Oh yes, absolutely. But those 363 pages weren't even a bill until they were introduced. Until that Tuesday, anyone who complained that there was pending legislation like that waiting in the wings would have been lambasted as a paranoid conspiracy nut. Especially if they made the obviously ludicrous claim that it would go from bill to law in three days.
What exactly would be the point of having the list of congressmen or senators who voted for or against something available right away?
I was talking about having the text of the bill right away. I was wondering if it was even available at all for public review before it was voted into law.
You have to lodge your objection BEFORE they vote, because maybe in some alternate universe it might make a difference. Afterwards, all you can do is vote for somebody else in the next election.
Yes, that was my point. The USAPATRIOT act was railroaded through before anyone even had a chance to object. Even if the text was available to the public the moment the bill was introduced, it would have been too late for anyone to object to it.
How do we know that "once society has advanced enough," they won't simply decide that the geezercicles aren't worth the time or energy?
We don't know that. Most people probably wouldn't want to be revived into such a cold world anyway... Of course, the world we currently live in is probably that cold as it is right now. Replace "frozen people" with desperate living refugees on ships and we have pretty much the same situation.
Anyone know if anyone has ever tried memory experiments with animals that can survive freezing and thawing? I'm not sure exactly how you would do it though. Is it possible to train a frog to do tricks or run mazes or something? If you could, then you could demonstrate that, in principle, memory can survive the freezing process. Of course, it still might be the case that the memory of amphibians and the like isn't stored in the same way as the memory of humans and other mammals.
They have demonstrated chilled (but not frozen) suspended animation over a period of hours in mice and pigs. Their hearts were stopped completely and they were effectively dead the entire time before being warmed back up. Presumably if memory were stored in ways that requires a continuous refresh, those pigs and mice would have lost their memories. I can't find any details of whether any memory tests were done on those animals however. Pigs and mice are, at least, quite trainable.
Still, even the pigs and mice in the suspended animation experiments weren't as totally dead as someone completely frozen. There still might have been some undetectable slow process going on keeping their memories going (or, once again, maybe they actually didn't keep their memories).
Before a law becomes a law, it was known as a bill
I am interested to know how many of you guys actually spend time to review the myriad of bills that are awaiting to be passed in the parliament/congress, and/or state-level legislatures/senates ?
Isn't it a little bit too late complaining about "malicious" laws while none of us paid any attention to them when they were still bills ?
Well, in the case of the USAPATRIOT act, it was introduced on Tuesday, passed the House on Wednesday, then passed the Senate on Thursday, then signed by the President on Friday. It is 363 pages long. Numerous congressmen have admitted to not having read it before voting for it (and let's face it, they probably never read through the whole thing after passing it either). As for the rest of us... frankly I'm not sure how quickly the congressional record was actually available back in 2001. Anyone know? Would it have been immediately available to the public as soon as it was introduced? Put online somewhere maybe? Or would it be done at the end of the day? Perhaps the end of the week after it had already been signed into law? This is something I really want to know. In any case, even if it were available to the public instantly and a it was read through by an amazing speed reading legal scholar, their letter of objection to their congressman probably wouldn't have gotten there in time.
Well the courts have not overturned it yet, so it can be considered the law of the land.
See, this is the thing I don't quite get. If the courts do overturn it, what happens? This isn't some civil case, this is the very deliberate, premeditated taking of a human life. If the courts overturn the laws allowing it on the grounds that the law was never legal in the first place, does anyone get prosecuted for murder? If not, then why not?
An example. Someone comes after you with a knife screaming that they're going to gut you like a pig. You run away from them until you see a piece of rebar lying on the ground and you pick it up, wait for them to come into range, then whack them in the skull killing them. You assumed that the law allowed that as justifiable self defense. Oops. It turns out that, while running away, you crossed state lines and now you're in a state where self-defense is more narrowly defined and you were only legally allowed to kill in defense if it was impossible for you to run away. Since you stopped running, you're now going to jail for murder.
