with a story about how you plan to round up all these bad brown people, I am all ears.
As it happens, it's difficult to obtain numbers for whatever lift/propulsion system you're thinking about if you don't actually mention what it is. VASIMR looks like a wonderful propulsion system, with the minor details of needing 200kW worth of power supply and supercooled superconductors. Whatever power source you have is going to be very, very large and heavy. This paper goes into some detail.
Limiting ourselves to current technology, the case for a space tug is nowhere near as clear-cut as you're suggesting. It seems like it might be effective for some missions (e.g. ISS resupply) but even designing such a thing is very expensive, let alone getting it up there. If you assume an arbitrarily-scalable future-technology rocket engine I'm sure you can work out many solutions where it would be advantageous to push things around with it. It's even better if you assume that it's free and has an indefinite operating life. Ad Astra's papers (I won't say marketing material) make things look quite sensible. I wish them luck wholeheartedly and without sarcasm. However, until there is such thing as a space tug, the surest evidence against its viability is that no one has taken the trouble to build one yet. Give them a decade of real existence, and then you can lecture me on their economics to your hearts content.
Constant acceleration ships have been built. Deep Space-1
Deep Space 1 used an ion engine, which requires fuel, and is not in any sense a constant acceleration ship. There are a number of engines which can sustain a constant thrust for a long period of time, including ion engines and their close relations, but constant thrust always leads to increasing acceleration due to the fact that you are losing mass.
Most people would probably interpret a "1/100g ship" to mean something capable of producing that acceleration for arbitrarily long periods of time. This is unphysical: it cannot exist without violating conservation of momentum. To start talking about a real thing, you have to nail down what you're thinking of in terms of spacecraft mass and how long you imagine that this constant thrust should be maintained. Again, going back to the CPU analogy, it makes no sense to measure a CPU in gigabytes: it's "not even wrong". Now if you were to say you think someone should build a CPU which could add ten gigabytes worth of integers in one picosecond, you might be asking for something impractical, but it would at least make sense as a question. If you wanted a rocket engine that could accelerate a 10,000 ton ship at.1g for 10,000 years, that would be a case where it would at least be possible to say whether or not it was practical.
I'm saying the same thing over and over again in different words. You are deeply confused. Please take some time to figure out why.
There is no such thing as a "1/100g engine". There might be such thing as an engine which could maintain 1/100g over a specified period of time, with a given total mass and mass-to-fuel ratio. You need all the parts to even be making a sensible statement. It's fine to point out that small constant acceleration can lead to a large change in position/velocity over a long enough timeframe, but that actually has nothing to do with building rocket engines. Clearly we have rocket engines which can sustain acceleration equal or greater than g for some period of time, with some amount of lift capacity. So congratulations, what you want already exists. However, if you'd like to fill in a few more boxes in the rocket equation, we may eventually get to the point of understanding what it is that you're actually suggesting be built. Alternately, we must assume that you're asking for something either blatantly unphysical, or something that already exists, or (nonexclusive) that you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
Nobody is suggesting that our constant-g rocket will run forever.
The point is you're missing terms from your equation, and it's not sensible to describe a rocket engine in terms of acceleration alone: you need the other factors in the rocket equation: total mass, mass-to-fuel ratio, time, and effective propellant velocity. You can't escape dealing with those terms unless you have a reactionless drive, and that requires dispensing with conservation of energy. A "1G drive" is a meaningless concept, and I stand by the validity of my analogies.
See the difference? In the latter case, you don't have to keep launching the heavy but efficient propulsion system. It's as if all subsequent launches get a heavy but efficient propulsion system for free.
They don't get a heavy but efficient propulsion system for free. They get it for the initial launch cost, propellant, and more propellant to get it back to where it might be useful again. If your tug is heavy that would mean that it would need to be even more efficient to be economical. Without some plausible numbers to throw into a delta-v calculator I am afraid that I will remain skeptical.
This is one of the dumber things posted to slashdot. It's like suggesting that an over-unity device would solve our electric needs. If you have some magic box that never needs fuel, sure, you can go anywhere. In the real world your ability to go somewhere is limited by the rocket equation. Talking about spaceship engines in terms of acceleration is as meaningless as talking about CPUs in terms of gigabytes. You don't get to hand-wave away conservation of momentum.
