What I found interesting from the table is that the 55 Republicans are more beholden to their side (on avg, 10.47 away from 100% on all issues) than the 44 Democrats are to their side (on avg, 13.56 away from 100% on all issues).
Are they "beholden to their side", or just "strongly committed to their beliefs on the core issues"? I don't think it's possible to tell based on the cited data.
There is a better way of course but you're unlikely to see it in your lifetime.
Well, there is some room for optimism... there's a movement afoot amongst various states to agree to allocate all their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote tally. The agreement would be legally binding and go into effect as soon as enough states are parties to it represent 270 votes (i.e. enough to be the sole determiners of the election winner). The bill has been passed in California and is awaiting the Governor's signature.
The beauty of this scheme is that it delivers the result we want (presidential election by popular vote) without having to change the electoral college system (and thus not having to modify the Constitution, which is a very difficult thing to do).
I don't think this is the case, according to our current knowledge of space/time.
I'm afraid it is the case. Check out the Twins Paradox for details.
but given that he can get to earth in, say, 5 minutes
It would be 5 minutes according to the travelling alien's wriswatch, 50,000 years according to anyone observing the spaceship from the outside. (I'm presuming his spaceship can only go near-lightspeed, not faster than light... if that is possible, then all bets are off:^))
The far-left is already wreaking havoc in the Democratic party
How so? As far as I can tell, the thing that's wreaking havoc on the Democratic Party is (a) being completely out of power, and thus almost completely ineffective at governing, and (b) until recently(?), not having figured out a way to respond to the Republican Party's relentless demonization of all things non-Republican.
The only saving grace for the Democrats is that the Republicans' skill at demagoguery is surpassed by their incompetence at running the nation.
The problem with those is that they're either riggable, or fail the condorcet winner criterion. So either voters can rig the election by putting in things that aren't their real preferences, or the person who would beat every single other candidate one-on-one can loose.
It's true no system is going to be perfect. However, even a system with all of the problems you describe above (which are mainly theoretical and unlikely to be a factor in real life scenarios) would still be preferable to the deeply flawed system we have now.
There's a big difference between a chemical compound that has certain effects on humans and a parasitic mold that uses human bodies as a host, as in the GGP.
It works just as well the other way, too: Why is it that healthy people don't get digested and putrefied by bacteria, when corpses will be broken down in a few weeks or months? Because the human immune system has been refined over a long period to recognize and fight the particular organisms that continuously try to invade and digest our bodies. So why would you expect our immune system to know how to fight off a completely alien lifeform that it's never experienced anything like before? Hell, lots of people get sick just flying to another continent, let alone another ecosystem.
Keep in mind that in the eat-or-be-eaten scenario, the eater need only know how to digest and make use of the opponent's raw materials. The eatee has to know how to disable or kill the attacker, a much more difficult problem. Without our immune system, we're equivalent to 150-pound bags of rich growth medium...
Get close enough to light speed and any trip will take zero time for the traveler.
... but plenty of time for the people at the destination. So perhaps an alien hopped into his spaceship this morning, he's going to pop over to Earth before lunch time (according to his watch)... but as far as we're concerned, he won't be here for another 50,000 years.:^(
Given all that, I think the lack of ETs on Earth is due to one of two possible causes: either the probability of life arising is very low, or there is an "interdict law" among space-faring races, that protect from contact planets with primitive life forms that may eventually develop intelligence.
There's an easier explanation: space is big. Really, really big. You have no idea how mind-bogglingly vast interstellar distances are. As Adams says, it simply doesn't fit in the human imagination. Perhaps even the most technologically advanced space aliens simply can't afford the time and effort to cruise around goggling at every two-bit civilization in the galaxy.:^) (and that's assuming they even know we're here... we've only been sending out radio signals for a few decades, they've hardly had time to propogate anywhere). Or perhaps, they simply don't care... they're more interested in their own affairs.
The law seems like a good idea (or at least the idea is good, even if the fact that it's a law really isn't good), but having laws regarding technology made by people who don't really know the technology involved seems like a bad idea.
Have you actually read the text of the law, or just the above summary of the law, written by (wait for it...) some journalist who doesn't really know law or the technology involved, and is trying to summarize the law's intent in one quick paragraph?
I'm not saying the politicians behind this law do know what they're doing (I haven't read the law either), but it's hardly fair to accuse them of ignorance when you haven't even looked at what they did.
