I understand why the judge is holding her in contempt if she fails to decrypt. The fact is that he can't physically make her do it. But that simple fact should be a key reason why you can't order people to do it.
An unenforceable law is a stupid law. It's like laws against suicide... how are you going to stop anyone from doing it and how are you going to punish them after they did it?
It's a dumb law.
The real problem is how to do you catch bad people that have incriminating evidence locked by encryption?
You could make strong encryption illegal... but all of that seems unlikely to stand.
Its an interesting issue. I feel for the judge here... he's in an impossible situation.
In most positions in a company there is some sort of career track that allows for skilled workers to justify higher pay by taking on additional responsibility or by acquiring additional abilities.
An engineer with 30 years of experience should have gained some useful skills that a kid fresh out of college would not possess. What are they and can those skills be leveraged to move older engineers into positions of responsibility, oversight, mentoring, and guidance? I don't buy that these guys are just dead weight. Some of course are... but some are also extremely valuable and some are just as valuable as they always were just in different ways.
Give them a different position. Change the job in some way. Firing them and then importing cheap foreign labor is self destructive. It sends a strong signal to US students that there is no job security in technical professions. Which means that an existing shortage will get worse because no one will want to work in the industry. That will require more outsourcing or more importing of foreign specialists. In either case that will empower foreign competitors which will increasingly get an edge. Eventually, the US companies will be marginalized for lack of having any marketable technology, products, or services.
This is a very bad situation. I'm not saying this in defense of domestic workers. I'm saying this in defense of the very multinational corporations that THINK they're making a good choice here when really they're cutting their own throats little by little.
These companies can't survive without a technical advantage. That is their primary business model at this point. They lose that and they're done.
The overwhelming majority of papers are read once and then never read again. I know that much.
This is especially true of people drawing conclusions rather then reporting data.
It's actually odd that they focus on asking graduate students to draw novel conclusions when it probably more useful to ask them to discover novel data. No interpretation. Just come up with an experiment or find something that has never been measured before. Then report in detail everything so it can be repeated or remeasured.
Most reports would probably be more useful.
There's nothing wrong with spending your life collecting dots for other people to connect. It's an absolutely vital portion of science. Too often sciences get too theoretical... too full of conjecture. Science is supposed to be about empiricism. Which requires 99 percent data and 1 percent conclusion.
They're being asked to pad their paper because the actual evidence being cited might not look that convincing on it's own right. And many of the conclusions aren't properly supported. Come on, we all had that experience writing papers. You've got a deadline, you're trying to get from point A to point B and you just don't have enough to make it all the way. So you make a statement you don't have support for and then link it to source material you know no one will read. So it looks like your conclusion is supported when in fact it isn't. You don't care though because the point is to get from point A to point B... and the only person you have to fool is the teacher or in this case the peer review that probably doesn't care that much anyway. Also... everyone else is doing it... and for the teacher to actually verify all those citations would be pretty much impossible. The only thing you have to be careful of is to not say something the teacher knows is false or will think is false. If you do that they might check the citation. But if you go outside of their knowledge forcing them to basically check everything or nothing... or stick closely to whatever the teacher is likely to believe anyway... you can get away with about 99 times out of a hundred. And the time you're caught... slap on the wrist or a small hit to your grade.
Now I have no experience with what happens when you actually start publishing things. I fully admit my ignorance here. But I'd be surprised if an academic history conditioned by this environment didn't predispose graduates to try the same thing. And really, who is going to stop them? They've had their whole academic career to perfect the best ways to scam the system. All those years they weren't just learning the subject but they were also learning how the subject is taught, how it is graded, the social characteristics of their judges, human psychology as it relates to auditing, etc. We learn all this stuff naturally.
Anyway, that there is fraud in academia isn't shocking. All human interactions involve fraud. If there's a benefit in deceiving someone then we probably do it and we get very good at it. This is indifferent to morality. It has more to do with intelligence. If you're clever whether you're a good person or a bad person... you learn to lie. Even if you don't use it for evil it's just a skill you acquire.
If there is anything I find bothersome here it is the conspiratorial aspect where someone is encouraged to decieve others. This sort of thing is marginally less offensive when it's kept isolated to individuals even if everyone is doing it. And really what people SHOULD be doing rather then finding bogus sources is find ACTUAL sources.
It's actually not useful to anyone if it's fifty percent bullshit. I don't care if it's half brilliant and half bullshit. Even ten percent bullshit isn't acceptable. Strip out everything that isn't backed by bullshit. If you can't get from point A to point B without using bullshit sources then maybe those two dots don't actually connect. I know you need to make a connection and maybe you are even required to make that specific connection because your peers won't tolerate anything short of it. But that isn't science and it isn't academically useful. Sure you get your grade or you get your degree or you get your job or you get paid. You get what you want. But you do it at the expense of system's integrity.
I don't know... it's hard to audit this stuff without investing unreasonable numbers of man hours.
I am a republican and I am not theistic. Many republicans have no particular religious leanings.
It is as accurate to say the republicans are all religious nuts as it is to say the democrats are all foaming at the mouth communists.
Are you a foaming at the mouth communist? Then appreciate that perhaps your perspective of the rival party is distorted by bad media and your own ignorance.
