The democrats owe their political power to people who believe in science.
A belief in science is correlated with low income and dependency on welfare?
Yes, a cheap shot, but it's about as accurate as your characterization of Democratic and Republican support (I should mention that I think both parties are despicable).
If you're dumb enough to spend thousands of dollars on something called a 'Thetin meter' then it's your fault.. not the seller's, then again it's France:P..
So there should be no laws against fraud? Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, Madoff... all that should be completely legal, because it's the victim's fault?
I sometimes wonder if there wouldn't be less of those schemes if they were legal. I think people often assume they must be legit just because they'd be shut down if they were illegal, right? Heck, in Madoff's case, there was a whole government bureaucracy set up specifically to assure people that he was playing straight.
The process of R2-45 specifically pertains to shooting the target with a Colt.45 pistol, causing the victim's "thetan" to leave the body (exteriorization)
Will that work with my Kimber 1911 or do I have to find an original Colt Government Model to destroy my thetan with?;)
Knowing Scientology, you need a very particular custom Kimber that can only be purchased from the CoS for a cost about five times that of the fanciest race gun you've ever seen.
All that's needed to qualify is self-governance for the constituent entities, with clearly defined limits which cannot be encroached upon by the central government.
Which proves that the US is not a federation. c.f. Gonzales v Raich.
The US was intended to be a federation, but the states have been gradually weakened to the point that they have only whatever power the central government chooses to allow them, and not one bit more. The big turning point was the 16th and 17th amendments. The 16th gave the federal government the power of the purse and the 17th liberated it from state oversight.
Nope. Think about it as a statistical thing. There's an equal probability that you'll change your password to something that the cracker is just about to try, as there is to change it to something the cracker hasn't tried yet
Correct. The purpose of password changes is to (hopefully) reduce the window of vulnerability, so that if an attacker has obtained your password (by cracking, shoulder-surfing, social engineering, etc.) they can exploit it only for a limited time.
This is just an idea, but wouldn't it be better for hash algorithms to be slower since it'd make it harder to brute force?
You can always slow down a hash algorithm by iterating it, if you really want to. But there are lots of applications where they need to be fast and unless the algorithm is flawed, brute force is simply impractical no matter how fast the hash is.
Finding a collision by brute force for a specific input and an unflawed 256-bit hash algorithm will require, on average, hashing 2^255 trial inputs. That's an impossibly huge number.
Even if you just wanted to generate *any* collision, so you get a major helping hand from the Birthday Problem, you'd still have to try, on average 2^128 inputs. If you had a trillion computers, each able to do a trillion hashes per second, it would take, on average, ten million years. Oh, and you'd also need 2^136 bits of storage. The problem with that is that even if you could use only electron per bit to store your data, there aren't enough electrons in the universe!
These are some seriously big numbers. A couple of orders of magnitude of performance one way or the other isn't going to make any difference. Or rather, if it does, the hash is already too broken to be of any use and should be replaced.
So far, i've only seen units designed for use in the US, which means they have a physically incompatible plug (and thus require a bulky adapter) and require 110V whereas european sockets provide 240V...
According to the feature list, it handles 100-240VAC/50-60Hz. So you may need a plug adapter, but the voltage isn't an issue.
If you want to actually sell enough CDs (or novels, or software, or greetings cards, or whatever) to make anything like a living, you need marketing.
Jonathan Coulton is doing well without a big marketing engine behind him. He may never be a millionaire, but he's making a comfortable income doing what he loves to do.
I think the future of music is a lot more people making a living, but at white-collar income levels, not superstar income levels. If all you're aiming for is a comfortable six-figure income, a few thousand CDs per year plus some solid income from live performances can do the trick.
I think many dead Germans would beg to differ. Bletchley Park didn't decrypt messages so they could catch unicorns in giant butterfly nets, they did it so that they could locate and sink German convoys, and outmaneuver and crush German forces.