There is literally no part of this idea that makes sense. Either way you still need to get your propellant to orbit in some manner, and having your "tug" move up and down in the gravity well just wastes twice as much fuel (2x delta-v). Adding nuclear power to this solves no problems and introduces others. Plus it's not like you can just park it somewhere convenient and take it up and down like an elevator.
I don't think you thought this through. If you want a space elevator, you kinda have to build a space elevator, and there isn't any trickery with boosters or fuel types that will free you from the tyranny of the rocket equation.
There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. What exactly is your plan to deport them? To round them up? Where are you going to house and feed them while you do? Are you going to build some sort of colossal prison-city?
It's all very well to talk about deportation, but it's not a practical idea at this point, and to even attempt to do so would be both ruinously expensive and necessitate the vast expansion of police numbers and powers. We would destroy our society in this vain and foolhardy attempt.
For my part, I have been an illegal immigrant before, staying on a tourist visa in Central America for several years*. I would still be there today, building a better life for myself, if I could have managed it. I was far from the only gringo there trying to do so. I can say from personal experience that it takes an exceptional kind of person to pack up and leave their entire family and try to settle in a new country, and many American families are also proud to attest to this. As far as I can tell, there is no economic or social argument to be made against the free flow of labor other than simple racism. I see no reason why this latest group of immigrants should not be granted the same opportunities our ancestors were. I believe that it is a moral imperative to do so, as well as patriotic. And not to belabor the point, but there really isn't an alternative: a wall might keep some people out, but the immigrants in the country now are here to stay.
* My reasons were complicated and not worth getting into.
It's a hoax. I modded it down in Firehose and am pissed it made the front page. That screenshot is from some page on NVIDIA's site, with an edited header. This is a non-story, and it should be blatantly obvious by now they have no interest in Linux interop.
The point is sometimes it is the victim's own fault.
The banks were the ones with criminal designs and motives. The people taking bad loans were merely stupid. The American people collectively and severally were ripped off both by the banking industry and the federal government, and you're complaining about how you got screwed because of your neighbors: what misguided myopia.
Your argument is as specious as the rapist suggesting that his victim's skirt was too short. The intelligence level of the victims of a crime is as irrelevant as their skin color. No one forced the banks to start offering NINJA loans to anyone who could fog a mirror. I understand you have this ego-supporting narrative about your own financial acumen in relation to this crash, but you are doing an injustice to your peers. If we were to reduce this to strictly legal terms, you're suggesting that the victims had some responsibility to ensure that their loans were a sound investment for the bank. Even if that were true (and it is not), the banks had a far greater responsibility to not make idiotic investments. The loan officers knowingly failed any due diligence required of their positions. Not only is assigning culpability to the victim of fraud legally indefensible, but it also contradicts your earlier statements: if you're going to deride people for making poor investments, does that not apply in greater force to banking establishments?
I'm sure you're a shrewd investor and clearly people who don't listen to you are bad people and deserve to have bad things happen to them. Your misanthropy aside, blaming people for being victims of fraud is still morally and legally indefensible.
This is all true. However, you seem to be exonerating the bank in only discussing the personal responsibility side of things. The loan officer absolutely knew that you would not be able to make payments. Why did he offer you that loan? Offering people loans they can't afford to pay interest on is a terrible way to do business.
Except if you can package the bad loans into a mortgage-backed security, have it rated AAA, sell it for a hefty profit, and leave some other sucker holding the bag. Or were you unaware that the banks made billions of dollars giving out these bad loans?
You're saying people should know better than the loan officer what kind of loan they need. Maybe that's even true, in an ideal world. In an ideal world, investment and consumer banking would have nothing to do with each other, removing incentives for banks to offer bad loans to their customers. In this world, stupid people still want houses to live in, most people don't know enough about loans to be able to contradict a loan officer or even to read the fine print, and banks don't always need to maximize loan repayments to maximize profits.
The people who got fucked hard in '08 were the entire world, and especially US citizens, who saw $10 trillion dollars worth of wealth disappear due to a massive amount of fraudulent securities. But go ahead and blame it on the victims.
Diffie testified in the NewEgg patent troll case and was grilled pretty hard by the attorney, specifically about the work and role of Ellis/GCHQ. He has never tried to deny them credit for their work, but in most practical senses, they didn't invent it.
"Dr. Diffie, you were not the first to invent public key cryptography, were you?"
"I believe that I may have been," said Diffie, speaking cautiously. "But perhaps you could be more specific?"
"In fact, a gentleman named James Ellis in England invented it before you, right?"
