The profit motive of the federal government is that of thousands of people who would be without a job if the government didn't have all those agencies controlling every detail in your life.
And every one of those thousands of people would be fired or imprisoned if they were caught breaking their institution's ethics rules for their own personal gain. It's called "political corruption" in that case.
But the leaders of a *corporation* are not just allowed to use the corporation's resources for profit regardless of ethics, they're *required* to, and their thousands of employees will be fired if they don't go along with it. It's called "preserving shareholder value" in this case.
I'm not saying governments, or the people who work in them, have any inherent merit. I'm saying that when it comes to privacy issues, a corporation is like a government which is *guaranteed* to be corrupt.
You've missed my point. I'm not saying that there *should be* a government-run identity system, I'm saying that *if* we have one, we'd be better off if the government ran it.
If you believe the government will do nefarious stuff with your data, since corporations will hand over their data the moment some guy with a suit and a badge shows up and says "national security", giving your data to a corporation is the same as giving it directly to the government.
And while it's true that some government officials might be persuaded to become corrupt and sell your data for profit over principle, corporations *by definition* are in the business of putting profit motive first.
So corporate verification of identity has all the drawbacks of government verification of identity, plus more.
In essence, when personal privacy is on the line, corporate officials are just government officials who are *guaranteed to be corrupt*.
It's NOT the private sector. It's the government, which is worse.
I'll be honest here: *If* we do something like this, I'd rather have the federal government managing it directly. Large corporations are just as cooperative with the cops as your average branch of government, and at least the federal government doesn't have a profit motive for sharing the information it has about me.
I like seeing stories like this. Maybe if we have enough of 'em, people will realize that gambling when the house has a stake is a sucker's game.
There's an anecdote in the book "Games You Can't Lose" by Harry Anderson (who played the judge in Night Court, and is a longtime stage magician and collector of cons and swindles). To paraphrase:
One day on a whim, this guy places a bet at a sidewalk Three Card Monte game and of course he loses. So he starts watching carefully how the game is played. And he notices how the dealer ignores bets that are placed on the right card when someone else bets on the wrong one, and how a Monte game always has a bunch of shills around who will helpfully make the wrong bet in case none of the marks do.
So the guy comes back the next day, and when the dealer calls for bets, the guy pulls out a staple gun and staples his dollar to the Queen. Bam! The first guy to ever win at Three Card Monte.
And he pocketed his winnings, after the nurse at the emergency room un-stapled them from his forehead.
I'm willing to offer parents the freedom to not vaccinate their kids, so long as they accept responsibility for the consequences. Namely, they pay all medical costs if the kid gets sick from a preventable disease, and go to jail for involuntary manslaughter if it dies.
But if you want society to take that burden from you, society gets to decide if your kid gets his shots.
If you read one scientific study and believe it, you're a fool. If you read three studies and two of them say one thing and one says another, you're a fool to believe any of 'em.
Scientific truth is not found in a single article, but in the cumulative outcome of thousands of people, verifying others' work, testing extenuating circumstances, and trying new ideas.
In the '60s, you had a couple studies funded by tobacco companies saying that smoking causes rainbows and puppies, and thousands of public health officials demonstrating that this was bullshit.
Today, you have a couple studies (some funded by fossil fuel companies) saying that global warming is a hoax, and thousands of climate scientists pointing at terabytes of data and thousands of simulation predictions saying that it's real.
Today again, same thing for autism and vaccination.
That's not to say the majority is always right --- for centuries all the experts believed that the sun went around the earth --- but it's your best bet. If you refuse to trust science unless it's always right all the time, you really can't function in modern society at all, because every element of our technological life is based on science that, at one point or another, was controversial.
As a climate scientist, I thought about this comparison.
But we're not throwing Wakefield to the wolves because he was wrong. Lots of scientists are wrong, it's okay. And it's not because he spoke with bias for a hypothesis he believed in. That's okay too. Wakefield's crimes are 1) deliberately falsifying and modifying data to fit his theory, and 2) doing so for profit without disclosing a conflict of interest.
The East Anglia CRU emails, which I assume are the hotbuttons you're pushing at the moment, show scientists with strong opinions, possibly putting a little spin on their presentations, but there is no evidence that they falsified data or took money under the table for their activities.
Fraud, yes. Reckless endangerment, yes. Racketeering, probably if you've got a smart DA. Maybe even constructive manslaughter. But I can't pin murder on him.
If we're going to string people up for murder, I'd suggest the idiotic parents who believed this guy's lies and Jenny McCarthy's frantic hype, against the advice of the FDA, CDC, and every doctor in the country from their pediatrician on up.
