People have rights. People delegate *powers* to the state. The state does not have rights. Con Law 101, or maybe Con Law 1.
How in blazes did your ignorance get modded +5 informative? Oh.... I guess the mods need to take Con Law 1, too.
It's very interesting how different definitions of political words get used.
"Right" is a particularly tricky one. Despite American Jingoists insistance that the mid-18th century Enlightenment definition is the only possible one, and that anyone using it any other way should shot, it has multiple meanings.
An older definition is that a 'right' is specific to an individual or group of individuals. Medieval rebellions in defense of "rights" were not demanding everyone have the exact same rights, they were demanding the King respect the right of different groups of people to be treated differently. It's a perfectly valid use of the term, but it's also the exact opposite of the pseudo-intelectual definition you just gave. It's even perfectly valid in some American legal contexts. For example, you don't have the right to practice medicine in Ohio unless you get the approval of a group of people who do have that right. The right to sell Star Wars DVDs do not belong to everyone in the entire world equally, they belong to the one guy who has the Copyright.
Since this is all very confusing, with right on one hand meaning something literally anyone can do and on the other hand meaning something only one person (or a handful of people) can do, in common usage "Right" just means legal ability to do something. I have the right to sue your ass because there isn't a Court Order that says otherwise. The Government has the right to tax your ass because you can't get a court order telling them to stop. I have the right to call your ass stupid because the First Amendment says so, not because some 18th Century French Baron thought it was only natural and a generation of thinkers every American reveres agreed.
How, exactly, does this qualify as 1st Amendment speech?
The 1st doesn't assure people of saying anything they want without repercussions.
How is this not -5, Flamebait?
The "repercussion" you're discussing is an illegal threat to kill people for perfectly legal speech. That is not protected speech. It has never been protected speech.
If you were in the military you know the Taliban use weapons that are a hell of a lot more lethal then anything that's currently legal. RPGs and fully-auto AK-47s are not technically "sophisticated," but they are very very illegal. IEDs can be sophisticated, but aren't legal. More importantly if you were actually a rebel you wouldn't give a damn about the law. You'd make that RPG yourself.
In other words, if we do hav a Civil War there is roughly a 0% chance that the legality of semi-automatic rifles with large magazines would change it's outcome.
I'm trying to think of a LIC where the rebels/guerillas/terrorists main weapon was a fully or semi-automatic rifle. I'm coming up blank.
They either don't use guns much (in 'Nam most US casualties were caused by booby traps, and Iraq it's IEDs), or they use them as a support weapon for rocket fire. The Taliban typically use RPG-7s as their killing weapon, the AKs are used to keep us from getting a good angle to blow up the RPG guy.
Same thing as the "Right to bear arms" --- you think with your pissy little semi-automatic assault rifles you can fight the army?
America is no longer the land of the free - although there are still a lot of very brave people living there.
An assault rifle can be set for fully automatic operation. A semi-automatic rifle that looks like an assault rifle is pissy as you say.
Then the US Military doesn't use assault rifles, because the max an M-16 will do is a three-round burst. Some M4s can do full-auto, but those are only issued to Special Ops guys. Regular Army grunts are limited to three-round bursts.
Additionally, in such a worst case scenario, one must remember that a good portion of our military forces is made up of Army and Air National Guard troops.
The Reserves aren't technically under state command, but many of the same social factors that glue Guardsman to their local states also glue reservists. They've got regular jobs, they vote, they stay in the same community for years and years on end, etc.
And the Regular troops aren't exactly the demographic one would expect to fight for an outright dictatorship, especially an anti-Second Amendment dictatorship.
In other words it's a lot more likely that some crazy-ass state government would oppress it's own people, and then claim the Feds have no legal authority to stop them then the other way around. Pro-Second Amendment Types conveniently forget that the last massive wave of repression by official government officials on their citizens was Jim Crow, which was only possible due to the combination of the Second Amendment and the power of local state governments to scream "tyranny" when the Feds told them to stop being racist.
There's a reason the US Demographic with the most actual reason to fear government power (blacks) votes for the pro-Federal government power party by 70-80 points consistently.
Very few of our casualties in any of those wars were caused by firearms. Most in 'Nam were by booby-traps, which were generally improvised from non-military materials including the many poisons that occur naturally in a jungle, in Iraq and Afghanistan they arm their booby-traps with explosives to create IEDs.
The automatic rifle today is roughly where the sword was in the mid-18th. Many more soldiers get them and train on them then could possibly ever use them. They're good for suppressive fire, but not much else. And any insurgent who tries to use suppressive fire on the good old US Army gets blown up by the Air Force right quick. It's very easy to target somebody who is shooting that much.
