It isn't. And the first one might cost $800 billion, each subsequent one would cost less. Indeed, that first one you build should be the smallest and crudest, in order to learn your systems, train your workforce, bug-fix your clumsy initial designs. By the sixth full-sized one, you'd be rattling the things off for a few billion each.
[That's the mistake that NASA (indeed most space agencies) make. They only ever build the first one. Then years later they build another, different, first one. At the beginning of the space program they built incrementally, multiple similar craft, improving little by little as they went. Then they stopped that, and started building one-offs.]
where authorities complained that an AMBER alert hoax cost taxpayers large amounts of money all told ($50-$100k+). I assume the hoaxes cost the same as the "real" ones, so it's clearly impossible that there is hardly any money involved.
While I agree that Amber alerts are probably bullshit security theatre, I would point out that the "cost" here is likely not the cost of the alert, but the cost of responding to a kidnapping hoax. Ie, everything except the alert. Things that authorities did for any reported kidnapping, before Amber alerts were even thought of.
saving children's lives isn't worth a few minutes inconvenience to you.
Well, apparently it wasn't worth the time to develop a better system.
If everyone who gets an alert takes 2 minutes out of their busy life to memorize even part of the alert and keep half an eye out as they go about their normal day
Remember, this was not just a text message. It apparently went off like a fire alarm. In the middle of the night. Repeatedly. As a result, most of the state turned off Amber alerts so they could go back to sleep. Most won't reactivate it. If you repeatedly set off alarms for no or minor reasons, people stop paying attention to alarms. This has been known this since Aesop.
But if poor implementation (this is not just a text-alert noise, which mutes to vibrate when told to), results in millions of people disabling Amber alerts, then you've dramatically reduced the chance of it "reaching one person who can help find the missing child" next time.
Worse, if it results in reflexively people turning off all such warnings (including weather/emergency alerts), then you've also reduced the chance of people receiving appropriate warnings of danger. Ie, you've increased the risk of preventable deaths.
In other words, the system most definitely didn't work.
Any alert that sounds when it's not needed merely trains people to ignore all such alerts. This is pretty basic "emergency" psychology, and hardly new.
That doesn't make the assholes the enemy. It just makes them painfully clumsy at fighting the enemy. (And I agree that they are clearly idiots who will end up getting 3d printers licensed and killing the entire maker-movement.) The enemy are the politicians and media who go along with the ignorant hysteria over "z0mg 3d printed guns".
BUT... IF there were military in the streets shoving those people around, you can bet your ass that would change in a heartbeat.
Except that "those people" they are pushing around would be those who are already against the government. That's the only reason troops would be in the streets, to "keep the peace" against violent anti-government protesters. Or to round up "terrorists" and confiscate their weapons (long titillating list of their stockpiled arms/explosives-ingredients/etc released to the servile media.) Would the US public tolerate that? Look at the acquiescence to the TSA, to warrantless stop-and-frisk, the media support (both "liberal" media and Fox News) for universal NSA surveillance, and against Snowden, the public tolerance of police abuses against the Occupy protesters, and the routine support by court juries for officers who abuse their power, etc etc etc....
Even tyrants don't put actually put troops on the streets unless they have to. And the people in your country seem to tolerate abuses of power that the average tyrant would love to be able to get away with without resistance.
You are picturing a sudden overthrow of government or declaration of dictatorship. You should be picturing a gradual build up of abuse of power. A slowly boiling frog, and you are already in the pot being trained to tolerate heat.
If you watch Black Hawk down for example, [...] Equipped with guns they tore into the US, requiring thousands more people and equipment.
Have you watched it? Ignore the incompetence of the commanders, just the events on the ground. The opposition militia did not "tear into the US". About 100 US troops held out in an unprotected, unplanned crash position, in an urban area, with no resupply and little support, against several thousand armed opposition who could bring in more men and supplies at will. And they did so with 50-1 kill ratios. And this was the first such battle since Vietnam, with the whole command structure notoriously incompetent to cope with the unexpected. (Today's US military has had over a decade of experience against such militias, IEDs, RPGs, ambushes, etc.)
