I hate to say this, because it will certainly be flamed, derided as only half true, or worse, but...
The federalization of the US was a slipperly slope. The problem with any federalizing body is that said body tries to mandate things out of the component parts, above and beyond what the terms of said federalization were at the time of signature.
Take for instance, the US, as per you example.
In the US, a hotbutton topic is that of "state rights". Our constitution states that any power not explicitly granted by said constitution or its amendments is retained by the component states, or the people. This means that unless it deals with foriegn powers, or some similarly and explicitly worded function of the federal government, the fed should piss off. However, our fed likes to dictate federal education, federal healthcare, federal taxlaw, federal laws of other forms, and federal oversights onto its member states with a decidedly "suck it bitch!" Attitude, flagrantly violating the constitution's terms, abusing the fuck out of the commerce clause, and just overall thinking they have the legal authority to do these things when legally they don't.
If that's your example of how federalization is supposed to work, I hope the eu movement dies in its crib, and the eu member states all run home and build walls around themselves. Seriously.
Really, this idea has lots of warm fuzzy, but it won't work as a general industry practice.
Take my current location: last summer we had epic heatwaves of triple digit ambient daytime temps. Using open air cooling those servers would be actively overheating just by being turned on, let alone running code. Generating their own heat, they would risk serious failures. In palo alto, where they have a cooling ocean breeze blowing inland and moderating summer temperatures, it might work. In the landlocked hellhole I live in, average summer hatwaves would devistate their servers horribly.
Then you have the problem with the realestate needed for the solar arrays themselves and with the low efficiency of current energy storage technologies, and the high voltages needed to efficiently power a data center. Solar PV is DC, and is not made to supply high voltages. To get the high voltages, you need to turn it to AC, so you can use a transformer. Then you have to turn it back into DC at the high voltage, so you can efficiently distribute it through the datacenter. That's 2 great big energy vampires right there. Add the weaksauce of current solar generation efficiencies, and you have a "are you smoking crack!?" Moment.
While you might be able to utilize idealized conditions at idealized locations to make a low cost data center, you don't get to dictate that more than half the time. Somebody in rekjavik could make use all the geothermal power, and freezing cold outside for a really cheap datacenter too. Doesn't mean somebody in say, bahrain could do the same thing. Its not location agnostic.
Likewise, the power content of solar rays is not constant across the planet, so the costs of powering with solar vs the land utilization costs needed to run a datacenter that does more than just sit there to look pretty are non-trivial, and may well be outright impossible in certain areas.
I don't see this being more than just a pipedream.
This is only true for people who are hopelessly specialized, and literally depend on a social safety net to garantee sertain basic services just to stay alive.
Eg, the doctor relies on a whole host of other government services to ensure that the car he drives won't gas him with carbon monoxide, or that his house doesn't contain cyanide. His specialist skill as a doctor comes with some hoops he might find trite; (recognition from a state medical board, stringent legal fees and practices to avoid malpractice litigation, varying levels of oversight to retain a medical license, the need for the license to begin with, etc..) but those hurdles are there to make the safety net reciprocal.
If the doctor suddenly crashed in the sudan, or the congo, his ability to tie first rate sutures won't help him get clean water to drink, a shelter over his head, or food to eat.
Some people erroneously define that safety net as "civilization." This is completely wrong. It is a form of civilization, but is not itself the de-facto requirement. A civilization is any mass aggregation of people living and working together. It can exist with or without such a provision.
A person who wants to be free from such an intricate safety net does not, therefor, reject "civilization." They reject the specialist centric nature of the society that mandates the safety net. They may do so for any number of reasons, but those are immaterial. They simply want the net gone, and assert that they do not require it. Many civilizations throughout history have been able to function just fine without one.
If I can treat my own injury, why do I need a doctor? (Is not one of the precepts of medicine "doctor, heal thyself?") If I can fix my own computer, why do I need a service tech? If I can cook my own food, why do I need a cook? Etc.
The problem with a safety net, is that it seeks to make "everyone safe", even from themselves. (Arguably, especially from themselves.) You might be well versed in medicine and surgical techniques, but under the pretense of public safety, you aren't allowed to give yourself stitches when you cut yourself. That's what's so onerous about it. It basically is an official policy enacted, to protect people from themselves, and in so doing, blatantly saying you can't be trusted with your own safety. It does this because some people really are that hopelessly incompetent, and require that functionality. Since the net is made to service everyone, it defaults to the lowest common denominator, and seeks to protect the stupid from themselves at all costs, and ultimately ends up being officious, cumbersome, and tyrranical. (Things like mandating warnings on windscreen covers saying not to drive with them in place. I mean, really? Who's stupid enough to think they are superman and can drive with a trifold sheet of opaque material blocking their vision, sufficiently that they need a fucking warning not to do that put on the product, or suffer legal liability?)
People that want the safetynet gone want people who try to drive with the windscreen cover on to be liable for the accidents they cause, and not be protected from themselves. If they want to fix their own car, and it explodes, they expect to be held liable for their faulty repair. They follow a different philosophy about responsibility.
They tend to be generalists, rather than specialists, and to do most of their own repair work. They learn quickly what they really can or cannot do, and choose responsibly who to trust and who not to trust with the things they really can't do themselves. They don't expect other people to be responsible for their own poor decisions, and are disgusted by people who do.
Yes. It embraces risks.
Doctors are held liable only by how many patients decide they can be trusted. If they are shitty doctors, people look elsewhere for care. This means shitty doctors doing shitty medicine on people that don't know any better. There are two ways to look at that.
1) "that's regressive! Our safteynet of state medi
Factor in the adult education costs to meet the requirements. You will find that your applicants will be statistically saddled with out of control student loans they need to make payments on. As such, they actually *NEED* the 100k figure, just to buy food and gas to come and work for you.
The one suffering the entitlement complex is the business's HR dept, demanding absurd requirements for a low paying position. "We don't want to pay to train those people!" Is not a suitable out for this problem. I don't want to pay taxes either, but that doesn't mean I can tell uncle sam to fuck off on tax season.
Like any purchaser, (an employer purchases labor.), you need to shop, and determine a fair price based on all outstanding market forces, and realize that after a certain point, you get what you pay for.
It is unsrealistic to expect people to live in poverty like conditions (yes, you pay them a "decent wage", but that is for somebody that isn't paying asstons of money to an educational institution on the installment plan. When you pay several grand a month for student loan payments, 50k a year is barely livable on the "ramen for dinner" budget. Eg, poverty.) *JUST* so they can work for you.
I understand that as an employer, you have to make sure your applicants meet your basic needs. When buying a boat, you want one that doesn't leak. However, demanding a yacht for 300$ is rediculous. It costs more than that to build the yacht. Saying the shipyard is suffering from entitlement issues is totally in the wrong. If all you need is a boat to putter around a lake in, a little fishing boat is more appropriate to your needs and your budget. That is what you should hire. Don't demand a yacht unless you need a yacht, because you *will* end up paying yacht prices.
