The beams radiate a prodigious amount of energy into the walls of the beampipe (even in the absence of collisions! Search on synchrotron radiation.). That energy is then absorbed by everything surrounding the beampipe, in particular, into the magnets. That heat has to be continually extracted to keep the magnets below the superconducting threshold.
I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street.
I don't mean to sound like I'm ripping on you, but QM isn't really that fundamentally "weird" or difficult to understand, or "odd" at this point in history; it's not any more complicated to wrap your brain around than classical mechanics, or E&M, or automobile maintenance. The "romance" that QM (like Relativity) is "hard" is, I think, a remnant of early popularizations of cutting edge research in the 1920s and 1930s, when a coherent theoretical framework was under construction for the first time, and physicists didn't really know how far down the rabbit hole went. Popularizers were desperately flailing around, looking for analogies that a much more rural and less technically sophisticated public could understand, and to whom they had trouble relating (the "they're all bumpkins" fallacy). We physicists were pretty inept at doing so then, and have been particularly inept at eradicating those early and incorrectly popularized notions from our public interactions to this day.
Today, we should know better... most of QM is robust and mature enough that it's an engineering discipline, for cripes sake. Hopefully, the popularizations will catch up with the reality at some point, and we won't keep subjecting generations to the "QM is so weird you can't possibly understand it unless you're a genius" meme.
At roughly $1000.00 per leter of Liquid He, Liquid Nitrogin is much cheaper.
You've got the right idea, but your numbers are a bit out of whack... LN2 is about $0.10/L in large quantity, while LHe is about $3-20/L, with large variation in price around the world (due to constrained supply and large transportation and energy costs). US He is relatively cheap, as we have a few of the small number of high quality sources. In Europe, He is very much more expensive, as they don't have any local, high quality sources. A recent compilation of costs is available here: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/NadyaDillon.shtml
Helium is so expensive, because it is very entery intensive to liquify, and it isn't commercially extracted from the atmosphere like nitrogen... there just isn't enough of it to be commercially viable. Instead, it is generally found in pockets underground and "mined". The helium originates as alpha particles in the decay of radioisotopes (mostly Uranium and Thorium), and permeates through the crust. It gets trapped in high pressure gas pockets by impermeable rocks, in the same types of geology that trap natural gas, and is extracted for commercial scale from those pockets. There are only a few global sources where the concentrations of helium are high enough to extract economically.
I se no evidence of "private road" signs, nor do I see "no trespassing" signs. The house is certainly not visible from the main street, and it's not really visible where the "gravel" portion of the driveway becomes "concrete", which was supposed to be some big tipoff.
I fail to be impressed... the Streetview driver drove down a named road marked on his map, which wasn't posted as private, wasn't obviously private, and ended up having to find a place to turn around at the end... which just happened to be in the driveway of these homeowners. So what? As a homeowner myself, I hardly find this outrageous... people turn around in my driveway all the time. And although Streetview has missed my house by a block, I'm not going to be outraged when they finally come back.
Ummm... a record of each Representative's position WAS kept. Passage was by Unanimous Consent, which meant ALL members voted in favor. The rules of both the House and the Senate allow any member of the body to object to vote by unanimous consent, requiring a vote with records of "yeas and nays". No one did... hence, you can conclude that your Congresspeople were not opposed.
A Senator may request unanimous consent on the floor to set aside a specified rule of procedure so as to expedite proceedings. If no Senator objects, the Senate permits the action, but if any one Senator objects, the request is rejected.
Furthermore, Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution sets specific rules for requiring roll call votes:
... and the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.
That requires no more than 20 votes in the Senate, and as few as 11. That's a trivially low bar... clearly, not that many Senators thought this was a bad idea.
If you read between the lines, and know anything about SELinux (also orginating inside the NSA), you come away with the impression that this is SELinux ported to OpenSolaris. Since the code will be as open as the rest of the OpenSolaris code, it doesn't sound like that big a deal to me...
What you say is true... however, there are many caveats, with much well settled case law. For instance:
Treaty provisions that violate the U.S. Constitution are not enforceable in the United States.
Some treaties are not enforceable without Congressional passage of enabling legislation. These are the so-called "non-self executing" treaties. Self executing treaties have to be clear that they are, in fact, self executing. See the recent Medellin case from the Supreme Court, and references therein, for discussion of the principle and precedents.
