As the article notes, it will cost more in brokerage fees to issue the shares than the trading value of the shares on the pink sheets.
Hell, my dad still holds** Enron shares in a brokerage account and even the *trading* fees are larger than the trading value of the stock (if he were to actually able sell the shares, his net would be negative).
**Fortunately, an IRS rule change about 10 years ago generously allows you to write off the loss w/o having to actually sell the shares in the case of illiquid stock losses that trade on the pink sheets. Of course if the stock is ever worth anything in the future, and you sell them, you have to use a zero basis, not your purchase basis in determining the gain.
... I applaud the GDC for ensuring that their institution reflects what is right.
Anybody remember when the UK government refused to acknowledge a known terrorist; Nelson Mandela? Then there's that terrorist every American admires: George Washington. If you think wrong choices must be punished by the mob, fine but don't choose the SJW complaint of the day.
In Canada, what percentage of our members of parliament will we kick out before we realize that we had a system were a high percentage of seemingly normal men, when put in a position of power, behaved deplorably?
I dunno, but they elected Rob Ford in Toronto, right?
I have the affliction where I can't remember people's names. I forget what it is called...
I think the word you are looking for is Dysnomia (aka Anomic Aphasia)...
Often people afflicted with this type of cognitive deficit often use circumlocutory phrases in an attempt to hide it (e.g., rather than addressing someone's name, they often use phrases like "I met you/him/her at that party last week...") or they make up nicknames for people based on other things they remember about them (e.g., "Mr. Java Expert", kind of a circumlocutation in itself)...
Dysnomia often isn't limited to remembering people's names, but also certain words (say, like Dysnomia). Similar circumlocutory strategies are often deployed to avoid getting communication trapped by the deficit (e.g., "I have the affliction where I can't remember people's names").
Although modern medicine doesn't know for sure, if your Dysnomia isn't likely genetic (e.g., you have had it as long as you can remember), it may, unfortunately, actually be a sign of a real problem (e.g., other aphasias), not something that is transient...
I'm not sure I buy the security angle though. Phones are likely fast enough to encrypt conversations end to end real time, but maybe our government doesn't want to implement that:)
As illustrated by the latest Strava revelation, sideband/meta-data information is quite useful and end-to-end encryption often doesn't protect against leaking this information. Things like Tor reduce the leakage of this type of sideband, but as we also know, actual implementations like Tor cannot be perfect (nor the users that use the technology).
I don't see what a content provider restricting access to their own content has to do with Net Neutrality.
I host a website. If I don't want you to access content on it, too bad. If I only let you access content on it using Internet Explorer 6, too bad.
Actually, this is kind of like back in the old days when the Bell company didn't let you use non-Bell company telephones to receive/make telephone calls on their network (well, technically a company could by a really expensive license to make equipment to attach to the phone network, but it was so expensive a license it killed the secondary market for telphones).
Basically the telephone was the equipment you used to access the telephone network and encode/render the audio. Similarly your browsing equipment is sort of the same thing for the internet. I think we broke up the Bell company back in 1982 because of monopolistic behavior like attempting to restrict the equipment used on the endpoint by using monopoly powers...
It may not have to do with Net Neutrality, but it is potentially anti-trust behavior...
It's Nvidia and ATI's shortsightedness that we are in the situation we are in. They should have ramped up production to address demand 8 months ago.
Unfortunately, they can't. TSMC has given each company a wafer allocation (silicon fabs take years to build and wafers are allocated years in advance). Also, TSMC has bigger companies to feed...
* Apple SoCs for iPhones (100millon chips or so) * Bitmain the leading ASIC for Bitcoin mining (buying about 20,000 wafers/month)
Basically, there's no "extra" fab capacity to be had to ramp up production...
Nvidia should put buzz words like "blockchain" and "crypto" in the name/descriptions of a line of video cards they're producing with a high margin and let nature take its course.
Nvidia and AMD have already released "Mining" SKUs which have been picked up by vendors like ASUS...
Except that many miners overclock the crap out of the cards meaning the voltage is generally high for extended periods of operational time (even if at a reasonably stable in temperature). This causes the silicon to age and parametrically get worse (e.g. not as overclockable) and may lead to premature transistor failure. This is due to effects like metal migration, hot-carrier injection increasing gate turn on thresholds, charge-traps/dielectric breakdown, etc...
