Based on wikipedia's definitions, I'd agree America's not a fascist state. Police state, hmm...
The term police state is a term for a state in which the government exercises rigid and , in many peoples' opinions, repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population, especially by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional republic. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.
No fly lists, security theater, free speech zones, warrantless wiretapping, world's highest documented incarceration rate, sanctioned torture, extraordinary rendition, detention camps, invasions on false pretexts, no-bid contracts, voting irregularities, untouchable president... but you're still allowed to protest, and nobody's had their whole family disappeared, so yeah. Maybe you're not a police state. Maybe there's just a lot of velvet on the fist.
But whatever you actually are, it's not something to be proud of, you're no longer the big brave sheriff in the stetson hat, and the rest of the free world doesn't look up to you anymore. You've got a bad case of clay feet and your friends hope you do something about it soon.
Probably not that far off. Addonics already makes a four-slot CF raid device as a PCI card, RAID 0/1/10. You'd have to use software for RAID 5 on it. I emailed them and they're looking at a PCI Express version. Can you get CF/SDHC adapters?
http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad4cfprj.asp
[...]
4: There are no solutions to the energy crisis. Nuclear plants are not going to be built anytime soon, nuclear fusion is a joke to keep tokamaks funded, even though there have been -zero- advances in fusion since the laser was invented. Solar is a joke because it costs more to make a solar panel than what energy it ever gets through its useful life. Wind, geothermal, are only useful in rare areas. Pretty much, the US lives and dies on coal and oil... and cars don't burn coal.
[...] Again, like #4, there is -zero- interest by the government in energy, or breakthroughs in alternative energy sources that will provide more than piecemeal help.
[...]
Prove me wrong on this.
Photovoltaics are still messy, but solar-thermal plants are entirely doable, both technologically and economically. The trouble is, as you said, that the "powers that be" apparently have zero serious interest in replacing coal plants with anything different.
Over the years I've noticed a growing disconnect between US leaders and citizenry. I'm tempted to opine that your "leaders" simply don't give a damn; the US really needs to give the Old Guard the boot at the next election, on both sides of your weird two-party-one-horse government. I remember when your dollar was worth two of ours - now it's heading the other way around.
The courts and the police see arrest without charge as a small, everyday occurrence When the arrest is for suspicion of pedophilia, it bloody well is not a small, everyday occurrence, and they should have far better evidence than credit card purchases. I see such behaviour as negligent at best. If the police involved didn't understand - or worse didn't care about - the consequences of their actions, then heads should roll.
People who complain of RF sensitivity are in the same category as people who complain of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. They really do suffer from a disease that causes real symptoms. However the disease they have is a form of panic attack - which can in the case of MCS especially progress to something akin to agoraphobia. When you test people who are labeled as having MCS in a blinded fashion to things they are sensitive to, they don't get triggered any more often than placebo.
I wonder if the key word there is "labeled". I remember Chronic Fatigue Syndrome when it got noticed - a whole bunch of people got labeled with it, and told it was "all in their head", but a portion of them actually did have what the medical community finally decided was CFS (more or less). A bunch had other things which just looked similar, some other previously unknown ailments got discovered along the way, and of course there were the usual hypochondriacs. Meanwhile a few people got mistakenly committed to mental asylums, others got treated with "remedies" worse than the disease, and most just muddled along as best they could with whatever help their overworked GP could provide. Etcetera.
Look back at the annals of medical science, you'll find similar scenarios repeated. MCS? RF sensitivity? It's hard to get reproducibility and rigour when you're not allowed to breed, clone, imprison or vivisect your test subjects, so I wouldn't be so quick to say MCS or even RFS is all in their heads. We're a weird mob, six billion strong, and a few poor souls perhaps actually are allergic to cellphones, lost in the noise of the hypochondriacs and the technophobes.
