I agree on the high tech toys, but we are 8th in the world in the number of soldiers. China alone outnumbers the US Military 3 to 1. North Korea outnumbers combined US and South Korean forces.
Yes, those high tech gadgets give us an important force multiplier and equalizer. But people can get stupid real fast and it would take us a while to train up and organize enough of an army to stay in a fight. Relying on technology is shortsighted.
The US should be doubling the size of our reserve and especially our national guard forces. With other nations closing the technology gap the US is increasingly vulnerable to the shear size of potential adversaries forces.
Good discussion. Although, I think that often overlooked in discussion of settlement patterns is the affects of the sexual revolution and more recently the Internet revolution. When you had a primary "bread winner" you could more easily cluster around that person's employment. But transportation that provides for faster travel times to more jobs enables better job options for everyone in the household.
Alternatively, with jobs that can be done remotely, then it does provide some flexibility and people rely on communication rather than transportation.
Personally I've been in the situation of moving to be closer to work, then having the job change, then moving again, then having the job change. Finally you settle down and it becomes harder and harder and more costly to move, but yet the job market doesn't stay the same for a lot of people in the economy. Time efficient transportation has to be available to fill in some of that gap to enable opportunity.
It is all well and good to lament the changes in settlement and development patterns from a time when most people relied on walking for their daily jobs, but the loss of job opportunities for households with multiple bread winners when you don't have a flexible and time efficient transportation system should be the main consideration in transportation planning. Efficient transportation is an enabler of the middle class.
First, powering wireless while driving is extremely expensive, as large portions of the road must be equipped with coils. This approach is also very resource hungry and therefore not applicable. Second, installing such coils for parking or on traffic lights is also expensive and complicated, as they have to be switched on and off 100s of times every day.
Yes, embedding cables in the roadway is not going to be viable for a variety of reasons and I don't need any pilot program to tell me that.
Third, cars are by concept very inefficient, as normals cars weight 1-2 t and are used to carry around 1.3 persons weighting 80-120 kg. 1:10 to 1:20 ratio. In addition, they require a lot of space. While this is not a problem in large areas of North America, it is a problem in densely populated areas, like Central and Western Europe, and even more in India, China, Japan, etc.
Inefficient in terms of what? Cost, energy, time? In terms of time cars are often twice or 2.5 times as time efficient as public transport for most people, even during peak commuting times. Just do some comparisons using Google Maps and you will get a good idea of the differences. Sure in dense metropolitan downtown areas, cars are going to be less time efficient because there is nowhere to park.
Cost wise public transport is going to win out from an individual perspective, but the difference is most likely because public transit systems are heavily subsidized, while car transportation is heavily taxed.
Energy wise, it depends on the efficiency of the vehicle in question, but yes on average mass transit is going to give you a fuel efficiency economy of scale type of effect.
The solution to present day transportation issues in metropolitan areas, where most people live, are public transport. Well implemented, it is faster than cars in traffic, they require less space than cars, and they require less energy. In addition we should promote bicycles, as they are more flexible and a good short range people mover. They also come with the bonus of better health. The individual traffic (with cars) is dead, as there is no individuality in traffic jams and when thousands of people all drive in the same direction every morning and back in the evening.
I think most is more like 50-50, because just outside the metropolitan urban core mass transit sucks it pretty hard. I think if there is an obvious under addressed and under utilized transportation system it is the two legs that people have under them. Yes, bikes are pretty good for short trips, but making sure we have complete streets and walking oriented development are key.
Instabilities in the labor market combined with rise of gender equality has meant that at least one person in a household is going to have a longer commute. Gone are the days when Dad got a job and the family moved close to where that job was in order to lessen the commute. Now the chances of Mom and Dad getting a job right down the street are much much less and cars are here to stay.
but I'd rather see more desalinization plants. The trouble is shade balls were probably pretty cheap. If you think California lacks the political will to tell their 1% to back off on the water usage try getting the tax raises through needed to support desalinization plants.
Taxes don't need to be raised, the water bill would go up slightly. Last I read it was something like $30 a month to the average residential water bill in order to add a desalination plant to the local supply mix. Costs of desalination have come down quite a bit.
