Wow... that's such a high bar, no bankruptcy or unpaid bills. So someone with good financial history has an excellent chance of getting Secret clearance? Maybe you didn't think you response all the way through. Maybe you didn't read his response all the way through. Financial history is only part of the investigation.
I would certainly hope that every worker in our national space and military industries would have to undergo background checks and periodic lie detector tests, just like they use in the CIA. The CIA only uses polygraphs because it's an agency full of dumbfuck ivy league morons* who conduct themselves based on some weird internally generated self-image, rather than the realistic needs of the country. I swear, the CIA employees I was exposed to came off as intelligent, earnest dopes who had a tendency to act like everything is a James Bond movie. I was a HUMINT and COMINT analyst in the Army for eight years. I worked with some extremely sensitive information and never once had to take a polygraph. Nor did did anyone I worked with. Lie detector tests are a sham, security theater used to trick the guilty into confessing. Nobody uses the polygraph as a serious investigative tool, as anyone with any knowledge of how they work can invalidate the results. Really, all you have to know to realize that polygraphs are complete hogwash is that there are only two possible results: "shows signs of deception", and "inconclusive". It's a scaremonger's tool.
* There are many examples of institutional incompetence in the CIA, but two I think exemplify it:
Exhibit A: failure to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union. It was a complete surprise to them.
Exhibit B: yellowcake uranium. 'nuff said.
too much privatization, and not enough oversight Not enough oversight, perhaps. Too much privatization? How do you figure? NASA has never built anything itself. NASA has always gotten the systems they need the same way any other government agency has, by 1) releasing a specification, 2) reviewing the submissions made by contractors, then 3) selecting the contractor that best meets their specs. North American Aviation built the CSM for the Apollo Program; Grumman, the lunar module; the Saturn V launch vehicle parts were built by Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft Company, and IBM; the Gemini and Mercury capsules by McDonnell Aircraft. Point is, the government has never built its own stuff, be it spacecraft, aircraft, even trucks. It has always contracted out.
Every time you step into a courtroom, look at the flags. Do any have a gold border around them? California's flag do have a gold border around them - you might as well not count yourself in the USA or even on US soil. Irrelevant, in terms of double jeopardy. Article I, Section 13 of the California Constitution:
"No person shall be twice put in jeopardy for the same offense"
It's pretty crap to be judged by 12 of your peers that aren't smart enough to avoid jury service. Some of us don't want to avoid jury duty, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. I work for a government entity, so I earn my full salary, but sitting on a jury I work shorter hours. Smug pricks like to joke about how juries are full of idiot postal workers and senile elderly folks, but it's just not the case.
if you've locked a kid in the car they go out immediately and do it for free (if not, don't deal with them anymore, find someone else; all the ones I've seen do). It's part of responsible use of your skills. I'm a locksmith. If someone said "come out and get my kid out of the car for free because I have no money" I'd say "break a window, or call the fire department. This ain't the charity department."
The Locksmith Ledger and other trade magazines will disclose such information. If I'm a locksmith, I can sell the techniques to open locks to these trade magazines. Indeed, The Locksmith Ledger is probably one of the best places for "0-day exploitz" for bypassing automobile door locks. You think they call up Ford and say, "Hey we found an easy way into the new Taurus"? Heck no. They let Ford subscribe to the magazine and find out the same way everyone else does. And what does it take to subscribe to The Locksmith Ledger? $47 and a mailing address. Sure, they ask you what kind of locksmithing you do, but they don't ask for state/city license numbers (they can't, as some states do not have licensing). Seems like all these people should be mad at LL too, as they're telling CAR THIEVES how to STEAL THEIR CARS!!!!!
Quote: "Look at any big breakthrough in science, it has never, ever, been done by an outsider."
Ever heard of Fermat? Or is mathematics not a science? Context, man, context. In this context he is using "outsider" to mean "one ignorant of, and uneducated in, the field in which the breakthrough occurs". Fermat was something of a recluse, but he was still a mathematician well versed in the science of the day. He corresponded with Blaise Pascal, so he couldn't really be called an "outsider" in the field.
