The Normans (lit. The North Men, or Norse Men) were basically the same as the Danes who had ruled over most of England under Danelaw - which, ultimately, was not significantly different from Saxon law.
Neither Danelaw nor Saxon law (the Dooms) were significantly different from Romano-British law (which was more British than Roman and was derived from Insular Celtic law). The Insular Celts, unlike their European counterparts, were more absorbed by the Bronze Age people than vice versa. Genetically, their fingerprint is no more than 25%, with the Bronze Age peoples at 65% and everyone else (Romans, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Norse, Danes, etc) making up the pathetic 10% that's left. Insular Celts largely replaced the previous language but many of the traditions and practices from the prior peoples remained intact (and some survive intact to this day).
Thus, the modern government of Britain is a direct descendant of the Mesolithic governmental systems, without interruption and without substantial change. Hell, most of the county boundaries abolished in Thatcher's time were Mesolithic political boundaries - something well-attested by archaeology.
Oh, absolutely! Certain facts are useful as a foundation to a subject, but 99% of all facts taught aren't going to be memorized, are only going to end up being looked up in reference texts, and are therefore bleeding time that could be spent on comprehension, thought processing, research skills, transferable skills, logical processes and assorted forms of reasoning, etc.
Language is particularly fun. For a long time, people honestly believed that you shouldn't teach multiple languages at the same time (it would confuse the poor dears) and some people even believed you shouldn't teach multiple languages at all (it'll overload the brain). Both these are now falsified. Although very unlikely to get anywhere, the British are even contemplating requiring kids to be trilingual by the time they're 5 or 6. It would be wonderful if it ever happened.
I mostly agree with your view of the role of a teacher, but would add that when I've taught I've always taken the approach that my job is not that much different from the Greek's mythological muses - the one who pokes at the imagination, prods at the possibilities and throws the fuel of how to find out more onto whatever fires I can start. (Ok, maybe more like a mental pyromaniac in a classroom full of fireworks. What's the difference?)
True, not every one of the teachers in my family would agree with that strategy. Mind you, those are the ones who aren't able to get their graduate students to do any interesting research, so I'm inclined to think they're missing some essential points.
A great IQ means you can find patterns and connect dots faster than others. Essentially, a hunch is the same thing with incomplete data.
Good education could raise everyone's standards enormously. For all practical intents and purposes, the difference between the least-educated of the poorest farming communities and the very best of the agriculturalists, horticulturalists and gardeners is solely that the latter group have been taught how to correlate and how to research, giving them the skills to best exploit the ground to maximize the return for their investment over the short and long term. Teach the rural folk about what really working the soil means and you could eliminate dustbowls, double yield, reduce costs and eliminate many of the highly toxic garbage commonly used on cheap and very nasty farmland.
And, yes, I can say this. As well as top-flight academics in the family, I've plenty of top-flight farmers and gardeners as well - many serious geekheads, exploiting every last inch of their intelligence, IT and engineering to do stuff 20-30 years before anyone else. Which is insane. 1 year after a geek farmer has shown something can be done cheaply enough to be profitable, anyone capable of reading a book should have been able to do the same. That doesn't require much intelligence, but it DOES require learning about how to learn.
Give any person a good education AND the research skills, and there is absolutely no reason why they couldn't move 30 years ahead of where they were. Give them a good grounding in how to turn inspiration and deduction into invention and creativity - well, you might not end up with a nation full of Wosniks but you'll certainly end up with a nation that would regard some of the most common problems today as mere child's play.
We're nowhere near our limits to understand. We're only at the limits to understand given the massive overheads the educational system imposes. (As I've mentioned elsewhere, there should be 100K kids entering High School with the kind of knowledge and understanding normally expected of those entering Harvard or MIT. Essentially, that would reduce the overheads imposed by 6 years. Six years, at the peak age for mental growth and mental agility rather than at the end of the brain's functional lifetime. A small city's population-worth of geniuses. That kind of optimization would allow such people to actually understand things like M-Theory and produce useful analysis and thus testable predictions based on it.
Of those, I'd expect maybe 10K people on-par with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gregory Perelman, Stephen Hawking or John Nash, and maybe 1K people on-par with Leonardo da Vinci.
We'd have fusion within the week and interstellar flight within a lifetime. Maybe even flying cars!
Yes and no. There's no more low-hanging fruit, sure, but let's examine the case of Ruth Lawrence. There's nothing that I can find which gives her IQ, other than that child psychologists have seen plenty of people of equal calibre. I'm guessing, from the lack of diversity in her skills and the fact that there are many comparable people in a country as small as Britain, that it's probably in the mid 160s. The IQ rarity table tells us that there's 100,000 people as bright as that.
To put it another way, there should be High Schools in the US - maybe 2 in each State - that are teaching Harvard- or MIT-grade material, going by potential and the US' population.
Yes, Ruth Lawrence was pressured far too hard and was lucky not to burn out the way Sufiah Yusof so spectacularly did. (She dropped out of Oxford and became a high-class hooker.) However, she nonetheless demonstrates that the human brain has vastly greater potential than is being utilized. No, not the mythical 10% bullshit. I'm talking about the much more real capacity of the brain to store and process data efficiently and effectively. Poor educational practices are leaving people dumber than necessary.
