And it will be more complex, heavier, lower performing, and have more potential failure modes than the conventional rocket it replaces.
Interesting claim, especially given that scramjets have no moving parts, no theoretical upper speed limit, and are expected to be around 3 times more fuel efficient that today's best liquid chemical rockets (which are very near the maximum allowed by physics), to say nothing of being able to ditch a great deal of fuel and oxidizer (the shuttle, IIRC, takes along a few million pounds of LO2).
Scramjets certainly will have difficulties. Chief among these is the fact that it can't ignite at anything less than mach 5, thus necessitating other propulsion systems which would, as you point out, be so much dead weight at scramjet & orbital speeds. There is also the materials problems of surface heating of a plane approaching orbtal velocity of mach 26.
So, nobody is suggesting that scramjets are as simple as legos. But if you're going to argue against even _trying_ to use them, at least pick some limitations that really exist. You might also notice that while advanced rocket technology is over 50 years old, it was the nevertheless the rocket boost that caused of the failure of the last test, not the scramjet.
Indeed, though I have found myself using the phrase inappropriately on occasion as well. You have to admit, though, to someone who doesn't already know the meaning, the image that comes to mind on hearing it is that of a person or an anthropomorphized question mark on their knees pleading to be allowed to ask something. Which is usually how it is used; some line of reasoning leads to a question that is so interesting that it demands, prompts, _begs_ to be asked.
What we need is a (this is the important part here!) catchy turn of phrase that can take the place of "begs the question" but can be easily seen to mean "demands to be asked" or "prompts the question", as the parent put it.
I should hope that the 'Guilty until proven innocent' part only applies to proving the statement to be true, not that you never stated it in the first place. To prove that you never said something is... rather problematic. In fact it's quite impossible, unless the allegedly libelous statement is not capable of being spoken or written by humans.
The problem is, you won't. The severed flesh will be flush, or nearly so, with the severed bone. You'd have to cut or rip off a bit of the surrounding muscle, tendons, nerves, fat, and other tissues to expose a sufficient length of it to be useful. I can't guarantee you'd stay conscious through that kind of pain.
Now explosive damage, that's a different story. Bone is much more resistant to flame & shrapnel, so there'd definitely be a nice (jagged!) chunk of crystalized calcium sticking out from your body.
Hmmm, I definitely agree about the need for cops to refrain from abusing their position. But removing officer discretion? We'll never be able to come up with a list of rules and regulations for cops and civilians that is so comprehensive that it'll cover everything they do, and if we did nobody would be able to understand it. There are zillions of actions that are perfectly legal under some circumstances but are illegal under others, and trying to perfectly distinguish between the two in legalese is an exercise in futility. We _want_ cops and judges to be able to do their jobs well, to exercise their descretion, to use their power intelligently, even if it's not 100% by the book. Otherwise we might as well replace the entire system with computers and robots. We don't want to take power away from them, we just want them to be unable to abuse it to the detriment of those they are supposed to be protecting.
In a perfect world, they simply wouldn't, right? The next best thing is to come down like a ton of bricks on those that do. Video cameras in squad cars is, in the immortal words of Bonno, a f*cking brilliant part of that. Would Hiibel's problem even be an issue if it wasn't a matter of video record? Not letting them turn the camera off (or being _very_ suspicious when they do) or tying microphones actually on the cops into the recording device (for when they are too far away from the car to pick up voices; the sound quality on the video was atrocious) would be even better. They simply have too much power, especially when bad and ambiguous laws are in place (something that will never be avoided entirely), to have their actions while on the job to be undocumented.
I would love it if cops had just enough power to do their jobs but not enough to abuse it. But I think it unlikely we'll ever be able to strike the perfect balance. What we need is a way of rectifying mistakes and punishing abuses.
That only applies to the CVD diamonds. The high-temperature high-pressure technique Gemesis uses apparently leaves behind some very distinct chemical signatures.
But otherwise, yeah, gem experts are basically left with a judgement call on whether it's too perfect to be real.
It probably engages an automatic appelite review of the case, as well, as a built-in safeguard.
That sounds workable emough. Granting power to individuals is useful. It's unaccountable power that worries me.
Hmmm, look a little harder. Googling for "Jury Nulification" turned up some interesting results right at the top. For instance, the Georgia and Virginia State constitutions specifically give juries power to "be judges of law as well as fact". Here and here.
Jury nullification provides an important mechanism for feedback. Jurors sometimes use nullification to send messages to prosecutors about misplaced enforcement priorities or what they see as harassing or abusive prosecutions. Jury nullification prevents our criminal justice system from becoming too rigid--it provides some play in the joints for justice, if jurors use their power wisely.
There is indeed a lack of legislative text about the topic, but that makes sense. How do you draft laws to dictate how people will ignore them? Indeed, it seems to be only the highest judicial levels that give the matter any weight at all (generally courts that don't actually have juries, oddly enough). Apparently just speaking in public in a courthouse about it is enough to get you kicked out or arrested.
