Huxley anticipated that objection by creating an experiment where they placed nothing but alphas on an island. Being highly intelligent, they didn't want to do the manual labor that society needs to survive, and the whole thing collapsed. The one thing he didn't count on, of course, was robotics and other advanced forms of automation: sufficiently advanced robots can serve to replace humans for all the menial physical tasks. No one needs to clean a toilet if a robot can be programed to do it for you, so it may well be possible to develop humanity to an all-alpha paradise. Maybe.
First, I'm not 100% certain such a co-op would be legal in all cases, but aside from that it wouldn't matter in all the most important cases. See, the real patent trolls are those who don't even have a product, only a patent: the co-op is powerless against them, since they have no leverage (remember, the troll isn't using any patent or possible patent, he only "owns" them), while the troll can patent nearly anything, which means there will always be something the co-op members could get sued for (it just isn't possible for them to cover everything themselves).
So while a decent idea, in theory, I doubt very much it would actually work. It might prevent this suit, but really this suit isn't one of the really egregious cases anyways (except insofar as software patents are bullshit).
Plus, in the extreme opposite direction, Apple has far too much clout to be bowed by such a co-op, and I suspect there would be others who are too powerful as well (Microsoft, perhaps) and without the ability to force everyone to join, it won't ultimately be effective.
Even before Nazism, Brave New World theorized doing almost exactly what Liao seems to be proposing: behavioral modification to force people towards "desirable" behavior, and (essentially) bioengineering children, to create a more ordered society (so not 100% the same as Liao on that point, but the concept is pretty much identical).
ranging from using pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people, to using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children.
Pretty sure I've read this book before. Now, if I could only remember what it was called. Hmmm...
Well, no time to waste, lets go create our bold refreshed earth, now with vegetarian midgets!
This is much, much more effective than tear gas: the pain ray has a several thousand-foot range and nearly instantaneous effects, plus you can't negate the effects with a (fairly) simple gas mask. Also, tear gas is pretty dangerous stuff which can cause lasting damage, and anyone who uses it risks getting caught by it themselves (a fundamental problem with all chemical weapons).
I don't think personal details like these are considered "sensitive", exactly. It's pretty basic information that any spy (and most citizens, if so inclined) can find out with a few days worth of work. Facebook just makes it a lot easier, and also allows them to get more personal stuff they couldn't easily find, like pictures, which could be used to influence (bribe, extort, blackmail) them later. Which is why Facebook is pretty stupid overall: you never know what is going to come back and bite you in the arse later on.
We have people who are killing others. They are bombing innocents. They are threatening the security of the free World. And they are eluding authorities.
But God forbid you attack some Big Corps website and *gasp* force their website down! Then there's a HUGE manhunt to get those criminals!
Every one of these "law enforcement" officials should get a swift kick in the ass and their priorities straightened out.
Right, because identity theft and monetary fraud should be ignored so long as there are murderers and rapists out there. And yes, the Lulzsec guys did, in fact, steal CC and SSN numbers and use them to commit fraud. Our present financial system, like it or not, is based around electronic identity and credit/debit. Comitting fraud like that destroys the trust in the system, which in turn contributes to economic insecurity for our entire economy.
Was what they did as bad as the CEOs of mega-corporations who gamed the system, or a random murderer? No. Was it illegal and destructive to society, and therefore worthy of prosecution? Yes. Perhaps more importantly, if they let these guys continue, it gives other hackers confidence to try the same thing, and you can bet they won't all restrict themselves to hacking Stratfor: very soon, it would be your bank and your money that gets stolen, potentially destroying your entire life. Lawlessness cannot be allowed to continue, or it will spread. It happens every time.
I have to wonder how these autonomous vehicles will handle unusual road conditions such as snow patches on the road, black ice, a ball bouncing out into the road, etc. It may be that autonomous vehicles are by far safer than vehicles with drivers -- until the unexpected happens at which point they completely fail.
I can just see it now: You are sleeping as your autonomous car is driving across country and then the horns and bells go off with a voice says: "Quick driver, take over, we are spinning out on black ice at 70mph and you have three seconds to recover or you and this car will die."
Far better than a human who isn't programmed to deal with every possible situation a car can find itself in. The car can calculate up to the millisecond road and atmospheric conditions, as well as scan the road ahead for patches of unexpected alterations in the road that could be ice/snow/water/etc, and of course know local weather through radio transmission (as well as the position, velocity, and condition of every driverless car nearby). You can simulate and test every possible condition for the car, and train the algorithm to handle each situation in the ideal fashion. Humans, on the other hand, can do none of these things.