Diffie sighed. He seemed, suddenly, almost tired. He had heard this one before. "I spent a lot of time talking to James Ellis, and I can't figure it out," he said. "James Ellis did very fine work."
[...]
"So, in fact, according to the IEEE, someone else invented public key cryptography before you, correct?"
"I disagree," said Diffie. "Ellis' paper is in no sense enabling. [His partner] Malcolm Williamson's paper enables Diffie-Hellman, and it was an internal secret note written two months after I presented that at the largest computer conference in the world."
[...]
"The alleged prior inventors not only kept it secret but did very little with it," said Diffie. "In James Ellis' words to me: 'You did a lot more with it than we did.'"
[...]
"The short answer would be that James Ellis' work in 1969 and 1970 certainly does not teach the methods. Personally, I find that paper incomprehensible. I'm not clear how anybody became convinced of anything from it."
So what? It's not like there's a forum for meta-discussion here, and most of the discussions for any given article are tangential. The only time the moderators get involved is if the discussion is both off-topic and not worth discussing.
From your comment history it really seems like Twitter is more your style. Maybe you should spend some more time there rather than trying to drag this forum down to your level.
That's all very well and good, but satellite communications in those bands are regularly drowned out by the Sun here on Earth. One watt isn't going to be detectable from Mars, let alone any further bodies. At a distance of 1 light year, you're talking about 8.891Ã--10^-34 W/m^2. The strongest radio transmitter seems to be the 768kW transmitter at Lake Kickapoo, which would bring us up to 10^-28 W/m^2, but you'd still have to get lucky to notice that, due to that whole thing where the planet moves around.
The best case scenario is not good. There's a worse chance of being able to detect alien intelligence than there is of detecting intelligence in Congress. Some SETI guys were estimating that the SKA would be able to pick up an airport radar at 20 lyr, but others have taken issue with their figures, and I'm pretty sure they run more on optimism than sense. I think that if you actually took the time to investigate this matter, you would arrive at a similar conclusion
Slashdot Mirror
If you know enough to quote the original French (brioche is delicious btw) why did you bother attributing it to M. Antoinette?
The mailing list is public, go and check it. Alternately, this site was put together as a summary of the various positions and options. If I can characterize it, there was a strong desire to move away from sysvinit due to lack of features, bugs, and difficulty of maintenance. Systemd at the time was seen as the best of the alternatives, offering more features and easier maintenance, at the cost of compatibility with non-Linux systems.
Not that I have any great insight into the minds of developers, but I suspect that the decision might have gone otherwise if it were re-held today. I think there would be a stronger consensus against sysvinit, as even fewer people are interested in maintaining those scripts. OpenRC has had more time to mature, and as far as I know Upstart development has basically ended. Interestingly, OpenRC and systemd share a number of features, particularly in their heavy use of C libraries, for which OpenRC receives no criticism and systemd no end to criticism. Either way it looks like that, dependency resolution, cgroup support, and parallel startup have made everybody's minimum feature list. I'm sure it would have been an even more different story if cgroups/process tracking had been a part of sysvinit/POSIX to begin with, but as I understand they were mostly codifying existing practices rather than trying to actually create a good standard.
In any case, Debian moving away from sysvinit wasn't any more influenced by Red Hat than it was by Canonical. All options were on the table, and each of them had their proponents. There was somewhat more backlash against systemd than other options, but I don't think politics played much of a hand in the decision -- politics didn't have to maintain the code afterwards. And despite the popular clamor for sysvinit, most everyone else seems to have dropped it happily, so ignoring the populace seems to have been the right decision in that respect.
I believe that you're misstating the case. The merchants of Peak Oil doom were not arguing that there would be no new oil discoveries, but that the rate of new discoveries would not keep pace with increasing consumption. I was finding it hard to find good/recent graphs, but it seems like while consumption is flat or declining in the developed world, global oil consumption is still rising due to developing nations. What's the situation with discoveries?
You say the price of oil is rising, which allows for new methods of production. The current (frankly bizarre) glut in production aside, most people seem to agree that oil prices will rise in the future. To what degree are our economies dependent on cheap oil? How easy do you see the transition to a post-oil economy being? Are we at an end to "wars for oil" and the "petrodollar"?
