I recalled McCain's argument for lowering business taxes. He used a very specific example...Ireland.
It's purely a red herring, and he knows it as well as anyone.
Companies that "can locate any place in the world" already do, NOT because of taxes (which are actually modest) but because cost of living is two orders of magnitude lower in 3rd world countries.
That 10% extra tax you have to pay to operate in the US is NOTHING compared to the adjusted cost of living.
So, cutting corporate taxes is NOT going to bring in any more business. What it's going to do is to give free money to those companies who CAN'T relocate.
So... Why would he advocate cutting taxes on companies, and the richest 2% (see the "Bush Tax Cuts"). It's the typical Republican mantra of "trickle-down" or "voodoo" economics. The idea that we give all our money to the richest of the rich, and they will, in turn, do great things with it, and give the rest of us more value in return. It's been panned by every credible economist on the planet over the past century, and it's been tried several times, with terrible results. It didn't work in the Guilded Age, it didn't work for Reagan, it hasn't worked for G.W. Bush. Every time it's been tried, it has resulted in a deep recession, and directly led to The Great Depression.
For the Republicans, trickle-down economics is just a bullshit mask, so that they can PRETEND that their corrupt actions are well-intentioned. Even though, in plain fact, they're out and out doing the bidding of Corporate America, so that they get nice big campaign contributions, more houses than they can keep track of, and keeping the revolving door spinning, so they get a cushy, ridiculously high-paying, do-nothing job from the industry, when they finally get kicked out of Washington by the voters, or by the courts, for rampant corruption.
See: Tom Delay, "Duke" Cunningham, Ted Stevens, John McCain (he just barely escaped the "Keating Five" scandal by the skin of his teeth), the K Street Project, Jack Abramoff, and everyone else in the Republican Party that is perpetually on the edge of indictment.
In fact they can't even feign to support their own stated principles, since they regularly throw them out the window, whenever the well-being of their rich friends happens to be in jeopardy. See the Terry Schiavo affair, where "state's rights" were summarily thrown out the window to pander to the religious right. See G.W. Bush's huge deficits, massive growth of the government. See the $700 billion bailout, which is now actually up to $1,100 billion, filled with the typical new tax cuts to help Republicans pander to their preferred corporate overlords...
Not that the Democrats are perfect. They're typically beholden to the media industry (ie. RIAA/MPAA/Disney), and I'd certainly love to be rid of Dianne Frankenstein. But they're squeaky clean virgins by comparison. Most important of all, they don't use discredited pseudo-economic bullshit as an excuse to do what they want... They actually have REAL economists working for them, and make policies that will actually, provably, HELP the economy (going back to FDR's New Deal, that the Republicans have been desperately trying to covertly dismantle for half a century). It's the difference between a party of adults running the country, and a bunch of children using the government as their own play thing.
Of course I don't hate all Republicans. After a rough few years at the start, Arnold Schwarzenegger has since actually done quite a respectable job as Governor of CA. And I personally happen to be much more on the conservative side myself, and cringe when I hear democrats regularly pandering to women about the provably non-existent "gender gap/glass ceiling" and promoting ever easier abortions for under-aged girls, and the like. Still, I can see through the vast majority of the GOP's pandering, lies, and out and out irresponsibility with the government they run, and can't possibly vote to subject the country to more of that.
No it isn't. Sun-burns make your sensitive to HEAT, not light. It just happens that sun-light is a common cause of your skin heating up... Of course your sun-burned skin ISN'T sensitive to indoor lighting. You might just as well have said that sun-burn makes your skin sensitive to WATER, since taking a hot shower is painful...
Being able to feel heat is a long, LONG way from being able to perceive light. And if we did actually evolve that way, why can't we see infrared-spectra light today? It would be a natural capability if eyes evolved from heat-sensing organs, and certainly a HUGE competitive advantage.
You have fallen into the same trap as most of the populous. You seem to think that a 200+ year old paper can actually affect anyone's actions.
No, I'm not. You're just being extremely pedantic so you can raise a different point, trying to change the subject to something that is completely tangential and irrelevant to the topic.
Technically, you need fumes for an explosion, but that's just a quick flash inside the fuel tank... You probably won't even see any external flames.
