There are a lot of far-out libertarians on here, but I figure that population probably isn't voting for one of the major parties anyway, so they're kind of pointless.
As for the rest, it seems to me that you've argued that political ads are useless on the whole. Either you agree with them, in which case you'll already vote for that candidate, or you disagree with them, in which case, you seem to claim, you'll ignore the ad because you disagree with it. Given how much people think that money influences the vote, either this isn't true or everybody is mistaken about the importance of money.
Historically, the terrorists get treated like criminals, and the heads of state get treated like the heads of rogue states. See for example the prosecution of the Lockerbie bombing, wherein Libya was an international pariah for decades but the suspects got regular trials and the one found responsible went to regular jail.
I see no reason to change this approach, and every reason not to change it.
I never gave any opinion of Barr. I don't see how you could possibly conclude that I would write her in as President. Maybe you should pay more attention to what people say and less to what your biases say.
And I didn't miss anything. Of course the people are the country, in the end. But the politicians don't understand this and don't act like it.
You're approximately the 37th person to have made that "joke" by transforming "tool" into "fool". I really don't get it, though. Do you not understand the manner in which "tool" can be used as an insulting way to describe a person, or is there some other thing at work that I don't understand?
Big deal. I probably couldn't sing it either. I could do with having politicians be a little less patriotic. Have them start doing what's best for the people instead of what's best for the country.
The 'big thing' about Katrina is that literally billions of dollars from the federal government were wildly mismanaged both before and after the hurricane. It was a poster child moment for how not to use government assets.
Nope, sorry. Billions of dollars of federal funds get wildly mismanaged all the time. Major cities get flooded due to a failure of engineering pretty much never. When you're deciding what the "big thing" is, pick the one that's extremely rare and killed a whole lot of people.
All terrorism falls under regular law enforcement. There is no legal basis for this mysterious separation of "terrorist" from "criminal" that we see today. They're all criminals. The only time you treat people differently is when you're fighting a war against their country. Despite the modern name of the "War on Terror", such a name has no legal standing.
And then these civil rights you talk about do not happen because the people in question are US citizens. The Constitution is quite explicit when it wants to discuss only citizens. In most places it just talks about people. To enjoy amendments 1 through 10 you do not need to be a citizen, merely be in the country where those amendments have the force of law.
To put it another way: some Saudi Arabian guy arrested in New York for trying to blow up the Empire State Building has exactly the same civil rights as Jane Soccer Mom who was born in Brooklyn. At least he's supposed to. Government seems to be ignoring this inconvenient legality these days.
Katrina was hardly the first big hurricane to hit New Orleans. Seriously, you know where New Orleans is, right? The city gets hit by a hurricane with fair regularity. This graphic shows you the tracks and strengths of a few major ones. Katrina was not even particularly strong by comparison. It was much weaker and passed much farther away than, for example, Camille, which was a category 5 when it hit and was very nearly a direct hit. The only thing that made Katrina special was that the city's flood control measures completely failed. But this failure says a lot more about the flood control measures that were in place at the time than it says about the suitability of the location or the size of the storm.
The threat to human life from one of these storms is beyond measure.
No it's not. The expected deaths can be quite easily measured. The worst-case scenario is quite obvious: there is no way that it could possibly kill more than the entire population of the planet. The more realistic risks are also well within the realm of measurement.
I appreciate that these things are dangerous and that you want to make them sound dangerous, but please be more accurate about them.
Just because there was a massive failure of engineering and emergency management during Katrina does not mean that New Orleans is a bad location. The city was nearly destroyed last time, not because of where it is, but because the flood control structures were inadequate.
In 1906 San Francisco was nearly destroyed due to an earthquake. Did they decide that San Francisco was a bad place for a city and abandon it? No, they rebuilt it and made sure that the new city could withstand an earthquake without being nearly destroyed. New Orleans ought to get the same treatment.
I'd rather keep my money. But if the government is going to take it from me anyway, I'd rather have it go to New Orleans than Iraq. (I'd really rather have it go other places, but if that's the only choice I have, what the hell, it's better than the zero choice I get now.)
