Does deterance no longer work? North Korea (admittedly not 3rd world) has both nuclear weapons and ICBM delivery capability. They don't launch on us because they know that about 45 mins after pushing their big red button, South Korea would be an island.
The point is that an ABM shield is very expensive and difficult to deploy and much cheeper and easier to work around.
Moreover, it is seen as a threat by countries with a nuclear deterant. Their rational is that the US, with its new wiz-bang ABM shield can now choose general nuclear war when things don't go its way and will not have to worry about the possibility of retailiation. This makes the decision to go nuclear a more justifiable one and thus makes the world a more dangerous place.
While your point on the scientific infeasability of the ABM system is well taken, more significant is the game in which ABM is but a pawn.
Regan thought the ABM system would allow him to spend the Soviets into the ground. He was wrong about this, it turned out to be democratic pressures in Easter Europe that finally destroyed the Soviet Block, but the premise remains. The functionality of the ABM shield was irrelevant to Reagan's rational.
Bush has tried to follow in Reagan's footsteps with his own ABM program. Unlike Reagan, however, Bush lacks the subtlety that Reagan so masterfully employed.
Russia has responded to the ABM program as one would expect, by resurrecting a few of the technologies developed during the Reagan era. As it turns out, ABM technology enjoys a relationship with Ballistic Missiles akin to that between Code Breakers and Code Makers. In short, that it always requires more time/money/resources/intelligence to break codes than it does to make them and that it requires more time/money/resources/intelligence to shoot down missiles than it does to avoid an ABM system.
Russia is believed to be very close to completion of a new kind of ICBM, one that utilizes Russia's recently developed hypersonic cruise missile technology during reentry to maneuver around ABM systems which are fundamentally designed around a ballistic entry path.
Point being, we've spent billions on this, and Russia is going to render it little more effective than a paperweight in a few years time.
but still seem to mistake the symbol of value for the value itself
Not really.... Money is nothing more than the good of ultimate preference. That is to say, the good for which all other goods will reasonably be traded (assuming proper value). In today's society a Yak has a fixed value in, say, dollars, because a sum of dollars can be exchanged for more and different goods than the Yak itself. You can't buy a Video Card with a Yak, you can buy it with "Yak" quantity of dollars.
In earlier days, Gold was the good of ultimate preference. That's why money was based on the Gold Standard. By backing dollars with gold dollars became a *pointer (to borrow your phraseology) to Gold and thus could be treated the same as Gold but without the problem of weight and bulk.
When we went off the gold standard dollars surpassed gold as the good of ultimate preference. This was interesting because, unlike Gold which has real physical limits on where it comes from and how much you can get, dollars have no such limit. Scarcity makes things rare, rarity makes things valuable. Without scarcity a thing has no value. Gold is scarce because it's hard to find/mine/refine. Dollars are scarce because the US government, which transacts all its business in dollars, says they won't print a huge assload of them.
Thus, dollars have value because the people have faith in their imposed scarcity by the federal government and because they are willing to accept money as the good of ultimate preference, both by choice and by law.
Later on, yes, my comment RE fluctuation of economies and money/gold was in reference to the game world, not the real world. The US can no more afford to go back on the Gold standard than Denmark can afford to return to global economic naval superiority.
That said, yes, the purchase seems silly... mostly because while I'm willing to have faith in the governments pledge not to devalue money and not to seize assets without reason or recompense, I have no such faith, or even a pledge from a game company.
It's worth pointing out here that the phrase "Real Money" hasn't meant dick squat since the US went off the Gold Standard in the 1970s (1972? 71?).
Today money is backed by the full faith and credit of the US (or whatever country you happen to live in) Government. Without anything of real value behind the money it has value simply because people belive it to have value.
At least in the MMORPG world the game developers (who define rules for the world they oversee) have more to say about the value of a currency. If you confine your sphere of thinking to the game world, it's like having a currency backed by God (in the God walking around on the earth turning people into pillars of salt sence).
What's interesting is that this particular RPG has chosen to base its currency off of the US dollar (in that there is a 1:1 exchange between US dollars and this game's currency). It would be somewhat more interesting to allow the currency to float or to base it on the price of gold. This way fluctuations in the world econonmy would affect it more predictably. At present, the US economy is tanking and, if you're playing this game from Europe, life is good for you buying in, but sucks for you buying out.
Base it on the price of Gold and you only need to worry about the fluctuation of your own economy. Sure, that makes it more complicated for us Yanks, but the rest of you are doing twice as much math and you need to do.
I think fundamentaly we need to have three alternitives for punishing people and we need to make these alternatives as well suited to the crime in question as possible.
1 - Fines/Fees/Suspension of specific rights/privilages: This is what we allready use for the enforcement of traffic violations etc. This can be used to deal with people who make stupid decisions but aren't a real threat to anyone. Consuming a drug that society terms "illegal" would be well covered by this.