Ironically hunting-style rifles would probably be more useful for an insurgency. They're higher caliber, which means heavier throw weight; they're accurate for miles, so figuring out where a sniper's hiding is not trivial, you can;t just call the USAF or an Apache in; and they can target unarmored portions of the body.
No modern military wants a soldier with poor critical thinking skills and no ethical scruples. What they want is a soldier who applies all his critical thinking skills to the mission at hand, in the context of the larger campaign, and instinctively follows military ethics. Guys who are unethical and don't think things through tend to go to the nearest village and massacre everyone the second after a successful Taliban Ambush, which is not acceptable.
The TMS tech you're talking about is intended to enhance critical thinking by eliminating distractions while on-duty. The idea is that if you don't get bored and start thinking about Star Wars your reaction-time will get better, and everyone is more likely to survive an ambush. Therefore they turn off the part of your brain that rants against Lucas.
That ethics professors don't understand current military ethics, and are therefore not qualified to comment on how military ethics are likely to change in ligh of new technical developments.
in this case if you simply replace the scare-words like "mutant," and "bio-weapon" with older military technologies like "machine-gun," or "metal monoplane," that changed everything pretty much every sentence he wrote still works. This means that pretty much everything he wrote is going over very old ground in military terms. Arms races, dangerous R + D, etc. are still arms races and dangerous R + D even if the actual arms being raced/researched are human arms, instead of a new airframe.
They might have a point with bio-weapons and international law, but the problem here is that Philosophy Professors are obsessed with the precise meanings of definitions in ways the rest of thew world isn't. To a Philosophy Prof determining whether a bio-enhanced human violates a treaty that was only supposed to ban chemical agents and germ warfare is a fascinating way to spend an afternoon. An international lawyer will only agree that it does so if the plain language of the text explicitly says so, and if he is actually forced to agree a specific, militarily useful, enhancement counts as a bioweapon his immediate reaction will be to call the Russians/Chinese/etc. and get the treaty changed. After all, they have militaries too.
You mean pretend that something completely normal, totally routine, and not-at-all-different is the end of the world? I suppose that is actually slightly more useful to the human race then arguing about Nietche.
Most of the stuff they're worried about is common to all forms of technology. The V-22 Osprey must killed 30 Marines before they got the computer flight controls working right. People started using drugs to enhance their military performance roughly 30 seconds after they discovered coffee. Arms races are equally old. None of these things are particularly good, but it's not like policy-makers need new conceptual tools to deal withan Arms race just because the Arms being raced are actual mutant, super-strong Arms and not H-Bombs.
The only one that actually requires anyone to think differently is the possibility that a soldier enhanced the right way would count as a bio-weapon, but that's almost certainly overblown. If something promising actually seems like it would violate international law it's likely everyone else will want that something too, and said something will be easy to legalize.
In the US we have lots of extra money. The debate in DC over the deficit neatly illustrates his point. If we chose to raise taxes to their Clinton-levels we could easily fund the government without cutting anything. If we chose to add a little to those Clinton rates we could easily fund more. OTOH, if we chose to cut taxes significantly, while simultaneously cutting spending (particularly on the Pentagon and entitlements for the elderly), we could do that too. Both choices would probably be hailed by our Grandchildren as brilliant. The guys who prefer the former won the last elections, but they didn't win decisively enough to keep the dudes who want to do the latter from vetoing their policies.
In short the reason we have a deficit problem is solely that we have chosen a political system that allows a significant minority the ability to exert major control over public policy through it's House Majority. While this is great from the standpoint of freedom, it is somewhat sub-optimal from the standpoint of actually getting shit done.
Add in all the ways private citizens can derail infrastructure projects ("You can't do that, I just discovered that the brownish owls in that field are a distinct subspecies," or "you can't do that, I refuse to let the gubbment build on my land on principle") and you've got a pretty clear reason why nobody's been able to do anything serious on infrastructure since Eisenhower.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that I want us to become China. But I'm not so Jingoistic that I don't realize their system does not have major practical advantages. Moreover I have the sense of perspective to see how fucking rich we are. For example, have you ever played the game where you check defense budget on Wikipedia, then divide it by the price of an F-22, and figure out how many years it would take them to buy a flight of 4? Even for some large countries that should be putting every dime they can into their military (such as the DRCongo, which has a depressing tendency to be invaded by Rwanda), take more then one.
You know if the Democrats had actually showed up to vote in the 2010 elections we'd have hi-speed rail. For one thing those elections directly killed off the plans for WI, OH, and FL.
For another, the GOP took full control of multiple state governments. They took advantage of the once-a-decade Congressional re-districting to lock in GOP majorities in several states. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted pretty strongly for Democrats in the US House in 2012, but both delegations are heavily Republican. Instead of getting 20-25 seats out of those states the Dems got 12, and the GOP was also able to dominate Ohio 12-4 despite only getting 51% of the popular vote. If those states had fair district boundaries the Dems win the House back.
