I prefer to consider it the Boiling Frog analogy. You can't plop a frog in boiling water, because it will get pissed off and hop out. But you can plop a frog in warm water, and slowly heat it until the frog is dead.
likewise, we won't stand for massive usurpations of our liberties... but we will stand for small incremental ones. We will go to a place by baby steps where we would refuse to go all at once.
It isn't logically certain that water being raised a single degree will result in boiling water somewhere down the line (because the temperature might go down a degree later). But if we refuse to have the water heated that single degree, we know it CAN'T result in boiling water. That is the point. We are trying to prevent the possibility of loosing all our freedom, we are NOT saying that a small loses of liberty will NECESSARILY result in a massive one.
Or to steal the words of someone who said it better: "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature.
When vacancies happen in the representation of any state in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.
This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.
How does this allow the fed to act virtually unchecked by the states
APF has nothing to do with Stevens, sure. But you don't pay taxes, you get about $1000 each year form the state. So us in the lower 48 figure you have enough money to fund your own projects.
Meanwhile, for each dollar you send to the federal government, you get about $1.80 back from them. Instead of taking money from the federal government (ie: us in the lower 48), just stop taking the $1k a year and put it into bridges and so forth.
here's my source, btw: http://www.nemw.org/fundsrank.htm I'm from Jersey. look at the bottom of the right column. We get back on $0.63 on each dollar we send to the federal government.
Why shouldn't Alaskan money go to Alaska, and Hawaiian money go to Hawaii? Why send it through more bureaucracy? From what I understand, Alaska doesn't even collect state income taxes. Maybe they don't need to, since the federal government pays for all their stuff?
And I'm from New Jersey. For every $1 we send to the government, we get about $0.63 back. We get the least back from the federal government of all the states. Alaska is on the other end of the scale, getting back about $1.80 for each dollar they send to the federal government (they are #2, right behind New Mexico's $1.91 return on their dollar). So, on the whole money is flowing from my state, to Alaska.
Hawaii isn't quite as bad as NM or Alaska, but they are #7, getting back $1.54 for each dollar they send to the feds.
You could calculate it in a bunch of different ways, but the numbers are so far apart that I doubt you could massage them into saying that I'm not getting the short end of the stick when it comes to federal funds.
I thinks that's rather tangential to the discussion. The SI UNITS don't really have much to do with how we name the NUMBER of said units. SI "Mega" is decimal because, well, we count in decimal.
The whole point of the SI prefixes is to make sure there is no ambiguity. Context SHOULD NOT matter. Mega means a million of something. There should be NO possibility of someone saying "Oh, 1 kilobyte per millisecond must be the same thing as one megabyte per second"
Hey, I have no real problem with using the word "Megabyte". I use it to mean 2^20. But it amounts to geeks using SI prefixes because it was "Close enough" to what we meant. It is, in essence, slang. It meant one million, and WE took it and WE modified it and WE are the ones using it "improperly".
But please, keep using it the terminology. Just don't act indignant when there are ambiguities, because the geeks created the ambiguity.
I was going to list "Partisan bickering" as one of the things that is bringing us down hill...
If you are going to view the people who oppose you as mindless manipulated pawns instead of people with honest disagreements, you are part of the problem.
Depleted uranium is not a chemical weapon. It is used because extremely dense materials penetrate armor better.
White Phosphorous is not really a chemical weapon either. A few people have been saying it is lately, so that they can say "The US is using chemical weapons! They are using WMDs!" Sort of like how China accused us of using "Chemical weapons" in North Korea... when in fact we were using tear gas to smoke NKs out of bunkers in lieu of out and out killing them. It's a political motivated definition making "chemical weapons" into what Orwell called "meaningless words".
Chemical weapons are things like Nerve Agents (VX and Sarin), Blister agents (mustard gas), and choking agents (Phosgene). Depleted uranium and white phosphorous don't fit into these categories.
Tell the nearest Black guy you see that he is less free now then he would have been 225 years ago. [ "Freedom is Slavery", right?;) ]
There are important points that the US has gotten worse on, but there are also a few that we've gotten better on. I don't mean this post to be a "Don't Worry, Be Happy!" statement to make people complacent. On the contrary, I point out the successes to show that not all is lost.
