Actually, if your personal debt is high enough, you cannot get security clearance from the government. This is actually a significant problem in the US armed forces currently, as many servicemen take out "payday loans", and some are so far in debt that they do not have security clearance to go to Iraq.
Wow, if that's true, I foresee a great business in helping US soldiers get out of Iraq. Offer them massive, low-interest loans to help get them disqualified from duty, which they are required to keep secured in some non-withdrawable account so you can't actually lose any money. Treat the 'interest' as a direct payment from the soldier that is essentially a fee not to have to go risk their lives. I bet you could get tens of thousands of soldiers to buy into this.
The tendency to assume that the driving force behind every lawsuit is a lawyer is erroneous.
Pretty much every such lawsuit is executed by a lawyer, however, and those lawyers do have a responsibility to refuse representation of frivolous suits.
Just to clear it up for the mods, this is intended to be funny, not a troll. The funny parts are:
1) We don't actually have enough nukes to blow up the moon. As much as we like to believe in our power, the danger our nukes pose is mostly to the surface mile or so of the earth, which just happens to be 100% of the part we live on.
2) If we solved the problem of delivering all the nukes to the moon, bringing back plenty of moon rocks would no longer be a challenging problem.
3) If we actually destroyed the moon, the amount of moon material falling on us would, rather than being several tons, be enough to kill us all.
4) Having destroyed the moon, our need to have several tons of moon material to help practice for a moon landing goes away.
detonating all of the Earth's arsenal a thousand of kilometers or so under the surface might produce some results (but 'm doubtful about it) but there's no way we can do that.
Well that's all part of the delivery challenge I was talking about.
Now that was the kind of answer I was hoping for. Did you see the guy who (apparently) took my post seriously, and challenged it on the technical merits?
Blow up the moon. We probably have enough nukes to do it, and how hard can delivery be? The amount of material that drops on the earth as a result will surely be at least several tons.
I think we may be at cross-purposes here; my point is that the participants benefit from discovering how easily they can be used. A greater service to society would be provided by the widely publishing the results of the study.
But the actual results suggest that the participants don't benefit, they suffer.
Torture isn't the only bad thing done by people 'only obeying orders'.
The point being the number of people this is likely to cause to react better to any real world situation differently is going to be close to zero. And since people who are traumatized in various ways actually tend to react worse to real world situations after the trauma, it would be reasonable to theorize that this experiment does both short term and long term harm to both the subject and society.
My cell number got cloned. Many calls were made on the account. Am I responsible for paying for them?
Verizon might like to argue to dispute this to the end, but if it can be shown that my cell didn't make those calls (analogy: my computer didn't download the mp3s traced to my IP), I can tell you which way the courts are going to hold. And Verizon knows it, which is why they won't take you to court, they'll just refund the cost of the calls to you, and apologize for the inconvenience to you.
Yeesh, what's wrong with you people. I'm 36, and I just moved a 36" crt tv down a half flight of stairs, up 2 full flights of stairs, maneuvered it through the door, and into the back of my apartment by myself. It wasn't that hard. Lift with the legs!
Compare this to a course which demonstrates the impairment of driving abilities whilst under the influence - by allowing the participants to drive drunk under controlled conditions.
This is a perfect comparison, thank you.
In the drunk driving case, perhaps we will cause an emotional harm by making a drunk driver realize the danger they pose to others. We trade this off against the likely societal benefit: drunk drivers pose a significant threat to our communal health. Would this be ethical? You'd have to carefully weigh the total harm done to the drunk drivers, and compare to the harm likely to be done by those drivers, and factor in the likelyhood that the experiment will have an effect on the harm done by those drivers (will the experiment impact what they do when intoxicated?)
In the torture and killing study, we have to weigh the emotional harm caused to a participant in making them confront what they might be capable of in a very specific slippery slope scenario. We must balance that harm against the benefit to society of innoculating them against actually participating in torture. What's that you say? The odds of them ever being asked to participate in torture are negligible? Then I'm afraid it becomes difficult to justify the study. The harm to the participants grossly outweighs the benefits to society.
All of which still ignores the fact that in human subjects consideration, we weigh the harm to subjects a thousand times more heavily than the benefit to society. This helps us to avoid situations where scientists expose undesireables to cancer in order to help reach a cure for the rest of us more quickly.
The argument is that the desensitization that the artificial child porn produces increases the risk of an actual overt act. There's some scientific rationale to think this is true. Society has to make a trade off: freedom to make fake child porn vs increased risk that actual children will be victimized.
Big surprise which way society is leaning on this one.
My guess is that the processor for this is pretty expensive. IE you want to have an enormous land use area to algae processor ratio for profitability. So chances are setting up solar panels on the same surface area will be cheaper/more efficient for you.
Just commenting on your sig: You've probably gotten banned from moderation. You can get this most commonly by having used your modpoints negatively on a slashdot editor's post. Once you're banned, you'll never see mod points again.
Because if there is one thing that's bad for sales of your toy, it's a crowd of people hanging around looking at how neat it is, waiting for their turn to try playing with it.
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Actually, if your personal debt is high enough, you cannot get security clearance from the government. This is actually a significant problem in the US armed forces currently, as many servicemen take out "payday loans", and some are so far in debt that they do not have security clearance to go to Iraq.
Wow, if that's true, I foresee a great business in helping US soldiers get out of Iraq. Offer them massive, low-interest loans to help get them disqualified from duty, which they are required to keep secured in some non-withdrawable account so you can't actually lose any money. Treat the 'interest' as a direct payment from the soldier that is essentially a fee not to have to go risk their lives. I bet you could get tens of thousands of soldiers to buy into this.
