American politics is just a dysfunctional example. There are examples of it working better elsewhere in the world. Here in the UK, for example. We grumble about our politicians a lot, and it's no great secret that they are in bed with financial interests, but at the same time we do get to have a sensible debate over social issues in a manner that seems to be impossible in the US. You won't find anyone in politics here accusing the prime minister of trying to import illegal children to sell for medical research, or claiming the national health service is a secret plan to destroy the economy because our leader suffers white guilt. Accusations that are commonplace in the US. We have our lunatic fringe, sure - but in the US, that fringe seems to be almost all of politics.
I think a lot of it can be blamed on the media. Success in politics there demands brand recognition, which means there's a need to constantly out-outragious your rivals in order to remain a household name. It's better to be mocked by half the country than ignored by all of it.
There was an incident some years ago very similar to that - a Russian man tried to sell a 'perpetual motion machine' on eBay. He had no idea what it was, it was in the basement when he inherited the house and had been powering the lights for years. Free power, so he wasn't going to question it until he desperately needed money.
Turned out to be an RTG. When the soviet union collapsed a lot of soldiers realised they weren't going to be paid for some time, and a couple of the more enterprising ones managed to steal one. They soviet union used to use some of the most powerful ones built to provide long-term reliable power to remote military bases, lighthouses, navigational beacons and suchlike. When you've that much snow around you don't want to have to haul diesel.
Note that fossil fuels are still the dominant energy source, despire being the dirtyiest and most dangerous option. Why? Because they are cheap. Really cheap. So cheap nothing else can match them. And the deaths are nicely externalisable too, so people get used to them. Nuclear reactors are emission-free, so the only environmental cost is with building the facilitities and mining the ore.
Barely working. Not due to a lack of power: It's just that half the systems have broken down from age. It's a tribute to the skill and dedication of engineers that they work at all still. You try designing a sensor package and transmittor that can go four decades without maintenance. Difficult enough with modern parts.
Dead Like Me. The show went with a toilet seat for comedy reasons. In practice not a lot is going to survive most burn-ups. With satellites, the most durable parts will be attitude control gyros. I expect MIR had some substantial pressure hatches too. But an important element of the first episode was the arbitaryness of the death: The character didn't do anything at all to earn it, or even cause it. One day she was just walking along and, suddenly, supersonic toilet seat falls from the sky. No grand plan. Sometimes people die because of of simple bad luck and circumstances over which they have no control. She spends much of the rest of the series dealing with others who died in similar pointless chance events.
In terms of power generation, they are a replacement for coal. They fill the same role: Great for baseload, but ramp up/down times are awful. Still need gas for that.
That might be 'How to Kill a Human Being' - a BBC program (I think) in which the presenter studies the political situation around the death penalty in the US and controversy over means of execution considering such factors as reliability, painlessness, level of gore and dependence upon executioner training. He does conclude that nitrogen is the ideal means by all standards. At the conclusion of the program he discusses this finding with a representative of a death-penalty campaign group, and is shocked at the response: The representative explained that in his view, the condemned must be made to die painfully - to do otherwise is an injustice towards the victims.
It's not just Apple. I just got a new Asus laptop for a family member. It needed full disk encryption software installed (Windows 8 Home edition disables bitlocker), and in anticipation of screwing up the boot process I naturally wanted to image the drive first. The bottom comes off with a few screws, but what did I find inside? not only is the RAM soldered to the mainboard, but the hard drive has a 'warranty void if removed' sticker placed atop one of the retaining screws. Fortunately I don't care about warranties, but I suspect that if I'd gotten an SSD model I may well have found that soldered to the board too.
I think a lot of it in laptops is driven by the quest for ultimate thinness. Manufacturers are desperate to shave off milimeters, with Apple leading the charge. Conenctors are too thick, so they have to go. Even screws are too thick, so they go and everything gets glued together instead.
Should be doable. They are quite capable of Pavlovian association. Knock them out, apply suitable stimulus - say, a moderately painful electric shock plus a distinctive scent in the water. Repeat enough time for your unsedated control group to show a fear response to the scent, and see if your sedated octopods have learned the association too.
A paralytic is used as part of the three-drug protocol for lethal injection, as the first of the three. It's there to make sure that if the sedative (Drug number two) doesn't actually suffice to knock the condemned out, they won't spend their last moments crying out in agony and making a scene that'll embarrass the prison service and provide a grounds for which later condemned may challenge the means of execution as cruel and unusual punishment. They can still suffer an agonizing death in silence - most of those executed are murderers, so there's minimal public pressure to find a less painful means of execution.
