Yeah, if there's one time when lethal force is justified, it's this. Doesn't excuse scumbags tazing grannies, but kudos to this officer for handling a dangerous situation optimally
Optimally? You can't think of any better outcome than this? To be sure, I'm amazed that New York City cops didn't manage to shoot bystanders on this one but, for all that you seem to think his life had negative worth, a human being did die.
That article pretty much does say that the plans are very similar at their core, just that the heritage foundation plan had a bunch of other details to it that would have been much worse that the ACA. Basically, the ACA is bad, but it could have been worse. It could have been better, as well.
The US government still keeps gold at Fort Knox. There's about 1/4 as much gold in the vault there now as there was at its peak. At modern gold prices and in modern dollars the largest quantity of gold ever stored there would have been worth about $840 billion dollars. That's less than a quarter of what the government spends in a year. It's 5.35% of the GDP. It's less than $2700 per person. And that's going by current gold prices, which would take a major dive if anyone ever actually tried to sell even 10% of it. Gold by itself, or even in combination with a few other precious metals just doesn't make any sense as the basis for a currency. It just sits there doing absolutely nothing in a vault where no-one even gets to look at it (and therefore verify its existence) except for a few select people. I've always found it hilarious that people declare non-gold backed currencies "fiat money" when you consider the massive amount of government fiat required to actually have a gold-backed currency in the first place. As another poster pointed out, the actual assets that back the currency are all the assets the country has. The other assets possessed by the US absolutely dwarf the relatively paltry amount of gold.
Neutrinos? Surely you mean neutrons. Has anyone on Earth ever even conceived of a realistic man-made device that could produce enough neutrinos that be dangerous to a human being?
6. Break into someone's house and use their land line phone.
Why even bother breaking in. Traditional POTS service generally has an easy to break into box on the outside of the house. Let's also not forget that pretty much everyone with home telephone service now uses convenient wireless DECT 6.0 handsets that are also convenentily completely insecure (they have encryption, but it's already been completely broken).
I think I finally understand what you're trying to say here, although I'm not sure you understand it. I think you're talking about how Netflix, in response to Comcast's complaints that Netflix was using their network as it is meant to be used, proposed local cachiing at various physical locations, connected to Comcasts network(s). And, since that would greatly diminish the supposed horrible network load that Comcast was complaining about, Netflix didn't think they owed Comcast anything to address Comcast's complaints. But that was just a proposed solution. They didn't send out an army of linemine to forcibly wire themselves into Comcast networks the way your posts seem to imply.
"Unreasonable" probably wasn't strong enough a word. And it certainly is a civil rights issue in the sense that many of the "drug war" standard policies are complete violations of civil rights. Civil forfeiture, for example.
I was actually going to post replying to the GP that, while the drug war policies are unreasonable in many ways, it's not really a civil rights issue. Then I read your post with its de-humanizing of drug users (well, some drug users since I'm sure you don't have an issue with caffeine users and alcohol drinkers) and rabid, vitreolic response to someone defending them from persecution... To make a long story short, thanks to you, I'm reconsidering the GP's position.
Kickbacks, insider trading, extortion. There's lots of ways to attain wealth besides embezzlement.
A kickback is taking money that you control, but don't own, paying it out to a third party, who funnels some of it back to you. So that is a form of embezzlement.
Most likely, if killer robots did get out of control that they would hit some limiting factor and loose the ability to kill all humans before getting the job done
Ok. That one definitely calls for:
Fry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system" Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them." Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that." Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down."
Sure, if it's a connection with really low bandwidth to begin with. The kind of broadband connection that _should_ be typical in homes should be capable of, in the realm of video, matching a truck full of discs for all practical purposes. Then there's latency.