I'm sure that pain is a very effective teaching mechanism. And I'm also sure most parents feel it hurts them more than the victim. It's still assault, though: "Modern American statutes define assault as: 1. an attempt to cause or purposely, knowingly, or recklessly causing bodily injury to another; or, 2. negligently causing bodily injury to another with a deadly weapon" (Wiki). The victim's age and/or relation to the perpetrator are irrelevant. If that statute considers "bodily injury" to include transitory pain... can you think of ANYONE who has not caused someone pain in their life? And thus should escape arrest? That law should not be considered exclusive of all others (such as the legal concepts of "good samaritan" and "de minimus" for starters).
When did I ever say anything about the State stepping in? When you said parents who cause their child pain should be arrested for assault? Arrests are performed by the State.
Parents already have all the power in the world; from a child's point-of-view there is no higher authority. They don't need the extra power trip of legally inflicting pain. Except parents don't, even if the kid thinks they do (and such kids aren't likely to have the problem discussed here). And any parent who finds it a power trip... maybe parents are different where you are, and need different laws, but it's not an absolute. And at some point legislating to protect people from the consequences of their actions (young or old) leads to a nanny State. Personally I think State intervention for a smack on the bum crosses that point.
obTopic: ditto my country's attempt at censorship in the name of protecting the children. It crosses the line.
P.S. Your sig was appreciated.:)
Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been not terrorism, but the power of the State.
Forget the "child abuse" label. Hitting someone is assault, whether the person you're hitting is an adult or a child, and regardless of whether the child is yours or someone else's. It should be treated as such. However, SOME (not all, not none) children DO respond positively to a spanking (which I define as open palm, briefly, not hard enough to bruise). Pain IS a teaching mechanism. I've never done it myself - I have had it done to me, though, way back when. Here's the thing - spanking your children shouldn't be a right, but it should be a privilege, in the old-fashioned sense of "this will hurt me more than it hurts you" (and meaning it). Like any privilege, it shouldn't be abused, but neither should we toss it into the same basket as assault. (Though I suppose having the police show up to throw your parents in jail for spanking you would teach you all sorts of rather harsh lessons about power, responsibility, and consequences).
On the other hand, the parents should have some leverage as well. I propose that they not be legally obligated to provide shelter or care; any child that habitually breaks the rules can find its own food and shelter. You appear to be proposing that improving child responsibility can be done by reducing parental responsibility? As children learn in part by observing their parents, I suspect this may not be successful. The Australian government's filtering attempt fits the same pattern...
Bottom line: if a child believes there are no consequences for mis-behaving, and that the State will shelter them from everything (right up until the moment they're legally an adult - at which point it will turn on them) then it's a rare child that won't run amok. Making the last resort the only resort is not going to help this. We must provide parents with more options, not strait-jacket them while saying "but hey we won't arrest you if you stop caring".
Actually, he did vote yes - *against* the immunity provisions. Here's the voting record on the amendment. Note the wording of the "Statement of Purpose". To vote "yes" was to say, "telcos should be held accountable for their actions".
Question: On the Amendment (Dodd Amdt. No. 3907 ) Vote Number: 15 Vote Date: February 12, 2008, 11:03 AM Required For Majority: 1/2 Vote Result: Amendment Rejected Amendment Number: S.Amdt. 3907 to S.Amdt. 3911 to S. 2248 (FISA Amendments Act of 2007) Statement of Purpose: To strike the provisions providing immunity from civil liability to electronic communication service providers for certain assistance provided to the Government.
The babies that are born through artificial insemination are great. The problem with it lies in all of the fertilized eggs that are discarded once a pregnancy occurs or that are lost during "handling".
There are AI methods that fertilize one egg at a time.
What if I'm one of those kids? Going to throw me in jail? Maybe in the cell next to my molester?
I doubt that's what you want. But stupider things have happened. That's the danger of laws. They get used against people, not just for them. See: law of unintended consequences.
What if I'm the victim? Do I need a "professional" reason? Should I be arrested for possession when I turn 18? What about my parents? What if I email them to you? Should you go to jail?
Creating laws to codify everything we can say and do is Lawful Stupid or Lawful Evil. Or both. Take your pick.
