No, you're thinking of the large military contractors. We're talking about small-scale civil aviation. Boeing, Lockheed, et al don't produce the class of civil aviation products (i.e. light planes) that are subject to the kind of absurd liability claims that drove the old Piper company out of business. Companies like Beech, Cessna, Mooney, or Piper don't receive "taxpayer subsides", even in the form of military contracts. Really, you should make sure you understand the original point before chiming in with snide commentary. It makes you look foolish.
I think that if one of our (pick your country:) military planes goes down in enemy territory that I don't want said enemy to have access to how well, or poorly the plane may or may not operate in certain circumstances...
This isn't for military aircraft, it's a civil aviation product. Military instrumentation has nothing to do with this situation.
In fact, as I remember it, one of the first safety elevators was demonstrated at a World's fair (don't remember which one). The demo was the inventor cutting the rope that held the elevator up to the shock and amazement of the crowd.
Elisha Otis, at the 1853-54 World's Fair. Interesting history of the safety elevator here.
I'm not sure if I'm familiar with that reference, but it's from a fairly geeky one, if you geek on literature or... whatever that part of research that deals with written language is that has thus escaped me...;
"skazat" is Nadsat - the "A Clockwork Orange" teen talk. It means, "to say". So the whole thing goes like this,
Talk to me, baby.
or something...
Groovy. Makes sense then. I was thinking it was a direct reference to the Russian verb "to tell" (as the other poster noted). Most of the Clockwork Orange slang was based on Russian. e.g. the word "nadsat" is the Russian literal equivalent of the english "teen", as the numbers 11-19 in Russian are basically the words for 1-9 with the ending "nadsat" tacked on. Anyway, rambling on....
Because when you're away, you can't say "No, I can't do it", "No, I'm busy with something else", "Why don't you do this yourself?" or such. There's no "Reply" button on post-it notes, which makes them a great tool to unload your own work onto someone else.
But on the up-side, post-its leave no sender-side copy of themselves, nor is there any delivery confirmation mechanism. I have shirked off jobs that others have tried to shirk off on me via post-it by simply "vanishing" the note. "Dincha' see that post-it I left?" "Nope. Must've fallen off and stuck to the back of something and got thrown away."
Vaseline was gunk that kept seeping out of the joints on an oil rig's drill bits.
The fella who noticed that wounds didn't get infected if you covered them with vaseline lived into his 90s, and credited his long life to a full-skin vaseline massage given to him by his nurse everyday.
Robert Chesebrough, the inventor/discoverer, wasa wack guy. It gets even better:
The best use of Vaseline® has to be by Mr. Chesebrough, himself. He believed that a person should eat a spoonful every day for good health.
He lived to ninety-six years of age and never missed that delicious spoonful every morning.
First of all, there's a difference between an ID that is issued locally and the ID that is proposed. If you read the original, then you would understand how the proposed ID is different and why there are privacy concerns.
Seriously, what's the significant difference? Most state driver's licenses already comply with the minimum information, machine readability, and tamper proof feature requirements. Most states already collect a thumbprint when they issue an ID. The one major change is that states won't be able to accept foreign documents as proof of identity in issuing these IDs. I really don't see how anything has changed. We've gone from an ad-hoc collection of mildly invasive ID procedures to a single national standard of the same mildly invasive ID procedures.
Further, am I really required to provide ID when flying on an airplane?
They already make you show your state issued ID to board a plane. If you're opposed to that, fine; but the RealID act has nothing to do with it. The requirement was there before the act, and it remains there now.
I do read what I link to, thank you. Had you bothered to follow the link through to the actual ruling, and had you actually bothered to read it, you would have noticed this little gem:
"[I]nterrogation relating to one's identity or a request for identification by the police does not, by itself, constitute a Fourth Amendment seizure."
So yes, a police officer can interrogate someone and demand to see some form of identification.
Read it again, further down:
With regard to the privacy implications of case, the court claimed "[t]o hold that a name, which is neutral and non-incriminating information, is somehow an invasion of privacy is untenable . . . . Requiring identification is far less intrusive than conducting a pat down search of one's physical person,"
The "request for identification" you cite is simply a request for someone's name. The case itself was about Mr. Hiibel being arrested for refusing to give his name. I challenge you to find any reference to identification cards or papers anywhere in the linked article.