I live in the US. $5,000 is pretty doable, although that's probably not going to be possible if you live in a big city, or if you're a slow learner. $120/hour is about right for training here, much more than that and you're probably going to the wrong place.
You can further cut costs by joining a flying club rather than flying with a commercial operation, and still further by learning to fly gliders rather than regular planes. (Gliders are more fun as well as being cheaper, so why not!) I didn't count it explicitly (I'm kind of afraid to), but my best guess is that my glider rating, flying with a club, cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000. (The costs were $15-30/flight for the tow, and $15-40/hour for the aircraft plus instruction.) All American dollars, of course, although they seem to be worth less every day.
Yes, it's possible. On the other hand there is no evidence for it. The simpler explanation is that they are what they appear to be: a bunch of incompetent idiots.
So you're saying that if TSA's policy was to kick you square in the nuts as you go past, you would "attack the policy", but be perfectly fine with the guy who's actually putting his foot in your crotch?
Did you read Carmack's post? It's literally pour fuel into peroxide, gently stir, and Presto!
I read that it's "not very challenging" from somebody who builds large rockets for fun in his spare time.
Mixing such a shock-sensitive mixture in an airliner bathroom without setting it off prematurely is going to be tough. I don't know about this specific case (he doesn't say what fuels work) but a lot of these things are significantly exothermic as well, even when they're just dissolving, which makes it even harder.
And as an aside, throwing it where the wing connects to the plane is probably the worst (from a bomber's point of view) place to detonate it. The main spar is the strongest component of the entire aircraft. It's stressed to carry at least five times the theoretical maximum weight of a fully loaded fuselage. It won't even notice a hastily-mixed bathroom bomb going off on the floor above it.
If you want to take down an airliner, you basically need to do one of two things. One is to destroy the ability of the pilots to control the airplane. This is generally done by severing hydraulics or control cables, but could also be done by, say, draining all the fuel or destroying the engines so that the plane can't stay aloft. The other way is to directly destroy the structural integrity of the aircraft. This is a lot harder than most people think. Blowing a hole in the side definitely won't do it. Even that most famous airliner bomb, Pan Am 103, did not directly destroy the structural integrity of the aircraft. It did a lot of damage, but what ultimately destroyed the plane was violent shaking of the control cables.
I'm not saying that you couldn't take down an airliner with such a bathroom bomb, but it's going to be much tougher than most people realize.
This doesn't make any sense to me. We already cause some harm to innocents, so it doesn't matter how much harm we cause?
When it comes to the guilty, I see basically no difference between life in prison and execution. In both cases their life is over. Unless they somehow manage to escape, a possibility which is exceedingly small, that's it. They're essentially as good as executed, it just takes longer. When it comes to the innocent, I see a big difference. An innocent man can be freed from jail, reducing the total wrongful punishment inflicted upon him, only if he has been put in prison and not if he has been executed.
Basically, punishment by life in prison instead of execution has no downside and some upside. Even if that upside is merely punishing the innocent less, surely that's worthwhile?
Talking about using the dearth penalty in only the most certain of cases is interesting, but it's not going to happen. The American justice system is binary in this regard. Either you are guilty, or you are not guilty. When found guilty, the probability of guilt is not taken into account when deciding the punishment. The system assumes that that probability is always "beyond a reasonable doubt". If it's not, then you should have been found not guilty.
As for "Every punishment is already carried out on the assumption that it is accurate", you're only describing the way things are, not the way they have to be. If you admit that there is always the possibility of convicting an innocent man, then what harm is there in giving life in prison instead of the death penalty? Yes, you still severely damage people's lives, and in many cases the innocent will not be exonerated, destroying their lives fully. But that does not make any sort of argument for not reducing some of the harm done to innocent people.
Nobody watches you, but somebody is going to get suspicious when you're in there for half an hour straight trying to use the place as a chemistry lab.
As for the bathroom being a perfectly fine place to detonate a bomb, I'm doubtful that the bathroom is a critical area. Unless the bomb is truly enormous, you need to do more than just place it against the skin. That will just make a big hole, kill the attacker, and annoy and frighten everyone else. You need to get it to an area where it can cut hydraulics, screw up control cables, ignite fuel, or other such nasty things.