Ratifying a treaty doesn't necessarily give Congress the power to pass legislation to enforce that treaty, if it wouldn't have had the power to pass that legislation in its absence. Basically, the Senate can't get in through the back door what the Constitution wouldn't let in through the front. The Senate could certainly ratify a treaty requiring the United States to prevent publication of religious criticism, or requiring the nation's Chief Executive to be no older than 25, or to completely ban the sale of green socks in Idaho. But those treaty wouldn't be judicially enforceable in any way, effectively null and void.
No treaty (self executing or otherwise) is judicially enforceable in the United States if the Constitution does not delegate power to hear the case to the Federal Courts in the first place, or if the topics are purely political (the so called "non justiciable" issues), or if Congress has restricted or eliminated Federal Court jurisdiction over the relevant issue.
Constitutional amendments, later treaties, or even later laws can overrule the enforcement provisions of earlier treaties.
The President and the Courts can't enforce a non-self executing treaty without Congressional authorization to do so, even if they really, really want to.
The other parties to the treaty may still expect that the United States lives up to treaties it has ratified, even if the government never had the grant of power to enforce treaty obligations in the first place. But the Congress can't, through a treaty, give the Federal Government any power that "We the People" have not already granted to it in the Constitution.
The WTO treaty at issue here was explicitly written to be non-self executing, was agreed by all parties to be non-self executing, provides no enforcement mechanism, and hence requires Congress to pass laws to enforce the provisions, as they've done in many cases. In some cases, Congress has chosen not to do so, or has explicitly chosen to pass laws contrary to treaty obligations. There isn't a thing that this or any other Administration can do to enforce the WTO ruling in the cases mentioned in the article... the President is required to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed", and the Law says what it says.
Actually, this has next to nothing to do with this or any Administration unilaterally ignoring WTO rulings. The issues raised in the article have to do with laws passed by the Congress of the United States. Without the Congress of the United States repealing those laws, the current (or indeed, any future) Administration has no power to do anything about these WTO rulings.
I fail to understand the outrage in this case. Yes, the OOXML specification sucks and is thoroughly umimplementable. And Microsoft is evil. Check. But these are rules for how National Bodies must proceed to change their votes. We're not talking about some uneducated John Doe here trying to punch a butterfly ballot... we're talking about institutional groups like ANSI, BSI, JISC, and Standards Australia. If those groups, with their staffs and lawyers, can't figure out how to change their vote, and to use ISO procedural rules to make sure their votes are properly counted, perhaps they shouldn't be able to change their votes. I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly rocket science...
how long before the home gym captures energy for your home.
Never:-)
Humans can not produce large amounts of sustained output power, even when exercising. A "healthy human" can probably push out 300W for about 20 minutes before they collapse from exhaustion. Even if you can convert all of that to electricity and store it for later use at something like 50% efficiency (which would be staggeringly high), you're only talking about 0.05kWh of usable energy. You could do much better if you were willing to exercise at much lower intensity for much much longer periods of time (but who would do that just to light a minuscule handful of light bulbs). But you're really not going to ever get usable amounts of power out of your daily exercise routine.
The Senate tries impeachment proceedings, but the House has to vote Articles of Impeachment (like a grand jury) first... the Senate can't impeach anyone by itself.
Does that not mean that passing a law to validate such violations, even after the fact, is still a violation of the 4th amendment?
Assuming this is a 4th Amendment Violation (there are lots of tricky issues, and anyway, that's not the authority these suits were brought under, so it's not really relevant to the fate of these suits), the right question is "What's the remedy for the people whose rights were violated?" The Courts can fashion a remedy that undoes the violation (typically "evidence suppression": forbidding the government from using the information it illegally obtained in any criminal case against you), but absent statutory authority, a court can't fashion punitive responses. If there is no law that says "you can sue telecoms for complicity and get money damages", then you don't have the option of suing for money damages. Congress can't validate violations, per se, but they can withdraw or eliminate statutory languages allowing civil suits. Without that, these suits dry up overnight, with no recourse short of Congress reinstating the old language in yet another new law.
Meaning that the this little retroactive immunity provision is a stupid political statement.