To get a fireball, and/or any sustained burning, you need copious quantities of fuel. And an average person doesn't know the difference between an explosion and a conflagration.
Your experiment probably won't work, because gasoline will extinguish an open flame rather than igniting. Sparks, and or hot metal will work much better.
replace "one-party government" with just "government" and it's quite similar.
Yes, if you change important words, you can make any two things sound similar...
"one-party" is extremely important. It's the difference between totalitarian and democracy. It means it's both practical and beneficial to censor, and punish people, for political speech. With multiple parties, such heavy handed tactics become extremely impossible at best, and by and large, impossible.
Everything else you've said is just plain old conspiracy theory, with no evidence at all, and I've reached my quota of stupid for the day...
Firstly, those being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are NOT US Citizens. NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM.
Secondly, it's not even true that the foreign terrorist suspects are being held "without lawyer or trial". They ARE given access to lawyers, and are tried before a military tribunal.
The Patriot Act, or any other law, can say anything it damn well wants to... That won't make such actions constitutional, so it's not enforceable.
This doesn't sound any different from how the United States operate.
The US taps phone calls in an attempt to uncover evidence of violent crimes, to prevent them from happening, and to prosecute and jail those responsible.
China taps phone calls so they can find out who is speaking out against the one-party government, or bringing up other embarrassing subjects, so that they can send police to drag them out of their house, and put them in front of a firing squad.
Not at all. The government didn't come out and explain this secret program... The program was exposed by the press. Why is it that you believe the press can uncover this program in the first place, but only the relatively benign part, while the evil conspiracy is able to stay hidden?
Or realize that the FBI was openly recruiting people to spy on protest groups in Minnesota before the RNC.
After 9/11, FBI agents were sent out to go under-cover in just about every organization they could, to see if there was any signs of terrorist activities. Having an un-declared FBI agent joint your open group isn't exactly a violation of your human rights.
Also remember that the patriot act has been used 1000's of times against people who have done nothing terror related.
Yes, and? It's a big law, with lots of things in it, and it's not all related to the evil Arab terrorists.
The RICO act has probably been used 1000's of times in cases that it wasn't meant for... So? The law of unintended consequences applies, but that doesn't mean your neighbors are going to start disappearing tomorrow.
Did you just get a fresh shipment of red herring today?
What's found? A partially burned piece of some of the most flammable things on the plane, including a very small piece of PLASTIC that happens to have his name on it.
Nobody said anything about the findings being burned, partially or otherwise.
But no body, no 1,000 pounds of steel,
Large, bulky items tend to stay right where they were put... Smaller and lighter items get picked up by winds, water (streams, rivers, etc.), etc.
just a few, highly flammable personal items (clothing, ID)
Yes, because the real world is just like the movies... where every crash causes an explosion and a raging inferno, even when the vehicle has run out of gas.
Which is why there are no undiscovered crash sites, since someone always notices the raging inferno... And of course you don't actually find a downed plane, because noting remains after the necessary conflagration...
there is no technological security fix made by a man that cannot also be broken by a man
Computers are math machines. Math can be proven to be 100% factually correct.
The only problem with computer security is that the systems are too complex to go through every line systematically to verify and ensure 100% correctness.
Of course your statement was pretty vague, so you could be talking about physical security, or any number of other unrelated issues.
how do you end up getting ships in and out of the coast?
First, you draw this tsunami-wave canceling device on a placemat, labeling the ocean as "START" and the coastline as "FINISH". Print out thousands of them and hand out the placemats to family restaurants, along with a few boxes of crayons.
Then, you just go around collecting the "used" placemats, kindly filled out by unsuspecting 5 year-olds, and deliver them to cargo-ship captains.
And here they are claiming the Falcon, with a failure rate almost an order of magnitude greater and a fraction of the performance of either, is the rocketship of their dreams.
Everyone's hopped-up on fantasies of how "privatization" will give us everything we want the government to do, for free. Politicians have been hyping the discredited theory for decades to eager listeners. It's no surprise the same irrational praise of corporations, and fear of government, should now extend to NASA.
It doesn't help that there's a good dozen or so extremely vocal, and utterly insane Libertarians here on/. who will promote such things to the heavens to advance their cause, no matter the reality of the situation.
but I dispute your claim that electric drive systems have poor 'fuel' efficency at highway speeds.