I never said that unlimited service only exists for multicast. I said that you can get unlimited TV but not unlimited internet over the same lines because TV is multicast/broadcast and internet is not. You're falsely generalizing this point, and then accusing me because the generalization does not hold true. Where I come from, that's what we call a "shitty debate tactic".
The fact that truly unlimited TV service exists is not relevant to whether a truly unlimited home internet service is economically feasible. This is because the nature of TV impacts the network in a vastly different way.
The fact that truly unlimited phone service exists is also not relevant to whether a truly unlimited home internet service is economically feasible, but for completely different reasons. In this case it's because, bit for bit, you pay several hundred times as much for the phone service as for your internet service. (And that's ignoring the fact that your internet service gets you anywhere in the world for the same flat rate, whereas your phone service might include unlimited calls to a select group of foreign countries.) Interestingly, from what I'm told, that's in the same neighborhood as what an ISP might pay for its upstream no-cap truly-unlimited-usage connection.
I'm quite familiar with the McDonald's coffee case, including all the various rebuttals about why it's not frivolous. It also happens that I disagree with them, and still think it is. Regardless, I definitely know enough about the case to know that it makes a horrible example because a lot of people disagree with me on it.
Anyway, what am I presuming that isn't true? That there are a lot of frivolous lawsuits? I'll need a cite for that, if so. That a lot of frivolous lawsuits win? Well, I didn't actually claim that.
That's a funny use of the word "price". Normally when you pay the price for something, you get that something in return. I see no evidence that the price we pay constantly to the TSA results in getting security in return.
If their job was to kick you square in the nuts every time you went through the security gate, would you still think that they shouldn't be criticized for "doing their job"?
Well that's why I think it should only be allowed if they're going to put forth all their effort to fix the problem. If they're going to adjust their analysis to take the vulnerabilities into account, give them (and their customers) time to fix the problems. If they aren't, screw 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of far-out libertarians on here, but I figure that population probably isn't voting for one of the major parties anyway, so they're kind of pointless.
As for the rest, it seems to me that you've argued that political ads are useless on the whole. Either you agree with them, in which case you'll already vote for that candidate, or you disagree with them, in which case, you seem to claim, you'll ignore the ad because you disagree with it. Given how much people think that money influences the vote, either this isn't true or everybody is mistaken about the importance of money.
Historically, the terrorists get treated like criminals, and the heads of state get treated like the heads of rogue states. See for example the prosecution of the Lockerbie bombing, wherein Libya was an international pariah for decades but the suspects got regular trials and the one found responsible went to regular jail.
I see no reason to change this approach, and every reason not to change it.
I never gave any opinion of Barr. I don't see how you could possibly conclude that I would write her in as President. Maybe you should pay more attention to what people say and less to what your biases say.
And I didn't miss anything. Of course the people are the country, in the end. But the politicians don't understand this and don't act like it.
You're approximately the 37th person to have made that "joke" by transforming "tool" into "fool". I really don't get it, though. Do you not understand the manner in which "tool" can be used as an insulting way to describe a person, or is there some other thing at work that I don't understand?
Big deal. I probably couldn't sing it either. I could do with having politicians be a little less patriotic. Have them start doing what's best for the people instead of what's best for the country.
It would be kind of silly for Obama to do much advertising on Slashdot. "Preaching to the choir", I believe it's called.
The 'big thing' about Katrina is that literally billions of dollars from the federal government were wildly mismanaged both before and after the hurricane. It was a poster child moment for how not to use government assets.
Nope, sorry. Billions of dollars of federal funds get wildly mismanaged all the time. Major cities get flooded due to a failure of engineering pretty much never. When you're deciding what the "big thing" is, pick the one that's extremely rare and killed a whole lot of people.
This post is frighteningly wrong-headed.
All terrorism falls under regular law enforcement. There is no legal basis for this mysterious separation of "terrorist" from "criminal" that we see today. They're all criminals. The only time you treat people differently is when you're fighting a war against their country. Despite the modern name of the "War on Terror", such a name has no legal standing.
