Why are they engaging in such theatrics? So far, most banks in the US don't even use two factor authentication (no, it's not a panacea, but it helps, in particular against man in the middle attacks).
A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of 'biosphere' which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star
Such a "Dyson sphere" would grow naturally and incrementally, and it doesn't require any unusual materials.
Funny, when right wing activists criticize research funding (oh, say, on climate change) as having a socialist and progressive bias, people call the people making the criticism anti-scientific. When left-wing activists criticize research funding as having a religious bias, the research funded by that is then itself called into question.
At its heart, thermodynamics is nothing more than the assumption that certain processes are fundamentally random and unpredictable, an assumption about symmetry. These symmetries may well turn out to be broken by processes that we haven't observed yet, for example on a cosmic scale.
Even with existing physics, there are lots of things they could potentially do that would look like a violation of thermodynamics to us (even though it isn't): use a black hole, use a wormhole, radiate the heat in a tight beam, use neutrino cooling, or maybe even cool with dark matter.
That's because you are a sloppy reader. I'm pro-photography. Projects like these give anti-photography lunatics ammunition without achieving anything useful.
Taking pictures in your private space may be embarrassing and may expose your mistress or illegal pot plants to the world, but as far as burglars go, it is irrelevant: they can tell easily whether your house is worth breaking into from the outside. And the idea that a bunch of dim-wit burglars are using poor quality 3D models to plan their heist wouldn't even fly as a movie plot.
This project strengthens the ludicrous idea in people's heads that photography is somehow a significant threat to safety or security. Photographic documentation is an extremely important part of modern democracy, and projects like these threaten the ability of people to take pictures.
These are the laws that existed in the 1980s when America had fully functioning democracy and arguably the democracy that was least restrictive on speech.
That's nostalgia, not reality. In everything, from civil rights to free speech to economics, people were far worse off in the 1980's than they are now.
I find it interesting that you perfectly OK with corporations in general regulating speech but not a particular group of corporations with a much narrower set of objectives.
The only corporations that can keep you from speaking are those having near-monopolies on distribution channels, and most of those are government-granted. You want to give these corporations even more control because you have been brainwashed into thinking that these media companies are some benevolent "fourth estate". What we should do instead is separate content creation from content distribution: broadcasters and Internet providers should become neutral conduits that are paid solely by the hour or data volume, just like other common carriers.
Rich people have always been able to give up to $2500 to the political campaign of the candidate of their choosing.
Overturning Citizens United won't keep multimillionaires from stuffing mailboxes with DVDs or buying television air time. What overturning Citizens United will do is keep people like me getting together with other people like me, pooling our money, and attacking candidates we don't like. And that's why many politicians hate this: they can pay off a few wealthy people and news organizations with political favors and keep everyone on their message, but the idea that a few thousand citizens can get together, pool their money, and run a series of devastating attack ads scares them to death.
Those organizations weren't able to buy direct political ads a generation ago. They could have issue ads but they could not buy political advertising.
Yes, and now they can engage in direct political ads, and that's a good thing.
(Incidentally, there is something called a BLOCKQUOTE element...)
The kind of free speech that most of the public has. The 99.9% of the people in the USA that can't afford to buy advertising if they want to speak to large numbers of people have to be invited by a media figure.
Everybody can afford to contribute to organizations that buy advertising: the Sierra club, Catholic charities, the ACLU, unions, and many others. Citizens United (which has Obama riled up so much) is a nonprofit corporation, just like any of these others.
The media is the agency which determines what information is of broad public interest and filters information appropriately. The public chooses between media presentations. That's how free speech works for most people.
"The media" is a bunch of big corporations with agendas and large numbers of incompetent employees. Many of them are the same corporations that hound people for all sorts of perceived copyright violations and lobby hard to get all sorts of special deals. And you want to give these people the power to decide who may be heard by the public at large? No way.
Except for their personal ideologies turned into law none of those are matters of policy, except for policy related to how politicians are treated. On the ideologies, if there was a situation where an overwhelming number of politicians had a "personal ideology", and thus there was no debate on the topic as it moved towards law; then it would be expected that the ideology was also shared broadly by the public. In which case that is the system working.
Your naive belief in the proper behavior of politicians and the ability of voters to control them is both charming and scary.
I'm not sure it would be. It would be fairly easy to have one set of rules for for profit agencies and another for non profits.
The "corporation" that Obama wants to change the Constitution for is a non-profit, Citizens United.
Furthermore, no matter what you do, rich people can always spend their own money privately to broadcast their opinions. Or are you going to restrict that too?