Society pressures women in a variety of ways into abortions. Economic deprivation such that if a woman chose to have a child being in a poor economic situation she would be viewed as having made a bad choice and their children less chance of success. While welfare in many places would provide some bare minimum necessities in some states this is also socially looked down upon. Being considered "too young" is also something that is of great pressure on young people these days. And it seems the larger societal motivation is primarily commercially predatory in nature, because young people with children have less disposable income which can be tapped. Young people are fuel for the economy.
And then most disturbing of all we have a concerted effort by the abortion industry to turn every negative of abortion into a positive. Kill your unborn child snuffing out a lifetime of potential.... No worries you can donate their organs and feel better about it. You are a hero and that baby of yours, you know the one with all those partially developed organs... was never really alive.
In the US we have a tiered health care system where lower income people will often only be able to afford high deductible insurance plans that are unaffordable to actually use. Made slightly better these days because if you find out you are sick you can now upgrade into a better plan with lower deductibles next calendar year... but again the point is that even with Obamacare the rich and upper middle class are getting far better and far quicker medical care.
I think these videos and the apparent lack of ethical oversight in this practice of harvesting baby organs raises many important questions about what the "costs" are being reimbursed and how the incentives are victimizing women. At $30 to $100 per "specimen", with evidence that doctors are changing abortion procedures to obtain better quality specimens to increase their value, it is a completely fair question to take a look at who is getting money and what perverse effects money is having on the practice and incentivization of abortions.
Is the organ harvesting lowering the cost of abortions? Are women being told that the procedures are going to be less comfortable because the doctors are trying to obtain better specimens to get higher prices? The statements by the Planned Parenthood employee raise very very disturbing questions that raise ethical issues even beyond the ethics of abortion itself. Are abortion providers delaying appointments for abortions to give the fetus more time to develop their organs and provide better specimens?
I don't disagree that we often have to choose between the lesser of evils. That is part of being human. But many people seem to have forgotten that abortion is evil and are going to great lengths to say it isn't. I think even if you think the practice should continue and it is a lesser evil, then you shouldn't bury your head to the apparent ethical conflicts at every level of this.
So why should we not use dead baby/foetus body parts for research then?
Because killing babies, even or especially unborn babies is evil and anything that encourages or rewards people for killing babies is fruit of that ethically poisoned vine.
Being pro-choice doesn't mean you should look away from the evil of a mother killing her unborn child. Or the evil of a society which encourages mothers to kill their unborn children even if it is in order to help others. That is a perverse society with incentives to create unwanted pregnancies and prey upon the women who do. Instead we should all be focused and have the shared goal of reducing unwanted pregnancies. That is the right path to be on for our society.
To ignore that the benefits of this "research" are more likely bestowed on the rich and wealthy while the women pressured into these choices are often poor is malicious ignorance. Turning poor women into spare parts factories for the rich isn't pro choice... it is a dead end.
As a society we concluded that a person had a right to privacy in their own body and that because of that right to privacy they must even be allowed to choose to end an unwanted pregnancy. That is as far as we should go, otherwise all our rights are meaningless in a society where life itself is merely a commodity.
Abortion is a legal choice, but the fact that we as a society are forcing women into a position where they feel they need to make that choice needs to be stopped. And creating an industry around abortion that benefits financially from that choice undermines that.
For all the good that might come of research on aborted body parts, find another way or accept that there must be ethical limits to what we do to survive.
here's a counter counter example: It takes 1 hour for me to take the train into the city. It takes 2.5 hours to drive into the city. The cost of parking in the city for the day is double the price of the train ticket. But that is irrelevant, the time difference alone seals the deal for the train.
For the metropolitan urban core and people commuting into the urban core this is often the case. Yet it is the exact opposite outside the urban core where even during peak rush hour mass transit takes 2.5 times that of cars.
These days Google Maps makes it easy to compare different commutes and commuting times.
Mass transit is capital intensive, inflexible when it is along fixed and often incompatible rail networks and therefore often lags development and is geared towards... surprise... places with already a very high population density or places where such high density is planned for. Cars can get bogged down in the city where trains operating at full capacity can move a lot of people from point A to point B in a predictably consistent amount of time, but car transportation is much less capital intensive than mass transit in small cities, suburban and rural areas where paving a road (or even a dirt road can suffice) and buying cars are cheaper than trains and rail infrastructure and can be adapted to smaller scale development more quickly.
