What's that have to do with it? 55 was simply a maximum speed limit; municipalities were free to set limits below that.
These little towns have always set limits lower than 55 on the state/federal highways going through them, so the 55 federal limit doesn't really affect them at all.
I think this is partly a consequence of American federalism (which has a lot of upsides, but some downsides too): as I understand it in most of Europe, tax rates aren't set locally, but for large sections of the country at a time. But these little towns would have to tax themselves appropriately, and nobody living there wants that: they want to "tax" other people.
I at some points piss off these small towns by driving precisely at their speed limit in the left lane, and accumulate a line of cars behind me wishing I'd drive at a sane speed rather than at their speed limit.
In the Southwest, highway speed limits are fairly sane, and people generally drive between the limit and 10 over. But urban interstates? The limit on the Beltway is 55, but often the traffic pattern goes 70 (when it isn't prevented from doing so because of congestion).
I had to go to traffic court to dispute a "being parked with no plates" ticket that I'd received shortly after recovering my stolen car, while the replacement plates were still in the mail. (The thief stole the plates.)
I saw the magistrate at 4PM, and he told me I was the first person he'd "let off" that day. He saw probably a dozen cases an hour; if he'd been working five hours that's 60 cases. A guilty rate of 98.5%? That's remarkable.
I can agree on taking the incentive out of ticketing for the sake of ticketing, but unfortunately, it would never happen. There's way too much money to be made.
I can agree on taking the incentive out of robbing people for the sake of profit, but unfortunately, it would never happen. There's way too much money to be made.
I've argued for this for a while -- and the penalty for violating this should be the same as the penalty for robbing someone at gunpoint on the highway plus the penalty for abusing your authority as a peace officer, since it amounts to essentially the same thing.
Law enforcement and revenue collection are not the same thing.
There is a difference between driving 100mph, weaving in and out of traffic, on a crowded road where the traffic pattern is going 65mph... and driving at a safe speed that just happens to be higher than the one on the sign. I've gotten plenty of speeding tickets doing the latter (and none doing the former, but that's probably because I don't do it).
It's worse than that, because in many places everyone acknowledges that the speed on the sign is unrealistic and drives faster than that. So it becomes this sadly hilarious guessing game, where people have to guess how fast they should really drive, and what speed the cops will actually object to. In places it's 15 or even 20 mph over (the stretch of I-83 through Baltimore where the speed limit is 45mph comes to mind, as does the whole Beltway). None of these folks are driving particularly unsafely, though.
In most of the criminal code, we've asked ourselves "What things are actually harmful to others and worth criminalizing?" You can tell that there's been a lot of thought given to this in places. Yet with the speed limits there seems to have been no such care taken.
Setting speed limits below the maximum safe speed under ideal conditions is also "overticketing". Setting speed limits and designing a traffic enforcement program with revenue, rather than public safety, in mind is a subversion of the purpose of law enforcement and ought to land the folks doing it in prison for a very long time -- it's just as bad as bribery, as far as undermining the legitimacy of the rule of law.
Honestly, I'd like to see statewide referenda passed wherever possible saying that all revenue from traffic and parking tickets goes not to any particular government body but gets donated to the "offender"'s choice of charity. Taking the profit out of claims of "but it's for your saaaaafety!" ought to nip this nonsense in the bud.
Actually, in many places with red light cameras, the city has decreased the length of the yellow light below that recommended by national safety guidelines in order to get more ticket revenue.
Let me say that again: they've shortened the length of the yellow lights, not for safety, but in spite of safety, so they get to write more tickets.
At many of these places, it's possible to be driving along at a safe speed and see the light turn yellow, and be put in a situation where you have to absolutely slam on your brakes in order to stop behind the line -- and this is me driving a small passenger car with brakes limited only by the coefficient of friction. Drivers of large trucks which can't brake as hard complain even harder about this.
Exactly -- and, even more strongly, we have been genetically engineering other animals for millennia, by selective breeding. We built, for instance, the bulldog -- a dog with no face, that can't fuck on its own, can't give birth on its own, and is generally completely physically incompetent. How is building a goat that makes spider silk any more unnatural or cruel?
