Addicts already commit petty crime to pay for their drug habits
Of course, but now they get a minor punishment for the petty theft (enough to act as a disincentive for most people), but can get put away for years for minor possession.
plus the police wouldn't be busy trying to deal with drug dealers so they would have more resources available to deal with petty crimes.
It's an obvious solution, and the only ones who stand to lose are the criminal gangs who are currently making huge profits from illegal drugs.
Well them and, in the USA, the corporations that makes loads of money running prisons to hold people for drug possession and trafficking. They have a lot of money to throw around at politicians and media to fight the obvious solution.
The biggest counterargument is that petty crime will increase as addicts need to pay for their drug habits. I think that could easily be solved by saying that criminal penalties are tripled on anything other than a first offence if traces of a psychoactive drug (be it cocaine, THC, opiates like heroin or vicodin, or whatever) can be found in your bloodstream after a crime. Unlike 60 years ago, our diagnostic technology is now good enough to allow that to happen. Heck even if the accused refuses to give a blood sample, a urine sample will do. They gotta pee sometime.
Sure, but while your exhaust may give your general position away, it still makes it hard to aim weaponry accurately enough to ensure the kill on the tank. On the other hand, if the enemy throws some incendiaries or fragmentation ordnance your way, that fancy expensive IR camo just turned into bad ablative armor and probably isn't going to be much further use for stealthing.
If you're not on bedrock and not moving, you could drive a thermally conductive spike into the ground and dump your heat underground. It would take longer to spread and then, when you do move, you leave a false heat signature where you used to be, possibly further confusing the enemy with false data.
Not to mention that firing up a phosphor flare will light up plenty of ground and is a heck of a lot cheaper than any remote control searchlight. No expensive power source to get blown up either. The thing is you have to know the enemy is coming or lying in ambush.
That whole "remote control searchlight where you're not" thing is only any good at all if you're the one with a stationary position. Even then it's still acting as a beacon saying "I am around here" because it has to be on all the time or the stealthed enemy will sneak up on you when it isn't on.
It also isn't going to do you much good if you're travelling through enemy territory and the stealthed enemy tanks are lying doggo waiting for you. Some red shirt ensign expendable is going to need to be driving the searchlight along. I think Ensigns __Paul__ and camperdave just volunteered.
That would be my guess. There is a Tricorder app for iOS. A friend showed it to me the other day. It costs $0.99 and, in comparison to the Android app, it sucks massively. But maybe they pay off CBS and are planning an Android port. I won't be buying it.
Democrat is a singular noun whereas Republican can either be a singular noun or an adjective. I know the Republicans wish the Democrats were a party of one but...
Steve Jobs' health has gotten so bad he's had to resign. While Apple has many creative people in its society of mind, the company just lost the ego and super-ego that made them work together. Maybe somebody will step up to the plate and fill Jobs' shoes, but he certainly won't be replaced successfully by patent barratry.
The next 80 years saw a lot more invention in the U.S. It should be no surprise that the pace of invention was slow for a while, there was a significant upheaval involved in the Revolutionary War and in forming a new country after.
Sure, but a big part of that is that the industrial revolution finally made it across the ocean a few decades after it really got going in England and France. You need industrialization to provide force multiplication to the farmers, free up agrarian population for the growth of cities, and lead to more people with exposure to a basic technical education needed to push the state of the art. Again, there's a reason why most of those inventions you mentioned were made outside of the USA, and the ones that came from the USA were mostly from the tail end of that period. Apart for the steam locomotive and the steamship, most of the USA population wouldn't have known about any of those bazillion things you mentioned. Heck, antiseptics didn't really get widespread adoption in the USA until the Civil War's battlefield medicine acted as an indisputable proving ground. Also note here for a timeline of railroads in the USA, how the early ones came from England, and when people in the USA actually started inventing significant improvements.
There's a certain argument that, while slavery was the rallying point, the Civil War was also an economic war caused by the industrialized NorthEast wanting to keep its monopoly on industrial processing and preventing the previously agrarian South from becoming a competitor and cutting them out of the loop. In other words, the Revolution was possible because the USA had started to develop a localized industrial base, but the Civil War happened because that industrial base was no longer localized. That industrialized base is the incubator of innovation. So it should be no surprise that, after recovery from the Civil War, the rate of innovation as indicated by patent submissions would pick up.
Canadian emission standards are stricter than California's (one of the stricter US states) so there could be some increased cost there, though not enough to justify an $8000 markup.