I've heard that supposedly the humans were actually supposed to be part of a giant computer, actually running the matrix and functioning as a data center for the AIs to live on in earlier versions of the story, but they changed it to batteries because it was too deep an idea for most people to understand. That may be mythical, of course. I've never understood why they didn't just make it a three laws situation (our programming forbids us to kill off humanity, but we can work around it and stuff you all in tubes and give you simulated lives) or even sentimentality on the part of the AIs with the Matrix basically being a national park with the Agents as park rangers who euthenize any dangerous animals.
What it would probably lack is the billion years of baggage humans are saddled with that give us a full assortment of needs and urges, including an urge to survive. If we achieved AI with a top-down, planned approach, there's no reason that a robot would "want" anything that wasn't built in. Consider all the things that make you want to eliminate the competition and tell me why any of those things would need to be part of a robots core goals and not tempered with higher goals? On the other hand, we might build AI by basically copying humans, in which case, we just have a new species of human built on different underlying hardware.
By "readers", I meant blu-ray drives/players. I was talking about what it would take to move the bandwidth of the truckload of dense storage media from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of the practical. If each disk represents hours of reading/writing at either end then, in addition to the physical transport, you have to consider the writing of the disks at one end, the packaging and loading, the transport itself, the unpacking and unloading, loading the storage media into readers, then the actual read time.
The HAARP system is being used to cause Hurricanes, earthquakes, and drought conditions. The reason is to thin out the population and create conditions (Global Warming) for martial law in the USA.
Pedophilia flourishes as it is an Elite 'habit' (to rob energy, called energy vampirism see: Energy robbing, one visible face of Satanism) and the main control tool 1 of the visible ruling Elite through potential blackmail/shame 2 (politicians, judges...) created by NSA psychics 3 or through Sodomic (satanic) mind control, and it could be a predilection of Psychopathy, certainly of the Elite psychopaths
Covert genocide, looks like the Global Warming Lie is a cover story. You can see these most days right across the sky at low altitudes, whereas contrails are at higher alt and only follow the plane for a short distance. The editor had 4 chemtrails crossing right above his house like 2 train tracks, and his house is not even in a designated flight path (1), while military jets that often fly over in low altitude training never leave any trails. In some photos you can see gaps in the trail (1), a dead giveaway, while others have absurd flight paths (1), and others have very strange planes (1) that look to be masked and appear as orbs as was seen at 911, while contrails go to nothing and chemtrails spread to act like clouds
[Mind control is the Reptilians Matrix of Evil, put into action by their on planet proxies: the Psychopath Satanic Reptilian hosts. It consists mostly of information control (see: Lying Medical mind control), Suppressing sexuality, and spreading Fear, through controlled Media, Politics, Movie industry, Music industry, Wikipedia, Television, & Education, with help from chemicals (Fluoride, Chlorine, Drugs, Aspartame, Vaccine poisons), and Death Towers, with Murder Inc keeping a final lid on the truth. This allows them to get away with Human Abuse and Mass Murder for Energy vampirism.
So, sorry if I misunderstood, but were you trying for a funny mod?
Are you commonly concerned about the anal-oral route for pathogens?
Many, if not most of the vegetables you eat are picked by workers on gigantic tracts of industrial farmland with miles to even the nearest port-a-potty and an antagonistic attitude towards breaks from management.
Polio shows no symptoms in 90% of cases, even though the infected are still contagious. So 417 reported cases means at least 4170 infected individuals. Not to mention that many cases with symptoms will not have made it into those statistics, so the number is probably much higher.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a USPS truck carrying BDs in envelopes.
The problem with that is that it's not a very useful measure of bandwidth. Sure a million blu-ray disks being physically transported represents a lot of theoretical bandwidth, but, in order to realize it as practical bandwidth, you have to write it at one end with a million writers and read it at the other end with a million readers. If we're talking movies then the individual watching them is a bottleneck. The maximum AV speed on a Blu-ray disk is something like 48 Mbits per second. The actual typical bit rate is more around 20 Mbits per second or lower. If you can get within an order of magnitude of that bit-rate over the network, then you're beating the practical bandwidth of that truck full of disks even if the theoretical bandwidth blows the network connection away.