Historically. temperature instability caused problems with the package solder balls in older solder alloys (e.g., xbox red-ring-of-death). Those old solder compounds aren't used anymore and temperature instability isn't as big a problem as it used to be, although it certainly can be a factor with fast thermocycling...
Considering behavior, very few governments clearly hold regard for human life.
That has little bearing on the rights to volunteer for experimental treatments. Unfortunately, it is of significant likelihood that participation in such treatment are not really what you might call a volunteer (e.g., if risky experimental treatments are being offered mainly to uninformed/desperate patients, it might signal that many aren't really volunteers, but are merely being tricked).
In many places you can volunteer for experimental treatments. For example, in the USA this is done under a program called expanded access (aka compassionate use) exemption... However, it is important to note that this doesn't apply to experimental treatments which are NOT currently approved for trials, it only allows access to treatment that is available in an approved trial to patients that are not part of the trial (e.g., because the patient doesn't meet study parameters, or the study is full)... At least in this case there is an active controlled study going on that could give such a patient some indications if things could be going south before things get totally out of hand...
I suspect that people are unaware of the current (documented) level of experimentation. To do a study of a rare genetic condition they found a person with the blood disorder, extracted their skin cells and used cloning techniques to develop embryos with the same genetic makeup and then proceeded to edit the gene using the CRISPR-Cas9 technique. In 8/20 embryos, they were able to make a correct edit and even then, the resulting embryo was a mosaic (some cell-lines corrected, some original generating some potential immunological problems) which even if was able to correct the disorder in the specific individual, would still likely allow the disorder to be passed to offspring.
The whole issue of volunteering for this is fraught with ethical issues (do parents technically "own" the right to make the choice for embryo, as the embryo isn't alive enough to do any volunteering)
With current experiments, the cloned embryos were not kept after 14 days. In the future, to make the changes lasting and w/o mosaic-ism, the modification would need to be done on the egg/sperm cells which has other ethical decisions (what to do with the uncorrected embryos, not too different than doing sex-selection on multiple embryos)
However there are a lot more parts of California than the cost, and many of those parts are not that inspiring.
Oh man, were you on hwy 101? There are unbelievably beautiful vistas throughout the Central Coast region.
If you ever have to make that trip, I highly recommend taking Amtrak's Coast Starlight train. It goes right along the coast and you can put your legs up and use the wi-fi and there's a dining car. It's terrific. If you do that, let me know and I'll meet you at one of the stops and buy you lunch. You can get on and off on a single ticket.
AFAIK, they only run one Coast Starlight train per day and they don't stop at any stop long enough for "lunch". Also, technically it isn't hop-on-hop-off, you'll need a reservation for each "leg" of your trip if you want to get off at a stop for 24 (or 48, or 72) hours, it probably isn't too hard to do that during non-peak times, but that's yet another complication...
The Mission is a district in San Francisco, somewhat akin to the way New York City is broken up into boroughs like the Bronxand Manhattan. From what I've gathered (having never visited the Bay Area), the Mission is well-known for its art scene, LGBTQ community, and food, though hopefully a local can chime in with better information.
SF is small compared to NYC. The Mission is a neighborhood not similar to a borough... If you had to draw an analogy, in SF they have districts (which elect their own supervisors). For example, SF supervisor District 9 encompasses the "Mission" and "Bernal Heights" neighborhoods. A Borough in NYC like Brooklyn would have many neighborhoods (e.g., Bedford-Stuyvesant, Sunset park, Flatbush, etc)...
The Mission is unfortunately also known as one of the places where Tech buses (Google, Apple, etc) go and are attacked by local protesters...
But there are good restaurants and other things to do there (attracting the people who use aforementioned Tech buses and drive up local rents and thus generating local strife)...
much of SF believes the rest of the world revolves around their epicenter.
NYC has the same attitude, except maybe 10X more extreme. But at least for NYC it is somewhat justifiable.
The problem with SF's Tenderloin is that it is named after NY's Tenderloin. Both are historically red light districts. Although SF's Tenderloin is becoming more gentrified over the last 30 years that it will probably need to be renamed.