You can dispute anything you want, but it won't change the facts.
that has a low amount of shutdowns and startups using a battery to 'cache' energy (15kWh for example) produced by turbine so that you dont need to constantly start up and shut down the turbine, will make a very energy efficient car.
Turbines with air-foil bearings have cycle counts in the HUNDREDS before they need to be torn down and serviced. Turbines are great for LARGE applications where they need to be spinning CONSTANTLY, but terrible for portable applications where they don't. That's why we have Gasoline and Diesel Engines.
(BTW gas turbines have 40~50% thermal eficcency, compare I.C.E. with ~25%).
Show me a gas turbine, small enough for use in a car, that can actually get 40% efficiency. I'll wait...
Even if you have 40% efficiency, even in your own scenario, you lose 30% converting it to and from electricity.
And there's no reason to compare it with a gasoline engine. Diesel engines are much more efficient, and actually available.
whoever gets space travel pinned down first is going to have a pretty good advantage over other nations.
"Pinned down" is quite a stretch, implying some sudden, overwhelming breakthrough that gives a huge competitive advantage.
Instead, space travel is like any other scientific or engineering endeavor. Progress is linear, and what one group learns can be applied by others soon after. It's a ridiculous stretch to claim that putting a person on Mars first is going to give whatever nation responsible a substantial advantage in other unrelated endeavors, like putting up communications satellites.
In other words, it might well be cheaper and easier to let someone else go first, and then replicate and improve upon their methods. ie. Second-mover advantage.
Rather than solving the problem, i.e. our dependency on fossil-fuels, we are treating the symptoms of it.
I have an idea... LET'S DO BOTH!
Yours is a typical false dichotomy. Prove that the people in question could have contributed something significant to non-fossil fuel power generation or storage. Prove that some of the resources that went into their work would have gone into something better if they weren't doing this work. And finally, prove that there IS even some alternative that we could conceivably switch-over to before devices such as this could go into production.
Reducing consumption of fossil fuels is a laudable goal. Many of the technologies will directly translate into improved efficiency of comparable biofuels. And even if it absolutely doesn't, it gives us more time to develop good alternatives.
but because its possibe and it would reduce the need for fuel by at least 50 percent, the current politic will not allow it.
Yeah, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that turbines and ultracapacitors are ridiculously expensive, turbines have a very small number of spin-up/down cycles before requiring expensive maintenance (on the bearings, primarily), and that electric drive systems get very poor fuel efficiency at highway speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh*
It's purely a red herring, and he knows it as well as anyone.
Companies that "can locate any place in the world" already do, NOT because of taxes (which are actually modest) but because cost of living is two orders of magnitude lower in 3rd world countries.
That 10% extra tax you have to pay to operate in the US is NOTHING compared to the adjusted cost of living.
So, cutting corporate taxes is NOT going to bring in any more business. What it's going to do is to give free money to those companies who CAN'T relocate.
So... Why would he advocate cutting taxes on companies, and the richest 2% (see the "Bush Tax Cuts"). It's the typical Republican mantra of "trickle-down" or "voodoo" economics. The idea that we give all our money to the richest of the rich, and they will, in turn, do great things with it, and give the rest of us more value in return. It's been panned by every credible economist on the planet over the past century, and it's been tried several times, with terrible results. It didn't work in the Guilded Age, it didn't work for Reagan, it hasn't worked for G.W. Bush. Every time it's been tried, it has resulted in a deep recession, and directly led to The Great Depression.
For the Republicans, trickle-down economics is just a bullshit mask, so that they can PRETEND that their corrupt actions are well-intentioned. Even though, in plain fact, they're out and out doing the bidding of Corporate America, so that they get nice big campaign contributions, more houses than they can keep track of, and keeping the revolving door spinning, so they get a cushy, ridiculously high-paying, do-nothing job from the industry, when they finally get kicked out of Washington by the voters, or by the courts, for rampant corruption.
See: Tom Delay, "Duke" Cunningham, Ted Stevens, John McCain (he just barely escaped the "Keating Five" scandal by the skin of his teeth), the K Street Project, Jack Abramoff, and everyone else in the Republican Party that is perpetually on the edge of indictment.