So, most likely, the car wouldn't wake you up because it would never need to. It wouldn't travel 70mph in conditions that can result in black ice. It would see the ice well in advance and slow down, not overreact if it began the spin, and recover better once it entered it (humans tend to turn against the spin, which just makes it worse.)
The launch-line also has to be about 1600km in length by present designs. A few neighbors might take objection to Iran attempting to build one over the top of them. Ideally, it should be close to the equator, and while it can be over water, hurricanes would be a serious issue. Pretty much makes the US, China, and possibly Russia the only countries large enough to build one (I mean physically large enough). Others might, of course, be able to negotiate with neighbors to build it over their heads: but anyone trying to use it militarily will probably run into issues with that.
Sandia National Laboratories has carried out a '"murder-squad" investigation of the Startram concept, whose purpose is to find any flaw in a proposed project. They gave Startram a clean bill of health.
Sandia, if you don't know, is a major Lockheed Martin-owned research lab that does research work for the DoE in nuclear science, materials research, etc. I have a high degree of confidence they know what they are talking about (more, TBH, than either the article or any arm-chair commentators on Slashdot). The designer has also been working on the design since at least 2002, so I imagine he has given at least some thought to the technical problems it possesses. So, slightly more than working out the basics on a cocktail napkin.
This isn't even close to the space-elevator. That is well known to be impossible with current materials research. There are several space-lift designs, however, that are very much possible (currently), and this looks like one of them. The problem is getting someone to front billions on a project that may well, half-way through, run into massive technical problems, and will, at best, take decades to complete, much less show a return on investment. Which, BTW, makes it a perfect project for the government, so long as they can dedicate themselves to actually finishing it (which I'm not naive enough to think will happen). So, any such system is unlikely to get built for a while.
That is true. And of course you need to factor in costs of getting the train/ship/elevator/whatever up as well. Helpfully, the earth is spinning at nearly half a km/s near the equator, which does help somewhat, but of course the actual costs are, even in the best case, going to be in the thousands of dollars to get a human up (alive). I wouldn't mind paying a few thousands dollars to go to orbit, though.
For those who are curious, I ran some quick numbers on WolframAlpha. Using U=mgh as an accurate-enough measure, for a 100kg human to travel to LEO (300km) from Earth gravity (9.8 m/s) would be an energy cost of 294MJ. In kWh that is 82, or about $9 where I live. Technically, g diminishes as you go up, so it will be slightly less than that, but you get the point: the actual energy cost of getting to orbit isn't the problem. Moving upwards through 300km of mostly nothingness, is.
The actual energy requirements to get into orbit are pretty small, when you run the math. A couple hundred kg at standard kWh costs would be a couple hundred USD (don't remember the exact numbers and don't feel like doing them again. I actually ran the math to get from Earth surface to infinity: LEO would be much cheaper). You also need to accelerate to get orbital velocity, but again that actually doesn't take that much energy. The problem is, rockets are extremely inefficient. Hence why people want space elevators: technically, you could get to space, personally, for 50-60 dollars using that method. Now, this is pure physics: the actual energy cost is much higher, but even assuming only decent energy efficiency, it still wouldn't cost more than a thousand or so after you get the system set up.
Not when the launch tube is magnetically levitated, as suggested. TFA actually claims that the design is perfectly possible with existing technology, and they seem to have run the math. You need tethers to stop the tube from levitating too much, actually, but that is again perfectly possible.
I still to this day have not been able to fathom why they couldn't just use regular, non-transparent aluminium, or whatever metal the Klingon ships inner structure was made from to make their tank. Why did it need to be transparent? I don't know and I don't know why this conversation so strongly reminds me of that.
I've wondered this myself. I think it has to do with what happens when the whales suddenly find themselves inside a dark, enclosed space. They are used to an enclosure, so that wouldn't be an issue, but a non-transparent one might. Of course, Spock was supposed to have mind-melded to tell them it wouldn't be an issue. But I think the idea is without being able to see someone they know, they might freak out. And several pissed-off whales in an enclosed and not terribly strong space traveling through the vacuum of space at warp 9+ isn't a recipe for success.
The only thing that has made me lose respect for them is the drama over the DOTA trademark.