2 - Community Service/More severe suspension of rights/privilages: Essentialy a method of dealing with people who've clearly done something wrong but who don't represent a physical threat to anyone. This would include the "white collar punks" you refer to. Penalties could range from the most simplistic and easiest forms of community service (helping out with an inner city school) to more distastefull and unpleasent work. Similarly options up to and including a form of house arrest and seizure of assets would be possible. It's key to avoid putting these people in prison, but what's to say that we can't restrict the kind of work they can seek, restrict their freedom of motion, and seize assets?
3 - Prison/Execution: An option reserved only for violent criminals who represent a clear and present danger to society at large. These are individuals we simply can not afford to have on the streets.
The trick to this system is making sure that the teir two section is well executed and well administered. If people get the idea that it's a cakewalk it won't be effective. If utilized properly it can be just as effective as a minimum securiyt prison without any of the disadvantages. Moreover, it can allow retribution in kind for those white collar criminals that hurt so many people. Riches to Rags in the rap of gavel.
And in the soulless capitalist education system there's no opportunity to succeed.
Let's run full sprint into your personal educational holy land. We get rid of all property taxes that fund public schools, distributing the money back to the taxpayer so that they can choose a school for their children to attend.
Of course, this means that with a renewed interest in private education the cost of private education will go down, well within the reach of most middle class families.
The lower classes, however, will not have sufficient funds to buy the education their children need to move upward. The worst slums in the country, already difficult to escape under the pathetic excuse for public education the United States presents will become economic death traps. Where there were previously poorly funded and marginally effective schools there will be nothing. Crime rates will skyrocket, land values will plummet.
Of course, states like Michigan are already trying the opposite of this. Lump state property taxes together and distribute evenly across school districts by pupil. The result has been stupendous. Test scores are up. Drop out rates are down. More and more people are being given the chance to escape hereditary poverty.
What you're completely unable to see (and I don't expect you to get it from this post) is that while private solutions offer up superior service at the highest levels, everyone else suffers for it. Education and other programs that benefit the society as a whole aren't about providing the best to the elite. They're about lot leaving anyone out in the cold, about making society as a whole better.
In that sense, private efforts fail us. What private school can afford to educate those who can not afford to pay for education?
Before you launch into the idea of vouchers and government scholarships, realize this. What will the market do to schools that it perceives as being filled with an undesirable peer group?
How do you address the problem that, in a private system there is no incentive to educate the poor?
So to reiterate, how long before someone builds a buisness model on this?
I'm not ashamed to admit I've gotten rooked at the mechanic's before. White collar guy with a laptop walks in driving an import and they know (or at least can reasonably gamble) that you don't know shit about cars. Add in a few charges here and there for things that didn't need to be replaced, hell, even claim to have replaced parts that they never touched... poof... profit.
I wonder how many "computer repair" shops out there charging $80+ an hour are getting computers with a few spyware programs running on them, sending SpyBotS&D or Adware on its rounds and then charging for 6+ hours of labor for "system optimization, registry repair, selective component removal, and application stabilization."
While the grandparents fantasy is more than a little bit of a stretch, this does fall into the category of "one step closer."
Observe -- American citizens are allowed to travel between states and (for the most part) out of the country with little to no oversight. Before the widespread use of the credit card, it was literally impossible to track the interstate movements of an individual without going out into the field and tracking people down.
Before the introduction of a formalized passport system it was nearly impossible to track who was leaving the country where and for how long.
Every time we lower the cost and inconvenience incurred by our government when it wants to keep tabs on us we invite our government to do exactly that. While, ideally, those with nothing to hide wouldn't have to worry about this, recent changes in the way the justice department is run leave the real possibility of being locked up on a military base in Cuba for no particular reason rather open.
What it comes down to is this. Every time we do something like this we make it a little easier for Big Brother to watch us like a hawk. Granted, today that's not the end of the world. Of course, it's a bit more worrisome today than it was 20 years ago.
The problem is this. Once this is in place on a nationwide scale we can't take it back. We can't undo a system like this. Once it's in place we have to rely on the good will of the United States Government not to invade our privacy and not to use this information against us.
In an era where information is more powerful than soldiers and tanks, willfully making this information available to a government, indeed any government, is a serious step and one to be considered thoughtfully.
We can trust our government today. Can we trust it in 20 years? Can we afford to have a government we don't trust in possession of this capability?
Actualy the industry standard is DVR (digital video recorder) as opposed to PVR. Dish Network tried to push the whole PVR shtick for a while and found it went nowhere, so they switched over about a year ago. It's been DVR across the major players in the industry ever sence.
PVR isn't descriptive enough. A VCR is a PVR if you think about it.