But if you had 100,000 people doing BS/BA-grade work by the time they're 12, if they were going to make radical discoveries then you're damn right I'd expect them to do so by age 30. The failing isn't in Einstein's expectations, the failing is in the completely negligent teaching practices in use. Teaching today has barely evolved from Einstein's day, maybe even regressed in places, but science and technology have moved on. If the gap increases by too much, no human will have enough time to slug through at the crawl we currently demand of them to ever discover anything.
Education is a race - not student against student, but method against requirement. And education is losing.
The student loans were never going to get paid back by the students. The entire student loan system should be replaced by government grants. Besides, if the students aren't paying the money back via the loan system, they'll have money to spend on paying their taxes, so the government will get the money back. Further, the money has already been promised and is therefore not new spending. If you want an educated, rational populace, and the loan sharks currently authorized to pay student loans make it impossible to be both educated and rational, the government has to step in somehow. If you want this avoided in future, abolish the loan system.
The debt ceiling crisis wasn't fake, it was extremely real and the extremists were hijacking the House in an effort to prevent the debts Constitutionally required to be paid from being so. Obama could, technically, have used the Constitution to mandate a raise in the spending limit but he wanted both sides of the House to work together to agree on that. He wanted a consensual, rather than mandated, solution. The Tea Party refused to consent to anything other than its whims and played chicken with the law. The Tea Party won that round, resulting in a second-dip recession being unavoidable for the sole benefit of not having to agree with Democrats.
Obama, realizing that the Tea Party would wreck the US completely before it agreed to a damn thing with those it sees as rivals, has now chosen to use his Constitutional mandate. Remember, he is sworn to uphold the Constitution and the Constitution FORBIDS unpaid debts. He has no choice. That isn't being the King, that's merely following the law. It is the Tea Party that is the Pretender to the throne, in openly advocating the abolition of Constitutional Amendments without due process for political point-scoring purposes.
The answer to that is simple. The voting bloc Israel represents is huge. I'm not saying there's a conspiracy - in fact, I'm certain that there isn't - but politics is very us-vs-them and Obama has no interest in being one of "them". He wants strategic ambiguity and anything that could be deemed a slight or an insult would break that ambiguity.
Even in this case, he was reluctant to say anything overt. His brief statement had the air of plausible denial over its meaning. It may let him claim to both camps that he's on their side. That would be very much like Obama.
Remember, when he wants to be insulting, there's no question about it. Obama has very openly insulted the British on numerous occasions and has made it clear that he sees nothing special about the Anglo-American relationship. Indeed, such was his level of gross abuse on his various visits that it's safe to say Britain ranks about on-par with Pakistan at this point in his eyes. Usable but expendable, with Britain being the more expendable of the two right now.
The tactics used in this case were much more cleverly crafted, so Obama places a far greater value on Israel and its view of the world. Just as with Britain, though, it's not out of compassion or understanding, it's a calculation. It would not surprise me if this whole stunt was a calculation. But what was he calculating and who was the broadcast really aimed at?
Not before the US election. He wouldn't risk alienating his core voters. He could claim humanitarian reasons for Libya and used NATO as a shield, but that wouldn't be possible with Iran. There's no humanitarian cause (at this time) and NATO won't risk a confrontation with Russia.
There's a much more plausible explanation: The US public are sick of wars and Obama can now put his opponents on the line. What would they do about Iran if they won? (If they say "nothing", then they lose the Jewish American vote - a very sizable bloc. If they say anything other than nothing, then they lose almost everyone else because there's too much war fatigue right now and no money to spend on such ventures. If they prevaricate, they lose the Tea Party vote because wars are expensive and the Tea Party wants a constitutional cap on total spending.)
Obama's forays into war had little to do with him thinking he was king. Every one of his ventures can be explained as tactical PR gestures for domestic consumption. In order to anticipate his next move, you have to stop and ask what PR gesture could he possibly want in an election year. By far the simplest explanation is that he wants to put his rivals into a spot where anything they say will alienate too large a percentage of voters for them to win.
His use of executive orders is interesting but nowhere near as bad as Bush using them to authorize assassination of Americans on US soil, nor as bad as Congress forbidding the US Government from meeting its international legal obligations vis a vis Gitmo. I'd argue that Congress, in ordering the President to commit a crime, has carried out a far worse crime than anything Obama has done. I'd also argue that Bush, using a signing statement to negate a law forbidding torture by declaring that the provisions of the law were to be ignored, again abused power on a massive scale.
(If you can use a signing statement to edit laws, not merely interpret them, then veto-proof margins can be unconstitutionally ignored. You don't veto the bill, you use a signing statement to say it doesn't apply. Further, even interpreting them is questionable. There's nothing to stop a President from using a signing statement to rewrite a bill completely from the ground up. It would take a while to write, but it could be done and therefore will eventually be done.)
I'm not saying Obama is innocent of abuse, merely that he's no worse than anyone else and that you should be careful to not ascribe him with motivations that obviously don't apply. Blame him for the right reasons, or the important points you make will be ignored by others.
At least some of those have opted to use Proportional Representation. A number are parts of federations larger than themselves that they respect, leading to much less insular thinking. However, one could argue that even when these are the case, the structure of government is a consequence of the culture of the country. For that reason, it becomes hard to distinguish.