That's the way it works for most of us. Commit a crime that you thought was legal and go to jail.
That's a fairly responsible way to operate. Still, it can't really beat having home heating as one of the primary uses for the device. Only during colder months of course, and a modern well-insulated home reduces the necessity of heating.
When they discovered it during excavation, was it full of pinkish psychoreactive slime flowing towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Did the excavators get put on trial for violating their judicial restraining order?
Do find out how many passengers his hyperloop can transport per hour.
Apparently 3,360 per tube. I can't actually find any numbers on how many per hour a conventional train carries. I'll try guessing. We're talking about Los Angeles to San Francisco, so the existing trains take about six hours, or 12 times longer than the hyperloop would take. So, the distance is about 382 miles, and we'll divide that by six to get 63.66 miles or 336,125 feet. Cut that by 1% since we'll need an engine every 100 cars or so and we have 332764. We'll call a passenger car 85 feet including linkages, so we can have about 3915 passenger cars in that 63.66 mile stretch. A passenger car can hold maybe 100 people. So, a decent upper limit, without overloading, for people the conventional train system can carry per hour is 391,500, which is about 117 times as many as the hyperloop. That's a silly number of course. To maintain that rate you would need 23490 passenger cars and around 235 engines.
So, anyway, it looks like conventional trains could certainly carry more passengers on one set of tracks based on the numbers musk gives and the numbers I've roughed out for trains. On the other hand, there's no particularly good reason you couldn't stack hyperloop tubes on top of each other and next to each other to achieve more capacity.
Sorry, this amendment was added to the constitution when? Also, Julian Assange planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist acts on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons?
If it's an Obama-ordered drone strike, it isn't legally murder.
Is this Nixon's: "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal"? The Constitution is still meant to be the supreme law of the land and extrajudicial executions outside of warfare are still illegal under the Constitution.
There is *no* use case for generating power from natgas coming in through a pipe.
(1) The pipe is as easy to break as the power line
As others have pointed out, this isn't really the case. Outages are very rare with natural gas and, unlike most of the power lines in the US, natural gas lines pretty much always run underground (with some really weird exceptions I'm sure).
(2) It's more efficient to generate power on a large scale
The point of this device is that it's highly efficient. Transmission losses are nowhere near what they used to be, but they are still a factor counting against centralized generation. So, if home generation can get close to the efficiency of centralized generation, then it can beat it by dropping the overhead. There's also the issue of waste heat, power plants may just have to dump it, but homes can use it for hot water and home heating in the winter, although dumping it in summer might be an issue for heavily built up areas. Let's also not forget that most power plants don't have one giant generating turbine, etc. but rather have a cluster of generating devices. So, clearly there's a point of diminishing returns in just making it bigger. Depending on the method, the point where the diminishing returns makes building a bigger one not really worth it might be at the scale of a single home. For fuel cells, that might be the case.
There is a use case for generating (emergency backup) power on site. That's covered by diesel generators, and solar cells.
Technological changes can alter that dynamic. They're working on nanopore carbon storage for natural gas so it can be stored at high density with relatively low pressure like propane. If that becomes possible, there's no particularly good reason to stick with diesel when a similarly sized tank can store an equivalent amount of power and the tank can be continuously replenished by a pipe running into the house. You can run diesel pipes around too, but it's a much bigger environmental disaster when one of those leaks. Solar cells are always going to be handy for an emergency, but there's the local power storage problem. It's possible to use electricity to generate methane from atmospheric CO2 and water, although we don't have a very efficient process yet. If the storage problem is fixed for natural gas and an efficient process for making the stuff from air and electricity is developed, then a natural gas storage tank can replace lead-acid batteries as the principal storage method for solar power.
That's also ignoring the use case of power generation in remote locations with natural gas but no electrical service.
Bob won't get anything the bank will take the land and the money.