Out of curiosity, why? They have the original creator of DotA and the current maintainer of DotA on payroll, and are creating the sequel to it, whereas Blizzard did... nothing, at all, with DotA before Valve picked it up.
You get all the content that was in the game before it went F2P, plus all the content afterwards, for free. Good enough?
Oh sure you need a tiny bit of grind to get some of the new items, but that actually adds a sense of accomplishment to getting the items. Likely, a lot of people would stop playing if they got all the new items automatically. It's no more evil than WoW (actually, far less evil than WoW, since there isn't a monthly fee). And it isn't like the new items give a much of an advantage, either: they chiefly just help with certain playstyles.
the fremium model is designed to give those who don't pay a lesser experience then those who willingly ignore simple addition and pay for a weapon here(10 dollars), a perk there (12 dollars), double experience(10 dollars), unlocking classes(15 dollars), etc.
Not if done right. TF2 does it right (I haven't played much since they went F2P, granted): all the classes are unlocked by default. None of the unlockable weapons are overtly more powerful than the defaults. Some are certainly easier to use, or more effective with certain play-styles (or overpowered on certain maps, etc), but all of them have some sort of draw-back for whatever advantage they give, so unlocking a new one is more of a side-ways shift rather than an upwards one. Also, you can unlock everything in TF2 (with 1 or 2 pretty rare exceptions, usually special cosmetic items) just by playing it, so long as you have, at one point in the past, paid any money at all for the game (buying an item or buying the game pre-F2P).
It's a health issue in, what, 5 percent of cases (being extremely generous)? For the most part, it's just women wanting to have sex without the inevitable consequences, to wit, pregnancy ("horniness" is not a health issue, IMO). BTW, that extends to the men too: they want their girlfriends on birth control too (lest you think I am being sexist here).
Also, don't know what your talking about giving religious organizations wheelbarrows of cash. Do you mean they aren't taxed at the same rate? Because not taking money is not the same as giving people money (much as the government likes to claim so for political reasons). In any case, it doesn't matter: yes, the government is in fact forcing, under the current plan, religious organizations to provide health-care that includes birth control (which means, de facto, that they are funding birth control directly).
Type in the name in the search box at the bottom. If you type the full name properly, hitting enter will act as a run command (very useful for starting the command prompt: "cmd", enter, up it comes). And the pinning is nice, too, but I rarely use that.
No, the issue at question here is whether it is right and legal to force religious organizations to act against their conscience, i.e. to provide health insurance that must includes contraceptives. This isn't government policy on contraceptives: it is government policy setting organizational policy on birth control. As the good Rabbi says in the linked article,
“We are not here because we seek to hurt preventative care of anybody. We are here today because the administration is showing insensitivity to the liberty of conscience.”
You wouldn't be in favor of the government forcing vegan restaurant to server meat, would you? This is very similar, except even more so: this is more like the government forcing the vegans to slaughter the animals on-site, then serve the meat. Flukes argument (in this analogy) is that her friend didn't get enough protein because the vegan restaurant doesn't serve meat. But I suppose it's OK to force people to act against their conscience, because it's for the common good. Right?
There are two things about that story that are quite interesting. The first is that the "story" Fluke wanted to tell was a personal anecdote (hardly fit material for a discussion, unless you are attempting an emotional appeal... which again, is not exactly what we want our laws to be based one). Second, they put the fact that she was a minority in the headline (as if that was the issue) when clearly at least one of the witnesses was already black (so, not the actual issue). And finally, since when was a student at a university considered an expert witness on anything like this? Seriously. A professor, sure. A random person they happened to find in a university with a (no doubt) heart wrenching story? I'm sorry, but she doesn't actually have any standing to testify. I can demonstrate that with an easy (ridiculous) example: have a white person testify that black people beat him up, at a hearing to pass a law to throw all black people in jail. Does that testimony offer any credible reason to pass the law? No, and neither does Fluke's.
Also, the best part was this quote:
She criticized the Republican committee chairman, Rep. Darrel Issa, for wanting to “roll back the fundamental rights of women to a time when the government thought what happens in the bedroom is their business.”
Actually, Issa wants the government to not be involved in the bedroom: i.e. not to have the government fund their contraceptives, or, rather, to force religious organizations to provide them (which contradicts religious principles).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it still will be. Those old VCRs that used to flash 12:00? A stopped digital clock, right twice a day.
Now, if the digital clock is broken, and not merely stopped, such that it cannot display anything, it will never be either right or wrong.