Need somebody to cobble together a shellscript? Your typical highschool kid can do that. Don't demand 10+yrs linux experience with sysadmin experience, a CS degree, and 50 industry certs. That's like demanding a nascar certified pit mechanic to have your tire changed, when a walmart tech with a speedwrench is more than adequate. Hire the walmart kid. Leave the nascar pit mechanic to the nascar circuit where he's really needed.
stop saying the nascar guy suffers "entitlement" bcause he refuses to work changing your tire for 10$/hr. You're the one suffering entitlement by demanding a high-rate nascar pit mechanic for piddly shit. Seriously.
Agreed, oversight is also a mixed bag. And yes, I despise MBAs. They are the fuckers making the byzantine 3 ring circus I have to deal with to get a specification for a fucking hydraulic port, or some similar crap.
However, things like the ASME, while I curse that they demand money out of me and don't keep good records of purchases, are a fantastic thing for standardization otherwise.
The initial private craft design specs that spacex and co. Develop are de-facto standards, rather than broadly designed standards. They are more like the old "soundblaster and compatibles" standard for audio cards in the 90s. Sadly, they also cover the databus design, slot architecture, and endianness as well.
Non-competative regulatory and standards agencies can totally suck balls sometimes, no contest, but they also make things better in a lot of ways.
Also, simply because the ISO fubared XLM, doesn't mean ISO fubars everything else. That's a non-sequitor.:)
Private sector space exploration is a mixed blessing without regulatory oversight.
The FAA does wonders for ensuring consistent manufacturing and engineering policies, as do the various ISO industrial process certification programs for industrial centers.
Government sponsored engineering tends to be a total money and resource sink, and what comes out tends to look like the engineers went out of their way to make things needlessly cryptic and arcane to justify their bills.
Essentially, the equivalent of a 500 line "hello world!", which ignores normal OS window classes, allocates and frees its own memory, and has an integrated kernel runtime to make sure nobody is snooping on the secret sauce from outside of userspace.
Private designs tend to shy away from uniqueness, and toward stringent use of the KISS principle, but may excessively use protected engineering documentation and practices. (Imagine somebody writing their own application API on top of the perfectly functional standard one for their target, and locking that bitch down so tight that its like watching a snuff film, then using it religiously to keep people from "copying" their ideas. Nevermind that all their competitors are also working from the KISS handbook on the actual engineering, and that the differences are all almost entirely process related. Fit form and function is conserved.)
Oversight helps to keep these proprietary engineering toolbases under control, and helps ensure interoperability of critical systems, like runway boarding ramps on the aircraft's skin, type of fuel used, and standard cabin pressures.
Without the unifying influence of such oversight, no airplane in the sky would follow any standards except internal OEM ones. An airbus and a boeing offering would not use the same cabin pressure (just to throw something out there), because one of them would get the brightt idea to lower it 5psi so they could fly a little higher and reduce skin stresses as a competative edge.
Space vehicles, being radically new to private industry, would be especially vulnerable to marketing and PR drones dictating on the engineering so that the vehicle stands out from the crowd, even though that is a terrible thing for interoperability.
So, while I like the leaner design implementations that come out of private companies, I strongly advocate oversight and regulatory compliance for safety and interoperability reasons.
Otherwise the specs on a private spaceship will be a countless mess of cross-referencing NDA laden proprietary internal standards docs, and as an engineer for a company that does outsourced work from the big boys, I only have so much goddam space on my desk for binders full of proprietary specifications so I can read somebody's engineering properly. "Torque bolts to LES####" is fine and dandy if you work for learjet. For the rest of us, I'm happy to get an AME or NAS number that I can look up instead of calling your support line, talking with a string of bobbleheads behind desks who are more concerned over weather or not I might discuss what's in a spec for tightening bolts with "unauthorized" people, and if I am indeed authorized to know the secret of the bolt tightening in the first place. I'm an engineer. Just give me the damn spec, your corporate crap smells up my day.
Regulatory oversight makes things magically simpler, because it forces LES#### to be compliant with a standard AMS#### or similar regulatory body that I don't have to suck a dick to get my hands on.
I'm thrilled that the dragon heavy lifter works. It opens all sorts of doors for much cheaper orbital deployments, and the soyouz capsules were starting to have unreliable failure rates from excessive use and improper maintenance downtimes. This will work wonders.
But for FSM's sake, institute some damned industry regulations!
I would, but they haven't invented hardlight holograms yet! Perhaps I should write out the contents of my bitcoin encrypted wallet on some paper, and try throwing that?
You need to add clay to that as well. Peat is organic sponge, but it alone won't support heavy agriculture without the mineral and evaporation control that good clay adds.
After about 5 years of production the mineral stored in the peat from the peatbog it was harvested from will be depleted, and your crops will look scraggly if you don't.
You could use crushed up seashells, or degraded plastic sludge for goodness sake!
You heat up the carbon bearing feedstock until it catches fire, then spray it with steam. This creates a reduction reaction powered by the prior cumbustion's heat, creating CO and hydrogen gas.
Landfill trash, sewer mud, grass clippings, tree and yard waste, lumber yard sawdust; a syngas plant wouldn't care, as long as it contains carbon, and can be burned.
Syngas can be further processed into real synthetic natural gas. The idea is to transform non-bioprocessable carbon bearing waste into an easily transportable gas form that can make use of existing transport infrastructures.
Ocean water traveling around the earth in the tidal bulge does not move around free of losses. This means the orbital momentum of the moon is depleting weather you use it or not. Its like arguing that using wind power will make the winds stop.
Besides. The moon is moving away from the earth, not toward. Depleting orbita momentum will actually stabilize its orbit.
It is catalytically created with heat from a mixture of organic feedstock and water. (Essentially sewer mud.)
It *IS* more expensive than oil you get from the ground, but when that isn't an option, you can consider the benefits of eliminating septic waste while also heating homes. Charging for sewer services, as well as for fuel produced, let's you subsidise at both ends, which could lower expected costs.
How much energy flow is needed to drive an EV? Let's see... the battery pack has a 13kw/h or so capacity, and drives for 80 miles or so... approx what,.53kw/h per mile? (530v@1a?)
Let's say instead of a mr. Fusion, we build a large carbon 14 betaelectric power core, about the size of a gastank. It weighs about 200lbs let's say. Inside is a honeycomb of thin carbon 14 rods surrounded in a cheap polymer semiconductor, and which produce about 1v @100ma of juice each. (Totally fictional numbers, btw, but other betavoltaic devices about the size of a penny produce.1v or so, from memory. These hypothetical cores are the size of a #1 pencil, so 1v is well within reason I think.)
You need 5300 cores to reach "direct drive" power output. I think you can fit that many in there if you use efficient packing.
Carbon 14 is a beta emitter, with an absurdly long halflife. It does not use catalyzed fission, and can be produced reasonably cheaply (given its long half life| and thus service life) in bulk by seeding ordinary graphite inside a fast breeder reactor, then centrifuging it properly.
By "absurdly long", I mean "over 1 million years". This means that the semiconductor wrapped around the core will fail before the power source inside it does, so old cells could be recycled economically.
Your EV could drive continuously for decades, nonstop.
Basically, you take a section of rocky sea coast (UK has plenty), dig out an artificial harbor like area, build what looks like a shipping lock to nowhere in it.
