Not much. Harsh punishments are less effective at deterring crime than are moderate punishments that are more likely to happen...unless, of course, you are likely to be punished even if innocent. To be effective the punishment only needs to be sufficient that the net benefit of an act is negative...but they need to be expected to happen if you are guilty. And sooner is much more effective than later.
Yeah, I know these requirements are in conflict. If it were simple, someone would have had a decent government by now.
In particular the Supreme Court has, IIUC, decided that if you share any information with anyone except your lawyer, then you have "no expectation of privacy". And currently most of the Court has strong Republican leanings.
Neither party is worth ANY degree of trust. A very few individuals within each party appear to currently be trustworthy. (And being trustworthy doesn't mean that they will support your position, it means that they will support their own stated position.)
This is what you get when you have a "plurality wins" electoral system. It took it over a century to get quite *this* corrupt, but I don't think it's achieved maximum corruption quite yet.
I wouldn't like to trust our climate models. The problem is, we've got to. Saying "Assume things will stay the same." is also a climate model, after all. And the evidence so far seems to show it's wrong...though not usually drastically wrong in the short term. But changes are cumulative, so when you project further out, you get larger amounts of uncertainty.
OTOH, even a primitive climate model says that the climate between, say, 1930 and 1980 was unusually stable and favorable (unless you lived in a place where it wasn't favorable, of course). That means NO MATTER WHAT you should expect an increase in unseasonable storms and droughts. That's even without thinking about global warming. So currently I don't believe that global warming has had as many effects as people are crediting. But changes are cumulative, so one shouldn't expect that to continue to be true (except, of course, in every short term).
Excuse me, but doesn't the Supreme Court have original jurisdiction in cases where there are crimes by the government that cross national boundaries? Is there some requirement that the case be filed by a state's Attorney General?
I can't see this as a dispute between the states, so that's not the grounds. But I thought that when the government committed crimes in foreign countries, THAT was grounds. (N.B.: I'm drawing a distinction here between the government and the people who work for the government. I'm not totally comfortable doing so, as I believe that's a fraudulent distinction, but I believe that it is considered valid by the government.)
OTOH, IANAL, so I could be all wrong here. I could be only describing how things ought to work.
There are several stop codes. Not every gene uses the modified version. (I.e., each gene has only one stop code.) Probably most genes do NOT include the modified stop code. If they do, then they will still do what they did before (probably) but they'll also do something unexpected. I.e., the protein that is coded for will be longer than it would otherwise be, and will include the original protein at its head. It may well fold differently (almost certainly unless it's one of the proteins with an amorphous shape).
I will agree that almost alway the inclusion would be deleterious to the micro-organism that accepted it. Those aren't the ones that would be dangerous. But the version that's more effective than usual at detoxifying poisons (i.e., antibiotics) or at digesting food (i.e., intestinal tracts) might well be dangerous. Or, of course, it might not. And it would certainly have difficulty in sharing it's modified capabilitities with any organisms that weren't expressing the modified code.
I don't think of this as a major danger, merely a new one. And I wish they were doing it with something that didn't think of people as a place to live.
If it trades genes with a wild organism, the gene fails (because it won't be transcribed correctly in the wild host)
as this sort of depends on whether the acquired gene contains the modified code. P.S.: I think you meant (because it won't be transcribed correctly in the modified host as we are talking about the modifed host acquiring a wild gene.
Well, it couldn't cause "grey goo", as that's the result of run-amuck assemblers. But it might yield a plague that killed everyone who bit their fingernails. (Unless, of course, this is one of those strains of e. coli that's been so crippled that it can't live outside the lab. Even then... does e. coli go in for gene swapping?)
That doesn't work unless you become overly dependent on a single source. I'll admit that it has it's dangers, but it's not inherently fatal. But you might only want to take money for companies advertising their own product rather than from an ad agency. (And make sure early on, like from the start, that nobody has any exclusive right, and also that anything deemed false can be removed. And have the contract [a standard contract for everyone] written by a very good lawyer...who is working for you.)
In the first place, that was probably satire. It's hard to be sure, but I doubt that he's ever actually worked as a marketer at a PR firm.