I'm not saying that we necessarily have a n^2 or even log(n) method of retreiving data in the human brain. I'm just saying that it's an inescapable law that it takes more time to sort through more data. The only exception I am aware of is the hash table, which compensates time with space.
While this may account for the very small portion of the human brain we use, it does not adequately explain the existance of savants.
The exact structure the brain uses will likely never be known to us. It is significant to note that the recolection process takes time for less frequently used bits of information (cache? paging?).
The purpose of the above was simply to assert that the brain doesn't store things in a magicaly accessable area with 0 access time. I've no idea how it actualy stores, save to note that's it's not magical.
Assumption: The human brain stores data in some physical format (neurons, synapses, etc). The exact physical mechanism is not of consequence.
Assumption: The human brain moves information as a series of electrical pulses. These are likely analog in nature.
Assertion: If data is stored in a physical format, it must therefore have all the properties of a physical object, that is to say it must have a location, a "where" if you will.
Assertion: We know that certain processing centers of the brain (speech, sight, specific cognitive functions) have a location in the brain as well.
Assertion: In order for the brain to make cognitive decisions about specific information, data must either enter these regions or signals from these regions must pass through the data regions, otherwise no connection between data and logic is possible. How this occurs is immaterial.
Assertion: If communication between logic and data portions of the brain is necessary for logical and academic thought, and both of these things are located in specific portions of the brain, there must be some way for the brain to select information and route is properly. How this happens is interesting, but immaterial.
Assertion: Any routing mechanism in the brain must join two locations within the brain, and as such must have a way to tell where in the brain both data and logic centers are. This requires either hard wired connections (which should be the same across all human brains) or some form of indexing system.
Assertion: Baring quantum processes, searching a mass of data (be that routing data or just choosing the right path in the first place) takes time. More data == more time.
The human brain may have a lot to teach us about computing power or specialty applications, but it does not have any magical properties which allow it to sequence data or store it in some sort of ephemeral dimension.
Indeed the human brain may hold the key to the NP-complete question -- throw lots of computing power at it and hope for the best. Either that, or try methods that work most of the time, and develop strong methods of dealing with failure.
Indeed, perhaps the ability of the human eye to be fooled by optical illusions is an example of the use of heuristics in the brain.
The grandparent post was not refering to the total CO2 output of china due to coal consumption.
In the mid 1870s a fire broke out in a coal mine in China. The fire was extinguished sometime last week. While it burned it accounted for (on the agrigate) about 2% of the world's CO2 output during the period.
Because what you see as decay others see as halted attempts at progress.
Further, what you see as a child, others see as a collection of cells that could no more survive outside the human body than a tumor.
Your opinion of the fetus as a child is no more than that, an opinion. Don't give me heartbeat, brainwaves, etc. A cow has a heartbeat, brainwaves. Hell, a cow is self mobile, and (with some grass that no one's cut) self sustaining. You can't say that about a fetus... but you'll eat a cow (mmmmm... steak).
I'm not suggesting that we start eating fetuses, but there's plenty of other things out there that are a hell of a lot more "alive" than a fetus that no one on the right gives a crap about protecting.
The question of whether or not a fetus is a child is an article of faith. It is just as much an article of faith as Transubstantiation, the Ascension of Muhammad, and the power of Kami. Unless you want the Federal Government to start enforcing laws about those things, you shouldn't encourage it to enforce laws about your beliefs.
Religion isn't for the State to decide. The objection to the destruction of a fetus is an article of faith, a tenet of Religion. It is not the role of the State to deal in "what ifs." It is certainly not the role of the State to restrict the freedoms of its citizens in the name of some ephemeral idea which can neither be proven or even reasonably tested.
I'm not missing it, I just considered it a somewhat forgone conclusion. Harris is as partisan as they come, and had no buisness administering a Presidental election, least of all one in which her Boss' brother was involved.
If you can find a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court or, hell, even at the federal level, preventing a public school from teaching a unbiased comparative religions course I'll eat my hat.
That said, answer me this. How do you construct a school sponsored moment wherein kids can pray if they want to without in some manner distinguishing between those children who do and do not pray. To be different in elementary school/middle school is to be inferior. The kid who doesn't pray is being coerced by the system.
The answer is simple, and conveniently already allowed under existing law and the constitution. Kids don't need to shout their prayers over the PA, God can hear them just fine if they pray silently.
We don't need a moment of silence or any other specifically reserved time for God because to confine God to a specific moment or setting belies His true nature and His import in our society.
We should not restrict our children's right to pray silently by asking them to do so during a quiet moment in the day. Our children should be free to exercise their right to pray silently during the everyday moments of their school day.
I don't understand how this logic works. Maybe you and your friends on the right can help me.