No, it isn't; as a number of people have noted, the "ex post facto" restriction does not apply in this case. It only applies when some activity is made criminally illegal that wasn't, or penalties are increased after a defendant committed a crime... in the latter case, the defendant must be sentenced under the earlier, more lenient statute. It doesn't forbid lowering penalties (if a sentence exceeds the new, lower threshold, your sentence would be reduced), or to eliminating crimes (you would be freed if a crime you were convicted for was wiped off the books), or to civil cases of any kind.
This change to FISA would have the very real effect of barring any and all current and future suits for these particular activities (depending on the language of the act, of course), unless Congress later chooses to explicitly undo all these changes. The lawsuits being discussed here were brought under provisions of federal law that permit private actors to sue other private actors for being complicit with the government's violation of those laws (and I believe there are a bunch of caveats like "knowingly violated" and such that would have to be proven by the plaintiffs, but I don't know the details for sure). Congress can, if it so chooses, eliminate the language that allows these suits to proceed, or explicitly forbid these suits from proceeding. If the plaintiffs don't have statutory authority to sue, that's the ballgame, and the suits are over (well, it will drag on for a few weeks as the motions to dismiss are filed and responded to and ruled on, but basically the clock will run out quickly).
Contrary to popular belief in our litigious society, you really can't just sue anyone for anything you want and get to a trial, even if what you allege the defendant did was illegal... there has to be justiciable issue, there has to be some sort of active conflict, you have to have standing and statutory authority to bring the case, etc. etc. etc. With clear language from Congress to the contrary, there's not much a court could do to sustain a suit brought under the updated FISA statute.
Many types of laws can be made retroactive, but not all. The U.S. Constitution says (Article I, Section 9)
No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed. This has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to apply "only to penal and criminal legislation and not to civil laws that affect private rights adversely." (see next link) This prevents criminalizing activities that were not criminal when they occurred, or increasing the penalty after commission of the crime, or getting in through the back door by calling a change in punishment a change in "procedure". (Cornell has a good discussion here and here in their annotated Constitution).
But there isn't a restrictions against reducing or eliminating liability for criminal activity after the fact. For instance, if a criminal defendant was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death, and the Congress subsequently outlaws capital punishment, the death sentence is reduced in accordance with the new law. If they change their mind and reinstate the death penalty, the hypothetical criminal defendant is not eligible for an increase in his sentence. In particular, it is well established that Congress can pass laws in gray areas to clearly specify that something isn't criminal, even after convictions based on the old law, or to eliminate even very broad classes of liability after the commission of the offending action.
In this case, there is a claim of criminal activity that the Justice Department refuses to prosecute because it does not believe it was illegal. The plaintiffs have chosen to pursue civil cases on a theory of civil liability for those actions, based on Federal law. Congress may choose clarify (or eliminate, depending on your point of view) the law to state that the given behavior was not a crime. In this case, it clearly does not run afoul of Congressional power to do so. If that happens, there is no longer even a colorable argument that the plaintiffs have been been harmed, so the cases will be dismissed.
If you had said "Applied Technology and product research should be cut entirely", I'd agree with you. But the private sector already pays the vast majority of that. Further, private industry already pays for a 2/3 majority of all R&D research in the United States: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guitotal.htm As you can see from the graphs, that fraction has been increasing every year, (in real dollar terms!) since the early 1970s. Clearly, private industry DOES see many areas where funding large R&D programs brings it a competitive advantage.
But this does not in any way support the contention that government funded "scientific research" should be cut entirely. There are many areas of research whose outcomes are so uncertain that it doesn't make any sense for private enterprise to finance them, but where the net economic and social benefits are very long term and very positive. Consider research on the germ theory or disease, or the discovery of the electron. Together, those fields for the bedrock of all modern economies. Space exploration and fusion power research are two modern examples where the fundamental research could not possibly be supported directly by private enterprise without governmental assistance. There are other areas related specifically to government responsibilities (defense, law enforcement, environmental stewardship, etc.) where I would expect the government to provide funding. Finally, there are a number of research areas with a large societal benefit, but little to no profit or market advantage, where private actors shouldn't be expected to fill. The modern archetype is vaccine research.
I'm as big a fan of the free market and constitutional restrictions on government action as the next guy, but I still accept that there are areas that there are things, like government funding of fundamental research, that would not be supported but for government intervention.
Last time i was in NY (pre 2001, though), it was "US citizens and greencard holders first, europeans last".