Then, whe the tide is high, you open the doors on the lock. Tide bulge water rushes in. Close the lock when full. Tide goes down. Boom. Reservoir of free water you didn't have to pump.
Further inland, you build another lock. This is the "battery". It is elevated a few feet above the main generator pool. Using power produced at low tide, a small amount of water is pumped into the reservoir lock. At high tide, the reservoir lock flows back into the generator pool while the main lock doors are open to catch the tide. This provides relief power while the main lock refills over the hour or so that the tide is full. Rinse, repeat.
How much sewerage does the UK make? (I'm being serious here!)
If a sufficient amount is produced, then syngas plants running on gassified biomatter from the sewerage system could be dropped on top of existing nat gas infrastructures, and would have the benefit of plausibly getting labled "carbon neutral". (If it weren't for fossil fuel fertilizers in the food chain.)
This is the UK, what sunlight? During the day, they have indirect, mist scattered sun from a mostly cloudy sky. No good for solar heating.
Best solution is large scale deployment of tidal powered hydro plants.
Here's the basic idea behind how they could be deployed:
You build what looks like a shipping lock. At high tide, you open the lock, and let the tide in. The at max tide, you close the lock. The tide passes, but the raised water stays in. Nature fills the tank for you. Now you release the trapped high pressure water through hydro generators, and have a small backup battery reserve to buffer production during the next high tide when generation has to stop to let the lock refill.
A very large scale installation could be made between the UK and france, if money isn't an obstacle, and could even be a joint venture between those countries like the chunnel project was.
If I were an island nation with lots of sea coast, its at least something I would try.
. doesn't that make poor people face criminal penalties for being poor that a rich person, having performed the same actions, wouldn't face?
Yes and no. Its the fairest way to determine if a criminal case needs to be brought to address the complaint or not as far as I can see. Setting the value too high forces things that shouldn't be decided in civil court, to be decided there, like these crazy copyright infraction cases. Setting it too low causes problems where timmy nicking a candybar when mommy isn't looking brands him as a felon for life.
10% was an "I pulled it out of my ass" number. However, in the case of Joe Ordinary, who makes a median income of between 30k and 40k, that's a threshold for damages in the 3k to 4k range. Less than that, civil. Joe could reasonably be expected to pay that as a civil court awarded damage claim. Greater than that, and joe deserves the option to serve jailtime instead, and to have a jury be able to more actively decide for him as needed.
Most people would have a very hard time paying a 3-4k damage claim. If you are wealthy, and make 100K+ a year, and can afford a 10K+ damage claim without selling off vital organs, you should be free to make use of the civil option available to you.
There is a reason why I would want the number of criminal level cases to increase like this: making a disproportionate percentage of the population into convicted felons would at once lessen the stigma of petty offense felony convictions in the public eye, and also put strong political pressure to fix te system creating damage claims that cross those thresholds. If for no other reason that the suddenly huge glut of inmates being put into low security prisons.
As it currently stands, there is no incentive for government to hear tannenbaum's appeal, and every incentive for them to ignore it, which is precisely what has happened here.
The judicial system looks out for itself. That's the most important lesson to gain from this. To make that system look out for you, you have to make it be in their best interest to do so, which is exactly what the recording industry does, ans subsequently, why they get practically carte blanc with the BS they can present in court.
I have 3 friends, one of which is foriegn, in a foreign country, one of which is a janitor, and the last of which knows better than to try to get me to compromise my principles.
I am a 30 year old virgin, have never slept around ever and have therefore never had that "mistake in college", and who's largest infraction with the law was driving without a seatbelt, as a passenger, in a vehicle without seatbelts.
The media would have a very difficlt time getting anything dirty on me, in comparison to the dirt and skeletons in most other politician's closets.
The worst thing I have against me is being a HS dropout, but since I have a degree now, I fail to see how that means a whole lot. If asked about it, I would answer truthfully. I dropped out because I have a heart condition that was diagnosed by a cardiologist that was being worsened by the officious behavor of one of the PE faculty, and was issued an ultimatum of "do what I say in contradiction of the cardiologist's instructions, or don't graduate." I chose not to graduate. I didn't run into that kind of stupidity at the university, and had no trouble there.
The main three reasons I do not run for elected office are quite simple, and all damning.
1) I don't have the financial resources with which to campaign, and refuse to prostitute myself politically to gain it through "the usual channels."
2) I willingly admit to being socially akward, and aesthetically less than spectacular. I'm not ugly, but given the popularity contest component indemic in american politics, I know my image is not up to par, and that it would seriously hurt my chances of winning.
3) I refuse to compromise my principles for money or favors of any kind, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential. I would bluntly refuse a suitcase full of money, and would equally turn down something as paltry as a parking permit. Moreover, I would call the police and press charges. If that means I have to put cameras in every square inch of my home and office to estalish a public record, so be it. The public will get very tired of seeing me play xbox on my couch in my bathrobe.
Quite right. Don't have anything to add to that other than a wishlist, but that's pretty worthless.
Personally though, I think that any suit for damages exceeding 10% of defendant's yearly earnings warrants a criminal trial instead of a civil one. If Mr Tannenbaum had "stolen" that much money, it would be considered grand theft. Instead, we have the nebulous situation which could be parodied all manner of ways, and is always equally absurd.
"He copied my great auntie mabel's secret ambrosia salad recipie! I want MILLIONS in statutory damages! (Nevermind that I was renting out said secret at a fair market price. Totally ignore that, I want my millions!)" Type absurd here.
In situations like this, I long for stronger sanctions against barratry.
The use of a civil court to decide damages of such obscenely disproportionate ammounts against individual citizens is a gross misuse of the court system, and is one that I would love to see made to endure serious sanction in and of itself some day. The court is there to determine liability, and to pass sentence. However, if the sentence is egregious, it should run afoul of the 8th amendment, regardess of trial type.
I'm not saying tannenbaum should get off the hook. I'm saying he shouldn't pay damages with a quadruple digit multiplier, when actual damages *CAN* be determined within a practical statistical bounding.
At the very most, I could see tannenbaum liable for 200k in damages. At the very highest extreme. We are talking "al capone of file sharing" here. As it is, tannenbum was a single offender making use of an illegal service to gain unlicensed access to material, the mechanism of which also causes him to reciprocate in the utility of making said material available to others. The ones who should get the "al capone" sized bill should be initial seeders, not driveby downloaders. Tannenbaum, as a result, should probably be paying less than 100k in damages at most, using very generous interpretations of statutory awards.
The values the recording industry is reporting are known to be fallacious, for goodness sake! The statistics they use to justify them have been independantly invalidated as self-referrential dogmatic BS numberous times by academic experts and economists. I would think that bringing them up in court should have some kind of penalty, wouldn't you? Last I checked, knowingly lieing to the court was a very serious infraction, yet the media industry does it flagrantly.
Dare I say, contemptuously.
Ok.. wishlist over.
I agree though, jurors should be properly educated about their powers and responsibilities contingent upon the type of trial they are sitting. Anything less is a recipie for abuse and disaster. It is important to know what the proper course of action is for the proper venue.