Huxley anticipated that objection by creating an experiment where they placed nothing but alphas on an island. Being highly intelligent, they didn't want to do the manual labor that society needs to survive, and the whole thing collapsed. The one thing he didn't count on, of course, was robotics and other advanced forms of automation: sufficiently advanced robots can serve to replace humans for all the menial physical tasks. No one needs to clean a toilet if a robot can be programed to do it for you, so it may well be possible to develop humanity to an all-alpha paradise. Maybe.
First, I'm not 100% certain such a co-op would be legal in all cases, but aside from that it wouldn't matter in all the most important cases. See, the real patent trolls are those who don't even have a product, only a patent: the co-op is powerless against them, since they have no leverage (remember, the troll isn't using any patent or possible patent, he only "owns" them), while the troll can patent nearly anything, which means there will always be something the co-op members could get sued for (it just isn't possible for them to cover everything themselves).
So while a decent idea, in theory, I doubt very much it would actually work. It might prevent this suit, but really this suit isn't one of the really egregious cases anyways (except insofar as software patents are bullshit).
Plus, in the extreme opposite direction, Apple has far too much clout to be bowed by such a co-op, and I suspect there would be others who are too powerful as well (Microsoft, perhaps) and without the ability to force everyone to join, it won't ultimately be effective.
Even before Nazism, Brave New World theorized doing almost exactly what Liao seems to be proposing: behavioral modification to force people towards "desirable" behavior, and (essentially) bioengineering children, to create a more ordered society (so not 100% the same as Liao on that point, but the concept is pretty much identical).
ranging from using pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people, to using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children.
Pretty sure I've read this book before. Now, if I could only remember what it was called. Hmmm...
Well, no time to waste, lets go create our bold refreshed earth, now with vegetarian midgets!
This is much, much more effective than tear gas: the pain ray has a several thousand-foot range and nearly instantaneous effects, plus you can't negate the effects with a (fairly) simple gas mask. Also, tear gas is pretty dangerous stuff which can cause lasting damage, and anyone who uses it risks getting caught by it themselves (a fundamental problem with all chemical weapons).
I don't think personal details like these are considered "sensitive", exactly. It's pretty basic information that any spy (and most citizens, if so inclined) can find out with a few days worth of work. Facebook just makes it a lot easier, and also allows them to get more personal stuff they couldn't easily find, like pictures, which could be used to influence (bribe, extort, blackmail) them later. Which is why Facebook is pretty stupid overall: you never know what is going to come back and bite you in the arse later on.
We have people who are killing others. They are bombing innocents. They are threatening the security of the free World. And they are eluding authorities.
But God forbid you attack some Big Corps website and *gasp* force their website down! Then there's a HUGE manhunt to get those criminals!
Every one of these "law enforcement" officials should get a swift kick in the ass and their priorities straightened out.
Right, because identity theft and monetary fraud should be ignored so long as there are murderers and rapists out there. And yes, the Lulzsec guys did, in fact, steal CC and SSN numbers and use them to commit fraud. Our present financial system, like it or not, is based around electronic identity and credit/debit. Comitting fraud like that destroys the trust in the system, which in turn contributes to economic insecurity for our entire economy.
Was what they did as bad as the CEOs of mega-corporations who gamed the system, or a random murderer? No. Was it illegal and destructive to society, and therefore worthy of prosecution? Yes. Perhaps more importantly, if they let these guys continue, it gives other hackers confidence to try the same thing, and you can bet they won't all restrict themselves to hacking Stratfor: very soon, it would be your bank and your money that gets stolen, potentially destroying your entire life. Lawlessness cannot be allowed to continue, or it will spread. It happens every time.
According to this Q/A session, a little larger than normal picture files. What that actually means, I don't know (could be mostly marketing).
I have to wonder how these autonomous vehicles will handle unusual road conditions such as snow patches on the road, black ice, a ball bouncing out into the road, etc. It may be that autonomous vehicles are by far safer than vehicles with drivers -- until the unexpected happens at which point they completely fail.
I can just see it now: You are sleeping as your autonomous car is driving across country and then the horns and bells go off with a voice says: "Quick driver, take over, we are spinning out on black ice at 70mph and you have three seconds to recover or you and this car will die."