If anything illustrates Cyberax's original point, it's the battle of Mogadishu.
Read Article 1, Section 8. The US Constitution clearly differentiates between an army and a militia. I interpret that as meaning that the militia is the non-standing part of the army, ie, people called up on short notice to support the government, maintain the peace, defend against bad guys.
(Otherwise I agree with your interpretation of the 2nd. It means, "Unfortunately, we need to let the government have the power to call up a militia, coz it's a dangerous world, so we need to make sure towns can defend themselves against the misuse of that militia." Which means it has nothing to do with home defence and hunting, everything to do with military-grade weapons (back then cannons and barrels of gunpowder, today RPGs.) Indeed, I interpret most of the original BoR in that light. The first is the right to agitate and organise against the government. The second to defend against pro-government militias.The third to prevent government intimidation, by housing troops in anti-government towns. Fourth to allow you to secretly plot and plan and pass messages between your groups. The fifth to prevent you from being jailed for not confessing or informing; to prevent perpetual re-trials/jury-shopping; to prevent unjust seizure of property, etc etc. The sixth to prevent indefinite detention without trial, secret trials and kangaroo courts. The seventh to limit the power of pro-government judges. The eighth to prevent excessive punishments/bail for political reasons. And when interpreted in that light, it becomes obvious how far the US has drifted away from the Constitution. And I say all this as a latte-drinking wishy-washy Guardian-reading left-wing pro-gun-control moonbat.)
But thank you for illustrating my point. What you did is exactly what I hate, you made the definition of "religion" so broad as to be worthless, twice.
While I know what you mean, I still feel that even there a distinction needs to be drawn between "like religion" and "religion". Ie, between "dogmatic belief" and "religious belief", because religious beliefs can be dogmatic or they can be fuzzy and soft, so clearly the two terms are not synonymous.
(My objection to the original story is creating a phony "religion" based on file sharing. While I'm happy to mock dogmatic religions with "pastafarianism" and the like, I cringe when people claim a "religion" around stuff they happen to like/want/believe. It reinforces the claim by those same dogmatic religious types and their apologists that atheism (or science, or anything they don't like) is "just a religion too". It also makes discussing actual religion impossible.)
but a religion implies some organization, instead of belief which can exist by itself.
No, religion isn't just organisation. It's the nature of the belief. People can have religious beliefs without belonging to a church, distinct from their non-religious beliefs.
If all beliefs, all philosophies, all personal preferences are "religion", then the word "religion" doesn't mean anything. If you redefine everything as a "hat", what do you call actual hats? How do you talk about hats when you've defined "hat" so broadly that not owning a hat is itself a type of hat?
Can we stop deliberately confusing "stuff I believe" with "religion"? Unless religion means more than just any arbitrary belief, the word is meaningless to describe actual religions. (I say this as an atheist. Religious people do this too. "Atheism is just a religion", "evolution is a religion", "environmentalism is a religion". No it isn't.)
RTFA, most of these were intended for existing homeless people in cities, or for temporary mass refugees. Not paranoid survivalist teotwawki gun nuts who presumably can just buy a regular sleeping bag and/or bivy.
Even on slashdot, if you are actually curious about the subject you click on TFA link. And it actually takes less time and effort than posting a request for someone else to do it for you, then checking back periodically hoping that someone replied with more than snark.
But since I'm already here: asymmetric hull design + shifting centre of mass with sea-water ballast + azipod engines.
While the z0mg!panic! was stupid, there is an issue here. Meltwater ponds reflect less sunlight than bare ice, so warm the ice underneath much quicker (until it cracks and the pond drains out.) The problem is that in single-year ice, the meltwater ponds form shallow and wide on the smooth surface, maximising their surface area. Multi-year ice is gnarled and shattered and jagged, so melt-water tends to collect in crevices (or even crevasses) with a much smaller area in the sun. With the recent losses of multi-year ice, the remaining ice is caught in a vicious feedback loop: More single-year ice, more open ponds, so more melting. More melting, more open ocean, so more single-year ice next winter. Rinse, repeat.