If you are John Goodman, hi, fantastic to meet you, I'm Jason Goodman, and I'm holding you responsible for all the Roseanne jokes made at my expense in middle school.
If you're just an Internet troll, I'm probably about to deeply regret linking my work website. Oh well!
"There has to be intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud another person"
I'm betting most posters in this thread are going to skip over this phrase completely, and raise the "free speech no matter what" flag.
But on the other hand, if the impersonation is done with intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud, why can't we just prosecute people for fraud, criminal intimidation, or whatnot?
Encouraging more people to drop out of college and go startup is good advice for a tiny tiny minority of people who will go on to found the Next Big Thing, and terrible advice for the vast majority who will end up living in their parents' basement and working at the local comic book shop.
But it is *always* good for Peter Thiel, venture capitalist, who stands to make a pile of money for risking a little cash, and isn't anteing up his entire future.
Nuclear aircraft are possible, in fact very effective, so long as you're willing to kill everything along their flight path. The US military designed unmanned supersonic nuclear aircraft: after they dropped their bombs, the plan was to let them just fly around the Soviet Union for weeks, wreaking havoc via their radioactive exhaust and devastating low-altitude sonic booms.
If you go with a nuclear design that *won't* kill everything it flies past, your power-to-weight ratio is once again terrible.
Synthetic fuels are also a viable option, but if you want to go that way you don't have to redesign the airplane at all.
In short, to make an effective non-fossil-fuel aircraft, you need to not just redesign the airplane, you need to invent some totally new engine system.
As far as I can tell, only Sonex has built an actual plane that actually gets off the ground, and even that was airborne for only a few seconds. Everything else looks like plans on paper and parts in the machine shop.
That's more than I expected, but it doesn't disprove my point, that an electric aircraft is massively more difficult to achieve compared to an electric ground vehicle.
There is a fundamental difference between internal combustion engines and other technologies: they have *phenomenal* power-to-weight and energy-to-weight ratios.
There is a fundamental difference between aircraft and other vehicles: if their power-to-weight ratio is too low, they do not fly. An underpowered car is an underpowered car, but an underpowered plane is not a plane.
There is a reason why nobody invented a workable aircraft until 1905, and it's not because everybody who tried before the Wright brothers was an idiot.
================== Example:
A set of lithium-ion batteries plus a modern electric motor of the type used in hybrid cars has a power-to-weight ratio of about 250 W/kg, and an endurance of 20-30 minutes at that power level. A small aircraft engine, including fuel tank, has a power-to-weight ratio of about 1000 W/kg, and an endurance of several hours.
For most small passenger aircraft, if you increase the weight of the power system by a factor of four, they will be too heavy to get off the ground. (Example: Cessna Skycatcher, engine weight 100 pounds, "spare" weight limit with only the pilot aboard: 150 pounds)
Last year, far more computers were sold than cars. Therefore, the automobile era is over, right? More cups of coffee were sold than houses. Therefore, the housing era is over, right?
"A sold more than B" does not say anything about the importance of B.
We don't need a trial by jury to conclude that this house is PACKED WITH EXPLOSIVES. This isn't a crime-and-punishment thing, this is eliminating an imminent threat to public safety.
Let's hear from an overeducated university student back home to visit his family:
To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd.
But antivirus isn't a solution for those people either. If they don't want to pay religious attention to system updates, they end up paying religious attention to their antivirus software.
To continue your car analogy, it's as if your solution to not wanting to pay attention to your car is to install a monitor that locks the car into 2nd gear every 5000 miles and won't let you out until you get an oil change. Effective? Yes. A good idea? No.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Antivirus causes more problems than it solves. You're far better off using a modern operating system (Mac, Linux, Win7, anything but XP) with no antivirus and religious attention to system updates.
This opinion may be totally uninformed and wrong, but since I never use Windows for anything mission-critical, I don't care if I turn out to be wrong.
The scientists themselves aren't helping, by naming the new sheep "Dolly" as well.
There are plenty of non-stupid reasons to do animal cloning, and human cloning has the potential to help millions of infertile couples. Someday cloning *will* begin to leave the laboratory, and when it does, we need to make sure the public has a rational understanding of what a clone is and is not. Otherwise, the horrific science fiction prophecies will fulfill themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
The profit motive of the federal government is that of thousands of people who would be without a job if the government didn't have all those agencies controlling every detail in your life.
And every one of those thousands of people would be fired or imprisoned if they were caught breaking their institution's ethics rules for their own personal gain. It's called "political corruption" in that case.