Raise their costs and they will pass it to the customer, plus tax and profits. Lower their costs and more companies will enter the market, with better services and lower prices. Please. The cost of paying for huge stacks of public records is infinitesimal compared to the total cost of running an insurance business. The taxpayer picking up the tab for their requests for public information would certainly not result in "more companies,... with better services and lower prices." That's like saying that if egg ranchers lowered their prices by 10 cents per dozen, we'd have a Denny's on every corner selling a five-egg breakfast for a dollar.
Why it isn't possible to build a machine that would suck energy from the earth's magnetic field. It might help if you stopped thinking of magnetic fields as power sources and started thinking of them more like springs. If you turn the compass needle by hand away from north, it springs back. A really terrible analogy for an electric motor might have you visualize the stator as a device that eats electricity and magically creates a compressed spring in just the right place to push against the edge of the rotor, and magically makes it disappear before it rebounds and starts to pull the rotor back. The "magic" of needing the "spring" to appear and disappear in the right places at the right time is why you cannot create a motor out of nothing but permanent magnets. You need to be able to turn them off and on, hence the need for electricity. It's actually far more complicated than that, but it's good enough to explain why a static magnetic field is not a power source.
However I'm finding it interesting that there are so many people willing to reject upfront the very notion that this machine can do what it appears to do. Yeah, why would anyone automatically doubt the word of a dyslexic chef, who freely admits having little education in math and physics, when he claims to have built a machine that is 7000% efficient? Major breakthroughs which overturn the known laws of physics aren't made by uneducated goofballs in their basements. Another poster said it better than I ever could.
That's kinda what they said about flying too. Of course there was a couple of brothers who kinda disputed that "laws of physics" Untrue. The only reputable man of science back then who said powered flight was "impossible" was Simon Newcomb, and he only said it within the narrow scope of a specific inventor's claims of a steam-powered flying machine being possible. This assertion was correct. He actually believed flight would be possible in the future, when technology advanced to allow lighter power sources. He has been continuously misquoted and/or quoted out of context since then, however, now to the point where the popular mythology holds that most scientists of the time though powered flight was impossible, when nothing of the kind was the case.
Actual claims the inventor made...are not that it's a "perpetual motion machine" but that he may have found a way to make electric motors significantly more efficient. This by itself is an entirely believable claim, and I think worthy of further serious investigation. Actually, if you dig around a little you find that Heins claims 7000% efficiency for the device--- just not in THIS article:
"This past weekend we gave a product demonstration (generator and transformer) to an international transformer manufacturer. Our transformer used 0.2 Watts in the primary and produced 14 watts through a 180 ohm - 25 watt resistor."
He's a dyslexic college dropout who freely admits he is bad at math and physics, yet asserts that it is only Zahn of MIT's education that makes him unable to see the genius of his work. He's classic crackpot material, like the Time Cube guy, but calmer.
The funny part is how you think being misunderstood is a function of problems in the people around you. Think about it. Hope this helps. I understood his every point from the first. It is a function of the people round him. People who through carelessness, ignorance, or willfulness did not understand his initial points. He made a comment about universal symmetry, and in the next sentence explained that he was speaking of symmetry of physical forces in all directions. It's not his fault that people can't read and blather about the asymmetry of quantities of matter and antimatter.
Yes, the point of the story was that his mocking attitude, and insistence on the term "zero bandwidth" (showing a lack of deep understanding of what he had invented), is what caused his rejection. And the inventor in TFA is wise to be humble and avoid any association with "perpetual motion". Though once you read the article, you see a few cracks in the veneer of humility. First, there's this bit:
Heins has an even greater uphill battle. He isn't an engineer. He doesn't have a graduate degrees in physics. He never even finished his electronics program at Heritage College in Gatineau, Quebec. "I have mild dyslexia and don't do well in math, so I didn't do very well in school," he says.
So we have a guy who freely admits he's a garage tinkerer with no significant technical education, other than trial-and-error practical observation. But then we have:
"He says Zahn will, and must, evaluate what he saw on his own terms and time. What's preventing the engineer from grasping it right away, he says, is his education, his scientific training."
Seriously, nothing says "arrogant crackpot" like a claim that knowing too much about a subject is what's making it hard to understand your genius. That's Time Cube guy stuff. Really, you read the article and you can tell he believes he's discovered perpetual motion. He's just a bit more rational than most such claimants in that he knows he can't call it perpetual motion. He wants to so badly though! What I don't understand about these guys is why they don't just wind up one of their machines and see how long it'll go. If it's perpetual motion, it should never stop, right? I suspect usually they claim there are a few "bugs" in the system that need to be worked out, but the initial test models "look promising". Unfortunately the "bug" in the system invariably turns out to be the First Law of Thermodynamics...