I would agree. Yes, it would require work. It would also require a lot of money, since to make a good evaluation requires more than the facts on the candidates but also research skills and a good enough grounding in a wide enough range of topics to be able to interpret those facts. And that means overhauling the educational system in America. (I'm thinking an absolute minimum would be to triple the mandatory educational budget.) It would also require purging schools of quite a bit of corruption, or the money will simply end in the pockets of organized thugs and megachurches.
What you're describing, and what I've believed in for some time, is a system that is very close to the one proposed by the Chartist movement - except I believe theirs was unnecessarily elitist and exclusive - and the one proposed by Plato in his book The Republic, which does indeed cover the idea of educating people to the necessary standard. It should be possible to raise standards to be as inclusive as humanly possible, as per Plato, but then include only those who opt-in to those standards, as per the Chartists. Those who voluntarily exclude themselves can't reasonably expect to be included (and could reasonably argue that it imposes on their right to exclude themselves if they want to).
I dunno. It has taken Britain over 9,000 years to become as corrupt and degenerate as it is, but the US has taken a mere 300 to at least rival, if not beat it. That would make the US 30 times as easy to corrupt.
It is apparently being used as training material for the British Civil Service. (We found that out not that long after Mrs. Thatcher said that she loved the show, but I don't recall exactly how long after.) Now, doubtless you might find Civil Servants who claimed that it's to teach you how not to be, but that's exactly what Bernard would claim too.
Herein lies the problem with that: Those who believe in reducing the power of government when on the outside discover - on being elected - that they now have power and that they're now the ones others are wanting to reduce. Suicide has an honorable(ish) history in Japan, not so much in America. In the beginning, it may start as a method of keeping them in office and not be the first ones eliminated in a government reduction. After all, if the reformers are the first eliminated, the reforms can be reversed. In time, it's merely a method of keeping them in office and stopping anything that could potentially threaten it (such as their former reformist colleagues).
Ok, there is another problem. Non-government bodies (such as billionaires, corporations, religious sects and the media) also abuse any power they get. Transferring power from one abuser to another won't reduce the abuse. The problem is not one of the entity, the problem is far more fundamental than that. You'd have to make everything smaller, not just the Federal government, but you can't grant anyone the power to make everything smaller without first making something bigger. And once they are bigger and have that power, they're never going to want to make themselves smaller again.
I still lean more towards Athenian-style democracy, using bureaucracy as a framework to keep things manageable. In other words, instead of making government smaller, make government everyone. Have nobody on the "outside" and therefore nobody to fear. You can't have a pure democracy on that scale - 360 million people is just too many for any kind of serious debate on every topic. So you subdivide up government such that the number of people in each bureau is manageable and then shift people around every year or so to eliminate any new them-vs-us mentalities building up. This would mean the end of career politicians, paid positions in government and other such notions. But if you're serious about eliminating them-vs-us then it would also mean eliminating both the Federal and State governments (and therefore State boundaries), replacing them with mere departments within this super-cell style of governance.
There's a few problems with this scheme. It would be impossible to divide society up into a million or so meaningful departments, let alone organize a system that complex. Too many people have a vested interest in them-vs-us. 50%+ of the population wants a smaller government and would never agree to everyone being the government (you need a 2/3rds majority of States and 2/3rds majority in both Federal houses to pass even an amendment, this would be a massive rewrite), and following on from that well over 50% of the population are Constitutionalists and would never countenance a massive rewrite. In other words, I might like Athenian democracy but I'm in a minority of 1, which is enough to pass the salt but nothing else.
So whilst I have a concept that might be a starting point, it's a useless starting point which basically means I have nothing on how to fix the problem.
Tampering with Federal property is a big no-no, even if it is being used in questionable ways. Reporting it as a suspicious device would be ok, but would probably not do any good. You could try driving a rally course - nothing illegal about that - and you've plausible denial of any knowledge/responsibility if anything happens. Of course, if you do that too often then the next device might not be for tracking. People are funny like that.
As for the story, once the covert value was blown, the police seem to have used much the same tactic they've already admitted to carrying out against people like John Lennon (ie: drive them into paranoia). It doesn't sound implausible, but the key aspect here that a lot of people are ignoring is that these tactics ARE used to discredit others by driving them into paranoia. It is a mix of PsyOps and Rupert Murdoch journalism at that point, not true surveillance. The winners are the ones who can keep their wits about them.
The probability of finding such a device on your car is extremely low outside of those individuals who have drawn attention to themselves with views contrary to either the political whims of the day or the views of the civil service. (And the latter is the more problematic. Politicians are nothing compared to the Humphrey Applebys that actually are out there.) Even then, military drones are now entering police service. Yes, the ones that can potentially carry hellfire missiles. Why bother with an individual device that can be found when an eye in the sky is much harder to detect and can watch many people at once?
Which goes back to my prior point. Keeping your wits is what matters. Giving in to people who want you to go nuts won't help you. If you want to beat such games, you cannot play them. Stay as you are or become increasingly sane and fearless. That's how to win against this kind of emotional manipulation.
Americans fear their government and so work to protect themselves accordingly. Americans become the next government, which now believes that a paranoid, armed citizenry fears them, and so work to protect themselves accordingly. Americans discover these new protections, with the result that they fear their government even more.