And in that case the Fiscal Cliff solution includes a hefty dose of Keynesian stimulus, probably focused on spending lots of money fairly quickly in ways that mitigate carbon pollution and give lefties warm fuzzies, and that means the various Hi-Speed rail programs that 2010 not only never died, they get re-inforced by fresh money in 2012.
Lots of things in the US are like that. Conservatives win by default because they have so many veto points to derail change, and they never sit out an election because they're pissed off about the 'tone' in DC.
Heck, just ask Florida. They voted in a high-speed rail. Then somebody lead a campaign to do what? End it. Why? Do you believe he was really concerned about the fiscal interests, or was he thinking of his own?
And here's the other thing that's often forgotten... Every time something like this gets proposed in Florida, it seems to parallel whatever the major inter-city highway is, while blatantly ignoring the sprawl. If a rail system is 10 miles from your home, and 20 miles from your destination, what good is it exactly? Places that do this right, tend to have some sort of light-rail system to help pick up the slack. However, the density is probably too low for such a system to be worthwhile. I suppose this is what the bus system is for, but those often seem implemented as a "barely acceptable solution" that you'd only consider if you had no other options.
IMHO, public transit is only good when those who can easily afford to drive would opt to use it instead.
Like a lot of objections to the idea, this isn't thought through long-term. Airports are much more remote then train stations, most were actually built 20 miles from any plausible destination on purpose. And yet people find a way to use them. There are car rental spots, special airport bus lines, etc. If there's a train from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa and a couple hundred people are taking it every day there will be demand for transportation from the Fort Lauderdale train station to Boynton Beach. That demand could be met by public funding (ie: a South Florida version of the El, a bunch of buses, etc.), or private companies (cabs, Hertz, etc.), but it will be met.
Hell trains have one huge advantage over planes in this department: they can actually transport your very own personal car in the same vehicle that transports you. The Chunnel trains in Europe do this all the time. It'll add about $70 to your ticket, but that is actually cheaper then car rental at an airport. Depending on how much your time is worth, spending 4 hours doing your actual job, rather then concentrating on driving; might actually save you money.
He's exaggerating a wee bit, but he does have an excellent point.
The supply of oil is roughly stagnant but demand is skyrocketing. Chinese and Indians are becoming wealthy enough to own cars There are roughly 2.5 Billion of them.
Which means that in the long-term any country that bases it's transit system on cheap fuel is being incredibly stupid.
If UCEProtect has an email they think is spam they are perfectly within their rights to proclaim said email is spam from the tops of the highest mountains. Other people have the right to either listen to them (and block the OP), or ignore them (and not block the OP). They do not have to be real nice to the alleged spammer and spend thousands of man-hours a year on appeals. It would be nice of them if they did, but their is no legal requirement to be nice to people.
Well, if it's a toy, it has to be just about my favorite toy. I'd rather have a tablet than a laptop myself
Then quite clearly you do not really belong on slashdot. Don't take this as an insult, but you are not a normal slashdot user if a tablet can replace a laptop in your universe. Its my grandmothers universe where a tablet can replace a laptop, because she isnt a nerd. She is just a technology consumer, and apparently you are just a technology consumer too.
Really?
Every Slashdot user uses his computers data-entry capabilities 24/7?
He does not spend much of his free time watching random episodes of long-dead Sci-Fi series, reading Slashdot, browsing Wikipedia, etc. At all hours of the entire day a Slashdotter is actually entering data.
Because a tablet's only real drawback as a main machine is you can't enter data on them very well. They can't do Photoshop, Word, coding, or long emails. They do games, content consumption, and short creation tasks just fine.
...will be in the bill? Politicians have a habit of rolling lots of things into one in bills, and you can only get all or nothing.
One thing I have never understood is how that works in the US system. There's normally plenty of time in the UK to take amendments on a Bill before you get to the take it or leave it stage.
The "US system" is purposefully designed to be a pain in the ass. "Checks and Balances," "Separation of Powers," etc. are supposed to make governing a complex dance between the Executive and Legislative. Since Congressman are much more independent of their leaders in the US then the UK it's 539 people are on the dance floor, and a 540th (the Vice President) has to come in whenever there's a tie in the Senate. That means a lot of what Americans call "the ordinary operations of the United States Government," are what any sane person would call "gaming the system" in frequently futile attempts to get things done.
