If Global Warming is a science issue then stop trying to make political arguments.
You are LOSING the political battle. Stop fighting. Everything since Al Gore started organizing this movement has been one political miscalculation after another.
Why would you expect otherwise? This is the same guy that lost to GWB after serving a Bill Clinton's Vice President for eight years. That election was in the bag. And he blew it by thinking that attacking guns in the middle of a presidential election was a good idea.
Are you saying that we should use guns to settle the "debate" on global warming?
Are you saying that advocates for action against CO2 pollution should present themselves as gun-friendly?
As long as you act like a jerk you're going to be treated like a jerk. That is the way the REAL WORLD works.
And of course being a jerk is a capital offense?
There are plenty of accounts of police officers shooting innocent, law-abiding civilians in their homes (usually when a warrant was served at the wrong address or when an informant gave maliciously bad information). Who was the jerk in that case?
I'm getting kind of concerned. While I agree strenuously that intentionally messing with the climate is likely to end as badly as unintentionally messing with the climate, the scary part is that the cost estimates for doing so aren't really that high.
It is at least plausible that a Buffet, Zuckerberg, Allen, or Musk might just go ahead and start seeding the upper atmosphere with sulphur dioxide. The cost estimates are low enough (and I suspect that you could do it for a lot less) to make it plausible for non-state actors to do exactly that -- without asking anyone's permission. I kind of doubt anyone would be able to stop them, either. And once they had managed to get away with it for a decade or so, my understanding is that we'd almost have to keep seeding the stratosphere or we'd have a very rapid, very scary climate shift in a very few years.
For that matter, I could see the Russians or the Saudis quietly pursuing a geoengineering program just so they can keep selling oil. It isn't that much of a stretch to imagine a consortium of hedge-fund billionaires with large holdings of Florida real estate doing exactly the same thing.
The heck of it is, if someone quietly did a sneaky climate hack, people would forget about the whole global warming thing in a very short time. Politicians, either ones who had pressed for action or who had pushed for doing nothing at all, would not pay very much attention to the issue if it appeared to be going away. And scientists who claim that someone is messing with the climate would be just as easily ignored as they are now.
I think the challenge should be something like, "reduce manned launch costs by 95% and increase launch reliability by 500%". That doesn't sound glamorous, that won't excite people, but that is exactly what it will take to make a manned Mars mission, asteroid mining, and all of the other great ideas a reality.
Honestly, at this point I could argue with a straight face that we ought to emphasize unmanned missions with high scientific returns and take the enormous pile of money spent on manned space programs for comparatively little scientific return and get the launch costs down and the reliability and safety way up, You'd probably want to bring in outside talent from NASA and you'd definitely want an administrator and a President and enough congresspeople and senators on board that could make the change in direction stick.
I do believe that it would be great for humans to become a true spacefaring species. The fact of the matter is that the present approaches that I see being seriously proposed will not get us there.
Also, I still believe the focus is on the wrong thing: rather than try and stop climate change (after all, if it doesn't change because of CO2, it may change due to something else) we should try and work on technologies so we can survive - no, thrive - regardless of the climate. (Isn't that what humanity has done for most of its existence anyway?)
I'd like to ask the Mayans, Anastazi, Minoans, and the Harappans, about surviving and thriving regardless of climate.
Also, I still believe the focus is on the wrong thing: rather than try and stop climate change (after all, if it doesn't change because of CO2, it may change due to something else) we should try and work on technologies so we can survive - no, thrive - regardless of the climate. (Isn't that what humanity has done for most of its existence anyway?)
I'd like to ask the Mayans, Anastazi, Minoans, and the Harappans, about surviving and thriving regardless of climate.
Every study ever done, every paper written by smart and productive people, says that knowledge workers need private spaces for concentration, and separate conference spaces for conferencing. The wide-open "collaborate all day" space sounds like hanging around the water cooler all day. At the cube farm I'm in now, I have a 7-foot wall between me and a main corridor; but people stop in the corridor junction and schmooze to the point that I can't hear myself think.
I'm glad there is someone referenced _Peopleware_. Honestly, it is ironic to me that between that book and _The Mythical Man-Month_ everything you need to know about managing software development from a personnel standpoint was written before most code grunts, indeed most managers, were born. Yet the good advice is universally ignored.