I wonder how many trees have been killed in the name of all those idiotic "This item contains substances known by the State of California to..." labels and stickers
If we're going to start with hypotheticals, I wonder how many people have been killed due to lack of those stickers elsewhere?
If there's a known carcinogen in the area that will affect my health, I want to know it -- then I can make a (somewhat) informed decision about whether I want to take the risk or not.
just for fun put in your bag a note and a tip note states "Thank you for ensuring my bag is not a threat to the aircraft network Please take the tip"
I'm not sure that would get the response you imagine.... airport security is famous for not getting the joke.
OTOH, when packing gear for shipment, my co-worker often does include notes to TSA instructing them on how it needs to be repacked... maybe they even read them, who knows?
and the flight attendant had to come and ensure that I was onboard before the "delayed" bag was brought onboard, just before landing
Your bag was brought on board just before landing? Very suspicious, indeed!;^)
"Random" selection is profiling under a PC name.
Well, just to play devil's advocate: The lottery is random, and your chances of winning it are miniscule, and yet somebody still wins it every week. Similarly, even in a true random profiling system, there will be some poor soul who "wins" three random-searches in a row, just from bad luck...
Given the above, why doesn't it make sense for U.S. airlines to use criteria that selects for those who are most likely to attack them?
It does, if you assume that past behavior is the sole predictor of future behavior. The problem is that there's no guarantee that future anti-US-aircraft terrorism will also be carried out by Muslims -- in fact, if you go with a Muslim-oriented profiling system, you end up creating a very inviting target for non-Muslim terrorist groups (existing or yet-to-be-created), who know that they will be able to walk right through "security".
To give a computer analogy: if you are adding security to a web site, do you just put in security software that detects last year's virus and stops it, or do you design the site to make it as difficult as possible for any type of virus (present or future) to get through? If you're smart, you'll do the latter, otherwise you'll end up continuously getting sucker-punched from places you didn't expect.
Check out the people who act suspicious, go with gut instincts, and if something "seems" wrong about someone, it probably is and they should be checked out.
I'd agree with this, if the 'behavioral profilers' have been trained in what to look for. If they are the $8/hour high-school dropouts that our airport security system is currently based on, OTOH, then their 'gut instincts' will probably be along the lines of 'brown skin == suspicious', and we'll be back to racial profiling and all its deficiencies.
I'd say the real problem isn't that we don't want security, it's that nobody is willing to pay for it.
This whole "I'd like to teach the world to sing... in perfect harmony" mentality is the kind of thing that will get us killed.
You're absolutely right, not protecting ourselves against known threats would be suicidal.
On the other hand, doing provocative, stupid things that are guaranteed to turn otherwise friendly or neutral people into our enemies is equally suicidal.
The whole "fuck what everybody thinks, we'll keep ourselves secure through military force alone" mentality is based on the assumption that we have the physical ability to do so. The hard truth, however, is that that simply isn't the case -- our military can barely keep the lid on Iraq, let alone any of the other 3-4 dozen countries where terrorism is a concern. Our only option is to enlist the aid of the rest of the world's governments and people in helping us stop terrorism. The good news is that that shouldn't be too difficult to do -- almost nobody likes terrorists. But to work with people (or governments), you have to treat them with respect -- in particular, you have to understand that it's a two-way street. Double-standards do not go unnoticed by the world's public.
Naturally, many of our flights are one way, so that obviously raises a flag.
Now that I really don't understand. Who are they trying to catch, the really thick terrorists who will spend several years of their lives and invent diabolical explosive devices, etc, and then risk it all to save $400 on airfare? Surely any terrorist worth his 72 virgins can figure out that it's better to buy a round-trip ticket even if you're not planning to use the second part...
Quite possibly, you don't. Space elevators aren't about low latency, they're about high bandwidth. If you need to FedEx something into orbit overnight, you're better off with a rocket. Even if you could somehow ship stuff to the base of the elevator instantly, it's still going to take a few days for the elevator car to climb into orbit.
That is a lot of mass to move up into the sky - so it only makes sense as part of a larger project that involves moving huge amounts of material into orbit or beyond.
According to what I've read, the mass of the initial "seed ribbon" could be placed into orbit in (the equivalent of) two or three shuttle flights. After that, the ribbon is strengthened by climbers that add material to it as they climb.
If the value is that you replace the fuel with a laser, why not just improve the tracking system and paint a free-flying machine into orbit?