FWIW, there was a proposal (by PETA) a few years ago to rename it the Tempeh district... Although having walked through there just last month, I'd say it has quite a ways to go before I would call it "gentrified"...
Just signed 702 Bill to authorize foreign intelligence collection," Trump tweeted. "This is NOT the same FISA law that was so wrongly abused during the election.
Are people really dumb enough to believe this? It’s just as bad as it ever was and still allows warrantless surveillance with pretty much non-existent oversight.
Of course it isn't the same. It may be not quite as bad, though according to this summary... But if you are against warrant-less intelligence collection in general, well, it's nothing new in that area, so from that point of view, it is basically the same.
The car sized 900kg Curiosity rovers used a Plutonium RTG as it's main power source.
Although the smaller 180kg Spirit and Opportunity rovers used solar panels for main power, the panels could only supply a peak of 140watts for about 4 hours per sol (martian day) when there wasn't a dust storm.
What is apparently not as well known is that even Spirit and Opportunity still used RHU (Radioisotope Heating Units) to keep warm at night to augment their batteries (as nearly all deep space missions have done).
Einstein was famous because he was good at PR. He wasn't the most capable Physicist, but he was good at discovering things to work on that would get him attention.
Now for what he is famous for, it's clearly relativity. The ideas behind special relativity were not new when Einstein proposed his views (Lorentz and Poincare were arguably first), but Einstein was probably the first to completely embrace relativity and the invariance principals.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to do relativity justice w/o appreciation of exactly what energy and momentum are and the insight that radiation can possess inertia. Of course you can short cut this all into the final insight that E=mc^2, but I'm not sure that is much better than teaching history by memorizing dates and reduces this from a scientific explanation to simply a historical explanation (basically Einstein is famous, like Michael Jordan is famous, but he's a famous scientist).
General relativity is even more complex. The beauty behind the discovery of general relativity is that the math actually works out (which is no mean feat). One can always propose an elegant theory, but if it turns out to be inconsistent with the math, it is just an idea, not a theory. Hilbert and Einstein both worked furiously to work out the math ahead of the other, but it is generally acknowledged that the earlier works of Einstein were likely the insights that motivated the solutions discovered by both men.
Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized. It is an irony of fate that I should have been showered with so much uncalled for and unmerited admiration and esteem. Perhaps this adulation springs from the unfulfilled wish of the multitude to comprehend the few ideas which I, with my weak powers, have advanced. -Einstein
I'm actually not arguing any of that, I'm genuinely curious about the answer to the following question:
Should people be forced into parenthood against their consent?
There is no "It depends" with this sort of question - either you feel it is morally wrong to force people into parenthood against their wishes or you feel it is morally right to force people into parenthood against their wishes
Choosing the answer of "it depends on who the person is" implies an internally inconsistent set of morals and a high degree of either hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance.
Current society "norms" have a implied contract that if you have sex, if by consequence of that act a child is born, you can be forced into supporting a child against your wishes (consent for sex is not required for this to be true). Whether than involves the act of being born, or parenting after the child is born, is not currently well defined, but at least the support part, there is no "it depends"...
Of course if the child is not born, there is no support requirement. The choice of birth is some combination of nature and the decisions of the mother. Generally, the sperm donor with an implied contract (and sometimes even with a specific performance contract) does not have an expost facto way to change anything (as is the case with most contracts). FWIW, there are several high profile cases moving through the courts about disposition of frozen embryos which would technically be post-sperm-donation forcing the creation of a child, but to my knowledge, none involve "support" or "parenting", merely potential birth of an offspring.
Maybe no child was intended with a sexual act, but if someone gets drunk and maims another person, that someone probably didn't intended that outcome either, so that appears to be somewhat consistent legally speaking, no?
Now there have been many cases of *fraud* and *deceit* where someone who was forced to support a child that they weren't actually responsible for. Generally that has been "justified" by the fact in that the person did not object soon enough. Although probably unfair, there was a window of time given for objection (statutorily 1 year in most jurisdictions), so probably still somewhat consistent with most "moral" systems.