Far better than a human who isn't programmed to deal with every possible situation a car can find itself in. The car can calculate up to the millisecond road and atmospheric conditions, as well as scan the road ahead for patches of unexpected alterations in the road that could be ice/snow/water/etc, and of course know local weather through radio transmission (as well as the position, velocity, and condition of every driverless car nearby). You can simulate and test every possible condition for the car, and train the algorithm to handle each situation in the ideal fashion. Humans, on the other hand, can do none of these things.
So, most likely, the car wouldn't wake you up because it would never need to. It wouldn't travel 70mph in conditions that can result in black ice. It would see the ice well in advance and slow down, not overreact if it began the spin, and recover better once it entered it (humans tend to turn against the spin, which just makes it worse.)
The launch-line also has to be about 1600km in length by present designs. A few neighbors might take objection to Iran attempting to build one over the top of them. Ideally, it should be close to the equator, and while it can be over water, hurricanes would be a serious issue. Pretty much makes the US, China, and possibly Russia the only countries large enough to build one (I mean physically large enough). Others might, of course, be able to negotiate with neighbors to build it over their heads: but anyone trying to use it militarily will probably run into issues with that.
From TFA:
Sandia National Laboratories has carried out a '"murder-squad" investigation of the Startram concept, whose purpose is to find any flaw in a proposed project. They gave Startram a clean bill of health.
Sandia, if you don't know, is a major Lockheed Martin-owned research lab that does research work for the DoE in nuclear science, materials research, etc. I have a high degree of confidence they know what they are talking about (more, TBH, than either the article or any arm-chair commentators on Slashdot). The designer has also been working on the design since at least 2002, so I imagine he has given at least some thought to the technical problems it possesses. So, slightly more than working out the basics on a cocktail napkin.
This isn't even close to the space-elevator. That is well known to be impossible with current materials research. There are several space-lift designs, however, that are very much possible (currently), and this looks like one of them. The problem is getting someone to front billions on a project that may well, half-way through, run into massive technical problems, and will, at best, take decades to complete, much less show a return on investment. Which, BTW, makes it a perfect project for the government, so long as they can dedicate themselves to actually finishing it (which I'm not naive enough to think will happen). So, any such system is unlikely to get built for a while.
That is true. And of course you need to factor in costs of getting the train/ship/elevator/whatever up as well. Helpfully, the earth is spinning at nearly half a km/s near the equator, which does help somewhat, but of course the actual costs are, even in the best case, going to be in the thousands of dollars to get a human up (alive). I wouldn't mind paying a few thousands dollars to go to orbit, though.
For those who are curious, I ran some quick numbers on WolframAlpha. Using U=mgh as an accurate-enough measure, for a 100kg human to travel to LEO (300km) from Earth gravity (9.8 m/s) would be an energy cost of 294MJ. In kWh that is 82, or about $9 where I live. Technically, g diminishes as you go up, so it will be slightly less than that, but you get the point: the actual energy cost of getting to orbit isn't the problem. Moving upwards through 300km of mostly nothingness, is.
The actual energy requirements to get into orbit are pretty small, when you run the math. A couple hundred kg at standard kWh costs would be a couple hundred USD (don't remember the exact numbers and don't feel like doing them again. I actually ran the math to get from Earth surface to infinity: LEO would be much cheaper). You also need to accelerate to get orbital velocity, but again that actually doesn't take that much energy. The problem is, rockets are extremely inefficient. Hence why people want space elevators: technically, you could get to space, personally, for 50-60 dollars using that method. Now, this is pure physics: the actual energy cost is much higher, but even assuming only decent energy efficiency, it still wouldn't cost more than a thousand or so after you get the system set up.
Not when the launch tube is magnetically levitated, as suggested. TFA actually claims that the design is perfectly possible with existing technology, and they seem to have run the math. You need tethers to stop the tube from levitating too much, actually, but that is again perfectly possible.
I mean, I knew they were working on Gmail Motion, but I though they left that idea when it stopped being April 1st.
I still to this day have not been able to fathom why they couldn't just use regular, non-transparent aluminium, or whatever metal the Klingon ships inner structure was made from to make their tank. Why did it need to be transparent? I don't know and I don't know why this conversation so strongly reminds me of that.
I've wondered this myself. I think it has to do with what happens when the whales suddenly find themselves inside a dark, enclosed space. They are used to an enclosure, so that wouldn't be an issue, but a non-transparent one might. Of course, Spock was supposed to have mind-melded to tell them it wouldn't be an issue. But I think the idea is without being able to see someone they know, they might freak out. And several pissed-off whales in an enclosed and not terribly strong space traveling through the vacuum of space at warp 9+ isn't a recipe for success.