For the specific example you mention Omnibus bills are great because they force Congress to actually do shit, rather then simply find ways to put things off until the next election. Everyone assumes that the Other Side will get wiped at the next election, and for 99.9% of issues the Executive really can BS a solution for a year or two. But that 0.1% HAS to be done this year, and if it's in the same bill with a lot of the crap that could be put off...
This kind of thing does not happen in Westminster systems because the guy in charge stops being in charge when most of Parliament votes against him. He's got every incentive to get everything done today, while he still has the Confidence of Parliament. The people with a reason to delay (the Opposition, members of his party who think they'll get a minutely better deal next year, etc.) do not have the power to actually stop him, or he wouldn't be Prime Minster anymore. Omnibus bills don't help him, risk angering his fellow MPs, and don't look good during Question Time.
BTW, the recent rise of the Filibuster, it's possible castration via the Constitutional Option, and the entire "Fiscal Cliff" debate show exactly how intricate the US Government is, and how incredibly stupid it can get when someone figures out a new way to gum up the works.
You'll be able to use/practice it almost immediately. It's a Romance Language that uses the Latin Alphabet so you've got a head start on the both vocab and alphabet. Generally vocab is the hard part of a language, grammer is a pain for six months or a year but it's a lot easier to learn a new way to organize sentences then just instinctively know 1,500 words.
Portuguese and French look good on paper, but the former is restricted to Brazil in this hemisphere, and the latter only has 10-15 million speakers. Anyone who speaks either language and comes to this country will also have fairly good English.
You just ain't gonna find a use for Hindi or Chinese in the US. Hinglish, or another Indian dialect of English, could be helpful if your company plans to out-source to India because Indian accents can be a massive pain even when they're trying to speak American English. But pure Hindi just will not be used in an engineering context, ever. If the Chinese company you're dealing with doesn't suck it will have paid for a translator. If it sucks why are you dealing with them?
Either way the costs of learning the multi-thousand-letter-containing Chinese alphabet far outweigh the benefit.
The problem with that method is you're not likely to want to speak with a random person. You want to speak with the dude standing in front of you. And if you're in the US that dude is not Asian. He's not Chinese, he's not Indian, he's not even Asian Russian. He's Latino. Depending on your region their might be other second languages that make sense. Arabic is not uncommon in Detroit.
But, in career terms, Chinese just does not make sense unless you intend to move to China or Taiwan. Any actual Chinese person trying to business with you in the US will a) suck or b) be damn near fluent in English.
The major language in India is English (it was a part of the Empire for a very long time).
More like the 70 year period during which England had machine guns and field howitzers and the Indians did not (1880s-1950s). Prior to that all england held was a constantly changing squabbling collection of coastal fiefdoms and minor holdings, much like the rest of the "empire". To say that India as a whole was part of the empire for a very long time is a major mischaracterisation. See for yourself.
You do realize this is primarily an American site, and to Americans anything longer then 50 years counts as a "very long time?"
I don't know if there's a strict definition, it's not like it was necessary to have one a few years back. You could probably steal one from any of the various Shield Laws 40 states and DC have passed, tho.
But there are a few things a journalist should do. First he should be reporting news. Some news will be secrets people want kept, most is publicly available information -- sports stories, press releases, etc. Second they should be trying to act in the public interest. Each thing published should have a real reason for you to read it. Third they should be doing some processing of the information. Some stuff they find out is not relevant to the story, some names have to be changed to protect privacy, etc.
In Wikileaks case they were doing this pretty well early on, when their info was being vetted by Der Spiegal, the Times, etc. People who talked to the US Embassy were referred to by pseudonyms in an attempt to prevent retaliation (thus the information was processed), cables wer generally released for a reason (trying to act in the public interest), and they were generally reported as part of a larger story (news). I'd acually have been happy to give them status as a news organization if they'd kept doing the first two. But they stopped doing that, and dumped everything over the internet on September 1, 2011; with no redactions.
Espionage Act of 1917. Apparently the entire point of the organization is to violate this Act, because they have yet to post any significant leaks from any other country in the entire world.
Nobody's been charged, which means nobody's been extradited. However that doesn't mean they can't be inconvenienced by the investigation. It's not like a US Cop can't drag a suspect downtown for interrogation if he feels like it.
And if you're gonna argue the Visa/Mastercard policy is more then an inconvenience you're gonna have to explain why Wikileaks isn't fighting that in US Court. It wouldn't be hard to do, if they can keep Bradley Manning's fund topped up surely they can run their own, but they aren't doing it. This means they think they'd lose.
Slashdot Mirror
People have rights. People delegate *powers* to the state. The state does not have rights. Con Law 101, or maybe Con Law 1.
How in blazes did your ignorance get modded +5 informative? Oh.... I guess the mods need to take Con Law 1, too.
It's very interesting how different definitions of political words get used.
