" If the state has one law and the feds make one that supersedes it, then the federal law wins."
This sometimes can lead to very ugly legal situations though - with federal, state and local authorities often working to subvert each other and all being constrained by the courts, America has a rich traditional of legal games and tricks, often resorting to indirectly prohibiting what cannot be directly prohibited or passing laws that are impossible to comply with in order to drive away undesirables.
BP received one of the largest fines in history for their deepwater screwup: $18.7 billion, or roughly six year's worth of declared operating profit. The investigating revealed systematic incompetence and lax safety practices, including deliberately electing not to install essential but expensive head equipment and falsifying equipment tests. Despite this few individuals have faced any serious penalty because the corporation, as corporations are intended to do, acts to shield individuals from liability. The only people who may face jail time are one engineer and two site managers - and so far only one has been sentenced, to probation. Not a single person has actually spent even one day behind bars.
A corporation as a legal entity has many purposes. One of which is to protect individual workers from liability. Turns out it's pretty good at protecting them from criminal accountability too.
"Now what would happen if a CO2 storage facility would have a similar blowout, of a gas that is very heavy and creeps along the ground and kills people in houses (and livestock) instead of just stinking them out?"
It's on my mad science to-do list already: - Achieve first magnetic shrinking of a manhole cover, powered by a lightning strike. - Build a fusion reactor. Just a fusor. - Manufacture a thioacetone stink bomb. - Build a laser lawnmower.
Current project: - Power a small LED above the handle on my back gate using energy harvested from radio transmissions.
I did a little BC mining myself as a hobby. I never aimed to make money off it, I just wanted to play with the technology. I learned enough to run the numbers and determine that it really isn't practical to mine BC for profit except on a very large scale - even if you have free power (ie, live in college dorm), the payback period for a miner is long enough that the miner will be obsolete by the end. The only way it an work is if you have not only cheap power, but enough scale to buy mining hardware in bulk and so pay less per GH/s.
I probably have the record for highest hash rate achieved on a Yellowjacket though. I had the thing immersed in silicone oil cooled by ice bricks.
Star Wars was never intended to be hard SF. It's pure space opera. The spaceships and robots serve only to create a setting for a reasonably epic story, the technology is not the focus. The characters are.
"Do I like it? No. Do I have a solution? Sure - force people to use their real identities on-line, same as they do to letters to the editor or tv and radio interviews."
There are some nasty people online. Flame wars can get out of hand. I've seen things turn bad. I've seen an over-the-top feminist who contacted an opponent's employer to falsely accuse him of harassment and advocating for legalisation of rape in an attempt to get him fired. I've seen a super-patriotic flag-waver who was filled with such a powerful loathing for anyone who opposed his political views that he once created a whole website in the name of an opponent in which he advocated sex with children and the abolition of age of consent laws in an attempt to discredit them. There have been numerous instances of people falsely making police calls claiming there is a shooting in progress in order to trigger a SWAT team attack upon someone's home over things as trivial as losing in an online game. You would have to be foolish indeed to reveal your real name when there are people like that on the internet.
You wouldn't need to hack the system. You'd need to disable it, which is a lot easier.
It's election day! Who shall be president?
A botnet strikes! Massive DDoS attacks upon internet infrastructure. Major AT&T and Comcast routers knocked out of service in Texas, Kansas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Millions are unable to vote. Guess who wins the election? Investigators are unsure if the attack was by an activist group or a state-sponsored actor on behalf of another country.
A republic partially addresses this because politicians are, mostly, reasonably well educated and have access to advisers. This means they can act as a sort of 'moron filter' that usually means the government can't be talked into banning the lethal chemical dihydrogen monoxide. Stupid ideas can still get passed, but the absolutely brain-dead idiotic ones usually don't. Usually.
I'd make it a minimum 70% to pass a law - because if you put it at 50%, a too-close-to-call issue could flip back and fourth twice a week as competing campaigns take the edge and the luck of the polling margin. That'd just leave people uncertain what the law actually says.
Britain is a republic in most practical senses. Our monarchy is vestigial, and not expected to exercise any real power. The only part that isn't a republic resides in the House of Lords, but their power is restricted. It is in the Commons that policy is made and passed.
Elizabeth II is a fine queen, and a queen the country can be proud of. But her role is purely that of a ceremonial figurehead. In theory she could gum up the works of government a bit still if there was an issue she felt strongly enough over, but she won't - and if any future monarch does, parliament will quickly revise the law to stop them. Personally I'd like to start the process of abolishing the monarchy so that it might end on a high note, rather than risk a future monarch either attempting to meddle or being caught in a terrible personal scandal and having to be forced from office in shame.
So we're a mostly-republic. A republic with a few non-republic elements left over from history, but that have little impact on the actual making of laws.