Media: 370 tons of high test explosives have gone missing in Iraq. Evidence now suggests they may be in the hands of terrorists.
Bush Inc: Yea, well, the explosives were missing before we got there. See! Saddam was giving weapons to terrorists.
Media: Oh, and here's video tape of the US Army inspecting the explosives we talked about.
Buch Inc: Crap, guess they didn't go missing before we showed up... uh... er.... Oh yea! Here's some guy with a vague notion of having destroyed those very explosives you see on video tape. No one else from his unit has come forward and his account is so sparse on details that he might be talking about blowing up a sawdust stockpile in Montana, but he says he did it.
Media: What???
How can you call this an animus against W? You've fundamentally got to admit one of two things. Either the Whitehouse's first response was a flat out lie and fabrication based entirely on a need to control the story and prevent it from damaging Bush's campaign, or the first bit was an honest mistake and the second bit is a complete and total fabrication for the aforementioned reasons.
Either the explosives were or were not there. You can't have it both ways. When the administration said those explosives were missing when our troops arrived, it said so as if it knew where they were. Was that not in fact the case? Was that a lie?
When the administration said that this solider and his compatriots blew up the stockpiles it either demonstrates that the first bit was a lie (they really had no idea what was going on) or it demonstrates that BOTH statements are lies and that confronted with video footage they needed something more concrete than "uh.... pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
The problem w/ recounting only some votes is that it violates the Equal Protection clause of the United States Constitution.
While (logically) there's nothing wrong with recounting just those counties which are close enough to swing on the recount, legally this presents a problem because you are saying that the state has a more compelling interest to get person X's vote properly recorded than person Y's.
Unfortunately for Gore, this was a catch 22 (something the GOP won't point out I might add). While the legal side of things dictated that he had to recount every vote, the GOP was trying to stop the recount. If no recount could be achieved before the deadline (I don't remember the exact date but is was coming up fast) then Katherine Harris couldn't certify the election results. Without her certification the assignment of Florida's all important electoral votes fell to the overwhelmingly Republican Florida legislature.
Gore needed to try to expedite the recount process because a full recount could never be accomplished before Jeb and his cronies could toss the election to the legislature. While Jeb and co could have approached the Gore camp and said that they were going to stave off this maneuver until a full recount could be accomplished, no such approach or effort was made.
The legal decision was a formality, and the Court knew it. That's why if you read Bush v. Gore you'll discover that the Court goes to great pains to make sure the decision doesn't apply to anything else. Ever.
Re:Running to the Right requires undemanding voter
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The Nader Factor
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Don't you think it's significant that not a single justice has stepped down under Bush? Don't you think it strange that Rehnquist, arguably the most conservative chief justice in living memory, has denied a republican president the ability to replace him?
The Court is getting old. Cancer has struck several members, and many of them were openly discussing stepping down before the 2000 elections.
The Court is -=terrified=- of Bush. He's run rip shod over the constitution and clearly considers his private ideology above that of the framers and the fundamental precepts upon which our Republic is based.
The justices haven't stepped down for a reason. The prospect of four more years of this guy, four years in which the Court may not have the endurance to survive, should horrify you.
"Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity"
I think you might be stretching a bit far by assuming that GW Bush Inc knows this. The man's only political experience was as the executive of Texas, the state with the least powerful governor in the Union. Bush basically needed the state senate's permission to get airline tickets. With the cult of personality he surrounds himself with, its unlikely anyone challenges the hair brained ideas that pop into his head.
That said, even if Bush Inc does know how the Senate works, the overwhelming majority of the American people don't. This is going to work, and has worked, because Americans are fundamentally over-inflated, egotistical, knot-heads who often confuse sound bites with actual information.
On a totally unrelated note. http://www.isbushwired.com
Re:Running to the Right requires undemanding voter
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 1
First off, the man elected this time around gets to appoint so many justices to the Court that his personal views on things like abortion will likely form judicial opinion for the next century.
Secondly, (to the Grandparent), Bush didn't side step the issue at all. He clearly said that he would not appoint justices who would hand down decisions like Dread Scott.
The Scott decision found that the slave in question was not allowed rights because he was property and not a person. As such, the state did not protect his rights. Bush's reference to Scott was not a way of saying that he was going to end slavery, it was a subtle way of saying that he was going to fight against Roe V. Wade (which denies a fetus rights on the ground that it, like Scott, is not a human being).
Bush didn't alienate his base... he cemented it brilliantly. Scott has been "code" for Roe V. Wade for decades now.
Slashdot Mirror
Does deterance no longer work? North Korea (admittedly not 3rd world) has both nuclear weapons and ICBM delivery capability. They don't launch on us because they know that about 45 mins after pushing their big red button, South Korea would be an island.