LOL, having to go through the same stuff here. My wife busted out the entire run of Touched by an Angel on DVD. Oh my, talk about pain. You think that's bad, my wife Netfilx'd the whole run of Queer as Folk. I am tolerant of gay lifestyles, but really, there's only so much graphic man-on-man action I can stomach.
We started a revolution, and installed the shah You don't know at all what you're talking about. Shah Pahlavi was already the Head of State. Christ almighty, just reading the wikipedia entry is enough to educate you to the truth: Shah Pahlavi was the last ruling monarch there in a line that goes back a continuous 2500 years! What the US did in the 50's was to urge the Shah to exercise his lawful powers under the ruling constitutional monarchy to oust a jackass prime minister that was bent on ruling the country himself. Mind you, PM Mossadeq was no more a bastard than Pahlavi, but Pahlavi was our bastard, so of course the US sided with him. But there was no "revolution", and no one was "installed"--- until 1979 when the Islamic Revolution happened, and then it was Khomeini who stepped up.
So is this the official NewYorkCountryLawyer gets modded up on every post thread? Its like your own personal karma whorehouse! Go man go! Seriously, who cares? Karma is just a (probably futile) way of keeping the trolls down. All it gets you is a potential +1 bonus. You can build up a good karma score in like 3 weeks by simply being halfway intelligent and/or posting content-free posts of the appropriate political alignment. The modding system is largely nonsense, little more than a popularity contest. It's good for keeping blatant trolls and goatse fools down, but not much else.
Iran had a perfectly fine, democratically elected leader in the person of Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953. "Perfectly fine"? The fucker demanded control of the military, (unconstitutionally) dissolved the parliament and rescinded the constitutional guarantee of secret ballot in order to guarantee his own re-election.
He had the outrecuidance to nationalize the oil industry, so the CIA fomented a coup against him and put the Shah in charge. Constitutional monarchy. The Shah was already in charge. The CIA actually only goaded the Shah into doing something that was well within his power. The Shah was an evil prick too, but that's a separate issue.
The US then supported this asshole for close to 30 years, until iranians revolted in 1979. True.
The revolution didn't end so swell, the mullahs took the helm eventually. Are you kidding? Khomeini led the revolution, and upon victory formed the now-reigning Islamic Republic. They call it the Islamic Revolution for a reason. But the country wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the sick US meddling. Sure, that was back in 1953, but the pattern continued in other countries over the world in the 55 years that followed. So yeah, the US is responsible, Fucking ignorant dumbass. You think Iran wasn't headed for that anyway? Try actually reading some actual history of the place, rather than parroting the crap spewed by your beret wearing friends. Mossadeq came to power with support from the mullahs. He appointed Ayatollah Kashani house speaker to bolster their support of him. The Islamic Revolution was coming long before the so-called "coup" in the 50's.
Iran WAS a democracy, until the CIA and the British military intelligence organized a coup and replaced their democracy with a subservient monarchy. THis is the problem when people get their history education third hand from rumors and oft-told tales.
No, Iran was the same constitutional monarchy from 1906 to 1979. If anything, the problem that prompted CIA action was actually a loss of democracy. The CIA did...ahem... "encourage" Shah Pahlavi to give the elected prime minister The Boot due to his [nationalizing/seizing] of foreign oil operations, but there was no democracy there at that point. PM Mossadeq was just a preview of what was coming in '79. He was bucking to push out the Shah and become dictator, and appointed Ayatollah Kashani as Speaker of the House. His seizure of British Petroleum's refineries resulted in an oil embargo that nearly ruined the Iranian economy. When he moved to collectivize agriculture, the CIA did the unspeakable: they actively lobbied the Shah to exercise his powers as monarch and remove Mossadeq (O the horror). During this time, Mossadeq illegally dissolved parliament, abolished the constitutional provisions for secret ballots in elections (essentially guaranteeing reelection), and generally behaved like a dictatorial ass. Giving him the push was probably one of the most reasonable acts Shah Pahlavi ever made. It hardly fit the definition of a "coup". Unfortunately, Pahlavi was only slightly less a jerk, as is traditional for old-world monarchies, and the CIA played no small part in encouraging this as well, lest the people somehow elect another crazy pseudo-populist prime minister. The Mossadeq period was just a prelude. The real revolution was in '79, when they finally dumped their asshat king... and installed an asshat theocrat in his place. Just goes to show, some people are really culturally unprepared for actual self-rule. Iran remains a fucked-up backwater due to the influence of religious conservatism, whose importance (like most such places in the region) is due only to its natural resources. It's main problem now is the militant Islamists running the place. None of the Iranian nationals I know (and I know quite a few) are particularly devout, but they say that in public, you act the part, because you hear stories of what happens when you don't. Behind closed doors, it's cocktails, rock n' roll, and mini-skirts; but in public, it's the hijab and beating your head with a sword....