Not true. Ancient Athens had a direct democracy. Ancient Greece was not a country, it was a culture - a collection of what we would call countries all unified only by a common language and religion and reasonably similar culture. They were not all under the same form of government, and were frequently at war with one another. Athens was the one that had a direct democracy for a time, and it didn't last long.
Satellites don't have to deal with launch windows that much. That's more for interplanetary systems. Sats do have launch windows, they just come very frequently. Weather is more of a concern.
Trees as a whole do not benefit from being tall. It uses resources, and makes them vulnerable to weather damage. If the trees were intelligent they would hold a conference and decide that they should cooperate to collect as much sun as they can - staying just above ground height. They may pass a law prohibiting trees from growing too tall and shading their neighbours. But trees are not intelligent - the tree that goes higher than those around it gets more sun, and so creates more offspring, and so over evolutionary time giant forests emerge. Trees struggling, directing vast resources to making structurally sound wood to gain that critical edge against those adjacent. This struggle is detrimental to treekind as a whole, but it doesn't matter, because it is individual survival or failure that incentivises the trees.
It can have an effect on the police district income though. In the US fines go to the local police district, so there's an incentive for local government to set the limits low and use them as a source of easy income - ideally by catching people travelling through but not living locally, so there won't be any political fallout. We had a similar thing in the UK many years ago with speed cameras that were being blatantly used as revenue generators, until the law was changed to place some restrictions on their use and require they be highly visible.
Who the internet 'should' be managed by doesn't matter, because the internet is composed of hardware, and the hardware exists within the jurisdiction of various countries. The UN can say whatever they want - but if some country passes a law mandating censorship, and has the power to compel equipment operators to comply under threat of criminal prosecution, then censorship will occur within the borders of that country.
I ran into this problem while trying to build a laser lawnmower. You have to boil the water out of the grass before the laser will cut it, so the lawnmower needs to move at a very slow speed to cut effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
" If the state has one law and the feds make one that supersedes it, then the federal law wins."
This sometimes can lead to very ugly legal situations though - with federal, state and local authorities often working to subvert each other and all being constrained by the courts, America has a rich traditional of legal games and tricks, often resorting to indirectly prohibiting what cannot be directly prohibited or passing laws that are impossible to comply with in order to drive away undesirables.
BP received one of the largest fines in history for their deepwater screwup: $18.7 billion, or roughly six year's worth of declared operating profit. The investigating revealed systematic incompetence and lax safety practices, including deliberately electing not to install essential but expensive head equipment and falsifying equipment tests. Despite this few individuals have faced any serious penalty because the corporation, as corporations are intended to do, acts to shield individuals from liability. The only people who may face jail time are one engineer and two site managers - and so far only one has been sentenced, to probation. Not a single person has actually spent even one day behind bars.
A corporation as a legal entity has many purposes. One of which is to protect individual workers from liability. Turns out it's pretty good at protecting them from criminal accountability too.
"Now what would happen if a CO2 storage facility would have a similar blowout, of a gas that is very heavy and creeps along the ground and kills people in houses (and livestock) instead of just stinking them out?"
Lake Nyos.
"What's that in tons or cubic meters?"
- The entire rest of the world.
It's on my mad science to-do list already:
- Achieve first magnetic shrinking of a manhole cover, powered by a lightning strike.
- Build a fusion reactor. Just a fusor.
- Manufacture a thioacetone stink bomb.
- Build a laser lawnmower.
Current project:
- Power a small LED above the handle on my back gate using energy harvested from radio transmissions.
I did a little BC mining myself as a hobby. I never aimed to make money off it, I just wanted to play with the technology. I learned enough to run the numbers and determine that it really isn't practical to mine BC for profit except on a very large scale - even if you have free power (ie, live in college dorm), the payback period for a miner is long enough that the miner will be obsolete by the end. The only way it an work is if you have not only cheap power, but enough scale to buy mining hardware in bulk and so pay less per GH/s.
I probably have the record for highest hash rate achieved on a Yellowjacket though. I had the thing immersed in silicone oil cooled by ice bricks.
I thought piracy was supposed to be killing the creative industries?
Star Wars was never intended to be hard SF. It's pure space opera. The spaceships and robots serve only to create a setting for a reasonably epic story, the technology is not the focus. The characters are.
I found the perfect phrase to sum up Interstellar: "The least realistic black hole since The Black Hole."
"Do I like it? No. Do I have a solution? Sure - force people to use their real identities on-line, same as they do to letters to the editor or tv and radio interviews."