Watch where you're throwing those stones, buddy:-)
I travel to Europe regularly on business. At EVERY European airport I've been too, there's an "EU passport holders" line (and Switzerland, usually) and an "everyone else" line.
He found several glaring errors and thus retracted the paper. He probably would have done this a long time ago, but had simply forgotten about it.
I think that's so highly unlikely I can't put words to it. Very VERY few papers are ever retracted, in any field, by their authors. Most errors in papers, even glaring errors, are of no consequence, because almost no papers are of any consequence (including most of my own:-) And MOST papers have errors in them... that's just what happens when fallible human beings try to push back the boundaries of human knowledge. But it doesn't matter, because most errors of consequence are pointed out and corrected in later papers, either by the original author or others. Retraction is so EXCEEDINGLY rare that this retraction has attracted attention! He's doing this because he doesn't like that he's being quoted by creationist nutjobs to support their unscientific positions, and he wants to stick it to 'em; he would never have retracted otherwise. It's a completely self-serving, hypocritical and irrational action... it certainly has nothing to do with the content or progress of evolution as science, and it certainly won't dissuade the creationists.
Don't forget motion paths in Presenter! A feature that used to be available in OOo1.1, but was lost in OOo2... and despite years and YEARS of complaints from users, major and minor, still hasn't made a comeback. This missing feature alone makes OOo a very very tough sell to my colleagues.
I live in the Eastern US, and someone in Ireland missed a conference call with us because everyone on both sides of the Atlantic thought that Ireland was always 5 hours ahead
Even before this change, there was a difference in the start dates of Daylight Saving and Summer Time across the Atlantic; for the last decade, it was a one week difference at the start. Before then, all hell broke loose across Europe, as different countries started and ended at different times. Most of the world outside Europe and North America doesn't bother with EVER changing their clocks, but those in the Southern Hemisphere that DO observe Daylight Saving do so roughly 180 days out of phase with the Northern Hemisphere. The time deltas between two points on the globe can differ by many hours (up to three!) throughout the year due to DST changes. Dealing with an international scientific collaboration as I do sensitizes you to the insanity of DST rather rapidly:-)
You want to sell a PS3 game? Well, you'd better hire some bloody good reverse engineers and start building your own blu-ray plant.
I didn't argue that it would be "cheap" or "easy"... I only argued that the cost structure isn't about "entitlement" but rather "mutually beneficial business arrangements". If building that blue-ray plant was a beneficial business arrangement for the developer, it would be built. The fact that it isn't, because the cost is high, doesn't weaken the argument.
Microsoft selling the odd copy of windows and visual studio to PC developers isn't really in the same league as getting 7 dollars per boxed copy.
Again, I disagree... Microsoft and the developer community have arrived at mutually beneficial level of costs and benefits here. If Microsoft charged developers much more than they do, then some of the marginal development houses might not develop. If they charged less, then Microsoft would make less. They've arrived at a mutually beneficial business arrangement. I didn't say it was identical or even directly comparable to the console arrangements... I said it was a more apt analogy to compare Microsoft and the console manufacturers than to compare Dell and the console manufacturers.
I don't think that the designers of the console should be entitle to anything.
They're not "entitled"... the companies have simply established a mutually beneficial business arrangement that you're willing to pay for when you buy a game. Nintendo sinks money into developing a console, in the interests of making money. The software company sinks money into developing a game title, in the interests of making money. The software company pays Nintendo to license the Wii name and logos for marketing and sales purposes (you know, so they can say the game is for the Wii), and to get Nintendo's technical assistance and expertise. That serves the software house's interest, as it allows them to sell more games, and hence make more money. It also serves Nintendo's interests, as they also make more money. You're free to go ahead on your own and develop and market a console game without the help of the console manufacturer... but you aren't going to make a whole lot of money without their assistance and logos. Really, how many people are going to spend money to buy a game for a console when the box doesn't say it's for that console? Bloody few....
I don't see Dell getting a cut when PC games are sold.
In this instance, there's no mutually beneficial business arrangement that would dictate that. The correct comparison would to Microsoft getting a cut for each PC game sold. And they DO get a cut (of a kind... I don't know if they get an actual slice of money per box), in that they license their Windows logos and tools to developers in another kind of mutually beneficial business arrangement.