The strange thing is that under my understanding, with current law, since the "fetus" has no owner, and it is not a person or corporation, it has no independent rights under our system of laws. IF a fetus did have an owner, say the mother and the father, then an individual owner would not be able to arbitrarily terminate the life of the fetus if there existed some shared interest in that property. In this way a human "fetus" actually has fewer rights than an "fetus" of an animal that is owned by two humans or a corporation under our system of laws.
Say you take a drink and get in a car buzzed and maimed a homeless person. A jury finds you responsible and basically have to support this person for the rest of your life (through monthly payments, you don't have to actually do anything).
You might argue that it would be better for you to have the state take care of that person, or maybe you should be allowed to have that person killed (because nobody wanted them anyhow) so you don't have to support this person because you didn't want to support this person and you didn't intent to maime them when you got drunk so it was completely unintentional (although maybe reckless).
Society has basically has said tough luck to that, you need to pay (although probably not all the support, but enough so it's noticeable to you). It is a choice, though, you could imagine a different society that socialized this support to a higher degree (or even totally absorb the cost), or decided it was okay to simply terminate this life (because nobody cared). I'm sure people can make arguments for each type of society. It's simply our collective choice.
If you follow your logic, you can justify cannibalism. Not that I'm saying you support cannibalism, just your line of logic: it is "okay" to kill animals and eat meat and humans are simply animals and the justification you appear to give is if it isn't gonna be cared for properly why not (nothing about "age", "right to self determination", etc)...
Just pointing out that everyone has their moral line in the sand. We have Fruitarianism, and we have people that are cannibals, and some might argue if you kill something that *could* be food, it would be a sin to waste it, others could care less about waste and others might argue it is sacrilege to violate a dead body.
Most people are in between when it comes to beliefs and of course many feel that others that don't believe as they are stupid (or brainwashed). That is the first step to dehumanizing them. Be careful how many steps you to take when dehumanizing people. Generally that path ends more like animal-kingdom than civilized society....
T-Mobile asks the FCC to re-examine the proposal because it "will be challenging for Administrators, the Commission, and licensees to manage". In other words, hey guys, do you realize how much fucking work this is going to be for you? Are you sure you don't want to see it our way?
The argument that it will be challenging to manage probably tickles a bureaucrats toes: huge head-count, complicated reporting structure, impossible to audit for efficiency... That is the kind of mission that calls for truckloads of mid-level managers (A-4,B-5,C-3) which means there are empires to build...
A long time ago, my sister worked for the BLM. She had horror stories on how mining leases are handled by the federal government. They hired so many people at the BLM to oversee the leases that many employees were so bored at times that they would literally fight to do work when it came in the door. Processes were deliberately non-automated and nobody was allowed to work on anything that wasn't specifically listed in their job function. Basically all this 110 person division she worked in was accepting and depositing royalty checks from mining companies for only one region of the country. Nobody ever actually audited any of the mining leases unless someone complained. My sister got her CPA and of course she wasn't allowed to work on audits (because it wasn't listed in the job function she was hired into and they already hired too many auditors, many of whom didn't even have business or accounting degrees so they couldn't be promoted, only "step-ed" up). Nobody knew anything about what was going on about any mining leases, let alone any auditing techiques.
I'm thinking the FCC managing spectrum leases would be similar level of "quality service".
FWIW, my sister quit after about a year because she couldn't stand the boredom anymore (the supervisors even deleted solitaire from their windows computers installs because some GSA auditor complained that it "looked bad to the director to see them playing solitaire when he dropped in for visit") and she took a significant PAY CUT to work for a CPA firm which tells you how much they were overpaying people...
The schools didn't get that much more expensive to run either. Nor did the salaries go up all that much (the admin staff always made a tidy sum).
FWIW, The staff required to run the University is generally unrelated to the amount of staff that gets hired by the university. Not only do they make a tidy sum, but their ranks swell to consume all budget surpluses, but never seem to shrink at other times. It's a classic government bureaucracy...
Slashdot Mirror
Enron
Looks like it's still worth something
As the article notes, it will cost more in brokerage fees to issue the shares than the trading value of the shares on the pink sheets.
Hell, my dad still holds** Enron shares in a brokerage account and even the *trading* fees are larger than the trading value of the stock (if he were to actually able sell the shares, his net would be negative).