But the leaders of a *corporation* are not just allowed to use the corporation's resources for profit regardless of ethics, they're *required* to, and their thousands of employees will be fired if they don't go along with it. It's called "preserving shareholder value" in this case.
I'm not saying governments, or the people who work in them, have any inherent merit. I'm saying that when it comes to privacy issues, a corporation is like a government which is *guaranteed* to be corrupt.
You've missed my point. I'm not saying that there *should be* a government-run identity system, I'm saying that *if* we have one, we'd be better off if the government ran it.
If you believe the government will do nefarious stuff with your data, since corporations will hand over their data the moment some guy with a suit and a badge shows up and says "national security", giving your data to a corporation is the same as giving it directly to the government.
And while it's true that some government officials might be persuaded to become corrupt and sell your data for profit over principle, corporations *by definition* are in the business of putting profit motive first.
So corporate verification of identity has all the drawbacks of government verification of identity, plus more.
In essence, when personal privacy is on the line, corporate officials are just government officials who are *guaranteed to be corrupt*.
It's NOT the private sector. It's the government, which is worse.
I'll be honest here: *If* we do something like this, I'd rather have the federal government managing it directly. Large corporations are just as cooperative with the cops as your average branch of government, and at least the federal government doesn't have a profit motive for sharing the information it has about me.
You do realize that a good fraction of the people on this website make a living trying to prove you wrong, don't you?
I like seeing stories like this. Maybe if we have enough of 'em, people will realize that gambling when the house has a stake is a sucker's game.
There's an anecdote in the book "Games You Can't Lose" by Harry Anderson (who played the judge in Night Court, and is a longtime stage magician and collector of cons and swindles). To paraphrase:
One day on a whim, this guy places a bet at a sidewalk Three Card Monte game and of course he loses. So he starts watching carefully how the game is played. And he notices how the dealer ignores bets that are placed on the right card when someone else bets on the wrong one, and how a Monte game always has a bunch of shills around who will helpfully make the wrong bet in case none of the marks do.
So the guy comes back the next day, and when the dealer calls for bets, the guy pulls out a staple gun and staples his dollar to the Queen. Bam! The first guy to ever win at Three Card Monte.
And he pocketed his winnings, after the nurse at the emergency room un-stapled them from his forehead.
I'm willing to offer parents the freedom to not vaccinate their kids, so long as they accept responsibility for the consequences. Namely, they pay all medical costs if the kid gets sick from a preventable disease, and go to jail for involuntary manslaughter if it dies.
But if you want society to take that burden from you, society gets to decide if your kid gets his shots.
I stand corrected. Thanks.
If you read one scientific study and believe it, you're a fool. If you read three studies and two of them say one thing and one says another, you're a fool to believe any of 'em.
Scientific truth is not found in a single article, but in the cumulative outcome of thousands of people, verifying others' work, testing extenuating circumstances, and trying new ideas.
In the '60s, you had a couple studies funded by tobacco companies saying that smoking causes rainbows and puppies, and thousands of public health officials demonstrating that this was bullshit.
Today, you have a couple studies (some funded by fossil fuel companies) saying that global warming is a hoax, and thousands of climate scientists pointing at terabytes of data and thousands of simulation predictions saying that it's real.
Today again, same thing for autism and vaccination.
That's not to say the majority is always right --- for centuries all the experts believed that the sun went around the earth --- but it's your best bet. If you refuse to trust science unless it's always right all the time, you really can't function in modern society at all, because every element of our technological life is based on science that, at one point or another, was controversial.
As a climate scientist, I thought about this comparison.
But we're not throwing Wakefield to the wolves because he was wrong. Lots of scientists are wrong, it's okay. And it's not because he spoke with bias for a hypothesis he believed in. That's okay too. Wakefield's crimes are 1) deliberately falsifying and modifying data to fit his theory, and 2) doing so for profit without disclosing a conflict of interest.
The East Anglia CRU emails, which I assume are the hotbuttons you're pushing at the moment, show scientists with strong opinions, possibly putting a little spin on their presentations, but there is no evidence that they falsified data or took money under the table for their activities.
Fraud, yes. Reckless endangerment, yes. Racketeering, probably if you've got a smart DA. Maybe even constructive manslaughter. But I can't pin murder on him.
If we're going to string people up for murder, I'd suggest the idiotic parents who believed this guy's lies and Jenny McCarthy's frantic hype, against the advice of the FDA, CDC, and every doctor in the country from their pediatrician on up.
If you consider that shouting, hoo boy have I got a show for you to watch.
http://nancygrace.blogs.cnn.com/
Well that all depends. How much is relieving your vague sense of unease over a scary-sounding chemical worth?