That's not what they're claiming at all. From their brief, starting bottom of page 1:
In light of [the Government's] invocation of the state secrets privilege, Plaintiffs will not have access to the evidence necessary to establish standing, and, just as important, AT&T will be prevented from tendering any evidence that would disprove it. Firmly established precedent mandates that a case must be dismissed whenever it becomes clear that the state secrets privilege will prevent a plaintiff from proving a necessary element of his case or a defendant from defending itself fully on an issue. In cases such as this one, where there is "no hope of a complete record and adversarial development of the issue," the only proper result is to dismiss the complaint.
where the quotes are from previous cases.
Contrary to the blog's claims, AT&T is NOT saying that national security prevents them from litigating... they are saying that the Government's actions prevent both the plaintiffs AND themselves from litigating: the plaintiffs can't show they have standing without access to information AT&T doesn't have and hence can't produce, and AT&T can't obtain material is needs to defend itself. The Government, not AT&T, has claimed the state secret privilege. It's the same result perhaps, but for a very different set of reasons than the blog post claims. I'm not going to take a position on the state secrets privilege here, but a full debate on the issue needs to correctly state the facts.
Those things are in quotes because they are in fact quotes. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if I'm interpreting the footnotes correctly, but they appear to be a direct quotation as referenced in Footnote 2 of the AT&T brief: Kasza v. Browner, 133 F.3d 1159, 1166 (9th Cir. 1998).
According to salary.com, the median income for a "high school teacher" in the United States is currently either $49839 or $69120 if you include benefits. The Census Bureau reports that in 2005, the median household income (which includes more or less the same set of benefits quoted by salary.com) was $46,326. Do we pay teachers enough? I don't know the answer to that question... but the median teacher is clearly not earning a "pittance" for their time. Perhaps it is a pittance compared to what they might be earning in the private sector, but I don't have enough information to make a decision either way....
Slashdot Mirror
The beams radiate a prodigious amount of energy into the walls of the beampipe (even in the absence of collisions! Search on synchrotron radiation.). That energy is then absorbed by everything surrounding the beampipe, in particular, into the magnets. That heat has to be continually extracted to keep the magnets below the superconducting threshold.
I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street.
I don't mean to sound like I'm ripping on you, but QM isn't really that fundamentally "weird" or difficult to understand, or "odd" at this point in history; it's not any more complicated to wrap your brain around than classical mechanics, or E&M, or automobile maintenance. The "romance" that QM (like Relativity) is "hard" is, I think, a remnant of early popularizations of cutting edge research in the 1920s and 1930s, when a coherent theoretical framework was under construction for the first time, and physicists didn't really know how far down the rabbit hole went. Popularizers were desperately flailing around, looking for analogies that a much more rural and less technically sophisticated public could understand, and to whom they had trouble relating (the "they're all bumpkins" fallacy). We physicists were pretty inept at doing so then, and have been particularly inept at eradicating those early and incorrectly popularized notions from our public interactions to this day.
Today, we should know better ... most of QM is robust and mature enough that it's an engineering discipline, for cripes sake. Hopefully, the popularizations will catch up with the reality at some point, and we won't keep subjecting generations to the "QM is so weird you can't possibly understand it unless you're a genius" meme.
The interesting question, IMHO, is: Was this particle predicted by anybody else's research?
Yes. It's called the standard model. It's not surprising that it was found ... it would have been more surprising if it hadn't been found eventually.
You've got the right idea, but your numbers are a bit out of whack
Helium is so expensive, because it is very entery intensive to liquify, and it isn't commercially extracted from the atmosphere like nitrogen
From the fine article:
... the Streetview driver drove down a named road marked on his map, which wasn't posted as private, wasn't obviously private, and ended up having to find a place to turn around at the end ... which just happened to be in the driveway of these homeowners. So what? As a homeowner myself, I hardly find this outrageous ... people turn around in my driveway all the time. And although Streetview has missed my house by a block, I'm not going to be outraged when they finally come back.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0407081google2.html
I se no evidence of "private road" signs, nor do I see "no trespassing" signs. The house is certainly not visible from the main street, and it's not really visible where the "gravel" portion of the driveway becomes "concrete", which was supposed to be some big tipoff.