The "conspiracy" part of these financial conspiracies is the silly/unnecessary element. It doesn't require collusion for one rich and powerful person to enact some change which will help other rich and powerful men, merely self-interest. It's generally substantially easier to get laws enacted which benefit a class to which you belong than laws which enrich yourself personally. Postulating a conspiracy generally adds little or no explanatory power, especially in the (typical) case where you conspire to do what you would have done anyway.
As far as the gold-based currencies are concerned, they seem to have been dropped repeatedly during war-time. Governments needed lots more money, but couldn't dig up a bunch of gold in a hurry. Going back to a gold standard would have lost a vital element of monetary control, and indeed, of sovereignty.
As an aside, Panama uses the US dollar as their currency. Technically it's the Balboa, and it's just pegged to the dollar, but they only mint Balboa coins; all their banknotes come from the US. Many Panamanians resent the past and current US influence in their country's affairs, and take this out on tourists. In my experience, when an irate Panameño is telling you to "Get out of my country!", digging a greenback out of your wallet and looking at it in an astonished manner is very communicative but still a bad idea.
It is actually a completely unreasonable position. No government will ever return to using commodity money. Some discussions of the issue here, here, and here. Probably any number of textbooks cover the issue as well.
Generally, just being subject to (large) volatility having nothing to do with the actual need for money for exchanges is a bad enough trait to disqualify it, without getting into any other issues. Anyone who is willing to ignore the problems with commodity money is put into the position of needing some alternate explanation for its abandonment by one and all. A conspiracy theory of some sort is a requirement; the exact form is immaterial. Lizard men are only slightly sillier than Rothschilds (Rothschildren?), Illuminati, Bilderbergs, Jews, or whichever other group our gold bug decides to blame: a difference of degree, not character.
All other justifications aside, I sure as shit don't need to pander to any given worldview in the context of a joke.
Found the gold bug!
Remind me again, was it the Illuminati or the Lizard Men who took us off the Gold Standard?
I'm sorry, are you suggesting that there is an infinite amount of oil, or that the production (biogenesis) of oil is greater than or equal to demand? Because otherwise, isn't "peak oil" a mathematical certainty? Or am I missing something?
That is not true. They're illegal because they skipped the entire immigration process. They cut the line. There's tons of immigrants that would love to come to this country legally, and they wait their turn while going through the process. Which is the only way it can be, unless you advocate having no immigration process whatsoever.
I would be very much in favor of having no immigration restrictions, as it happens. Free flow of labor is generally considered to be a good thing, as I understand it.
I'm not sure where your numbers are coming from
I googled "cost to deport a person" and clicked the first link. I had been expecting some number in the low five figures; the actual number was something like $28.5k. I've had acquaintances deported (to Bermuda, I believe), there was a substantial amount of time and paperwork involved.
Instead of devoting resources to finding these people and carting them out of the country, you devote resources to removing their reasons for being here and they'll leave of their own accord. Prevent them from getting jobs, or from utilizing government programs. This could be potentially achieved with a national ID system and harsher sentences for businesses using illegal immigrants as labor.
Having removed someone's ability to travel or make money, you imagine that they will be able to leave the country voluntarily? How do you imagine that will happen? And there's always going to be someone willing to employ people under the table -- I have experience to attest to this. The direct method is too expensive, but somehow an indirect method will be less expensive and just as effective? Somehow you're going to get people who are already ignoring the law to pay attention to it, without massively increasing police powers? At what point will more onerous laws simply provide more incentive to evade them? Why are you sure that there is a simple or inexpensive solution to making 11 million persons want to leave?
Secondly, another potential legislative solution would be a path to legalization. But again, this must originate in Congress, not with the President's fiat dictatorial power.
The President, law enforcement officers, and the People all preserve the right to selectively enforce law. This is a well-established principle of jurisprudence, and I believe there are several SCOTUS rulings to support it. As it happens, the program started by Obama does not in any sense confer citizenship or resident alien status, and is actually nothing more than a formal request for the CBP/INS to use their enforcement discretion for persons in that program. In other words, it's slightly better than bumwad as legal protection, and the next President could just as easily ask the INS to dispense with the program. Either way, despite what Republican leaders want you to believe, there is nothing actually illegal about the program. It's not like they're not happy to sue the Federal government given half the chance, and I'm sure they'd be just as willing to impeach Obama and his Cabinet, and his little dog, too. Don't mistake grandstanding for an actual legal challenge.
Frankly I don't think you even believe in conflating legal and moral issues; it's just convenient for you to do so at the moment.