In the second place, your postulate about percentages appears to be incorrect. Perhaps it works that way for you, as an individual, but if so you are unusual. I believe that I am also unusual...I remember several ads from my childhood, but I have rarely, if ever, bought the products advertised. Still, if I hear "AJAX" I think of "The foaming clenser", not the "noble" Greek warrior (or maybe he was Trojan). Except that now I often think of a web scripting approach, which I've also never used.
Sorry, anarchism is unstable, tending towards warlords, who become feudal barons, who fight until you have a king or an emperor. That how we got here. (Things were pretty anarchic in Europe after the Romans retreated and the Huns wandered through...though admittedly it never got all the way down to pure anarchy. For that you need to look at, perhaps, the Ik (reputed to have been quite anarchic and relatively peaceful until there was a drought and crop failure).
I agree we need something different, but perhaps some sort of mesh government rather than hierarchical. The trouble is government sort of needs to be based on geography. But DON'T have a plurality rules electoral system.
It's worse than that. If specialists in a field spend the time to contribute an article, they are likely to have it reverted by some idiot who knows nothing about the field. I won't speculate on his reasons, but facts are not what Wikipedia runs on, just what it occasionally provides. And then you can't trust them.
OTOH, the US paid no attention to the Geneva convention. The Vietnam War need never have happened. That would probably have prevented the Pot Pol horror. (I know, it's a different country. but violence tends to spread.)
Still, it's true. You need to be more afraid of your neighbors than of someone who lives a hundred miles away. And it's been awhile since the US has invaded either Mexico or Canada. But I'm sure they both remember it unhappily, even though in the US it's mainly forgotten.
Unfortunately, there are many indications that the current social unrest in the US is going to be getting worse for awhile. This may remain internal, but governments tend to try to divert internal unrest by fomenting external conflicts. I don't know where China stands on this. Are the powerful elites getting more powerful? Is the middle class rising or shrinking? FWIW, I expect the first really clear warning sign to be a series of coupes. The leading edge is the concentration of power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands. But remember, too, that the Roman Empire lasted for quite awhile with new Emperors being killed off within a few years. So don't expect rapid collapse, just that things will be getting less and less plesant as things get weaker and weaker, until finally the pieces at the edge start leaving. (Unless someone gets impatient and starts a war. Given the insanity at the top that tends to pervade during such periods that could lead to a sterilized planet.)
Yeah. But for some reason I think I have less to worry about (directly) from the Chinese government that from the US government. I would have thought that neither would be interested in me, but the NSA has proven that incorrect.
Sorry, he's saying that if "you" can nitpick, so can he. It is, indeed, a nitpick, as the Air Force could be reincorporated into the Army without changing very much at all. But it's a valid nitpick. Nobody on either side has been quite as specific about Social Security, etc. (outside of claiming that it fits under General Welfare, which is plausible, but IIRC that's from the preamble, and thus not an enabling section).
To be fair, as long as the supporters aren't specific, their opponents don't have anything specific to disprove, and so they are operating under an handicap. This smacks of a debater's trick rather than a valid argument.
That said, I could see it being something that should be left to the states, but ONLY if the Supreme Court decision saying that the Cities and States couldn't have a residency requirement for the general support that they offer was removed.
There are a LOT of interlocking features, and no simple answer is going to work. Yes, the feds have illegitimately centralized power and government, but while doing so they have simultaneously prevented the various states from fulfilling their proper roles via not only the confiscation of funding, but also by various legal decisions. Many of them were made in the name of equality, but they have had a net pernicious effect.
I agree that that is the way it is phrased, and that it was intended to be understood in that way. I deny that it is a fact. It is, rather, an extremely highly desireable state of being.
Don't confuse political statements with reality, even when you agree with those speaking.
You've almost got it. The real problem is that if the government claims that something promotes the general welfare, whether anyone believes them or not, doesn't it fall within their scope of action?
This is a real problem, and it may be inherent in natural languages. (Formal languages have their own, different, problems.) Natural languages always work on the "I'm pointing at this, you know what I mean" principle, but often other people not only don't know what you mean, but disagree on it, especially WRT the details.