I fail to be impressed
For instance, in the Senate:
Furthermore, Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution sets specific rules for requiring roll call votes:
That requires no more than 20 votes in the Senate, and as few as 11. That's a trivially low bar
If you read between the lines, and know anything about SELinux (also orginating inside the NSA), you come away with the impression that this is SELinux ported to OpenSolaris. Since the code will be as open as the rest of the OpenSolaris code, it doesn't sound like that big a deal to me ...
The other parties to the treaty may still expect that the United States lives up to treaties it has ratified, even if the government never had the grant of power to enforce treaty obligations in the first place. But the Congress can't, through a treaty, give the Federal Government any power that "We the People" have not already granted to it in the Constitution.
The WTO treaty at issue here was explicitly written to be non-self executing, was agreed by all parties to be non-self executing, provides no enforcement mechanism, and hence requires Congress to pass laws to enforce the provisions, as they've done in many cases. In some cases, Congress has chosen not to do so, or has explicitly chosen to pass laws contrary to treaty obligations. There isn't a thing that this or any other Administration can do to enforce the WTO ruling in the cases mentioned in the article
Actually, this has next to nothing to do with this or any Administration unilaterally ignoring WTO rulings. The issues raised in the article have to do with laws passed by the Congress of the United States. Without the Congress of the United States repealing those laws, the current (or indeed, any future) Administration has no power to do anything about these WTO rulings.
I fail to understand the outrage in this case. Yes, the OOXML specification sucks and is thoroughly umimplementable. And Microsoft is evil. Check. But these are rules for how National Bodies must proceed to change their votes. We're not talking about some uneducated John Doe here trying to punch a butterfly ballot ... we're talking about institutional groups like ANSI, BSI, JISC, and Standards Australia. If those groups, with their staffs and lawyers, can't figure out how to change their vote, and to use ISO procedural rules to make sure their votes are properly counted, perhaps they shouldn't be able to change their votes. I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly rocket science...
how long before the home gym captures energy for your home.
:-)
Never
Humans can not produce large amounts of sustained output power, even when exercising. A "healthy human" can probably push out 300W for about 20 minutes before they collapse from exhaustion. Even if you can convert all of that to electricity and store it for later use at something like 50% efficiency (which would be staggeringly high), you're only talking about 0.05kWh of usable energy. You could do much better if you were willing to exercise at much lower intensity for much much longer periods of time (but who would do that just to light a minuscule handful of light bulbs). But you're really not going to ever get usable amounts of power out of your daily exercise routine.
The Senate tries impeachment proceedings, but the House has to vote Articles of Impeachment (like a grand jury) first ... the Senate can't impeach anyone by itself.
Does that not mean that passing a law to validate such violations, even after the fact, is still a violation of the 4th amendment?
Assuming this is a 4th Amendment Violation (there are lots of tricky issues, and anyway, that's not the authority these suits were brought under, so it's not really relevant to the fate of these suits), the right question is "What's the remedy for the people whose rights were violated?" The Courts can fashion a remedy that undoes the violation (typically "evidence suppression": forbidding the government from using the information it illegally obtained in any criminal case against you), but absent statutory authority, a court can't fashion punitive responses. If there is no law that says "you can sue telecoms for complicity and get money damages", then you don't have the option of suing for money damages. Congress can't validate violations, per se, but they can withdraw or eliminate statutory languages allowing civil suits. Without that, these suits dry up overnight, with no recourse short of Congress reinstating the old language in yet another new law.
Meaning that the this little retroactive immunity provision is a stupid political statement.
... in the latter case, the defendant must be sentenced under the earlier, more lenient statute. It doesn't forbid lowering penalties (if a sentence exceeds the new, lower threshold, your sentence would be reduced), or to eliminating crimes (you would be freed if a crime you were convicted for was wiped off the books), or to civil cases of any kind.
... there has to be justiciable issue, there has to be some sort of active conflict, you have to have standing and statutory authority to bring the case, etc. etc. etc. With clear language from Congress to the contrary, there's not much a court could do to sustain a suit brought under the updated FISA statute.