Fight on, my fried. The struggle for freedom did not end 225 years ago.
Erm, Embryonic stem cell research is NOT banned in the USA. You can come here and do all the Embryonic stem cell research your little heart desires, and your wallet can pay for.
*the more you know*
I'm going to go back to being oppressed by my the religious police now and not watch titties on my prime time TV. DAMN my ability to download porn over this internet thingy that my oppressive pentagon created!:(
I'll let you go find the BBC and Reuters articles that say that the killing of JFK was the start of a protracted coup by the government using check points, surveilence, vote stealing and no bid contracts to keep the plebs in check.
So you claim to be able to produce articles from credible sources that you don't even name? And instead of producing those sources... you ask your opponent to produce sources in contradiction to something you claim is true with out support?
I like this standard of proof you go by.
You know, I once did FOUR chicks at once. I won't say which ones, but there is a credible source out there. If you want to refute me, please find just ONE credible source that says I haven't.
hey now, whether or not it is true that Karl Rove might be a mean and dastardly fellow bent on helping Bush make money for his oil cronies by turning the blood of muslim babies into Texas Tea......but he in NO WAY invented making fun of the French.
The rest of the world actually has fewer nukes then us. Even if all the highest estimates are assumed, they have marginally more nukes then us. And we are far more adept at delivering nukes then most of the other countries out there. There only stand Russia and (to a very small extent) China that could retaliation within minutes. You could add France and the UK to that list if their SSBNs happened to be within range, and happen to be able to avoid the US navy long enough to launch. The rest of the nukes out there are either on shorter ranged missiles, or air dropped, neither of which are a substantial threat any more. Most planes capable of dropping nukes are not capable of getting here. And anything capable of GETTING here has a slim chance of getting through the USAAF.
But besides that, they GP's point is valid anyway. You use the right weapon for the right job. The political implications that you mentioned are EXACTLY why a non-lethal weapon like this is deployed at all. We don't nuke Baghdad for the same reasons we don't mow down riots with 50 caliber machine guns and grenades.
So there are 1000 grams in a Kilogram, and 1000 meters in a Kilometer, and 1000 watts in a kilowatt, but 1024 bytes in a kilobyte?
sorry dude, the computer geeks broke this one. kilo is 10^3, mega is 10^6, and giga is 10^9. We stole the prefixes and slapped them on 2^10, 2^20, 2^30, etc. Any ambiguity is our fault.
Re:Funniest eBay listing I've seen in a while
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We were also fooled by them, too. Our ICMB strategy was to "dense pack" our silos close together so that a first strike was impossible. In theory, only a DIRECT hit can take out the hardened missile silos. But then, once a direct hit is made, clouds of debris and fallout near the ground will destroy any incoming ICBMs in the vicinity, as they would be moving very fast. Keeping the silos close together assured that only one silo could be destroyed at a time, retaining our ability to retaliate.
In reality, the soviets never had the technology to make a direct hit on a US missile silo. In fact, the US didn't either, until the Missile-X/Peacekeeper project. And even then it was figured that the Peacekeeper would only be able to get a close enough hit 50% of the time.
Granted, the Soviets were just as scared about OUR ability to make a first strike, but the reality of the technology never measured up.
Of course we pulled tricks, too. They skipped the F-19 fighter designation to make the soviets believe it was a top secret project and waste intelligence efforts tracking down details on the mythical project. They succeeded in fooling Microprose, at least, who released F-19 Stealth Fighter before they released F-117a Stealth Fighter.;)
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I was just using Al Gore's analogy. i don't normally torture frogs to death, so i took his word for it.
either way, i'm sure you understand the point.
I prefer to consider it the Boiling Frog analogy. You can't plop a frog in boiling water, because it will get pissed off and hop out. But you can plop a frog in warm water, and slowly heat it until the frog is dead.
likewise, we won't stand for massive usurpations of our liberties... but we will stand for small incremental ones. We will go to a place by baby steps where we would refuse to go all at once.
It isn't logically certain that water being raised a single degree will result in boiling water somewhere down the line (because the temperature might go down a degree later). But if we refuse to have the water heated that single degree, we know it CAN'T result in boiling water. That is the point. We are trying to prevent the possibility of loosing all our freedom, we are NOT saying that a small loses of liberty will NECESSARILY result in a massive one.