Already done. That's why these icebreakers are so useful.
By eliminating much of the multi-year ice, all they have to worry about is the thin smooth single-year ice that forms each winter; the stuff that icebreakers like. That greatly increases the chance of a viable shipping lane being breakable along its full length each year.
And lobbied to prevent killer whale training being deemed a dangerous profession, with mandatory compensation and insurance commensurate with the increased risk.
Users have the ability to mod and tag the submitted stories. You could have modded this submission down and tagged it "spam" before it hit the front page. You didn't. You have no one to blame but yourself.
Of course, if a remote crew is supposed to only intervene when the shit hits the fan, getting them up to speed might take at least as long as the so-called "startle effect" did in the case of AF447.
With over a thousand landings a day, say 80% commercial airliners, that gives the SFO remote crews 800 remote landings. Assuming 90% go off without a hitch on auto-pilot, that's 720 that they only need to monitor. And 80 landings a day that require some level of interventions. Within a year, they'd be some of the most experienced pilots in the world, even excluding training and sims, and specifically experienced at knowing how to go from monitor, to intervention, to full control.
There are cases where having remote crews would cause more accidents (as some have mentioned), but IMO those cases are rarer than accidents which would be prevented by having a smaller number of dedicated crews that just do emergencies. Net reduction in accidents. Of course, it's hard to get around the knee-jerk reaction to not having pilots on board.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually if it's from NASA, it's invariably naively underpriced. The real thing would be vastly more expensive and go massively overbudget.
(assuming the cost to size ratio is linear).
It isn't. And the first one might cost $800 billion, each subsequent one would cost less. Indeed, that first one you build should be the smallest and crudest, in order to learn your systems, train your workforce, bug-fix your clumsy initial designs. By the sixth full-sized one, you'd be rattling the things off for a few billion each.
[That's the mistake that NASA (indeed most space agencies) make. They only ever build the first one. Then years later they build another, different, first one. At the beginning of the space program they built incrementally, multiple similar craft, improving little by little as they went. Then they stopped that, and started building one-offs.]
where authorities complained that an AMBER alert hoax cost taxpayers large amounts of money all told ($50-$100k+). I assume the hoaxes cost the same as the "real" ones, so it's clearly impossible that there is hardly any money involved.
While I agree that Amber alerts are probably bullshit security theatre, I would point out that the "cost" here is likely not the cost of the alert, but the cost of responding to a kidnapping hoax. Ie, everything except the alert. Things that authorities did for any reported kidnapping, before Amber alerts were even thought of.
saving children's lives isn't worth a few minutes inconvenience to you.
Well, apparently it wasn't worth the time to develop a better system.
If everyone who gets an alert takes 2 minutes out of their busy life to memorize even part of the alert and keep half an eye out as they go about their normal day
Remember, this was not just a text message. It apparently went off like a fire alarm. In the middle of the night. Repeatedly. As a result, most of the state turned off Amber alerts so they could go back to sleep. Most won't reactivate it. If you repeatedly set off alarms for no or minor reasons, people stop paying attention to alarms. This has been known this since Aesop.
But if poor implementation (this is not just a text-alert noise, which mutes to vibrate when told to), results in millions of people disabling Amber alerts, then you've dramatically reduced the chance of it "reaching one person who can help find the missing child" next time.
Worse, if it results in reflexively people turning off all such warnings (including weather/emergency alerts), then you've also reduced the chance of people receiving appropriate warnings of danger. Ie, you've increased the risk of preventable deaths.
In other words, the system most definitely didn't work.
Any alert that sounds when it's not needed merely trains people to ignore all such alerts. This is pretty basic "emergency" psychology, and hardly new.