The problem is that US courts have been compromised on proceedure.
Specifically, a trial can be voided if the jury fails to follow a judge's instructions. Also, several "powers" assigned to the jury are subject to specific realtiatory actions by the judicial system if enacted.
As such, the jury is selected from individuals during the voir dire process that know jack squat about the actual powers and obligations of what a juror are supposed to be, and who will blindly amd methodically do what the presiding judge says to do during jury instruction.
This is to prevent things like a jury nullification being enacted, or for jurors to demand a remitted sentence, as per their powers. (In US courts, juries determine both guilt *and* fact. A jury can summarily rule that no crime has been comitted, despite what is written in the lawbook. )
Common "remedies" for a suspected nullifcaton attempt are to declare a mistrial, and try again with a dumber jury, if not to expel jurors who attempt to exercise these powers.
Clearly, nullification and similar related powers of the jury can be abused. However, equally clearly, and equally devistating to justice, as we are clearly witnessing, is the monopoly over jury instruction by suspicious judges with lifetime appointments.
Nullification was intended as a REMEDY for the latter. That is why US juries were given that power in the first place, as the situation with crooked judges that we have now existed THEN too, in the courts of england. Putting powers into the hands of ordinary people in the jury as a meas of preventing officious behavior from the legal system, and to help ensure that blind justice was served. Its also why jurors have legal protections against punitative reprisals from angry judges.
Want this shit to end? Educate the public, and end the "jury instruction" free ride.
What about the atari cartridge compatibility with colecovision's "module #1" expansion?
That's practically a dead ringer.
Colecovision created a hardware emulation module for their technologically superior console that enabled it to use atari 2600 rom carts, thus increasing the available software library immensely.
Atari tried to sue coleco, but lost, since the entire 2600 could be produced using off the shelf parts. (Sound familiar?)
Stanford mentions that this case was more a battle of clones, rather than emulation, and mentions that it should not be employed as precedent in cases surrounding emulation. However psystar is not emulating a modern mac at all. It is running on bare metal, on a clone.
For all intents and purposes, the cases are remarkably similar, with the exception of the DMCA.
However, it was my understanding that psystar was creating clones before the DMCA was enacted, so surely some form of estoppel qualifies in this particular case?
The only "decision" these government agencies respect is their own decision that they are more important than everyone else, and therefore completely justified in breaking laws.
Afterall, those laws are meant for those other people, not for them.
You are right that water absorbs NIR. It also absorbs red light quickly, which is why you don't see red scuba suits. We are assuming the planet is heated using both light emissions from the brown star, and heavy geological activity (geysers and what not) caused by the gravitational tug of war.
Brown stars are variable blackbody emitters. Some emit long wavelenth IR only. Some emit all the way into the visible red spectrum. In this case, we are looking at a star that emits at the far end of the visible spectrum, and the near IR spectrum. The star is a small star, and the planet is heated primarily by tectonic activity. This means water would be liquid even if the star was totally dark. The tidal forces keep it sloshing, and keeps the crust hot.
A planet this close to the star is likely to be tidelocked. This means one side of the atmosphere will be baked hard by intense IR and nIR light. The scattering of the water vapor in the atmosphere will create a strong "dusk" light dispersal through the atmosphere. This means a fairly wide terminator zone where life could thrive. It also means a hot, baked side of the planet, and a chill far side.
Atmospheric water will condense out and rain heavily on the far side of the planet. This also creates a strong atmospheric temperature gradient, so there are powerful storms and winds.
The oceans of this world will be turbulent and hostile near the surface. Deep ocean would probably be temperate because of deep seafloor heating, and strong prevailing currents from the tidelocked weather on the surface. I would expect a thriving chemoautotroph supported smoker ecology down there.
Given widespread ocean cover like earth's, water will steam away from the oceans under the unrelenting light. Heat tolerant organisms could thrive on the ocean surface at this side of the planet, which probably where most of the atmospheric carbon sequestration will occur. Water will convect here, driving deep ocean currents from the deep ocean on the far side, and up to the surface on the light side. Algeal photosynthesis occurs under the high brightness (water blocks a lot of the energy, but we are close enough to the star to be tidelocked, and to be heated by tectonic forces. This means the sun will be huge in the sky, and will be dumping epic shittons of IR on the bright side of the planet. More than the atmosphere can scatter, and the ocean would provide a needed filter role to protect the algea.) These oceans would be hot, steaming, and humid. Strong hurricanes would form here.
Over the terminator zone, organism laden surface ocean would flow out toward the chilled dark side of the planet. Hot air laden with water would ride under cold upper atmosphere air from the dark side. This would cause heavy rains and thunderstorm activity. This area would be drenched under repeated, and heavy rainfall. This is where the equivilent of broadleaf forests of dark colored surface flora would thrive. Mountain ranges would create temporary rainshadows and make areas of the surface climactically mild. On earth it creates a desert, such as found in western california. Here, it creates rainshadow that stops the endless barrage of hurricanes and typhoons from the lit side, and shelters lifeforms. The sea level of this region will rise and fall yearly as the planet completes its orbit due to the growth and shrinkage of the tidal bulge. Evolutionarily, this is where the pressure to adapt to surface life would occur, because organisms on the coastal shores would suffer seasonal habitat loss as the sea levels dropped in the summer.
The tectonic activity of the planet ensures plenty of rift zone in this area from repeated elongation and contraction of the crust as the tidelocked planet completes an eliptical orbit. This means rift valleys and mountain ranges to harbor surface life. It also means seasonal earthquakes, rockslides, mudslides, and the like.
The dark side of the planet is cold. Warm ocean water quickly chills, and
The world would be "dark", or a deep wine red colored in terms of "daylight", but with oxygen producing photosynthesis, and tectonic warming, the planet would have a "habitable" biosphere, you would just need a flashlight everywhere you go.
Any animal forms would be either blind, or have very large, flat eyes, or just eye spots. (Red light is low energy, and is scattered easily. IR and nIR are absorbed by water, so the vitreous humors in these hypothetical creature's eyes would pose a hidrance to photon conduction to the retina. The less humor in between the focusing lens and the retina, the more efficient they eye would be. Hence large and flat.)
Plants would probably be such a dark shade as to appear black. It would be a warm world that for us at least, is bathed in continual night. (Some people have limited ability to see IR light, so some people might see a dull red "day" on the planet.)
The planet would have other harvestable energy sources for artificial lighting, such as wind and hydro, (slow respiration of native life would limit coal and oil deposit formation), and since you don't have to blow as much energy on environmental control, its reasonable that with essentially some big stadium lights, we could grow earth flora there for food. (I'm thinking big sulfur lamps with a little orange neon added to push the yellow spectrum a little. Got plenty of red already.)
It wouldn't be anything like earth, but humans could potentially colonize it.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say this, because it will certainly be flamed, derided as only half true, or worse, but...
The federalization of the US was a slipperly slope. The problem with any federalizing body is that said body tries to mandate things out of the component parts, above and beyond what the terms of said federalization were at the time of signature.
Take for instance, the US, as per you example.