In fact they can't even feign to support their own stated principles, since they regularly throw them out the window, whenever the well-being of their rich friends happens to be in jeopardy. See the Terry Schiavo affair, where "state's rights" were summarily thrown out the window to pander to the religious right. See G.W. Bush's huge deficits, massive growth of the government. See the $700 billion bailout, which is now actually up to $1,100 billion, filled with the typical new tax cuts to help Republicans pander to their preferred corporate overlords...
Not that the Democrats are perfect. They're typically beholden to the media industry (ie. RIAA/MPAA/Disney), and I'd certainly love to be rid of Dianne Frankenstein. But they're squeaky clean virgins by comparison. Most important of all, they don't use discredited pseudo-economic bullshit as an excuse to do what they want... They actually have REAL economists working for them, and make policies that will actually, provably, HELP the economy (going back to FDR's New Deal, that the Republicans have been desperately trying to covertly dismantle for half a century). It's the difference between a party of adults running the country, and a bunch of children using the government as their own play thing.
Of course I don't hate all Republicans. After a rough few years at the start, Arnold Schwarzenegger has since actually done quite a respectable job as Governor of CA. And I personally happen to be much more on the conservative side myself, and cringe when I hear democrats regularly pandering to women about the provably non-existent "gender gap/glass ceiling" and promoting ever easier abortions for under-aged girls, and the like. Still, I can see through the vast majority of the GOP's pandering, lies, and out and out irresponsibility with the government they run, and can't possibly vote to subject the country to more of that.
No it isn't. Sun-burns make your sensitive to HEAT, not light. It just happens that sun-light is a common cause of your skin heating up... Of course your sun-burned skin ISN'T sensitive to indoor lighting. You might just as well have said that sun-burn makes your skin sensitive to WATER, since taking a hot shower is painful...
Being able to feel heat is a long, LONG way from being able to perceive light. And if we did actually evolve that way, why can't we see infrared-spectra light today? It would be a natural capability if eyes evolved from heat-sensing organs, and certainly a HUGE competitive advantage.
No, I'm not. You're just being extremely pedantic so you can raise a different point, trying to change the subject to something that is completely tangential and irrelevant to the topic.
Technically, you need fumes for an explosion, but that's just a quick flash inside the fuel tank... You probably won't even see any external flames.
To get a fireball, and/or any sustained burning, you need copious quantities of fuel. And an average person doesn't know the difference between an explosion and a conflagration.
Your experiment probably won't work, because gasoline will extinguish an open flame rather than igniting. Sparks, and or hot metal will work much better.
Yes, if you change important words, you can make any two things sound similar...
"one-party" is extremely important. It's the difference between totalitarian and democracy. It means it's both practical and beneficial to censor, and punish people, for political speech. With multiple parties, such heavy handed tactics become extremely impossible at best, and by and large, impossible.
Everything else you've said is just plain old conspiracy theory, with no evidence at all, and I've reached my quota of stupid for the day...
You're really demonstrating your stupidity here.
Firstly, those being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are NOT US Citizens. NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM.
Secondly, it's not even true that the foreign terrorist suspects are being held "without lawyer or trial". They ARE given access to lawyers, and are tried before a military tribunal.
The Patriot Act, or any other law, can say anything it damn well wants to... That won't make such actions constitutional, so it's not enforceable.
No. Video cards don't do any encoding.
Point out ONE case where that has happened or just up.
The US taps phone calls in an attempt to uncover evidence of violent crimes, to prevent them from happening, and to prosecute and jail those responsible.
China taps phone calls so they can find out who is speaking out against the one-party government, or bringing up other embarrassing subjects, so that they can send police to drag them out of their house, and put them in front of a firing squad.
Clearly, the two are not at all different.
Not at all. The government didn't come out and explain this secret program... The program was exposed by the press. Why is it that you believe the press can uncover this program in the first place, but only the relatively benign part, while the evil conspiracy is able to stay hidden?
After 9/11, FBI agents were sent out to go under-cover in just about every organization they could, to see if there was any signs of terrorist activities. Having an un-declared FBI agent joint your open group isn't exactly a violation of your human rights.