Based on the episodes I've seen, Star Trek transporters aren't the suicide booth kind (except when they fail).
* movie and episode where we see consciousness being retained during transport. * episodes too numerous (for me) to count that mention "pattern buffers", "matter streams", "Heisenberg compensators", "confinement beams" and other such technobabble.
Although, given it seems you get the ultimate in deep probing, followed by being polymorphed into pseudo-goo, stored in the equivalent of a tube of toothpaste, squirted through space, and finally remotely poked and prodded back into your original form... despite the fact that it doesn't *technically* kill you, I can still see why Doctor McCoy hates the things.:)
While this is scary, use of computers in everyday life necessarily equals loss of privacy as everything you do can be automatically scanned for patterns, archived indefinitely and disclosed to 3rd parties.
The difference between "Computer, where's Doctor McCoy" and "Computer, where's Weng Chiang" is that the Enterprise computer happily tells *anyone* where the doctor is. I doubt the PROC computers will be so generous.
That's also why talking to a passenger in the car is different. If there's a red light coming up and you're not stopping for it, the passenger will either stop talking or say something about it (according to taste).
Or they'll just keep talking on and on and on... (insert spouse joke here).
He says his *instinct* is cops are bad, he doesn't say he *treats* them that way. Looks to me the lesson is that young minds are impressionable minds. If your childhood was full of bad X, your gut instinct is going to say "bad" every time, even if you know the particular X in front of you is a living saint.
"Small independent businesses in rural and outlying areas don't have the buying power and shipping infrastructure that these multinational mega corps have."
How could one fix this (without doing more harm than good)?
Buried fly wheels can be in vacuum canisters floating on magnetic bearings. Absolutely no servicing.
This reminds me, there was an earlier/. where people were talking about magnets decaying. And they'd have to: thermodynamics and all that. But I got to wondering how long it would actually take, and some googling later... http://howthingswork.virginia.edu/page1.php?QNum=1 235
"However, good permanent magnets demagnetize so slowly that the changes are completely undetectable. You might have to wait a billion years to detect any significant weakening in the magnetic field around such a magnet."
But the page has no references? Anyone have some better / more descriptive links? Or is this one of those "so obvious to the specialists that they overlooked the rest of us not knowing" things?:)
Patents are simply recognizing the inventor's right to say, "I'll show you how to do X if you promise to do Y."
Anyone can say "I'll show you how to do X if you do Y for me." What a patent means is that you still have to do Y for me, even if you figure out X on your own.
Regardless, whether patents were a good or bad idea is moot. The existing system does not scale well enough to cope with the creative output of six billion independent human minds; it is now a hindrance, not an aid, to the promotion of science and the useful arts.
What - if anything - should replace it is a different discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because we can like Americans without having to like the USA? How's that old saw go, "love the people, fear the government"?
What I find amazing is how many can't see the difference.
Closer than one'd think. IP law is about controlling ideas - and there's nothing the corrupt like more than controlling other people.
No fly lists, security theater, free speech zones, warrantless wiretapping, world's highest documented incarceration rate, sanctioned torture, extraordinary rendition, detention camps, invasions on false pretexts, no-bid contracts, voting irregularities, untouchable president... but you're still allowed to protest, and nobody's had their whole family disappeared, so yeah. Maybe you're not a police state. Maybe there's just a lot of velvet on the fist.
But whatever you actually are, it's not something to be proud of, you're no longer the big brave sheriff in the stetson hat, and the rest of the free world doesn't look up to you anymore. You've got a bad case of clay feet and your friends hope you do something about it soon.
You DO know that the Congressional Record includes a couple of good recipes for chowder, right? That's the sort of thing the Record is full of....
So? If the politicians spent more time entering good recipes rather than bad laws, we'd all be better off.Probably not that far off. Addonics already makes a four-slot CF raid device as a PCI card, RAID 0/1/10. You'd have to use software for RAID 5 on it. I emailed them and they're looking at a PCI Express version. Can you get CF/SDHC adapters? http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad4cfprj.asp
Photovoltaics are still messy, but solar-thermal plants are entirely doable, both technologically and economically. The trouble is, as you said, that the "powers that be" apparently have zero serious interest in replacing coal plants with anything different.