Then you don't know me. I'm a firm believer in the civics process.
So before the Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage, was it immoral to have a gay marriage? Before the 13th Amendment, was it moral to own slaves? I think you're talking yourself into an absurd position. Your firm belief in the civic process apparently only applies to select parts of the civics process and seems to ignore the powers and delegated powers of the other two branches of government. Regardless, I'm not particularly interested in your views on the proper role of government; they aren't applicable to the subject at hand.
Living and working in a country is not typically considered an illegal or harmful action, whereas I believe killing people in the country you're in is typically looked upon with disfavor without much regard for circumstances. Your analogy gives great insight into your mentality, but it is fundamentally unsound. These people are "illegal" immigrants because of administrative policy and nothing more; it is very much not an issue of public safety (as speeding is). I would argue for more open immigration policies no matter the number of persons involved. The last figures I read gave something on the order of $30k to deport one person. Setting aside your hypothetical, that brings the price to remove all the illegal immigrants currently in the US as about $300 billion dollars, which would be on the order of $1000 worth of increased taxes to everyone. That does not change the moral argument, which I submit is still not in your favor, but it certainly puts hard economic limits on our ability to purge undesirables.
Of course there's alternatives. It's called the legislative branch of government. Just because the current executive branch would rather exert its unilateral will rather than find middle ground with the legislative doesn't mean the process doesn't exist.
If the effect of any legislative decision would necessarily be the same, then there should not be anything morally wrong with anticipating their decision and acting accordingly. I have great confidence in Congress' ability to ignore reality, morality, economics, and common human decency, but I am quite sure that anyone proposing $300 billion in new taxes would be lynched by his own party.
Frankly I don't think you even believe in conflating legal and moral issues; it's just convenient for you to do so at the moment. Legalizing or criminalizing drugs, immigration, slavery, or treason shouldn't have any bearing on their morality. If some detail of the law is the only thing distinguishing your position from simple racism then I suggest you find a bigger fig leaf.
I am not arguing that we should do evil in order to do good, I am arguing that violating an unjust law is a universal good, and a law that criminalizes eleven million persons is unjust on its face. I am also arguing that there is no alternative, which you conveniently ignored. Whether Congress decides to authorize treating these people as human beings is not a particularly interesting topic, and certainly has no moral bearing. However, if you were going to regale me with a story about how you plan to round up all these bad brown people, I am all ears.
As it happens, it's difficult to obtain numbers for whatever lift/propulsion system you're thinking about if you don't actually mention what it is. VASIMR looks like a wonderful propulsion system, with the minor details of needing 200kW worth of power supply and supercooled superconductors. Whatever power source you have is going to be very, very large and heavy. This paper goes into some detail.
Limiting ourselves to current technology, the case for a space tug is nowhere near as clear-cut as you're suggesting. It seems like it might be effective for some missions (e.g. ISS resupply) but even designing such a thing is very expensive, let alone getting it up there. If you assume an arbitrarily-scalable future-technology rocket engine I'm sure you can work out many solutions where it would be advantageous to push things around with it. It's even better if you assume that it's free and has an indefinite operating life. Ad Astra's papers (I won't say marketing material) make things look quite sensible. I wish them luck wholeheartedly and without sarcasm. However, until there is such thing as a space tug, the surest evidence against its viability is that no one has taken the trouble to build one yet. Give them a decade of real existence, and then you can lecture me on their economics to your hearts content.
Constant acceleration ships have been built. Deep Space-1
Deep Space 1 used an ion engine, which requires fuel, and is not in any sense a constant acceleration ship. There are a number of engines which can sustain a constant thrust for a long period of time, including ion engines and their close relations, but constant thrust always leads to increasing acceleration due to the fact that you are losing mass.
Most people would probably interpret a "1/100g ship" to mean something capable of producing that acceleration for arbitrarily long periods of time. This is unphysical: it cannot exist without violating conservation of momentum. To start talking about a real thing, you have to nail down what you're thinking of in terms of spacecraft mass and how long you imagine that this constant thrust should be maintained. Again, going back to the CPU analogy, it makes no sense to measure a CPU in gigabytes: it's "not even wrong". Now if you were to say you think someone should build a CPU which could add ten gigabytes worth of integers in one picosecond, you might be asking for something impractical, but it would at least make sense as a question. If you wanted a rocket engine that could accelerate a 10,000 ton ship at .1g for 10,000 years, that would be a case where it would at least be possible to say whether or not it was practical.