Yes, and? It's a big law, with lots of things in it, and it's not all related to the evil Arab terrorists.
The RICO act has probably been used 1000's of times in cases that it wasn't meant for... So? The law of unintended consequences applies, but that doesn't mean your neighbors are going to start disappearing tomorrow.
Did you just get a fresh shipment of red herring today?
By "over" you of course mean "under", right?
"crew members trekked 85 miles north to the point at which the remains were found;"
Nobody said anything about the findings being burned, partially or otherwise.
Large, bulky items tend to stay right where they were put... Smaller and lighter items get picked up by winds, water (streams, rivers, etc.), etc.
Yes, because the real world is just like the movies... where every crash causes an explosion and a raging inferno, even when the vehicle has run out of gas.
Which is why there are no undiscovered crash sites, since someone always notices the raging inferno... And of course you don't actually find a downed plane, because noting remains after the necessary conflagration...
You are a moron.
It's "Verizon math"...
Just my 0.02 cents worth.
I have a radio... It's capable of more than 10 GHz.
Birthday parties and weddings are MUCH more exciting with hydrogen-filled balloons.
Computers are math machines. Math can be proven to be 100% factually correct.
The only problem with computer security is that the systems are too complex to go through every line systematically to verify and ensure 100% correctness.
Of course your statement was pretty vague, so you could be talking about physical security, or any number of other unrelated issues.
First, you draw this tsunami-wave canceling device on a placemat, labeling the ocean as "START" and the coastline as "FINISH". Print out thousands of them and hand out the placemats to family restaurants, along with a few boxes of crayons.
Then, you just go around collecting the "used" placemats, kindly filled out by unsuspecting 5 year-olds, and deliver them to cargo-ship captains.
Problem solved.
Everyone's hopped-up on fantasies of how "privatization" will give us everything we want the government to do, for free. Politicians have been hyping the discredited theory for decades to eager listeners. It's no surprise the same irrational praise of corporations, and fear of government, should now extend to NASA.
It doesn't help that there's a good dozen or so extremely vocal, and utterly insane Libertarians here on /. who will promote such things to the heavens to advance their cause, no matter the reality of the situation.
Yes, I'm sure they're now totally in awe of his 25% success rate...
It's a bit early to start gloating.
You can dispute anything you want, but it won't change the facts.
Turbines with air-foil bearings have cycle counts in the HUNDREDS before they need to be torn down and serviced. Turbines are great for LARGE applications where they need to be spinning CONSTANTLY, but terrible for portable applications where they don't. That's why we have Gasoline and Diesel Engines.
Show me a gas turbine, small enough for use in a car, that can actually get 40% efficiency. I'll wait...
Even if you have 40% efficiency, even in your own scenario, you lose 30% converting it to and from electricity.
And there's no reason to compare it with a gasoline engine. Diesel engines are much more efficient, and actually available.
"Pinned down" is quite a stretch, implying some sudden, overwhelming breakthrough that gives a huge competitive advantage.
Instead, space travel is like any other scientific or engineering endeavor. Progress is linear, and what one group learns can be applied by others soon after. It's a ridiculous stretch to claim that putting a person on Mars first is going to give whatever nation responsible a substantial advantage in other unrelated endeavors, like putting up communications satellites.
In other words, it might well be cheaper and easier to let someone else go first, and then replicate and improve upon their methods. ie. Second-mover advantage.
Yes, because The Universe works on the "finders, keepers" principle.
I have an idea... LET'S DO BOTH!
Yours is a typical false dichotomy. Prove that the people in question could have contributed something significant to non-fossil fuel power generation or storage. Prove that some of the resources that went into their work would have gone into something better if they weren't doing this work. And finally, prove that there IS even some alternative that we could conceivably switch-over to before devices such as this could go into production.
Reducing consumption of fossil fuels is a laudable goal. Many of the technologies will directly translate into improved efficiency of comparable biofuels. And even if it absolutely doesn't, it gives us more time to develop good alternatives.
Yeah, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that turbines and ultracapacitors are ridiculously expensive, turbines have a very small number of spin-up/down cycles before requiring expensive maintenance (on the bearings, primarily), and that electric drive systems get very poor fuel efficiency at highway speeds.