But if the people of the USA choose to ban any corporation including non-profits from purchasing political advertising, I can live with that.
Well, I cannot live with it, because that restricts my right to free speech, which I exercise by donating to organizations that represent my points of view.
"And who determines what is "incorrect or biased information"? The government?" I didn't say that anyone has to determine it. You are quoting out of of context. What I said was that people weren't able to filter. In terms of who presents information, that's the media's job.
So you want the media to be arbiters over who speaks the truth, and hence what information is "incorrect or biased". No way
I never wanted to grant to government the ability to regulate speech. We are talking about regulating advertising.
That is one of the consequences of your ideas, whether you understand it or not.
I've traveled to countries that work like you want it to. They are socialist states and totalitarian regimes. My family fled from such countries. We are going to fight that sort of thing happening in the US every step of the way. What you want is anti-democratic and plain evil.
We live in a democracy. Politicians as far as policy goes, with possible minor exceptions like being able to move to lobbying, don't have separate policy agendas.
Are you kidding? Politicians have many agendas that have nothing to do with the interest of the public, like getting reelected, making a name for themselves, securing a nice retirement package, getting their personal ideologies turned into law, etc.
Plenty of people speak without purchasing advertising or contributing. Corporations when they used to be prohibited from buying advertising were perfectly able to speak by going on public interest shows and discussing their ideas in open forums.
So in your version of "free speech", people can only speak to large numbers of other people if some media figure invites them? What kind of bullsh*t version of free speech is that?
And make no mistake about it: if this is the rule for corporations, it will also be the rule for any other organization: unions, churches, environmental organizations, etc.
You can have a moderate positions that voters can parse information but not perfectly and are influenced by incorrect or biased information.
And who determines what is "incorrect or biased information"? The government? That may seem like a good idea to you now that Obama is in place, but imagine Bush had been able to regulate who can say what about abortion, sexuality, civil liberties, etc. You basically want to kill our democracy and replace it with a Soviet-style government by educated elites, elites that suppress speech that doesn't conform to what they believe the truth to be.
And what exactly is he doing over ethernet that needs that much speed?
Many distributed computations are network bound or require a lot of manual optimization. The faster the network, the more speedup you get from distribution. And that kind of computation is useful even just for video transcoding. Network speeds that become comparable to bus speeds really change how people can develop parallel software. But more likely, we need 1Tb networks soon just to keep up with, and support, CPUs and GPUs.
Exactly. Which is what I said. They are effected by a small percentage of regulations specific to media. Which means on most regulations they are unaffected and indifferent.
The "percentage" doesn't matter. If media companies are the only companies who can engage in that kind of speech, Washington will focus on them to have them say and do whatever is most useful for Washington politicians.
You don't have any idea what sort of system I favor.
Why? You have been pretty clear about the kinds of restrictions you want to place on companies. Have you been lying?
Nobody is questioning them producing content. They are questioning purchasing advertising.
As I was saying: "These companies and organizations make films and ads and put them on the air, just like anybody else who wants to speak to the American public." That means "making contributions", "producing content", and "purchasing advertising". All three are necessary in order to speak to the public during an election. You said you want to restrict two of the three activities. I disagree, as do others and the SCOTUS. Not only are these rights protected under the Constitution, as I was saying, I want to hear from these companies and organizations, even if I usually end up totally disagreeing with them.
Restricting the ability of these companies and organizations to "purchase advertising" only makes sense if you view the voter as some dumb robot, incapable of figuring out which information is good and which information is bad, and pressing the buttons he is told. If that's what voters are, then we might as well give up on democracy altogether.
How does the fact that an prosecutor was considering charging Manning with "communicating with the enemy" in some pre-trial notes turn into "US designates Assange an enemy of the state"?
Any regulation Washington chooses to dream up, like requirements for what to broadcast, wireless sales, content regulations, etc. Many countries with the kind of system you favor force media companies to have government representatives on their board or submit to government content regulation.
How does that happen?
They hand-pick their own political successors, use the media and the party machineries to position them for election, and then have compliant replacements for retirement. You see the extremes of this in communist regimes, where there is only one party and a sure-fire successor, but weaker versions of that exist in many "democracies".
The issue isn't their right to speak. It is their right to contribute.
There are no contributions involved. These companies and organizations make films and ads and put them on the air, just like anybody else who wants to speak to the American public. And you want to silence them.
City buses aren't illegal; there are plenty of those. Private long-distance buses were illegal for nearly a century, for the explicit reason that they are cheaper than rail travel and rail can't compete with them.