We are both well meaning and quiet reasonable. We simply want our values tolerated. Most of us have no interest in telling you how to live your life. The social cons obviously like to attack gays and whine endlessly about abortion. But there are compromises we can strike there that give everyone what they want.
The price of lasting peace between our political factions is limiting the power of government to it's traditional roles. If you stop sticking your finger up our anus to check our prostate we can promise to control the social cons. That is a bargain we keep for centuries... forever. But the price is not negotiable.
In so far as I've talked with democrats this is not acceptable. They see it as their right and responsibility to involve themselves in people's personal lives and personal choices. They are unwilling to grant us our basic individual rights. And as such, peace is impossible until they are willing to admit our rights and hold to a grand bargain. And because my political faction must fight for it's life it will make whatever bargains it must with whatever factions in this country it can find to get votes. That means amongst other things trying to give the social cons what they want even though we find some of their goals to be distasteful. We have no choice. It's either do that or submit to the democrats and allow them to chain us. We'll die first.
All we want is tolerance. And if that is not granted we'll do whatever we must ensure our rights are protected.
This is blood in the streets talk... I'm just making it clear that this is not a negotiable issue. We will not be made into slaves.
Anyone that takes the oath office should limit their office to the powers it should have and nothing more.
Washington could have been king. Doubtless one of the other founders would have tried to kill him had he tried it. But he was basically supreme military commander at that point and could have killed them all.
This country was founded by people that sought limited powers fearing the excesses of government.
Nearly all our problems come from government either doing things it wasn't supposed to do or refusing to do things it used to do but has since stopped doing.
As they say, power corrupts... or at least, attracts the corruptible. The more powerful the government gets the more corrupt it will get. All of our divisions, hatreds, and rivalries get worse as the government gets more powerful.
It's in part the stakes. If you lose power then your political rivals get enourmous power to do terrible things to your faction. If your faction gets power then you can not only do pretty much whatever you want but you can savage your rivals almost without heed to reprisals.
It's too sweet to let anyone else have a sip.
The solution is to limit power to what is needed and then divide that power such that no one group can control what power is needed.
The executive is too powerful. It has too many agencies with too little congressional oversight, too little judicial review, and too little elected office. I mean, you elect one man and he then appoints effectively thousands of officials that head up the incredibly complex federal executive. That has to be broke up and made more transparent. It can't be made transparent because the current president wants to be open. He must have no choice.
The legislature is way too powerful. They basically reinterpreting the constitution to mean... whatever. The commerce clause has become a catch all that basically means anything that involves economic matters they can automatically dominate.
The Judiciary is just about right. I wouldn't make it more powerful. I'd just make the other branches less powerful.
Then the whole balance between federal and state governments is wrong. At most they should be co-equal. As it stands, the states are effectively subordinate to the federal government which is wrong. How it is supposed to work is that the feds have jurisdiction on extra national and national matters. That means anything that CANNOT be local. Education for example is something that CAN be local and so should not be federal. However, national defense or interstate commerce is obviously extra national and national respectively. Interstate commerce only means allowing the free and unfettered exchange of goods between states. Nothing else. A given state might be prone to put a toll on a road between two cities that goes through it's state... and that toll could technically be very high because those cities have no other means of shipping goods between each other. Interstate commerce clause is supposed to stop that sort of behavior. But beyond that sort of thing it has no relevance.
Beyond everything though, the biggest loser is the people. We have become less powerful. Every time our government gets more powerful we get weaker. Our votes matter less. Our government cares less what anyone thinks. More of our money is "deemed" to belong to them. They assume the right to tell us what is right and wrong.
They have no right to any of that. They serve us. They are not nobles or kings. But we are slowly making them nobles year by year.
People talk about the corporations abusing their power and talking about how powerful they are...
The sad thing is the corporations aren't more powerful. What happened is they KEPT their power. We lost it. And not to the corporations. We lost it to the government. Our politicians took our power away and the corporations kept most of their power.
I don't want to make the corporations less powerful. I want to make myself more powerful.
First, the drm was broken just about instantly by the pirates. So this is at BEST pointless.
Second, if you're going to set up systems like this then you have to be committed to a strategy of NOT having the systems drop... EVER. I mean, if you have them drop for five minutes at 2 am on a Sunday... then that's excusable. But a whole god damn week? If you can't do better then you have no business setting up a system like that.
Basic rule of security is that if the hacker gets physical control of the code you're basically boned. The only way to protect yourself is to not give up bigger portions of the game code. Too much to be reasonably emulated. That way... best case... it ACTUALLY works. That will mean more robust servers and bandwidth to process whatever is being offloaded. Doubtless that's a cost benefit issue... do the curve and get as close as is economically possible.
Another option might be releasing games exclusively over some system like OnLive which retains the game effectively in the cloud and it never gets on the user's machine at all. A system like that should make hacking a game difficult.
I'm not going to blame either side for this... I think we can agree that both parties have been on both sides of this issue.
Lets just be happy SOPA died and remember in the future that MAYBE the "other" party which ever that might be for you MIGHT not be made up entirely of vampire demon nazis... and might just be okay people with a different perspective on things.