The game changer for nuclear weapons is not a faster delivery system, it's an effective shield. That was why the Soviet Union was so worried about Star Wars. If it had worked, then it would have meant that the USA could have launched a first strike without worrying about the USSR's second strike capability. Hypersonics just make it harder to develop any kind of active shield (it's hard for an interceptor to hit something travelling at Mach 5-25).
I think the Soviet Union was afraid of more than Star Wars. I remember in the late 1980's there was an article (I think in _Foreign Affairs_) hypothesizing that a very small number of conventional cruise missiles, launched from submarines in the Barents, Baltic, and Black seas, could completely disable the command and control network for a nuclear launch as well as the early warning systems used to activate the ABMs around Moscow. All while causing very few casualties. The article was probably quite a ways out there, but I am sure the same ideas occurred to American and NATO planners.
NASA has sent spaceprobes to every planet in the solar system. And turned those places from lights in the sky into worlds.
NASA has discovered volcanism on Io, Enceladus, Triton and probably Venus.
NASA has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets with the Kepler probe.
The various CMB probes have mapped out the very early history of the universe.
All of this in less than fifty years.
You could argue that NASA has mapped more land area than all of the explorers in history, combined. Until we visit other stars no one will beat that record.
Another ignored amendment: the 2nd. And just about every other recently by the Obama administration.
Say what you want about republicans, but they don't shit over the constitution like the dems do.
Yeah, because suspending habeus corpus indefinitely is so constitutional. And reading everyone's email doesn't violate the fourth amendment. I'm also pretty sure that torture violates the fourth and fifth amendments.
How about not enforcing the laws there since doing otherwise is a stupid waste of law enforcement time and resources? I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization. You have to be basically live up your own ass for decades to come up with that opinion.
There are lots of examples of this in action. Many states have laws against adultery, cohabitation, and consensual oral sex. Yet when was the last time someone got a felony rap for carpet munching?
On a even less serious note, many states have ridiculous laws which were put on the books back during the Jurassic period of American jurisprudence. So, as an example, in Washington state it is illegal to sell bedding or meat on a Sunday. You will recall the wave of busts against Bed Bath and Beyond, Pottery Barn, and Safeway. Yeah, right...
Back in the 90's Montana didn't have a speed limit on the Interstates. "Reasonable and prudent" speed for the conditions was the rule. I do remember there being a night-time speed limit of 65 or 70, though.
While it does ignore geographic features, the algorithm has the virtue of extreme simplicity and does seem to produce quite reasonable results in all but a few cases.
The "10x productivity" idea is somewhat silly anyhow - sure, some people are quite productive, but mostly if one guy is 10x another, the other guy just sucks.
It is more like 10000x rather than 10x.
First off, we humans are just barely intelligent enough to write nontrivial computer programs in the first place. I believe strongly if humans were on average ten percent less intelligent we would still be stuck on the towers of hanoi and bubblesorts. Of course, what "intelligence" means in the context of computer programming is highly idiosyncratic and not very well understood. Finding those people with the right cognitive toolkit for solving a particular set of coding problems can make a huge difference in the success or failure of a company. Or at least a product.
Second, I've lost count of the number of times where I've ran into someone (or some enormous team of people) who labored on some project for years and then ran into some dude (nearly always a dude, sorry ladies) who solved exactly the same problem in a few weeks. Or less. For an infamous example consider the history of the Xanadu project versus the early http servers and Mosaic. Yes, yes, I know Xanadu was trying to do something totally different than the WWW did. Of course, WWW worked and Xanadu never did.
Third, a lot of the real value add is the "Aha!" type of insights that translate large, intractable problems into easily solvable ones (see again Xanadu/WWW). The people who can provide those kinds of insights are rare and precious. The whole purpose of the enterprise is to solve problems, and if you aren't finding and taking vicious shortcuts to solve those problems you aren't doing your job.
In the end I absolutely agree in the sense that writing software is largely a creative enterprise, not an engineering one. And the people who write software need to be managed and compensated as creative people are, not like they are replaceable parts. Because that is the other point where software authoring is so different from other enterprises -- coders are often extremely specialized, to the point where managing coders, especially talented, productive coders, becomes largely a problem of matching tasks to appropriate talent.
I'd recommend two or three bottles of MacAllan's. If you try to buy local you will end up with Bagpiper or Old Collie, which are as aesthetically pleasing as they sound. Also a single shot and you will make instant friends for life.