"Right" is a particularly tricky one. Despite American Jingoists insistance that the mid-18th century Enlightenment definition is the only possible one, and that anyone using it any other way should shot, it has multiple meanings.
An older definition is that a 'right' is specific to an individual or group of individuals. Medieval rebellions in defense of "rights" were not demanding everyone have the exact same rights, they were demanding the King respect the right of different groups of people to be treated differently. It's a perfectly valid use of the term, but it's also the exact opposite of the pseudo-intelectual definition you just gave. It's even perfectly valid in some American legal contexts. For example, you don't have the right to practice medicine in Ohio unless you get the approval of a group of people who do have that right. The right to sell Star Wars DVDs do not belong to everyone in the entire world equally, they belong to the one guy who has the Copyright.
Since this is all very confusing, with right on one hand meaning something literally anyone can do and on the other hand meaning something only one person (or a handful of people) can do, in common usage "Right" just means legal ability to do something. I have the right to sue your ass because there isn't a Court Order that says otherwise. The Government has the right to tax your ass because you can't get a court order telling them to stop. I have the right to call your ass stupid because the First Amendment says so, not because some 18th Century French Baron thought it was only natural and a generation of thinkers every American reveres agreed.
How, exactly, does this qualify as 1st Amendment speech?
The 1st doesn't assure people of saying anything they want without repercussions.
How is this not -5, Flamebait?
The "repercussion" you're discussing is an illegal threat to kill people for perfectly legal speech. That is not protected speech. It has never been protected speech.
I was in the military and I can tell you the odds of that are pretty fucking slim. Most wouldn't even shoot an air-gun at a fellow American.
At least until that fellow American fired on him first.
Or at least threw some rocks.
Guys like this don't think of anti-war protesters as real Americans.
If you were in the military you know the Taliban use weapons that are a hell of a lot more lethal then anything that's currently legal. RPGs and fully-auto AK-47s are not technically "sophisticated," but they are very very illegal. IEDs can be sophisticated, but aren't legal. More importantly if you were actually a rebel you wouldn't give a damn about the law. You'd make that RPG yourself.
In other words, if we do hav a Civil War there is roughly a 0% chance that the legality of semi-automatic rifles with large magazines would change it's outcome.
I'm trying to think of a LIC where the rebels/guerillas/terrorists main weapon was a fully or semi-automatic rifle. I'm coming up blank.
They either don't use guns much (in 'Nam most US casualties were caused by booby traps, and Iraq it's IEDs), or they use them as a support weapon for rocket fire. The Taliban typically use RPG-7s as their killing weapon, the AKs are used to keep us from getting a good angle to blow up the RPG guy.
Same thing as the "Right to bear arms" --- you think with your pissy little semi-automatic assault rifles you can fight the army?
America is no longer the land of the free - although there are still a lot of very brave people living there.
An assault rifle can be set for fully automatic operation. A semi-automatic rifle that looks like an assault rifle is pissy as you say.
Then the US Military doesn't use assault rifles, because the max an M-16 will do is a three-round burst. Some M4s can do full-auto, but those are only issued to Special Ops guys. Regular Army grunts are limited to three-round bursts.
Additionally, in such a worst case scenario, one must remember that a good portion of our military forces is made up of Army and Air National Guard troops.
The Reserves aren't technically under state command, but many of the same social factors that glue Guardsman to their local states also glue reservists. They've got regular jobs, they vote, they stay in the same community for years and years on end, etc.
And the Regular troops aren't exactly the demographic one would expect to fight for an outright dictatorship, especially an anti-Second Amendment dictatorship.
In other words it's a lot more likely that some crazy-ass state government would oppress it's own people, and then claim the Feds have no legal authority to stop them then the other way around. Pro-Second Amendment Types conveniently forget that the last massive wave of repression by official government officials on their citizens was Jim Crow, which was only possible due to the combination of the Second Amendment and the power of local state governments to scream "tyranny" when the Feds told them to stop being racist.
There's a reason the US Demographic with the most actual reason to fear government power (blacks) votes for the pro-Federal government power party by 70-80 points consistently.
Question:
When in US History has opposing the tyranny of the majority by military means actually worked?
Hell when has opposing the tyranny of a well-armed minority actually worked?
Dude,
Very few of our casualties in any of those wars were caused by firearms. Most in 'Nam were by booby-traps, which were generally improvised from non-military materials including the many poisons that occur naturally in a jungle, in Iraq and Afghanistan they arm their booby-traps with explosives to create IEDs.
The automatic rifle today is roughly where the sword was in the mid-18th. Many more soldiers get them and train on them then could possibly ever use them. They're good for suppressive fire, but not much else. And any insurgent who tries to use suppressive fire on the good old US Army gets blown up by the Air Force right quick. It's very easy to target somebody who is shooting that much.