No, it isn't; as a number of people have noted, the "ex post facto" restriction does not apply in this case. It only applies when some activity is made criminally illegal that wasn't, or penalties are increased after a defendant committed a crime
This change to FISA would have the very real effect of barring any and all current and future suits for these particular activities (depending on the language of the act, of course), unless Congress later chooses to explicitly undo all these changes. The lawsuits being discussed here were brought under provisions of federal law that permit private actors to sue other private actors for being complicit with the government's violation of those laws (and I believe there are a bunch of caveats like "knowingly violated" and such that would have to be proven by the plaintiffs, but I don't know the details for sure). Congress can, if it so chooses, eliminate the language that allows these suits to proceed, or explicitly forbid these suits from proceeding. If the plaintiffs don't have statutory authority to sue, that's the ballgame, and the suits are over (well, it will drag on for a few weeks as the motions to dismiss are filed and responded to and ruled on, but basically the clock will run out quickly).
Contrary to popular belief in our litigious society, you really can't just sue anyone for anything you want and get to a trial, even if what you allege the defendant did was illegal
But there isn't a restrictions against reducing or eliminating liability for criminal activity after the fact. For instance, if a criminal defendant was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death, and the Congress subsequently outlaws capital punishment, the death sentence is reduced in accordance with the new law. If they change their mind and reinstate the death penalty, the hypothetical criminal defendant is not eligible for an increase in his sentence. In particular, it is well established that Congress can pass laws in gray areas to clearly specify that something isn't criminal, even after convictions based on the old law, or to eliminate even very broad classes of liability after the commission of the offending action.
In this case, there is a claim of criminal activity that the Justice Department refuses to prosecute because it does not believe it was illegal. The plaintiffs have chosen to pursue civil cases on a theory of civil liability for those actions, based on Federal law. Congress may choose clarify (or eliminate, depending on your point of view) the law to state that the given behavior was not a crime. In this case, it clearly does not run afoul of Congressional power to do so. If that happens, there is no longer even a colorable argument that the plaintiffs have been been harmed, so the cases will be dismissed.
If you had said "Applied Technology and product research should be cut entirely", I'd agree with you. But the private sector already pays the vast majority of that. Further, private industry already pays for a 2/3 majority of all R&D research in the United States: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guitotal.htm As you can see from the graphs, that fraction has been increasing every year, (in real dollar terms!) since the early 1970s. Clearly, private industry DOES see many areas where funding large R&D programs brings it a competitive advantage.
But this does not in any way support the contention that government funded "scientific research" should be cut entirely. There are many areas of research whose outcomes are so uncertain that it doesn't make any sense for private enterprise to finance them, but where the net economic and social benefits are very long term and very positive. Consider research on the germ theory or disease, or the discovery of the electron. Together, those fields for the bedrock of all modern economies. Space exploration and fusion power research are two modern examples where the fundamental research could not possibly be supported directly by private enterprise without governmental assistance. There are other areas related specifically to government responsibilities (defense, law enforcement, environmental stewardship, etc.) where I would expect the government to provide funding. Finally, there are a number of research areas with a large societal benefit, but little to no profit or market advantage, where private actors shouldn't be expected to fill. The modern archetype is vaccine research.
I'm as big a fan of the free market and constitutional restrictions on government action as the next guy, but I still accept that there are areas that there are things, like government funding of fundamental research, that would not be supported but for government intervention.
Last time i was in NY (pre 2001, though), it was "US citizens and greencard holders first, europeans last".
Watch where you're throwing those stones, buddy :-)
I travel to Europe regularly on business. At EVERY European airport I've been too, there's an "EU passport holders" line (and Switzerland, usually) and an "everyone else" line.
He found several glaring errors and thus retracted the paper. He probably would have done this a long time ago, but had simply forgotten about it.
I think that's so highly unlikely I can't put words to it. Very VERY few papers are ever retracted, in any field, by their authors. Most errors in papers, even glaring errors, are of no consequence, because almost no papers are of any consequence (including most of my own :-) And MOST papers have errors in them ... that's just what happens when fallible human beings try to push back the boundaries of human knowledge. But it doesn't matter, because most errors of consequence are pointed out and corrected in later papers, either by the original author or others. Retraction is so EXCEEDINGLY rare that this retraction has attracted attention! He's doing this because he doesn't like that he's being quoted by creationist nutjobs to support their unscientific positions, and he wants to stick it to 'em; he would never have retracted otherwise. It's a completely self-serving, hypocritical and irrational action ... it certainly has nothing to do with the content or progress of evolution as science, and it certainly won't dissuade the creationists.