Also, this:
They crunched numbers, invented great mathematics and the entire field of Computer Science
is not exactly true. The mathematics was done in Poland, and Bombes weren't computers at all. Bombes were essentially high-speed, motorized Enigmas with a circuit that tested the output against a cribbed value. The Colossus machines at Bletchley Park were computers, but weren't Turing-complete and were roughly contemporary with both Zuse' work in Germany (the Z3 was the first programmable electronic computer) and ENIAC (the first Turing-complete computer) development in the US.
As for computer science more generally, Turing was crucial to its development, but much of his key work was done before the war, not at Bletchley Park. Meanwhile, many other key ideas came from elsewhere, both before and during the war, including the work of Claude Shannon and John von Neumann.
The work at Bletchley Park was hugely important to ending the war, and a lot of very clever people worked very hard to break Enigma messages on an industrial scale, but most of what they did had no non-war value.
I think it's worth preserving, but let's not overstate the case.
parents frequently have to overcome previously decided upon levels of contamination to function as a parent
No doubt. Two of my kids have thrown up into my mouth, and one son actually managed to pee in my mouth. Yuck! But you deal with it.
The puke was arguably my own fault. I was lying on my back and tossing the kid to make him giggle. He laughed so hard he spit up and I was laughing, too, so my mouth was open. You'd think after this happened once I'd have learned my lesson, but a few years later I repeated the performance with a second child.
The pee was the fault of a clueless niece who didn't know how to change a baby boy's diaper. Those with experience know that you do NOT leave the penis uncovered. Cool, fresh air seems to trigger urination. I was actually just opening my mouth to explain this fact when I got hit right in the face. Like any experienced parent, my automatic reaction was to block the stream with one hand while getting a diaper over it with the other. Then I rinsed my mouth.
I made both. I supplied a quotation from the founding documents supporting my side of the argument, in addition to stating why that quotation is largely irrelevant.
My apologies, then. I did jump into the thread in-progress. I think your position is wrong, but at least it's not inconsistent.
Those state legislatures are engaged in wholesale political posturing. If they actually cared about the constitutional powers of the Federal government, why are guns, abortion, and gay marriage the only issues they ever bring up?
Why? Because they're hypocritical neo-cons, who like big government as long as it does what they want, of course. My perception is that there is a small but growing true constitutionalist sentiment, though that may primarily be an artifact of who I choose to hang out with.
Assuming my perception isn't too skewed, though, what I see is that a lot of people are really frightened by the growth of the federal government over the last couple of presidencies, and see Obama massively increasing the pace. I think the scale of the bailouts (both Bush's and Obama's) woke them up. Now they're wondering if it can possibly be sustained or if the federal government is going to collapse, and thinking that perhaps a return to more decentralized power is a way to mitigate those risks.
Whittling the Commerce Clause down to an appropriate size, as opposed to the all-powerful status it's had since FDR beat the Supreme Court into submission, is a crucial first step.
I'm a strong supporter of the right to keep and bear arms[*], but even if I weren't I'd still be rooting for this particular "posturing" to succeed.
My view is the the Federal Government is too centralized and powerful. I think the institutions that deny due process like the CIA and NSA and DHS should be vehemently attacked for being unconstitutional, and then we can worry about things of lesser importance. I think that's a more principled stance that the people who claim to have principles, but are in fact extraordinary hypocrites. When it comes to unconstitutionality, regulating minimum fuel efficiency isn't even on my radar.
I agree with all of the that. Like I said, I think you can even make a case that Congress legitimately should be able to regulate fuel efficiency under the Commerce Clause. I think tariffs make more sense and would be more effective, but in any case it's a trivial issue.
Still, I like to argue against Congress' power to regulate whenever there's a hint of justification for it because so many Americans have forgotten that there are supposed to be limits to Congressional power. And, frankly, it's easier to get people to listen when you say Congress shouldn't be able to do something that your audience already dislikes.