Honestly, most of the political disagreements would go away if we stopped trying to impose things on people that don't want to participate. If you have a great idea... great. Anyone that actually likes that idea will support it. If your idea involves forcing people at gun point to do what you say though... maybe it isn't such a great idea.
LA gets water from all over the south east. We largely bankrolled Hoover Dam which is one of the reasons we such a choice cut of the water. We also piped water in from all over the region... going over mountains and through valleys.
There is water in Australia... it's just mostly running out into the ocean.
When every river is just a trickle by the time it reaches the ocean... then you can claim they're out of water. And in the meantime, separate your water out into drinking water, gray water, and waste water. If you're really low then there's no reason to be wasteful.
None of this is actually that expensive. For every one of these water projects you should be able to get new growth that will off set whatever the costs were to build the project.
It's going to take some big brass balls engineering projects but on a per capita basis the costs are going to be minor.
They're having a hard time raising taxes without pissing off rank and file voters especially since some states already have pretty high taxes. New Jersey for example has property taxes about as high as mortgage rates. Consequently you can pay your mortgage down and pay about as much in property taxes.
Anyway, as they can't do that they're now going after sin taxes. They'll tax booze, sugar, sodas, fast food... anything seen as a moral or ethical lapse. They'll tax them one at a time so that only the group that likes that sin fights.
It's about the money. It's not about public safety, the children, or medical health. It's just money. Period.
Easiest way to prove it... tell them "yes, great idea. Only instead of a tax/fine we'll do something that doesn't net you any money or we'll collect the tax but it will be explicitly used for something you can't touch." Almost instantly they tend to not care anymore about whatever they were whining about. Which is odd because if they cared about "the children" that should be good enough. But that was never the point. It was just the money.
What's most remarkable about this fellow is that he actually thinks he'll get any measurable amount of money from such a tax or that it would even be enforceable.
Interstate commerce is a catch all the government uses when it has no right to do something and wants to do it anyway.
What I find amusing about this is that so many people are upset about this stem cell thing but aren't upset by all the things that created the precedence that allowed them to make these claims in the first place.
if you want this to stop then the inter state commerce clause needs to get it's wings clipped. That's the problem. Go to the source.
I come from the western United States and my family was involved with farming for a few generations... I know what scarce water means.
I also know that not all water in Australia is tapped for drinking and agriculture. I'm not suggesting that the middle of the country be made to bloom with vegetation. I am suggesting you can build small to medium sized communities throughout the area. It will require a keen attention to water resources but it's all workable if water isn't wasted. Obviously in many of these places you're not going to be able to have lawns. At least not with subsidized municipal water. If someone wants to truck water in from somewhere else on their own dime to water their lawn that's their own business.
wow... You're the second person that doesn't realize there are major cities in deserts throughout the US. Also much of the middle east is pretty arid and yet people live quiet comfortably there when they're not busy killing each other.
As to the cost of pumping in water... there's plenty of water in Australia and even more in Tasmania. They have lots of options.
do people live in Arizona? How about new Mexico? What about Nevada?
Come now... why am I always the one playing devil's advocate.
before you make an argument think of why it might be wrong.
Look at the middle east. Lots of people live in deserts. All you need is enough water for crops and the humans. It's not that much especially if you focus on low water crops. If you're growing rice or something out there then you're screwed. Corn however has pretty reasonable water needs. There are other alternatives. Staple crops are the only real requirement. Technically everything can probably be imported but costs will be a lot lower if you can at least grow your primary source of calories.
First, the train isn't going straight from LA to SF. That would take it through park land and mountains. If we were really serious about a train them we'd do what the Swiss did when they wanted a train... Tunnel through. There are many such tunnels in the Rocky Mountains. Only way to get a freeway through them in many cases is to tunnel. Anyway, this train won't be doing any of that for a few reasons. One, it would spoil the area in the opinion of some. Cali has some of the most extreme NIYBism you'll find anywhere in the world. Second, it would make the whole thing more expensive and the cost of the project without doing this has already TRIPLED. If we then tunneled it would probably take the tripled costs and quadruple them. Third, there are no population centers in that area. They do actually want the train to be able to stop somewhere besides LA and SF. But if it goes through the mountains then that will be about it. Etc.
Second, the train is going to stop at various places along the way. Stopping means decelerating, not moving for a while, and then accelerating. That process radically slows the total travel time of the train. A plane from LA to SF does not stop.
Third, the check in process for domestic flights from LA to SF is not a big deal. The biggest problem is the security and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have a security scan on the high speed train. I don't know if it will be as extreme but it's likely to be annoying.
Oh and because you're apparently waving on this issue. The ticket price for the train is between 60-70 USD for one way. Airplanes are 50 dollars one way. And that's not counting the cost of building the track or maintaining the track. That's just what it costs to run the train. And worse still that price assumes 60 million passengers a year. Want to guess how often government projections are accurate about things like this? Expect the figures to be off by about 30 percent at least which means either the ticket price will have to go up by 30 percent or more likely the train will have to be further subsidized by the government.
The whole plan is idiotic. And I don't mind stupid plans. My problem is with the government enacting a stupid plan with my money. If some private collection of investors want to get together and build this thing then have fun. It's their money to waste. But they're effectively beggaring the richest state in the union for nothing and tying future generations to continue to maintain the tracks if only to disguise the fact that it was all a massive waste.