Don't forget motion paths in Presenter! A feature that used to be available in OOo1.1, but was lost in OOo2 ... and despite years and YEARS of complaints from users, major and minor, still hasn't made a comeback. This missing feature alone makes OOo a very very tough sell to my colleagues.
Even before this change, there was a difference in the start dates of Daylight Saving and Summer Time across the Atlantic; for the last decade, it was a one week difference at the start. Before then, all hell broke loose across Europe, as different countries started and ended at different times. Most of the world outside Europe and North America doesn't bother with EVER changing their clocks, but those in the Southern Hemisphere that DO observe Daylight Saving do so roughly 180 days out of phase with the Northern Hemisphere. The time deltas between two points on the globe can differ by many hours (up to three!) throughout the year due to DST changes. Dealing with an international scientific collaboration as I do sensitizes you to the insanity of DST rather rapidly :-)
You want to sell a PS3 game? Well, you'd better hire some bloody good reverse engineers and start building your own blu-ray plant.
I didn't argue that it would be "cheap" or "easy" ... I only argued that the cost structure isn't about "entitlement" but rather "mutually beneficial business arrangements". If building that blue-ray plant was a beneficial business arrangement for the developer, it would be built. The fact that it isn't, because the cost is high, doesn't weaken the argument.
Microsoft selling the odd copy of windows and visual studio to PC developers isn't really in the same league as getting 7 dollars per boxed copy.
Again, I disagree ... Microsoft and the developer community have arrived at mutually beneficial level of costs and benefits here. If Microsoft charged developers much more than they do, then some of the marginal development houses might not develop. If they charged less, then Microsoft would make less. They've arrived at a mutually beneficial business arrangement. I didn't say it was identical or even directly comparable to the console arrangements ... I said it was a more apt analogy to compare Microsoft and the console manufacturers than to compare Dell and the console manufacturers.
I don't think that the designers of the console should be entitle to anything.
They're not "entitled" ... the companies have simply established a mutually beneficial business arrangement that you're willing to pay for when you buy a game. Nintendo sinks money into developing a console, in the interests of making money. The software company sinks money into developing a game title, in the interests of making money. The software company pays Nintendo to license the Wii name and logos for marketing and sales purposes (you know, so they can say the game is for the Wii), and to get Nintendo's technical assistance and expertise. That serves the software house's interest, as it allows them to sell more games, and hence make more money. It also serves Nintendo's interests, as they also make more money. You're free to go ahead on your own and develop and market a console game without the help of the console manufacturer ... but you aren't going to make a whole lot of money without their assistance and logos. Really, how many people are going to spend money to buy a game for a console when the box doesn't say it's for that console? Bloody few....
I don't see Dell getting a cut when PC games are sold.
In this instance, there's no mutually beneficial business arrangement that would dictate that. The correct comparison would to Microsoft getting a cut for each PC game sold. And they DO get a cut (of a kind ... I don't know if they get an actual slice of money per box), in that they license their Windows logos and tools to developers in another kind of mutually beneficial business arrangement.
That's not what they're claiming at all. From their brief, starting bottom of page 1:
where the quotes are from previous cases.
Contrary to the blog's claims, AT&T is NOT saying that national security prevents them from litigating ... they are saying that the Government's actions prevent both the plaintiffs AND themselves from litigating: the plaintiffs can't show they have standing without access to information AT&T doesn't have and hence can't produce, and AT&T can't obtain material is needs to defend itself. The Government, not AT&T, has claimed the state secret privilege. It's the same result perhaps, but for a very different set of reasons than the blog post claims. I'm not going to take a position on the state secrets privilege here, but a full debate on the issue needs to correctly state the facts.
Those things are in quotes because they are in fact quotes. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if I'm interpreting the footnotes correctly, but they appear to be a direct quotation as referenced in Footnote 2 of the AT&T brief: Kasza v. Browner, 133 F.3d 1159, 1166 (9th Cir. 1998).
Isn't that worth more than a pittance?
According to salary.com, the median income for a "high school teacher" in the United States is currently either $49839 or $69120 if you include benefits. The Census Bureau reports that in 2005, the median household income (which includes more or less the same set of benefits quoted by salary.com) was $46,326. Do we pay teachers enough? I don't know the answer to that question ... but the median teacher is clearly not earning a "pittance" for their time. Perhaps it is a pittance compared to what they might be earning in the private sector, but I don't have enough information to make a decision either way....