Sure, but many or most of those inventions you listed were made in Europe. The US was primarily an agrarian nation for most of the time range you quoted, whereas Europe had more urban areas, denser population which made communications easier/faster, and a class system that made it easier for the upper classes to study and research. Of course a meritocracy has important advantages over a class system, but these are less significant in an agrarian society, Having >80% of your population toiling on farms tends to take the wind out of the sails of innovation (apart for farming implements and techniques).
It depends on the rate of inflation. If inflation is high enough, losses due to inflation over a ten year long payout can certainly overcome the higher taxes of a lump sum payment and increase from wise or even conservative investment over that 10 years.
Bigger eyes for lower light at northern latitudes? OK. But bigger brains because of lower light during winter? I don't buy it. However there's a theory that we lost our body hair because it allowed us to keep shed excess heat more easily, which allowed us to grow larger brains than our hirsute ape cousins because big brains generate a lot of heat. So it's more likely that humans at northern latitude had bigger brains because, just as with the evolution of naked skin, the cooler weather made it easier to keep bigger brains cool, and therefore made them an evolutionary advantage (due to more analytical/processing power and memory) instead of an evolutionary disadvantage (by requiring less activity to stay within a safe body temperature range).
Hmmm. Funny, I thought that the origin of spic was a shortened version of hispanic. Of course it's to be expected that ignorant bigots can't tell the difference between Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese.
Well since the US is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gas per capita (although China is catching up in pure volume), since that is likely to be one of the greatest causes of human misery in the 21st and 22nd century, and since a supermajority of US citizens are in denial about climate change.... good luck with that.
Hm, point. It's been a while since I was dealing with this stuff. I almost did make that mistake and, having worked with PostgreSQL, where metadata frequently refers to tables as relations, I should know better. Nevertheless, it can be pretty hard to put data into normalized forms that are more space-efficient and more easily kept consistent like 3rd or 4th Normal forms if you don't have FKs and RI. So, sure, you can have an RDBMs that doesn't support foreign keys and referential integrity, but you're probably going to run into efficiency or consistency issues unless you're dealing with relatively simple or disjointed data models.
I probably should have said: it's a pretty poor RDBMS if it doesn't support RI. That admits it's still an RDBMS, albeit a relatively poor one. In general conversation, that statement would probably be considered close to, if not interchangeable with my original statement. However I appreciate your request for the semantic correction.
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Of course, but now they get a minor punishment for the petty theft (enough to act as a disincentive for most people), but can get put away for years for minor possession.
Indeed.
12
Well them and, in the USA, the corporations that makes loads of money running prisons to hold people for drug possession and trafficking. They have a lot of money to throw around at politicians and media to fight the obvious solution.
The biggest counterargument is that petty crime will increase as addicts need to pay for their drug habits. I think that could easily be solved by saying that criminal penalties are tripled on anything other than a first offence if traces of a psychoactive drug (be it cocaine, THC, opiates like heroin or vicodin, or whatever) can be found in your bloodstream after a crime. Unlike 60 years ago, our diagnostic technology is now good enough to allow that to happen. Heck even if the accused refuses to give a blood sample, a urine sample will do. They gotta pee sometime.
Nah. Most likely is that the notaries will outsource all their IT to one or two ASPs (let's call it NotaryIT.com) and THAT gets hacked.
"Dolby noise reduction". Unfortunately it makes all music sound out of tune too.
Could be a problem if Ellison gets to choose weapons and choose fighter jets.
"Non-laws" like this one
Sure, but while your exhaust may give your general position away, it still makes it hard to aim weaponry accurately enough to ensure the kill on the tank. On the other hand, if the enemy throws some incendiaries or fragmentation ordnance your way, that fancy expensive IR camo just turned into bad ablative armor and probably isn't going to be much further use for stealthing.
If you're not on bedrock and not moving, you could drive a thermally conductive spike into the ground and dump your heat underground. It would take longer to spread and then, when you do move, you leave a false heat signature where you used to be, possibly further confusing the enemy with false data.
Not to mention that firing up a phosphor flare will light up plenty of ground and is a heck of a lot cheaper than any remote control searchlight. No expensive power source to get blown up either. The thing is you have to know the enemy is coming or lying in ambush.
That whole "remote control searchlight where you're not" thing is only any good at all if you're the one with a stationary position. Even then it's still acting as a beacon saying "I am around here" because it has to be on all the time or the stealthed enemy will sneak up on you when it isn't on.
It also isn't going to do you much good if you're travelling through enemy territory and the stealthed enemy tanks are lying doggo waiting for you. Some red shirt ensign expendable is going to need to be driving the searchlight along. I think Ensigns __Paul__ and camperdave just volunteered.