It's pretty straightforward. You pay for access to the Internet through your ISP, which may be Comcast. Netflix pays for access to the Internet through their ISPs, although their service providers are probably a different tier than the consumer level service you're getting. The way it's supposed to work is that you're both connected to the Internet, so data you send between each other is covered by whatever plan you have with your ISP. What Comcast is doing here is double-dipping. They want to charge you for sending and receiving data to and from Netflix and also charge Netflix for sending and receiving data to and from you. The effect of this is that Netflix basically ends up paying twice for bandwidth. You may shrug your shoulders and say "why should I care", but who exactly do you think ultimately pays for this? The answer is that _you_ pay if you're a Comcast customer who uses Netflix (or any other service they manage to extort this way).
This is basically a telecom finding yet another way to charge hidden fees to customers. Ever actually look at the bill from pretty much any telecom such as Comcast? Ever look at the fees section? Where they directly charge you for all the taxes and other fees that anyone charges them? Things that every other business rolls into the final price as part of the cost of doing business but telecoms somehow get a pass to do? It allows them to lie to you about the price of your service when you sign up. Ever try to ask them in advance what your actual basic monthly bill will be when trying to order service and they can't or won't tell you? They're scum, plain and simple.
As businesses that require extensive, distributed infrastructure (mostly situated on property acquired through eminent domain, variances, etc. for the public good) telecoms tend to be what's referred to as "natural monopolies". As natural monopolies, they're meant to be heavily regulated since they generally can't even exist without massive exceptions and exceptional favors being granted to them. Trouble is, as vast, powerful monopolies, they distort the market they exist in and capture the regulatory system. They should be forced to act as non-profits and run as public utilities considering the massive abuses they perpetrate constantly. Trouble is, that won't fly well in the US where too many people are severely opposed to that kind of regulation of "private" industry, completely blind to the fact that the industry in question only exists because it gets the benefits of being a public institution without actually being one.
Repeatedly sending big, high def movie files over the internet backbone seems so wasteful.
Wasteful of what, exactly? Most of the costs in networking are fixed. You use a little bit more electricity to send more data but, generally speaking, most of the physical equipment involved doesn't really experience extra wear and tear when a connection is saturated versus being unused (some that's poorly designed might from, for example, overheating). In other words, if you graphed it, the real cost of bandwidth per unit is going to go down the more bandwidth is actually used. Obviously you run into problems if the network is oversaturated, but it's not somehow a waste to actually use bandwidth once all the infrastructure for it is in place.
I remember when my car was stolen right out of a mall parking lot quite a while back now. I met the police in the mall security office. They literally laughed in my face about the whole thing while taking the report. They also obviously weren't bothered with checking surveillance video since they were in the security office at the time and didn't even ask mall security about it. My car was later found abandoned on the side of the road with the battery dead (it turned out I had a failing alternator, which may have saved me the whole car). After it was found, the officer following up was very interested in questioning _me_ about why there was a scale in the trunk (it was a broken one from the bakery I was working in at the time).
That one bothered me at the time. Since then I've become more relaxed about it. There are actually a lot of possibilities for solid matter that aren't on the periodic table. Things like exotic purely non-baryonic matter, or combinations of baryonic and non-baryonic matter. Atoms with electrons replaced by Muons, for example. Many of the theoretical ideas for such exotic forms of matter have been ruled out, but there's a still a _lot_ out there. We are not yet remotely at the point where we can know for sure what might be possible. We're not even remotely at the point where we know everything that's possible in normal chemistry, after all, so why should exotic materials be any different.
The Moon may not be a good example because it does extract energy from the Earth (from its rotation via tidal forces) so that its orbital distance is actually increasing over time. Not arguing agains the gravity tractor, just saying that maybe wasn't the best example.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, if there's one time when lethal force is justified, it's this. Doesn't excuse scumbags tazing grannies, but kudos to this officer for handling a dangerous situation optimally
Optimally? You can't think of any better outcome than this? To be sure, I'm amazed that New York City cops didn't manage to shoot bystanders on this one but, for all that you seem to think his life had negative worth, a human being did die.