The monopoly started because the victors of WWI wanted to have a monopoly on transportation in Germany and extract the excessive monopoly profits as war reparations. Later, Hitler used the monopoly to subsidize a railway he used for military purposes and to send Jews to the gas chambers.
German highways are more than covered by the nearly 100% gasoline taxes and user charges on trucks, so they are actually self-financing.
As for rail, if you live in Oberbumfuck (as most people do) and want to travel anywhere, the train is going to be slower than going by car (slow feeders, train changes, frequently delays) and just as expensive. You can't use Greyhound because that's verboten (or used to be). In the end, only 7% of German passenger traffic moves by rail.
Germany is a textbook example for why government-subsidized high speed rail is a bad deal. It's mostly tourists and politicians that like it.
Linus is probably one of the most important figures in the technology industry during the last 20 years or so
True, but so is Bill Gates. Just because their products are popular doesn't mean that they are technically good.
I have respect for Linus's C coding skills and persistence, and I am thankful for his hard work. On pretty much all other issues, I think he is himself what he accused Romney to be.
Media companies have a limited number of issues which directly impact them.
The biggest issue that directly impacts them is government regulation, which means that in that case, media just become a propaganda tool for a political elite, and their purpose and goal becomes to keep that elite in power.
Outside of those issues, a media consensus represents a consensus of America's educated elite, the top 20%
And that "educated elite" soon turns into a non-meritocratic elite of power and privilege, twisting facts for their own political and economic interests. Thanks, but no thanks.
If you don't want to hear what Exxon or Google or the Catholic church have to say about a law, don't listen to them. I do want them to contribute to political debate even if I think some of them are the spawn of the devil.
You bitch about big bad European governments wanting to spy on your data but you're so smug about living in the... USA??? WTF?
Despite its problems, my government still respects my civil rights more than your government respects yours. Of course, what really bugs people like you is that my government doesn't respect your civil rights.
I wonder which European country you lived in, Albania?
Switzerland, UK, France, and Germany (in increasing order of awfulness and violation of civil liberties).
My parents took a bus halfway through Germany just a few years ago. They didn't like it but it was some nearly free deal.
There are some airport transports and some foreign operators, maybe they took those. There is no private long distance bus service in Germany because it was illegal until this year.
The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book The Origin of the Serif is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush marks which flared at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs. Another theory is that serifs were devised to neaten the ends of lines as they were chiseled into stone
So you are saying that if we only adopted Mexican election laws, our democracy and economy could flourish in the same way! We, too, could have 60 years of single party rule, because our citizens would not be "distracted" by campaigns. Thanks, but I think I'll pass.
McCain-Feingold never prohibited speech by existing media at all.
Why should giant media companies, companies with big agendas and big money, have rights that other corporations don't have? Do you really think Fox or the NYT are more trustworthy than any other corporation?
I can use encryption as much as I want just like I can keep anything I want inside my house
You can use encryption all you want--except when it matters: to keep your information secure from the government.
Ah, I love the smell of anti-European bigotry in the morning. Yeah, we're truly miserable here
You are; I lived in Europe for many years, and my family immigrated from there. And the funny thing is that you're so ignorant, you don't even know what's going on in your own continent.
Compared to the massive subsidization of American roads and air travel that you just ignored?
Subsidies are irrelevant to the question of whether a system is efficient. Assuming no subsidies to any mode of transportation, rail is not competitive with an infrastructure consisting of air and road travel.
And talking of subsidies... The US Interstate highway system cost about $450 billion in modern dollars, for 47000 miles, almost all financed by its users (through various driving-related taxes). California high speed rail costs $55 billion for 430 miles, and it is never going to recoup that cost from users, and people all over the country who are never going to benefit are forced to pay for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are they engaging in such theatrics? So far, most banks in the US don't even use two factor authentication (no, it's not a panacea, but it helps, in particular against man in the middle attacks).
Dyson ran the numbers:
Such a "Dyson sphere" would grow naturally and incrementally, and it doesn't require any unusual materials.
Funny, when right wing activists criticize research funding (oh, say, on climate change) as having a socialist and progressive bias, people call the people making the criticism anti-scientific. When left-wing activists criticize research funding as having a religious bias, the research funded by that is then itself called into question.
At its heart, thermodynamics is nothing more than the assumption that certain processes are fundamentally random and unpredictable, an assumption about symmetry. These symmetries may well turn out to be broken by processes that we haven't observed yet, for example on a cosmic scale.
Even with existing physics, there are lots of things they could potentially do that would look like a violation of thermodynamics to us (even though it isn't): use a black hole, use a wormhole, radiate the heat in a tight beam, use neutrino cooling, or maybe even cool with dark matter.