The point is that an ABM shield is very expensive and difficult to deploy and much cheeper and easier to work around.
Moreover, it is seen as a threat by countries with a nuclear deterant. Their rational is that the US, with its new wiz-bang ABM shield can now choose general nuclear war when things don't go its way and will not have to worry about the possibility of retailiation. This makes the decision to go nuclear a more justifiable one and thus makes the world a more dangerous place.
While your point on the scientific infeasability of the ABM system is well taken, more significant is the game in which ABM is but a pawn.
Regan thought the ABM system would allow him to spend the Soviets into the ground. He was wrong about this, it turned out to be democratic pressures in Easter Europe that finally destroyed the Soviet Block, but the premise remains. The functionality of the ABM shield was irrelevant to Reagan's rational.
Bush has tried to follow in Reagan's footsteps with his own ABM program. Unlike Reagan, however, Bush lacks the subtlety that Reagan so masterfully employed.
Russia has responded to the ABM program as one would expect, by resurrecting a few of the technologies developed during the Reagan era. As it turns out, ABM technology enjoys a relationship with Ballistic Missiles akin to that between Code Breakers and Code Makers. In short, that it always requires more time/money/resources/intelligence to break codes than it does to make them and that it requires more time/money/resources/intelligence to shoot down missiles than it does to avoid an ABM system.
Russia is believed to be very close to completion of a new kind of ICBM, one that utilizes Russia's recently developed hypersonic cruise missile technology during reentry to maneuver around ABM systems which are fundamentally designed around a ballistic entry path.
Point being, we've spent billions on this, and Russia is going to render it little more effective than a paperweight in a few years time.
but still seem to mistake the symbol of value for the value itself
Not really.... Money is nothing more than the good of ultimate preference. That is to say, the good for which all other goods will reasonably be traded (assuming proper value). In today's society a Yak has a fixed value in, say, dollars, because a sum of dollars can be exchanged for more and different goods than the Yak itself. You can't buy a Video Card with a Yak, you can buy it with "Yak" quantity of dollars.
In earlier days, Gold was the good of ultimate preference. That's why money was based on the Gold Standard. By backing dollars with gold dollars became a *pointer (to borrow your phraseology) to Gold and thus could be treated the same as Gold but without the problem of weight and bulk.
When we went off the gold standard dollars surpassed gold as the good of ultimate preference. This was interesting because, unlike Gold which has real physical limits on where it comes from and how much you can get, dollars have no such limit. Scarcity makes things rare, rarity makes things valuable. Without scarcity a thing has no value. Gold is scarce because it's hard to find/mine/refine. Dollars are scarce because the US government, which transacts all its business in dollars, says they won't print a huge assload of them.
Thus, dollars have value because the people have faith in their imposed scarcity by the federal government and because they are willing to accept money as the good of ultimate preference, both by choice and by law.
Later on, yes, my comment RE fluctuation of economies and money/gold was in reference to the game world, not the real world. The US can no more afford to go back on the Gold standard than Denmark can afford to return to global economic naval superiority.
That said, yes, the purchase seems silly... mostly because while I'm willing to have faith in the governments pledge not to devalue money and not to seize assets without reason or recompense, I have no such faith, or even a pledge from a game company.
It's worth pointing out here that the phrase "Real Money" hasn't meant dick squat since the US went off the Gold Standard in the 1970s (1972? 71?).
Today money is backed by the full faith and credit of the US (or whatever country you happen to live in) Government. Without anything of real value behind the money it has value simply because people belive it to have value.
At least in the MMORPG world the game developers (who define rules for the world they oversee) have more to say about the value of a currency. If you confine your sphere of thinking to the game world, it's like having a currency backed by God (in the God walking around on the earth turning people into pillars of salt sence).
What's interesting is that this particular RPG has chosen to base its currency off of the US dollar (in that there is a 1:1 exchange between US dollars and this game's currency). It would be somewhat more interesting to allow the currency to float or to base it on the price of gold. This way fluctuations in the world econonmy would affect it more predictably. At present, the US economy is tanking and, if you're playing this game from Europe, life is good for you buying in, but sucks for you buying out.
Base it on the price of Gold and you only need to worry about the fluctuation of your own economy. Sure, that makes it more complicated for us Yanks, but the rest of you are doing twice as much math and you need to do.
I think fundamentaly we need to have three alternitives for punishing people and we need to make these alternatives as well suited to the crime in question as possible.
1 - Fines/Fees/Suspension of specific rights/privilages: This is what we allready use for the enforcement of traffic violations etc. This can be used to deal with people who make stupid decisions but aren't a real threat to anyone. Consuming a drug that society terms "illegal" would be well covered by this.