And then these civil rights you talk about do not happen because the people in question are US citizens. The Constitution is quite explicit when it wants to discuss only citizens. In most places it just talks about people. To enjoy amendments 1 through 10 you do not need to be a citizen, merely be in the country where those amendments have the force of law.
To put it another way: some Saudi Arabian guy arrested in New York for trying to blow up the Empire State Building has exactly the same civil rights as Jane Soccer Mom who was born in Brooklyn. At least he's supposed to. Government seems to be ignoring this inconvenient legality these days.
Katrina was hardly the first big hurricane to hit New Orleans. Seriously, you know where New Orleans is, right? The city gets hit by a hurricane with fair regularity. This graphic shows you the tracks and strengths of a few major ones. Katrina was not even particularly strong by comparison. It was much weaker and passed much farther away than, for example, Camille, which was a category 5 when it hit and was very nearly a direct hit. The only thing that made Katrina special was that the city's flood control measures completely failed. But this failure says a lot more about the flood control measures that were in place at the time than it says about the suitability of the location or the size of the storm.
The threat to human life from one of these storms is beyond measure.
No it's not. The expected deaths can be quite easily measured. The worst-case scenario is quite obvious: there is no way that it could possibly kill more than the entire population of the planet. The more realistic risks are also well within the realm of measurement.
I appreciate that these things are dangerous and that you want to make them sound dangerous, but please be more accurate about them.
Remember kids, you should always evaluate any argument based on who's making it, not on what it says.
Just because there was a massive failure of engineering and emergency management during Katrina does not mean that New Orleans is a bad location. The city was nearly destroyed last time, not because of where it is, but because the flood control structures were inadequate.
In 1906 San Francisco was nearly destroyed due to an earthquake. Did they decide that San Francisco was a bad place for a city and abandon it? No, they rebuilt it and made sure that the new city could withstand an earthquake without being nearly destroyed. New Orleans ought to get the same treatment.
I'd rather keep my money. But if the government is going to take it from me anyway, I'd rather have it go to New Orleans than Iraq. (I'd really rather have it go other places, but if that's the only choice I have, what the hell, it's better than the zero choice I get now.)
I live in the US. $5,000 is pretty doable, although that's probably not going to be possible if you live in a big city, or if you're a slow learner. $120/hour is about right for training here, much more than that and you're probably going to the wrong place.
You can further cut costs by joining a flying club rather than flying with a commercial operation, and still further by learning to fly gliders rather than regular planes. (Gliders are more fun as well as being cheaper, so why not!) I didn't count it explicitly (I'm kind of afraid to), but my best guess is that my glider rating, flying with a club, cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000. (The costs were $15-30/flight for the tow, and $15-40/hour for the aircraft plus instruction.) All American dollars, of course, although they seem to be worth less every day.
Yes, it's possible. On the other hand there is no evidence for it. The simpler explanation is that they are what they appear to be: a bunch of incompetent idiots.
So you're saying that if TSA's policy was to kick you square in the nuts as you go past, you would "attack the policy", but be perfectly fine with the guy who's actually putting his foot in your crotch?
Did you read Carmack's post? It's literally pour fuel into peroxide, gently stir, and Presto!
I read that it's "not very challenging" from somebody who builds large rockets for fun in his spare time.
Mixing such a shock-sensitive mixture in an airliner bathroom without setting it off prematurely is going to be tough. I don't know about this specific case (he doesn't say what fuels work) but a lot of these things are significantly exothermic as well, even when they're just dissolving, which makes it even harder.
And as an aside, throwing it where the wing connects to the plane is probably the worst (from a bomber's point of view) place to detonate it. The main spar is the strongest component of the entire aircraft. It's stressed to carry at least five times the theoretical maximum weight of a fully loaded fuselage. It won't even notice a hastily-mixed bathroom bomb going off on the floor above it.
If you want to take down an airliner, you basically need to do one of two things. One is to destroy the ability of the pilots to control the airplane. This is generally done by severing hydraulics or control cables, but could also be done by, say, draining all the fuel or destroying the engines so that the plane can't stay aloft. The other way is to directly destroy the structural integrity of the aircraft. This is a lot harder than most people think. Blowing a hole in the side definitely won't do it. Even that most famous airliner bomb, Pan Am 103, did not directly destroy the structural integrity of the aircraft. It did a lot of damage, but what ultimately destroyed the plane was violent shaking of the control cables.