Ironically hunting-style rifles would probably be more useful for an insurgency. They're higher caliber, which means heavier throw weight; they're accurate for miles, so figuring out where a sniper's hiding is not trivial, you can;t just call the USAF or an Apache in; and they can target unarmored portions of the body.
No modern military wants a soldier with poor critical thinking skills and no ethical scruples. What they want is a soldier who applies all his critical thinking skills to the mission at hand, in the context of the larger campaign, and instinctively follows military ethics. Guys who are unethical and don't think things through tend to go to the nearest village and massacre everyone the second after a successful Taliban Ambush, which is not acceptable.
The TMS tech you're talking about is intended to enhance critical thinking by eliminating distractions while on-duty. The idea is that if you don't get bored and start thinking about Star Wars your reaction-time will get better, and everyone is more likely to survive an ambush. Therefore they turn off the part of your brain that rants against Lucas.
That ethics professors don't understand current military ethics, and are therefore not qualified to comment on how military ethics are likely to change in ligh of new technical developments.
in this case if you simply replace the scare-words like "mutant," and "bio-weapon" with older military technologies like "machine-gun," or "metal monoplane," that changed everything pretty much every sentence he wrote still works. This means that pretty much everything he wrote is going over very old ground in military terms. Arms races, dangerous R + D, etc. are still arms races and dangerous R + D even if the actual arms being raced/researched are human arms, instead of a new airframe.
They might have a point with bio-weapons and international law, but the problem here is that Philosophy Professors are obsessed with the precise meanings of definitions in ways the rest of thew world isn't. To a Philosophy Prof determining whether a bio-enhanced human violates a treaty that was only supposed to ban chemical agents and germ warfare is a fascinating way to spend an afternoon. An international lawyer will only agree that it does so if the plain language of the text explicitly says so, and if he is actually forced to agree a specific, militarily useful, enhancement counts as a bioweapon his immediate reaction will be to call the Russians/Chinese/etc. and get the treaty changed. After all, they have militaries too.
You mean pretend that something completely normal, totally routine, and not-at-all-different is the end of the world? I suppose that is actually slightly more useful to the human race then arguing about Nietche.
Most of the stuff they're worried about is common to all forms of technology. The V-22 Osprey must killed 30 Marines before they got the computer flight controls working right. People started using drugs to enhance their military performance roughly 30 seconds after they discovered coffee. Arms races are equally old. None of these things are particularly good, but it's not like policy-makers need new conceptual tools to deal withan Arms race just because the Arms being raced are actual mutant, super-strong Arms and not H-Bombs.
The only one that actually requires anyone to think differently is the possibility that a soldier enhanced the right way would count as a bio-weapon, but that's almost certainly overblown. If something promising actually seems like it would violate international law it's likely everyone else will want that something too, and said something will be easy to legalize.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Just because he's evil doesn't mean he is wrong.
In the US we have lots of extra money. The debate in DC over the deficit neatly illustrates his point. If we chose to raise taxes to their Clinton-levels we could easily fund the government without cutting anything. If we chose to add a little to those Clinton rates we could easily fund more. OTOH, if we chose to cut taxes significantly, while simultaneously cutting spending (particularly on the Pentagon and entitlements for the elderly), we could do that too. Both choices would probably be hailed by our Grandchildren as brilliant. The guys who prefer the former won the last elections, but they didn't win decisively enough to keep the dudes who want to do the latter from vetoing their policies.
In short the reason we have a deficit problem is solely that we have chosen a political system that allows a significant minority the ability to exert major control over public policy through it's House Majority. While this is great from the standpoint of freedom, it is somewhat sub-optimal from the standpoint of actually getting shit done.
Add in all the ways private citizens can derail infrastructure projects ("You can't do that, I just discovered that the brownish owls in that field are a distinct subspecies," or "you can't do that, I refuse to let the gubbment build on my land on principle") and you've got a pretty clear reason why nobody's been able to do anything serious on infrastructure since Eisenhower.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that I want us to become China. But I'm not so Jingoistic that I don't realize their system does not have major practical advantages. Moreover I have the sense of perspective to see how fucking rich we are. For example, have you ever played the game where you check defense budget on Wikipedia, then divide it by the price of an F-22, and figure out how many years it would take them to buy a flight of 4? Even for some large countries that should be putting every dime they can into their military (such as the DRCongo, which has a depressing tendency to be invaded by Rwanda), take more then one.
You do realize that that the Highways only passed one of your three tests when they were built?
That's the thing about building infrastructure. It costs a lot of money, but it earns it back.
You know if the Democrats had actually showed up to vote in the 2010 elections we'd have hi-speed rail. For one thing those elections directly killed off the plans for WI, OH, and FL.