Well, I can think of two reasons: (1) an elevator would be more fail-safe... i.e. if you ever need to shut down the lasers, your elevator car comes to a halt, puts on the brakes, and waits for the lasers to start again, whereas a free-flying vehicles would fall to its destruction. But more importantly, (2) it's not clear to me how a free-flying externally powered craft would work. How is the received laser power to be converted into upward acceleration? If it's done by boiling reaction mass off the bottom of the craft and shooting particles towards Earth somehow (i.e. rocket-style), then we're back to the original scaling problem of having to lift additional mass. A Space elevator solves the problem by giving the craft something to pull against, so it can just use an electric motor to lift itself. I'm not saying it can't be done -- as you say, the energy is there -- I just don't see how.
Why the hell would we lift raw mass out of our gravity well when there is so much of it available in much shallower wells?
Seems like there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there: you need large manufacturing facilities in space in order to make all that stuff from raw materials up there, but the large manufacturing facilities are far too heavy to lift into space.:^/ No doubt you could slow bootstrap your way up over many decades by delivering very small facilities and using them to build larger ones, and so on... but building an entire parallel manufacturing infrastructure in space is ambitious enough to make a space elevator seem like a reasonable alternative. Besides, even with lots of stuff manufactured in space, there are still lots of things to be lifted from Earth.... the people to man the colonies, for instance. We can't let the space-borne have all the fun!;^)
Point is, it would probably not take long before such elevator would be completely useless due to its slow speed and low capacity.
It's true that we may never see a space elevator -- it's entirely possible that the engineering problems involved in deploying one a simply beyond our ability to solve. But assuming for the sake of discussion that it is possible to deploy one, then there's no question that it would be an order of magnitude more useful than any imaginable rocket-based delivery system. Rockets are a good (if risky) way to get small amounts of material into orbit, but they completely fail to scale up past a certain size. The reason for that is because they have to carry their fuel up into space with them.... the more mass the payload has, the more fuel it has to carry, and the real killer is that you also have to carry more extra fuel to lift the extra fuel. So as the mass of your payload increases linearly, the mass of the fuel you'll need to launch it increases exponentially. At some point there simply isn't enough money in any nation's budget to acquire the amount of fuel they would need (never mind building a rocket big enough to hold it all).
That's why (barring the invention of some near-massless rocket fuel) you'll never see massive amounts infrastructure being lifted into space on rockets. With the space elevator, on the other hand, the problem is neatly bypassed: the elevator "car" carries no fuel at all. Instead, the energy needed for lift is beamed to photo cells on the bottom of the car via ground-based lasers. If you want more lifting power, you simply point another (or a bigger) laser at the bottom of the car... there is no exponential increase in fuel requirements, just more equipment (and more power consumption) back on the ground.
So yes, rockets can get us a nice little "lift the rich tourist into low-Earth-orbit for a few days" industry. But if you want to do Big Stuff, like large spaceships capable of carrying a crew to Mars and back, or solar power satellites, then you'll either need a Space Elevator to bulk-lift all that mass, or some way of finding pre-existing mass already in space and building all the components there.
By the time we have the technology for space elevators, far superior modes of lift and orbital flight will exist.
Really? And what are you basing that prediction on, other than wishful thinking? I'd be the first to welcome the invention of a nice anti-gravity device (or whatnot) myself, but it would be silly to think that something unforseen like that will be invented just because I think it ought to be, laws of physics be damned. Hell, as long as we're going with 'unforseen inventions' as our Great White Hope, perhaps the big surprise invention will be a big advance in the technologies needed to deploy a space elevator. It could go either way.
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Well, at least you managed to spell 'Firearms' correctly...
Are they "beholden to their side", or just "strongly committed to their beliefs on the core issues"? I don't think it's possible to tell based on the cited data.
Well, there is some room for optimism... there's a movement afoot amongst various states to agree to allocate all their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote tally. The agreement would be legally binding and go into effect as soon as enough states are parties to it represent 270 votes (i.e. enough to be the sole determiners of the election winner). The bill has been passed in California and is awaiting the Governor's signature.
The beauty of this scheme is that it delivers the result we want (presidential election by popular vote) without having to change the electoral college system (and thus not having to modify the Constitution, which is a very difficult thing to do).
I'm afraid it is the case. Check out the Twins Paradox for details.
but given that he can get to earth in, say, 5 minutes
It would be 5 minutes according to the travelling alien's wriswatch, 50,000 years according to anyone observing the spaceship from the outside. (I'm presuming his spaceship can only go near-lightspeed, not faster than light... if that is possible, then all bets are off
How so? As far as I can tell, the thing that's wreaking havoc on the Democratic Party is (a) being completely out of power, and thus almost completely ineffective at governing, and (b) until recently(?), not having figured out a way to respond to the Republican Party's relentless demonization of all things non-Republican.