I think "libertarian socialism" doesn't necessarily have to be an oxymoron. Classically the socialist institutions people envision are involuntary and government-run, but I can envision voluntary ones, too; the Free Software community, for instance, is very socialist ("hey, let's produce a thing, and let the public use it"). So is the work of organization like the Nature Conservancy. You could also call co-ops and credit unions and similar operations "libertarian socialist" -- they're worker-owned or user-owned means of production, but they were built without the government forcing anybody to do anything.
The thing about the use of guns for self-defense, additionally, is that there is the possibility of a snowball effect. If the possibility of victims being armed deters crime (the thesis of the gun-rights crowd), then even unarmed people benefit from their peaceful neighbors being armed. I used to live in a shitty neighborhood in Baltimore (and, before that, a shitty neighborhood in Washington); I don't own a gun and don't have the experience necessary to carry one safely, but I would have been happier if some of my neighbors were armed.
How are socialists and globalists to be tarred with the same brush?
Socialists are people who think that the government knows better than you do how you should participate in the economy.
Globalists are people who think that national boundaries are artificial, detrimental barriers to trade and that, if two people under two different governments want to buy and sell things, they should be able to do so without interference from their governments.
Well, it is copyrighted. I can't republish it or claim that it is mine. But I can do other things, like translate it to Spanish, or move it around in my computer's RAM, or print it out and take it on an airplane with me. "Access", here, means the ability to do anything with it other than those things that are specifically forbidden to me by copyright law. They're welcome to claim that there are other things they don't want me to do either -- maybe "you can't read this text while drunk." But (under any sane legal system) that should be no more enforceable than me telling Slashdot readers that if they want to display this comment on a smartphone they have to do the Funky Chicken while reading.
Go back and read the GPL. There's a clever little idea in there:
It says: "You don't have to agree to this license to use this software. However you got the copy you've got, you're welcome to do anything you want with it which is otherwise permitted to you. However, you're not allowed to redistribute this software, since I've got a copyright on it, unless you agree to these terms."
A license is a thing that lets you do something beyond the rights that you have by default. What you're claiming is that it's legally enforceable to give someone a book and then putting a note inside the front cover saying "You can't read this book unless you do X". No, you sold me the damn book -- it's mine and I can do whatever I want with it, so long as I don't violate your copyright.
No, you don't. And they can't impose a condition: "you have to agree to X in order to do something that you are permitted to do anyway" (namely, copy some bits from Firefox's address space to the address space where KDE keeps its cut-and-paste buffer). I am perfectly free to see their T&C and say "No, I don't agree, but you already sent me the bits before you told me what the conditions of receiving them were, so I'm going to manipulate them locally in any way I want so long as it doesn't violate your copyright. If you wanted me to only receive those bits if I agreed to some terms or other, you should have made me agree beforehand."
And I don't even have to read their T I can download their page via wget or curl. Again, if you didn't want me to have it, don't put a damn computer on the internet that offers it to anyone who asks.
You are giving an interpretation according to the laws of some country or other. Which country? Do you think that interpretation is sane? At some point we have to acknowledge that basically no legal system is going to get copyright right as it relates to digital media and the internet and construct our own ethics, fully acknowledging that the lawyers may not like it.
Yes, reproducing the article in its entirety and publishing it is a violation of copyright. I agree that if I were to, say, copy and paste that text on a website and publish it and claim it as my own, I'm committing a tort against the writer. But simply moving some bits around on a computer, no matter what I do to them, isn't copyright infringement. Neither is exercising fair use rights.
They have a computer. If you ask their computer nicely, it will send you some bits.
They're free to send me whatever bits they like in response to my request (so long as they don't materially misrepresent what they are, as in the case of malware etc.). In turn, I'm free to do whatever I like with the bits they send me. If I want to interpret them as instructions for rendering a webpage, as is conventional, I can do so. I can also print out the HTML and wipe my ass with it if I like.
If that webpage has some Javascript that says "Ooh, you highlighted some text, pay me please!" I am free to turn off Javascript and cut and paste that text, or render it in Lynx, or grep the HTML, or whatever the hell else I want.