In the US, a hotbutton topic is that of "state rights". Our constitution states that any power not explicitly granted by said constitution or its amendments is retained by the component states, or the people. This means that unless it deals with foriegn powers, or some similarly and explicitly worded function of the federal government, the fed should piss off. However, our fed likes to dictate federal education, federal healthcare, federal taxlaw, federal laws of other forms, and federal oversights onto its member states with a decidedly "suck it bitch!" Attitude, flagrantly violating the constitution's terms, abusing the fuck out of the commerce clause, and just overall thinking they have the legal authority to do these things when legally they don't.
If that's your example of how federalization is supposed to work, I hope the eu movement dies in its crib, and the eu member states all run home and build walls around themselves. Seriously.
Really, this idea has lots of warm fuzzy, but it won't work as a general industry practice.
Take my current location: last summer we had epic heatwaves of triple digit ambient daytime temps. Using open air cooling those servers would be actively overheating just by being turned on, let alone running code. Generating their own heat, they would risk serious failures. In palo alto, where they have a cooling ocean breeze blowing inland and moderating summer temperatures, it might work. In the landlocked hellhole I live in, average summer hatwaves would devistate their servers horribly.
Then you have the problem with the realestate needed for the solar arrays themselves and with the low efficiency of current energy storage technologies, and the high voltages needed to efficiently power a data center. Solar PV is DC, and is not made to supply high voltages. To get the high voltages, you need to turn it to AC, so you can use a transformer. Then you have to turn it back into DC at the high voltage, so you can efficiently distribute it through the datacenter. That's 2 great big energy vampires right there. Add the weaksauce of current solar generation efficiencies, and you have a "are you smoking crack!?" Moment.
While you might be able to utilize idealized conditions at idealized locations to make a low cost data center, you don't get to dictate that more than half the time. Somebody in rekjavik could make use all the geothermal power, and freezing cold outside for a really cheap datacenter too. Doesn't mean somebody in say, bahrain could do the same thing. Its not location agnostic.
Likewise, the power content of solar rays is not constant across the planet, so the costs of powering with solar vs the land utilization costs needed to run a datacenter that does more than just sit there to look pretty are non-trivial, and may well be outright impossible in certain areas.
I don't see this being more than just a pipedream.
This is only true for people who are hopelessly specialized, and literally depend on a social safety net to garantee sertain basic services just to stay alive.
Eg, the doctor relies on a whole host of other government services to ensure that the car he drives won't gas him with carbon monoxide, or that his house doesn't contain cyanide. His specialist skill as a doctor comes with some hoops he might find trite; (recognition from a state medical board, stringent legal fees and practices to avoid malpractice litigation, varying levels of oversight to retain a medical license, the need for the license to begin with, etc..) but those hurdles are there to make the safety net reciprocal.
If the doctor suddenly crashed in the sudan, or the congo, his ability to tie first rate sutures won't help him get clean water to drink, a shelter over his head, or food to eat.
Some people erroneously define that safety net as "civilization." This is completely wrong. It is a form of civilization, but is not itself the de-facto requirement. A civilization is any mass aggregation of people living and working together. It can exist with or without such a provision.
A person who wants to be free from such an intricate safety net does not, therefor, reject "civilization." They reject the specialist centric nature of the society that mandates the safety net. They may do so for any number of reasons, but those are immaterial. They simply want the net gone, and assert that they do not require it. Many civilizations throughout history have been able to function just fine without one.
If I can treat my own injury, why do I need a doctor? (Is not one of the precepts of medicine "doctor, heal thyself?") If I can fix my own computer, why do I need a service tech? If I can cook my own food, why do I need a cook? Etc.
The problem with a safety net, is that it seeks to make "everyone safe", even from themselves. (Arguably, especially from themselves.) You might be well versed in medicine and surgical techniques, but under the pretense of public safety, you aren't allowed to give yourself stitches when you cut yourself. That's what's so onerous about it. It basically is an official policy enacted, to protect people from themselves, and in so doing, blatantly saying you can't be trusted with your own safety. It does this because some people really are that hopelessly incompetent, and require that functionality. Since the net is made to service everyone, it defaults to the lowest common denominator, and seeks to protect the stupid from themselves at all costs, and ultimately ends up being officious, cumbersome, and tyrranical. (Things like mandating warnings on windscreen covers saying not to drive with them in place. I mean, really? Who's stupid enough to think they are superman and can drive with a trifold sheet of opaque material blocking their vision, sufficiently that they need a fucking warning not to do that put on the product, or suffer legal liability?)
People that want the safetynet gone want people who try to drive with the windscreen cover on to be liable for the accidents they cause, and not be protected from themselves. If they want to fix their own car, and it explodes, they expect to be held liable for their faulty repair. They follow a different philosophy about responsibility.
They tend to be generalists, rather than specialists, and to do most of their own repair work. They learn quickly what they really can or cannot do, and choose responsibly who to trust and who not to trust with the things they really can't do themselves. They don't expect other people to be responsible for their own poor decisions, and are disgusted by people who do.
Yes. It embraces risks.
Doctors are held liable only by how many patients decide they can be trusted. If they are shitty doctors, people look elsewhere for care. This means shitty doctors doing shitty medicine on people that don't know any better. There are two ways to look at that.
1) "that's regressive! Our safteynet of state medi
Wrong.
Factor in the adult education costs to meet the requirements. You will find that your applicants will be statistically saddled with out of control student loans they need to make payments on. As such, they actually *NEED* the 100k figure, just to buy food and gas to come and work for you.
The one suffering the entitlement complex is the business's HR dept, demanding absurd requirements for a low paying position. "We don't want to pay to train those people!" Is not a suitable out for this problem. I don't want to pay taxes either, but that doesn't mean I can tell uncle sam to fuck off on tax season.
Like any purchaser, (an employer purchases labor.), you need to shop, and determine a fair price based on all outstanding market forces, and realize that after a certain point, you get what you pay for.
It is unsrealistic to expect people to live in poverty like conditions (yes, you pay them a "decent wage", but that is for somebody that isn't paying asstons of money to an educational institution on the installment plan. When you pay several grand a month for student loan payments, 50k a year is barely livable on the "ramen for dinner" budget. Eg, poverty.) *JUST* so they can work for you.
I understand that as an employer, you have to make sure your applicants meet your basic needs. When buying a boat, you want one that doesn't leak. However, demanding a yacht for 300$ is rediculous. It costs more than that to build the yacht. Saying the shipyard is suffering from entitlement issues is totally in the wrong. If all you need is a boat to putter around a lake in, a little fishing boat is more appropriate to your needs and your budget. That is what you should hire. Don't demand a yacht unless you need a yacht, because you *will* end up paying yacht prices.
Need somebody to cobble together a shellscript? Your typical highschool kid can do that. Don't demand 10+yrs linux experience with sysadmin experience, a CS degree, and 50 industry certs. That's like demanding a nascar certified pit mechanic to have your tire changed, when a walmart tech with a speedwrench is more than adequate. Hire the walmart kid. Leave the nascar pit mechanic to the nascar circuit where he's really needed.
stop saying the nascar guy suffers "entitlement" bcause he refuses to work changing your tire for 10$/hr. You're the one suffering entitlement by demanding a high-rate nascar pit mechanic for piddly shit. Seriously.