2 - Community Service/More severe suspension of rights/privilages: Essentialy a method of dealing with people who've clearly done something wrong but who don't represent a physical threat to anyone. This would include the "white collar punks" you refer to. Penalties could range from the most simplistic and easiest forms of community service (helping out with an inner city school) to more distastefull and unpleasent work. Similarly options up to and including a form of house arrest and seizure of assets would be possible. It's key to avoid putting these people in prison, but what's to say that we can't restrict the kind of work they can seek, restrict their freedom of motion, and seize assets?
3 - Prison/Execution: An option reserved only for violent criminals who represent a clear and present danger to society at large. These are individuals we simply can not afford to have on the streets.
The trick to this system is making sure that the teir two section is well executed and well administered. If people get the idea that it's a cakewalk it won't be effective. If utilized properly it can be just as effective as a minimum securiyt prison without any of the disadvantages. Moreover, it can allow retribution in kind for those white collar criminals that hurt so many people. Riches to Rags in the rap of gavel.
And in the soulless capitalist education system there's no opportunity to succeed.
Let's run full sprint into your personal educational holy land. We get rid of all property taxes that fund public schools, distributing the money back to the taxpayer so that they can choose a school for their children to attend.
Of course, this means that with a renewed interest in private education the cost of private education will go down, well within the reach of most middle class families.
The lower classes, however, will not have sufficient funds to buy the education their children need to move upward. The worst slums in the country, already difficult to escape under the pathetic excuse for public education the United States presents will become economic death traps. Where there were previously poorly funded and marginally effective schools there will be nothing. Crime rates will skyrocket, land values will plummet.
Of course, states like Michigan are already trying the opposite of this. Lump state property taxes together and distribute evenly across school districts by pupil. The result has been stupendous. Test scores are up. Drop out rates are down. More and more people are being given the chance to escape hereditary poverty.
What you're completely unable to see (and I don't expect you to get it from this post) is that while private solutions offer up superior service at the highest levels, everyone else suffers for it. Education and other programs that benefit the society as a whole aren't about providing the best to the elite. They're about lot leaving anyone out in the cold, about making society as a whole better.
In that sense, private efforts fail us. What private school can afford to educate those who can not afford to pay for education?
Before you launch into the idea of vouchers and government scholarships, realize this. What will the market do to schools that it perceives as being filled with an undesirable peer group?
How do you address the problem that, in a private system there is no incentive to educate the poor?
So to reiterate, how long before someone builds a buisness model on this?
I'm not ashamed to admit I've gotten rooked at the mechanic's before. White collar guy with a laptop walks in driving an import and they know (or at least can reasonably gamble) that you don't know shit about cars. Add in a few charges here and there for things that didn't need to be replaced, hell, even claim to have replaced parts that they never touched... poof... profit.
I wonder how many "computer repair" shops out there charging $80+ an hour are getting computers with a few spyware programs running on them, sending SpyBotS&D or Adware on its rounds and then charging for 6+ hours of labor for "system optimization, registry repair, selective component removal, and application stabilization."
Sounds like a way to make a tidy sum to me.
Stupid ethics....
While the grandparents fantasy is more than a little bit of a stretch, this does fall into the category of "one step closer."
Observe -- American citizens are allowed to travel between states and (for the most part) out of the country with little to no oversight. Before the widespread use of the credit card, it was literally impossible to track the interstate movements of an individual without going out into the field and tracking people down.
Before the introduction of a formalized passport system it was nearly impossible to track who was leaving the country where and for how long.
Every time we lower the cost and inconvenience incurred by our government when it wants to keep tabs on us we invite our government to do exactly that. While, ideally, those with nothing to hide wouldn't have to worry about this, recent changes in the way the justice department is run leave the real possibility of being locked up on a military base in Cuba for no particular reason rather open.
What it comes down to is this. Every time we do something like this we make it a little easier for Big Brother to watch us like a hawk. Granted, today that's not the end of the world. Of course, it's a bit more worrisome today than it was 20 years ago.
The problem is this. Once this is in place on a nationwide scale we can't take it back. We can't undo a system like this. Once it's in place we have to rely on the good will of the United States Government not to invade our privacy and not to use this information against us.
In an era where information is more powerful than soldiers and tanks, willfully making this information available to a government, indeed any government, is a serious step and one to be considered thoughtfully.
We can trust our government today. Can we trust it in 20 years? Can we afford to have a government we don't trust in possession of this capability?
Since you can't mod yourself down, your sig has no base case.
You will be moding down forever! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA.... and I'm done.
Actualy the industry standard is DVR (digital video recorder) as opposed to PVR. Dish Network tried to push the whole PVR shtick for a while and found it went nowhere, so they switched over about a year ago. It's been DVR across the major players in the industry ever sence.
PVR isn't descriptive enough. A VCR is a PVR if you think about it.