That would be my guess. There is a Tricorder app for iOS. A friend showed it to me the other day. It costs $0.99 and, in comparison to the Android app, it sucks massively. But maybe they pay off CBS and are planning an Android port. I won't be buying it.
Democrat is a singular noun whereas Republican can either be a singular noun or an adjective. I know the Republicans wish the Democrats were a party of one but...
Steve Jobs' health has gotten so bad he's had to resign. While Apple has many creative people in its society of mind, the company just lost the ego and super-ego that made them work together. Maybe somebody will step up to the plate and fill Jobs' shoes, but he certainly won't be replaced successfully by patent barratry.
Sure, but a big part of that is that the industrial revolution finally made it across the ocean a few decades after it really got going in England and France. You need industrialization to provide force multiplication to the farmers, free up agrarian population for the growth of cities, and lead to more people with exposure to a basic technical education needed to push the state of the art. Again, there's a reason why most of those inventions you mentioned were made outside of the USA, and the ones that came from the USA were mostly from the tail end of that period. Apart for the steam locomotive and the steamship, most of the USA population wouldn't have known about any of those bazillion things you mentioned. Heck, antiseptics didn't really get widespread adoption in the USA until the Civil War's battlefield medicine acted as an indisputable proving ground. Also note here for a timeline of railroads in the USA, how the early ones came from England, and when people in the USA actually started inventing significant improvements.
There's a certain argument that, while slavery was the rallying point, the Civil War was also an economic war caused by the industrialized NorthEast wanting to keep its monopoly on industrial processing and preventing the previously agrarian South from becoming a competitor and cutting them out of the loop. In other words, the Revolution was possible because the USA had started to develop a localized industrial base, but the Civil War happened because that industrial base was no longer localized. That industrialized base is the incubator of innovation. So it should be no surprise that, after recovery from the Civil War, the rate of innovation as indicated by patent submissions would pick up.
Canadian emission standards are stricter than California's (one of the stricter US states) so there could be some increased cost there, though not enough to justify an $8000 markup.
Sure, but many or most of those inventions you listed were made in Europe. The US was primarily an agrarian nation for most of the time range you quoted, whereas Europe had more urban areas, denser population which made communications easier/faster, and a class system that made it easier for the upper classes to study and research. Of course a meritocracy has important advantages over a class system, but these are less significant in an agrarian society, Having >80% of your population toiling on farms tends to take the wind out of the sails of innovation (apart for farming implements and techniques).
Well, if you were going to take it that far, Berkeley would be a vacuum because most matter (neutronium excepted) has nuclei.
It depends on the rate of inflation. If inflation is high enough, losses due to inflation over a ten year long payout can certainly overcome the higher taxes of a lump sum payment and increase from wise or even conservative investment over that 10 years.
Also commonly used for "dry cleaning"
Bigger eyes for lower light at northern latitudes? OK. But bigger brains because of lower light during winter? I don't buy it. However there's a theory that we lost our body hair because it allowed us to keep shed excess heat more easily, which allowed us to grow larger brains than our hirsute ape cousins because big brains generate a lot of heat. So it's more likely that humans at northern latitude had bigger brains because, just as with the evolution of naked skin, the cooler weather made it easier to keep bigger brains cool, and therefore made them an evolutionary advantage (due to more analytical/processing power and memory) instead of an evolutionary disadvantage (by requiring less activity to stay within a safe body temperature range).
Hmmm. Funny, I thought that the origin of spic was a shortened version of hispanic. Of course it's to be expected that ignorant bigots can't tell the difference between Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese.
So you're saying they have delusions of being Australians? :-)
Better get cracking on creating a Tevatron-level accelerator to verify those Fermilab results.
Well since the US is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gas per capita (although China is catching up in pure volume), since that is likely to be one of the greatest causes of human misery in the 21st and 22nd century, and since a supermajority of US citizens are in denial about climate change.... good luck with that.
Hm, point. It's been a while since I was dealing with this stuff. I almost did make that mistake and, having worked with PostgreSQL, where metadata frequently refers to tables as relations, I should know better. Nevertheless, it can be pretty hard to put data into normalized forms that are more space-efficient and more easily kept consistent like 3rd or 4th Normal forms if you don't have FKs and RI. So, sure, you can have an RDBMs that doesn't support foreign keys and referential integrity, but you're probably going to run into efficiency or consistency issues unless you're dealing with relatively simple or disjointed data models.
I probably should have said: it's a pretty poor RDBMS if it doesn't support RI. That admits it's still an RDBMS, albeit a relatively poor one. In general conversation, that statement would probably be considered close to, if not interchangeable with my original statement. However I appreciate your request for the semantic correction.