Yes, that was the point. The AC I replied to was basically claiming that contracts end at death and don't transfer to the estate. That's clearly not the case.
The journalist disclaimed all rights to the site's content and released it into the public domain. Thus there is no content to inherit.
Not quite correct. There is no mechanism in copyright law to transfer anything to the public domain except by expiration of copyright (even then it's a little fuzzy whether copyright law really recognizes a "public domain" except in the constitution). Saying that you release something to the public domain creates an implied license for everyone in the world to copy and modify their copies of the content as they see fit. The estate still inherits the copyright itself, there's just not much they can do with it that everyone else can't. Under current copyright law, the time clock on the copyright starts ticking as of the author's death.
The hosting contract ending with death is a matter of law. Many jurisdictions may not actually allow that. At the very least, the estate is probably due compensation in just about every jurisdiction.
The terms of service forbidding information condoning self-harm is the strongest legal argument Yahoo! has. It's also the most disturbing. Modern common carriers are, unfortunately, not recognized as such. Even your ISP or an Internet backbone can, in this day and age, restrict speech on its network and force those restrictions to everyone downstream. That leaves us in a situation where we have free speech in theory, but in practice it's heavily censored. We can still have individual speech on a person to person basis, but free speech is effectively non-existant in modern public forums.
So... a person's estate isn't responsible for any of their contractually incurred debts? So Bob's dying great uncle can take out a loan for $1,000,000 against his property, then die and leave the $1,000,000 and the property to Bob and Bob will owe nothing (except inheritance taxes) since the loan contract ended with the death of the great uncle?
A government in this role would be yet another middleman. To eliminate middlemen altogether, you'd have to pay directly and fully for your own health care.
Paying directly for your own healthcare is not pooling risk. How can you pay directly for your own healthcare and simultaneously pool risk? If you actually have some ingenious and effective peer to peer system I've never considered, I honestly would love to hear it. The only solutions along those lines I can think of involve technology that doesn't exist yet.
Good enough since 1% is much greater than 0%. I suspect the actual fraction is probably closer to 25% than 1%. If you're single and young, then bare bones insurance probably is a better choice.
I don't think you quite understand how much worst case scenario medical care actually costs. The actual percentage of people who can afford that based on their personal assets is around the 1% mark. It's not remotely close to 25%. Bear in mind, I'm talking about mitigating risk. Many people may not actually ever need that level of health care, but, in your proposal, everyone who gets seriously ill, if they're not in that 1% who can afford any contingency, dies. This is why it makes sense to pool risk when it's something that could happen to anybody. Therefore, insurance. If everyone is going to have insurance, then it makes sense for everyone to be insured in some way through the state.
Then why on Earth do we even bother using lie detectors at all?
As others have pointed it, they can be used as a scam to interrogate people without their lawyer present. They can also be used for other types of scams. Like police dogs which will signal the presence of drugs at their handlers command rather than when they actually scent drugs (or perhaps it's more that they avoid signalling that they scent drugs until they get their handlers commands because their noses are so sensitive they smell drugs on just about everyone from the money in their pockets and just from walking around on the streets) in order to manufacture probable cause. Also as a scam to force a confession like the traditional, "your partner ratted you out, sign this confession and you'll walk in a couple of years, otherwise we'll see to it that you get the chair!". There may be other reasons as well, but one of the most important things to remember is that fake "bomb detectors" which were actually re-branded "golfball detectors" (which didn't work to find golfballs either) were bought in large quantities by law enforcement agencies and, even after the scam was revealed, some of those agencies stubbornly continued to use them. Draw from that what you will.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, absolutely. But those 363 pages weren't even a bill until they were introduced. Until that Tuesday, anyone who complained that there was pending legislation like that waiting in the wings would have been lambasted as a paranoid conspiracy nut. Especially if they made the obviously ludicrous claim that it would go from bill to law in three days.
What exactly would be the point of having the list of congressmen or senators who voted for or against something available right away?