That's because you are a sloppy reader. I'm pro-photography. Projects like these give anti-photography lunatics ammunition without achieving anything useful.
Taking pictures in your private space may be embarrassing and may expose your mistress or illegal pot plants to the world, but as far as burglars go, it is irrelevant: they can tell easily whether your house is worth breaking into from the outside. And the idea that a bunch of dim-wit burglars are using poor quality 3D models to plan their heist wouldn't even fly as a movie plot.
This project strengthens the ludicrous idea in people's heads that photography is somehow a significant threat to safety or security. Photographic documentation is an extremely important part of modern democracy, and projects like these threaten the ability of people to take pictures.
That's nostalgia, not reality. In everything, from civil rights to free speech to economics, people were far worse off in the 1980's than they are now.
The only corporations that can keep you from speaking are those having near-monopolies on distribution channels, and most of those are government-granted. You want to give these corporations even more control because you have been brainwashed into thinking that these media companies are some benevolent "fourth estate". What we should do instead is separate content creation from content distribution: broadcasters and Internet providers should become neutral conduits that are paid solely by the hour or data volume, just like other common carriers.
Overturning Citizens United won't keep multimillionaires from stuffing mailboxes with DVDs or buying television air time. What overturning Citizens United will do is keep people like me getting together with other people like me, pooling our money, and attacking candidates we don't like. And that's why many politicians hate this: they can pay off a few wealthy people and news organizations with political favors and keep everyone on their message, but the idea that a few thousand citizens can get together, pool their money, and run a series of devastating attack ads scares them to death.
Yes, and now they can engage in direct political ads, and that's a good thing.
(Incidentally, there is something called a BLOCKQUOTE element...)
Everybody can afford to contribute to organizations that buy advertising: the Sierra club, Catholic charities, the ACLU, unions, and many others. Citizens United (which has Obama riled up so much) is a nonprofit corporation, just like any of these others.
"The media" is a bunch of big corporations with agendas and large numbers of incompetent employees. Many of them are the same corporations that hound people for all sorts of perceived copyright violations and lobby hard to get all sorts of special deals. And you want to give these people the power to decide who may be heard by the public at large? No way.
Your naive belief in the proper behavior of politicians and the ability of voters to control them is both charming and scary.
The "corporation" that Obama wants to change the Constitution for is a non-profit, Citizens United.
Furthermore, no matter what you do, rich people can always spend their own money privately to broadcast their opinions. Or are you going to restrict that too?
Well, I cannot live with it, because that restricts my right to free speech, which I exercise by donating to organizations that represent my points of view.
So you want the media to be arbiters over who speaks the truth, and hence what information is "incorrect or biased". No way
That is one of the consequences of your ideas, whether you understand it or not.
I've traveled to countries that work like you want it to. They are socialist states and totalitarian regimes. My family fled from such countries. We are going to fight that sort of thing happening in the US every step of the way. What you want is anti-democratic and plain evil.
You can just run an Android image inside VirtualBox. It's free and it works today (and it actually works reasonably well).
Are you kidding? Politicians have many agendas that have nothing to do with the interest of the public, like getting reelected, making a name for themselves, securing a nice retirement package, getting their personal ideologies turned into law, etc.
So in your version of "free speech", people can only speak to large numbers of other people if some media figure invites them? What kind of bullsh*t version of free speech is that?
And make no mistake about it: if this is the rule for corporations, it will also be the rule for any other organization: unions, churches, environmental organizations, etc.
And who determines what is "incorrect or biased information"? The government? That may seem like a good idea to you now that Obama is in place, but imagine Bush had been able to regulate who can say what about abortion, sexuality, civil liberties, etc. You basically want to kill our democracy and replace it with a Soviet-style government by educated elites, elites that suppress speech that doesn't conform to what they believe the truth to be.
Many distributed computations are network bound or require a lot of manual optimization. The faster the network, the more speedup you get from distribution. And that kind of computation is useful even just for video transcoding. Network speeds that become comparable to bus speeds really change how people can develop parallel software. But more likely, we need 1Tb networks soon just to keep up with, and support, CPUs and GPUs.
The "percentage" doesn't matter. If media companies are the only companies who can engage in that kind of speech, Washington will focus on them to have them say and do whatever is most useful for Washington politicians.
Why? You have been pretty clear about the kinds of restrictions you want to place on companies. Have you been lying?