Agreed, but NASA is well justified in their paranoia, until a less partial regulatory body steps in.
If there is one thing abundantly clear about this century's history, you simply can't trust industry to be self-regulating.
Agreed, oversight is also a mixed bag. And yes, I despise MBAs. They are the fuckers making the byzantine 3 ring circus I have to deal with to get a specification for a fucking hydraulic port, or some similar crap.
However, things like the ASME, while I curse that they demand money out of me and don't keep good records of purchases, are a fantastic thing for standardization otherwise.
The initial private craft design specs that spacex and co. Develop are de-facto standards, rather than broadly designed standards. They are more like the old "soundblaster and compatibles" standard for audio cards in the 90s. Sadly, they also cover the databus design, slot architecture, and endianness as well.
Non-competative regulatory and standards agencies can totally suck balls sometimes, no contest, but they also make things better in a lot of ways.
Also, simply because the ISO fubared XLM, doesn't mean ISO fubars everything else. That's a non-sequitor. :)
(Disclaimer: I work in aerospace)
Private sector space exploration is a mixed blessing without regulatory oversight.
The FAA does wonders for ensuring consistent manufacturing and engineering policies, as do the various ISO industrial process certification programs for industrial centers.
Government sponsored engineering tends to be a total money and resource sink, and what comes out tends to look like the engineers went out of their way to make things needlessly cryptic and arcane to justify their bills.
Essentially, the equivalent of a 500 line "hello world!", which ignores normal OS window classes, allocates and frees its own memory, and has an integrated kernel runtime to make sure nobody is snooping on the secret sauce from outside of userspace.
Private designs tend to shy away from uniqueness, and toward stringent use of the KISS principle, but may excessively use protected engineering documentation and practices. (Imagine somebody writing their own application API on top of the perfectly functional standard one for their target, and locking that bitch down so tight that its like watching a snuff film, then using it religiously to keep people from "copying" their ideas. Nevermind that all their competitors are also working from the KISS handbook on the actual engineering, and that the differences are all almost entirely process related. Fit form and function is conserved.)
Oversight helps to keep these proprietary engineering toolbases under control, and helps ensure interoperability of critical systems, like runway boarding ramps on the aircraft's skin, type of fuel used, and standard cabin pressures.
Without the unifying influence of such oversight, no airplane in the sky would follow any standards except internal OEM ones. An airbus and a boeing offering would not use the same cabin pressure (just to throw something out there), because one of them would get the brightt idea to lower it 5psi so they could fly a little higher and reduce skin stresses as a competative edge.
Space vehicles, being radically new to private industry, would be especially vulnerable to marketing and PR drones dictating on the engineering so that the vehicle stands out from the crowd, even though that is a terrible thing for interoperability.
So, while I like the leaner design implementations that come out of private companies, I strongly advocate oversight and regulatory compliance for safety and interoperability reasons.
Otherwise the specs on a private spaceship will be a countless mess of cross-referencing NDA laden proprietary internal standards docs, and as an engineer for a company that does outsourced work from the big boys, I only have so much goddam space on my desk for binders full of proprietary specifications so I can read somebody's engineering properly. "Torque bolts to LES####" is fine and dandy if you work for learjet. For the rest of us, I'm happy to get an AME or NAS number that I can look up instead of calling your support line, talking with a string of bobbleheads behind desks who are more concerned over weather or not I might discuss what's in a spec for tightening bolts with "unauthorized" people, and if I am indeed authorized to know the secret of the bolt tightening in the first place. I'm an engineer. Just give me the damn spec, your corporate crap smells up my day.
Regulatory oversight makes things magically simpler, because it forces LES#### to be compliant with a standard AMS#### or similar regulatory body that I don't have to suck a dick to get my hands on.
I'm thrilled that the dragon heavy lifter works. It opens all sorts of doors for much cheaper orbital deployments, and the soyouz capsules were starting to have unreliable failure rates from excessive use and improper maintenance downtimes. This will work wonders.
But for FSM's sake, institute some damned industry regulations!
I would, but they haven't invented hardlight holograms yet! Perhaps I should write out the contents of my bitcoin encrypted wallet on some paper, and try throwing that?
Its worse than that. Shit like this has acilliary chilling effects.
Thought experiments:
Youtube comments.
4chan posts.
I dnt need to explain more.
You need to add clay to that as well. Peat is organic sponge, but it alone won't support heavy agriculture without the mineral and evaporation control that good clay adds.
After about 5 years of production the mineral stored in the peat from the peatbog it was harvested from will be depleted, and your crops will look scraggly if you don't.
You don't use microbes for syngas! Argh!
You could use crushed up seashells, or degraded plastic sludge for goodness sake!
You heat up the carbon bearing feedstock until it catches fire, then spray it with steam. This creates a reduction reaction powered by the prior cumbustion's heat, creating CO and hydrogen gas.
Landfill trash, sewer mud, grass clippings, tree and yard waste, lumber yard sawdust; a syngas plant wouldn't care, as long as it contains carbon, and can be burned.
Syngas can be further processed into real synthetic natural gas. The idea is to transform non-bioprocessable carbon bearing waste into an easily transportable gas form that can make use of existing transport infrastructures.
This is an argument I have never quite grasped.
Ocean water traveling around the earth in the tidal bulge does not move around free of losses. This means the orbital momentum of the moon is depleting weather you use it or not. Its like arguing that using wind power will make the winds stop.
Besides. The moon is moving away from the earth, not toward. Depleting orbita momentum will actually stabilize its orbit.
Not biogas. Syngas. You don't use microbes at all. You just need a carbon rich feedstock. Turds and toilet paper would work great.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas
It is catalytically created with heat from a mixture of organic feedstock and water. (Essentially sewer mud.)
It *IS* more expensive than oil you get from the ground, but when that isn't an option, you can consider the benefits of eliminating septic waste while also heating homes. Charging for sewer services, as well as for fuel produced, let's you subsidise at both ends, which could lower expected costs.
How much energy flow is needed to drive an EV? Let's see... the battery pack has a 13kw/h or so capacity, and drives for 80 miles or so... approx what, .53kw/h per mile? (530v@1a?)
Let's say instead of a mr. Fusion, we build a large carbon 14 betaelectric power core, about the size of a gastank. It weighs about 200lbs let's say. Inside is a honeycomb of thin carbon 14 rods surrounded in a cheap polymer semiconductor, and which produce about 1v @100ma of juice each. (Totally fictional numbers, btw, but other betavoltaic devices about the size of a penny produce .1v or so, from memory. These hypothetical cores are the size of a #1 pencil, so 1v is well within reason I think.)
You need 5300 cores to reach "direct drive" power output. I think you can fit that many in there if you use efficient packing.
Carbon 14 is a beta emitter, with an absurdly long halflife. It does not use catalyzed fission, and can be produced reasonably cheaply (given its long half life| and thus service life) in bulk by seeding ordinary graphite inside a fast breeder reactor, then centrifuging it properly.
