Nothing makes ME think Obama is behind this arrest, but it is still topical to mention what you think he should be doing about it, especially since the summary said:
"The situation is a win-win for the Obama administration, who can now appear to be punishing the man..."
I will be extremely disturbed if making inflammatory videos within the borders of the United States or other western countries is made illegal, regardless of the content.
I mean this unequivocally, irrevocably and without reservation, in the spirit of protecting freedom. It's not one of those things that can have a "but maybe when" clause.
Criticism of a religion or political viewpoint, or otherwise CANNOT be viewed as a crime, regardless of how insane the targets of said video are. A radio commentator made a good point the other day when discussing with a muslim cleric. There was a Canadian Muslim who made a comparably incendiary video about Christians. It prompted... get this... a letter to the editor...
There are plenty of equally incendiary videos about Jews. They waive their hands in the air and say "OYE!".
Just because the islamists over in Africa completely freak out and use such things as a flimsy excuse for pursuing sectarian violence against perceived slights doesn't make them right, nor does it make the act illegal.
The guys video was nasty. It was inappropriate. It was seriously morally problematic. But it was NOT illegal.
No web services I've ever seen actually log the content of HTTPS POST requests. That's strictly against every best practice and security recommendation for exactly this reason.
The problem isn't the article. It's your limited understanding of evolution and genetics.:-)
According to modern evolutionary theory, mutations create ALL change. Most mutations don't do something favourable, or really actually probably don't do anything at all, but some of them are favourable and those individuals go onto spread that gene more effectively than their peers until many many generations later, this gene has spread throughout the species (or the region, or the tribe, etc).
If a tribe of ancient humans gradually gained the ability to survive without meat, and a major event such as volcanic eruption or something killed off the local food staple, the tribe that could survive for years without meat might be the only survivors in the entire area. If the species is isolate to that area, they could plausibly be the only survivors of the species.
In this way it is actually possible for the entire species to gain a trait in just a few generations. Or, a mutation can gradually make its way into cultures in a more limited sense.
For example, genetic analysis suggests that ALL blue eyed individuals are descendants from a single individual with a unique mutation about 6-10,000 years ago. People with brown eyes have a huge variety of genes that affect pigmentation, whereas all individuals with blue eyes have a very specific sequence that controls it, which, along with mitochondrial DNA surveys, leads researchers to conclude the bit about a single individual.
When they talked about "liners" they are talking about the material that is crushed by the magnetic fields. It's the "bullet casing" to the nuclear slug.
I suspect they're talking about something like this:
A practical system would be a rapid-fire pulse system, firing every 10 seconds.
This has already been simulated, although there are plenty of practical issues, it seems pretty reasonable to me, and might even be possible to do without subjecting the machinery to neutron bombardment throughout the process.
The "liner" in this example is just a beryllium cylinder. It's essentially the "bullet casing" for the "slug" that is the fissile material.
I don't remember if this article mentions it or not (and i don't really want to read it again), but they are hoping that the existing z machine will be able to handle a new "bullet" every 100 seconds or so. A theoretical practical reactor could do it once every 10 seconds or so.
It's roughly the equivalent of firing a canon, with an auto-loading mechanism. Charge up the capacitors, pulse the equipment, get the output, discharged the spent cartridge (or what's left of its plasma) and move on to the next one.
Cool idea, poorly described in this article, I think. Keep in mind they're hoping to use lithium or boron in the future, because those can be fused with light hydrogen in a reaction that does not produce stray neutrons. It's the neutrons that degrade the lining of the reactor itself.
But apparently there is some confusion in the word "lining"...
Well, small scale units are just big magnets with a cold beryllium cylinder at the centre. They're not power plants.
In order to get this type of fusion to work, you have to input a few dozen times the world's power output for a few nanoseconds, contain the core as it is heated to 6 billion degrees kelvin in under a microsecond, manage 2.7 megajoules of xray radiation, contain an atomic-bomb scale EMP, shape one of the strongest magnetic fields in the galaxy as it collapses and ensure that a neutron pulse doesn't destroy the reactor lining in the process.