That article pretty much does say that the plans are very similar at their core, just that the heritage foundation plan had a bunch of other details to it that would have been much worse that the ACA. Basically, the ACA is bad, but it could have been worse. It could have been better, as well.
The US government still keeps gold at Fort Knox. There's about 1/4 as much gold in the vault there now as there was at its peak. At modern gold prices and in modern dollars the largest quantity of gold ever stored there would have been worth about $840 billion dollars. That's less than a quarter of what the government spends in a year. It's 5.35% of the GDP. It's less than $2700 per person. And that's going by current gold prices, which would take a major dive if anyone ever actually tried to sell even 10% of it. Gold by itself, or even in combination with a few other precious metals just doesn't make any sense as the basis for a currency. It just sits there doing absolutely nothing in a vault where no-one even gets to look at it (and therefore verify its existence) except for a few select people. I've always found it hilarious that people declare non-gold backed currencies "fiat money" when you consider the massive amount of government fiat required to actually have a gold-backed currency in the first place. As another poster pointed out, the actual assets that back the currency are all the assets the country has. The other assets possessed by the US absolutely dwarf the relatively paltry amount of gold.
if you aren't getting too many neutrinos
Neutrinos? Surely you mean neutrons. Has anyone on Earth ever even conceived of a realistic man-made device that could produce enough neutrinos that be dangerous to a human being?
6. Break into someone's house and use their land line phone.
Why even bother breaking in. Traditional POTS service generally has an easy to break into box on the outside of the house. Let's also not forget that pretty much everyone with home telephone service now uses convenient wireless DECT 6.0 handsets that are also convenentily completely insecure (they have encryption, but it's already been completely broken).
I think I finally understand what you're trying to say here, although I'm not sure you understand it. I think you're talking about how Netflix, in response to Comcast's complaints that Netflix was using their network as it is meant to be used, proposed local cachiing at various physical locations, connected to Comcasts network(s). And, since that would greatly diminish the supposed horrible network load that Comcast was complaining about, Netflix didn't think they owed Comcast anything to address Comcast's complaints. But that was just a proposed solution. They didn't send out an army of linemine to forcibly wire themselves into Comcast networks the way your posts seem to imply.
"Unreasonable" probably wasn't strong enough a word. And it certainly is a civil rights issue in the sense that many of the "drug war" standard policies are complete violations of civil rights. Civil forfeiture, for example.
I was actually going to post replying to the GP that, while the drug war policies are unreasonable in many ways, it's not really a civil rights issue. Then I read your post with its de-humanizing of drug users (well, some drug users since I'm sure you don't have an issue with caffeine users and alcohol drinkers) and rabid, vitreolic response to someone defending them from persecution... To make a long story short, thanks to you, I'm reconsidering the GP's position.
Kickbacks, insider trading, extortion. There's lots of ways to attain wealth besides embezzlement.
A kickback is taking money that you control, but don't own, paying it out to a third party, who funnels some of it back to you. So that is a form of embezzlement.
Most likely, if killer robots did get out of control that they would hit some limiting factor and loose the ability to kill all humans before getting the job done
Ok. That one definitely calls for:
Fry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system"
Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them."
Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that."
Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down."
Sure, if it's a connection with really low bandwidth to begin with. The kind of broadband connection that _should_ be typical in homes should be capable of, in the realm of video, matching a truck full of discs for all practical purposes. Then there's latency.
I've heard that supposedly the humans were actually supposed to be part of a giant computer, actually running the matrix and functioning as a data center for the AIs to live on in earlier versions of the story, but they changed it to batteries because it was too deep an idea for most people to understand. That may be mythical, of course. I've never understood why they didn't just make it a three laws situation (our programming forbids us to kill off humanity, but we can work around it and stuff you all in tubes and give you simulated lives) or even sentimentality on the part of the AIs with the Matrix basically being a national park with the Agents as park rangers who euthenize any dangerous animals.