By "absurdly long", I mean "over 1 million years". This means that the semiconductor wrapped around the core will fail before the power source inside it does, so old cells could be recycled economically.
Your EV could drive continuously for decades, nonstop.
We can do it now.
See my idea for tidal powered locks above.
Basically, you take a section of rocky sea coast (UK has plenty), dig out an artificial harbor like area, build what looks like a shipping lock to nowhere in it.
Then, whe the tide is high, you open the doors on the lock. Tide bulge water rushes in. Close the lock when full. Tide goes down. Boom. Reservoir of free water you didn't have to pump.
Further inland, you build another lock. This is the "battery". It is elevated a few feet above the main generator pool. Using power produced at low tide, a small amount of water is pumped into the reservoir lock. At high tide, the reservoir lock flows back into the generator pool while the main lock doors are open to catch the tide. This provides relief power while the main lock refills over the hour or so that the tide is full. Rinse, repeat.
How much sewerage does the UK make? (I'm being serious here!)
If a sufficient amount is produced, then syngas plants running on gassified biomatter from the sewerage system could be dropped on top of existing nat gas infrastructures, and would have the benefit of plausibly getting labled "carbon neutral". (If it weren't for fossil fuel fertilizers in the food chain.)
This is the UK, what sunlight? During the day, they have indirect, mist scattered sun from a mostly cloudy sky. No good for solar heating.
Best solution is large scale deployment of tidal powered hydro plants.
Here's the basic idea behind how they could be deployed:
You build what looks like a shipping lock. At high tide, you open the lock, and let the tide in. The at max tide, you close the lock. The tide passes, but the raised water stays in. Nature fills the tank for you. Now you release the trapped high pressure water through hydro generators, and have a small backup battery reserve to buffer production during the next high tide when generation has to stop to let the lock refill.
A very large scale installation could be made between the UK and france, if money isn't an obstacle, and could even be a joint venture between those countries like the chunnel project was.
If I were an island nation with lots of sea coast, its at least something I would try.
Yes and no. Its the fairest way to determine if a criminal case needs to be brought to address the complaint or not as far as I can see. Setting the value too high forces things that shouldn't be decided in civil court, to be decided there, like these crazy copyright infraction cases. Setting it too low causes problems where timmy nicking a candybar when mommy isn't looking brands him as a felon for life.
10% was an "I pulled it out of my ass" number. However, in the case of Joe Ordinary, who makes a median income of between 30k and 40k, that's a threshold for damages in the 3k to 4k range. Less than that, civil. Joe could reasonably be expected to pay that as a civil court awarded damage claim. Greater than that, and joe deserves the option to serve jailtime instead, and to have a jury be able to more actively decide for him as needed.
Most people would have a very hard time paying a 3-4k damage claim. If you are wealthy, and make 100K+ a year, and can afford a 10K+ damage claim without selling off vital organs, you should be free to make use of the civil option available to you.
There is a reason why I would want the number of criminal level cases to increase like this: making a disproportionate percentage of the population into convicted felons would at once lessen the stigma of petty offense felony convictions in the public eye, and also put strong political pressure to fix te system creating damage claims that cross those thresholds. If for no other reason that the suddenly huge glut of inmates being put into low security prisons.
As it currently stands, there is no incentive for government to hear tannenbaum's appeal, and every incentive for them to ignore it, which is precisely what has happened here.
The judicial system looks out for itself. That's the most important lesson to gain from this. To make that system look out for you, you have to make it be in their best interest to do so, which is exactly what the recording industry does, ans subsequently, why they get practically carte blanc with the BS they can present in court.
Sounds like I should run then.
I have 3 friends, one of which is foriegn, in a foreign country, one of which is a janitor, and the last of which knows better than to try to get me to compromise my principles.
I am a 30 year old virgin, have never slept around ever and have therefore never had that "mistake in college", and who's largest infraction with the law was driving without a seatbelt, as a passenger, in a vehicle without seatbelts.
The media would have a very difficlt time getting anything dirty on me, in comparison to the dirt and skeletons in most other politician's closets.
The worst thing I have against me is being a HS dropout, but since I have a degree now, I fail to see how that means a whole lot. If asked about it, I would answer truthfully. I dropped out because I have a heart condition that was diagnosed by a cardiologist that was being worsened by the officious behavor of one of the PE faculty, and was issued an ultimatum of "do what I say in contradiction of the cardiologist's instructions, or don't graduate." I chose not to graduate. I didn't run into that kind of stupidity at the university, and had no trouble there.
The main three reasons I do not run for elected office are quite simple, and all damning.
1) I don't have the financial resources with which to campaign, and refuse to prostitute myself politically to gain it through "the usual channels."
2) I willingly admit to being socially akward, and aesthetically less than spectacular. I'm not ugly, but given the popularity contest component indemic in american politics, I know my image is not up to par, and that it would seriously hurt my chances of winning.
3) I refuse to compromise my principles for money or favors of any kind, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential. I would bluntly refuse a suitcase full of money, and would equally turn down something as paltry as a parking permit. Moreover, I would call the police and press charges. If that means I have to put cameras in every square inch of my home and office to estalish a public record, so be it. The public will get very tired of seeing me play xbox on my couch in my bathrobe.
Quite right. Don't have anything to add to that other than a wishlist, but that's pretty worthless.
Personally though, I think that any suit for damages exceeding 10% of defendant's yearly earnings warrants a criminal trial instead of a civil one. If Mr Tannenbaum had "stolen" that much money, it would be considered grand theft. Instead, we have the nebulous situation which could be parodied all manner of ways, and is always equally absurd.
"He copied my great auntie mabel's secret ambrosia salad recipie! I want MILLIONS in statutory damages! (Nevermind that I was renting out said secret at a fair market price. Totally ignore that, I want my millions!)" Type absurd here.
In situations like this, I long for stronger sanctions against barratry.
The use of a civil court to decide damages of such obscenely disproportionate ammounts against individual citizens is a gross misuse of the court system, and is one that I would love to see made to endure serious sanction in and of itself some day. The court is there to determine liability, and to pass sentence. However, if the sentence is egregious, it should run afoul of the 8th amendment, regardess of trial type.
I'm not saying tannenbaum should get off the hook. I'm saying he shouldn't pay damages with a quadruple digit multiplier, when actual damages *CAN* be determined within a practical statistical bounding.
At the very most, I could see tannenbaum liable for 200k in damages. At the very highest extreme. We are talking "al capone of file sharing" here. As it is, tannenbum was a single offender making use of an illegal service to gain unlicensed access to material, the mechanism of which also causes him to reciprocate in the utility of making said material available to others. The ones who should get the "al capone" sized bill should be initial seeders, not driveby downloaders. Tannenbaum, as a result, should probably be paying less than 100k in damages at most, using very generous interpretations of statutory awards.
The values the recording industry is reporting are known to be fallacious, for goodness sake! The statistics they use to justify them have been independantly invalidated as self-referrential dogmatic BS numberous times by academic experts and economists. I would think that bringing them up in court should have some kind of penalty, wouldn't you? Last I checked, knowingly lieing to the court was a very serious infraction, yet the media industry does it flagrantly.