Or to steal the words of someone who said it better:
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson
aha! I get it now. The 17th Amendment is related to the point because it changed Senatorial elections from indirect to direct elections.
How much did that really change, though? Wasn't most States' method of electing Senators to have them elected in the General election anyway?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendmen
How does this allow the fed to act virtually unchecked by the states
Er, what does direct taxation and filling Senate vacancies have to do with this?
And how does something being constitutional make it the right or fair thing to do?
APF has nothing to do with Stevens, sure. But you don't pay taxes, you get about $1000 each year form the state. So us in the lower 48 figure you have enough money to fund your own projects.
Meanwhile, for each dollar you send to the federal government, you get about $1.80 back from them. Instead of taking money from the federal government (ie: us in the lower 48), just stop taking the $1k a year and put it into bridges and so forth.
here's my source, btw: http://www.nemw.org/fundsrank.htm
I'm from Jersey. look at the bottom of the right column. We get back on $0.63 on each dollar we send to the federal government.
Why shouldn't Alaskan money go to Alaska, and Hawaiian money go to Hawaii? Why send it through more bureaucracy? From what I understand, Alaska doesn't even collect state income taxes. Maybe they don't need to, since the federal government pays for all their stuff?
And I'm from New Jersey. For every $1 we send to the government, we get about $0.63 back. We get the least back from the federal government of all the states. Alaska is on the other end of the scale, getting back about $1.80 for each dollar they send to the federal government (they are #2, right behind New Mexico's $1.91 return on their dollar). So, on the whole money is flowing from my state, to Alaska.
Hawaii isn't quite as bad as NM or Alaska, but they are #7, getting back $1.54 for each dollar they send to the feds.
Here's my source: http://www.nemw.org/fundsrank.htm
You could calculate it in a bunch of different ways, but the numbers are so far apart that I doubt you could massage them into saying that I'm not getting the short end of the stick when it comes to federal funds.
joule, watt, and hertz are all SI derived units,
I thinks that's rather tangential to the discussion. The SI UNITS don't really have much to do with how we name the NUMBER of said units. SI "Mega" is decimal because, well, we count in decimal.
The whole point of the SI prefixes is to make sure there is no ambiguity. Context SHOULD NOT matter. Mega means a million of something. There should be NO possibility of someone saying "Oh, 1 kilobyte per millisecond must be the same thing as one megabyte per second"
Hey, I have no real problem with using the word "Megabyte". I use it to mean 2^20. But it amounts to geeks using SI prefixes because it was "Close enough" to what we meant. It is, in essence, slang. It meant one million, and WE took it and WE modified it and WE are the ones using it "improperly".
But please, keep using it the terminology. Just don't act indignant when there are ambiguities, because the geeks created the ambiguity.
The SI prefix "Mega" already means 1,000,000.
a megajoule is 1,000,000 joules
a megawatt is 1,000,000 watts
a megahertz is 1,000,000 hertz
but a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes?
I was going to list "Partisan bickering" as one of the things that is bringing us down hill...
If you are going to view the people who oppose you as mindless manipulated pawns instead of people with honest disagreements, you are part of the problem.
I could show you pictures of people hit with .50 caliber bullets or rockets or explosive shells or JDAM bombs. It will be gruesome.
But they are not chemical weapons.
This is slashdot. A site full of intelligent nerds. We should be able to separate emotion from fact.
Depleted uranium is not a chemical weapon. It is used because extremely dense materials penetrate armor better.
White Phosphorous is not really a chemical weapon either. A few people have been saying it is lately, so that they can say "The US is using chemical weapons! They are using WMDs!" Sort of like how China accused us of using "Chemical weapons" in North Korea... when in fact we were using tear gas to smoke NKs out of bunkers in lieu of out and out killing them. It's a political motivated definition making "chemical weapons" into what Orwell called "meaningless words".
Chemical weapons are things like Nerve Agents (VX and Sarin), Blister agents (mustard gas), and choking agents (Phosgene). Depleted uranium and white phosphorous don't fit into these categories.