[*] FYI, my position on firearms is (1) I think they're a crucial last line of defense against tyranny; (2) I don't think it's possible to disarm criminals with any gun law; (3) studies of the effectiveness of gun control laws have shown them to be completely ineffective at reducing crime; (4) studies of the the effects of liberalized concealed carry laws have shown them to *reduce* crime, especially violent crime; and (5) I enjoy shooting, both targets and hunting, and I find it a great, wholesome family activity that teaches discipline, self-control and respect. Due to (4), I have a concealed firearm permit and carry a gun most everywhere I go. I hope I never have reason to draw it, but I am prepared should the need ever arise to defend myself or those around me.
My position on the other hot-button topics you mentioned: I think abortion is very sad but I'm pro-choice, and I think government has no place regulating any sort of marriage.
If the constitution is irrelevant whenever it disagrees with modern practice, why does it matter what some dead guy argued 220 years ago? If you're going to ignore the foundational documents, you may as well not bother with appeals to that authority, and just make arguments that stand on their own merits.
It's doubtful. Again, interstate squabbling over commerce will immediately come back under the rule of the Federal Government. That's one of the main reasons we have it.
The point is that the commerce in question is not interstate. But I suppose all of those state legislatures are just engaging in a historical mind experiment.
Sure, buddy. Just provide a single quote, footnote, or anything supporting your claim that the founding fathers would be against this particular regulation. Seems rather ridiculous, doesn't it?
Doesn't work that way -- or at least it wasn't supposed to. The US Constitution specifies the limited set of powers given to the federal government, and reserves everything else to the sates and the people. Unless you can find something in there that indicates this SHOULD be a federal responsibility, it shouldn't.
There's no direct constitutional support for the CIA, NSA, Air Force, CDC, FDA, FEMA...
You're right about the CIA, NSA, CDC and FEMA; they can't be justified constitutionally. With the possible exception of the CDC they're also agencies which are often found infringing on civil liberties. The FBI is also pretty questionable.
All of the above agencies could be legitimately created by the states, of course, either by establishing them as joint state offices, or by amending the Constitution to give the federal government those powers explicitly. If we as a nation really think we need those agencies, and we need them to be part of the federal executive branch, then we should ratify the appropriate constitutional amendments to allow them to be created, rather than simply ignoring the founding document.
The Air Force is a reasonable extension of Congress' powers to maintain a Navy or raise Armies -- though that power has also been hugely abused. The Constitution intended the bulk of non-naval national defense to be performed via state militias. National Guard units can (and do) provide air power. The full-time federal military forces should be a tiny fraction of what they are. Among other things, reducing them to a Constitutional level would remove the temptation to deploy them all over the world to meddle in the affairs of others. That would be a good thing since no president, from either party, seems to be able to resist that temptation.
So, did they in particular have a propensity to deny states certain rights that threatened the prosperity and security of the nation?
No, they did not. The sovereign states are empowered to respond to threats, both individually and collectively. And if the states collectively feel that it's necessary to give additional power to the federal government, then the states can do that, through the amendment process.
Does dependence on a finite fuel which has been bankrupting our country for decades count as a danger? Is the freedom to produce an inefficient car that important in comparison? Again, I would say that the "freedom" to have a Hummer matters far less than the freedom to be free of entangling alliances and dependence on foreign nations for basic transportation.
Bah.
There's a simple and completely constitutional mechanism to address these issues: Congress can tax imports. They should put a $50 per barrel tax on imported oil. This would provide the motivation for more efficient cars as well as boosting focus on exploiting local oil resources (oil shale, tar sands, etc.) and use of renewable energy sources.
That said, I think regulation of automobiles sold across state lines does fall within the legitimate purview of Congress. This is an area where the Commerce Clause clearly applies. What they can't do is regulate automobiles that are manufactured and sold intrastate, nor do they have any legitimate power to deny those vehicles to be used in other states -- though other states certainly could choose to deny their use.
There's a test of the theory that intrastate commerce is exempt from federal regulation coming up. It'll be very interesting to see how it goes. Montana and Texas have passed legislation specifying that firearms that are manufactured in their states and which do not leave their states are not subject to federal regulations. A dozen other states are preparing to
I can speak only about my childhood but somehow my grandparents could fit both them and their three grandchildren in a bloody Lada.