People can get almost religious in their beliefs about the benefits of either system, but there are benefits to both roads and rail applied to the right situation. With new automated car technology that could shift the balance of benefits back towards cars closer to the high density urban core and I think it will certainly help those smaller cities that were often left without good mass transit and rely on parking garages to get people into the city. But steel on rail trains in a well run system with dedicated rights of way are likely to win out in the bigger city downtown urban core areas because of higher capacity and reliable transit times.
Traffic studies/simulations have repeatedly shown that most traffic problems originate from a single car causing a chain reaction which amplifies. You would need a significant portion of the system automated to compensate for that. Either to avoid those problems in the first place or to compensate once the problem has occurred.
Those individual cars that cause the most problems are probably driven by people who are bad drivers, know they are bad drivers and are going to be more likely to want automated vehicles. So, you are potentially realizing improvements and efficiencies early on in the adoption cycle.
You mean donating. They weren't selling and never have sold fetal tissue.
I'd rather see the practice of "donating" dead baby parts completely banned than argue about whether $100 dollars for a dead baby's liver is just reimbursement for the cost and whether the "research" being performed is worthy. Being pro choice doesn't mean I am going to look the other way.
It's painfully obvious, the property owner needs to get a lawyer that can pursue the drone owner for criminal misconduct.
Actually, everyone should take a chill. All the charges should be dropped and these people should just work it out. The neighborly thing to do would have been to tell the neighbor not to fly over his property before shooting it out of the sky or anything like that. I think some partial compensation would be appropriate as a civil matter negotiated between the neighbors or in civil small claims court.
The only reason that this is being given any attention is because "drone" has become the catch all word for a bunch of techno paranoia.
In other words, if a stranger wanders onto your property, you shoot them and ask questions later.
If a stranger wanders onto your property carried along on the back of a foot long drone, then I think any reasonable person would assume an alien invasion by really tiny people (or ants) is in progress and do their patriotic duty and start shooting.
In the words of the wise: "How can you be expected to teach children to read if they can't fit inside the building?"
Shooting at the sky is bad. Falling bullets can kill.
And that was one of the charges. I think the facts of the particular case are important rather than the principles at stake. Of course he had an expectation of privacy and below a certain height (I think it is 500 feet or so) the other person was trespassing with the drone. Did shooting it out of the sky reasonably endanger anyone... How far from the property line was it? What direction did he shoot? This was a shotgun, so pellets generally have a shorter range than a rifle or hand gun. The fact that only the drone was damaged and no one was actually hurt should count for a lot.
It is no more "bullshit" than a bank being required to open a safety deposit box when a warrant is presented against whoever is leasing the safety deposit box. That search is happening on bank property, but the bank does not have legal standing to challenge the warrant.
We do NOT need internet-enabled corporations running rampant over the law as if they had no legal responsibilities nor limitations on the scope on what they're allowed to do. There are often CLEAR examples of similar situations with physical property, but the weasels in the "new" digital world would like to claim that they're above those precedents.
When I upload pictures or make a post on Facebook I am conveying Facebook certain rights to that content through their terms of service and that is what should give them standing. Facebook isn't merely holding some information for me like a storage provider or "safety deposit box". They are creating information about their transactions with me. They are hosting content which I have conveyed some ownership rights to. These are business records owned in some way by the business. Companies don't have standing to represent me (unless I have given them permission to do so through their terms of service which should be updated to convey the right to do so in this type of situation), but they should and must have standing to represent themselves and their own interests in protecting their data from unlawful searches.
If I write about someone in my journal. Say a transaction log. And put it in a locked cabinet in my home. Then that is my information and not owned by the person I am writing about. If the government then wants my journal and wants me to provide the key, then I certainly have standing to challenge a government demand for the key to the cabinet where my journal is held.
Facebook is the same. They are the ones keeping the journal, the logs, the databases. I don't have a key to Facebook's server room or a colocated server in their facility. There is no analogy to a bank's safety deposit box that makes sense or applies here.