Does the term "vicious cycle" mean anything to you guys? Or, since we're geeks, "positive feedback loop"?
When both sides of a debate fear each other and, in their efforts to protect themselves, cause the other side to fear them even more, neither side has a hope in hell of ever winning. Right now, total trust wouldn't be the brightest idea either (and would have to come from both sides at the same time) and I have no clue how to fix this bug, but both sides are guaranteed to lose if they keep going like this.
It could be interesting, but it'll be a while. Extracting 45-million year old strains of brewing yeast from amber sounds much more fun (and cheaper) - Wired ran a story on how to do this and I'm planning on giving it a go at some point. The challenge is to identify what's brewing yeast and what's lethal bacteria. Before it kills you.
I know some rocketry groups do just that, so whilst I can't speak as to whether Derek does, I can say that it should not be hard to find an expert amateur rocket guy to give such a talk.
Yeah, but a VM image isn't a cold boot. A plain VM image is essentially a warm boot (a lot of the system is already initialized) and most VMs are quite capable of handling VM images that are partially into a boot (since the first phase of the bootstrap really doesn't do anything that's important to a VM).
If you're going to consider VMs and other such hacks, then Coreboot + Linux + image of a ramdisk in Flash would give you a 3 second bootup time to a console, just not to a GUI desktop. With a few additional hacks, you can probably make an image of an already-started X server that can be loaded in to avoid having that start up. And so on. But the more hacks and shortcuts you take, the less you can justify calling that a cold boot to desktop. Lukewarm, maybe, since parts are "cold boot", but the rest gains performance by being warm boot in all but name and not by actually being fast from cold.
The flaw is to think that exactly one person is 100% to blame and that no other division of responsibility is possible.
If you bought a used car that was defective at time of manufacture and it still had the same fault, you'd blame the previous owner for not fixing it but you'd not hold the manufacturer blameless either. They created the problem, the fact that nobody fixed it doesn't change that. If you prefer a different example, if you throw a stone into the water, the stone only directly creates the first ripple but you would not then claim that each ripple out had nothing to do with the stone. That would be daft.
Yes, she's an adult which means that some percentage of the responsibility shifts onto her. Unlike the car or the ripple, she has some measure of independent thought. Not necessarily a normal adult's level - she's what psychologists call an "adult child", in part because of her disability and in part because an abusive background stunts mental growth.
My philosophy is that placing responsibility on one person and one person alone on almost anything is merely a way the members of society can avoid ever having to address underlying causes. the "one bad apple" theory simply doesn't hold up, IMHO. If you prefer a programming example, a segfault rarely occurs where the actual bug appears. It's normally the result of a bug somewhere else. Blaming that part of the code and/or trying to fix the wrong bit will bypass that one visible occurrence but it won't fix the problem itself.
In this case, I'd say that the father is 45% responsible, the daughter is 45% responsible and the mother is 10% responsible.
The father essentially brainwashed his daughter into being defective, the mother was compliant with this (knowing full well that it was criminal) and the daughter did nothing to remedy the defects later. In fairness to the mother, she was also brainwashed. The household apparently followed a typical cult mentality with the father being the cult leader. Cults are extremely hard to go against. However, it's not impossible and she earns a token responsibility for not doing so.
The daughter, again by being indoctrinated into a cult, isn't fully culpable. This is actually the law these days. I'm sure you remember from the Beltway Smiper case the references to the Triggerman Theory, where the brainwasher IS legally liable for the actions of those they brainwash. She snapped, in this case, and retaliated rather than being ordered to blackmail, but I don't consider mere orders to be a valid stopping point. It doesn't matter, in the end, if the person pushing the dominoes actually orders the last one to topple. It will fall because the first one fell because that's what dominoes do. She's not devoid of responsibility but she's not 100% responsible either.
Obviously, that depends on the Statute and the State Constitution governing it, but if it looks like that applies here then if the State has a serious issue all it has to do is raise the time limit. Frankly, I'm not a great fan of Statutes of Limitations. Yes, there comes a time when the evidence no longer exists, but clearly that's not the case here and that kind of debate is better settled by investigators or the court, it shouldn't be settled by some politicians setting a deadline.
I wouldn't necessarily trust a Texan to know Texan law. I wouldn't trust more than half of America to know how to spell "law". Being born in a given location doesn't give you any special privileges or abilities when it comes to knowing something.
Having said that, what matters is purely what is known and by whom. I would trust you to know Texas law because everything you've said matches what I've looked up. Ergo, you've done the legwork. Ergo, your comment is as correct as you're going to get outside of asking a lawyer certified in Texas. (Though why you'd ask someone who was positively certifiable, I dunno....)
This is the Great Error made by a lot of newbies to the Internet. They're too busy looking for things that confirm their biases that they don't look at the facts.
I believe some random guy on the Internet CAN discover some part of the Texas penal code that COULD demonstrate the State AG did not use all means at their disposal. Not "is", "can".
I believe it is reprehensible, bordering on fanatical, to reject a claim before you even know what the claim is.
I believe it is good judgement to listen, impartially and rationally, to a viewpoint that differs from my own.
I definitely believe that your kind of cynical, twisted excuse of a slam is truly pathetic.
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The Normans (lit. The North Men, or Norse Men) were basically the same as the Danes who had ruled over most of England under Danelaw - which, ultimately, was not significantly different from Saxon law.