I certainly don't think it's quite as onerous, but it's not too far from it. I did read the article and here's the second paragraph:
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.
So what's your objection? You don't want a new driver's license that differs from your old one in that it has a federally standardized mag stripe on the back? Or that you'll have to present ID to do all those things listed which, at present, already require presenting an ID? Honestly, nothing is changing unless you are an illegal alien hoping to get a driver's license with your Mexican matricular card as identification.
Further, with the Supremes recently ruling that's it's OK to arrest someone who fails to produce an ID upon demand, this just puts us one step closer.
No, they just said you have to identify yourself, not that you hade to produce proof of identity. The dude in that case need only have said "my name is Larry Hiibel". Cripes, don't you people even read what you link to?
-- Having worked around script writers, though, I understand why this is: most of them are fools. or arts students, at least
Yeah, don't I know it. I've worked with some of those same fools. I think what gets me so riled up about it is that I have been informally consulted by some of them on technical details, but they invaribly say something like "yeah, I think I'll just go with the way I had it" after I painstakingly explain the various ways in which they might get their "wacky presumptions" to jibe with actual reality.
Other shows don't matter so much. Lost is a good example to bring up; they get non-plot dependent details wrong and they're usually somewhat technical. They needed a reason to get this group out into the wild for a bit. But you also have to remember, that there seems to be an invisible monster that runs around knocking down trees, they crashed somewhere in the Pacific but there's a plane full of heroin that seems to be Central American in origin, there's a sequence of numbers that seem to bring good luck to the receiver but bad luck to everyone around him, there's a character who was wheelchair bound but now can walk, etc.
It's like someone complaining when a cartoon character runs off a cliff and then manages to tip toe back after realizing what he's done. And why don't the Simpsons ever age? Hell, Lisa's brilliant, why doesn't she ever get out of elementary school? She's been there for more than a decade!
Yeah, but I will bet you a ten dozen Krispy Kremes that none of those "non-plot" details were intentionally done wrong to increase the sense of mystery. If they were, someone would have mentioned it, as it's the kind of show where they lay the "mystery" on with a hydraulic pump and cemet mixer. I will bet you TWENTY dozen Krispy Kremes that no metion will ever be made of that locationally-improbable heroin in the virgin mary statues unusual apparent origin. The whole damn series has "dumbfuck writers" written all over it!
For example, let's take the scene in the first episode where they talk to the plane's pilot. The pilot survives just long enough to spew out a lot of paifully bad expository dialogue before "the monster" eats him. Now, a smart writer who understands that mystery should be subtle would have had the pilot say "I radioed an SOS and they had us on radar-- help is on the way!" This would have increased the tension when help DIDN'T arrive. But no! They instead had the pilot rattle of some impossible bullshit about "the radio dying" (really? all fucking FIVE of them, plus the distress beacons in the black boxes and life rafts?). It's just sloppy, stupid writing by hacks. They've taken an intriguing idea and brought it to the screen using cheap parlor tricks (e.g. scary noises), irrationally defined characters, a lot of very lame dialogue, and a shitload of erroneous factual assumptions about the nature of fucking reality*.
* Even if the island is a sort of purgatory**, there's no reason why it wouldn't mimic reality better.
** the purgatory idea is perhaps the one thing that might make the premise cool, but the creator(s) have vehemently denied that it is anything at all like that, that these people are just lost on a real island somewhere and that's all. Given their apparent inability to write creatively, I believe they're telling the truth. Coming up with something as interesting as the "purgatory" idea is way beyond their abilities.
That incident was implausible until we learn later in the series that Hurley causes bad luck to occur to those around him
Sorry, but Hurley's bad juju is not sufficient to keep an upside down jet engine attached to a chunk of broken wing supplied with the 23 gallons per minute necessary to stay spooled up fast enough to suck someone in. Also, this doesn't even get into the non-insignificant issue of how the engine EXPLODED in a ball of fire when it ingested a person...