Well no. Hitler died during the war as well, shot himself in the head. It was Donitz who surrendered to the allies, not Adolph.
Won't this make parallel parking a bit of a difficulty?
Yes, but the more you tighen your beam..., the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Someone had to say it....
I note that you say "all." So you'd agree that -=some=- criminals deserve to be anally raped?
Yea... I'm just being a bastard. I know what you meant.
I'm not saying that we necessarily have a n^2 or even log(n) method of retreiving data in the human brain. I'm just saying that it's an inescapable law that it takes more time to sort through more data. The only exception I am aware of is the hash table, which compensates time with space.
While this may account for the very small portion of the human brain we use, it does not adequately explain the existance of savants.
The exact structure the brain uses will likely never be known to us. It is significant to note that the recolection process takes time for less frequently used bits of information (cache? paging?).
The purpose of the above was simply to assert that the brain doesn't store things in a magicaly accessable area with 0 access time. I've no idea how it actualy stores, save to note that's it's not magical.
Assumption: The human brain stores data in some physical format (neurons, synapses, etc). The exact physical mechanism is not of consequence.
Assumption: The human brain moves information as a series of electrical pulses. These are likely analog in nature.
Assertion: If data is stored in a physical format, it must therefore have all the properties of a physical object, that is to say it must have a location, a "where" if you will.
Assertion: We know that certain processing centers of the brain (speech, sight, specific cognitive functions) have a location in the brain as well.
Assertion: In order for the brain to make cognitive decisions about specific information, data must either enter these regions or signals from these regions must pass through the data regions, otherwise no connection between data and logic is possible. How this occurs is immaterial.
Assertion: If communication between logic and data portions of the brain is necessary for logical and academic thought, and both of these things are located in specific portions of the brain, there must be some way for the brain to select information and route is properly. How this happens is interesting, but immaterial.
Assertion: Any routing mechanism in the brain must join two locations within the brain, and as such must have a way to tell where in the brain both data and logic centers are. This requires either hard wired connections (which should be the same across all human brains) or some form of indexing system.
Assertion: Baring quantum processes, searching a mass of data (be that routing data or just choosing the right path in the first place) takes time. More data == more time.
The human brain may have a lot to teach us about computing power or specialty applications, but it does not have any magical properties which allow it to sequence data or store it in some sort of ephemeral dimension.
Indeed the human brain may hold the key to the NP-complete question -- throw lots of computing power at it and hope for the best. Either that, or try methods that work most of the time, and develop strong methods of dealing with failure.
Indeed, perhaps the ability of the human eye to be fooled by optical illusions is an example of the use of heuristics in the brain.
The grandparent post was not refering to the total CO2 output of china due to coal consumption.
In the mid 1870s a fire broke out in a coal mine in China. The fire was extinguished sometime last week. While it burned it accounted for (on the agrigate) about 2% of the world's CO2 output during the period.
That's just one fire. Impressive eh?
Because what you see as decay others see as halted attempts at progress.
Further, what you see as a child, others see as a collection of cells that could no more survive outside the human body than a tumor.
Your opinion of the fetus as a child is no more than that, an opinion. Don't give me heartbeat, brainwaves, etc. A cow has a heartbeat, brainwaves. Hell, a cow is self mobile, and (with some grass that no one's cut) self sustaining. You can't say that about a fetus... but you'll eat a cow (mmmmm... steak).
I'm not suggesting that we start eating fetuses, but there's plenty of other things out there that are a hell of a lot more "alive" than a fetus that no one on the right gives a crap about protecting.
The question of whether or not a fetus is a child is an article of faith. It is just as much an article of faith as Transubstantiation, the Ascension of Muhammad, and the power of Kami. Unless you want the Federal Government to start enforcing laws about those things, you shouldn't encourage it to enforce laws about your beliefs.
Religion isn't for the State to decide. The objection to the destruction of a fetus is an article of faith, a tenet of Religion. It is not the role of the State to deal in "what ifs." It is certainly not the role of the State to restrict the freedoms of its citizens in the name of some ephemeral idea which can neither be proven or even reasonably tested.
I'm not missing it, I just considered it a somewhat forgone conclusion. Harris is as partisan as they come, and had no buisness administering a Presidental election, least of all one in which her Boss' brother was involved.
If you can find a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court or, hell, even at the federal level, preventing a public school from teaching a unbiased comparative religions course I'll eat my hat.
That said, answer me this. How do you construct a school sponsored moment wherein kids can pray if they want to without in some manner distinguishing between those children who do and do not pray. To be different in elementary school/middle school is to be inferior. The kid who doesn't pray is being coerced by the system.
The answer is simple, and conveniently already allowed under existing law and the constitution. Kids don't need to shout their prayers over the PA, God can hear them just fine if they pray silently.