There's a semi-urban legend of a burglar who fell down through a skylight while attempting to break into this one home and successfully sued the owners for negligence in not putting up warning signs on their roof. I'm unable to find anything more than anecdote about it, but (assuming it's more or less accurate) you can guess what happened; the jury was told that they had to base their decision off of the facts of the case alone. I'd bet my next paycheck that they were told that though the law, when applied to this case, lost all resemblance to common sense, they would have to find the owners guilty if the facts of the case demanded it.
That said, I fully appreciate the need for juries to consider the law far in front of their own consciences. Were I on a jury, for me to even consider nullification it would have to be a case that I felt to be so detrimental to the public good that to convict the guy would be a insult.
To what degree? I.e., can the judge just say, "I don't think he's innocent. So despite the jury, _I_ find him guilty and sentence him to 30 years in a pound-you-in-the-ass prison"? Or can they only nullify verdicts so as to favor of the defendent?
I wouldn't have a problem with not letting attorneys tell juries about their power to nullify if the other side wasn't allowed to tell them, "You must consider the exact letter of the law, not the spirit". That and the fact that from most reports, if a judge finds out you so much as _think_ the word "nullification", they'll dismiss you so fast you'll get whiplash.
Regardless, one of the reasons we have juries is so that an impartial person can consider cases that don't fit nicely into the mold of the law. There is no law so brilliantly crafted that I can't come up with a situation wherein the defendent is, under the letter of the law, guilty as hell but it would still be _wrong_ to convict.
I dunno, with that much power over the jury, couldn't a judge just mistrial every acquital until he finally gets a verdict he likes? Considering some of the judges I've read about, if anyone had that kind of power, we'd be hearing about exactly that sort of crap an awful lot. I don't think they can declare a mistrial _after_ the jury's deliberations.
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." -- Jack Valenti
You want even better? Larry Lessig hit him with that during a debate a few years back. Jack's response was along the lines of, "And you can see just how right I was then. We've lost billions of dollars to movies pirated with VCRs".
You didn't pay for the air, you paid for the rental of the air compressor. The distinction is similar to that of source code. The raw material, the code, is free for the taking. But unless you happen to have the skills needed to make use of them, you'll have to 'rent' them from someone else.
That seems awfully small. By my calculations, a transmitter 12 mi = 19 km = 19000 m off the surface has line-of-sight to a radius nearly 500 km out. Granted, the most usable part of that would be where it's closest to being overhead, and signal power will attenuate quickly, but that's still an awful lot of lost coverage. Even ground-based FM radio towers get better.
Hmmm, or would the limitation be in the ground-based client transmitters? Yeah, that's probably it. Ok, never mind me.
If he lived under it forever, maybe. I'm thinking something you activate with a harmless looking wall switch that will turn any electronics carried through it into so much scrap. Then you turn it off after the SS and FBI leave. They can have fun trying to SQUID a few kilobytes of useful data off it at massive expense.
I get really frustrated when people express the notion that civilization would suffer from an excess of accurate information.
The end of dating? People will still want to have fun, hang out, have sex. Why does requiring each party to be honest about their past behavior and future intentions mean that no one will ever date?
End of advertising? Haven't we already got truth in advertising laws? Aren't they a Good Thing?
Politicians, however have it made
Oh sure. But how often do you think the "I have no knowledge of that" excuse is actually true? And if a truth-verified politician is found to be innocent but not have the foggiest idea what's going on in his office on a regular basis, what then? Will he last in office come the next election?
Asimov wrote a short story ("The Dead Past") about a widget that let you point a video camera into any room on the planet at any point in recent (125 years) history. The story ended with the revelation that the plans were about to become public and the characters all thought that society would fatally explode as a result. "All human activity has required at least some privacy", or some such.
Compare this to "The Light of Other Days", by Baxter and Clarke, where the widget becomes public right from the start. In the novel, suicides and divorces skyrocketed for many years. 90% of politicians in office resigned. Popular religious figures dropped like flies. Peeping Tom laws became instantly unenforcable. And violent crime fell to almost nothing. Hypocrisy on the part of leaders became a thing of the past. Lies by governments and media became instanly uncoverable by anyone. Censorship became impossible.
Remember that in the face of world-changing events, most people don't want to simply give up and die. The vast majority will find a way to live and be happy. You may notice that this is _more_ difficult, not less, when accurate information is kept in the hands of an elite and the great unwashed are left to muddle through life, not knowing anything. Taking control of the citizenry's sources of information is usually the first step towards an unhappy dictatorship, while things like the Freedom of Information Act are the product of a (more or less) happy democracy that keeps it's leaders in line simply by knowing things about them.