I'm saying the same thing over and over again in different words. You are deeply confused. Please take some time to figure out why.
There is no such thing as a "1/100g engine". There might be such thing as an engine which could maintain 1/100g over a specified period of time, with a given total mass and mass-to-fuel ratio. You need all the parts to even be making a sensible statement. It's fine to point out that small constant acceleration can lead to a large change in position/velocity over a long enough timeframe, but that actually has nothing to do with building rocket engines. Clearly we have rocket engines which can sustain acceleration equal or greater than g for some period of time, with some amount of lift capacity. So congratulations, what you want already exists. However, if you'd like to fill in a few more boxes in the rocket equation, we may eventually get to the point of understanding what it is that you're actually suggesting be built. Alternately, we must assume that you're asking for something either blatantly unphysical, or something that already exists, or (nonexclusive) that you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
Nobody is suggesting that our constant-g rocket will run forever.
The point is you're missing terms from your equation, and it's not sensible to describe a rocket engine in terms of acceleration alone: you need the other factors in the rocket equation: total mass, mass-to-fuel ratio, time, and effective propellant velocity. You can't escape dealing with those terms unless you have a reactionless drive, and that requires dispensing with conservation of energy. A "1G drive" is a meaningless concept, and I stand by the validity of my analogies.
See the difference? In the latter case, you don't have to keep launching the heavy but efficient propulsion system. It's as if all subsequent launches get a heavy but efficient propulsion system for free.
They don't get a heavy but efficient propulsion system for free. They get it for the initial launch cost, propellant, and more propellant to get it back to where it might be useful again. If your tug is heavy that would mean that it would need to be even more efficient to be economical. Without some plausible numbers to throw into a delta-v calculator I am afraid that I will remain skeptical.
This is one of the dumber things posted to slashdot. It's like suggesting that an over-unity device would solve our electric needs. If you have some magic box that never needs fuel, sure, you can go anywhere. In the real world your ability to go somewhere is limited by the rocket equation. Talking about spaceship engines in terms of acceleration is as meaningless as talking about CPUs in terms of gigabytes. You don't get to hand-wave away conservation of momentum.
There is literally no part of this idea that makes sense. Either way you still need to get your propellant to orbit in some manner, and having your "tug" move up and down in the gravity well just wastes twice as much fuel (2x delta-v). Adding nuclear power to this solves no problems and introduces others. Plus it's not like you can just park it somewhere convenient and take it up and down like an elevator.
I don't think you thought this through. If you want a space elevator, you kinda have to build a space elevator, and there isn't any trickery with boosters or fuel types that will free you from the tyranny of the rocket equation.
There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. What exactly is your plan to deport them? To round them up? Where are you going to house and feed them while you do? Are you going to build some sort of colossal prison-city?
It's all very well to talk about deportation, but it's not a practical idea at this point, and to even attempt to do so would be both ruinously expensive and necessitate the vast expansion of police numbers and powers. We would destroy our society in this vain and foolhardy attempt.
For my part, I have been an illegal immigrant before, staying on a tourist visa in Central America for several years*. I would still be there today, building a better life for myself, if I could have managed it. I was far from the only gringo there trying to do so. I can say from personal experience that it takes an exceptional kind of person to pack up and leave their entire family and try to settle in a new country, and many American families are also proud to attest to this. As far as I can tell, there is no economic or social argument to be made against the free flow of labor other than simple racism. I see no reason why this latest group of immigrants should not be granted the same opportunities our ancestors were. I believe that it is a moral imperative to do so, as well as patriotic. And not to belabor the point, but there really isn't an alternative: a wall might keep some people out, but the immigrants in the country now are here to stay.
* My reasons were complicated and not worth getting into.
It's a hoax. I modded it down in Firehose and am pissed it made the front page. That screenshot is from some page on NVIDIA's site, with an edited header. This is a non-story, and it should be blatantly obvious by now they have no interest in Linux interop.
It's a Slashdot tradition to have joke stories on April 1st. Think of it as payback for all the times you troll.
The point is sometimes it is the victim's own fault.
The banks were the ones with criminal designs and motives. The people taking bad loans were merely stupid. The American people collectively and severally were ripped off both by the banking industry and the federal government, and you're complaining about how you got screwed because of your neighbors: what misguided myopia.