As for what history shows...look up the "Alien and Sedition acts", which occurred while the writers of the Constitution were largely in control of the government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts There was disagreement about the powers granted to the government from nearly the start.
Personally, I agree with a very libertarian reading of the Constitution. I also believe that it would result in an unworkable government in an age of rapid communication and fast transportation. But instead of hashing out agreed upon fixes during the country's history, repeatedly the government has just ignored those parts that were inconvenient. Personally I believe that just about every clause in the Constitution has occasionally had its meaning perverted by the government. Rarely has the government appealed to it in the sense in which it ought to be interpreted if taken as a document in context. This is because it is a document that is almost entirely concerned with forbidding the government to do various things. It needs to be much easier for the citizenry to initiate an amendment, though perhaps not that much easier to get it passed. But each such amendment needs to be quite limited in length (perhaps 500 words) and to only reference parts of the constitution already in place. Understandability needs to be prized. Also there needs to be a total length limit. And instead of the Supreme Court deciding what it means it needs to be decided by a group of 30 12th grade students chosen at random. I.e., it needs to be held to mean what it says it means.
War isn't profitable for countries. It used to be profitable for the country that won the war, but not in the last 100 years, for any major conflict, and I don't think that it's been profitable for anything involving actual countries for the last 25 or so. (I'd need studies to be sure.)
Profitable for the suppliers or weapons, yes. No question there.
Now there's no proof that they wanted it to happen. I'll admit that there is proof that they knew about it, and about some of the participants, ahead of time, but that's separate from what their desires and goals were.
If you were to ask me what I guessed, then I would agree with you, but I don't know where the decision came from, and I tend to believe that the decision was a bit higher. That, however, is also just a guess.
P.S.: We also don't know just exactly how much they knew ahead of time, and how specific their information was. It's even possible that they had actual good reasons. I doubt this judging by the actions taken right after the events, but I must acknowledge the possibility.
Well, as for private networks... Do you remember a few years back when a nuclear plant that was only on a private network was taken over by a virus. (Nothing major happened that time.) This was because in a different building on the network a contractor plugged in his laptop to the private network. I believe that this was by accident. I think he was trying to go on the web. But his laptop had an active infection.
What with wifi becomming increasingly common, I don't think private networks count as security unless they are QUITE strictly controlled.
IIUC, this wouldn't depend on a botnet. This isn't a DDOS attack, this is a code vulnerability. So a lone malicious hacker could take down the grid. (Yeah, some code vulnerabilities need a botnet to set things up. IIUC this isn't one of them.)
AC disconnects are only useful if you have a very large number of high powered batteries. Which can easily double the cost of the installation. Yeah, they're quite useful. Useful enough? Maybe not.
But if its being used by a tyrant, is the code really free?
You need to understand the license. It's not the developer that is free, it's the user. And there are few freer than a tyrant.
Of course, if he developes the code and distributes the changes, then the license requires him to distribute the source on request, but as he's a tyrant he is free to ignore the license.
Sort of yes. I'm not at all happy with the US govt.s aggressive foreign policy, *or* intrusive domestic policy. But it doesn't really matter whether they use MSWind or Linux, except that I believe Linux is more reliable (well, I haven't used MSWind in over a decade) and they MAY adhere to the GPL, if it suits them. (SELinux is one significant contribution. Not enough to forgive the NSA over, but still significant...unless, of course, it's a honeypot.)
Given the typical military mission that I've heard of in recent years, I'm not real pleased that they are more able to carry them out. But choice of operating system probably isn't significant.
Yes, animals fight, and humans are animals. But countries are NOT animals. And when countries have the weapons that modern countries have, fighting edges towards suicidal. (Remember, nuclear weapons can be detected, but biological weapons can't. And they can be just as dangerous, if less targeted. And who knows what's coming down the pike. War needs to be obsoleted. It's not like it's even profitable anymore.)
Unfortunately, the current political system is captive of the corporations. I've seen predictions that this will continue to get worse until society collapses. Before then expect a series of coupes, so I don't think we're well into the process.
One can hope that these predictions are wrong, but so far things seem to match pretty well.