As to Manhattan to DC... that's a much shorter distance between SF and LA. And you have a direct line between both places and there isn't a mountain range between the two cities.
The real problem in any case is that airport security is too slow. Building a train doesn't solve that problem. What happens if a terrorist blows himself up on a train. Then they'll ask you to take your shoes off before getting on the train and whatever speed benefits you think you got are gone. Its all about the security gate. And in any case, there's no way any islamic terrorist is going to take over a US plane probably for the next 30 years or ever again. The reality is that the pilots on those planes LET the terrorists have control because they thought the worst that would happen is that the plane would fly to some foreign airport, there would be some sort of hostage negotiation, everyone would eat pizza brought in, and everyone would be released before or after the terrorists were shot in the head by snipers. Instead, the planes were flown into the sides of buildings. No pilot is going to surrender the cockpit under those terms and the passengers likewise won't submit to terrorists with box cutters. What made 9/11 work was that no one knew what the terrorists were going to do with control of the plane. That had never been done before. The fourth plane didn't crash into the white house because the passengers were informed by cell phone that the fi
Oh please don't bring up that joke all over again.
That stuff has to be the most over-hyped medical hazard in US history.
Also... its likely that removing it from the space shuttle is why started to become too hazardous to fly. They were initially designed to use asbestos between the panels and the structure. That was removed and replaced with something less effective.
Anyway... this sort of material isn't something you waste putting everywhere. It's something you use when nothing else will get the job done.
We also desperately need a replacement for asbestos that is cost effective and at least as good at containing heat.
I'm tired of environmental and health concerns forcing us BACK in time. Nuclear power plants are being shut down and there is nothing to replace them but coal. Coal is being shut down and there is nothing to replace them but hydro power. Many of the wonder materials we've discovered over the years have health concerns and so we ban them and replace them with inferior substitutes.
Right now the State of California in which I live is trying to build a "high speed rail" system from Los Angeles to San Francisco which will be SLOWER then an airplane, cost more then an airplane, and go to fewer places then an airplane. Does that stop them from building it even with the state going broke?
Not long ago we had a big solar power plant we were building shut down because it infringed on the habitat of a local lizard. I mean... are you f'ing kidding me? There is no where on earth you can build where something like that won't happen. So by that genius logic we can never build anything ever again anywhere.
Sorry I'm ranting here... I'm annoyed by all the Luddites.
Know what the first person to discover fire said?
Ouch.
Imagine if some group of jackasses at the time had said "oh fire is dangerous, you shouldn't use that. And it's a threat to the environment. And the smoke will give people cancer... etc"... If the alternative is worse then it doesn't matter.
Fire for all it's threats will keep you warm. It will cook your food. It will clear land. It will keep most dangerous predators away. Fire is awesome.
Likewise, there are a lot of technologies and materials and forces that have negative effects. But if we're careful about it and the pros outweigh the cons then we should do it.
Lets say a few thousand people in the US get cancer every year as result of asbestos exposure. Bad right? Okay, what if in the process we save a few tens of thousands of people from burning to death?
Choices. Now if I can get the best of both worlds, fine. But if I have to let tens of thousands die to save a few thousand then that's stupid.
Rather then fill the outback with yet another untested and likely useless species. Why don't they just put more people out there?
Build a few more cities or towns... expand... tame the wilderness. If people actually live out there then any undesired species isn't going to last very long.
What's so odd about these self assembly claims is that while they do that to some extent it's rarely very reliable or significant.
Several industries want this material for use in products but they can't get the tons of the stuff required to actually go into production.
Why use carbon fiber when we can make nanotubes that are many times as strong when weaved appropriately? Well... because no one can get their hands on enough of it to bother making anything.
It's very frustrating.
I'm sure they'll crack the problem eventually, but until then I'm taking these reports with a grain of salt until I see them going into industrial production.
... I guess... but those planes are basically cargo planes with bomb bay doors.
I'm just saying... lets say we make the bomb 60,000lbs... so the plane can only carry one... is that really better at penetrating bunkers then two 30,000lb bombs? I'm seriously asking... I have no way of knowing. I mean, it does make for a heavier bomb that might through shear kinetic force go deeper. But... a second bomb could use the hole made by the first bomb to get a head start. They say the current generation of these bombs can get down to 60 feet through reinforced concrete. So... two of these bombs means 120? Would a 60,000 pound go deeper then then that? I don't know... I seems unlikely. In fact, you'd think smaller would be better so long as you were precise about where the bombs landed. Most of the blast force is wasted after all as it radiates outward. Smaller bombs repeatedly detonated in the same place would collectively concentrate more force on a smaller area.
That's just my amateur speculation... but it seems hard to argue against.
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I understand why the judge is holding her in contempt if she fails to decrypt. The fact is that he can't physically make her do it. But that simple fact should be a key reason why you can't order people to do it.
An unenforceable law is a stupid law. It's like laws against suicide... how are you going to stop anyone from doing it and how are you going to punish them after they did it?
It's a dumb law.
The real problem is how to do you catch bad people that have incriminating evidence locked by encryption?
You could make strong encryption illegal... but all of that seems unlikely to stand.