If you have ever worked on software that stored data hourly, having one day of the year have twenty three hours and one day of the year have twenty five hours is enough to make you weep in frustration.
I don't think either Iran or North Korea has the launch capacity to put the 1000+kg that they would need to put a nuke into orbit.
Agreed that a nuke in LEO would play merry hell with GPS and lots of other satellites. But I can't really see North Korea or Iran being crazy or stupid enough to piss off their remaining allies (or sort-of-allies) like China or Russia. Of course, we are talking about North Korea and Iran...
The GPS satellites are in pretty high orbits (around 20000km if memory serves). I don't know if anybody has an anti-satellite weapon that can target a satellite that high. For that matter, the WAAS satellites are in geosynchronous orbit and even harder to shoot down.
You would also have to shoot down several GPS satellites in quick succession to produce a significant gap in coverage. Since the Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons are based on orbital launchers (for obvious reasons) the countries in question would have to do five or six satellite launches in a relatively short time window.
It would probably be far, far cheaper to jam GPS signals than to shoot down the satellites.
Heart disease kills 600 million americans a year. thats 150 times the number of people who died in the world trade center
Given that the U.S. population is around 300 million, the only way we could get to 600 million deaths heart disease deaths per year is by importing 600 million people per year and force-feeding them bacon. Lots of bacon.
No, a flight ban would be all airlines just temporarily suspend all flights to the three West African countries until the epidemic has subsided enough, only then the flights can continue. During the epidemic only military flights can fly into the affected countries, with tightly restricted passenger and cargo access. That way health care supplies etc. can be sent to the affected countries, and health care workers can fly between countries and back (after a 21 day waiting period) to whichever country they came from. Other travel restrictions may apply as well, but the sooner it's done the better, before the epidemic is completely out of control. The dimwits in this administration have it backwards.
And who would enforce the ban? Last I checked the U.S. constitution doesn't give the government the power to ban foreign airlines from flying to a foreign country.
From a practical standpoint, I'd point out that there really aren't that many military transport aircraft in the world, that a great many of them are American, and that they are blocked out literally months in advance. Would your 21-day waiting period also apply to aircrew? That will really bollix things up.
I strongly suspect (but do not know for sure) that the 3000-odd US Military personnel on the way to that part of the world are depending on civilian air transport for much of their logistics. Certainly MSF and other NGOs do so. I also strongly suspect that going to a purely military transport system for Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea would greatly reduce the flow of emergency aid to these countries at precisely the time that their needs are so large.
We should also be careful what we wish for. I am sure that if we institute some kind of silly travel ban from ebola-infected countries, a large number of countries around the world are going to enact a similar ban -- I say "similar" because the major difference is that they will also ban travel with the United States, home of the most ebola cases outside of Africa.
I think a lot of what is going on is that healthcare workers in rich western countries have very little actual experience with an 80% fatal infectious disease.
While they may have training on protocols for dealing with such a disease, they undoubtedly are too busy to actually practice enough to keep current.
With the exception of SARS (and SARS didn't get most places it quite positively could have), we haven't had a real, o my god outbreak in living memory in the western world. So our health care professionals are going to be a little out of practice.
Yes, people die from the flu. Most doctors and nurses get flu shots. Most doctors and nurses are neither extremely young nor extremely old, so the worst case outcome if the get the flu is that they get the flu.
So, I can use one passport to go in and out of Cuba, Africa, Iraq, or wherever, and use the US passport for going in and out of the USA. How would they track that?
The United States government has no constitutional power to ban travel of its citizens, except in specific cases (for example, when the government reasonably believes an individual is trying to evade prosecution -- it isn't exactly clear they would even have legal authority to stop you from leaving if you were going to join ISIL though, although they would probably throw you in jail and sort it out much later). This has been beaten to death by the Supreme Court since the 1950's. The Trading With the Enemy Act prohibits U.S. citizens from spending money in Cuba, but the United States government has no authority to prohibit its free citizens from traveling there.
The State Department does issue travel advisories, and if you have any brains at all, you will at least check those out before traveling anywhere sketchy.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if Genghis Khan's life had been extended, or Stalin's.