**Fortunately, an IRS rule change about 10 years ago generously allows you to write off the loss w/o having to actually sell the shares in the case of illiquid stock losses that trade on the pink sheets. Of course if the stock is ever worth anything in the future, and you sell them, you have to use a zero basis, not your purchase basis in determining the gain.
Anybody remember when the UK government refused to acknowledge a known terrorist; Nelson Mandela? Then there's that terrorist every American admires: George Washington. If you think wrong choices must be punished by the mob, fine but don't choose the SJW complaint of the day.
The winners (re)write the history books, right?
In Canada, what percentage of our members of parliament will we kick out before we realize that we had a system were a high percentage of seemingly normal men, when put in a position of power, behaved deplorably?
I dunno, but they elected Rob Ford in Toronto, right?
I have the affliction where I can't remember people's names. I forget what it is called...
I think the word you are looking for is Dysnomia (aka Anomic Aphasia)...
Often people afflicted with this type of cognitive deficit often use circumlocutory phrases in an attempt to hide it (e.g., rather than addressing someone's name, they often use phrases like "I met you/him/her at that party last week...") or they make up nicknames for people based on other things they remember about them (e.g., "Mr. Java Expert", kind of a circumlocutation in itself)...
Dysnomia often isn't limited to remembering people's names, but also certain words (say, like Dysnomia). Similar circumlocutory strategies are often deployed to avoid getting communication trapped by the deficit (e.g., "I have the affliction where I can't remember people's names").
Although modern medicine doesn't know for sure, if your Dysnomia isn't likely genetic (e.g., you have had it as long as you can remember), it may, unfortunately, actually be a sign of a real problem (e.g., other aphasias), not something that is transient...
I'm not sure I buy the security angle though. Phones are likely fast enough to encrypt conversations end to end real time, but maybe our government doesn't want to implement that :)
As illustrated by the latest Strava revelation, sideband/meta-data information is quite useful and end-to-end encryption often doesn't protect against leaking this information. Things like Tor reduce the leakage of this type of sideband, but as we also know, actual implementations like Tor cannot be perfect (nor the users that use the technology).
I don't see what a content provider restricting access to their own content has to do with Net Neutrality.
I host a website. If I don't want you to access content on it, too bad. If I only let you access content on it using Internet Explorer 6, too bad.
Actually, this is kind of like back in the old days when the Bell company didn't let you use non-Bell company telephones to receive/make telephone calls on their network (well, technically a company could by a really expensive license to make equipment to attach to the phone network, but it was so expensive a license it killed the secondary market for telphones).
Basically the telephone was the equipment you used to access the telephone network and encode/render the audio. Similarly your browsing equipment is sort of the same thing for the internet. I think we broke up the Bell company back in 1982 because of monopolistic behavior like attempting to restrict the equipment used on the endpoint by using monopoly powers...
It may not have to do with Net Neutrality, but it is potentially anti-trust behavior...
It's Nvidia and ATI's shortsightedness that we are in the situation we are in.
They should have ramped up production to address demand 8 months ago.
Unfortunately, they can't. TSMC has given each company a wafer allocation (silicon fabs take years to build and wafers are allocated years in advance). Also, TSMC has bigger companies to feed...
* Apple SoCs for iPhones (100millon chips or so)
* Bitmain the leading ASIC for Bitcoin mining (buying about 20,000 wafers/month)
Basically, there's no "extra" fab capacity to be had to ramp up production...
Nvidia should put buzz words like "blockchain" and "crypto" in the name/descriptions of a line of video cards they're producing with a high margin and let nature take its course.
Nvidia and AMD have already released "Mining" SKUs which have been picked up by vendors like ASUS...
https://www.asus.com/Graphics-...
Despite these announcements, there is no availability of these SKUs either... Can't sell what you don't have...
Except that many miners overclock the crap out of the cards meaning the voltage is generally high for extended periods of operational time (even if at a reasonably stable in temperature). This causes the silicon to age and parametrically get worse (e.g. not as overclockable) and may lead to premature transistor failure. This is due to effects like metal migration, hot-carrier injection increasing gate turn on thresholds, charge-traps/dielectric breakdown, etc...