Neither Danelaw nor Saxon law (the Dooms) were significantly different from Romano-British law (which was more British than Roman and was derived from Insular Celtic law). The Insular Celts, unlike their European counterparts, were more absorbed by the Bronze Age people than vice versa. Genetically, their fingerprint is no more than 25%, with the Bronze Age peoples at 65% and everyone else (Romans, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Norse, Danes, etc) making up the pathetic 10% that's left. Insular Celts largely replaced the previous language but many of the traditions and practices from the prior peoples remained intact (and some survive intact to this day).
Thus, the modern government of Britain is a direct descendant of the Mesolithic governmental systems, without interruption and without substantial change. Hell, most of the county boundaries abolished in Thatcher's time were Mesolithic political boundaries - something well-attested by archaeology.
Oh, absolutely! Certain facts are useful as a foundation to a subject, but 99% of all facts taught aren't going to be memorized, are only going to end up being looked up in reference texts, and are therefore bleeding time that could be spent on comprehension, thought processing, research skills, transferable skills, logical processes and assorted forms of reasoning, etc.
Language is particularly fun. For a long time, people honestly believed that you shouldn't teach multiple languages at the same time (it would confuse the poor dears) and some people even believed you shouldn't teach multiple languages at all (it'll overload the brain). Both these are now falsified. Although very unlikely to get anywhere, the British are even contemplating requiring kids to be trilingual by the time they're 5 or 6. It would be wonderful if it ever happened.
I mostly agree with your view of the role of a teacher, but would add that when I've taught I've always taken the approach that my job is not that much different from the Greek's mythological muses - the one who pokes at the imagination, prods at the possibilities and throws the fuel of how to find out more onto whatever fires I can start. (Ok, maybe more like a mental pyromaniac in a classroom full of fireworks. What's the difference?)
True, not every one of the teachers in my family would agree with that strategy. Mind you, those are the ones who aren't able to get their graduate students to do any interesting research, so I'm inclined to think they're missing some essential points.
I think we're basically on the same page.
A great IQ means you can find patterns and connect dots faster than others. Essentially, a hunch is the same thing with incomplete data.
Good education could raise everyone's standards enormously. For all practical intents and purposes, the difference between the least-educated of the poorest farming communities and the very best of the agriculturalists, horticulturalists and gardeners is solely that the latter group have been taught how to correlate and how to research, giving them the skills to best exploit the ground to maximize the return for their investment over the short and long term. Teach the rural folk about what really working the soil means and you could eliminate dustbowls, double yield, reduce costs and eliminate many of the highly toxic garbage commonly used on cheap and very nasty farmland.
And, yes, I can say this. As well as top-flight academics in the family, I've plenty of top-flight farmers and gardeners as well - many serious geekheads, exploiting every last inch of their intelligence, IT and engineering to do stuff 20-30 years before anyone else. Which is insane. 1 year after a geek farmer has shown something can be done cheaply enough to be profitable, anyone capable of reading a book should have been able to do the same. That doesn't require much intelligence, but it DOES require learning about how to learn.
Give any person a good education AND the research skills, and there is absolutely no reason why they couldn't move 30 years ahead of where they were. Give them a good grounding in how to turn inspiration and deduction into invention and creativity - well, you might not end up with a nation full of Wosniks but you'll certainly end up with a nation that would regard some of the most common problems today as mere child's play.
We're nowhere near our limits to understand. We're only at the limits to understand given the massive overheads the educational system imposes. (As I've mentioned elsewhere, there should be 100K kids entering High School with the kind of knowledge and understanding normally expected of those entering Harvard or MIT. Essentially, that would reduce the overheads imposed by 6 years. Six years, at the peak age for mental growth and mental agility rather than at the end of the brain's functional lifetime. A small city's population-worth of geniuses. That kind of optimization would allow such people to actually understand things like M-Theory and produce useful analysis and thus testable predictions based on it.
Of those, I'd expect maybe 10K people on-par with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gregory Perelman, Stephen Hawking or John Nash, and maybe 1K people on-par with Leonardo da Vinci.
We'd have fusion within the week and interstellar flight within a lifetime. Maybe even flying cars!
Yes and no. There's no more low-hanging fruit, sure, but let's examine the case of Ruth Lawrence. There's nothing that I can find which gives her IQ, other than that child psychologists have seen plenty of people of equal calibre. I'm guessing, from the lack of diversity in her skills and the fact that there are many comparable people in a country as small as Britain, that it's probably in the mid 160s. The IQ rarity table tells us that there's 100,000 people as bright as that.
To put it another way, there should be High Schools in the US - maybe 2 in each State - that are teaching Harvard- or MIT-grade material, going by potential and the US' population.
Yes, Ruth Lawrence was pressured far too hard and was lucky not to burn out the way Sufiah Yusof so spectacularly did. (She dropped out of Oxford and became a high-class hooker.) However, she nonetheless demonstrates that the human brain has vastly greater potential than is being utilized. No, not the mythical 10% bullshit. I'm talking about the much more real capacity of the brain to store and process data efficiently and effectively. Poor educational practices are leaving people dumber than necessary.