I'm not saying that you couldn't take down an airliner with such a bathroom bomb, but it's going to be much tougher than most people realize.
This doesn't make any sense to me. We already cause some harm to innocents, so it doesn't matter how much harm we cause?
When it comes to the guilty, I see basically no difference between life in prison and execution. In both cases their life is over. Unless they somehow manage to escape, a possibility which is exceedingly small, that's it. They're essentially as good as executed, it just takes longer. When it comes to the innocent, I see a big difference. An innocent man can be freed from jail, reducing the total wrongful punishment inflicted upon him, only if he has been put in prison and not if he has been executed.
Basically, punishment by life in prison instead of execution has no downside and some upside. Even if that upside is merely punishing the innocent less, surely that's worthwhile?
Talking about using the dearth penalty in only the most certain of cases is interesting, but it's not going to happen. The American justice system is binary in this regard. Either you are guilty, or you are not guilty. When found guilty, the probability of guilt is not taken into account when deciding the punishment. The system assumes that that probability is always "beyond a reasonable doubt". If it's not, then you should have been found not guilty.
As for "Every punishment is already carried out on the assumption that it is accurate", you're only describing the way things are, not the way they have to be. If you admit that there is always the possibility of convicting an innocent man, then what harm is there in giving life in prison instead of the death penalty? Yes, you still severely damage people's lives, and in many cases the innocent will not be exonerated, destroying their lives fully. But that does not make any sort of argument for not reducing some of the harm done to innocent people.
Nobody watches you, but somebody is going to get suspicious when you're in there for half an hour straight trying to use the place as a chemistry lab.
As for the bathroom being a perfectly fine place to detonate a bomb, I'm doubtful that the bathroom is a critical area. Unless the bomb is truly enormous, you need to do more than just place it against the skin. That will just make a big hole, kill the attacker, and annoy and frighten everyone else. You need to get it to an area where it can cut hydraulics, screw up control cables, ignite fuel, or other such nasty things.
I never said that unlimited service only exists for multicast. I said that you can get unlimited TV but not unlimited internet over the same lines because TV is multicast/broadcast and internet is not. You're falsely generalizing this point, and then accusing me because the generalization does not hold true. Where I come from, that's what we call a "shitty debate tactic".
The fact that truly unlimited TV service exists is not relevant to whether a truly unlimited home internet service is economically feasible. This is because the nature of TV impacts the network in a vastly different way.
The fact that truly unlimited phone service exists is also not relevant to whether a truly unlimited home internet service is economically feasible, but for completely different reasons. In this case it's because, bit for bit, you pay several hundred times as much for the phone service as for your internet service. (And that's ignoring the fact that your internet service gets you anywhere in the world for the same flat rate, whereas your phone service might include unlimited calls to a select group of foreign countries.) Interestingly, from what I'm told, that's in the same neighborhood as what an ISP might pay for its upstream no-cap truly-unlimited-usage connection.
I'm quite familiar with the McDonald's coffee case, including all the various rebuttals about why it's not frivolous. It also happens that I disagree with them, and still think it is. Regardless, I definitely know enough about the case to know that it makes a horrible example because a lot of people disagree with me on it.
Anyway, what am I presuming that isn't true? That there are a lot of frivolous lawsuits? I'll need a cite for that, if so. That a lot of frivolous lawsuits win? Well, I didn't actually claim that.
Maybe if fewer frivolous lawsuits actually won, there wouldn't be so many of them.
It is a price for security.
That's a funny use of the word "price". Normally when you pay the price for something, you get that something in return. I see no evidence that the price we pay constantly to the TSA results in getting security in return.
If their job was to kick you square in the nuts every time you went through the security gate, would you still think that they shouldn't be criticized for "doing their job"?
Well that's why I think it should only be allowed if they're going to put forth all their effort to fix the problem. If they're going to adjust their analysis to take the vulnerabilities into account, give them (and their customers) time to fix the problems. If they aren't, screw 'em.