What it would probably lack is the billion years of baggage humans are saddled with that give us a full assortment of needs and urges, including an urge to survive. If we achieved AI with a top-down, planned approach, there's no reason that a robot would "want" anything that wasn't built in. Consider all the things that make you want to eliminate the competition and tell me why any of those things would need to be part of a robots core goals and not tempered with higher goals? On the other hand, we might build AI by basically copying humans, in which case, we just have a new species of human built on different underlying hardware.
By "readers", I meant blu-ray drives/players. I was talking about what it would take to move the bandwidth of the truckload of dense storage media from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of the practical. If each disk represents hours of reading/writing at either end then, in addition to the physical transport, you have to consider the writing of the disks at one end, the packaging and loading, the transport itself, the unpacking and unloading, loading the storage media into readers, then the actual read time.
Other great quotes from that site:
The HAARP system is being used to cause Hurricanes, earthquakes, and drought conditions. The reason is to thin out the population and create conditions (Global Warming) for martial law in the USA.
Pedophilia flourishes as it is an Elite 'habit' (to rob energy, called energy vampirism see: Energy robbing, one visible face of Satanism) and the main control tool 1 of the visible ruling Elite through potential blackmail/shame 2 (politicians, judges...) created by NSA psychics 3 or through Sodomic (satanic) mind control, and it could be a predilection of Psychopathy, certainly of the Elite psychopaths
Covert genocide, looks like the Global Warming Lie is a cover story. You can see these most days right across the sky at low altitudes, whereas contrails are at higher alt and only follow the plane for a short distance. The editor had 4 chemtrails crossing right above his house like 2 train tracks, and his house is not even in a designated flight path (1), while military jets that often fly over in low altitude training never leave any trails. In some photos you can see gaps in the trail (1), a dead giveaway, while others have absurd flight paths (1), and others have very strange planes (1) that look to be masked and appear as orbs as was seen at 911, while contrails go to nothing and chemtrails spread to act like clouds
[Mind control is the Reptilians Matrix of Evil, put into action by their on planet proxies: the Psychopath Satanic Reptilian hosts. It consists mostly of information control (see: Lying Medical mind control), Suppressing sexuality, and spreading Fear, through controlled Media, Politics, Movie industry, Music industry, Wikipedia, Television, & Education, with help from chemicals (Fluoride, Chlorine, Drugs, Aspartame, Vaccine poisons), and Death Towers, with Murder Inc keeping a final lid on the truth. This allows them to get away with Human Abuse and Mass Murder for Energy vampirism.
So, sorry if I misunderstood, but were you trying for a funny mod?
Are you commonly concerned about the anal-oral route for pathogens?
Many, if not most of the vegetables you eat are picked by workers on gigantic tracts of industrial farmland with miles to even the nearest port-a-potty and an antagonistic attitude towards breaks from management.
Polio shows no symptoms in 90% of cases, even though the infected are still contagious. So 417 reported cases means at least 4170 infected individuals. Not to mention that many cases with symptoms will not have made it into those statistics, so the number is probably much higher.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a USPS truck carrying BDs in envelopes.
The problem with that is that it's not a very useful measure of bandwidth. Sure a million blu-ray disks being physically transported represents a lot of theoretical bandwidth, but, in order to realize it as practical bandwidth, you have to write it at one end with a million writers and read it at the other end with a million readers. If we're talking movies then the individual watching them is a bottleneck. The maximum AV speed on a Blu-ray disk is something like 48 Mbits per second. The actual typical bit rate is more around 20 Mbits per second or lower. If you can get within an order of magnitude of that bit-rate over the network, then you're beating the practical bandwidth of that truck full of disks even if the theoretical bandwidth blows the network connection away.