If they didn't want me to have access to the text they sent me, they shouldn't have sent it to me.
They use another trick to take care of this, though: "microlenses", miniature optics in front of each pixel that channel light away from the insensitive regions (the data paths) and onto the actual light-sensitive pixels. A recent advance is "gapless microlenses", where nearly all of the light incident on the sensor winds up falling on some pixel or other.
You can compute the force on the asteroid as a function of distance: if it's 1000km away from the asteroid, the acceleration of the asteroid is 7*10^-19 m/s^2 for a 10-ton spaceship. That r^2 in Newton's law of gravity is a bitch. If this is going to work at all you've got to get closer.
This has always struck me as the most direct, reliable solution.
If you're going to use rockets with small thrust, you'd be better off just sticking two rockets on your probe, using one to push on the asteroid (with the exhaust gases or ions or whatever) and the other pointed in the other direction for station-keeping. Gravity is pretty damn weak.
As was pointed out earlier, the spaceship needs to be far enough out that its exhaust gases (from the retrorockets used for station-keeping) don't mostly strike the asteroid and cancel the force of gravity. (Perhaps we can use multiple retrorockets at angles pointed away from each other to ensure all the gases miss the asteroid, but this is inefficient -- you can do the trig.) If the asteroid is 500m across, let's say that we'll need to be at least 500m away. But in computing the force we need to compute the distance to the center of mass of the asteroid, giving a total distance of 1km.
Let's say we have a 10-ton spacecraft (very expensive to launch) up there.
Then the acceleration on the asteroid is
(10^4 kg) 7 * 10^-11 / (1000)^2 m/s^2 = 7*10^-7 / 1*10^6 = about 7*10^-13 m/s^2.
A year is 3*10^7 sec, so after a year we'd have a delta-v of about twenty microns per second.
Google Calculator will do this for you too: google "gravitational constant * 10 tonnes / (1 km^2) * 1 year".
Slashdot Mirror
What's that have to do with it? 55 was simply a maximum speed limit; municipalities were free to set limits below that.
These little towns have always set limits lower than 55 on the state/federal highways going through them, so the 55 federal limit doesn't really affect them at all.
Exactly.
I think this is partly a consequence of American federalism (which has a lot of upsides, but some downsides too): as I understand it in most of Europe, tax rates aren't set locally, but for large sections of the country at a time. But these little towns would have to tax themselves appropriately, and nobody living there wants that: they want to "tax" other people.
I at some points piss off these small towns by driving precisely at their speed limit in the left lane, and accumulate a line of cars behind me wishing I'd drive at a sane speed rather than at their speed limit.
I dunno what road you're driving on. :)
In the Southwest, highway speed limits are fairly sane, and people generally drive between the limit and 10 over. But urban interstates? The limit on the Beltway is 55, but often the traffic pattern goes 70 (when it isn't prevented from doing so because of congestion).
I had to go to traffic court to dispute a "being parked with no plates" ticket that I'd received shortly after recovering my stolen car, while the replacement plates were still in the mail. (The thief stole the plates.)
I saw the magistrate at 4PM, and he told me I was the first person he'd "let off" that day. He saw probably a dozen cases an hour; if he'd been working five hours that's 60 cases. A guilty rate of 98.5%? That's remarkable.
I can agree on taking the incentive out of ticketing for the sake of ticketing, but unfortunately, it would never happen. There's way too much money to be made.
I can agree on taking the incentive out of robbing people for the sake of profit, but unfortunately, it would never happen. There's way too much money to be made.
I've argued for this for a while -- and the penalty for violating this should be the same as the penalty for robbing someone at gunpoint on the highway plus the penalty for abusing your authority as a peace officer, since it amounts to essentially the same thing.
Law enforcement and revenue collection are not the same thing.
There is a difference between driving 100mph, weaving in and out of traffic, on a crowded road where the traffic pattern is going 65mph... and driving at a safe speed that just happens to be higher than the one on the sign. I've gotten plenty of speeding tickets doing the latter (and none doing the former, but that's probably because I don't do it).