I used to have fresh dulse from time to time... I liked it. And will occasionally buy some when I find it in the grocery store. I never thought to fry it up like bacon. Perhaps frying something that is good for you is a bit counterproductive?
While I generally agree, what happens when the only jobs left are those that require creativity or critical thinking. There's a lot of people out there who can't do anything more complicated than repeating a few simple tasks over and over again. These jobs are going to be replace by robots. When the only jobs left are jobs that require high levels of thought, there's going to be a lot of people who simply can't hold down a job. I don't think that changing the way we educate people or making education free or anything else is going to be able to change the fact that some people don't have the cognitive ability to do the high level jobs that robots won't be able to do.
Also, realistically there are limited jobs for creative and critical thinking and most of those aren't really necessary. Food, Shelter, Clean Water, Transportation, Energy are the really critical things that people need on a day to day basis. And those things can be produced more efficiently in more industrialized and automated ways. Creative and critical thinking are overrated as useful skills. Especially when you have a thousands of people that have those skills applying for one actual job.
That leaves the rest of us pattering about on blogs and making babies, drinking which is all well and good until someone decides they aren't getting enough or are pissed off that the person who cheated to be.01% better than them has 50% or 99% more than them and the system is based on a bunch of meritocratic BS lies.
Adobe should provide/sell tools that will enable people to convert their Flash content into the equivalent standards based browser supported formats. If they make it easy they will have created an essential web development tool in the process. If they stick with Flash they are just milking the dead horse.
Choose
A)Iran - Not Assad's Syria (which is as bad or worse than ISIS)
And C) Recognize Kurdistan
And D) De facto or by international agreement (ya right) partition both Iraq and Syria to create a new non-ISIS dominate Sunni state as reward for Sunnis to help overthrow ISIS.
is reformed in the House bill, which does away with it over six months and instead gives phone companies the responsibility of maintaining phone records that the government can search." Obama criticized the Senate for not acting on that legislation, saying they have necessitated a renewal of the Patriot Act provisions.
You are right, as it ended up being the House Patriot Act extension in the name of the USA Freedom Act was not a real reform. Requiring a warrant to gain access to the information was the real issue.
Although if they simply required the companies to retain the data for a period of time AND required the government to get a constitutionally valid search warrant to access particular records directly related to a terrorism case then that would be the reform we need. The companies have these records anyway, it is the search warrant part that is what we need.
In secret... and illegally! There is a big difference between walking up to the front door and demanding cooperation from a business and covertly gaining access to those records. It is a several order of magnitude difference in effective ability to collect information about people
Having fourth amendment protections honored and respected means that the police can't just knock down the door of your business to search your records because of the remote possibility that someone that you do business with could be a terrorist.
Having a Patriot Act provision that says the the government doesn't need a constitutionally valid warrant to get business records is far far different than covertly collecting information via hacking or by purchasing the information. To have the freedom to choose companies that will honor their privacy agreements is itself an important step. To have the recourse to sue those companies when they voluntarily sell the government your private information in violation of your privacy agreement is important.
What is at stake is the government being able to walk into a company with a secret order demanding they hand over all the records the government wants without a constitutionally valid warrant. Having a law to point to that says companies can be forced to cooperate makes a big difference to the ease at which the government can collect mega data and conduct unconstitutional drag net surveillance.
Billions and billions of records about everyone's communications with which you can monitor their movements, their political affiliations and activism, monitor all their recorded financial transactions and purchases, determine their race, infer their sexual activity, and otherwise find exploitable personal weaknesses, affinities and affiliations en masse.
Oh and then put that in a giant database which is exploitable by America's adversaries.
But my point is that there isn't enough competition now, so any consolidation of top competitors should be blocked at least until there is a healthy free market.
Look at the cable market city by city, town by town... If there are currently fewer than 3 options for services in any areas they are proposing to merge or if their merger would drop the competition to less than 3, then they can't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree on the high tech toys, but we are 8th in the world in the number of soldiers. China alone outnumbers the US Military 3 to 1. North Korea outnumbers combined US and South Korean forces.