If you think you can design one to fit on your power pole outside, I encourage you to talk to Fermilab or Sandia, because they want to talk to you.:-)
To be fair, there are really only two SI units from which the rest can be derived.
For example, a kilogram can be defined as the weight of 100 cubic mL of pure distilled water at STP.
A gram is also defined by the weight of one mole of an element (inverse to its atomic weight).
A joule is defined by the energy required to apply a force of one newton for one metre. The list goes on.
A calorie (SI) is defined by the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree celsius.
A hectare is 10,000 sq meters
The whole point of SI units is that you can define two units (it doesn't matter which), and obtain all the rest from those two. (You also have to define the size of one degree celsius/kelvin, but kelvin is actually based at absolute zero, so it requires no other definition)
The imperial metrics are not often related to each other at all, so it's absolutely insane to try to use them in science, since converting between major units is so damn hard. How many feet in a mile? 5280. How much does water weigh? 8.345404 pounds per gallon, or 62.42796 pounds per cubic foot. A gallon is 0.133681 cubic feet, or 231 cubic inches. An acre is 45560 sq ft. Don't even start trying to define BTU (instead of joule). Its one of the few that's well defined (in terms of heating water), but then there are no international standards, so countries that use BTU all have slightly different definitions of it. The US, UK, India all have measures that differ by about 5%. Neat!
Have you EVER SEEN an epidemic? Do you know what polio does to people?
Do you know how many millennia that Measles ravaged the population?
You think that somehow immunity to Measles will magically appear when you stop giving vaccines? What?!?
Measles, smallpox, rubella, scarlet fever, etc killed almost 40% of children before the age of 5 just 80 years ago.
You WANT this?
Vaccines are the primary reason that life expectancy increased from 45 to 70+. Antibiotics being the other... Do you advocate for the elimination of those as well? After all, the negative effects of their overuse are actually far more relevant than those of vaccines...
Wow..... I'm stunned. I prefer to chalk it up to ignorance, rather than malice... I hope I'm right.
He needs some education, those aren't the only options under RomneyCare.
In fact, he's probably got options that are about 1/4 the cost.
Regardless, the individual mandate is unfortunately required in order to have the "no pre-existing conditions" clause. They are intrinsically tied.
With the pre-existing conditions mandate, the financially smart thing to do is to simply not get any insurance until you have a major medical event, and then to exploit the situation to get insurance to cover you, without having paid premiums the whole time.
That's broken.
The individual mandate is the only logical alternative to keep the current private multi-payer system.
The only other alternative is status quo, or to go to a true single-payer option.
in fact, when faced with the very real chance of a single-payer system passing in the 1990s, the individual mandate was first proposed by Republicans. Bob Dole campaigned on it as an alternative to what Clinton was proposing at the time. It's funny how much the party is opposed to it now.
Personally, it's not a good solution, but the alternative is not politically approachable in the US.
Fortunately, I don't live in the US anymore, so it's not my problem.:-) It is an interesting intellectual topic, though.
Wait, I've lived in both the US and Canada. The provincial health system in Canada is better for 95% of people, provides better service and costs society less money (by a factor of 2x).
It's really not so bad. Comparable coverage, better outcomes for half the cost and covers 40% more people. Wow!
In Canada it's a frequent topic of chuckling around locker rooms and offices whenever someone in the US says wild, ridiculous things about Canadian healthcare. The vast majority of Canadians don't mind it so much. It's not perfect, but it's pretty decent.
Part of the issue here, is that for every hour of hospital service, 1-2 hours of paperwork is required to deal with insurance companies.
The overhead alone increases health care costs in the US by at least 30% and as much as 45%.