But if you had 100,000 people doing BS/BA-grade work by the time they're 12, if they were going to make radical discoveries then you're damn right I'd expect them to do so by age 30. The failing isn't in Einstein's expectations, the failing is in the completely negligent teaching practices in use. Teaching today has barely evolved from Einstein's day, maybe even regressed in places, but science and technology have moved on. If the gap increases by too much, no human will have enough time to slug through at the crawl we currently demand of them to ever discover anything.
Education is a race - not student against student, but method against requirement. And education is losing.
The student loans were never going to get paid back by the students. The entire student loan system should be replaced by government grants. Besides, if the students aren't paying the money back via the loan system, they'll have money to spend on paying their taxes, so the government will get the money back. Further, the money has already been promised and is therefore not new spending. If you want an educated, rational populace, and the loan sharks currently authorized to pay student loans make it impossible to be both educated and rational, the government has to step in somehow. If you want this avoided in future, abolish the loan system.
The debt ceiling crisis wasn't fake, it was extremely real and the extremists were hijacking the House in an effort to prevent the debts Constitutionally required to be paid from being so. Obama could, technically, have used the Constitution to mandate a raise in the spending limit but he wanted both sides of the House to work together to agree on that. He wanted a consensual, rather than mandated, solution. The Tea Party refused to consent to anything other than its whims and played chicken with the law. The Tea Party won that round, resulting in a second-dip recession being unavoidable for the sole benefit of not having to agree with Democrats.
Obama, realizing that the Tea Party would wreck the US completely before it agreed to a damn thing with those it sees as rivals, has now chosen to use his Constitutional mandate. Remember, he is sworn to uphold the Constitution and the Constitution FORBIDS unpaid debts. He has no choice. That isn't being the King, that's merely following the law. It is the Tea Party that is the Pretender to the throne, in openly advocating the abolition of Constitutional Amendments without due process for political point-scoring purposes.
Of course! They've got to train the student doctors on something^Wsomeone.
The answer to that is simple. The voting bloc Israel represents is huge. I'm not saying there's a conspiracy - in fact, I'm certain that there isn't - but politics is very us-vs-them and Obama has no interest in being one of "them". He wants strategic ambiguity and anything that could be deemed a slight or an insult would break that ambiguity.
Even in this case, he was reluctant to say anything overt. His brief statement had the air of plausible denial over its meaning. It may let him claim to both camps that he's on their side. That would be very much like Obama.
Remember, when he wants to be insulting, there's no question about it. Obama has very openly insulted the British on numerous occasions and has made it clear that he sees nothing special about the Anglo-American relationship. Indeed, such was his level of gross abuse on his various visits that it's safe to say Britain ranks about on-par with Pakistan at this point in his eyes. Usable but expendable, with Britain being the more expendable of the two right now.
The tactics used in this case were much more cleverly crafted, so Obama places a far greater value on Israel and its view of the world. Just as with Britain, though, it's not out of compassion or understanding, it's a calculation. It would not surprise me if this whole stunt was a calculation. But what was he calculating and who was the broadcast really aimed at?
Not before the US election. He wouldn't risk alienating his core voters. He could claim humanitarian reasons for Libya and used NATO as a shield, but that wouldn't be possible with Iran. There's no humanitarian cause (at this time) and NATO won't risk a confrontation with Russia.
There's a much more plausible explanation: The US public are sick of wars and Obama can now put his opponents on the line. What would they do about Iran if they won? (If they say "nothing", then they lose the Jewish American vote - a very sizable bloc. If they say anything other than nothing, then they lose almost everyone else because there's too much war fatigue right now and no money to spend on such ventures. If they prevaricate, they lose the Tea Party vote because wars are expensive and the Tea Party wants a constitutional cap on total spending.)
Obama's forays into war had little to do with him thinking he was king. Every one of his ventures can be explained as tactical PR gestures for domestic consumption. In order to anticipate his next move, you have to stop and ask what PR gesture could he possibly want in an election year. By far the simplest explanation is that he wants to put his rivals into a spot where anything they say will alienate too large a percentage of voters for them to win.
His use of executive orders is interesting but nowhere near as bad as Bush using them to authorize assassination of Americans on US soil, nor as bad as Congress forbidding the US Government from meeting its international legal obligations vis a vis Gitmo. I'd argue that Congress, in ordering the President to commit a crime, has carried out a far worse crime than anything Obama has done. I'd also argue that Bush, using a signing statement to negate a law forbidding torture by declaring that the provisions of the law were to be ignored, again abused power on a massive scale.
(If you can use a signing statement to edit laws, not merely interpret them, then veto-proof margins can be unconstitutionally ignored. You don't veto the bill, you use a signing statement to say it doesn't apply. Further, even interpreting them is questionable. There's nothing to stop a President from using a signing statement to rewrite a bill completely from the ground up. It would take a while to write, but it could be done and therefore will eventually be done.)
I'm not saying Obama is innocent of abuse, merely that he's no worse than anyone else and that you should be careful to not ascribe him with motivations that obviously don't apply. Blame him for the right reasons, or the important points you make will be ignored by others.
It's my understanding that if a Canadian hates you, you mysteriously end up in the middle of an Ice Hockey brawl with no protective gear.
At least some of those have opted to use Proportional Representation. A number are parts of federations larger than themselves that they respect, leading to much less insular thinking. However, one could argue that even when these are the case, the structure of government is a consequence of the culture of the country. For that reason, it becomes hard to distinguish.