For another, the GOP took full control of multiple state governments. They took advantage of the once-a-decade Congressional re-districting to lock in GOP majorities in several states. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted pretty strongly for Democrats in the US House in 2012, but both delegations are heavily Republican. Instead of getting 20-25 seats out of those states the Dems got 12, and the GOP was also able to dominate Ohio 12-4 despite only getting 51% of the popular vote. If those states had fair district boundaries the Dems win the House back.
And in that case the Fiscal Cliff solution includes a hefty dose of Keynesian stimulus, probably focused on spending lots of money fairly quickly in ways that mitigate carbon pollution and give lefties warm fuzzies, and that means the various Hi-Speed rail programs that 2010 not only never died, they get re-inforced by fresh money in 2012.
Lots of things in the US are like that. Conservatives win by default because they have so many veto points to derail change, and they never sit out an election because they're pissed off about the 'tone' in DC.
Heck, just ask Florida. They voted in a high-speed rail. Then somebody lead a campaign to do what? End it. Why? Do you believe he was really concerned about the fiscal interests, or was he thinking of his own?
And here's the other thing that's often forgotten... Every time something like this gets proposed in Florida, it seems to parallel whatever the major inter-city highway is, while blatantly ignoring the sprawl. If a rail system is 10 miles from your home, and 20 miles from your destination, what good is it exactly? Places that do this right, tend to have some sort of light-rail system to help pick up the slack. However, the density is probably too low for such a system to be worthwhile. I suppose this is what the bus system is for, but those often seem implemented as a "barely acceptable solution" that you'd only consider if you had no other options.
IMHO, public transit is only good when those who can easily afford to drive would opt to use it instead.
Like a lot of objections to the idea, this isn't thought through long-term. Airports are much more remote then train stations, most were actually built 20 miles from any plausible destination on purpose. And yet people find a way to use them. There are car rental spots, special airport bus lines, etc. If there's a train from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa and a couple hundred people are taking it every day there will be demand for transportation from the Fort Lauderdale train station to Boynton Beach. That demand could be met by public funding (ie: a South Florida version of the El, a bunch of buses, etc.), or private companies (cabs, Hertz, etc.), but it will be met.
Hell trains have one huge advantage over planes in this department: they can actually transport your very own personal car in the same vehicle that transports you. The Chunnel trains in Europe do this all the time. It'll add about $70 to your ticket, but that is actually cheaper then car rental at an airport. Depending on how much your time is worth, spending 4 hours doing your actual job, rather then concentrating on driving; might actually save you money.
He's exaggerating a wee bit, but he does have an excellent point.
The supply of oil is roughly stagnant but demand is skyrocketing. Chinese and Indians are becoming wealthy enough to own cars There are roughly 2.5 Billion of them.
Which means that in the long-term any country that bases it's transit system on cheap fuel is being incredibly stupid.
It's freedom of speech.
If UCEProtect has an email they think is spam they are perfectly within their rights to proclaim said email is spam from the tops of the highest mountains. Other people have the right to either listen to them (and block the OP), or ignore them (and not block the OP). They do not have to be real nice to the alleged spammer and spend thousands of man-hours a year on appeals. It would be nice of them if they did, but their is no legal requirement to be nice to people.
Well, if it's a toy, it has to be just about my favorite toy. I'd rather have a tablet than a laptop myself
Then quite clearly you do not really belong on slashdot. Don't take this as an insult, but you are not a normal slashdot user if a tablet can replace a laptop in your universe. Its my grandmothers universe where a tablet can replace a laptop, because she isnt a nerd. She is just a technology consumer, and apparently you are just a technology consumer too.
Really?
Every Slashdot user uses his computers data-entry capabilities 24/7?
He does not spend much of his free time watching random episodes of long-dead Sci-Fi series, reading Slashdot, browsing Wikipedia, etc. At all hours of the entire day a Slashdotter is actually entering data.
Because a tablet's only real drawback as a main machine is you can't enter data on them very well. They can't do Photoshop, Word, coding, or long emails. They do games, content consumption, and short creation tasks just fine.
...will be in the bill? Politicians have a habit of rolling lots of things into one in bills, and you can only get all or nothing.
One thing I have never understood is how that works in the US system. There's normally plenty of time in the UK to take amendments on a Bill before you get to the take it or leave it stage.
The "US system" is purposefully designed to be a pain in the ass. "Checks and Balances," "Separation of Powers," etc. are supposed to make governing a complex dance between the Executive and Legislative. Since Congressman are much more independent of their leaders in the US then the UK it's 539 people are on the dance floor, and a 540th (the Vice President) has to come in whenever there's a tie in the Senate. That means a lot of what Americans call "the ordinary operations of the United States Government," are what any sane person would call "gaming the system" in frequently futile attempts to get things done.