Its an interesting issue. I feel for the judge here... he's in an impossible situation.
seems a wise move... especially since we're moving to a more drone centric air theater and it makes little sense to double down on dog fighters.
In most positions in a company there is some sort of career track that allows for skilled workers to justify higher pay by taking on additional responsibility or by acquiring additional abilities.
An engineer with 30 years of experience should have gained some useful skills that a kid fresh out of college would not possess. What are they and can those skills be leveraged to move older engineers into positions of responsibility, oversight, mentoring, and guidance? I don't buy that these guys are just dead weight. Some of course are... but some are also extremely valuable and some are just as valuable as they always were just in different ways.
Give them a different position. Change the job in some way. Firing them and then importing cheap foreign labor is self destructive. It sends a strong signal to US students that there is no job security in technical professions. Which means that an existing shortage will get worse because no one will want to work in the industry. That will require more outsourcing or more importing of foreign specialists. In either case that will empower foreign competitors which will increasingly get an edge. Eventually, the US companies will be marginalized for lack of having any marketable technology, products, or services.
This is a very bad situation. I'm not saying this in defense of domestic workers. I'm saying this in defense of the very multinational corporations that THINK they're making a good choice here when really they're cutting their own throats little by little.
These companies can't survive without a technical advantage. That is their primary business model at this point. They lose that and they're done.
The overwhelming majority of papers are read once and then never read again. I know that much.
This is especially true of people drawing conclusions rather then reporting data.
It's actually odd that they focus on asking graduate students to draw novel conclusions when it probably more useful to ask them to discover novel data. No interpretation. Just come up with an experiment or find something that has never been measured before. Then report in detail everything so it can be repeated or remeasured.
Most reports would probably be more useful.
There's nothing wrong with spending your life collecting dots for other people to connect. It's an absolutely vital portion of science. Too often sciences get too theoretical... too full of conjecture. Science is supposed to be about empiricism. Which requires 99 percent data and 1 percent conclusion.
They're being asked to pad their paper because the actual evidence being cited might not look that convincing on it's own right. And many of the conclusions aren't properly supported. Come on, we all had that experience writing papers. You've got a deadline, you're trying to get from point A to point B and you just don't have enough to make it all the way. So you make a statement you don't have support for and then link it to source material you know no one will read. So it looks like your conclusion is supported when in fact it isn't. You don't care though because the point is to get from point A to point B... and the only person you have to fool is the teacher or in this case the peer review that probably doesn't care that much anyway. Also... everyone else is doing it... and for the teacher to actually verify all those citations would be pretty much impossible. The only thing you have to be careful of is to not say something the teacher knows is false or will think is false. If you do that they might check the citation. But if you go outside of their knowledge forcing them to basically check everything or nothing... or stick closely to whatever the teacher is likely to believe anyway... you can get away with about 99 times out of a hundred. And the time you're caught... slap on the wrist or a small hit to your grade.
Now I have no experience with what happens when you actually start publishing things. I fully admit my ignorance here. But I'd be surprised if an academic history conditioned by this environment didn't predispose graduates to try the same thing. And really, who is going to stop them? They've had their whole academic career to perfect the best ways to scam the system. All those years they weren't just learning the subject but they were also learning how the subject is taught, how it is graded, the social characteristics of their judges, human psychology as it relates to auditing, etc. We learn all this stuff naturally.
Anyway, that there is fraud in academia isn't shocking. All human interactions involve fraud. If there's a benefit in deceiving someone then we probably do it and we get very good at it. This is indifferent to morality. It has more to do with intelligence. If you're clever whether you're a good person or a bad person... you learn to lie. Even if you don't use it for evil it's just a skill you acquire.
If there is anything I find bothersome here it is the conspiratorial aspect where someone is encouraged to decieve others. This sort of thing is marginally less offensive when it's kept isolated to individuals even if everyone is doing it. And really what people SHOULD be doing rather then finding bogus sources is find ACTUAL sources.
It's actually not useful to anyone if it's fifty percent bullshit. I don't care if it's half brilliant and half bullshit. Even ten percent bullshit isn't acceptable. Strip out everything that isn't backed by bullshit. If you can't get from point A to point B without using bullshit sources then maybe those two dots don't actually connect. I know you need to make a connection and maybe you are even required to make that specific connection because your peers won't tolerate anything short of it. But that isn't science and it isn't academically useful. Sure you get your grade or you get your degree or you get your job or you get paid. You get what you want. But you do it at the expense of system's integrity.
I don't know... it's hard to audit this stuff without investing unreasonable numbers of man hours.
Your bigotry clouds your perspective.
I am a republican and I am not theistic. Many republicans have no particular religious leanings.
It is as accurate to say the republicans are all religious nuts as it is to say the democrats are all foaming at the mouth communists.
Are you a foaming at the mouth communist? Then appreciate that perhaps your perspective of the rival party is distorted by bad media and your own ignorance.
We are both well meaning and quiet reasonable. We simply want our values tolerated. Most of us have no interest in telling you how to live your life. The social cons obviously like to attack gays and whine endlessly about abortion. But there are compromises we can strike there that give everyone what they want.