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Not much. Harsh punishments are less effective at deterring crime than are moderate punishments that are more likely to happen...unless, of course, you are likely to be punished even if innocent. To be effective the punishment only needs to be sufficient that the net benefit of an act is negative...but they need to be expected to happen if you are guilty. And sooner is much more effective than later.
Yeah, I know these requirements are in conflict. If it were simple, someone would have had a decent government by now.
In particular the Supreme Court has, IIUC, decided that if you share any information with anyone except your lawyer, then you have "no expectation of privacy". And currently most of the Court has strong Republican leanings.
Neither party is worth ANY degree of trust. A very few individuals within each party appear to currently be trustworthy. (And being trustworthy doesn't mean that they will support your position, it means that they will support their own stated position.)
This is what you get when you have a "plurality wins" electoral system. It took it over a century to get quite *this* corrupt, but I don't think it's achieved maximum corruption quite yet.
I wouldn't like to trust our climate models. The problem is, we've got to. Saying "Assume things will stay the same." is also a climate model, after all. And the evidence so far seems to show it's wrong...though not usually drastically wrong in the short term. But changes are cumulative, so when you project further out, you get larger amounts of uncertainty.
OTOH, even a primitive climate model says that the climate between, say, 1930 and 1980 was unusually stable and favorable (unless you lived in a place where it wasn't favorable, of course). That means NO MATTER WHAT you should expect an increase in unseasonable storms and droughts. That's even without thinking about global warming. So currently I don't believe that global warming has had as many effects as people are crediting. But changes are cumulative, so one shouldn't expect that to continue to be true (except, of course, in every short term).
Excuse me, but doesn't the Supreme Court have original jurisdiction in cases where there are crimes by the government that cross national boundaries? Is there some requirement that the case be filed by a state's Attorney General?
I can't see this as a dispute between the states, so that's not the grounds. But I thought that when the government committed crimes in foreign countries, THAT was grounds. (N.B.: I'm drawing a distinction here between the government and the people who work for the government. I'm not totally comfortable doing so, as I believe that's a fraudulent distinction, but I believe that it is considered valid by the government.)
OTOH, IANAL, so I could be all wrong here. I could be only describing how things ought to work.
There are several stop codes. Not every gene uses the modified version. (I.e., each gene has only one stop code.) Probably most genes do NOT include the modified stop code. If they do, then they will still do what they did before (probably) but they'll also do something unexpected. I.e., the protein that is coded for will be longer than it would otherwise be, and will include the original protein at its head. It may well fold differently (almost certainly unless it's one of the proteins with an amorphous shape).
I will agree that almost alway the inclusion would be deleterious to the micro-organism that accepted it. Those aren't the ones that would be dangerous. But the version that's more effective than usual at detoxifying poisons (i.e., antibiotics) or at digesting food (i.e., intestinal tracts) might well be dangerous. Or, of course, it might not. And it would certainly have difficulty in sharing it's modified capabilitities with any organisms that weren't expressing the modified code.
I don't think of this as a major danger, merely a new one. And I wish they were doing it with something that didn't think of people as a place to live.
I'm not sure about:
If it trades genes with a wild organism, the gene fails (because it won't be transcribed correctly in the wild host)
as this sort of depends on whether the acquired gene contains the modified code.
P.S.: I think you meant
(because it won't be transcribed correctly in the modified host
as we are talking about the modifed host acquiring a wild gene.
Well, it couldn't cause "grey goo", as that's the result of run-amuck assemblers. But it might yield a plague that killed everyone who bit their fingernails. (Unless, of course, this is one of those strains of e. coli that's been so crippled that it can't live outside the lab. Even then ... does e. coli go in for gene swapping?)
That doesn't work unless you become overly dependent on a single source. I'll admit that it has it's dangers, but it's not inherently fatal. But you might only want to take money for companies advertising their own product rather than from an ad agency. (And make sure early on, like from the start, that nobody has any exclusive right, and also that anything deemed false can be removed. And have the contract [a standard contract for everyone] written by a very good lawyer...who is working for you.)
In the first place, that was probably satire. It's hard to be sure, but I doubt that he's ever actually worked as a marketer at a PR firm.