There are some nasty people online. Flame wars can get out of hand. I've seen things turn bad. I've seen an over-the-top feminist who contacted an opponent's employer to falsely accuse him of harassment and advocating for legalisation of rape in an attempt to get him fired. I've seen a super-patriotic flag-waver who was filled with such a powerful loathing for anyone who opposed his political views that he once created a whole website in the name of an opponent in which he advocated sex with children and the abolition of age of consent laws in an attempt to discredit them. There have been numerous instances of people falsely making police calls claiming there is a shooting in progress in order to trigger a SWAT team attack upon someone's home over things as trivial as losing in an online game. You would have to be foolish indeed to reveal your real name when there are people like that on the internet.
You wouldn't need to hack the system. You'd need to disable it, which is a lot easier.
It's election day! Who shall be president?
A botnet strikes! Massive DDoS attacks upon internet infrastructure. Major AT&T and Comcast routers knocked out of service in Texas, Kansas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Millions are unable to vote. Guess who wins the election? Investigators are unsure if the attack was by an activist group or a state-sponsored actor on behalf of another country.
Fundamental problem: People are idiots.
A republic partially addresses this because politicians are, mostly, reasonably well educated and have access to advisers. This means they can act as a sort of 'moron filter' that usually means the government can't be talked into banning the lethal chemical dihydrogen monoxide. Stupid ideas can still get passed, but the absolutely brain-dead idiotic ones usually don't. Usually.
I'd make it a minimum 70% to pass a law - because if you put it at 50%, a too-close-to-call issue could flip back and fourth twice a week as competing campaigns take the edge and the luck of the polling margin. That'd just leave people uncertain what the law actually says.
Britain is a republic in most practical senses. Our monarchy is vestigial, and not expected to exercise any real power. The only part that isn't a republic resides in the House of Lords, but their power is restricted. It is in the Commons that policy is made and passed.
Elizabeth II is a fine queen, and a queen the country can be proud of. But her role is purely that of a ceremonial figurehead. In theory she could gum up the works of government a bit still if there was an issue she felt strongly enough over, but she won't - and if any future monarch does, parliament will quickly revise the law to stop them. Personally I'd like to start the process of abolishing the monarchy so that it might end on a high note, rather than risk a future monarch either attempting to meddle or being caught in a terrible personal scandal and having to be forced from office in shame.
So we're a mostly-republic. A republic with a few non-republic elements left over from history, but that have little impact on the actual making of laws.
Not true. Ancient Athens had a direct democracy. Ancient Greece was not a country, it was a culture - a collection of what we would call countries all unified only by a common language and religion and reasonably similar culture. They were not all under the same form of government, and were frequently at war with one another. Athens was the one that had a direct democracy for a time, and it didn't last long.
In the US democracy, the most important issue in deciding who a person votes for is the dashed R or D that follows their name.
Satellites don't have to deal with launch windows that much. That's more for interplanetary systems. Sats do have launch windows, they just come very frequently. Weather is more of a concern.
"If you put it on by default, nobody pays attention to it."
If you don't put it on by default, nobody pays attention to it anyway. There's no incentive for sites to obey the request.
Why are trees tall?
Trees as a whole do not benefit from being tall. It uses resources, and makes them vulnerable to weather damage. If the trees were intelligent they would hold a conference and decide that they should cooperate to collect as much sun as they can - staying just above ground height. They may pass a law prohibiting trees from growing too tall and shading their neighbours. But trees are not intelligent - the tree that goes higher than those around it gets more sun, and so creates more offspring, and so over evolutionary time giant forests emerge. Trees struggling, directing vast resources to making structurally sound wood to gain that critical edge against those adjacent. This struggle is detrimental to treekind as a whole, but it doesn't matter, because it is individual survival or failure that incentivises the trees.
Now ask: Why are ads so annoying?
It can have an effect on the police district income though. In the US fines go to the local police district, so there's an incentive for local government to set the limits low and use them as a source of easy income - ideally by catching people travelling through but not living locally, so there won't be any political fallout. We had a similar thing in the UK many years ago with speed cameras that were being blatantly used as revenue generators, until the law was changed to place some restrictions on their use and require they be highly visible.
I think Obama got that prize mostly for keeping McCain out.
Yep. Our laser was only 3W, and that was quite enough of a hazard to our retinas.
Still a long way to go before we can be rid of the horrid thing, but this is one step closer.
Who the internet 'should' be managed by doesn't matter, because the internet is composed of hardware, and the hardware exists within the jurisdiction of various countries. The UN can say whatever they want - but if some country passes a law mandating censorship, and has the power to compel equipment operators to comply under threat of criminal prosecution, then censorship will occur within the borders of that country.
I ran into this problem while trying to build a laser lawnmower. You have to boil the water out of the grass before the laser will cut it, so the lawnmower needs to move at a very slow speed to cut effectively.