With the three kids all in seat belts, and maybe even in the enormous car seats and booster seats that are required by law?
In my state, kids have to be in some sort of a booster seat until they're eight years old. This means a family with three kids will, for several years, have all three of them in seats of some sort. Your typical small sedan may have three seat belts in the back, but there's simply no room to cram three car seats in there.
Modern small sedans have also done away with the bench seat in front, so the maximum seating capacity is five, even if everyone is small enough to fit, yet big enough not to require car seats. For a family with four kids, the only options are minivans or SUVs, because of the legal requirements dictating how everyone has to be strapped in.
Yeah, fuck everyone who can't afford to live closer to where they work. That'll show 'em!
If no one at the office can afford to get to the office, then the office will have to move.
If there's an economic incentive to reduce consumption -- with any mixture of increasing fuel efficiency or decreasing miles driven -- it will happen. Merely improving efficiency may actually increase miles driven, keeping consumption relatively constant.
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The democrats owe their political power to people who believe in science.
A belief in science is correlated with low income and dependency on welfare?
Yes, a cheap shot, but it's about as accurate as your characterization of Democratic and Republican support (I should mention that I think both parties are despicable).
If you're dumb enough to spend thousands of dollars on something called a 'Thetin meter' then it's your fault.. not the seller's, then again it's France :P..
So there should be no laws against fraud? Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, Madoff ... all that should be completely legal, because it's the victim's fault?
I sometimes wonder if there wouldn't be less of those schemes if they were legal. I think people often assume they must be legit just because they'd be shut down if they were illegal, right? Heck, in Madoff's case, there was a whole government bureaucracy set up specifically to assure people that he was playing straight.
I mean, scientologists are a bunch of loons, but take a look at the first set of Google search entries when you look up "catholic priests"
Whoah... you're right. The first two results are sad, but the third is just crazy.
I can't just borrow one from Tom Cruise?
Nope. They're custom-tuned to the body thetans of the particular individual. That's what makes them so expensive.
The process of R2-45 specifically pertains to shooting the target with a Colt .45 pistol, causing the victim's "thetan" to leave the body (exteriorization)
Will that work with my Kimber 1911 or do I have to find an original Colt Government Model to destroy my thetan with? ;)
Knowing Scientology, you need a very particular custom Kimber that can only be purchased from the CoS for a cost about five times that of the fanciest race gun you've ever seen.
It's actually quite frightening when you consider how much "reliable" material is out there that truly has basis neither in fact nor reality.
Is that fact reliable?
Makes me glad I'm not responsible for administering Windows systems! Thanks for the information, it's interesting.
All that's needed to qualify is self-governance for the constituent entities, with clearly defined limits which cannot be encroached upon by the central government.
Which proves that the US is not a federation. c.f. Gonzales v Raich.
The US was intended to be a federation, but the states have been gradually weakened to the point that they have only whatever power the central government chooses to allow them, and not one bit more. The big turning point was the 16th and 17th amendments. The 16th gave the federal government the power of the purse and the 17th liberated it from state oversight.
Nope. Think about it as a statistical thing. There's an equal probability that you'll change your password to something that the cracker is just about to try, as there is to change it to something the cracker hasn't tried yet
Correct. The purpose of password changes is to (hopefully) reduce the window of vulnerability, so that if an attacker has obtained your password (by cracking, shoulder-surfing, social engineering, etc.) they can exploit it only for a limited time.
Well, unless they can escalate to root.
Most systems have a "three strikes and you're out for 5 minutes". So that kind of makes 65 guesses a minute impossible. You'd have 3 every 5 minutes.
But most systems only apply this policy per account.
If you have 300 known usernames you can try another username/password pair every second and never test one account more than once per five minutes.
This is just an idea, but wouldn't it be better for hash algorithms to be slower since it'd make it harder to brute force?