I would agree. Yes, it would require work. It would also require a lot of money, since to make a good evaluation requires more than the facts on the candidates but also research skills and a good enough grounding in a wide enough range of topics to be able to interpret those facts. And that means overhauling the educational system in America. (I'm thinking an absolute minimum would be to triple the mandatory educational budget.) It would also require purging schools of quite a bit of corruption, or the money will simply end in the pockets of organized thugs and megachurches.
What you're describing, and what I've believed in for some time, is a system that is very close to the one proposed by the Chartist movement - except I believe theirs was unnecessarily elitist and exclusive - and the one proposed by Plato in his book The Republic, which does indeed cover the idea of educating people to the necessary standard. It should be possible to raise standards to be as inclusive as humanly possible, as per Plato, but then include only those who opt-in to those standards, as per the Chartists. Those who voluntarily exclude themselves can't reasonably expect to be included (and could reasonably argue that it imposes on their right to exclude themselves if they want to).
I dunno. It has taken Britain over 9,000 years to become as corrupt and degenerate as it is, but the US has taken a mere 300 to at least rival, if not beat it. That would make the US 30 times as easy to corrupt.
Ah, but what if that's what they WANT you to think?
It is apparently being used as training material for the British Civil Service. (We found that out not that long after Mrs. Thatcher said that she loved the show, but I don't recall exactly how long after.) Now, doubtless you might find Civil Servants who claimed that it's to teach you how not to be, but that's exactly what Bernard would claim too.
Herein lies the problem with that: Those who believe in reducing the power of government when on the outside discover - on being elected - that they now have power and that they're now the ones others are wanting to reduce. Suicide has an honorable(ish) history in Japan, not so much in America. In the beginning, it may start as a method of keeping them in office and not be the first ones eliminated in a government reduction. After all, if the reformers are the first eliminated, the reforms can be reversed. In time, it's merely a method of keeping them in office and stopping anything that could potentially threaten it (such as their former reformist colleagues).
Ok, there is another problem. Non-government bodies (such as billionaires, corporations, religious sects and the media) also abuse any power they get. Transferring power from one abuser to another won't reduce the abuse. The problem is not one of the entity, the problem is far more fundamental than that. You'd have to make everything smaller, not just the Federal government, but you can't grant anyone the power to make everything smaller without first making something bigger. And once they are bigger and have that power, they're never going to want to make themselves smaller again.
I still lean more towards Athenian-style democracy, using bureaucracy as a framework to keep things manageable. In other words, instead of making government smaller, make government everyone. Have nobody on the "outside" and therefore nobody to fear. You can't have a pure democracy on that scale - 360 million people is just too many for any kind of serious debate on every topic. So you subdivide up government such that the number of people in each bureau is manageable and then shift people around every year or so to eliminate any new them-vs-us mentalities building up. This would mean the end of career politicians, paid positions in government and other such notions. But if you're serious about eliminating them-vs-us then it would also mean eliminating both the Federal and State governments (and therefore State boundaries), replacing them with mere departments within this super-cell style of governance.
There's a few problems with this scheme. It would be impossible to divide society up into a million or so meaningful departments, let alone organize a system that complex. Too many people have a vested interest in them-vs-us. 50%+ of the population wants a smaller government and would never agree to everyone being the government (you need a 2/3rds majority of States and 2/3rds majority in both Federal houses to pass even an amendment, this would be a massive rewrite), and following on from that well over 50% of the population are Constitutionalists and would never countenance a massive rewrite. In other words, I might like Athenian democracy but I'm in a minority of 1, which is enough to pass the salt but nothing else.
So whilst I have a concept that might be a starting point, it's a useless starting point which basically means I have nothing on how to fix the problem.
Tampering with Federal property is a big no-no, even if it is being used in questionable ways. Reporting it as a suspicious device would be ok, but would probably not do any good. You could try driving a rally course - nothing illegal about that - and you've plausible denial of any knowledge/responsibility if anything happens. Of course, if you do that too often then the next device might not be for tracking. People are funny like that.
As for the story, once the covert value was blown, the police seem to have used much the same tactic they've already admitted to carrying out against people like John Lennon (ie: drive them into paranoia). It doesn't sound implausible, but the key aspect here that a lot of people are ignoring is that these tactics ARE used to discredit others by driving them into paranoia. It is a mix of PsyOps and Rupert Murdoch journalism at that point, not true surveillance. The winners are the ones who can keep their wits about them.
The probability of finding such a device on your car is extremely low outside of those individuals who have drawn attention to themselves with views contrary to either the political whims of the day or the views of the civil service. (And the latter is the more problematic. Politicians are nothing compared to the Humphrey Applebys that actually are out there.) Even then, military drones are now entering police service. Yes, the ones that can potentially carry hellfire missiles. Why bother with an individual device that can be found when an eye in the sky is much harder to detect and can watch many people at once?
Which goes back to my prior point. Keeping your wits is what matters. Giving in to people who want you to go nuts won't help you. If you want to beat such games, you cannot play them. Stay as you are or become increasingly sane and fearless. That's how to win against this kind of emotional manipulation.
Americans fear their government and so work to protect themselves accordingly. Americans become the next government, which now believes that a paranoid, armed citizenry fears them, and so work to protect themselves accordingly. Americans discover these new protections, with the result that they fear their government even more.