Over the years I've noticed a growing disconnect between US leaders and citizenry. I'm tempted to opine that your "leaders" simply don't give a damn; the US really needs to give the Old Guard the boot at the next election, on both sides of your weird two-party-one-horse government. I remember when your dollar was worth two of ours - now it's heading the other way around.
I wonder if the key word there is "labeled". I remember Chronic Fatigue Syndrome when it got noticed - a whole bunch of people got labeled with it, and told it was "all in their head", but a portion of them actually did have what the medical community finally decided was CFS (more or less). A bunch had other things which just looked similar, some other previously unknown ailments got discovered along the way, and of course there were the usual hypochondriacs. Meanwhile a few people got mistakenly committed to mental asylums, others got treated with "remedies" worse than the disease, and most just muddled along as best they could with whatever help their overworked GP could provide. Etcetera.
Look back at the annals of medical science, you'll find similar scenarios repeated. MCS? RF sensitivity? It's hard to get reproducibility and rigour when you're not allowed to breed, clone, imprison or vivisect your test subjects, so I wouldn't be so quick to say MCS or even RFS is all in their heads. We're a weird mob, six billion strong, and a few poor souls perhaps actually are allergic to cellphones, lost in the noise of the hypochondriacs and the technophobes.
Actually, he did vote yes - *against* the immunity provisions. Here's the voting record on the amendment. Note the wording of the "Statement of Purpose". To vote "yes" was to say, "telcos should be held accountable for their actions".
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00015
Question: On the Amendment (Dodd Amdt. No. 3907 )
Vote Number: 15 Vote Date: February 12, 2008, 11:03 AM
Required For Majority: 1/2 Vote Result: Amendment Rejected
Amendment Number: S.Amdt. 3907 to S.Amdt. 3911 to S. 2248 (FISA Amendments Act of 2007)
Statement of Purpose: To strike the provisions providing immunity from civil liability to electronic communication service providers for certain assistance provided to the Government.
31 YEAs:
Akaka (D-HI), Baucus (D-MT), Biden (D-DE), Bingaman (D-NM), Boxer (D-CA), Brown (D-OH), Byrd (D-WV), Cantwell (D-WA), Cardin (D-MD), Casey (D-PA), Dodd (D-CT), Dorgan (D-ND), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Harkin (D-IA), Kennedy (D-MA), Kerry (D-MA), Klobuchar (D-MN), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Menendez (D-NJ), Murray (D-WA), Obama (D-IL), Reed (D-RI), Reid (D-NV), Sanders (I-VT), Schumer (D-NY), Tester (D-MT), Whitehouse (D-RI), Wyden (D-OR).
67 NAYs:
Alexander (R-TN), Allard (R-CO), Barrasso (R-WY), Bayh (D-IN), Bennett (R-UT), Bond (R-MO), Brownback (R-KS), Bunning (R-KY), Burr (R-NC), Carper (D-DE), Chambliss (R-GA), Coburn (R-OK), Cochran (R-MS), Coleman (R-MN), Collins (R-ME), Conrad (D-ND), Corker (R-TN), Cornyn (R-TX), Craig (R-ID), Crapo (R-ID), DeMint (R-SC), Dole (R-NC), Domenici (R-NM), Ensign (R-NV), Enzi (R-WY), Feinstein (D-CA), Grassley (R-IA), Gregg (R-NH), Hagel (R-NE), Hatch (R-UT), Hutchison (R-TX), Inhofe (R-OK), Inouye (D-HI), Isakson (R-GA), Johnson (D-SD), Kohl (D-WI), Kyl (R-AZ), Landrieu (D-LA), Lieberman (ID-CT), Lincoln (D-AR), Lugar (R-IN), Martinez (R-FL), McCain (R-AZ), McCaskill (D-MO), McConnell (R-KY), Mikulski (D-MD), Murkowski (R-AK), Nelson (D-FL), Nelson (D-NE), Pryor (D-AR), Roberts (R-KS), Rockefeller (D-WV), Salazar (D-CO), Sessions (R-AL), Shelby (R-AL), Smith (R-OR), Snowe (R-ME), Specter (R-PA), Stabenow (D-MI), Stevens (R-AK), Sununu (R-NH), Thune (R-SD), Vitter (R-LA), Voinovich (R-OH), Warner (R-VA), Webb (D-VA), Wicker (R-MS).