Is it worth 622 dead children?
Why is this making the news now?
Because the final in-depth analysis has been published by the journal which originally published Wakefield's findings.
To put it in courtroom drama terms, it's the difference between a suspect being charged with a crime and a being convicted.
If you are John Goodman, hi, fantastic to meet you, I'm Jason Goodman, and I'm holding you responsible for all the Roseanne jokes made at my expense in middle school.
If you're just an Internet troll, I'm probably about to deeply regret linking my work website. Oh well!
"There has to be intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud another person"
I'm betting most posters in this thread are going to skip over this phrase completely, and raise the "free speech no matter what" flag.
But on the other hand, if the impersonation is done with intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud, why can't we just prosecute people for fraud, criminal intimidation, or whatnot?
Encouraging more people to drop out of college and go startup is good advice for a tiny tiny minority of people who will go on to found the Next Big Thing, and terrible advice for the vast majority who will end up living in their parents' basement and working at the local comic book shop.
But it is *always* good for Peter Thiel, venture capitalist, who stands to make a pile of money for risking a little cash, and isn't anteing up his entire future.
Nuclear aircraft are possible, in fact very effective, so long as you're willing to kill everything along their flight path. The US military designed unmanned supersonic nuclear aircraft: after they dropped their bombs, the plan was to let them just fly around the Soviet Union for weeks, wreaking havoc via their radioactive exhaust and devastating low-altitude sonic booms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft
If you go with a nuclear design that *won't* kill everything it flies past, your power-to-weight ratio is once again terrible.
Synthetic fuels are also a viable option, but if you want to go that way you don't have to redesign the airplane at all.
In short, to make an effective non-fossil-fuel aircraft, you need to not just redesign the airplane, you need to invent some totally new engine system.
As far as I can tell, only Sonex has built an actual plane that actually gets off the ground, and even that was airborne for only a few seconds. Everything else looks like plans on paper and parts in the machine shop.
That's more than I expected, but it doesn't disprove my point, that an electric aircraft is massively more difficult to achieve compared to an electric ground vehicle.
There is a fundamental difference between internal combustion engines and other technologies: they have *phenomenal* power-to-weight and energy-to-weight ratios.
There is a fundamental difference between aircraft and other vehicles: if their power-to-weight ratio is too low, they do not fly. An underpowered car is an underpowered car, but an underpowered plane is not a plane.
There is a reason why nobody invented a workable aircraft until 1905, and it's not because everybody who tried before the Wright brothers was an idiot.
==================
Example:
A set of lithium-ion batteries plus a modern electric motor of the type used in hybrid cars has a power-to-weight ratio of about 250 W/kg, and an endurance of 20-30 minutes at that power level. A small aircraft engine, including fuel tank, has a power-to-weight ratio of about 1000 W/kg, and an endurance of several hours.
For most small passenger aircraft, if you increase the weight of the power system by a factor of four, they will be too heavy to get off the ground. (Example: Cessna Skycatcher, engine weight 100 pounds, "spare" weight limit with only the pilot aboard: 150 pounds)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_162
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-weight_ratio#Electric_Motors.2FElectromotive_Generators
Last year, far more computers were sold than cars. Therefore, the automobile era is over, right?
More cups of coffee were sold than houses. Therefore, the housing era is over, right?
"A sold more than B" does not say anything about the importance of B.
We don't need a trial by jury to conclude that this house is PACKED WITH EXPLOSIVES. This isn't a crime-and-punishment thing, this is eliminating an imminent threat to public safety.
Let's hear from an overeducated university student back home to visit his family:
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
Somebody get that kid some Prozac.
But antivirus isn't a solution for those people either. If they don't want to pay religious attention to system updates, they end up paying religious attention to their antivirus software.
To continue your car analogy, it's as if your solution to not wanting to pay attention to your car is to install a monitor that locks the car into 2nd gear every 5000 miles and won't let you out until you get an oil change. Effective? Yes. A good idea? No.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Antivirus causes more problems than it solves. You're far better off using a modern operating system (Mac, Linux, Win7, anything but XP) with no antivirus and religious attention to system updates.
This opinion may be totally uninformed and wrong, but since I never use Windows for anything mission-critical, I don't care if I turn out to be wrong.
The scientists themselves aren't helping, by naming the new sheep "Dolly" as well.
There are plenty of non-stupid reasons to do animal cloning, and human cloning has the potential to help millions of infertile couples. Someday cloning *will* begin to leave the laboratory, and when it does, we need to make sure the public has a rational understanding of what a clone is and is not. Otherwise, the horrific science fiction prophecies will fulfill themselves.