The price of lasting peace between our political factions is limiting the power of government to it's traditional roles. If you stop sticking your finger up our anus to check our prostate we can promise to control the social cons. That is a bargain we keep for centuries... forever. But the price is not negotiable.
In so far as I've talked with democrats this is not acceptable. They see it as their right and responsibility to involve themselves in people's personal lives and personal choices. They are unwilling to grant us our basic individual rights. And as such, peace is impossible until they are willing to admit our rights and hold to a grand bargain. And because my political faction must fight for it's life it will make whatever bargains it must with whatever factions in this country it can find to get votes. That means amongst other things trying to give the social cons what they want even though we find some of their goals to be distasteful. We have no choice. It's either do that or submit to the democrats and allow them to chain us. We'll die first.
All we want is tolerance. And if that is not granted we'll do whatever we must ensure our rights are protected.
This is blood in the streets talk... I'm just making it clear that this is not a negotiable issue. We will not be made into slaves.
Anyone that takes the oath office should limit their office to the powers it should have and nothing more.
Washington could have been king. Doubtless one of the other founders would have tried to kill him had he tried it. But he was basically supreme military commander at that point and could have killed them all.
This country was founded by people that sought limited powers fearing the excesses of government.
Nearly all our problems come from government either doing things it wasn't supposed to do or refusing to do things it used to do but has since stopped doing.
As they say, power corrupts... or at least, attracts the corruptible. The more powerful the government gets the more corrupt it will get. All of our divisions, hatreds, and rivalries get worse as the government gets more powerful.
It's in part the stakes. If you lose power then your political rivals get enourmous power to do terrible things to your faction. If your faction gets power then you can not only do pretty much whatever you want but you can savage your rivals almost without heed to reprisals.
It's too sweet to let anyone else have a sip.
The solution is to limit power to what is needed and then divide that power such that no one group can control what power is needed.
The executive is too powerful. It has too many agencies with too little congressional oversight, too little judicial review, and too little elected office. I mean, you elect one man and he then appoints effectively thousands of officials that head up the incredibly complex federal executive. That has to be broke up and made more transparent. It can't be made transparent because the current president wants to be open. He must have no choice.
The legislature is way too powerful. They basically reinterpreting the constitution to mean... whatever. The commerce clause has become a catch all that basically means anything that involves economic matters they can automatically dominate.
The Judiciary is just about right. I wouldn't make it more powerful. I'd just make the other branches less powerful.
Then the whole balance between federal and state governments is wrong. At most they should be co-equal. As it stands, the states are effectively subordinate to the federal government which is wrong. How it is supposed to work is that the feds have jurisdiction on extra national and national matters. That means anything that CANNOT be local. Education for example is something that CAN be local and so should not be federal. However, national defense or interstate commerce is obviously extra national and national respectively. Interstate commerce only means allowing the free and unfettered exchange of goods between states. Nothing else. A given state might be prone to put a toll on a road between two cities that goes through it's state... and that toll could technically be very high because those cities have no other means of shipping goods between each other. Interstate commerce clause is supposed to stop that sort of behavior. But beyond that sort of thing it has no relevance.
Beyond everything though, the biggest loser is the people. We have become less powerful. Every time our government gets more powerful we get weaker. Our votes matter less. Our government cares less what anyone thinks. More of our money is "deemed" to belong to them. They assume the right to tell us what is right and wrong.
They have no right to any of that. They serve us. They are not nobles or kings. But we are slowly making them nobles year by year.
People talk about the corporations abusing their power and talking about how powerful they are...
The sad thing is the corporations aren't more powerful. What happened is they KEPT their power. We lost it. And not to the corporations. We lost it to the government. Our politicians took our power away and the corporations kept most of their power.
I don't want to make the corporations less powerful. I want to make myself more powerful.
do they take pictures of his eyes in the dark? Because a cat's eye's don't so much glow as reflect light.
Looking for some authentication here...
First, the drm was broken just about instantly by the pirates. So this is at BEST pointless.
Second, if you're going to set up systems like this then you have to be committed to a strategy of NOT having the systems drop... EVER. I mean, if you have them drop for five minutes at 2 am on a Sunday... then that's excusable. But a whole god damn week? If you can't do better then you have no business setting up a system like that.
Basic rule of security is that if the hacker gets physical control of the code you're basically boned. The only way to protect yourself is to not give up bigger portions of the game code. Too much to be reasonably emulated. That way... best case... it ACTUALLY works. That will mean more robust servers and bandwidth to process whatever is being offloaded. Doubtless that's a cost benefit issue... do the curve and get as close as is economically possible.
Another option might be releasing games exclusively over some system like OnLive which retains the game effectively in the cloud and it never gets on the user's machine at all. A system like that should make hacking a game difficult.
who was... wait for it... A democrat.
I'm not going to blame either side for this... I think we can agree that both parties have been on both sides of this issue.
Lets just be happy SOPA died and remember in the future that MAYBE the "other" party which ever that might be for you MIGHT not be made up entirely of vampire demon nazis... and might just be okay people with a different perspective on things.
Honestly, most of the political disagreements would go away if we stopped trying to impose things on people that don't want to participate. If you have a great idea... great. Anyone that actually likes that idea will support it. If your idea involves forcing people at gun point to do what you say though... maybe it isn't such a great idea.