I was talking about having the text of the bill right away. I was wondering if it was even available at all for public review before it was voted into law.
You have to lodge your objection BEFORE they vote, because maybe in some alternate universe it might make a difference. Afterwards, all you can do is vote for somebody else in the next election.
Yes, that was my point. The USAPATRIOT act was railroaded through before anyone even had a chance to object. Even if the text was available to the public the moment the bill was introduced, it would have been too late for anyone to object to it.
How do we know that "once society has advanced enough," they won't simply decide that the geezercicles aren't worth the time or energy?
We don't know that. Most people probably wouldn't want to be revived into such a cold world anyway... Of course, the world we currently live in is probably that cold as it is right now. Replace "frozen people" with desperate living refugees on ships and we have pretty much the same situation.
Anyone know if anyone has ever tried memory experiments with animals that can survive freezing and thawing? I'm not sure exactly how you would do it though. Is it possible to train a frog to do tricks or run mazes or something? If you could, then you could demonstrate that, in principle, memory can survive the freezing process. Of course, it still might be the case that the memory of amphibians and the like isn't stored in the same way as the memory of humans and other mammals.
They have demonstrated chilled (but not frozen) suspended animation over a period of hours in mice and pigs. Their hearts were stopped completely and they were effectively dead the entire time before being warmed back up. Presumably if memory were stored in ways that requires a continuous refresh, those pigs and mice would have lost their memories. I can't find any details of whether any memory tests were done on those animals however. Pigs and mice are, at least, quite trainable.
Still, even the pigs and mice in the suspended animation experiments weren't as totally dead as someone completely frozen. There still might have been some undetectable slow process going on keeping their memories going (or, once again, maybe they actually didn't keep their memories).
Did you know that for successful organ harvesting, you actually can't be completely dead.
The actual cells can't be dead, but most organs can certainly be harvested from a corpse that's clinically dead.
Before a law becomes a law, it was known as a bill
I am interested to know how many of you guys actually spend time to review the myriad of bills that are awaiting to be passed in the parliament/congress, and/or state-level legislatures/senates ?
Isn't it a little bit too late complaining about "malicious" laws while none of us paid any attention to them when they were still bills ?
Well, in the case of the USAPATRIOT act, it was introduced on Tuesday, passed the House on Wednesday, then passed the Senate on Thursday, then signed by the President on Friday. It is 363 pages long. Numerous congressmen have admitted to not having read it before voting for it (and let's face it, they probably never read through the whole thing after passing it either). As for the rest of us... frankly I'm not sure how quickly the congressional record was actually available back in 2001. Anyone know? Would it have been immediately available to the public as soon as it was introduced? Put online somewhere maybe? Or would it be done at the end of the day? Perhaps the end of the week after it had already been signed into law? This is something I really want to know. In any case, even if it were available to the public instantly and a it was read through by an amazing speed reading legal scholar, their letter of objection to their congressman probably wouldn't have gotten there in time.
Well the courts have not overturned it yet, so it can be considered the law of the land.
See, this is the thing I don't quite get. If the courts do overturn it, what happens? This isn't some civil case, this is the very deliberate, premeditated taking of a human life. If the courts overturn the laws allowing it on the grounds that the law was never legal in the first place, does anyone get prosecuted for murder? If not, then why not?
An example. Someone comes after you with a knife screaming that they're going to gut you like a pig. You run away from them until you see a piece of rebar lying on the ground and you pick it up, wait for them to come into range, then whack them in the skull killing them. You assumed that the law allowed that as justifiable self defense. Oops. It turns out that, while running away, you crossed state lines and now you're in a state where self-defense is more narrowly defined and you were only legally allowed to kill in defense if it was impossible for you to run away. Since you stopped running, you're now going to jail for murder.
That's the way it works for most of us. Commit a crime that you thought was legal and go to jail.
It's only legal under the stated supreme law of the land if the term "due process of law" is rendered utterly meaningless.