That's a federal crime. You're not authorised by the owner of the system to use it for reading slashdot, so your usage of it is unauthorised. It's supposed to be a law against hacking, it's just badly worded.
There are certain practical reasons for the memory access. It's basically DMA. Faster data transfer for less power. In mobile devices, power is everything. The baseband processor runs a seperate processor and OS for legal reasons - no need to get approval for ever new minor revision of a phone that way, and less chance of some clever hacker managing to root the thing and modify it to trample everyone else's timeslots and make sure they can still place calls when the network is overloaded.
The meanings of words change over time. This all gets confusing. A text with multiple meanings tends to reflect the reader's own views back upon them. Just look at what diversity of religious denominations may exist while sharing a common holy text.
The problem with this approach comes from trying to define 'oppressive.' You may like the idea of a clerk misplacing the paperwork required to authorise the use of force on peaceful protesters, yes. But elsewhere, another clerk has decided that the government has no right to 'redefine marriage' and is quietly smuging the ink on the appropriate applications to make sure gay couples don't get processed. Both would view themselves as the heroes, bravely risking their job to fight against a government exceeding lawful authority.
It's common with inheritence and minors. Imagine what would happen if a six-year-old suddenly inherited half a million dollars? Not a good thing. So in that circumstance, the money would be placed in a trust fund with a contract to return it to the beneficery when they reach a specified age, and (hopefully) have the maturity to use it wisely.
This is why I liked the original ending to I, Robot, before the movie changed it.
A conspiracy of AIs starts plotting to take overr the world. Scientists discover this, and initially panic over how they could hope to stop an intelligence of such vast capabilitiy. Then they realise that the new robot overlords are designed without any greed, or lust, or craving for power. That they are of far greater intelligence than any human, approach all decisions from a rational basis alone, and cannot make a mistake. That they are, by design, incapable of acting against the best interests of mankind. The scientists conclude their best option is to just do nothing: Let it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows... oh, what is Apple up to now? What? WINDOWS TEN!
American politics is just a dysfunctional example. There are examples of it working better elsewhere in the world. Here in the UK, for example. We grumble about our politicians a lot, and it's no great secret that they are in bed with financial interests, but at the same time we do get to have a sensible debate over social issues in a manner that seems to be impossible in the US. You won't find anyone in politics here accusing the prime minister of trying to import illegal children to sell for medical research, or claiming the national health service is a secret plan to destroy the economy because our leader suffers white guilt. Accusations that are commonplace in the US. We have our lunatic fringe, sure - but in the US, that fringe seems to be almost all of politics.
I think a lot of it can be blamed on the media. Success in politics there demands brand recognition, which means there's a need to constantly out-outragious your rivals in order to remain a household name. It's better to be mocked by half the country than ignored by all of it.
"Removing party affiliation from the ballot would be an excellent first step."
I like this idea! I suspect that most US voters wouldn't know who to vote for without the letter, presidential election excepted.
In the UK system, parties are a formal element of the democratic process. In the US they are really just an informal overlay.
There are always issues. If that's how you define free speech, it's interesting to see how broadly fraud can be defined.
There was an incident some years ago very similar to that - a Russian man tried to sell a 'perpetual motion machine' on eBay. He had no idea what it was, it was in the basement when he inherited the house and had been powering the lights for years. Free power, so he wasn't going to question it until he desperately needed money.
Turned out to be an RTG. When the soviet union collapsed a lot of soldiers realised they weren't going to be paid for some time, and a couple of the more enterprising ones managed to steal one. They soviet union used to use some of the most powerful ones built to provide long-term reliable power to remote military bases, lighthouses, navigational beacons and suchlike. When you've that much snow around you don't want to have to haul diesel.
About an hour ago I had to explain to my mother that Russia does not have a satellite they can use to spy through her webcam.
Remember that, on any specified subject, the vast majority of people are utter morons.
Cheaper, yes. Cleaner, no.
Note that fossil fuels are still the dominant energy source, despire being the dirtyiest and most dangerous option. Why? Because they are cheap. Really cheap. So cheap nothing else can match them. And the deaths are nicely externalisable too, so people get used to them. Nuclear reactors are emission-free, so the only environmental cost is with building the facilitities and mining the ore.
Barely working. Not due to a lack of power: It's just that half the systems have broken down from age. It's a tribute to the skill and dedication of engineers that they work at all still. You try designing a sensor package and transmittor that can go four decades without maintenance. Difficult enough with modern parts.
"science based- environmentalist/hippie/greenie "
Unfortunately the green movement is rather plagued by poor science.