As I was saying: "These companies and organizations make films and ads and put them on the air, just like anybody else who wants to speak to the American public." That means "making contributions", "producing content", and "purchasing advertising". All three are necessary in order to speak to the public during an election. You said you want to restrict two of the three activities. I disagree, as do others and the SCOTUS. Not only are these rights protected under the Constitution, as I was saying, I want to hear from these companies and organizations, even if I usually end up totally disagreeing with them.
Restricting the ability of these companies and organizations to "purchase advertising" only makes sense if you view the voter as some dumb robot, incapable of figuring out which information is good and which information is bad, and pressing the buttons he is told. If that's what voters are, then we might as well give up on democracy altogether.
How does the fact that an prosecutor was considering charging Manning with "communicating with the enemy" in some pre-trial notes turn into "US designates Assange an enemy of the state"?
Any regulation Washington chooses to dream up, like requirements for what to broadcast, wireless sales, content regulations, etc. Many countries with the kind of system you favor force media companies to have government representatives on their board or submit to government content regulation.
They hand-pick their own political successors, use the media and the party machineries to position them for election, and then have compliant replacements for retirement. You see the extremes of this in communist regimes, where there is only one party and a sure-fire successor, but weaker versions of that exist in many "democracies".
There are no contributions involved. These companies and organizations make films and ads and put them on the air, just like anybody else who wants to speak to the American public. And you want to silence them.
City buses aren't illegal; there are plenty of those. Private long-distance buses were illegal for nearly a century, for the explicit reason that they are cheaper than rail travel and rail can't compete with them.
The monopoly started because the victors of WWI wanted to have a monopoly on transportation in Germany and extract the excessive monopoly profits as war reparations. Later, Hitler used the monopoly to subsidize a railway he used for military purposes and to send Jews to the gas chambers.
German highways are more than covered by the nearly 100% gasoline taxes and user charges on trucks, so they are actually self-financing.
As for rail, if you live in Oberbumfuck (as most people do) and want to travel anywhere, the train is going to be slower than going by car (slow feeders, train changes, frequently delays) and just as expensive. You can't use Greyhound because that's verboten (or used to be). In the end, only 7% of German passenger traffic moves by rail.
Germany is a textbook example for why government-subsidized high speed rail is a bad deal. It's mostly tourists and politicians that like it.
True, but so is Bill Gates. Just because their products are popular doesn't mean that they are technically good.
I have respect for Linus's C coding skills and persistence, and I am thankful for his hard work. On pretty much all other issues, I think he is himself what he accused Romney to be.
The biggest issue that directly impacts them is government regulation, which means that in that case, media just become a propaganda tool for a political elite, and their purpose and goal becomes to keep that elite in power.
And that "educated elite" soon turns into a non-meritocratic elite of power and privilege, twisting facts for their own political and economic interests. Thanks, but no thanks.
If you don't want to hear what Exxon or Google or the Catholic church have to say about a law, don't listen to them. I do want them to contribute to political debate even if I think some of them are the spawn of the devil.
Despite its problems, my government still respects my civil rights more than your government respects yours. Of course, what really bugs people like you is that my government doesn't respect your civil rights.
Switzerland, UK, France, and Germany (in increasing order of awfulness and violation of civil liberties).
Yes, and it is 100% owned by the German government, as well as heavily subsidized.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bahn
There are some airport transports and some foreign operators, maybe they took those. There is no private long distance bus service in Germany because it was illegal until this year.
http://www.fodors.com/community/europe/germany-lifts-ban-on-long-distance-bus-travel.cfm
You need to do a bit more background research before you start insulting people.
He had the right idea, though. From Wikipedia:
Note that neither theory is about readability.
So you are saying that if we only adopted Mexican election laws, our democracy and economy could flourish in the same way! We, too, could have 60 years of single party rule, because our citizens would not be "distracted" by campaigns. Thanks, but I think I'll pass.
Why should giant media companies, companies with big agendas and big money, have rights that other corporations don't have? Do you really think Fox or the NYT are more trustworthy than any other corporation?
You can use encryption all you want--except when it matters: to keep your information secure from the government.
You are; I lived in Europe for many years, and my family immigrated from there. And the funny thing is that you're so ignorant, you don't even know what's going on in your own continent.
Subsidies are irrelevant to the question of whether a system is efficient. Assuming no subsidies to any mode of transportation, rail is not competitive with an infrastructure consisting of air and road travel.
And talking of subsidies... The US Interstate highway system cost about $450 billion in modern dollars, for 47000 miles, almost all financed by its users (through various driving-related taxes). California high speed rail costs $55 billion for 430 miles, and it is never going to recoup that cost from users, and people all over the country who are never going to benefit are forced to pay for that.