In the second place, your postulate about percentages appears to be incorrect. Perhaps it works that way for you, as an individual, but if so you are unusual. I believe that I am also unusual...I remember several ads from my childhood, but I have rarely, if ever, bought the products advertised. Still, if I hear "AJAX" I think of "The foaming clenser", not the "noble" Greek warrior (or maybe he was Trojan). Except that now I often think of a web scripting approach, which I've also never used.
Sorry, anarchism is unstable, tending towards warlords, who become feudal barons, who fight until you have a king or an emperor. That how we got here. (Things were pretty anarchic in Europe after the Romans retreated and the Huns wandered through...though admittedly it never got all the way down to pure anarchy. For that you need to look at, perhaps, the Ik (reputed to have been quite anarchic and relatively peaceful until there was a drought and crop failure).
I agree we need something different, but perhaps some sort of mesh government rather than hierarchical. The trouble is government sort of needs to be based on geography. But DON'T have a plurality rules electoral system.
It's worse than that. If specialists in a field spend the time to contribute an article, they are likely to have it reverted by some idiot who knows nothing about the field. I won't speculate on his reasons, but facts are not what Wikipedia runs on, just what it occasionally provides. And then you can't trust them.
OTOH, the US paid no attention to the Geneva convention. The Vietnam War need never have happened. That would probably have prevented the Pot Pol horror. (I know, it's a different country. but violence tends to spread.)
Still, it's true. You need to be more afraid of your neighbors than of someone who lives a hundred miles away. And it's been awhile since the US has invaded either Mexico or Canada. But I'm sure they both remember it unhappily, even though in the US it's mainly forgotten.
Unfortunately, there are many indications that the current social unrest in the US is going to be getting worse for awhile. This may remain internal, but governments tend to try to divert internal unrest by fomenting external conflicts. I don't know where China stands on this. Are the powerful elites getting more powerful? Is the middle class rising or shrinking? FWIW, I expect the first really clear warning sign to be a series of coupes. The leading edge is the concentration of power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands. But remember, too, that the Roman Empire lasted for quite awhile with new Emperors being killed off within a few years. So don't expect rapid collapse, just that things will be getting less and less plesant as things get weaker and weaker, until finally the pieces at the edge start leaving. (Unless someone gets impatient and starts a war. Given the insanity at the top that tends to pervade during such periods that could lead to a sterilized planet.)
Yeah. But for some reason I think I have less to worry about (directly) from the Chinese government that from the US government. I would have thought that neither would be interested in me, but the NSA has proven that incorrect.
Sorry, he's saying that if "you" can nitpick, so can he. It is, indeed, a nitpick, as the Air Force could be reincorporated into the Army without changing very much at all. But it's a valid nitpick. Nobody on either side has been quite as specific about Social Security, etc. (outside of claiming that it fits under General Welfare, which is plausible, but IIRC that's from the preamble, and thus not an enabling section).
To be fair, as long as the supporters aren't specific, their opponents don't have anything specific to disprove, and so they are operating under an handicap. This smacks of a debater's trick rather than a valid argument.
That said, I could see it being something that should be left to the states, but ONLY if the Supreme Court decision saying that the Cities and States couldn't have a residency requirement for the general support that they offer was removed.
There are a LOT of interlocking features, and no simple answer is going to work. Yes, the feds have illegitimately centralized power and government, but while doing so they have simultaneously prevented the various states from fulfilling their proper roles via not only the confiscation of funding, but also by various legal decisions. Many of them were made in the name of equality, but they have had a net pernicious effect.
I agree that that is the way it is phrased, and that it was intended to be understood in that way. I deny that it is a fact. It is, rather, an extremely highly desireable state of being.
Don't confuse political statements with reality, even when you agree with those speaking.
You've almost got it. The real problem is that if the government claims that something promotes the general welfare, whether anyone believes them or not, doesn't it fall within their scope of action?
This is a real problem, and it may be inherent in natural languages. (Formal languages have their own, different, problems.) Natural languages always work on the "I'm pointing at this, you know what I mean" principle, but often other people not only don't know what you mean, but disagree on it, especially WRT the details.