... or Leonardo Da Vinci's, or Rembrandt's, or Einsteins, or Planck's, or Feynman's, or Mark Twain's. Any powerful tool can be used for good or ill.
Anyone who is denounced so loudly by Koch Industries, the Scaife Foundation, and so many others probably has a story worth telling.
If Global Warming is a science issue then stop trying to make political arguments.
You are LOSING the political battle. Stop fighting. Everything since Al Gore started organizing this movement has been one political miscalculation after another.
Why would you expect otherwise? This is the same guy that lost to GWB after serving a Bill Clinton's Vice President for eight years. That election was in the bag. And he blew it by thinking that attacking guns in the middle of a presidential election was a good idea.
Are you saying that we should use guns to settle the "debate" on global warming?
Are you saying that advocates for action against CO2 pollution should present themselves as gun-friendly?
I don't get it.
As long as you act like a jerk you're going to be treated like a jerk. That is the way the
REAL WORLD works.
And of course being a jerk is a capital offense?
There are plenty of accounts of police officers shooting innocent, law-abiding civilians in their homes (usually when a warrant was served at the wrong address or when an informant gave maliciously bad information). Who was the jerk in that case?
Cops are not judge, jury, and executioner.
I'm getting kind of concerned. While I agree strenuously that intentionally messing with the climate is likely to end as badly as unintentionally messing with the climate, the scary part is that the cost estimates for doing so aren't really that high.
It is at least plausible that a Buffet, Zuckerberg, Allen, or Musk might just go ahead and start seeding the upper atmosphere with sulphur dioxide. The cost estimates are low enough (and I suspect that you could do it for a lot less) to make it plausible for non-state actors to do exactly that -- without asking anyone's permission. I kind of doubt anyone would be able to stop them, either. And once they had managed to get away with it for a decade or so, my understanding is that we'd almost have to keep seeding the stratosphere or we'd have a very rapid, very scary climate shift in a very few years.
For that matter, I could see the Russians or the Saudis quietly pursuing a geoengineering program just so they can keep selling oil. It isn't that much of a stretch to imagine a consortium of hedge-fund billionaires with large holdings of Florida real estate doing exactly the same thing.
The heck of it is, if someone quietly did a sneaky climate hack, people would forget about the whole global warming thing in a very short time. Politicians, either ones who had pressed for action or who had pushed for doing nothing at all, would not pay very much attention to the issue if it appeared to be going away. And scientists who claim that someone is messing with the climate would be just as easily ignored as they are now.
I think the challenge should be something like, "reduce manned launch costs by 95% and increase launch reliability by 500%". That doesn't sound glamorous, that won't excite people, but that is exactly what it will take to make a manned Mars mission, asteroid mining, and all of the other great ideas a reality.
Honestly, at this point I could argue with a straight face that we ought to emphasize unmanned missions with high scientific returns and take the enormous pile of money spent on manned space programs for comparatively little scientific return and get the launch costs down and the reliability and safety way up, You'd probably want to bring in outside talent from NASA and you'd definitely want an administrator and a President and enough congresspeople and senators on board that could make the change in direction stick.
I do believe that it would be great for humans to become a true spacefaring species. The fact of the matter is that the present approaches that I see being seriously proposed will not get us there.
I'd like to ask the Mayans, Anastazi, Minoans, and the Harappans, about surviving and thriving regardless of climate.
.... or the Vikings who colonized Greenland.
I'd like to ask the Mayans, Anastazi, Minoans, and the Harappans, about surviving and thriving regardless of climate.
Every study ever done, every paper written by smart and productive people, says that knowledge workers need private spaces for concentration, and separate conference spaces for conferencing. The wide-open "collaborate all day" space sounds like hanging around the water cooler all day. At the cube farm I'm in now, I have a 7-foot wall between me and a main corridor; but people stop in the corridor junction and schmooze to the point that I can't hear myself think.
I'm glad there is someone referenced _Peopleware_. Honestly, it is ironic to me that between that book and _The Mythical Man-Month_ everything you need to know about managing software development from a personnel standpoint was written before most code grunts, indeed most managers, were born. Yet the good advice is universally ignored.
Makes me glad that I am retired, honestly.
The game changer for nuclear weapons is not a faster delivery system, it's an effective shield. That was why the Soviet Union was so worried about Star Wars. If it had worked, then it would have meant that the USA could have launched a first strike without worrying about the USSR's second strike capability. Hypersonics just make it harder to develop any kind of active shield (it's hard for an interceptor to hit something travelling at Mach 5-25).