The only saving grace for the Democrats is that the Republicans' skill at demagoguery is surpassed by their incompetence at running the nation.
It's true no system is going to be perfect. However, even a system with all of the problems you describe above (which are mainly theoretical and unlikely to be a factor in real life scenarios) would still be preferable to the deeply flawed system we have now.
It works just as well the other way, too: Why is it that healthy people don't get digested and putrefied by bacteria, when corpses will be broken down in a few weeks or months? Because the human immune system has been refined over a long period to recognize and fight the particular organisms that continuously try to invade and digest our bodies. So why would you expect our immune system to know how to fight off a completely alien lifeform that it's never experienced anything like before? Hell, lots of people get sick just flying to another continent, let alone another ecosystem.
Keep in mind that in the eat-or-be-eaten scenario, the eater need only know how to digest and make use of the opponent's raw materials. The eatee has to know how to disable or kill the attacker, a much more difficult problem. Without our immune system, we're equivalent to 150-pound bags of rich growth medium...
There's an easier explanation: space is big. Really, really big. You have no idea how mind-bogglingly vast interstellar distances are. As Adams says, it simply doesn't fit in the human imagination. Perhaps even the most technologically advanced space aliens simply can't afford the time and effort to cruise around goggling at every two-bit civilization in the galaxy.
Have you actually read the text of the law, or just the above summary of the law, written by (wait for it...) some journalist who doesn't really know law or the technology involved, and is trying to summarize the law's intent in one quick paragraph?
I'm not saying the politicians behind this law do know what they're doing (I haven't read the law either), but it's hardly fair to accuse them of ignorance when you haven't even looked at what they did.
If we're going to start with hypotheticals, I wonder how many people have been killed due to lack of those stickers elsewhere?
If there's a known carcinogen in the area that will affect my health, I want to know it -- then I can make a (somewhat) informed decision about whether I want to take the risk or not.
I'm not sure that would get the response you imagine.... airport security is famous for not getting the joke.
OTOH, when packing gear for shipment, my co-worker often does include notes to TSA instructing them on how it needs to be repacked... maybe they even read them, who knows?
"delayed" bag was brought onboard, just before landing
Your bag was brought on board just before landing? Very suspicious, indeed!
"Random" selection is profiling under a PC name.
Well, just to play devil's advocate: The lottery is random, and your chances of winning it are miniscule, and yet somebody still wins it every week. Similarly, even in a true random profiling system, there will be some poor soul who "wins" three random-searches in a row, just from bad luck...
It does, if you assume that past behavior is the sole predictor of future behavior. The problem is that there's no guarantee that future anti-US-aircraft terrorism will also be carried out by Muslims -- in fact, if you go with a Muslim-oriented profiling system, you end up creating a very inviting target for non-Muslim terrorist groups (existing or yet-to-be-created), who know that they will be able to walk right through "security".
To give a computer analogy: if you are adding security to a web site, do you just put in security software that detects last year's virus and stops it, or do you design the site to make it as difficult as possible for any type of virus (present or future) to get through? If you're smart, you'll do the latter, otherwise you'll end up continuously getting sucker-punched from places you didn't expect.
Hm, according to Wikipedia half the world's terrorism since 1990 has been due to rogue elephants, enraged about their overpopulation problem....
I'd agree with this, if the 'behavioral profilers' have been trained in what to look for. If they are the $8/hour high-school dropouts that our airport security system is currently based on, OTOH, then their 'gut instincts' will probably be along the lines of 'brown skin == suspicious', and we'll be back to racial profiling and all its deficiencies.
I'd say the real problem isn't that we don't want security, it's that nobody is willing to pay for it.
I'd be more inclined to believe that if our "Christian" president wasn't in the middle of invading and occupying a middle-eastern country.
You're absolutely right, not protecting ourselves against known threats would be suicidal.
On the other hand, doing provocative, stupid things that are guaranteed to turn otherwise friendly or neutral people into our enemies is equally suicidal.