You can always slow down a hash algorithm by iterating it, if you really want to. But there are lots of applications where they need to be fast and unless the algorithm is flawed, brute force is simply impractical no matter how fast the hash is.
Finding a collision by brute force for a specific input and an unflawed 256-bit hash algorithm will require, on average, hashing 2^255 trial inputs. That's an impossibly huge number.
Even if you just wanted to generate *any* collision, so you get a major helping hand from the Birthday Problem, you'd still have to try, on average 2^128 inputs. If you had a trillion computers, each able to do a trillion hashes per second, it would take, on average, ten million years. Oh, and you'd also need 2^136 bits of storage. The problem with that is that even if you could use only electron per bit to store your data, there aren't enough electrons in the universe!
These are some seriously big numbers. A couple of orders of magnitude of performance one way or the other isn't going to make any difference. Or rather, if it does, the hash is already too broken to be of any use and should be replaced.
So far, i've only seen units designed for use in the US, which means they have a physically incompatible plug (and thus require a bulky adapter) and require 110V whereas european sockets provide 240V...
According to the feature list, it handles 100-240VAC/50-60Hz. So you may need a plug adapter, but the voltage isn't an issue.
If you want to actually sell enough CDs (or novels, or software, or greetings cards, or whatever) to make anything like a living, you need marketing.
Jonathan Coulton is doing well without a big marketing engine behind him. He may never be a millionaire, but he's making a comfortable income doing what he loves to do.
I think the future of music is a lot more people making a living, but at white-collar income levels, not superstar income levels. If all you're aiming for is a comfortable six-figure income, a few thousand CDs per year plus some solid income from live performances can do the trick.
bring a war to an end without hurting *anyone*
I think many dead Germans would beg to differ. Bletchley Park didn't decrypt messages so they could catch unicorns in giant butterfly nets, they did it so that they could locate and sink German convoys, and outmaneuver and crush German forces.
Also, this:
They crunched numbers, invented great mathematics and the entire field of Computer Science
is not exactly true. The mathematics was done in Poland, and Bombes weren't computers at all. Bombes were essentially high-speed, motorized Enigmas with a circuit that tested the output against a cribbed value. The Colossus machines at Bletchley Park were computers, but weren't Turing-complete and were roughly contemporary with both Zuse' work in Germany (the Z3 was the first programmable electronic computer) and ENIAC (the first Turing-complete computer) development in the US.
As for computer science more generally, Turing was crucial to its development, but much of his key work was done before the war, not at Bletchley Park. Meanwhile, many other key ideas came from elsewhere, both before and during the war, including the work of Claude Shannon and John von Neumann.
The work at Bletchley Park was hugely important to ending the war, and a lot of very clever people worked very hard to break Enigma messages on an industrial scale, but most of what they did had no non-war value.
I think it's worth preserving, but let's not overstate the case.
The 2^-18 is _really_scary_
The 'first 4 bytes', not so much.
So, meh. Of course true hardcore cryptanalysts are sure to be already ditching OpenSSH or maybe piping it through GPG first.
Fuck gubfr onfgneqf, ebg13 vf tbbq rabhtu sbe nalbar.
Allow me to translate:
$ echo "Fuck gubfr onfgneqf, ebg13 vf tbbq rabhtu sbe nalbar." | caesar
Shpx those bastards, rot13 is good enough for anyone.
parents frequently have to overcome previously decided upon levels of contamination to function as a parent
No doubt. Two of my kids have thrown up into my mouth, and one son actually managed to pee in my mouth. Yuck! But you deal with it.
The puke was arguably my own fault. I was lying on my back and tossing the kid to make him giggle. He laughed so hard he spit up and I was laughing, too, so my mouth was open. You'd think after this happened once I'd have learned my lesson, but a few years later I repeated the performance with a second child.
The pee was the fault of a clueless niece who didn't know how to change a baby boy's diaper. Those with experience know that you do NOT leave the penis uncovered. Cool, fresh air seems to trigger urination. I was actually just opening my mouth to explain this fact when I got hit right in the face. Like any experienced parent, my automatic reaction was to block the stream with one hand while getting a diaper over it with the other. Then I rinsed my mouth.