That doesn't make the assholes the enemy. It just makes them painfully clumsy at fighting the enemy. (And I agree that they are clearly idiots who will end up getting 3d printers licensed and killing the entire maker-movement.) The enemy are the politicians and media who go along with the ignorant hysteria over "z0mg 3d printed guns".
BUT... IF there were military in the streets shoving those people around, you can bet your ass that would change in a heartbeat.
Except that "those people" they are pushing around would be those who are already against the government. That's the only reason troops would be in the streets, to "keep the peace" against violent anti-government protesters. Or to round up "terrorists" and confiscate their weapons (long titillating list of their stockpiled arms/explosives-ingredients/etc released to the servile media.) Would the US public tolerate that? Look at the acquiescence to the TSA, to warrantless stop-and-frisk, the media support (both "liberal" media and Fox News) for universal NSA surveillance, and against Snowden, the public tolerance of police abuses against the Occupy protesters, and the routine support by court juries for officers who abuse their power, etc etc etc....
Even tyrants don't put actually put troops on the streets unless they have to. And the people in your country seem to tolerate abuses of power that the average tyrant would love to be able to get away with without resistance.
You are picturing a sudden overthrow of government or declaration of dictatorship. You should be picturing a gradual build up of abuse of power. A slowly boiling frog, and you are already in the pot being trained to tolerate heat.
If you watch Black Hawk down for example, [...] Equipped with guns they tore into the US, requiring thousands more people and equipment.
Have you watched it? Ignore the incompetence of the commanders, just the events on the ground. The opposition militia did not "tear into the US". About 100 US troops held out in an unprotected, unplanned crash position, in an urban area, with no resupply and little support, against several thousand armed opposition who could bring in more men and supplies at will. And they did so with 50-1 kill ratios. And this was the first such battle since Vietnam, with the whole command structure notoriously incompetent to cope with the unexpected. (Today's US military has had over a decade of experience against such militias, IEDs, RPGs, ambushes, etc.)
If anything illustrates Cyberax's original point, it's the battle of Mogadishu.
Read Article 1, Section 8. The US Constitution clearly differentiates between an army and a militia. I interpret that as meaning that the militia is the non-standing part of the army, ie, people called up on short notice to support the government, maintain the peace, defend against bad guys.
(Otherwise I agree with your interpretation of the 2nd. It means, "Unfortunately, we need to let the government have the power to call up a militia, coz it's a dangerous world, so we need to make sure towns can defend themselves against the misuse of that militia." Which means it has nothing to do with home defence and hunting, everything to do with military-grade weapons (back then cannons and barrels of gunpowder, today RPGs.) Indeed, I interpret most of the original BoR in that light. The first is the right to agitate and organise against the government. The second to defend against pro-government militias.The third to prevent government intimidation, by housing troops in anti-government towns. Fourth to allow you to secretly plot and plan and pass messages between your groups. The fifth to prevent you from being jailed for not confessing or informing; to prevent perpetual re-trials/jury-shopping; to prevent unjust seizure of property, etc etc. The sixth to prevent indefinite detention without trial, secret trials and kangaroo courts. The seventh to limit the power of pro-government judges. The eighth to prevent excessive punishments/bail for political reasons. And when interpreted in that light, it becomes obvious how far the US has drifted away from the Constitution. And I say all this as a latte-drinking wishy-washy Guardian-reading left-wing pro-gun-control moonbat.)
since English is a living language.
Not for long if you keep beating it like that.
But thank you for illustrating my point. What you did is exactly what I hate, you made the definition of "religion" so broad as to be worthless, twice.
While I know what you mean, I still feel that even there a distinction needs to be drawn between "like religion" and "religion". Ie, between "dogmatic belief" and "religious belief", because religious beliefs can be dogmatic or they can be fuzzy and soft, so clearly the two terms are not synonymous.
(My objection to the original story is creating a phony "religion" based on file sharing. While I'm happy to mock dogmatic religions with "pastafarianism" and the like, I cringe when people claim a "religion" around stuff they happen to like/want/believe. It reinforces the claim by those same dogmatic religious types and their apologists that atheism (or science, or anything they don't like) is "just a religion too". It also makes discussing actual religion impossible.)
but a religion implies some organization, instead of belief which can exist by itself.