I would say that the idea of polygraphs is perfectly valid. People really do hawe physical effects from lying; pro poker players make a living off of such effects, after all. They are simply too unreliable, too dependent on the emotional state of the subject, the results too open to interpretation, and testing too easily beaten with experience to be useful as 'smoking gun' evidence. In other words, it's a perfect idea marred once again by us imperfect humans:) Using it in the course of an investigation to uncover more tangible evidence? Go right ahead!
Augmented Reality (as opposed to Virtual Reality) glasses are by no means the brainchild of Vernor Vinge, though he is an excellent author and those were both stupendous books.
Unfortunately it wouldn't work here because he didn't have time; he had to get permission to go brush his teeth. You'd basically need to booby trap the computers, a la the electromagnet door frame in Cryptonomicon. Anyone know how well that would work in practice?
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Interesting claim, especially given that scramjets have no moving parts, no theoretical upper speed limit, and are expected to be around 3 times more fuel efficient that today's best liquid chemical rockets (which are very near the maximum allowed by physics), to say nothing of being able to ditch a great deal of fuel and oxidizer (the shuttle, IIRC, takes along a few million pounds of LO2).
Scramjets certainly will have difficulties. Chief among these is the fact that it can't ignite at anything less than mach 5, thus necessitating other propulsion systems which would, as you point out, be so much dead weight at scramjet & orbital speeds. There is also the materials problems of surface heating of a plane approaching orbtal velocity of mach 26.
So, nobody is suggesting that scramjets are as simple as legos. But if you're going to argue against even _trying_ to use them, at least pick some limitations that really exist. You might also notice that while advanced rocket technology is over 50 years old, it was the nevertheless the rocket boost that caused of the failure of the last test, not the scramjet.
How abot, Pinks the Floyd?
What we need is a (this is the important part here!) catchy turn of phrase that can take the place of "begs the question" but can be easily seen to mean "demands to be asked" or "prompts the question", as the parent put it.
I should hope that the 'Guilty until proven innocent' part only applies to proving the statement to be true, not that you never stated it in the first place. To prove that you never said something is ... rather problematic. In fact it's quite impossible, unless the allegedly libelous statement is not capable of being spoken or written by humans.
1489? Dang!
If I had to guess, I'd say that WOM is Write-Only Memory. Really the perfect place for all things Darl-related.
Now explosive damage, that's a different story. Bone is much more resistant to flame & shrapnel, so there'd definitely be a nice (jagged!) chunk of crystalized calcium sticking out from your body.
I can't believe I actually just wrote that.
In a perfect world, they simply wouldn't, right? The next best thing is to come down like a ton of bricks on those that do. Video cameras in squad cars is, in the immortal words of Bonno, a f*cking brilliant part of that. Would Hiibel's problem even be an issue if it wasn't a matter of video record? Not letting them turn the camera off (or being _very_ suspicious when they do) or tying microphones actually on the cops into the recording device (for when they are too far away from the car to pick up voices; the sound quality on the video was atrocious) would be even better. They simply have too much power, especially when bad and ambiguous laws are in place (something that will never be avoided entirely), to have their actions while on the job to be undocumented.
I would love it if cops had just enough power to do their jobs but not enough to abuse it. But I think it unlikely we'll ever be able to strike the perfect balance. What we need is a way of rectifying mistakes and punishing abuses.
But otherwise, yeah, gem experts are basically left with a judgement call on whether it's too perfect to be real.
That sounds workable emough. Granting power to individuals is useful. It's unaccountable power that worries me.
Hmmm, look a little harder. Googling for "Jury Nulification" turned up some interesting results right at the top. For instance, the Georgia and Virginia State constitutions specifically give juries power to "be judges of law as well as fact". Here and here.
Jury nullification provides an important mechanism for feedback. Jurors sometimes use nullification to send messages to prosecutors about misplaced enforcement priorities or what they see as harassing or abusive prosecutions. Jury nullification prevents our criminal justice system from becoming too rigid--it provides some play in the joints for justice, if jurors use their power wisely.
There is indeed a lack of legislative text about the topic, but that makes sense. How do you draft laws to dictate how people will ignore them? Indeed, it seems to be only the highest judicial levels that give the matter any weight at all (generally courts that don't actually have juries, oddly enough). Apparently just speaking in public in a courthouse about it is enough to get you kicked out or arrested.
There's a semi-urban legend of a burglar who fell down through a skylight while attempting to break into this one home and successfully sued the owners for negligence in not putting up warning signs on their roof. I'm unable to find anything more than anecdote about it, but (assuming it's more or less accurate) you can guess what happened; the jury was told that they had to base their decision off of the facts of the case alone. I'd bet my next paycheck that they were told that though the law, when applied to this case, lost all resemblance to common sense, they would have to find the owners guilty if the facts of the case demanded it.