Reading comprehension is not your strong suit.
I made both. I supplied a quotation from the founding documents supporting my side of the argument, in addition to stating why that quotation is largely irrelevant.
My apologies, then. I did jump into the thread in-progress. I think your position is wrong, but at least it's not inconsistent.
Those state legislatures are engaged in wholesale political posturing. If they actually cared about the constitutional powers of the Federal government, why are guns, abortion, and gay marriage the only issues they ever bring up?
Why? Because they're hypocritical neo-cons, who like big government as long as it does what they want, of course. My perception is that there is a small but growing true constitutionalist sentiment, though that may primarily be an artifact of who I choose to hang out with.
Assuming my perception isn't too skewed, though, what I see is that a lot of people are really frightened by the growth of the federal government over the last couple of presidencies, and see Obama massively increasing the pace. I think the scale of the bailouts (both Bush's and Obama's) woke them up. Now they're wondering if it can possibly be sustained or if the federal government is going to collapse, and thinking that perhaps a return to more decentralized power is a way to mitigate those risks.
Whittling the Commerce Clause down to an appropriate size, as opposed to the all-powerful status it's had since FDR beat the Supreme Court into submission, is a crucial first step.
I'm a strong supporter of the right to keep and bear arms[*], but even if I weren't I'd still be rooting for this particular "posturing" to succeed.
My view is the the Federal Government is too centralized and powerful. I think the institutions that deny due process like the CIA and NSA and DHS should be vehemently attacked for being unconstitutional, and then we can worry about things of lesser importance. I think that's a more principled stance that the people who claim to have principles, but are in fact extraordinary hypocrites. When it comes to unconstitutionality, regulating minimum fuel efficiency isn't even on my radar.
I agree with all of the that. Like I said, I think you can even make a case that Congress legitimately should be able to regulate fuel efficiency under the Commerce Clause. I think tariffs make more sense and would be more effective, but in any case it's a trivial issue.
Still, I like to argue against Congress' power to regulate whenever there's a hint of justification for it because so many Americans have forgotten that there are supposed to be limits to Congressional power. And, frankly, it's easier to get people to listen when you say Congress shouldn't be able to do something that your audience already dislikes.
[*] FYI, my position on firearms is (1) I think they're a crucial last line of defense against tyranny; (2) I don't think it's possible to disarm criminals with any gun law; (3) studies of the effectiveness of gun control laws have shown them to be completely ineffective at reducing crime; (4) studies of the the effects of liberalized concealed carry laws have shown them to *reduce* crime, especially violent crime; and (5) I enjoy shooting, both targets and hunting, and I find it a great, wholesome family activity that teaches discipline, self-control and respect. Due to (4), I have a concealed firearm permit and carry a gun most everywhere I go. I hope I never have reason to draw it, but I am prepared should the need ever arise to defend myself or those around me.
My position on the other hot-button topics you mentioned: I think abortion is very sad but I'm pro-choice, and I think government has no place regulating any sort of marriage.
If the constitution is irrelevant whenever it disagrees with modern practice, why does it matter what some dead guy argued 220 years ago? If you're going to ignore the foundational documents, you may as well not bother with appeals to that authority, and just make arguments that stand on their own merits.
It's doubtful. Again, interstate squabbling over commerce will immediately come back under the rule of the Federal Government. That's one of the main reasons we have it.
The point is that the commerce in question is not interstate. But I suppose all of those state legislatures are just engaging in a historical mind experiment.
Interesting... compact minivans. Makes sense.
Sure, buddy. Just provide a single quote, footnote, or anything supporting your claim that the founding fathers would be against this particular regulation. Seems rather ridiculous, doesn't it?
Doesn't work that way -- or at least it wasn't supposed to. The US Constitution specifies the limited set of powers given to the federal government, and reserves everything else to the sates and the people. Unless you can find something in there that indicates this SHOULD be a federal responsibility, it shouldn't.