LA gets water from all over the south east. We largely bankrolled Hoover Dam which is one of the reasons we such a choice cut of the water. We also piped water in from all over the region... going over mountains and through valleys.
There is water in Australia... it's just mostly running out into the ocean.
When every river is just a trickle by the time it reaches the ocean... then you can claim they're out of water. And in the meantime, separate your water out into drinking water, gray water, and waste water. If you're really low then there's no reason to be wasteful.
None of this is actually that expensive. For every one of these water projects you should be able to get new growth that will off set whatever the costs were to build the project.
It's going to take some big brass balls engineering projects but on a per capita basis the costs are going to be minor.
They're having a hard time raising taxes without pissing off rank and file voters especially since some states already have pretty high taxes. New Jersey for example has property taxes about as high as mortgage rates. Consequently you can pay your mortgage down and pay about as much in property taxes.
Anyway, as they can't do that they're now going after sin taxes. They'll tax booze, sugar, sodas, fast food... anything seen as a moral or ethical lapse. They'll tax them one at a time so that only the group that likes that sin fights.
It's about the money. It's not about public safety, the children, or medical health. It's just money. Period.
Easiest way to prove it... tell them "yes, great idea. Only instead of a tax/fine we'll do something that doesn't net you any money or we'll collect the tax but it will be explicitly used for something you can't touch." Almost instantly they tend to not care anymore about whatever they were whining about. Which is odd because if they cared about "the children" that should be good enough. But that was never the point. It was just the money.
What's most remarkable about this fellow is that he actually thinks he'll get any measurable amount of money from such a tax or that it would even be enforceable.
Interstate commerce is a catch all the government uses when it has no right to do something and wants to do it anyway.
What I find amusing about this is that so many people are upset about this stem cell thing but aren't upset by all the things that created the precedence that allowed them to make these claims in the first place.
if you want this to stop then the inter state commerce clause needs to get it's wings clipped. That's the problem. Go to the source.
I come from the western United States and my family was involved with farming for a few generations... I know what scarce water means.
I also know that not all water in Australia is tapped for drinking and agriculture. I'm not suggesting that the middle of the country be made to bloom with vegetation. I am suggesting you can build small to medium sized communities throughout the area. It will require a keen attention to water resources but it's all workable if water isn't wasted. Obviously in many of these places you're not going to be able to have lawns. At least not with subsidized municipal water. If someone wants to truck water in from somewhere else on their own dime to water their lawn that's their own business.
wow... You're the second person that doesn't realize there are major cities in deserts throughout the US. Also much of the middle east is pretty arid and yet people live quiet comfortably there when they're not busy killing each other.
As to the cost of pumping in water... there's plenty of water in Australia and even more in Tasmania. They have lots of options.
I cite Tasmania because it's my favorite idea... I like the audacity of it... here's the link:
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/bid-to-pipe-in-tasmanian-water/story-e6frea83-1111116947256
The project is entirely reasonable for its scale. Think hoover dam. It's a big project but the reward is so large that it doesn't matter.
do people live in Arizona? How about new Mexico? What about Nevada?
Come now... why am I always the one playing devil's advocate.
before you make an argument think of why it might be wrong.
Look at the middle east. Lots of people live in deserts. All you need is enough water for crops and the humans. It's not that much especially if you focus on low water crops. If you're growing rice or something out there then you're screwed. Corn however has pretty reasonable water needs. There are other alternatives. Staple crops are the only real requirement. Technically everything can probably be imported but costs will be a lot lower if you can at least grow your primary source of calories.
As to airplane versus airtravel... Yep... both.
First, the train isn't going straight from LA to SF. That would take it through park land and mountains. If we were really serious about a train them we'd do what the Swiss did when they wanted a train... Tunnel through. There are many such tunnels in the Rocky Mountains. Only way to get a freeway through them in many cases is to tunnel. Anyway, this train won't be doing any of that for a few reasons. One, it would spoil the area in the opinion of some. Cali has some of the most extreme NIYBism you'll find anywhere in the world. Second, it would make the whole thing more expensive and the cost of the project without doing this has already TRIPLED. If we then tunneled it would probably take the tripled costs and quadruple them. Third, there are no population centers in that area. They do actually want the train to be able to stop somewhere besides LA and SF. But if it goes through the mountains then that will be about it. Etc.
Second, the train is going to stop at various places along the way. Stopping means decelerating, not moving for a while, and then accelerating. That process radically slows the total travel time of the train. A plane from LA to SF does not stop.
Third, the check in process for domestic flights from LA to SF is not a big deal. The biggest problem is the security and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have a security scan on the high speed train. I don't know if it will be as extreme but it's likely to be annoying.
Oh and because you're apparently waving on this issue. The ticket price for the train is between 60-70 USD for one way. Airplanes are 50 dollars one way. And that's not counting the cost of building the track or maintaining the track. That's just what it costs to run the train. And worse still that price assumes 60 million passengers a year. Want to guess how often government projections are accurate about things like this? Expect the figures to be off by about 30 percent at least which means either the ticket price will have to go up by 30 percent or more likely the train will have to be further subsidized by the government.