The TV makers would have had to already have designed BF circuitry into their sets
"Circuitry"? It's all firmware, man. They twiddle a couple bytes in the master copy and *POOF*! no more broadcast flag. A couple guys with JTAG programmers could go through and reflash the already programmed TVs in a couple days.
Actually, it's Congress who gave them power. I think Congress delegates to organizations like this so that they won't be held directly responsible for stupid stuff like the broadcast flag. It gives them deniability.
Exactly. The only problem is, they're not supposed to do that. Just like they can't pass a law that says "we voluntarily hand all of our duties and powers over to the president".
News.com is running a story about the RealID Card legislation that's been attached to emergency military spending bills to ensure its passage. How soon does everyone think this system will be abused either by the government or by thieves ?
Put your tinfoil hat away, man. The real purpose of this bill is not to build some massive government tracking system, but to prevent states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. The idea is that your driver's license should continue to be taken as legitimate proof that you are either a) a citizen, or b) a legal resident. The issue was that some states were considering accepting Mexican matricular cards as sufficient proof of identity in issuing driver's licenses and that the matricular cards are not just easily forged, but easy to get in a false name from the Mexican government itself.
What doesn't match Genesis is the current ideas on how planets form... Genesis says that the Earth formed first, and then the Sun, moon, and stars formed.
If you view it on a larger scale instead of the earth-sun scale, it makes more sense. Large clouds of scattering matter coalescing into semi-solid bodies or dense clouds here and there. After a while, hydrogen clouds collapse in on themselves and ignite into stars. No reason why "earth" and "sun" have to be taken at their strict literal meanings.
You should be good to your fellow man, and treat him like a brother.
Why should I, really?
Well, because nobody likes an asshole. If we could all just not be assholes, the world would be a better place. You can't fix everything just by not being a dick, but if people just made an effort to be nicer, there'd logically be fewer pissed-off assholes around. The key is to not think of it as doing a favor to them by being nice, but doing something for yourself. As much as it sounds like a load of happy horseshit, your quality of life will improve because the nicer you are to others, the nicer most of them will be to you.
Science will never present us with a peer-reviewed study proving once and for all that you should be good to your fellow man, and treat him like a brother.
Why not? I can think of a few psychological, economical and sociological reasons for this, and it shouldn't be hard to think up a study that would test these hypothesis together and conclude once and for all that it is in your best interest not to be a self-centered jerk.
Heh. I think that's the difference between "science will never" and "science could never". From what I've seen there's way too much self-centered jerkiness in the scientific community for such a study to ever pass peer review...
Speaking as a veteran, a medic, a programmer, and a scientist, and thus a representative of a number of the most-often-abused groups, I have to say that my enjoyment of otherwise-good books, movies, and TV shows is very often spoiled by egregious stupidity.
I feel your pain, my brother, or at least a close variation thereof. I am a veteran (specifically: US Army, intelligence analyst/russian linguist, working closely with many special forces nutcases near the end of my enlistment), locksmith (for both mechanical and electronic security devices), telecom/network technician, electrician, and occasional script consultant. Needless to say, there are very few things on TV or in movies that don't make me want to throw things at the screen. Even if the idiot writers manage to avoid making any technical errors involving guns, helicopters, tactical ops, intelligence gathering/handling, russian speaking, lockpicks, electronic lock cracking, computer hacking, phone or network tapping, or electrical wiring, they usually still manage to rouse my ire via abominable script writing on its own. The TV show Alias is remarkable in that it manages to hit every single area in which I have expertise and make an utter mockery of it. My outrage at it is so extensive that I have subsequently been banned from the TV room while my girlfriend is watching it.
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No, you're thinking of the large military contractors. We're talking about small-scale civil aviation. Boeing, Lockheed, et al don't produce the class of civil aviation products (i.e. light planes) that are subject to the kind of absurd liability claims that drove the old Piper company out of business. Companies like Beech, Cessna, Mooney, or Piper don't receive "taxpayer subsides", even in the form of military contracts. Really, you should make sure you understand the original point before chiming in with snide commentary. It makes you look foolish.
This isn't for military aircraft, it's a civil aviation product. Military instrumentation has nothing to do with this situation.