Your argument is as specious as the rapist suggesting that his victim's skirt was too short. The intelligence level of the victims of a crime is as irrelevant as their skin color. No one forced the banks to start offering NINJA loans to anyone who could fog a mirror. I understand you have this ego-supporting narrative about your own financial acumen in relation to this crash, but you are doing an injustice to your peers. If we were to reduce this to strictly legal terms, you're suggesting that the victims had some responsibility to ensure that their loans were a sound investment for the bank. Even if that were true (and it is not), the banks had a far greater responsibility to not make idiotic investments. The loan officers knowingly failed any due diligence required of their positions. Not only is assigning culpability to the victim of fraud legally indefensible, but it also contradicts your earlier statements: if you're going to deride people for making poor investments, does that not apply in greater force to banking establishments?
I'm sure you're a shrewd investor and clearly people who don't listen to you are bad people and deserve to have bad things happen to them. Your misanthropy aside, blaming people for being victims of fraud is still morally and legally indefensible.
This is all true. However, you seem to be exonerating the bank in only discussing the personal responsibility side of things. The loan officer absolutely knew that you would not be able to make payments. Why did he offer you that loan? Offering people loans they can't afford to pay interest on is a terrible way to do business.
Except if you can package the bad loans into a mortgage-backed security, have it rated AAA, sell it for a hefty profit, and leave some other sucker holding the bag. Or were you unaware that the banks made billions of dollars giving out these bad loans?
You're saying people should know better than the loan officer what kind of loan they need. Maybe that's even true, in an ideal world. In an ideal world, investment and consumer banking would have nothing to do with each other, removing incentives for banks to offer bad loans to their customers. In this world, stupid people still want houses to live in, most people don't know enough about loans to be able to contradict a loan officer or even to read the fine print, and banks don't always need to maximize loan repayments to maximize profits.
The people who got fucked hard in '08 were the entire world, and especially US citizens, who saw $10 trillion dollars worth of wealth disappear due to a massive amount of fraudulent securities. But go ahead and blame it on the victims.
Diffie testified in the NewEgg patent troll case and was grilled pretty hard by the attorney, specifically about the work and role of Ellis/GCHQ. He has never tried to deny them credit for their work, but in most practical senses, they didn't invent it.
"Dr. Diffie, you were not the first to invent public key cryptography, were you?"
"I believe that I may have been," said Diffie, speaking cautiously. "But perhaps you could be more specific?"
"In fact, a gentleman named James Ellis in England invented it before you, right?"
Diffie sighed. He seemed, suddenly, almost tired. He had heard this one before. "I spent a lot of time talking to James Ellis, and I can't figure it out," he said. "James Ellis did very fine work."
[...]
"So, in fact, according to the IEEE, someone else invented public key cryptography before you, correct?"
"I disagree," said Diffie. "Ellis' paper is in no sense enabling. [His partner] Malcolm Williamson's paper enables Diffie-Hellman, and it was an internal secret note written two months after I presented that at the largest computer conference in the world."
[...]
"The alleged prior inventors not only kept it secret but did very little with it," said Diffie. "In James Ellis' words to me: 'You did a lot more with it than we did.'"
[...]
"The short answer would be that James Ellis' work in 1969 and 1970 certainly does not teach the methods. Personally, I find that paper incomprehensible. I'm not clear how anybody became convinced of anything from it."
So what? It's not like there's a forum for meta-discussion here, and most of the discussions for any given article are tangential. The only time the moderators get involved is if the discussion is both off-topic and not worth discussing.
From your comment history it really seems like Twitter is more your style. Maybe you should spend some more time there rather than trying to drag this forum down to your level.
That's all very well and good, but satellite communications in those bands are regularly drowned out by the Sun here on Earth. One watt isn't going to be detectable from Mars, let alone any further bodies. At a distance of 1 light year, you're talking about 8.891Ã--10^-34 W/m^2. The strongest radio transmitter seems to be the 768kW transmitter at Lake Kickapoo, which would bring us up to 10^-28 W/m^2, but you'd still have to get lucky to notice that, due to that whole thing where the planet moves around.
The best case scenario is not good. There's a worse chance of being able to detect alien intelligence than there is of detecting intelligence in Congress. Some SETI guys were estimating that the SKA would be able to pick up an airport radar at 20 lyr, but others have taken issue with their figures, and I'm pretty sure they run more on optimism than sense. I think that if you actually took the time to investigate this matter, you would arrive at a similar conclusion