Historically. temperature instability caused problems with the package solder balls in older solder alloys (e.g., xbox red-ring-of-death). Those old solder compounds aren't used anymore and temperature instability isn't as big a problem as it used to be, although it certainly can be a factor with fast thermocycling...
Considering behavior, very few governments clearly hold regard for human life.
That has little bearing on the rights to volunteer for experimental treatments. Unfortunately, it is of significant likelihood that participation in such treatment are not really what you might call a volunteer (e.g., if risky experimental treatments are being offered mainly to uninformed/desperate patients, it might signal that many aren't really volunteers, but are merely being tricked).
In many places you can volunteer for experimental treatments. For example, in the USA this is done under a program called expanded access (aka compassionate use) exemption... However, it is important to note that this doesn't apply to experimental treatments which are NOT currently approved for trials, it only allows access to treatment that is available in an approved trial to patients that are not part of the trial (e.g., because the patient doesn't meet study parameters, or the study is full)... At least in this case there is an active controlled study going on that could give such a patient some indications if things could be going south before things get totally out of hand...
I suspect that people are unaware of the current (documented) level of experimentation. To do a study of a rare genetic condition they found a person with the blood disorder, extracted their skin cells and used cloning techniques to develop embryos with the same genetic makeup and then proceeded to edit the gene using the CRISPR-Cas9 technique. In 8/20 embryos, they were able to make a correct edit and even then, the resulting embryo was a mosaic (some cell-lines corrected, some original generating some potential immunological problems) which even if was able to correct the disorder in the specific individual, would still likely allow the disorder to be passed to offspring.
The whole issue of volunteering for this is fraught with ethical issues (do parents technically "own" the right to make the choice for embryo, as the embryo isn't alive enough to do any volunteering)
With current experiments, the cloned embryos were not kept after 14 days. In the future, to make the changes lasting and w/o mosaic-ism, the modification would need to be done on the egg/sperm cells which has other ethical decisions (what to do with the uncorrected embryos, not too different than doing sex-selection on multiple embryos)
Sure, tell yourself that when everybody without Han ancestry drops dead
I'm sure they'll "passover" the people with Mongol and Manchu ancestry too which should spare quite a few non-chinese given the altan urag...
OTOH, it probably wouldn't hurt to mark the doorposts of your house with the blood of a slaughtered spring lamb to cover your bases...
Oh man, were you on hwy 101? There are unbelievably beautiful vistas throughout the Central Coast region.
If you ever have to make that trip, I highly recommend taking Amtrak's Coast Starlight train. It goes right along the coast and you can put your legs up and use the wi-fi and there's a dining car. It's terrific. If you do that, let me know and I'll meet you at one of the stops and buy you lunch. You can get on and off on a single ticket.
AFAIK, they only run one Coast Starlight train per day and they don't stop at any stop long enough for "lunch". Also, technically it isn't hop-on-hop-off, you'll need a reservation for each "leg" of your trip if you want to get off at a stop for 24 (or 48, or 72) hours, it probably isn't too hard to do that during non-peak times, but that's yet another complication...
The Mission is a district in San Francisco, somewhat akin to the way New York City is broken up into boroughs like the Bronxand Manhattan. From what I've gathered (having never visited the Bay Area), the Mission is well-known for its art scene, LGBTQ community, and food, though hopefully a local can chime in with better information.
SF is small compared to NYC.
The Mission is a neighborhood not similar to a borough... If you had to draw an analogy, in SF they have districts (which elect their own supervisors). For example, SF supervisor District 9 encompasses the "Mission" and "Bernal Heights" neighborhoods. A Borough in NYC like Brooklyn would have many neighborhoods (e.g., Bedford-Stuyvesant, Sunset park, Flatbush, etc)...
The Mission is unfortunately also known as one of the places where Tech buses (Google, Apple, etc) go and are attacked by local protesters...
But there are good restaurants and other things to do there (attracting the people who use aforementioned Tech buses and drive up local rents and thus generating local strife)...
much of SF believes the rest of the world revolves around their epicenter.
NYC has the same attitude, except maybe 10X more extreme. But at least for NYC it is somewhat justifiable.
The problem with SF's Tenderloin is that it is named after NY's Tenderloin. Both are historically red light districts. Although SF's Tenderloin is becoming more gentrified over the last 30 years that it will probably need to be renamed.