There's no direct constitutional support for the CIA, NSA, Air Force, CDC, FDA, FEMA...
You're right about the CIA, NSA, CDC and FEMA; they can't be justified constitutionally. With the possible exception of the CDC they're also agencies which are often found infringing on civil liberties. The FBI is also pretty questionable.
All of the above agencies could be legitimately created by the states, of course, either by establishing them as joint state offices, or by amending the Constitution to give the federal government those powers explicitly. If we as a nation really think we need those agencies, and we need them to be part of the federal executive branch, then we should ratify the appropriate constitutional amendments to allow them to be created, rather than simply ignoring the founding document.
The Air Force is a reasonable extension of Congress' powers to maintain a Navy or raise Armies -- though that power has also been hugely abused. The Constitution intended the bulk of non-naval national defense to be performed via state militias. National Guard units can (and do) provide air power. The full-time federal military forces should be a tiny fraction of what they are. Among other things, reducing them to a Constitutional level would remove the temptation to deploy them all over the world to meddle in the affairs of others. That would be a good thing since no president, from either party, seems to be able to resist that temptation.
So, did they in particular have a propensity to deny states certain rights that threatened the prosperity and security of the nation?
No, they did not. The sovereign states are empowered to respond to threats, both individually and collectively. And if the states collectively feel that it's necessary to give additional power to the federal government, then the states can do that, through the amendment process.
Does dependence on a finite fuel which has been bankrupting our country for decades count as a danger? Is the freedom to produce an inefficient car that important in comparison? Again, I would say that the "freedom" to have a Hummer matters far less than the freedom to be free of entangling alliances and dependence on foreign nations for basic transportation.
Bah.
There's a simple and completely constitutional mechanism to address these issues: Congress can tax imports. They should put a $50 per barrel tax on imported oil. This would provide the motivation for more efficient cars as well as boosting focus on exploiting local oil resources (oil shale, tar sands, etc.) and use of renewable energy sources.
That said, I think regulation of automobiles sold across state lines does fall within the legitimate purview of Congress. This is an area where the Commerce Clause clearly applies. What they can't do is regulate automobiles that are manufactured and sold intrastate, nor do they have any legitimate power to deny those vehicles to be used in other states -- though other states certainly could choose to deny their use.
There's a test of the theory that intrastate commerce is exempt from federal regulation coming up. It'll be very interesting to see how it goes. Montana and Texas have passed legislation specifying that firearms that are manufactured in their states and which do not leave their states are not subject to federal regulations. A dozen other states are preparing to
I can speak only about my childhood but somehow my grandparents could fit both them and their three grandchildren in a bloody Lada.
With the three kids all in seat belts, and maybe even in the enormous car seats and booster seats that are required by law?
In my state, kids have to be in some sort of a booster seat until they're eight years old. This means a family with three kids will, for several years, have all three of them in seats of some sort. Your typical small sedan may have three seat belts in the back, but there's simply no room to cram three car seats in there.
Modern small sedans have also done away with the bench seat in front, so the maximum seating capacity is five, even if everyone is small enough to fit, yet big enough not to require car seats. For a family with four kids, the only options are minivans or SUVs, because of the legal requirements dictating how everyone has to be strapped in.
Yeah, fuck everyone who can't afford to live closer to where they work. That'll show 'em!
If no one at the office can afford to get to the office, then the office will have to move.
If there's an economic incentive to reduce consumption -- with any mixture of increasing fuel efficiency or decreasing miles driven -- it will happen. Merely improving efficiency may actually increase miles driven, keeping consumption relatively constant.
Yeah, what next... revealing the existence of a secret bunker under the White House?!
Damn you! You just had to go and blurt it out, didn't you?
Do you have any idea what it's going to cost to relocate the White House over a different secret bunker now?
every 6 months I am upgrading my Linux and bitching every time when something breaks. I should just leave the freakin' thing alone!!!
Ubuntu LTS is probably a good choice for you. Upgrade every three years, rather than every six months.