So the US War of Independence happened because they were hungry?
Well, the US War of Independence wasn't really a revolution was it? It was, as you stated, a war of independence.
Based on some of the people who have received it, I've always assumed that it's mostly used in an attempt to try to shame people into being better.
That's a fairly responsible way to operate. Still, it can't really beat having home heating as one of the primary uses for the device. Only during colder months of course, and a modern well-insulated home reduces the necessity of heating.
I understand that it's de facto legal, it's still not de jurem legal.
When they discovered it during excavation, was it full of pinkish psychoreactive slime flowing towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Did the excavators get put on trial for violating their judicial restraining order?
Do find out how many passengers his hyperloop can transport per hour.
Apparently 3,360 per tube. I can't actually find any numbers on how many per hour a conventional train carries. I'll try guessing. We're talking about Los Angeles to San Francisco, so the existing trains take about six hours, or 12 times longer than the hyperloop would take. So, the distance is about 382 miles, and we'll divide that by six to get 63.66 miles or 336,125 feet. Cut that by 1% since we'll need an engine every 100 cars or so and we have 332764. We'll call a passenger car 85 feet including linkages, so we can have about 3915 passenger cars in that 63.66 mile stretch. A passenger car can hold maybe 100 people. So, a decent upper limit, without overloading, for people the conventional train system can carry per hour is 391,500, which is about 117 times as many as the hyperloop. That's a silly number of course. To maintain that rate you would need 23490 passenger cars and around 235 engines.
So, anyway, it looks like conventional trains could certainly carry more passengers on one set of tracks based on the numbers musk gives and the numbers I've roughed out for trains. On the other hand, there's no particularly good reason you couldn't stack hyperloop tubes on top of each other and next to each other to achieve more capacity.
So, in other words, the second AC was right.
Sorry, this amendment was added to the constitution when? Also, Julian Assange planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist acts on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons?
If it's an Obama-ordered drone strike, it isn't legally murder.
Is this Nixon's: "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal"? The Constitution is still meant to be the supreme law of the land and extrajudicial executions outside of warfare are still illegal under the Constitution.
There is *no* use case for generating power from natgas coming in through a pipe.
(1) The pipe is as easy to break as the power line
As others have pointed out, this isn't really the case. Outages are very rare with natural gas and, unlike most of the power lines in the US, natural gas lines pretty much always run underground (with some really weird exceptions I'm sure).
(2) It's more efficient to generate power on a large scale
The point of this device is that it's highly efficient. Transmission losses are nowhere near what they used to be, but they are still a factor counting against centralized generation. So, if home generation can get close to the efficiency of centralized generation, then it can beat it by dropping the overhead. There's also the issue of waste heat, power plants may just have to dump it, but homes can use it for hot water and home heating in the winter, although dumping it in summer might be an issue for heavily built up areas. Let's also not forget that most power plants don't have one giant generating turbine, etc. but rather have a cluster of generating devices. So, clearly there's a point of diminishing returns in just making it bigger. Depending on the method, the point where the diminishing returns makes building a bigger one not really worth it might be at the scale of a single home. For fuel cells, that might be the case.
There is a use case for generating (emergency backup) power on site. That's covered by diesel generators, and solar cells.
Technological changes can alter that dynamic. They're working on nanopore carbon storage for natural gas so it can be stored at high density with relatively low pressure like propane. If that becomes possible, there's no particularly good reason to stick with diesel when a similarly sized tank can store an equivalent amount of power and the tank can be continuously replenished by a pipe running into the house. You can run diesel pipes around too, but it's a much bigger environmental disaster when one of those leaks. Solar cells are always going to be handy for an emergency, but there's the local power storage problem. It's possible to use electricity to generate methane from atmospheric CO2 and water, although we don't have a very efficient process yet. If the storage problem is fixed for natural gas and an efficient process for making the stuff from air and electricity is developed, then a natural gas storage tank can replace lead-acid batteries as the principal storage method for solar power.