That said, I fully appreciate the need for juries to consider the law far in front of their own consciences. Were I on a jury, for me to even consider nullification it would have to be a case that I felt to be so detrimental to the public good that to convict the guy would be a insult.
To what degree? I.e., can the judge just say, "I don't think he's innocent. So despite the jury, _I_ find him guilty and sentence him to 30 years in a pound-you-in-the-ass prison"? Or can they only nullify verdicts so as to favor of the defendent?
I wouldn't have a problem with not letting attorneys tell juries about their power to nullify if the other side wasn't allowed to tell them, "You must consider the exact letter of the law, not the spirit". That and the fact that from most reports, if a judge finds out you so much as _think_ the word "nullification", they'll dismiss you so fast you'll get whiplash.
Regardless, one of the reasons we have juries is so that an impartial person can consider cases that don't fit nicely into the mold of the law. There is no law so brilliantly crafted that I can't come up with a situation wherein the defendent is, under the letter of the law, guilty as hell but it would still be _wrong_ to convict.
I dunno, with that much power over the jury, couldn't a judge just mistrial every acquital until he finally gets a verdict he likes? Considering some of the judges I've read about, if anyone had that kind of power, we'd be hearing about exactly that sort of crap an awful lot. I don't think they can declare a mistrial _after_ the jury's deliberations.
You want even better? Larry Lessig hit him with that during a debate a few years back. Jack's response was along the lines of, "And you can see just how right I was then. We've lost billions of dollars to movies pirated with VCRs".
I'd say his administration is socially medeival and fiscally insane.
Well, one out of three ain't bad.
Ok.. why? I mean is there something about being in a collar that being in a pocket or a belt buckle can't do?
You didn't pay for the air, you paid for the rental of the air compressor. The distinction is similar to that of source code. The raw material, the code, is free for the taking. But unless you happen to have the skills needed to make use of them, you'll have to 'rent' them from someone else.
Hmmm, or would the limitation be in the ground-based client transmitters? Yeah, that's probably it. Ok, never mind me.
Yes, but the reason it does that is because of being made here on earth.
If he lived under it forever, maybe. I'm thinking something you activate with a harmless looking wall switch that will turn any electronics carried through it into so much scrap. Then you turn it off after the SS and FBI leave. They can have fun trying to SQUID a few kilobytes of useful data off it at massive expense.
The end of dating? People will still want to have fun, hang out, have sex. Why does requiring each party to be honest about their past behavior and future intentions mean that no one will ever date?
End of advertising? Haven't we already got truth in advertising laws? Aren't they a Good Thing?
Politicians, however have it made
Oh sure. But how often do you think the "I have no knowledge of that" excuse is actually true? And if a truth-verified politician is found to be innocent but not have the foggiest idea what's going on in his office on a regular basis, what then? Will he last in office come the next election?
Asimov wrote a short story ("The Dead Past") about a widget that let you point a video camera into any room on the planet at any point in recent (125 years) history. The story ended with the revelation that the plans were about to become public and the characters all thought that society would fatally explode as a result. "All human activity has required at least some privacy", or some such.
Compare this to "The Light of Other Days", by Baxter and Clarke, where the widget becomes public right from the start. In the novel, suicides and divorces skyrocketed for many years. 90% of politicians in office resigned. Popular religious figures dropped like flies. Peeping Tom laws became instantly unenforcable. And violent crime fell to almost nothing. Hypocrisy on the part of leaders became a thing of the past. Lies by governments and media became instanly uncoverable by anyone. Censorship became impossible.
Remember that in the face of world-changing events, most people don't want to simply give up and die. The vast majority will find a way to live and be happy. You may notice that this is _more_ difficult, not less, when accurate information is kept in the hands of an elite and the great unwashed are left to muddle through life, not knowing anything. Taking control of the citizenry's sources of information is usually the first step towards an unhappy dictatorship, while things like the Freedom of Information Act are the product of a (more or less) happy democracy that keeps it's leaders in line simply by knowing things about them.
I would say that the idea of polygraphs is perfectly valid. People really do hawe physical effects from lying; pro poker players make a living off of such effects, after all. They are simply too unreliable, too dependent on the emotional state of the subject, the results too open to interpretation, and testing too easily beaten with experience to be useful as 'smoking gun' evidence. In other words, it's a perfect idea marred once again by us imperfect humans :) Using it in the course of an investigation to uncover more tangible evidence? Go right ahead!
Augmented Reality (as opposed to Virtual Reality) glasses are by no means the brainchild of Vernor Vinge, though he is an excellent author and those were both stupendous books.
Vocals, yes. Lyrics, no.
Unfortunately it wouldn't work here because he didn't have time; he had to get permission to go brush his teeth. You'd basically need to booby trap the computers, a la the electromagnet door frame in Cryptonomicon. Anyone know how well that would work in practice?