Yes, those high tech gadgets give us an important force multiplier and equalizer. But people can get stupid real fast and it would take us a while to train up and organize enough of an army to stay in a fight. Relying on technology is shortsighted.
The US should be doubling the size of our reserve and especially our national guard forces. With other nations closing the technology gap the US is increasingly vulnerable to the shear size of potential adversaries forces.
Good discussion. Although, I think that often overlooked in discussion of settlement patterns is the affects of the sexual revolution and more recently the Internet revolution. When you had a primary "bread winner" you could more easily cluster around that person's employment. But transportation that provides for faster travel times to more jobs enables better job options for everyone in the household.
Alternatively, with jobs that can be done remotely, then it does provide some flexibility and people rely on communication rather than transportation.
Personally I've been in the situation of moving to be closer to work, then having the job change, then moving again, then having the job change. Finally you settle down and it becomes harder and harder and more costly to move, but yet the job market doesn't stay the same for a lot of people in the economy. Time efficient transportation has to be available to fill in some of that gap to enable opportunity.
It is all well and good to lament the changes in settlement and development patterns from a time when most people relied on walking for their daily jobs, but the loss of job opportunities for households with multiple bread winners when you don't have a flexible and time efficient transportation system should be the main consideration in transportation planning. Efficient transportation is an enabler of the middle class.
First, powering wireless while driving is extremely expensive, as large portions of the road must be equipped with coils. This approach is also very resource hungry and therefore not applicable. Second, installing such coils for parking or on traffic lights is also expensive and complicated, as they have to be switched on and off 100s of times every day.
Yes, embedding cables in the roadway is not going to be viable for a variety of reasons and I don't need any pilot program to tell me that.
Third, cars are by concept very inefficient, as normals cars weight 1-2 t and are used to carry around 1.3 persons weighting 80-120 kg. 1:10 to 1:20 ratio. In addition, they require a lot of space. While this is not a problem in large areas of North America, it is a problem in densely populated areas, like Central and Western Europe, and even more in India, China, Japan, etc.
Inefficient in terms of what? Cost, energy, time? In terms of time cars are often twice or 2.5 times as time efficient as public transport for most people, even during peak commuting times. Just do some comparisons using Google Maps and you will get a good idea of the differences. Sure in dense metropolitan downtown areas, cars are going to be less time efficient because there is nowhere to park.
Cost wise public transport is going to win out from an individual perspective, but the difference is most likely because public transit systems are heavily subsidized, while car transportation is heavily taxed.
Energy wise, it depends on the efficiency of the vehicle in question, but yes on average mass transit is going to give you a fuel efficiency economy of scale type of effect.
The solution to present day transportation issues in metropolitan areas, where most people live, are public transport. Well implemented, it is faster than cars in traffic, they require less space than cars, and they require less energy. In addition we should promote bicycles, as they are more flexible and a good short range people mover. They also come with the bonus of better health. The individual traffic (with cars) is dead, as there is no individuality in traffic jams and when thousands of people all drive in the same direction every morning and back in the evening.
I think most is more like 50-50, because just outside the metropolitan urban core mass transit sucks it pretty hard. I think if there is an obvious under addressed and under utilized transportation system it is the two legs that people have under them. Yes, bikes are pretty good for short trips, but making sure we have complete streets and walking oriented development are key.
Instabilities in the labor market combined with rise of gender equality has meant that at least one person in a household is going to have a longer commute. Gone are the days when Dad got a job and the family moved close to where that job was in order to lessen the commute. Now the chances of Mom and Dad getting a job right down the street are much much less and cars are here to stay.
but I'd rather see more desalinization plants. The trouble is shade balls were probably pretty cheap. If you think California lacks the political will to tell their 1% to back off on the water usage try getting the tax raises through needed to support desalinization plants.
Taxes don't need to be raised, the water bill would go up slightly. Last I read it was something like $30 a month to the average residential water bill in order to add a desalination plant to the local supply mix. Costs of desalination have come down quite a bit.
Society pressures women in a variety of ways into abortions. Economic deprivation such that if a woman chose to have a child being in a poor economic situation she would be viewed as having made a bad choice and their children less chance of success. While welfare in many places would provide some bare minimum necessities in some states this is also socially looked down upon. Being considered "too young" is also something that is of great pressure on young people these days. And it seems the larger societal motivation is primarily commercially predatory in nature, because young people with children have less disposable income which can be tapped. Young people are fuel for the economy.