Additionally, insured patients are used to subsidize the hospitals for mandatory services performed on uninsured patients in the ER, which often account for 30-40% of hospital's billing.
Those together automatically double the costs, or more, simply because the US system is broken in those fundamental ways.
Decent hospitals will not, however, pass those costs on to patients who pay out of pocket.
The problem with health care is that people who are borderline poor have a tendency to put off preventative procedures in order to save money (or because they cannot afford it), which increase the expense of their lifetime health care fairly substantially.
Encouraging people to do preventative maintenance is not only beneficial to the people themselves, but to everyone in society.
You have to remember that something like 90% of people on earth live without any savings. Paycheck to paycheck (or even day-to-day) is human nature, like it or not.
You and I may have the foresight and financial intelligence to save and plan for expenses, but the majority of humans simply do not. But discouraging people from preventative services increases costs, overhead and demand on critical resources. It's not the right solution.
Most countries have rules about the age of said company. Companies often have to be operating in the country for 3-5 years with a minimum amount of revenue before they can sponsor workers.
This is to prevent shell-companies being used as immigration-factories to bring workers into the country.
It's pretty easy to incorporate and if that automatically gave you residence, it would be free-for-all immigration for anyone who could fill out the paperwork, no?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is that it does set a precedent that... if you don't like Western values, just riot, kill a few of them and the problem goes away...
That's a seriously bad thing.
Actually, I think it was living (while on probation) under a series of fake names and identities....
Nothing makes ME think Obama is behind this arrest, but it is still topical to mention what you think he should be doing about it, especially since the summary said:
"The situation is a win-win for the Obama administration, who can now appear to be punishing the man ..."
I will be extremely disturbed if making inflammatory videos within the borders of the United States or other western countries is made illegal, regardless of the content.
I mean this unequivocally, irrevocably and without reservation, in the spirit of protecting freedom. It's not one of those things that can have a "but maybe when" clause.
Criticism of a religion or political viewpoint, or otherwise CANNOT be viewed as a crime, regardless of how insane the targets of said video are. A radio commentator made a good point the other day when discussing with a muslim cleric. There was a Canadian Muslim who made a comparably incendiary video about Christians. It prompted... get this... a letter to the editor...
There are plenty of equally incendiary videos about Jews. They waive their hands in the air and say "OYE!".
Just because the islamists over in Africa completely freak out and use such things as a flimsy excuse for pursuing sectarian violence against perceived slights doesn't make them right, nor does it make the act illegal.
The guys video was nasty. It was inappropriate. It was seriously morally problematic. But it was NOT illegal.
No web services I've ever seen actually log the content of HTTPS POST requests. That's strictly against every best practice and security recommendation for exactly this reason.
They SHOULD NOT be transmitted in plain text.
This is just as big...no, this is a BIGGER problem than storing them in plain text.
If you know anyone still endorsing the use of HTTP and FTP for credential submission, please hit them (or fire them).
This is very 1996.
Basically, I don't understand this article.
The problem isn't the article. It's your limited understanding of evolution and genetics. :-)
According to modern evolutionary theory, mutations create ALL change. Most mutations don't do something favourable, or really actually probably don't do anything at all, but some of them are favourable and those individuals go onto spread that gene more effectively than their peers until many many generations later, this gene has spread throughout the species (or the region, or the tribe, etc).
If a tribe of ancient humans gradually gained the ability to survive without meat, and a major event such as volcanic eruption or something killed off the local food staple, the tribe that could survive for years without meat might be the only survivors in the entire area. If the species is isolate to that area, they could plausibly be the only survivors of the species.
In this way it is actually possible for the entire species to gain a trait in just a few generations. Or, a mutation can gradually make its way into cultures in a more limited sense.
For example, genetic analysis suggests that ALL blue eyed individuals are descendants from a single individual with a unique mutation about 6-10,000 years ago. People with brown eyes have a huge variety of genes that affect pigmentation, whereas all individuals with blue eyes have a very specific sequence that controls it, which, along with mitochondrial DNA surveys, leads researchers to conclude the bit about a single individual.