The only thing that has made me lose respect for them is the drama over the DOTA trademark.
Out of curiosity, why? They have the original creator of DotA and the current maintainer of DotA on payroll, and are creating the sequel to it, whereas Blizzard did... nothing, at all, with DotA before Valve picked it up.
You get all the content that was in the game before it went F2P, plus all the content afterwards, for free. Good enough?
Oh sure you need a tiny bit of grind to get some of the new items, but that actually adds a sense of accomplishment to getting the items. Likely, a lot of people would stop playing if they got all the new items automatically. It's no more evil than WoW (actually, far less evil than WoW, since there isn't a monthly fee). And it isn't like the new items give a much of an advantage, either: they chiefly just help with certain playstyles.
the fremium model is designed to give those who don't pay a lesser experience then those who willingly ignore simple addition and pay for a weapon here(10 dollars), a perk there (12 dollars), double experience(10 dollars), unlocking classes(15 dollars), etc.
Not if done right. TF2 does it right (I haven't played much since they went F2P, granted): all the classes are unlocked by default. None of the unlockable weapons are overtly more powerful than the defaults. Some are certainly easier to use, or more effective with certain play-styles (or overpowered on certain maps, etc), but all of them have some sort of draw-back for whatever advantage they give, so unlocking a new one is more of a side-ways shift rather than an upwards one. Also, you can unlock everything in TF2 (with 1 or 2 pretty rare exceptions, usually special cosmetic items) just by playing it, so long as you have, at one point in the past, paid any money at all for the game (buying an item or buying the game pre-F2P).
It's a health issue in, what, 5 percent of cases (being extremely generous)? For the most part, it's just women wanting to have sex without the inevitable consequences, to wit, pregnancy ("horniness" is not a health issue, IMO). BTW, that extends to the men too: they want their girlfriends on birth control too (lest you think I am being sexist here).
Also, don't know what your talking about giving religious organizations wheelbarrows of cash. Do you mean they aren't taxed at the same rate? Because not taking money is not the same as giving people money (much as the government likes to claim so for political reasons). In any case, it doesn't matter: yes, the government is in fact forcing, under the current plan, religious organizations to provide health-care that includes birth control (which means, de facto, that they are funding birth control directly).
Type in the name in the search box at the bottom. If you type the full name properly, hitting enter will act as a run command (very useful for starting the command prompt: "cmd", enter, up it comes). And the pinning is nice, too, but I rarely use that.
No, the issue at question here is whether it is right and legal to force religious organizations to act against their conscience, i.e. to provide health insurance that must includes contraceptives. This isn't government policy on contraceptives: it is government policy setting organizational policy on birth control. As the good Rabbi says in the linked article,
“We are not here because we seek to hurt preventative care of anybody. We are here today because the administration is showing insensitivity to the liberty of conscience.”
You wouldn't be in favor of the government forcing vegan restaurant to server meat, would you? This is very similar, except even more so: this is more like the government forcing the vegans to slaughter the animals on-site, then serve the meat. Flukes argument (in this analogy) is that her friend didn't get enough protein because the vegan restaurant doesn't serve meat. But I suppose it's OK to force people to act against their conscience, because it's for the common good. Right?
There are two things about that story that are quite interesting. The first is that the "story" Fluke wanted to tell was a personal anecdote (hardly fit material for a discussion, unless you are attempting an emotional appeal... which again, is not exactly what we want our laws to be based one). Second, they put the fact that she was a minority in the headline (as if that was the issue) when clearly at least one of the witnesses was already black (so, not the actual issue). And finally, since when was a student at a university considered an expert witness on anything like this? Seriously. A professor, sure. A random person they happened to find in a university with a (no doubt) heart wrenching story? I'm sorry, but she doesn't actually have any standing to testify. I can demonstrate that with an easy (ridiculous) example: have a white person testify that black people beat him up, at a hearing to pass a law to throw all black people in jail. Does that testimony offer any credible reason to pass the law? No, and neither does Fluke's.
Also, the best part was this quote:
She criticized the Republican committee chairman, Rep. Darrel Issa, for wanting to “roll back the fundamental rights of women to a time when the government thought what happens in the bedroom is their business.”
Actually, Issa wants the government to not be involved in the bedroom: i.e. not to have the government fund their contraceptives, or, rather, to force religious organizations to provide them (which contradicts religious principles).