I think the Soviet Union was afraid of more than Star Wars. I remember in the late 1980's there was an article (I think in _Foreign Affairs_) hypothesizing that a very small number of conventional cruise missiles, launched from submarines in the Barents, Baltic, and Black seas, could completely disable the command and control network for a nuclear launch as well as the early warning systems used to activate the ABMs around Moscow. All while causing very few casualties. The article was probably quite a ways out there, but I am sure the same ideas occurred to American and NATO planners.
I'll be impressed when they dance a quicksort to Flight of the Bumblebee.
Or a merge sort to Aaron Copland's "Fanfare of the Common Man".
I wonder sometimes.
NASA has sent spaceprobes to every planet in the solar system. And turned those places from lights in the sky into worlds.
NASA has discovered volcanism on Io, Enceladus, Triton and probably Venus.
NASA has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets with the Kepler probe.
The various CMB probes have mapped out the very early history of the universe.
All of this in less than fifty years.
You could argue that NASA has mapped more land area than all of the explorers in history, combined. Until we visit other stars no one will beat that record.
Really, has NASA done that badly?
Another ignored amendment: the 2nd. And just about every other recently by the Obama administration.
Say what you want about republicans, but they don't shit over the constitution like the dems do.
Yeah, because suspending habeus corpus indefinitely is so constitutional. And reading everyone's email doesn't violate the fourth amendment. I'm also pretty sure that torture violates the fourth and fifth amendments.
Please.
How about not enforcing the laws there since doing otherwise is a stupid waste of law enforcement time and resources? I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization. You have to be basically live up your own ass for decades to come up with that opinion.
There are lots of examples of this in action. Many states have laws against adultery, cohabitation, and consensual oral sex. Yet when was the last time someone got a felony rap for carpet munching?
On a even less serious note, many states have ridiculous laws which were put on the books back during the Jurassic period of American jurisprudence. So, as an example, in Washington state it is illegal to sell bedding or meat on a Sunday. You will recall the wave of busts against Bed Bath and Beyond, Pottery Barn, and Safeway. Yeah, right...
Back in the 90's Montana didn't have a speed limit on the Interstates. "Reasonable and prudent" speed for the conditions was the rule. I do remember there being a night-time speed limit of 65 or 70, though.
Someone has already implemented a pretty good algorithm for generating congressional districts.
http://rangevoting.org/SplitLR...
While it does ignore geographic features, the algorithm has the virtue of extreme simplicity and does seem to produce quite reasonable results in all but a few cases.
The "10x productivity" idea is somewhat silly anyhow - sure, some people are quite productive, but mostly if one guy is 10x another, the other guy just sucks.
It is more like 10000x rather than 10x.
First off, we humans are just barely intelligent enough to write nontrivial computer programs in the first place. I believe strongly if humans were on average ten percent less intelligent we would still be stuck on the towers of hanoi and bubblesorts. Of course, what "intelligence" means in the context of computer programming is highly idiosyncratic and not very well understood. Finding those people with the right cognitive toolkit for solving a particular set of coding problems can make a huge difference in the success or failure of a company. Or at least a product.
Second, I've lost count of the number of times where I've ran into someone (or some enormous team of people) who labored on some project for years and then ran into some dude (nearly always a dude, sorry ladies) who solved exactly the same problem in a few weeks. Or less. For an infamous example consider the history of the Xanadu project versus the early http servers and Mosaic. Yes, yes, I know Xanadu was trying to do something totally different than the WWW did. Of course, WWW worked and Xanadu never did.
Third, a lot of the real value add is the "Aha!" type of insights that translate large, intractable problems into easily solvable ones (see again Xanadu/WWW). The people who can provide those kinds of insights are rare and precious. The whole purpose of the enterprise is to solve problems, and if you aren't finding and taking vicious shortcuts to solve those problems you aren't doing your job.
In the end I absolutely agree in the sense that writing software is largely a creative enterprise, not an engineering one. And the people who write software need to be managed and compensated as creative people are, not like they are replaceable parts. Because that is the other point where software authoring is so different from other enterprises -- coders are often extremely specialized, to the point where managing coders, especially talented, productive coders, becomes largely a problem of matching tasks to appropriate talent.