Rods Per Hogshead, obviously. Duh.
No he didn't. He died of diptheria during an epidemic in 1861.
Elisha Otis, at the 1853-54 World's Fair. Interesting history of the safety elevator here.
Groovy. Makes sense then. I was thinking it was a direct reference to the Russian verb "to tell" (as the other poster noted). Most of the Clockwork Orange slang was based on Russian. e.g. the word "nadsat" is the Russian literal equivalent of the english "teen", as the numbers 11-19 in Russian are basically the words for 1-9 with the ending "nadsat" tacked on. Anyway, rambling on....
But on the up-side, post-its leave no sender-side copy of themselves, nor is there any delivery confirmation mechanism. I have shirked off jobs that others have tried to shirk off on me via post-it by simply "vanishing" the note. "Dincha' see that post-it I left?" "Nope. Must've fallen off and stuck to the back of something and got thrown away."
Robert Chesebrough, the inventor/discoverer, wasa wack guy. It gets even better:
You really shouldn't learn to spell things from song titles. Musicians are frequently the worst authority on literacy. The word you want is Vaseline.
Hey, shouldn't yer nick be like "skaZEETYEmebaby"?...
This is further proof that, even if you've already scraped the bottom of the barrel, if you look under the barrel...
Seriously, what's the significant difference? Most state driver's licenses already comply with the minimum information, machine readability, and tamper proof feature requirements. Most states already collect a thumbprint when they issue an ID. The one major change is that states won't be able to accept foreign documents as proof of identity in issuing these IDs. I really don't see how anything has changed. We've gone from an ad-hoc collection of mildly invasive ID procedures to a single national standard of the same mildly invasive ID procedures.
Further, am I really required to provide ID when flying on an airplane?
They already make you show your state issued ID to board a plane. If you're opposed to that, fine; but the RealID act has nothing to do with it. The requirement was there before the act, and it remains there now.
"[I]nterrogation relating to one's identity or a request for identification by the police does not, by itself, constitute a Fourth Amendment seizure." So yes, a police officer can interrogate someone and demand to see some form of identification.
Read it again, further down:
The "request for identification" you cite is simply a request for someone's name. The case itself was about Mr. Hiibel being arrested for refusing to give his name. I challenge you to find any reference to identification cards or papers anywhere in the linked article.
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.
So what's your objection? You don't want a new driver's license that differs from your old one in that it has a federally standardized mag stripe on the back? Or that you'll have to present ID to do all those things listed which, at present, already require presenting an ID? Honestly, nothing is changing unless you are an illegal alien hoping to get a driver's license with your Mexican matricular card as identification.
Further, with the Supremes recently ruling that's it's OK to arrest someone who fails to produce an ID upon demand, this just puts us one step closer.
No, they just said you have to identify yourself, not that you hade to produce proof of identity. The dude in that case need only have said "my name is Larry Hiibel". Cripes, don't you people even read what you link to?
Yeah, don't I know it. I've worked with some of those same fools. I think what gets me so riled up about it is that I have been informally consulted by some of them on technical details, but they invaribly say something like "yeah, I think I'll just go with the way I had it" after I painstakingly explain the various ways in which they might get their "wacky presumptions" to jibe with actual reality.
It's like someone complaining when a cartoon character runs off a cliff and then manages to tip toe back after realizing what he's done. And why don't the Simpsons ever age? Hell, Lisa's brilliant, why doesn't she ever get out of elementary school? She's been there for more than a decade!
Yeah, but I will bet you a ten dozen Krispy Kremes that none of those "non-plot" details were intentionally done wrong to increase the sense of mystery. If they were, someone would have mentioned it, as it's the kind of show where they lay the "mystery" on with a hydraulic pump and cemet mixer. I will bet you TWENTY dozen Krispy Kremes that no metion will ever be made of that locationally-improbable heroin in the virgin mary statues unusual apparent origin. The whole damn series has "dumbfuck writers" written all over it!