Pretty cool, eh?
When they talked about "liners" they are talking about the material that is crushed by the magnetic fields. It's the "bullet casing" to the nuclear slug.
I suspect they're talking about something like this:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/100128-coslog-hohlraum-466px-10a.jpg
It's cool, but irritating when they show an animation of fission in a video about fusion...
A practical system would be a rapid-fire pulse system, firing every 10 seconds.
This has already been simulated, although there are plenty of practical issues, it seems pretty reasonable to me, and might even be possible to do without subjecting the machinery to neutron bombardment throughout the process.
From what I"ve seen of the demos, the "liners" are about the size of a 50-cal bullet and produce on the order of megawatts of power.
Seems alright with me.
The "liner" in this example is just a beryllium cylinder. It's essentially the "bullet casing" for the "slug" that is the fissile material.
I don't remember if this article mentions it or not (and i don't really want to read it again), but they are hoping that the existing z machine will be able to handle a new "bullet" every 100 seconds or so. A theoretical practical reactor could do it once every 10 seconds or so.
It's roughly the equivalent of firing a canon, with an auto-loading mechanism. Charge up the capacitors, pulse the equipment, get the output, discharged the spent cartridge (or what's left of its plasma) and move on to the next one.
Cool idea, poorly described in this article, I think. Keep in mind they're hoping to use lithium or boron in the future, because those can be fused with light hydrogen in a reaction that does not produce stray neutrons. It's the neutrons that degrade the lining of the reactor itself.
But apparently there is some confusion in the word "lining"...
"Large scale is very dumb"
Well, small scale units are just big magnets with a cold beryllium cylinder at the centre. They're not power plants.
In order to get this type of fusion to work, you have to input a few dozen times the world's power output for a few nanoseconds, contain the core as it is heated to 6 billion degrees kelvin in under a microsecond, manage 2.7 megajoules of xray radiation, contain an atomic-bomb scale EMP, shape one of the strongest magnetic fields in the galaxy as it collapses and ensure that a neutron pulse doesn't destroy the reactor lining in the process.
If you think you can design one to fit on your power pole outside, I encourage you to talk to Fermilab or Sandia, because they want to talk to you. :-)
Obligatory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y2zo0JN2HE
Tethering is built into iOS. Verizon pushes out a special configuration command to disable it.
I'm certainly glad I don't live in the US anymore... This being just a small one of many reasons. :-)
Except those expensive plans were introduced BEFORE the tethering ruling came down....
They wanted to charge you more AND charge you for tethering, obviously.
No regulations had to force their hand, since the way they corner models of phones and geographical rollouts is borderline anti-competitive itself
But no carrier in the country I live in has ever restricted tethering
It didn't work from day one on iPhones (without a tethering plan, at least).
It did in other countries....
To be fair, there are really only two SI units from which the rest can be derived.
For example, a kilogram can be defined as the weight of 100 cubic mL of pure distilled water at STP.
A gram is also defined by the weight of one mole of an element (inverse to its atomic weight).
A joule is defined by the energy required to apply a force of one newton for one metre. The list goes on.
A calorie (SI) is defined by the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree celsius.
A hectare is 10,000 sq meters
The whole point of SI units is that you can define two units (it doesn't matter which), and obtain all the rest from those two. (You also have to define the size of one degree celsius/kelvin, but kelvin is actually based at absolute zero, so it requires no other definition)
The imperial metrics are not often related to each other at all, so it's absolutely insane to try to use them in science, since converting between major units is so damn hard. How many feet in a mile? 5280. How much does water weigh? 8.345404 pounds per gallon, or 62.42796 pounds per cubic foot. A gallon is 0.133681 cubic feet, or 231 cubic inches. An acre is 45560 sq ft. Don't even start trying to define BTU (instead of joule). Its one of the few that's well defined (in terms of heating water), but then there are no international standards, so countries that use BTU all have slightly different definitions of it. The US, UK, India all have measures that differ by about 5%. Neat!