It's pretty straightforward. You pay for access to the Internet through your ISP, which may be Comcast. Netflix pays for access to the Internet through their ISPs, although their service providers are probably a different tier than the consumer level service you're getting. The way it's supposed to work is that you're both connected to the Internet, so data you send between each other is covered by whatever plan you have with your ISP. What Comcast is doing here is double-dipping. They want to charge you for sending and receiving data to and from Netflix and also charge Netflix for sending and receiving data to and from you. The effect of this is that Netflix basically ends up paying twice for bandwidth. You may shrug your shoulders and say "why should I care", but who exactly do you think ultimately pays for this? The answer is that _you_ pay if you're a Comcast customer who uses Netflix (or any other service they manage to extort this way).
This is basically a telecom finding yet another way to charge hidden fees to customers. Ever actually look at the bill from pretty much any telecom such as Comcast? Ever look at the fees section? Where they directly charge you for all the taxes and other fees that anyone charges them? Things that every other business rolls into the final price as part of the cost of doing business but telecoms somehow get a pass to do? It allows them to lie to you about the price of your service when you sign up. Ever try to ask them in advance what your actual basic monthly bill will be when trying to order service and they can't or won't tell you? They're scum, plain and simple.
As businesses that require extensive, distributed infrastructure (mostly situated on property acquired through eminent domain, variances, etc. for the public good) telecoms tend to be what's referred to as "natural monopolies". As natural monopolies, they're meant to be heavily regulated since they generally can't even exist without massive exceptions and exceptional favors being granted to them. Trouble is, as vast, powerful monopolies, they distort the market they exist in and capture the regulatory system. They should be forced to act as non-profits and run as public utilities considering the massive abuses they perpetrate constantly. Trouble is, that won't fly well in the US where too many people are severely opposed to that kind of regulation of "private" industry, completely blind to the fact that the industry in question only exists because it gets the benefits of being a public institution without actually being one.
My thoughts exactly. This should be treated as extortion.
Repeatedly sending big, high def movie files over the internet backbone seems so wasteful.
Wasteful of what, exactly? Most of the costs in networking are fixed. You use a little bit more electricity to send more data but, generally speaking, most of the physical equipment involved doesn't really experience extra wear and tear when a connection is saturated versus being unused (some that's poorly designed might from, for example, overheating). In other words, if you graphed it, the real cost of bandwidth per unit is going to go down the more bandwidth is actually used.
Obviously you run into problems if the network is oversaturated, but it's not somehow a waste to actually use bandwidth once all the infrastructure for it is in place.
Since aquifers may extend tens or hundreds of miles, a couple of miles vertically just doesn't seem like that much.
I remember when my car was stolen right out of a mall parking lot quite a while back now. I met the police in the mall security office. They literally laughed in my face about the whole thing while taking the report. They also obviously weren't bothered with checking surveillance video since they were in the security office at the time and didn't even ask mall security about it.
My car was later found abandoned on the side of the road with the battery dead (it turned out I had a failing alternator, which may have saved me the whole car). After it was found, the officer following up was very interested in questioning _me_ about why there was a scale in the trunk (it was a broken one from the bakery I was working in at the time).
That one bothered me at the time. Since then I've become more relaxed about it. There are actually a lot of possibilities for solid matter that aren't on the periodic table. Things like exotic purely non-baryonic matter, or combinations of baryonic and non-baryonic matter. Atoms with electrons replaced by Muons, for example. Many of the theoretical ideas for such exotic forms of matter have been ruled out, but there's a still a _lot_ out there. We are not yet remotely at the point where we can know for sure what might be possible. We're not even remotely at the point where we know everything that's possible in normal chemistry, after all, so why should exotic materials be any different.
The Moon may not be a good example because it does extract energy from the Earth (from its rotation via tidal forces) so that its orbital distance is actually increasing over time. Not arguing agains the gravity tractor, just saying that maybe wasn't the best example.