It's worse than that, because in many places everyone acknowledges that the speed on the sign is unrealistic and drives faster than that. So it becomes this sadly hilarious guessing game, where people have to guess how fast they should really drive, and what speed the cops will actually object to. In places it's 15 or even 20 mph over (the stretch of I-83 through Baltimore where the speed limit is 45mph comes to mind, as does the whole Beltway). None of these folks are driving particularly unsafely, though.
In most of the criminal code, we've asked ourselves "What things are actually harmful to others and worth criminalizing?" You can tell that there's been a lot of thought given to this in places. Yet with the speed limits there seems to have been no such care taken.
Setting speed limits below the maximum safe speed under ideal conditions is also "overticketing". Setting speed limits and designing a traffic enforcement program with revenue, rather than public safety, in mind is a subversion of the purpose of law enforcement and ought to land the folks doing it in prison for a very long time -- it's just as bad as bribery, as far as undermining the legitimacy of the rule of law.
Honestly, I'd like to see statewide referenda passed wherever possible saying that all revenue from traffic and parking tickets goes not to any particular government body but gets donated to the "offender"'s choice of charity. Taking the profit out of claims of "but it's for your saaaaafety!" ought to nip this nonsense in the bud.
Actually, in many places with red light cameras, the city has decreased the length of the yellow light below that recommended by national safety guidelines in order to get more ticket revenue.
Let me say that again: they've shortened the length of the yellow lights, not for safety, but in spite of safety, so they get to write more tickets.
At many of these places, it's possible to be driving along at a safe speed and see the light turn yellow, and be put in a situation where you have to absolutely slam on your brakes in order to stop behind the line -- and this is me driving a small passenger car with brakes limited only by the coefficient of friction. Drivers of large trucks which can't brake as hard complain even harder about this.
Exactly -- and, even more strongly, we have been genetically engineering other animals for millennia, by selective breeding. We built, for instance, the bulldog -- a dog with no face, that can't fuck on its own, can't give birth on its own, and is generally completely physically incompetent. How is building a goat that makes spider silk any more unnatural or cruel?
I think "libertarian socialism" doesn't necessarily have to be an oxymoron. Classically the socialist institutions people envision are involuntary and government-run, but I can envision voluntary ones, too; the Free Software community, for instance, is very socialist ("hey, let's produce a thing, and let the public use it"). So is the work of organization like the Nature Conservancy. You could also call co-ops and credit unions and similar operations "libertarian socialist" -- they're worker-owned or user-owned means of production, but they were built without the government forcing anybody to do anything.
The thing about the use of guns for self-defense, additionally, is that there is the possibility of a snowball effect. If the possibility of victims being armed deters crime (the thesis of the gun-rights crowd), then even unarmed people benefit from their peaceful neighbors being armed. I used to live in a shitty neighborhood in Baltimore (and, before that, a shitty neighborhood in Washington); I don't own a gun and don't have the experience necessary to carry one safely, but I would have been happier if some of my neighbors were armed.
How are socialists and globalists to be tarred with the same brush?
Socialists are people who think that the government knows better than you do how you should participate in the economy.
Globalists are people who think that national boundaries are artificial, detrimental barriers to trade and that, if two people under two different governments want to buy and sell things, they should be able to do so without interference from their governments.
They're two opposing views.
Well, it is copyrighted. I can't republish it or claim that it is mine. But I can do other things, like translate it to Spanish, or move it around in my computer's RAM, or print it out and take it on an airplane with me. "Access", here, means the ability to do anything with it other than those things that are specifically forbidden to me by copyright law. They're welcome to claim that there are other things they don't want me to do either -- maybe "you can't read this text while drunk." But (under any sane legal system) that should be no more enforceable than me telling Slashdot readers that if they want to display this comment on a smartphone they have to do the Funky Chicken while reading.
Go back and read the GPL. There's a clever little idea in there:
It says: "You don't have to agree to this license to use this software. However you got the copy you've got, you're welcome to do anything you want with it which is otherwise permitted to you. However, you're not allowed to redistribute this software, since I've got a copyright on it, unless you agree to these terms."