That's also ignoring the use case of power generation in remote locations with natural gas but no electrical service.
Bob won't get anything the bank will take the land and the money.
Yes, that was the point. The AC I replied to was basically claiming that contracts end at death and don't transfer to the estate. That's clearly not the case.
The journalist disclaimed all rights to the site's content and released it into the public domain. Thus there is no content to inherit.
Not quite correct. There is no mechanism in copyright law to transfer anything to the public domain except by expiration of copyright (even then it's a little fuzzy whether copyright law really recognizes a "public domain" except in the constitution). Saying that you release something to the public domain creates an implied license for everyone in the world to copy and modify their copies of the content as they see fit. The estate still inherits the copyright itself, there's just not much they can do with it that everyone else can't. Under current copyright law, the time clock on the copyright starts ticking as of the author's death.
The hosting contract ending with death is a matter of law. Many jurisdictions may not actually allow that. At the very least, the estate is probably due compensation in just about every jurisdiction.
The terms of service forbidding information condoning self-harm is the strongest legal argument Yahoo! has. It's also the most disturbing. Modern common carriers are, unfortunately, not recognized as such. Even your ISP or an Internet backbone can, in this day and age, restrict speech on its network and force those restrictions to everyone downstream. That leaves us in a situation where we have free speech in theory, but in practice it's heavily censored. We can still have individual speech on a person to person basis, but free speech is effectively non-existant in modern public forums.
A dead person can not be part in a contract.
So... a person's estate isn't responsible for any of their contractually incurred debts? So Bob's dying great uncle can take out a loan for $1,000,000 against his property, then die and leave the $1,000,000 and the property to Bob and Bob will owe nothing (except inheritance taxes) since the loan contract ended with the death of the great uncle?
A government in this role would be yet another middleman. To eliminate middlemen altogether, you'd have to pay directly and fully for your own health care.
Paying directly for your own healthcare is not pooling risk. How can you pay directly for your own healthcare and simultaneously pool risk? If you actually have some ingenious and effective peer to peer system I've never considered, I honestly would love to hear it. The only solutions along those lines I can think of involve technology that doesn't exist yet.
Good enough since 1% is much greater than 0%. I suspect the actual fraction is probably closer to 25% than 1%. If you're single and young, then bare bones insurance probably is a better choice.
I don't think you quite understand how much worst case scenario medical care actually costs. The actual percentage of people who can afford that based on their personal assets is around the 1% mark. It's not remotely close to 25%. Bear in mind, I'm talking about mitigating risk. Many people may not actually ever need that level of health care, but, in your proposal, everyone who gets seriously ill, if they're not in that 1% who can afford any contingency, dies. This is why it makes sense to pool risk when it's something that could happen to anybody. Therefore, insurance. If everyone is going to have insurance, then it makes sense for everyone to be insured in some way through the state.
Because I was being helpful.
At least your heart was in the right place.
Yes, they still allow libraries, but if they use a networked electronic checkout system, every book you check out is reported to the police.
Then why on Earth do we even bother using lie detectors at all?
As others have pointed it, they can be used as a scam to interrogate people without their lawyer present. They can also be used for other types of scams. Like police dogs which will signal the presence of drugs at their handlers command rather than when they actually scent drugs (or perhaps it's more that they avoid signalling that they scent drugs until they get their handlers commands because their noses are so sensitive they smell drugs on just about everyone from the money in their pockets and just from walking around on the streets) in order to manufacture probable cause. Also as a scam to force a confession like the traditional, "your partner ratted you out, sign this confession and you'll walk in a couple of years, otherwise we'll see to it that you get the chair!". There may be other reasons as well, but one of the most important things to remember is that fake "bomb detectors" which were actually re-branded "golfball detectors" (which didn't work to find golfballs either) were bought in large quantities by law enforcement agencies and, even after the scam was revealed, some of those agencies stubbornly continued to use them. Draw from that what you will.