Yucko!
Have you EVER SEEN an epidemic? Do you know what polio does to people?
Do you know how many millennia that Measles ravaged the population?
You think that somehow immunity to Measles will magically appear when you stop giving vaccines? What?!?
Measles, smallpox, rubella, scarlet fever, etc killed almost 40% of children before the age of 5 just 80 years ago.
You WANT this?
Vaccines are the primary reason that life expectancy increased from 45 to 70+. Antibiotics being the other... Do you advocate for the elimination of those as well? After all, the negative effects of their overuse are actually far more relevant than those of vaccines...
Wow..... I'm stunned. I prefer to chalk it up to ignorance, rather than malice... I hope I'm right.
He needs some education, those aren't the only options under RomneyCare.
In fact, he's probably got options that are about 1/4 the cost.
Regardless, the individual mandate is unfortunately required in order to have the "no pre-existing conditions" clause. They are intrinsically tied.
With the pre-existing conditions mandate, the financially smart thing to do is to simply not get any insurance until you have a major medical event, and then to exploit the situation to get insurance to cover you, without having paid premiums the whole time.
That's broken.
The individual mandate is the only logical alternative to keep the current private multi-payer system.
The only other alternative is status quo, or to go to a true single-payer option.
in fact, when faced with the very real chance of a single-payer system passing in the 1990s, the individual mandate was first proposed by Republicans. Bob Dole campaigned on it as an alternative to what Clinton was proposing at the time. It's funny how much the party is opposed to it now.
Personally, it's not a good solution, but the alternative is not politically approachable in the US.
Fortunately, I don't live in the US anymore, so it's not my problem. :-) It is an interesting intellectual topic, though.
Wait, I've lived in both the US and Canada. The provincial health system in Canada is better for 95% of people, provides better service and costs society less money (by a factor of 2x).
It's really not so bad. Comparable coverage, better outcomes for half the cost and covers 40% more people. Wow!
In Canada it's a frequent topic of chuckling around locker rooms and offices whenever someone in the US says wild, ridiculous things about Canadian healthcare. The vast majority of Canadians don't mind it so much. It's not perfect, but it's pretty decent.
The US system has the highest overhead of any health care system on Earth.
It's very poor form to try to defend the US system with efficiency arguments.
Part of the issue here, is that for every hour of hospital service, 1-2 hours of paperwork is required to deal with insurance companies.
The overhead alone increases health care costs in the US by at least 30% and as much as 45%.
Additionally, insured patients are used to subsidize the hospitals for mandatory services performed on uninsured patients in the ER, which often account for 30-40% of hospital's billing.
Those together automatically double the costs, or more, simply because the US system is broken in those fundamental ways.
Decent hospitals will not, however, pass those costs on to patients who pay out of pocket.
The problem with health care is that people who are borderline poor have a tendency to put off preventative procedures in order to save money (or because they cannot afford it), which increase the expense of their lifetime health care fairly substantially.
Encouraging people to do preventative maintenance is not only beneficial to the people themselves, but to everyone in society.
You have to remember that something like 90% of people on earth live without any savings. Paycheck to paycheck (or even day-to-day) is human nature, like it or not.
You and I may have the foresight and financial intelligence to save and plan for expenses, but the majority of humans simply do not. But discouraging people from preventative services increases costs, overhead and demand on critical resources. It's not the right solution.
Most countries have rules about the age of said company. Companies often have to be operating in the country for 3-5 years with a minimum amount of revenue before they can sponsor workers.
This is to prevent shell-companies being used as immigration-factories to bring workers into the country.
It's pretty easy to incorporate and if that automatically gave you residence, it would be free-for-all immigration for anyone who could fill out the paperwork, no?