Dead Like Me. The show went with a toilet seat for comedy reasons. In practice not a lot is going to survive most burn-ups. With satellites, the most durable parts will be attitude control gyros. I expect MIR had some substantial pressure hatches too. But an important element of the first episode was the arbitaryness of the death: The character didn't do anything at all to earn it, or even cause it. One day she was just walking along and, suddenly, supersonic toilet seat falls from the sky. No grand plan. Sometimes people die because of of simple bad luck and circumstances over which they have no control. She spends much of the rest of the series dealing with others who died in similar pointless chance events.
In terms of power generation, they are a replacement for coal. They fill the same role: Great for baseload, but ramp up/down times are awful. Still need gas for that.
That might be 'How to Kill a Human Being' - a BBC program (I think) in which the presenter studies the political situation around the death penalty in the US and controversy over means of execution considering such factors as reliability, painlessness, level of gore and dependence upon executioner training. He does conclude that nitrogen is the ideal means by all standards. At the conclusion of the program he discusses this finding with a representative of a death-penalty campaign group, and is shocked at the response: The representative explained that in his view, the condemned must be made to die painfully - to do otherwise is an injustice towards the victims.
My mistake. You get the idea, though.
It's not just Apple. I just got a new Asus laptop for a family member. It needed full disk encryption software installed (Windows 8 Home edition disables bitlocker), and in anticipation of screwing up the boot process I naturally wanted to image the drive first. The bottom comes off with a few screws, but what did I find inside? not only is the RAM soldered to the mainboard, but the hard drive has a 'warranty void if removed' sticker placed atop one of the retaining screws. Fortunately I don't care about warranties, but I suspect that if I'd gotten an SSD model I may well have found that soldered to the board too.
I think a lot of it in laptops is driven by the quest for ultimate thinness. Manufacturers are desperate to shave off milimeters, with Apple leading the charge. Conenctors are too thick, so they have to go. Even screws are too thick, so they go and everything gets glued together instead.
Should be doable. They are quite capable of Pavlovian association. Knock them out, apply suitable stimulus - say, a moderately painful electric shock plus a distinctive scent in the water. Repeat enough time for your unsedated control group to show a fear response to the scent, and see if your sedated octopods have learned the association too.
A paralytic is used as part of the three-drug protocol for lethal injection, as the first of the three. It's there to make sure that if the sedative (Drug number two) doesn't actually suffice to knock the condemned out, they won't spend their last moments crying out in agony and making a scene that'll embarrass the prison service and provide a grounds for which later condemned may challenge the means of execution as cruel and unusual punishment. They can still suffer an agonizing death in silence - most of those executed are murderers, so there's minimal public pressure to find a less painful means of execution.
Have you ever read Slashdot at work?
That's a federal crime. You're not authorised by the owner of the system to use it for reading slashdot, so your usage of it is unauthorised. It's supposed to be a law against hacking, it's just badly worded.
There are certain practical reasons for the memory access. It's basically DMA. Faster data transfer for less power. In mobile devices, power is everything. The baseband processor runs a seperate processor and OS for legal reasons - no need to get approval for ever new minor revision of a phone that way, and less chance of some clever hacker managing to root the thing and modify it to trample everyone else's timeslots and make sure they can still place calls when the network is overloaded.
The DoI has no actual legal power or status. It's just a historical artifact.
The meanings of words change over time. This all gets confusing. A text with multiple meanings tends to reflect the reader's own views back upon them. Just look at what diversity of religious denominations may exist while sharing a common holy text.
The problem with this approach comes from trying to define 'oppressive.' You may like the idea of a clerk misplacing the paperwork required to authorise the use of force on peaceful protesters, yes. But elsewhere, another clerk has decided that the government has no right to 'redefine marriage' and is quietly smuging the ink on the appropriate applications to make sure gay couples don't get processed. Both would view themselves as the heroes, bravely risking their job to fight against a government exceeding lawful authority.
All six of them.
It's common with inheritence and minors. Imagine what would happen if a six-year-old suddenly inherited half a million dollars? Not a good thing. So in that circumstance, the money would be placed in a trust fund with a contract to return it to the beneficery when they reach a specified age, and (hopefully) have the maturity to use it wisely.
I'm not sure NK would notice. They don't have a lot of internet usage.
This is why I liked the original ending to I, Robot, before the movie changed it.
A conspiracy of AIs starts plotting to take overr the world. Scientists discover this, and initially panic over how they could hope to stop an intelligence of such vast capabilitiy. Then they realise that the new robot overlords are designed without any greed, or lust, or craving for power. That they are of far greater intelligence than any human, approach all decisions from a rational basis alone, and cannot make a mistake. That they are, by design, incapable of acting against the best interests of mankind. The scientists conclude their best option is to just do nothing: Let it happen.