There's no game in searching for traps, it's just a skill roll vs. a DC. There's nothing tactical about it. Same with locked doors. Depends on how it's done. To be sure, traps and locks that are simply laid on the map (i.e. this door is locked, that stairway has a trap) are just tedious DC rolls. The DM I'm currently playing has created a fairly trap & lock heavy campaign (Indiana Jones in the South American temple^2). The key to making traps more interesting is make them seem real. OK, so you found the 20x20 foot counterweighted trap door that will drop you 40 feet into icky water fill of eels--- how do you intend to get past it? Sure, I could roll Disable Device, except that the operating mechanism is 20 feet down the corridor on the other side of the pit! Or how about a locked door that won't open (inward) until you also drain the water from the room behind it? If the problem you present the players with can be solved with a simple Open Lock or Disable Device roll, there's no room to make it interesting.
I also want to know what has been made to add more non-combat, non-lock-picking roleplay. What in 4th edition stimulates the imagination more than 3rd, getting people to get more into the heads of their characters, more willing to interact with other PCs and NPCs? What is there to help DMs create more lifelike settings and social interactions? What makes characters less of a class/role stereotype and more of a unique individual? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you're never going to find any of that in a rule book. The rules supply a purely mechanical framework to determine success and failure. Story, character development, realistic NPCs--- these things come from the players and the DM. Systems that attempt to force "personality" in characters just don't work. A classic example of such a system is GURPS. The point-buy character generation system is supposed to encourage development of individual personalities by offering a myriad of Disadvantages that give you extra points to spend on skills, advantages, and stats. These are things as simple as Eunuch (-5 points) or as bizarre as Disembodied Brain (-100 points). Despite this, only good role players ever pick interesting disadvantages. Bad role players pick the most "ignorable" ones they can. The classic -40 point set is Greedy, Lazy, Alcoholic, though Ugly and Odious Personal Habit are also popular. Poor role players pick these because they can usually get away with ignoring them. Bad players play badly. There's nothing the rules can do about it.
I was under the impression that you could go to court, demonstrate...that there was no evidence of file sharing on your computer and you'd be let off. It should take an afternoon, and cost no more than a few hundred dollars, which the record labels have to pay after you are found innocent.
Does it not work like that? Are you kidding? How much does your lawyer cost? How much does this impartial third party expert cost? How much many days off work does it take? Not a chance in hell you could get away only a few hundred dollars down. When the RIAA brings you to court, they're there for blood. They want you to pay their settlement, not challenge their assertion. They'll stretch it out till the end in an attempt to run out your money. And uless you can show they brought the suit basically knowing you were innocent, don't expect a dime's reimbursement for your costs.
Once you get a high enough population density -- especially with mixed zoning -- cars just aren't needed. People walk to the grocery store [or eat out]. They take mass transit to/fro work. Once you get that critical mass, the number of cars per capita, and perhaps even the aggregate number of cars, can decrease. People whose only experience with large cities consists of old cities, like New York, which reached "high enough population density" more than 100 years ago don't understand the nature of the problem. The only reason New York is hospitable to mass transit is that it was built essentially as a pedestrian city. In the 19th and 18th centuries, neighborhoods required shopping within walking distance, as keeping a horse within the city was something that "regular folks" couldn't really afford. Fast forward to the early 20th century. Any city which saw its population explosion since the automobile was built with a completely different layout. Take Los Angles, for example. As Steve Martin's character in LA Story said, "Some of these buildings are almost 20 years old!" In Los Angeles, the city of the automobile age, expansion happened out rather than up. The major streets where the businesses cluster (zoning) are frequently a half mile apart, and just getting to a major street often isn't even half the battle. Supermarkets are miles apart. Install a subway under the major streets? Which ones? There are major streets every.25-.5 mile for thirty miles in every direction! The current solution is to throw a lot of buses at it, but the bus system is only adequate to get the latino housekeepers from East LA to their jobs in the affluent areas in Beverly Hills/Bel Air/Brentwood/Santa Monica. Everyone else drives. Most new cities are similar. Where's the new Wal-Mart? eight miles out, at the edge of town, on the highway, right next to the Home Depot. Where's the new houses? In a huge sprawling tract of prefabs, on the other edge of town, with no shopping anywhere nearby.