For the specific example you mention Omnibus bills are great because they force Congress to actually do shit, rather then simply find ways to put things off until the next election. Everyone assumes that the Other Side will get wiped at the next election, and for 99.9% of issues the Executive really can BS a solution for a year or two. But that 0.1% HAS to be done this year, and if it's in the same bill with a lot of the crap that could be put off...
This kind of thing does not happen in Westminster systems because the guy in charge stops being in charge when most of Parliament votes against him. He's got every incentive to get everything done today, while he still has the Confidence of Parliament. The people with a reason to delay (the Opposition, members of his party who think they'll get a minutely better deal next year, etc.) do not have the power to actually stop him, or he wouldn't be Prime Minster anymore. Omnibus bills don't help him, risk angering his fellow MPs, and don't look good during Question Time.
BTW, the recent rise of the Filibuster, it's possible castration via the Constitutional Option, and the entire "Fiscal Cliff" debate show exactly how intricate the US Government is, and how incredibly stupid it can get when someone figures out a new way to gum up the works.
You'll be able to use/practice it almost immediately. It's a Romance Language that uses the Latin Alphabet so you've got a head start on the both vocab and alphabet. Generally vocab is the hard part of a language, grammer is a pain for six months or a year but it's a lot easier to learn a new way to organize sentences then just instinctively know 1,500 words.
Portuguese and French look good on paper, but the former is restricted to Brazil in this hemisphere, and the latter only has 10-15 million speakers. Anyone who speaks either language and comes to this country will also have fairly good English.
You just ain't gonna find a use for Hindi or Chinese in the US. Hinglish, or another Indian dialect of English, could be helpful if your company plans to out-source to India because Indian accents can be a massive pain even when they're trying to speak American English. But pure Hindi just will not be used in an engineering context, ever. If the Chinese company you're dealing with doesn't suck it will have paid for a translator. If it sucks why are you dealing with them?
Either way the costs of learning the multi-thousand-letter-containing Chinese alphabet far outweigh the benefit.
The problem with that method is you're not likely to want to speak with a random person. You want to speak with the dude standing in front of you. And if you're in the US that dude is not Asian. He's not Chinese, he's not Indian, he's not even Asian Russian. He's Latino. Depending on your region their might be other second languages that make sense. Arabic is not uncommon in Detroit.
But, in career terms, Chinese just does not make sense unless you intend to move to China or Taiwan. Any actual Chinese person trying to business with you in the US will a) suck or b) be damn near fluent in English.
The major language in India is English (it was a part of the Empire for a very long time).
More like the 70 year period during which England had machine guns and field howitzers and the Indians did not (1880s-1950s). Prior to that all england held was a constantly changing squabbling collection of coastal fiefdoms and minor holdings, much like the rest of the "empire". To say that India as a whole was part of the empire for a very long time is a major mischaracterisation. See for yourself.
You do realize this is primarily an American site, and to Americans anything longer then 50 years counts as a "very long time?"
I don't know if there's a strict definition, it's not like it was necessary to have one a few years back. You could probably steal one from any of the various Shield Laws 40 states and DC have passed, tho.
But there are a few things a journalist should do. First he should be reporting news. Some news will be secrets people want kept, most is publicly available information -- sports stories, press releases, etc. Second they should be trying to act in the public interest. Each thing published should have a real reason for you to read it. Third they should be doing some processing of the information. Some stuff they find out is not relevant to the story, some names have to be changed to protect privacy, etc.
In Wikileaks case they were doing this pretty well early on, when their info was being vetted by Der Spiegal, the Times, etc. People who talked to the US Embassy were referred to by pseudonyms in an attempt to prevent retaliation (thus the information was processed), cables wer generally released for a reason (trying to act in the public interest), and they were generally reported as part of a larger story (news). I'd acually have been happy to give them status as a news organization if they'd kept doing the first two. But they stopped doing that, and dumped everything over the internet on September 1, 2011; with no redactions.
Espionage Act of 1917. Apparently the entire point of the organization is to violate this Act, because they have yet to post any significant leaks from any other country in the entire world.
Nobody's been charged, which means nobody's been extradited. However that doesn't mean they can't be inconvenienced by the investigation. It's not like a US Cop can't drag a suspect downtown for interrogation if he feels like it.
And if you're gonna argue the Visa/Mastercard policy is more then an inconvenience you're gonna have to explain why Wikileaks isn't fighting that in US Court. It wouldn't be hard to do, if they can keep Bradley Manning's fund topped up surely they can run their own, but they aren't doing it. This means they think they'd lose.