Dare I say, contemptuously.
Ok.. wishlist over.
I agree though, jurors should be properly educated about their powers and responsibilities contingent upon the type of trial they are sitting. Anything less is a recipie for abuse and disaster. It is important to know what the proper course of action is for the proper venue.
The problem is that US courts have been compromised on proceedure.
Specifically, a trial can be voided if the jury fails to follow a judge's instructions. Also, several "powers" assigned to the jury are subject to specific realtiatory actions by the judicial system if enacted.
As such, the jury is selected from individuals during the voir dire process that know jack squat about the actual powers and obligations of what a juror are supposed to be, and who will blindly amd methodically do what the presiding judge says to do during jury instruction.
This is to prevent things like a jury nullification being enacted, or for jurors to demand a remitted sentence, as per their powers. (In US courts, juries determine both guilt *and* fact. A jury can summarily rule that no crime has been comitted, despite what is written in the lawbook. )
Common "remedies" for a suspected nullifcaton attempt are to declare a mistrial, and try again with a dumber jury, if not to expel jurors who attempt to exercise these powers.
Clearly, nullification and similar related powers of the jury can be abused. However, equally clearly, and equally devistating to justice, as we are clearly witnessing, is the monopoly over jury instruction by suspicious judges with lifetime appointments.
Nullification was intended as a REMEDY for the latter. That is why US juries were given that power in the first place, as the situation with crooked judges that we have now existed THEN too, in the courts of england. Putting powers into the hands of ordinary people in the jury as a meas of preventing officious behavior from the legal system, and to help ensure that blind justice was served. Its also why jurors have legal protections against punitative reprisals from angry judges.
Want this shit to end? Educate the public, and end the "jury instruction" free ride.
What about the atari cartridge compatibility with colecovision's "module #1" expansion?
That's practically a dead ringer.
Colecovision created a hardware emulation module for their technologically superior console that enabled it to use atari 2600 rom carts, thus increasing the available software library immensely.
Atari tried to sue coleco, but lost, since the entire 2600 could be produced using off the shelf parts. (Sound familiar?)
Stanford mentions that this case was more a battle of clones, rather than emulation, and mentions that it should not be employed as precedent in cases surrounding emulation. However psystar is not emulating a modern mac at all. It is running on bare metal, on a clone.
For all intents and purposes, the cases are remarkably similar, with the exception of the DMCA.
However, it was my understanding that psystar was creating clones before the DMCA was enacted, so surely some form of estoppel qualifies in this particular case?
The only "decision" these government agencies respect is their own decision that they are more important than everyone else, and therefore completely justified in breaking laws.
Afterall, those laws are meant for those other people, not for them.
It depends on the frequency of the NIR.
You are right that water absorbs NIR. It also absorbs red light quickly, which is why you don't see red scuba suits. We are assuming the planet is heated using both light emissions from the brown star, and heavy geological activity (geysers and what not) caused by the gravitational tug of war.
Brown stars are variable blackbody emitters. Some emit long wavelenth IR only. Some emit all the way into the visible red spectrum. In this case, we are looking at a star that emits at the far end of the visible spectrum, and the near IR spectrum. The star is a small star, and the planet is heated primarily by tectonic activity. This means water would be liquid even if the star was totally dark. The tidal forces keep it sloshing, and keeps the crust hot.
A planet this close to the star is likely to be tidelocked. This means one side of the atmosphere will be baked hard by intense IR and nIR light. The scattering of the water vapor in the atmosphere will create a strong "dusk" light dispersal through the atmosphere. This means a fairly wide terminator zone where life could thrive. It also means a hot, baked side of the planet, and a chill far side.
Atmospheric water will condense out and rain heavily on the far side of the planet. This also creates a strong atmospheric temperature gradient, so there are powerful storms and winds.
The oceans of this world will be turbulent and hostile near the surface. Deep ocean would probably be temperate because of deep seafloor heating, and strong prevailing currents from the tidelocked weather on the surface. I would expect a thriving chemoautotroph supported smoker ecology down there.
Given widespread ocean cover like earth's, water will steam away from the oceans under the unrelenting light. Heat tolerant organisms could thrive on the ocean surface at this side of the planet, which probably where most of the atmospheric carbon sequestration will occur. Water will convect here, driving deep ocean currents from the deep ocean on the far side, and up to the surface on the light side. Algeal photosynthesis occurs under the high brightness (water blocks a lot of the energy, but we are close enough to the star to be tidelocked, and to be heated by tectonic forces. This means the sun will be huge in the sky, and will be dumping epic shittons of IR on the bright side of the planet. More than the atmosphere can scatter, and the ocean would provide a needed filter role to protect the algea.) These oceans would be hot, steaming, and humid. Strong hurricanes would form here.
Over the terminator zone, organism laden surface ocean would flow out toward the chilled dark side of the planet. Hot air laden with water would ride under cold upper atmosphere air from the dark side. This would cause heavy rains and thunderstorm activity. This area would be drenched under repeated, and heavy rainfall. This is where the equivilent of broadleaf forests of dark colored surface flora would thrive. Mountain ranges would create temporary rainshadows and make areas of the surface climactically mild. On earth it creates a desert, such as found in western california. Here, it creates rainshadow that stops the endless barrage of hurricanes and typhoons from the lit side, and shelters lifeforms. The sea level of this region will rise and fall yearly as the planet completes its orbit due to the growth and shrinkage of the tidal bulge. Evolutionarily, this is where the pressure to adapt to surface life would occur, because organisms on the coastal shores would suffer seasonal habitat loss as the sea levels dropped in the summer.
The tectonic activity of the planet ensures plenty of rift zone in this area from repeated elongation and contraction of the crust as the tidelocked planet completes an eliptical orbit. This means rift valleys and mountain ranges to harbor surface life. It also means seasonal earthquakes, rockslides, mudslides, and the like.
The dark side of the planet is cold. Warm ocean water quickly chills, and
The world would be "dark", or a deep wine red colored in terms of "daylight", but with oxygen producing photosynthesis, and tectonic warming, the planet would have a "habitable" biosphere, you would just need a flashlight everywhere you go.
Any animal forms would be either blind, or have very large, flat eyes, or just eye spots. (Red light is low energy, and is scattered easily. IR and nIR are absorbed by water, so the vitreous humors in these hypothetical creature's eyes would pose a hidrance to photon conduction to the retina. The less humor in between the focusing lens and the retina, the more efficient they eye would be. Hence large and flat.)
Plants would probably be such a dark shade as to appear black. It would be a warm world that for us at least, is bathed in continual night. (Some people have limited ability to see IR light, so some people might see a dull red "day" on the planet.)
The planet would have other harvestable energy sources for artificial lighting, such as wind and hydro, (slow respiration of native life would limit coal and oil deposit formation), and since you don't have to blow as much energy on environmental control, its reasonable that with essentially some big stadium lights, we could grow earth flora there for food. (I'm thinking big sulfur lamps with a little orange neon added to push the yellow spectrum a little. Got plenty of red already.)
It wouldn't be anything like earth, but humans could potentially colonize it.
Would make a great setting for a scifi book.