The whole "fuck what everybody thinks, we'll keep ourselves secure through military force alone" mentality is based on the assumption that we have the physical ability to do so. The hard truth, however, is that that simply isn't the case -- our military can barely keep the lid on Iraq, let alone any of the other 3-4 dozen countries where terrorism is a concern. Our only option is to enlist the aid of the rest of the world's governments and people in helping us stop terrorism. The good news is that that shouldn't be too difficult to do -- almost nobody likes terrorists. But to work with people (or governments), you have to treat them with respect -- in particular, you have to understand that it's a two-way street. Double-standards do not go unnoticed by the world's public.
Now that I really don't understand. Who are they trying to catch, the really thick terrorists who will spend several years of their lives and invent diabolical explosive devices, etc, and then risk it all to save $400 on airfare? Surely any terrorist worth his 72 virgins can figure out that it's better to buy a round-trip ticket even if you're not planning to use the second part...
Gee, I always thought that if they were working properly we wouldn't know it...
Quite possibly, you don't. Space elevators aren't about low latency, they're about high bandwidth. If you need to FedEx something into orbit overnight, you're better off with a rocket. Even if you could somehow ship stuff to the base of the elevator instantly, it's still going to take a few days for the elevator car to climb into orbit.
That is a lot of mass to move up into the sky - so it only makes sense as part of a larger project that involves moving huge amounts of material into orbit or beyond.
According to what I've read, the mass of the initial "seed ribbon" could be placed into orbit in (the equivalent of) two or three shuttle flights. After that, the ribbon is strengthened by climbers that add material to it as they climb.
Well, I can think of two reasons: (1) an elevator would be more fail-safe... i.e. if you ever need to shut down the lasers, your elevator car comes to a halt, puts on the brakes, and waits for the lasers to start again, whereas a free-flying vehicles would fall to its destruction. But more importantly, (2) it's not clear to me how a free-flying externally powered craft would work. How is the received laser power to be converted into upward acceleration? If it's done by boiling reaction mass off the bottom of the craft and shooting particles towards Earth somehow (i.e. rocket-style), then we're back to the original scaling problem of having to lift additional mass. A Space elevator solves the problem by giving the craft something to pull against, so it can just use an electric motor to lift itself. I'm not saying it can't be done -- as you say, the energy is there -- I just don't see how.
Why the hell would we lift raw mass out of our gravity well when there is so much of it available in much shallower wells?
Seems like there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there: you need large manufacturing facilities in space in order to make all that stuff from raw materials up there, but the large manufacturing facilities are far too heavy to lift into space.
It's true that we may never see a space elevator -- it's entirely possible that the engineering problems involved in deploying one a simply beyond our ability to solve. But assuming for the sake of discussion that it is possible to deploy one, then there's no question that it would be an order of magnitude more useful than any imaginable rocket-based delivery system. Rockets are a good (if risky) way to get small amounts of material into orbit, but they completely fail to scale up past a certain size. The reason for that is because they have to carry their fuel up into space with them.... the more mass the payload has, the more fuel it has to carry, and the real killer is that you also have to carry more extra fuel to lift the extra fuel. So as the mass of your payload increases linearly, the mass of the fuel you'll need to launch it increases exponentially. At some point there simply isn't enough money in any nation's budget to acquire the amount of fuel they would need (never mind building a rocket big enough to hold it all).
That's why (barring the invention of some near-massless rocket fuel) you'll never see massive amounts infrastructure being lifted into space on rockets. With the space elevator, on the other hand, the problem is neatly bypassed: the elevator "car" carries no fuel at all. Instead, the energy needed for lift is beamed to photo cells on the bottom of the car via ground-based lasers. If you want more lifting power, you simply point another (or a bigger) laser at the bottom of the car... there is no exponential increase in fuel requirements, just more equipment (and more power consumption) back on the ground.
So yes, rockets can get us a nice little "lift the rich tourist into low-Earth-orbit for a few days" industry. But if you want to do Big Stuff, like large spaceships capable of carrying a crew to Mars and back, or solar power satellites, then you'll either need a Space Elevator to bulk-lift all that mass, or some way of finding pre-existing mass already in space and building all the components there.
Really? And what are you basing that prediction on, other than wishful thinking? I'd be the first to welcome the invention of a nice anti-gravity device (or whatnot) myself, but it would be silly to think that something unforseen like that will be invented just because I think it ought to be, laws of physics be damned. Hell, as long as we're going with 'unforseen inventions' as our Great White Hope, perhaps the big surprise invention will be a big advance in the technologies needed to deploy a space elevator. It could go either way.
By ship. Or, possibly we allow a few highly secured planes in.