I'd recommend two or three bottles of MacAllan's. If you try to buy local you will end up with Bagpiper or Old Collie, which are as aesthetically pleasing as they sound. Also a single shot and you will make instant friends for life.
If you have ever worked on software that stored data hourly, having one day of the year have twenty three hours and one day of the year have twenty five hours is enough to make you weep in frustration.
I don't think either Iran or North Korea has the launch capacity to put the 1000+kg that they would need to put a nuke into orbit.
Agreed that a nuke in LEO would play merry hell with GPS and lots of other satellites. But I can't really see North Korea or Iran being crazy or stupid enough to piss off their remaining allies (or sort-of-allies) like China or Russia. Of course, we are talking about North Korea and Iran...
The GPS satellites are in pretty high orbits (around 20000km if memory serves). I don't know if anybody has an anti-satellite weapon that can target a satellite that high. For that matter, the WAAS satellites are in geosynchronous orbit and even harder to shoot down.
You would also have to shoot down several GPS satellites in quick succession to produce a significant gap in coverage. Since the Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons are based on orbital launchers (for obvious reasons) the countries in question would have to do five or six satellite launches in a relatively short time window.
It would probably be far, far cheaper to jam GPS signals than to shoot down the satellites.
Heart disease kills 600 million americans a year. thats 150 times the number of people who died in the world trade center
Given that the U.S. population is around 300 million, the only way we could get to 600 million deaths heart disease deaths per year is by importing 600 million people per year and force-feeding them bacon. Lots of bacon.
No, a flight ban would be all airlines just temporarily suspend all flights to the three West African countries until the epidemic has subsided enough, only then the flights can continue. During the epidemic only military flights can fly into the affected countries, with tightly restricted passenger and cargo access. That way health care supplies etc. can be sent to the affected countries, and health care workers can fly between countries and back (after a 21 day waiting period) to whichever country they came from. Other travel restrictions may apply as well, but the sooner it's done the better, before the epidemic is completely out of control. The dimwits in this administration have it backwards.
And who would enforce the ban? Last I checked the U.S. constitution doesn't give the government the power to ban foreign airlines from flying to a foreign country.
From a practical standpoint, I'd point out that there really aren't that many military transport aircraft in the world, that a great many of them are American, and that they are blocked out literally months in advance. Would your 21-day waiting period also apply to aircrew? That will really bollix things up.
I strongly suspect (but do not know for sure) that the 3000-odd US Military personnel on the way to that part of the world are depending on civilian air transport for much of their logistics. Certainly MSF and other NGOs do so. I also strongly suspect that going to a purely military transport system for Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea would greatly reduce the flow of emergency aid to these countries at precisely the time that their needs are so large.
We should also be careful what we wish for. I am sure that if we institute some kind of silly travel ban from ebola-infected countries, a large number of countries around the world are going to enact a similar ban -- I say "similar" because the major difference is that they will also ban travel with the United States, home of the most ebola cases outside of Africa.
I think a lot of what is going on is that healthcare workers in rich western countries have very little actual experience with an 80% fatal infectious disease.
While they may have training on protocols for dealing with such a disease, they undoubtedly are too busy to actually practice enough to keep current.
With the exception of SARS (and SARS didn't get most places it quite positively could have), we haven't had a real, o my god outbreak in living memory in the western world. So our health care professionals are going to be a little out of practice.
Yes, people die from the flu. Most doctors and nurses get flu shots. Most doctors and nurses are neither extremely young nor extremely old, so the worst case outcome if the get the flu is that they get the flu.
So, I can use one passport to go in and out of Cuba, Africa, Iraq, or wherever, and use the US passport for going in and out of the USA. How would they track that?
The United States government has no constitutional power to ban travel of its citizens, except in specific cases (for example, when the government reasonably believes an individual is trying to evade prosecution -- it isn't exactly clear they would even have legal authority to stop you from leaving if you were going to join ISIL though, although they would probably throw you in jail and sort it out much later). This has been beaten to death by the Supreme Court since the 1950's. The Trading With the Enemy Act prohibits U.S. citizens from spending money in Cuba, but the United States government has no authority to prohibit its free citizens from traveling there.
The State Department does issue travel advisories, and if you have any brains at all, you will at least check those out before traveling anywhere sketchy.