For example, let's take the scene in the first episode where they talk to the plane's pilot. The pilot survives just long enough to spew out a lot of paifully bad expository dialogue before "the monster" eats him. Now, a smart writer who understands that mystery should be subtle would have had the pilot say "I radioed an SOS and they had us on radar-- help is on the way!" This would have increased the tension when help DIDN'T arrive. But no! They instead had the pilot rattle of some impossible bullshit about "the radio dying" (really? all fucking FIVE of them, plus the distress beacons in the black boxes and life rafts?). It's just sloppy, stupid writing by hacks. They've taken an intriguing idea and brought it to the screen using cheap parlor tricks (e.g. scary noises), irrationally defined characters, a lot of very lame dialogue, and a shitload of erroneous factual assumptions about the nature of fucking reality*.
* Even if the island is a sort of purgatory**, there's no reason why it wouldn't mimic reality better.
** the purgatory idea is perhaps the one thing that might make the premise cool, but the creator(s) have vehemently denied that it is anything at all like that, that these people are just lost on a real island somewhere and that's all. Given their apparent inability to write creatively, I believe they're telling the truth. Coming up with something as interesting as the "purgatory" idea is way beyond their abilities.
Sorry, but Hurley's bad juju is not sufficient to keep an upside down jet engine attached to a chunk of broken wing supplied with the 23 gallons per minute necessary to stay spooled up fast enough to suck someone in. Also, this doesn't even get into the non-insignificant issue of how the engine EXPLODED in a ball of fire when it ingested a person...
"Circuitry"? It's all firmware, man. They twiddle a couple bytes in the master copy and *POOF*! no more broadcast flag. A couple guys with JTAG programmers could go through and reflash the already programmed TVs in a couple days.
Exactly. The only problem is, they're not supposed to do that. Just like they can't pass a law that says "we voluntarily hand all of our duties and powers over to the president".
Put your tinfoil hat away, man. The real purpose of this bill is not to build some massive government tracking system, but to prevent states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. The idea is that your driver's license should continue to be taken as legitimate proof that you are either a) a citizen, or b) a legal resident. The issue was that some states were considering accepting Mexican matricular cards as sufficient proof of identity in issuing driver's licenses and that the matricular cards are not just easily forged, but easy to get in a false name from the Mexican government itself.
I think "beta" for Google means they still haven't found a way to make it break even on advertising.
If you view it on a larger scale instead of the earth-sun scale, it makes more sense. Large clouds of scattering matter coalescing into semi-solid bodies or dense clouds here and there. After a while, hydrogen clouds collapse in on themselves and ignite into stars. No reason why "earth" and "sun" have to be taken at their strict literal meanings.
Why should I, really?
Well, because nobody likes an asshole. If we could all just not be assholes, the world would be a better place. You can't fix everything just by not being a dick, but if people just made an effort to be nicer, there'd logically be fewer pissed-off assholes around. The key is to not think of it as doing a favor to them by being nice, but doing something for yourself. As much as it sounds like a load of happy horseshit, your quality of life will improve because the nicer you are to others, the nicer most of them will be to you.
Why not? I can think of a few psychological, economical and sociological reasons for this, and it shouldn't be hard to think up a study that would test these hypothesis together and conclude once and for all that it is in your best interest not to be a self-centered jerk.
Heh. I think that's the difference between "science will never" and "science could never". From what I've seen there's way too much self-centered jerkiness in the scientific community for such a study to ever pass peer review...
I feel your pain, my brother, or at least a close variation thereof. I am a veteran (specifically: US Army, intelligence analyst/russian linguist, working closely with many special forces nutcases near the end of my enlistment), locksmith (for both mechanical and electronic security devices), telecom/network technician, electrician, and occasional script consultant. Needless to say, there are very few things on TV or in movies that don't make me want to throw things at the screen. Even if the idiot writers manage to avoid making any technical errors involving guns, helicopters, tactical ops, intelligence gathering/handling, russian speaking, lockpicks, electronic lock cracking, computer hacking, phone or network tapping, or electrical wiring, they usually still manage to rouse my ire via abominable script writing on its own. The TV show Alias is remarkable in that it manages to hit every single area in which I have expertise and make an utter mockery of it. My outrage at it is so extensive that I have subsequently been banned from the TV room while my girlfriend is watching it.