2 Not Voting:
Clinton (D-NY), Graham (R-SC).
The babies that are born through artificial insemination are great. The problem with it lies in all of the fertilized eggs that are discarded once a pregnancy occurs or that are lost during "handling".
There are AI methods that fertilize one egg at a time.
What if I'm one of those kids? Going to throw me in jail? Maybe in the cell next to my molester?
I doubt that's what you want. But stupider things have happened. That's the danger of laws. They get used against people, not just for them. See: law of unintended consequences.
What if I'm the victim? Do I need a "professional" reason? Should I be arrested for possession when I turn 18? What about my parents? What if I email them to you? Should you go to jail?
Creating laws to codify everything we can say and do is Lawful Stupid or Lawful Evil. Or both. Take your pick.
Based on the episodes I've seen, Star Trek transporters aren't the suicide booth kind (except when they fail).
:)
* movie and episode where we see consciousness being retained during transport.
* episodes too numerous (for me) to count that mention "pattern buffers", "matter streams", "Heisenberg compensators", "confinement beams" and other such technobabble.
Although, given it seems you get the ultimate in deep probing, followed by being polymorphed into pseudo-goo, stored in the equivalent of a tube of toothpaste, squirted through space, and finally remotely poked and prodded back into your original form... despite the fact that it doesn't *technically* kill you, I can still see why Doctor McCoy hates the things.
Other than...? If only more of our nations' leaders and public officials would do as much as this officer has: set a good example for others. :(
The difference between "Computer, where's Doctor McCoy" and "Computer, where's Weng Chiang" is that the Enterprise computer happily tells *anyone* where the doctor is. I doubt the PROC computers will be so generous.
Me too. Trouble is, I think the OP really meant, "just enough staff to keep things lurching from one barely-missed disaster to the next."
Or they'll just keep talking on and on and on... (insert spouse joke here).
Ok. Rootkit my Knoppix CD then.
Set(Vendors) includes Subset(HardwareVendors)? Install Rootkit(Motherboard/CPU).
Hmm. I'm not sure I'm phrasing this correctly - if we subtract a "basic cost of living" from these incomes, what are the respective percentages?
He says his *instinct* is cops are bad, he doesn't say he *treats* them that way. Looks to me the lesson is that young minds are impressionable minds. If your childhood was full of bad X, your gut instinct is going to say "bad" every time, even if you know the particular X in front of you is a living saint.
How could one fix this (without doing more harm than good)?
Buried fly wheels can be in vacuum canisters floating on magnetic bearings. Absolutely no servicing.
This reminds me, there was an earlier /. where people were talking about magnets decaying. And they'd have to: thermodynamics and all that. But I got to wondering how long it would actually take, and some googling later... http://howthingswork.virginia.edu/page1.php?QNum=1 235
But the page has no references? Anyone have some better / more descriptive links? Or is this one of those "so obvious to the specialists that they overlooked the rest of us not knowing" things? :)
Patents are simply recognizing the inventor's right to say, "I'll show you how to do X if you promise to do Y."
Anyone can say "I'll show you how to do X if you do Y for me." What a patent means is that you still have to do Y for me, even if you figure out X on your own.
Regardless, whether patents were a good or bad idea is moot. The existing system does not scale well enough to cope with the creative output of six billion independent human minds; it is now a hindrance, not an aid, to the promotion of science and the useful arts.
What - if anything - should replace it is a different discussion.