We don't need a moment of silence or any other specifically reserved time for God because to confine God to a specific moment or setting belies His true nature and His import in our society.
We should not restrict our children's right to pray silently by asking them to do so during a quiet moment in the day. Our children should be free to exercise their right to pray silently during the everyday moments of their school day.
Wait.... they already are.
I don't understand how this logic works. Maybe you and your friends on the right can help me.
Media: 370 tons of high test explosives have gone missing in Iraq. Evidence now suggests they may be in the hands of terrorists.
Bush Inc: Yea, well, the explosives were missing before we got there. See! Saddam was giving weapons to terrorists.
Media: Oh, and here's video tape of the US Army inspecting the explosives we talked about.
Buch Inc: Crap, guess they didn't go missing before we showed up... uh... er.... Oh yea! Here's some guy with a vague notion of having destroyed those very explosives you see on video tape. No one else from his unit has come forward and his account is so sparse on details that he might be talking about blowing up a sawdust stockpile in Montana, but he says he did it.
Media: What???
How can you call this an animus against W? You've fundamentally got to admit one of two things. Either the Whitehouse's first response was a flat out lie and fabrication based entirely on a need to control the story and prevent it from damaging Bush's campaign, or the first bit was an honest mistake and the second bit is a complete and total fabrication for the aforementioned reasons.
Either the explosives were or were not there. You can't have it both ways. When the administration said those explosives were missing when our troops arrived, it said so as if it knew where they were. Was that not in fact the case? Was that a lie?
When the administration said that this solider and his compatriots blew up the stockpiles it either demonstrates that the first bit was a lie (they really had no idea what was going on) or it demonstrates that BOTH statements are lies and that confronted with video footage they needed something more concrete than "uh.... pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
Which is it?
The problem w/ recounting only some votes is that it violates the Equal Protection clause of the United States Constitution.
While (logically) there's nothing wrong with recounting just those counties which are close enough to swing on the recount, legally this presents a problem because you are saying that the state has a more compelling interest to get person X's vote properly recorded than person Y's.
Unfortunately for Gore, this was a catch 22 (something the GOP won't point out I might add). While the legal side of things dictated that he had to recount every vote, the GOP was trying to stop the recount. If no recount could be achieved before the deadline (I don't remember the exact date but is was coming up fast) then Katherine Harris couldn't certify the election results. Without her certification the assignment of Florida's all important electoral votes fell to the overwhelmingly Republican Florida legislature.
Gore needed to try to expedite the recount process because a full recount could never be accomplished before Jeb and his cronies could toss the election to the legislature. While Jeb and co could have approached the Gore camp and said that they were going to stave off this maneuver until a full recount could be accomplished, no such approach or effort was made.
The legal decision was a formality, and the Court knew it. That's why if you read Bush v. Gore you'll discover that the Court goes to great pains to make sure the decision doesn't apply to anything else. Ever.
Don't you think it's significant that not a single justice has stepped down under Bush? Don't you think it strange that Rehnquist, arguably the most conservative chief justice in living memory, has denied a republican president the ability to replace him?
The Court is getting old. Cancer has struck several members, and many of them were openly discussing stepping down before the 2000 elections.
The Court is -=terrified=- of Bush. He's run rip shod over the constitution and clearly considers his private ideology above that of the framers and the fundamental precepts upon which our Republic is based.
The justices haven't stepped down for a reason. The prospect of four more years of this guy, four years in which the Court may not have the endurance to survive, should horrify you.
Old axiom
"Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity"
I think you might be stretching a bit far by assuming that GW Bush Inc knows this. The man's only political experience was as the executive of Texas, the state with the least powerful governor in the Union. Bush basically needed the state senate's permission to get airline tickets. With the cult of personality he surrounds himself with, its unlikely anyone challenges the hair brained ideas that pop into his head.
That said, even if Bush Inc does know how the Senate works, the overwhelming majority of the American people don't. This is going to work, and has worked, because Americans are fundamentally over-inflated, egotistical, knot-heads who often confuse sound bites with actual information.
On a totally unrelated note. http://www.isbushwired.com
First off, the man elected this time around gets to appoint so many justices to the Court that his personal views on things like abortion will likely form judicial opinion for the next century.
Secondly, (to the Grandparent), Bush didn't side step the issue at all. He clearly said that he would not appoint justices who would hand down decisions like Dread Scott.
The Scott decision found that the slave in question was not allowed rights because he was property and not a person. As such, the state did not protect his rights. Bush's reference to Scott was not a way of saying that he was going to end slavery, it was a subtle way of saying that he was going to fight against Roe V. Wade (which denies a fetus rights on the ground that it, like Scott, is not a human being).
Bush didn't alienate his base... he cemented it brilliantly. Scott has been "code" for Roe V. Wade for decades now.