Erm, I wasn't comparing Europe, or any country, to America. I was comparing America 225 years ago to America today. It hasn't all been down hill.
Tell the nearest Black guy you see that he is less free now then he would have been 225 years ago. [ "Freedom is Slavery", right? ;) ]
There are important points that the US has gotten worse on, but there are also a few that we've gotten better on. I don't mean this post to be a "Don't Worry, Be Happy!" statement to make people complacent. On the contrary, I point out the successes to show that not all is lost.
Fight on, my fried. The struggle for freedom did not end 225 years ago.
Erm, Embryonic stem cell research is NOT banned in the USA. You can come here and do all the Embryonic stem cell research your little heart desires, and your wallet can pay for.
:(
*the more you know*
I'm going to go back to being oppressed by my the religious police now and not watch titties on my prime time TV. DAMN my ability to download porn over this internet thingy that my oppressive pentagon created!
Do your legwork for you?
no
I'll let you go find the BBC and Reuters articles that say that the killing of JFK was the start of a protracted coup by the government using check points, surveilence, vote stealing and no bid contracts to keep the plebs in check.
So you claim to be able to produce articles from credible sources that you don't even name? And instead of producing those sources... you ask your opponent to produce sources in contradiction to something you claim is true with out support?
I like this standard of proof you go by.
You know, I once did FOUR chicks at once. I won't say which ones, but there is a credible source out there. If you want to refute me, please find just ONE credible source that says I haven't.
and that's what I call a real, true fact.
SSSHHH!!! you're ruining my amusing stereotyping!
Slashdotters can't be choosers.
hey now, whether or not it is true that Karl Rove might be a mean and dastardly fellow bent on helping Bush make money for his oil cronies by turning the blood of muslim babies into Texas Tea... ...but he in NO WAY invented making fun of the French.
The rest of the world actually has fewer nukes then us. Even if all the highest estimates are assumed, they have marginally more nukes then us. And we are far more adept at delivering nukes then most of the other countries out there. There only stand Russia and (to a very small extent) China that could retaliation within minutes. You could add France and the UK to that list if their SSBNs happened to be within range, and happen to be able to avoid the US navy long enough to launch. The rest of the nukes out there are either on shorter ranged missiles, or air dropped, neither of which are a substantial threat any more. Most planes capable of dropping nukes are not capable of getting here. And anything capable of GETTING here has a slim chance of getting through the USAAF.
But besides that, they GP's point is valid anyway. You use the right weapon for the right job. The political implications that you mentioned are EXACTLY why a non-lethal weapon like this is deployed at all. We don't nuke Baghdad for the same reasons we don't mow down riots with 50 caliber machine guns and grenades.
So there are 1000 grams in a Kilogram, and 1000 meters in a Kilometer, and 1000 watts in a kilowatt, but 1024 bytes in a kilobyte?
sorry dude, the computer geeks broke this one. kilo is 10^3, mega is 10^6, and giga is 10^9. We stole the prefixes and slapped them on 2^10, 2^20, 2^30, etc. Any ambiguity is our fault.
Don't you also need an answer?
Hello? This is slashdot.
Which brings up the question: why are you here?
We were also fooled by them, too. Our ICMB strategy was to "dense pack" our silos close together so that a first strike was impossible. In theory, only a DIRECT hit can take out the hardened missile silos. But then, once a direct hit is made, clouds of debris and fallout near the ground will destroy any incoming ICBMs in the vicinity, as they would be moving very fast. Keeping the silos close together assured that only one silo could be destroyed at a time, retaining our ability to retaliate.
;)
In reality, the soviets never had the technology to make a direct hit on a US missile silo. In fact, the US didn't either, until the Missile-X/Peacekeeper project. And even then it was figured that the Peacekeeper would only be able to get a close enough hit 50% of the time.
Granted, the Soviets were just as scared about OUR ability to make a first strike, but the reality of the technology never measured up.
Of course we pulled tricks, too. They skipped the F-19 fighter designation to make the soviets believe it was a top secret project and waste intelligence efforts tracking down details on the mythical project. They succeeded in fooling Microprose, at least, who released F-19 Stealth Fighter before they released F-117a Stealth Fighter.
Deception IS the art of war, after all.