And then most disturbing of all we have a concerted effort by the abortion industry to turn every negative of abortion into a positive. Kill your unborn child snuffing out a lifetime of potential.... No worries you can donate their organs and feel better about it. You are a hero and that baby of yours, you know the one with all those partially developed organs... was never really alive.
In the US we have a tiered health care system where lower income people will often only be able to afford high deductible insurance plans that are unaffordable to actually use. Made slightly better these days because if you find out you are sick you can now upgrade into a better plan with lower deductibles next calendar year... but again the point is that even with Obamacare the rich and upper middle class are getting far better and far quicker medical care.
I think these videos and the apparent lack of ethical oversight in this practice of harvesting baby organs raises many important questions about what the "costs" are being reimbursed and how the incentives are victimizing women. At $30 to $100 per "specimen", with evidence that doctors are changing abortion procedures to obtain better quality specimens to increase their value, it is a completely fair question to take a look at who is getting money and what perverse effects money is having on the practice and incentivization of abortions.
Is the organ harvesting lowering the cost of abortions? Are women being told that the procedures are going to be less comfortable because the doctors are trying to obtain better specimens to get higher prices? The statements by the Planned Parenthood employee raise very very disturbing questions that raise ethical issues even beyond the ethics of abortion itself. Are abortion providers delaying appointments for abortions to give the fetus more time to develop their organs and provide better specimens?
I don't disagree that we often have to choose between the lesser of evils. That is part of being human. But many people seem to have forgotten that abortion is evil and are going to great lengths to say it isn't. I think even if you think the practice should continue and it is a lesser evil, then you shouldn't bury your head to the apparent ethical conflicts at every level of this.
So why should we not use dead baby/foetus body parts for research then?
Because killing babies, even or especially unborn babies is evil and anything that encourages or rewards people for killing babies is fruit of that ethically poisoned vine.
Being pro-choice doesn't mean you should look away from the evil of a mother killing her unborn child. Or the evil of a society which encourages mothers to kill their unborn children even if it is in order to help others. That is a perverse society with incentives to create unwanted pregnancies and prey upon the women who do. Instead we should all be focused and have the shared goal of reducing unwanted pregnancies. That is the right path to be on for our society.
To ignore that the benefits of this "research" are more likely bestowed on the rich and wealthy while the women pressured into these choices are often poor is malicious ignorance. Turning poor women into spare parts factories for the rich isn't pro choice... it is a dead end.
As a society we concluded that a person had a right to privacy in their own body and that because of that right to privacy they must even be allowed to choose to end an unwanted pregnancy. That is as far as we should go, otherwise all our rights are meaningless in a society where life itself is merely a commodity.
Abortion is a legal choice, but the fact that we as a society are forcing women into a position where they feel they need to make that choice needs to be stopped. And creating an industry around abortion that benefits financially from that choice undermines that.
For all the good that might come of research on aborted body parts, find another way or accept that there must be ethical limits to what we do to survive.
here's a counter counter example: It takes 1 hour for me to take the train into the city. It takes 2.5 hours to drive into the city. The cost of parking in the city for the day is double the price of the train ticket. But that is irrelevant, the time difference alone seals the deal for the train.
For the metropolitan urban core and people commuting into the urban core this is often the case. Yet it is the exact opposite outside the urban core where even during peak rush hour mass transit takes 2.5 times that of cars.
These days Google Maps makes it easy to compare different commutes and commuting times.
Mass transit is capital intensive, inflexible when it is along fixed and often incompatible rail networks and therefore often lags development and is geared towards... surprise... places with already a very high population density or places where such high density is planned for. Cars can get bogged down in the city where trains operating at full capacity can move a lot of people from point A to point B in a predictably consistent amount of time, but car transportation is much less capital intensive than mass transit in small cities, suburban and rural areas where paving a road (or even a dirt road can suffice) and buying cars are cheaper than trains and rail infrastructure and can be adapted to smaller scale development more quickly.