FWIW, there was a proposal (by PETA) a few years ago to rename it the Tempeh district...
Although having walked through there just last month, I'd say it has quite a ways to go before I would call it "gentrified"...
Just signed 702 Bill to authorize foreign intelligence collection," Trump tweeted. "This is NOT the same FISA law that was so wrongly abused during the election.
Are people really dumb enough to believe this? It’s just as bad as it ever was and still allows warrantless surveillance with pretty much non-existent oversight.
Of course it isn't the same. It may be not quite as bad, though according to this summary... But if you are against warrant-less intelligence collection in general, well, it's nothing new in that area, so from that point of view, it is basically the same.
The car sized 900kg Curiosity rovers used a Plutonium RTG as it's main power source.
Although the smaller 180kg Spirit and Opportunity rovers used solar panels for main power, the panels could only supply a peak of 140watts for about 4 hours per sol (martian day) when there wasn't a dust storm.
What is apparently not as well known is that even Spirit and Opportunity still used RHU (Radioisotope Heating Units) to keep warm at night to augment their batteries (as nearly all deep space missions have done).
Einstein was famous because he was good at PR. He wasn't the most capable Physicist, but he was good at discovering things to work on that would get him attention.
Now for what he is famous for, it's clearly relativity. The ideas behind special relativity were not new when Einstein proposed his views (Lorentz and Poincare were arguably first), but Einstein was probably the first to completely embrace relativity and the invariance principals.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to do relativity justice w/o appreciation of exactly what energy and momentum are and the insight that radiation can possess inertia. Of course you can short cut this all into the final insight that E=mc^2, but I'm not sure that is much better than teaching history by memorizing dates and reduces this from a scientific explanation to simply a historical explanation (basically Einstein is famous, like Michael Jordan is famous, but he's a famous scientist).
General relativity is even more complex. The beauty behind the discovery of general relativity is that the math actually works out (which is no mean feat). One can always propose an elegant theory, but if it turns out to be inconsistent with the math, it is just an idea, not a theory. Hilbert and Einstein both worked furiously to work out the math ahead of the other, but it is generally acknowledged that the earlier works of Einstein were likely the insights that motivated the solutions discovered by both men.
Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized. It is an irony of fate that I should have been showered with so much uncalled for and unmerited admiration and esteem. Perhaps this adulation springs from the unfulfilled wish of the multitude to comprehend the few ideas which I, with my weak powers, have advanced. -Einstein
I'm actually not arguing any of that, I'm genuinely curious about the answer to the following question:
Should people be forced into parenthood against their consent?
There is no "It depends" with this sort of question - either you feel it is morally wrong to force people into parenthood against their wishes or you feel it is morally right to force people into parenthood against their wishes
Choosing the answer of "it depends on who the person is" implies an internally inconsistent set of morals and a high degree of either hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance.
Current society "norms" have a implied contract that if you have sex, if by consequence of that act a child is born, you can be forced into supporting a child against your wishes (consent for sex is not required for this to be true). Whether than involves the act of being born, or parenting after the child is born, is not currently well defined, but at least the support part, there is no "it depends"...
Of course if the child is not born, there is no support requirement. The choice of birth is some combination of nature and the decisions of the mother. Generally, the sperm donor with an implied contract (and sometimes even with a specific performance contract) does not have an expost facto way to change anything (as is the case with most contracts). FWIW, there are several high profile cases moving through the courts about disposition of frozen embryos which would technically be post-sperm-donation forcing the creation of a child, but to my knowledge, none involve "support" or "parenting", merely potential birth of an offspring.
Maybe no child was intended with a sexual act, but if someone gets drunk and maims another person, that someone probably didn't intended that outcome either, so that appears to be somewhat consistent legally speaking, no?
Now there have been many cases of *fraud* and *deceit* where someone who was forced to support a child that they weren't actually responsible for. Generally that has been "justified" by the fact in that the person did not object soon enough. Although probably unfair, there was a window of time given for objection (statutorily 1 year in most jurisdictions), so probably still somewhat consistent with most "moral" systems.