I'd like to believe that most of them are not deliberately speeding,
Was that a joke? Not deliberately speeding? Their foot just slipped, over and over and over and over again onto the gas pedal a little too hard?
The tendency to assume that the driving force behind every lawsuit is a lawyer is erroneous.
Pretty much every such lawsuit is executed by a lawyer, however, and those lawyers do have a responsibility to refuse representation of frivolous suits.
Why not to give RIAA a trillion rubbles at once? Oh, it's "rubles" with only one B... my bad!
That was the old plan with the nukes, before they went all capitalist on our asses.
Sure, as long as the DOJ honeypot you've been redirected to returns http 200 ok, then everything is fine. :-)
Just to clear it up for the mods, this is intended to be funny, not a troll. The funny parts are:
1) We don't actually have enough nukes to blow up the moon. As much as we like to believe in our power, the danger our nukes pose is mostly to the surface mile or so of the earth, which just happens to be 100% of the part we live on.
2) If we solved the problem of delivering all the nukes to the moon, bringing back plenty of moon rocks would no longer be a challenging problem.
3) If we actually destroyed the moon, the amount of moon material falling on us would, rather than being several tons, be enough to kill us all.
4) Having destroyed the moon, our need to have several tons of moon material to help practice for a moon landing goes away.
detonating all of the Earth's arsenal a thousand of kilometers or so under the surface might produce some results (but 'm doubtful about it) but there's no way we can do that.
Well that's all part of the delivery challenge I was talking about.
Now that was the kind of answer I was hoping for. Did you see the guy who (apparently) took my post seriously, and challenged it on the technical merits?
Blow up the moon. We probably have enough nukes to do it, and how hard can delivery be? The amount of material that drops on the earth as a result will surely be at least several tons.
They're dancing hard!
I'm afraid that guy went crazy because his brain cooked in the 0.6 degree warmer weather.
I think we may be at cross-purposes here; my point is that the participants benefit from discovering how easily they can be used. A greater service to society would be provided by the widely publishing the results of the study.
But the actual results suggest that the participants don't benefit, they suffer.
Torture isn't the only bad thing done by people 'only obeying orders'.
The point being the number of people this is likely to cause to react better to any real world situation differently is going to be close to zero. And since people who are traumatized in various ways actually tend to react worse to real world situations after the trauma, it would be reasonable to theorize that this experiment does both short term and long term harm to both the subject and society.
I actually considered adding (I know, roosters) after the word chicken, but decided it detracted from the funniness.
Actually, birdseed came before the chicken OR the egg ;)
I thought birdseed was what was released when the chicken came.
My cell number got cloned. Many calls were made on the account. Am I responsible for paying for them?
Verizon might like to argue to dispute this to the end, but if it can be shown that my cell didn't make those calls (analogy: my computer didn't download the mp3s traced to my IP), I can tell you which way the courts are going to hold. And Verizon knows it, which is why they won't take you to court, they'll just refund the cost of the calls to you, and apologize for the inconvenience to you.
Yeesh, what's wrong with you people. I'm 36, and I just moved a 36" crt tv down a half flight of stairs, up 2 full flights of stairs, maneuvered it through the door, and into the back of my apartment by myself. It wasn't that hard. Lift with the legs!
Compare this to a course which demonstrates the impairment of driving abilities whilst under the influence - by allowing the participants to drive drunk under controlled conditions.
This is a perfect comparison, thank you.
In the drunk driving case, perhaps we will cause an emotional harm by making a drunk driver realize the danger they pose to others. We trade this off against the likely societal benefit: drunk drivers pose a significant threat to our communal health. Would this be ethical? You'd have to carefully weigh the total harm done to the drunk drivers, and compare to the harm likely to be done by those drivers, and factor in the likelyhood that the experiment will have an effect on the harm done by those drivers (will the experiment impact what they do when intoxicated?)
In the torture and killing study, we have to weigh the emotional harm caused to a participant in making them confront what they might be capable of in a very specific slippery slope scenario. We must balance that harm against the benefit to society of innoculating them against actually participating in torture. What's that you say? The odds of them ever being asked to participate in torture are negligible? Then I'm afraid it becomes difficult to justify the study. The harm to the participants grossly outweighs the benefits to society.
All of which still ignores the fact that in human subjects consideration, we weigh the harm to subjects a thousand times more heavily than the benefit to society. This helps us to avoid situations where scientists expose undesireables to cancer in order to help reach a cure for the rest of us more quickly.
The argument is that the desensitization that the artificial child porn produces increases the risk of an actual overt act. There's some scientific rationale to think this is true. Society has to make a trade off: freedom to make fake child porn vs increased risk that actual children will be victimized.
Big surprise which way society is leaning on this one.
Nobody was harmed by this experiment or the original. A few eyes were opened to see the real world. That's help, not harm.
The harm beind discussed is harm done to the shocker not the shockee.
The concern is that the schocker might suffer PTSD or other mental disorders as a direct result of participating in the study.
The IRB that approved this should be fired.
By working with and doing the work assigned to him by the someone experienced, receiving assistance on the parts he doesn't understand as needed?
Thats about the size of West Virginia!
We don't really need West Virginia, do we?
My guess is that the processor for this is pretty expensive. IE you want to have an enormous land use area to algae processor ratio for profitability. So chances are setting up solar panels on the same surface area will be cheaper/more efficient for you.
Just commenting on your sig:
You've probably gotten banned from moderation. You can get this most commonly by having used your modpoints negatively on a slashdot editor's post.
Once you're banned, you'll never see mod points again.
Because if there is one thing that's bad for sales of your toy, it's a crowd of people hanging around looking at how neat it is, waiting for their turn to try playing with it.
Yeah, I probably should have clarified that this is urban driving.