Does the term "vicious cycle" mean anything to you guys? Or, since we're geeks, "positive feedback loop"?
When both sides of a debate fear each other and, in their efforts to protect themselves, cause the other side to fear them even more, neither side has a hope in hell of ever winning. Right now, total trust wouldn't be the brightest idea either (and would have to come from both sides at the same time) and I have no clue how to fix this bug, but both sides are guaranteed to lose if they keep going like this.
It could be interesting, but it'll be a while. Extracting 45-million year old strains of brewing yeast from amber sounds much more fun (and cheaper) - Wired ran a story on how to do this and I'm planning on giving it a go at some point. The challenge is to identify what's brewing yeast and what's lethal bacteria. Before it kills you.
I know some rocketry groups do just that, so whilst I can't speak as to whether Derek does, I can say that it should not be hard to find an expert amateur rocket guy to give such a talk.
Yeah, but a VM image isn't a cold boot. A plain VM image is essentially a warm boot (a lot of the system is already initialized) and most VMs are quite capable of handling VM images that are partially into a boot (since the first phase of the bootstrap really doesn't do anything that's important to a VM).
If you're going to consider VMs and other such hacks, then Coreboot + Linux + image of a ramdisk in Flash would give you a 3 second bootup time to a console, just not to a GUI desktop. With a few additional hacks, you can probably make an image of an already-started X server that can be loaded in to avoid having that start up. And so on. But the more hacks and shortcuts you take, the less you can justify calling that a cold boot to desktop. Lukewarm, maybe, since parts are "cold boot", but the rest gains performance by being warm boot in all but name and not by actually being fast from cold.
The flaw is to think that exactly one person is 100% to blame and that no other division of responsibility is possible.
If you bought a used car that was defective at time of manufacture and it still had the same fault, you'd blame the previous owner for not fixing it but you'd not hold the manufacturer blameless either. They created the problem, the fact that nobody fixed it doesn't change that. If you prefer a different example, if you throw a stone into the water, the stone only directly creates the first ripple but you would not then claim that each ripple out had nothing to do with the stone. That would be daft.
Yes, she's an adult which means that some percentage of the responsibility shifts onto her. Unlike the car or the ripple, she has some measure of independent thought. Not necessarily a normal adult's level - she's what psychologists call an "adult child", in part because of her disability and in part because an abusive background stunts mental growth.
My philosophy is that placing responsibility on one person and one person alone on almost anything is merely a way the members of society can avoid ever having to address underlying causes. the "one bad apple" theory simply doesn't hold up, IMHO. If you prefer a programming example, a segfault rarely occurs where the actual bug appears. It's normally the result of a bug somewhere else. Blaming that part of the code and/or trying to fix the wrong bit will bypass that one visible occurrence but it won't fix the problem itself.
In this case, I'd say that the father is 45% responsible, the daughter is 45% responsible and the mother is 10% responsible.
The father essentially brainwashed his daughter into being defective, the mother was compliant with this (knowing full well that it was criminal) and the daughter did nothing to remedy the defects later. In fairness to the mother, she was also brainwashed. The household apparently followed a typical cult mentality with the father being the cult leader. Cults are extremely hard to go against. However, it's not impossible and she earns a token responsibility for not doing so.
The daughter, again by being indoctrinated into a cult, isn't fully culpable. This is actually the law these days. I'm sure you remember from the Beltway Smiper case the references to the Triggerman Theory, where the brainwasher IS legally liable for the actions of those they brainwash. She snapped, in this case, and retaliated rather than being ordered to blackmail, but I don't consider mere orders to be a valid stopping point. It doesn't matter, in the end, if the person pushing the dominoes actually orders the last one to topple. It will fall because the first one fell because that's what dominoes do. She's not devoid of responsibility but she's not 100% responsible either.
Obviously, that depends on the Statute and the State Constitution governing it, but if it looks like that applies here then if the State has a serious issue all it has to do is raise the time limit. Frankly, I'm not a great fan of Statutes of Limitations. Yes, there comes a time when the evidence no longer exists, but clearly that's not the case here and that kind of debate is better settled by investigators or the court, it shouldn't be settled by some politicians setting a deadline.
I wouldn't necessarily trust a Texan to know Texan law. I wouldn't trust more than half of America to know how to spell "law". Being born in a given location doesn't give you any special privileges or abilities when it comes to knowing something.
Having said that, what matters is purely what is known and by whom. I would trust you to know Texas law because everything you've said matches what I've looked up. Ergo, you've done the legwork. Ergo, your comment is as correct as you're going to get outside of asking a lawyer certified in Texas. (Though why you'd ask someone who was positively certifiable, I dunno....)
This is the Great Error made by a lot of newbies to the Internet. They're too busy looking for things that confirm their biases that they don't look at the facts.
I believe some random guy on the Internet CAN discover some part of the Texas penal code that COULD demonstrate the State AG did not use all means at their disposal. Not "is", "can".
I believe it is reprehensible, bordering on fanatical, to reject a claim before you even know what the claim is.
I believe it is good judgement to listen, impartially and rationally, to a viewpoint that differs from my own.
I definitely believe that your kind of cynical, twisted excuse of a slam is truly pathetic.