A license is a thing that lets you do something beyond the rights that you have by default. What you're claiming is that it's legally enforceable to give someone a book and then putting a note inside the front cover saying "You can't read this book unless you do X". No, you sold me the damn book -- it's mine and I can do whatever I want with it, so long as I don't violate your copyright.
No, you don't. And they can't impose a condition: "you have to agree to X in order to do something that you are permitted to do anyway" (namely, copy some bits from Firefox's address space to the address space where KDE keeps its cut-and-paste buffer). I am perfectly free to see their T&C and say "No, I don't agree, but you already sent me the bits before you told me what the conditions of receiving them were, so I'm going to manipulate them locally in any way I want so long as it doesn't violate your copyright. If you wanted me to only receive those bits if I agreed to some terms or other, you should have made me agree beforehand."
And I don't even have to read their T I can download their page via wget or curl. Again, if you didn't want me to have it, don't put a damn computer on the internet that offers it to anyone who asks.
You are giving an interpretation according to the laws of some country or other. Which country? Do you think that interpretation is sane? At some point we have to acknowledge that basically no legal system is going to get copyright right as it relates to digital media and the internet and construct our own ethics, fully acknowledging that the lawyers may not like it.
Yes, reproducing the article in its entirety and publishing it is a violation of copyright. I agree that if I were to, say, copy and paste that text on a website and publish it and claim it as my own, I'm committing a tort against the writer. But simply moving some bits around on a computer, no matter what I do to them, isn't copyright infringement. Neither is exercising fair use rights.
They have a computer. If you ask their computer nicely, it will send you some bits.
They're free to send me whatever bits they like in response to my request (so long as they don't materially misrepresent what they are, as in the case of malware etc.). In turn, I'm free to do whatever I like with the bits they send me. If I want to interpret them as instructions for rendering a webpage, as is conventional, I can do so. I can also print out the HTML and wipe my ass with it if I like.
If that webpage has some Javascript that says "Ooh, you highlighted some text, pay me please!" I am free to turn off Javascript and cut and paste that text, or render it in Lynx, or grep the HTML, or whatever the hell else I want.
If they didn't want me to have access to the text they sent me, they shouldn't have sent it to me.
Take your always-on internet DRM and your micro-transactions and stick them up your ass.
Q: "What can change the nature of a publisher?"
A: "Involuntary sodomy."
I initially read "voting for $X" as "being given X dollars to vote" rather than as a Perl variable...
They use another trick to take care of this, though: "microlenses", miniature optics in front of each pixel that channel light away from the insensitive regions (the data paths) and onto the actual light-sensitive pixels. A recent advance is "gapless microlenses", where nearly all of the light incident on the sensor winds up falling on some pixel or other.
You can compute the force on the asteroid as a function of distance: if it's 1000km away from the asteroid, the acceleration of the asteroid is 7*10^-19 m/s^2 for a 10-ton spaceship. That r^2 in Newton's law of gravity is a bitch. If this is going to work at all you've got to get closer.
This has always struck me as the most direct, reliable solution.
If you're going to use rockets with small thrust, you'd be better off just sticking two rockets on your probe, using one to push on the asteroid (with the exhaust gases or ions or whatever) and the other pointed in the other direction for station-keeping. Gravity is pretty damn weak.
Well, we can work that out.
As was pointed out earlier, the spaceship needs to be far enough out that its exhaust gases (from the retrorockets used for station-keeping) don't mostly strike the asteroid and cancel the force of gravity. (Perhaps we can use multiple retrorockets at angles pointed away from each other to ensure all the gases miss the asteroid, but this is inefficient -- you can do the trig.) If the asteroid is 500m across, let's say that we'll need to be at least 500m away. But in computing the force we need to compute the distance to the center of mass of the asteroid, giving a total distance of 1km.
Let's say we have a 10-ton spacecraft (very expensive to launch) up there.
Then the acceleration on the asteroid is
(10^4 kg) 7 * 10^-11 / (1000)^2 m/s^2 = 7*10^-7 / 1*10^6 = about 7*10^-13 m/s^2.
A year is 3*10^7 sec, so after a year we'd have a delta-v of about twenty microns per second.
Google Calculator will do this for you too: google "gravitational constant * 10 tonnes / (1 km^2) * 1 year".