No, religion isn't just organisation. It's the nature of the belief. People can have religious beliefs without belonging to a church, distinct from their non-religious beliefs.
If all beliefs, all philosophies, all personal preferences are "religion", then the word "religion" doesn't mean anything. If you redefine everything as a "hat", what do you call actual hats? How do you talk about hats when you've defined "hat" so broadly that not owning a hat is itself a type of hat?
Can we stop deliberately confusing "stuff I believe" with "religion"? Unless religion means more than just any arbitrary belief, the word is meaningless to describe actual religions. (I say this as an atheist. Religious people do this too. "Atheism is just a religion", "evolution is a religion", "environmentalism is a religion". No it isn't.)
He shouldn't even have that. He's no longer an Australian citizen.
RTFA, most of these were intended for existing homeless people in cities, or for temporary mass refugees. Not paranoid survivalist teotwawki gun nuts who presumably can just buy a regular sleeping bag and/or bivy.
Even on slashdot, if you are actually curious about the subject you click on TFA link. And it actually takes less time and effort than posting a request for someone else to do it for you, then checking back periodically hoping that someone replied with more than snark.
But since I'm already here: asymmetric hull design + shifting centre of mass with sea-water ballast + azipod engines.
While the z0mg!panic! was stupid, there is an issue here. Meltwater ponds reflect less sunlight than bare ice, so warm the ice underneath much quicker (until it cracks and the pond drains out.) The problem is that in single-year ice, the meltwater ponds form shallow and wide on the smooth surface, maximising their surface area. Multi-year ice is gnarled and shattered and jagged, so melt-water tends to collect in crevices (or even crevasses) with a much smaller area in the sun. With the recent losses of multi-year ice, the remaining ice is caught in a vicious feedback loop: More single-year ice, more open ponds, so more melting. More melting, more open ocean, so more single-year ice next winter. Rinse, repeat.
Already done. That's why these icebreakers are so useful.
By eliminating much of the multi-year ice, all they have to worry about is the thin smooth single-year ice that forms each winter; the stuff that icebreakers like. That greatly increases the chance of a viable shipping lane being breakable along its full length each year.
Homeless people get robbed if they have anything valuable or as useful as a sleeping bag.
(Also, the one in the main cover image (images 7/10/11 in the gallery) is clearly just taking the piss.)
The whale-huggers despise Sea World. Hence the film. Hence the article.
That Sea World let it happen 3 times.
And lobbied to prevent killer whale training being deemed a dangerous profession, with mandatory compensation and insurance commensurate with the increased risk.
The first captive bred Orca was born in 1985. So they have already wasted nearly two full generations.
Users have the ability to mod and tag the submitted stories. You could have modded this submission down and tagged it "spam" before it hit the front page. You didn't. You have no one to blame but yourself.
http://slashdot.org/recent is what you are looking for.
...nationalise his media conglomerate in Australia and break it up.
No single person should be able to decide who will or won't be the next government.
Of course, if a remote crew is supposed to only intervene when the shit hits the fan, getting them up to speed might take at least as long as the so-called "startle effect" did in the case of AF447.
With over a thousand landings a day, say 80% commercial airliners, that gives the SFO remote crews 800 remote landings. Assuming 90% go off without a hitch on auto-pilot, that's 720 that they only need to monitor. And 80 landings a day that require some level of interventions. Within a year, they'd be some of the most experienced pilots in the world, even excluding training and sims, and specifically experienced at knowing how to go from monitor, to intervention, to full control.
There are cases where having remote crews would cause more accidents (as some have mentioned), but IMO those cases are rarer than accidents which would be prevented by having a smaller number of dedicated crews that just do emergencies. Net reduction in accidents. Of course, it's hard to get around the knee-jerk reaction to not having pilots on board.