People can get almost religious in their beliefs about the benefits of either system, but there are benefits to both roads and rail applied to the right situation. With new automated car technology that could shift the balance of benefits back towards cars closer to the high density urban core and I think it will certainly help those smaller cities that were often left without good mass transit and rely on parking garages to get people into the city. But steel on rail trains in a well run system with dedicated rights of way are likely to win out in the bigger city downtown urban core areas because of higher capacity and reliable transit times.
Traffic studies/simulations have repeatedly shown that most traffic problems originate from a single car causing a chain reaction which amplifies. You would need a significant portion of the system automated to compensate for that. Either to avoid those problems in the first place or to compensate once the problem has occurred.
Those individual cars that cause the most problems are probably driven by people who are bad drivers, know they are bad drivers and are going to be more likely to want automated vehicles. So, you are potentially realizing improvements and efficiencies early on in the adoption cycle.
Because I am not a monster.
All of those lives saved don't mean a damn if we allow the harvesting of dead babies organs. That's not ignorance, that is a choice to not ignore.
You mean donating. They weren't selling and never have sold fetal tissue.
I'd rather see the practice of "donating" dead baby parts completely banned than argue about whether $100 dollars for a dead baby's liver is just reimbursement for the cost and whether the "research" being performed is worthy. Being pro choice doesn't mean I am going to look the other way.
It's painfully obvious, the property owner needs to get a lawyer that can pursue the drone owner for criminal misconduct.
Actually, everyone should take a chill. All the charges should be dropped and these people should just work it out. The neighborly thing to do would have been to tell the neighbor not to fly over his property before shooting it out of the sky or anything like that. I think some partial compensation would be appropriate as a civil matter negotiated between the neighbors or in civil small claims court. The only reason that this is being given any attention is because "drone" has become the catch all word for a bunch of techno paranoia.
In other words, if a stranger wanders onto your property, you shoot them and ask questions later.
If a stranger wanders onto your property carried along on the back of a foot long drone, then I think any reasonable person would assume an alien invasion by really tiny people (or ants) is in progress and do their patriotic duty and start shooting.
In the words of the wise: "How can you be expected to teach children to read if they can't fit inside the building?"
Depends on what you shoot at it with.
Shooting at the sky is bad. Falling bullets can kill.
And that was one of the charges. I think the facts of the particular case are important rather than the principles at stake. Of course he had an expectation of privacy and below a certain height (I think it is 500 feet or so) the other person was trespassing with the drone. Did shooting it out of the sky reasonably endanger anyone... How far from the property line was it? What direction did he shoot? This was a shotgun, so pellets generally have a shorter range than a rifle or hand gun. The fact that only the drone was damaged and no one was actually hurt should count for a lot.
It is no more "bullshit" than a bank being required to open a safety deposit box when a warrant is presented against whoever is leasing the safety deposit box. That search is happening on bank property, but the bank does not have legal standing to challenge the warrant.
We do NOT need internet-enabled corporations running rampant over the law as if they had no legal responsibilities nor limitations on the scope on what they're allowed to do. There are often CLEAR examples of similar situations with physical property, but the weasels in the "new" digital world would like to claim that they're above those precedents.
When I upload pictures or make a post on Facebook I am conveying Facebook certain rights to that content through their terms of service and that is what should give them standing. Facebook isn't merely holding some information for me like a storage provider or "safety deposit box". They are creating information about their transactions with me. They are hosting content which I have conveyed some ownership rights to. These are business records owned in some way by the business. Companies don't have standing to represent me (unless I have given them permission to do so through their terms of service which should be updated to convey the right to do so in this type of situation), but they should and must have standing to represent themselves and their own interests in protecting their data from unlawful searches.
If I write about someone in my journal. Say a transaction log. And put it in a locked cabinet in my home. Then that is my information and not owned by the person I am writing about. If the government then wants my journal and wants me to provide the key, then I certainly have standing to challenge a government demand for the key to the cabinet where my journal is held.
Facebook is the same. They are the ones keeping the journal, the logs, the databases. I don't have a key to Facebook's server room or a colocated server in their facility. There is no analogy to a bank's safety deposit box that makes sense or applies here.