As for what history shows...look up the "Alien and Sedition acts", which occurred while the writers of the Constitution were largely in control of the government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts There was disagreement about the powers granted to the government from nearly the start.
Personally, I agree with a very libertarian reading of the Constitution. I also believe that it would result in an unworkable government in an age of rapid communication and fast transportation. But instead of hashing out agreed upon fixes during the country's history, repeatedly the government has just ignored those parts that were inconvenient. Personally I believe that just about every clause in the Constitution has occasionally had its meaning perverted by the government. Rarely has the government appealed to it in the sense in which it ought to be interpreted if taken as a document in context. This is because it is a document that is almost entirely concerned with forbidding the government to do various things. It needs to be much easier for the citizenry to initiate an amendment, though perhaps not that much easier to get it passed. But each such amendment needs to be quite limited in length (perhaps 500 words) and to only reference parts of the constitution already in place. Understandability needs to be prized. Also there needs to be a total length limit. And instead of the Supreme Court deciding what it means it needs to be decided by a group of 30 12th grade students chosen at random. I.e., it needs to be held to mean what it says it means.
War isn't profitable for countries. It used to be profitable for the country that won the war, but not in the last 100 years, for any major conflict, and I don't think that it's been profitable for anything involving actual countries for the last 25 or so. (I'd need studies to be sure.)
Profitable for the suppliers or weapons, yes. No question there.
Now there's no proof that they wanted it to happen. I'll admit that there is proof that they knew about it, and about some of the participants, ahead of time, but that's separate from what their desires and goals were.
If you were to ask me what I guessed, then I would agree with you, but I don't know where the decision came from, and I tend to believe that the decision was a bit higher. That, however, is also just a guess.
P.S.: We also don't know just exactly how much they knew ahead of time, and how specific their information was. It's even possible that they had actual good reasons. I doubt this judging by the actions taken right after the events, but I must acknowledge the possibility.
Well, as for private networks...
Do you remember a few years back when a nuclear plant that was only on a private network was taken over by a virus. (Nothing major happened that time.) This was because in a different building on the network a contractor plugged in his laptop to the private network. I believe that this was by accident. I think he was trying to go on the web. But his laptop had an active infection.
What with wifi becomming increasingly common, I don't think private networks count as security unless they are QUITE strictly controlled.
IIUC, this wouldn't depend on a botnet. This isn't a DDOS attack, this is a code vulnerability. So a lone malicious hacker could take down the grid. (Yeah, some code vulnerabilities need a botnet to set things up. IIUC this isn't one of them.)
AC disconnects are only useful if you have a very large number of high powered batteries. Which can easily double the cost of the installation. Yeah, they're quite useful. Useful enough? Maybe not.
Under virtualization.
But if its being used by a tyrant, is the code really free?
You need to understand the license. It's not the developer that is free, it's the user. And there are few freer than a tyrant.
Of course, if he developes the code and distributes the changes, then the license requires him to distribute the source on request, but as he's a tyrant he is free to ignore the license.
Sort of yes. I'm not at all happy with the US govt.s aggressive foreign policy, *or* intrusive domestic policy. But it doesn't really matter whether they use MSWind or Linux, except that I believe Linux is more reliable (well, I haven't used MSWind in over a decade) and they MAY adhere to the GPL, if it suits them. (SELinux is one significant contribution. Not enough to forgive the NSA over, but still significant...unless, of course, it's a honeypot.)
Given the typical military mission that I've heard of in recent years, I'm not real pleased that they are more able to carry them out. But choice of operating system probably isn't significant.
Yes, animals fight, and humans are animals. But countries are NOT animals. And when countries have the weapons that modern countries have, fighting edges towards suicidal. (Remember, nuclear weapons can be detected, but biological weapons can't. And they can be just as dangerous, if less targeted. And who knows what's coming down the pike. War needs to be obsoleted. It's not like it's even profitable anymore.)
Unfortunately, the current political system is captive of the corporations. I've seen predictions that this will continue to get worse until society collapses. Before then expect a series of coupes, so I don't think we're well into the process.
One can hope that these predictions are wrong, but so far things seem to match pretty well.