Making changes to society to encourage auto alternatives will have a greater influence in, say, Greensboro than in SF Bay where they've already got fairly good transit. Making changes to society? That's a pretty nebulous plan, and one you might find difficult to impose upon people in the US. That's a "centrally planned economy" sort of thing. The only place that really worked in the 20th century was the old Soviet Union. They built really good mass transit systems in the major cities, but certainly no one was going to object.
I've never seen red arrows before. I've seen yellow ones though. Isn't that a traffic oxymoron? Arrows mean go and red means stop. No, an arrow only indicates direction. A red left arrow is designed to work in conjunction with a general green, essentially saying "LEFT TURN LANE must wait for green arrow, even though thru traffic can go".
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* There are many examples of institutional incompetence in the CIA, but two I think exemplify it:
Exhibit A: failure to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union. It was a complete surprise to them.
Exhibit B: yellowcake uranium. 'nuff said.
Ever heard of Fermat? Or is mathematics not a science? Context, man, context. In this context he is using "outsider" to mean "one ignorant of, and uneducated in, the field in which the breakthrough occurs". Fermat was something of a recluse, but he was still a mathematician well versed in the science of the day. He corresponded with Blaise Pascal, so he couldn't really be called an "outsider" in the field.
Please. The cost of paying for huge stacks of public records is infinitesimal compared to the total cost of running an insurance business. The taxpayer picking up the tab for their requests for public information would certainly not result in "more companies,... with better services and lower prices." That's like saying that if egg ranchers lowered their prices by 10 cents per dozen, we'd have a Denny's on every corner selling a five-egg breakfast for a dollar.
He's a dyslexic college dropout who freely admits he is bad at math and physics, yet asserts that it is only Zahn of MIT's education that makes him unable to see the genius of his work. He's classic crackpot material, like the Time Cube guy, but calmer.
So we have a guy who freely admits he's a garage tinkerer with no significant technical education, other than trial-and-error practical observation. But then we have:
Seriously, nothing says "arrogant crackpot" like a claim that knowing too much about a subject is what's making it hard to understand your genius. That's Time Cube guy stuff. Really, you read the article and you can tell he believes he's discovered perpetual motion. He's just a bit more rational than most such claimants in that he knows he can't call it perpetual motion. He wants to so badly though! What I don't understand about these guys is why they don't just wind up one of their machines and see how long it'll go. If it's perpetual motion, it should never stop, right? I suspect usually they claim there are a few "bugs" in the system that need to be worked out, but the initial test models "look promising". Unfortunately the "bug" in the system invariably turns out to be the First Law of Thermodynamics...
No, Iran was the same constitutional monarchy from 1906 to 1979. If anything, the problem that prompted CIA action was actually a loss of democracy. The CIA did
Does it not work like that? Are you kidding? How much does your lawyer cost? How much does this impartial third party expert cost? How much many days off work does it take? Not a chance in hell you could get away only a few hundred dollars down. When the RIAA brings you to court, they're there for blood. They want you to pay their settlement, not challenge their assertion. They'll stretch it out till the end in an attempt to run out your money. And uless you can show they brought the suit basically knowing you were innocent, don't expect a dime's reimbursement for your costs.
Making changes to society to encourage auto alternatives will have a greater influence in, say, Greensboro than in SF Bay where they've already got fairly good transit. Making changes to society? That's a pretty nebulous plan, and one you might find difficult to impose upon people in the US. That's a "centrally planned economy" sort of thing. The only place that really worked in the 20th century was the old Soviet Union. They built really good mass transit systems in the major cities, but certainly no one was going to object.