The strange thing is that under my understanding, with current law, since the "fetus" has no owner, and it is not a person or corporation, it has no independent rights under our system of laws. IF a fetus did have an owner, say the mother and the father, then an individual owner would not be able to arbitrarily terminate the life of the fetus if there existed some shared interest in that property. In this way a human "fetus" actually has fewer rights than an "fetus" of an animal that is owned by two humans or a corporation under our system of laws.
Say you take a drink and get in a car buzzed and maimed a homeless person. A jury finds you responsible and basically have to support this person for the rest of your life (through monthly payments, you don't have to actually do anything).
You might argue that it would be better for you to have the state take care of that person, or maybe you should be allowed to have that person killed (because nobody wanted them anyhow) so you don't have to support this person because you didn't want to support this person and you didn't intent to maime them when you got drunk so it was completely unintentional (although maybe reckless).
Society has basically has said tough luck to that, you need to pay (although probably not all the support, but enough so it's noticeable to you). It is a choice, though, you could imagine a different society that socialized this support to a higher degree (or even totally absorb the cost), or decided it was okay to simply terminate this life (because nobody cared). I'm sure people can make arguments for each type of society. It's simply our collective choice.
If you follow your logic, you can justify cannibalism. Not that I'm saying you support cannibalism, just your line of logic: it is "okay" to kill animals and eat meat and humans are simply animals and the justification you appear to give is if it isn't gonna be cared for properly why not (nothing about "age", "right to self determination", etc)...
Just pointing out that everyone has their moral line in the sand. We have Fruitarianism, and we have people that are cannibals, and some might argue if you kill something that *could* be food, it would be a sin to waste it, others could care less about waste and others might argue it is sacrilege to violate a dead body.
Most people are in between when it comes to beliefs and of course many feel that others that don't believe as they are stupid (or brainwashed). That is the first step to dehumanizing them. Be careful how many steps you to take when dehumanizing people. Generally that path ends more like animal-kingdom than civilized society....
... I'm not sure if traffic will improve or get worse though.
There is some indication that even a small number of self-driving cars might improve traffic a bunch...
(including end of 2019)
I think they overestimate their chances!
Don't underestimate Detroit's ability to produce a car without a steering wheel, they've done it before...
T-Mobile asks the FCC to re-examine the proposal because it "will be challenging for Administrators, the Commission, and licensees to manage". In other words, hey guys, do you realize how much fucking work this is going to be for you? Are you sure you don't want to see it our way?
The argument that it will be challenging to manage probably tickles a bureaucrats toes: huge head-count, complicated reporting structure, impossible to audit for efficiency... That is the kind of mission that calls for truckloads of mid-level managers (A-4,B-5,C-3) which means there are empires to build...
A long time ago, my sister worked for the BLM. She had horror stories on how mining leases are handled by the federal government. They hired so many people at the BLM to oversee the leases that many employees were so bored at times that they would literally fight to do work when it came in the door. Processes were deliberately non-automated and nobody was allowed to work on anything that wasn't specifically listed in their job function. Basically all this 110 person division she worked in was accepting and depositing royalty checks from mining companies for only one region of the country. Nobody ever actually audited any of the mining leases unless someone complained. My sister got her CPA and of course she wasn't allowed to work on audits (because it wasn't listed in the job function she was hired into and they already hired too many auditors, many of whom didn't even have business or accounting degrees so they couldn't be promoted, only "step-ed" up). Nobody knew anything about what was going on about any mining leases, let alone any auditing techiques.
I'm thinking the FCC managing spectrum leases would be similar level of "quality service".
FWIW, my sister quit after about a year because she couldn't stand the boredom anymore (the supervisors even deleted solitaire from their windows computers installs because some GSA auditor complained that it "looked bad to the director to see them playing solitaire when he dropped in for visit") and she took a significant PAY CUT to work for a CPA firm which tells you how much they were overpaying people...
The schools didn't get that much more expensive to run either. Nor did the salaries go up all that much (the admin staff always made a tidy sum).
FWIW, The staff required to run the University is generally unrelated to the amount of staff that gets hired by the university. Not only do they make a tidy sum, but their ranks swell to consume all budget surpluses, but never seem to shrink at other times. It's a classic government bureaucracy...
E-Coin will take over.
Which means the dark army wins... You think these are related? ;^)