I used to have fresh dulse from time to time... I liked it. And will occasionally buy some when I find it in the grocery store. I never thought to fry it up like bacon. Perhaps frying something that is good for you is a bit counterproductive?
Nice catch! The article: Are we headed for a new ice age? By Phil Plait | June 17, 2011
Unless Phil Plait is a time traveler then he didn't address this new model's predictions 4 years ago.
While I generally agree, what happens when the only jobs left are those that require creativity or critical thinking. There's a lot of people out there who can't do anything more complicated than repeating a few simple tasks over and over again. These jobs are going to be replace by robots. When the only jobs left are jobs that require high levels of thought, there's going to be a lot of people who simply can't hold down a job. I don't think that changing the way we educate people or making education free or anything else is going to be able to change the fact that some people don't have the cognitive ability to do the high level jobs that robots won't be able to do.
Also, realistically there are limited jobs for creative and critical thinking and most of those aren't really necessary. Food, Shelter, Clean Water, Transportation, Energy are the really critical things that people need on a day to day basis. And those things can be produced more efficiently in more industrialized and automated ways. Creative and critical thinking are overrated as useful skills. Especially when you have a thousands of people that have those skills applying for one actual job.
That leaves the rest of us pattering about on blogs and making babies, drinking which is all well and good until someone decides they aren't getting enough or are pissed off that the person who cheated to be .01% better than them has 50% or 99% more than them and the system is based on a bunch of meritocratic BS lies.
Adobe should provide/sell tools that will enable people to convert their Flash content into the equivalent standards based browser supported formats. If they make it easy they will have created an essential web development tool in the process. If they stick with Flash they are just milking the dead horse.
Choose A)Iran - Not Assad's Syria (which is as bad or worse than ISIS) And C) Recognize Kurdistan And D) De facto or by international agreement (ya right) partition both Iraq and Syria to create a new non-ISIS dominate Sunni state as reward for Sunnis to help overthrow ISIS.
is reformed in the House bill, which does away with it over six months and instead gives phone companies the responsibility of maintaining phone records that the government can search." Obama criticized the Senate for not acting on that legislation, saying they have necessitated a renewal of the Patriot Act provisions.
You are right, as it ended up being the House Patriot Act extension in the name of the USA Freedom Act was not a real reform. Requiring a warrant to gain access to the information was the real issue.
Although if they simply required the companies to retain the data for a period of time AND required the government to get a constitutionally valid search warrant to access particular records directly related to a terrorism case then that would be the reform we need. The companies have these records anyway, it is the search warrant part that is what we need.
In secret... and illegally! There is a big difference between walking up to the front door and demanding cooperation from a business and covertly gaining access to those records. It is a several order of magnitude difference in effective ability to collect information about people
Having fourth amendment protections honored and respected means that the police can't just knock down the door of your business to search your records because of the remote possibility that someone that you do business with could be a terrorist.
Having a Patriot Act provision that says the the government doesn't need a constitutionally valid warrant to get business records is far far different than covertly collecting information via hacking or by purchasing the information. To have the freedom to choose companies that will honor their privacy agreements is itself an important step. To have the recourse to sue those companies when they voluntarily sell the government your private information in violation of your privacy agreement is important.
What is at stake is the government being able to walk into a company with a secret order demanding they hand over all the records the government wants without a constitutionally valid warrant. Having a law to point to that says companies can be forced to cooperate makes a big difference to the ease at which the government can collect mega data and conduct unconstitutional drag net surveillance.
Billions and billions of records about everyone's communications with which you can monitor their movements, their political affiliations and activism, monitor all their recorded financial transactions and purchases, determine their race, infer their sexual activity, and otherwise find exploitable personal weaknesses, affinities and affiliations en masse.
Oh and then put that in a giant database which is exploitable by America's adversaries.
Yes, this matters. Let the Patriot Act expire!
My town has two providers.
But my point is that there isn't enough competition now, so any consolidation of top competitors should be blocked at least until there is a healthy free market.
Look at the cable market city by city, town by town... If there are currently fewer than 3 options for services in any areas they are proposing to merge or if their merger would drop the competition to less than 3, then they can't do it.
It isn't going to be good for anyone because the answer is No, just No.