The whole plan is idiotic. And I don't mind stupid plans. My problem is with the government enacting a stupid plan with my money. If some private collection of investors want to get together and build this thing then have fun. It's their money to waste. But they're effectively beggaring the richest state in the union for nothing and tying future generations to continue to maintain the tracks if only to disguise the fact that it was all a massive waste.
As to Manhattan to DC... that's a much shorter distance between SF and LA. And you have a direct line between both places and there isn't a mountain range between the two cities.
The real problem in any case is that airport security is too slow. Building a train doesn't solve that problem. What happens if a terrorist blows himself up on a train. Then they'll ask you to take your shoes off before getting on the train and whatever speed benefits you think you got are gone. Its all about the security gate. And in any case, there's no way any islamic terrorist is going to take over a US plane probably for the next 30 years or ever again. The reality is that the pilots on those planes LET the terrorists have control because they thought the worst that would happen is that the plane would fly to some foreign airport, there would be some sort of hostage negotiation, everyone would eat pizza brought in, and everyone would be released before or after the terrorists were shot in the head by snipers. Instead, the planes were flown into the sides of buildings. No pilot is going to surrender the cockpit under those terms and the passengers likewise won't submit to terrorists with box cutters. What made 9/11 work was that no one knew what the terrorists were going to do with control of the plane. That had never been done before. The fourth plane didn't crash into the white house because the passengers were informed by cell phone that the fi
I'd just be more interested in this sort of thing if they ever made something actually useful.
We've been hearing about this technology for years now. It should be finding its way into fabrication.
Oh please don't bring up that joke all over again.
That stuff has to be the most over-hyped medical hazard in US history.
Also... its likely that removing it from the space shuttle is why started to become too hazardous to fly. They were initially designed to use asbestos between the panels and the structure. That was removed and replaced with something less effective.
Anyway... this sort of material isn't something you waste putting everywhere. It's something you use when nothing else will get the job done.
We also desperately need a replacement for asbestos that is cost effective and at least as good at containing heat.
I'm tired of environmental and health concerns forcing us BACK in time. Nuclear power plants are being shut down and there is nothing to replace them but coal. Coal is being shut down and there is nothing to replace them but hydro power. Many of the wonder materials we've discovered over the years have health concerns and so we ban them and replace them with inferior substitutes.
Right now the State of California in which I live is trying to build a "high speed rail" system from Los Angeles to San Francisco which will be SLOWER then an airplane, cost more then an airplane, and go to fewer places then an airplane. Does that stop them from building it even with the state going broke?
Not long ago we had a big solar power plant we were building shut down because it infringed on the habitat of a local lizard. I mean... are you f'ing kidding me? There is no where on earth you can build where something like that won't happen. So by that genius logic we can never build anything ever again anywhere.
Sorry I'm ranting here... I'm annoyed by all the Luddites.
Know what the first person to discover fire said?
Ouch.
Imagine if some group of jackasses at the time had said "oh fire is dangerous, you shouldn't use that. And it's a threat to the environment. And the smoke will give people cancer... etc"... If the alternative is worse then it doesn't matter.
Fire for all it's threats will keep you warm. It will cook your food. It will clear land. It will keep most dangerous predators away. Fire is awesome.
Likewise, there are a lot of technologies and materials and forces that have negative effects. But if we're careful about it and the pros outweigh the cons then we should do it.
Lets say a few thousand people in the US get cancer every year as result of asbestos exposure. Bad right? Okay, what if in the process we save a few tens of thousands of people from burning to death?
Choices. Now if I can get the best of both worlds, fine. But if I have to let tens of thousands die to save a few thousand then that's stupid.
I'm well aware of it's serious water issues... there are ways to get more water. It's a big topic but suffice to say there are a lot of options.
Rather then fill the outback with yet another untested and likely useless species. Why don't they just put more people out there?
Build a few more cities or towns... expand... tame the wilderness. If people actually live out there then any undesired species isn't going to last very long.
What's so odd about these self assembly claims is that while they do that to some extent it's rarely very reliable or significant.
Several industries want this material for use in products but they can't get the tons of the stuff required to actually go into production.
Why use carbon fiber when we can make nanotubes that are many times as strong when weaved appropriately? Well... because no one can get their hands on enough of it to bother making anything.
It's very frustrating.
I'm sure they'll crack the problem eventually, but until then I'm taking these reports with a grain of salt until I see them going into industrial production.
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just looking at this from an engineering perspective.
... I guess... but those planes are basically cargo planes with bomb bay doors.
I'm just saying... lets say we make the bomb 60,000lbs... so the plane can only carry one... is that really better at penetrating bunkers then two 30,000lb bombs? I'm seriously asking... I have no way of knowing. I mean, it does make for a heavier bomb that might through shear kinetic force go deeper. But... a second bomb could use the hole made by the first bomb to get a head start. They say the current generation of these bombs can get down to 60 feet through reinforced concrete. So... two of these bombs means 120? Would a 60,000 pound go deeper then then that? I don't know... I seems unlikely. In fact, you'd think smaller would be better so long as you were precise about where the bombs landed. Most of the blast force is wasted after all as it radiates outward. Smaller bombs repeatedly detonated in the same place would collectively concentrate more force on a smaller area.
That's just my amateur speculation... but it seems hard to argue against.