>The US won't be subject to this sort of lobbyist >terrorism, as the Supreme Court would eventually >strike this sort of thing down as taxation >without representation.
ROFL! You don't actually believe that, do you?
The government ends up with 47% of what you
earn -- subtract the amount that comes out of
your paycheck and think about where the rest of
that money comes from.
>...the real war to undermine the constitution >will take place over this taxation issue. Once >they've curcumvented that part of the >constitution, the damage to the dynamic on >capitol hill will be the foothold they need to >bring about whatever changes they desire.
The *sole purpose* of taxation is to allow the politically-connected to bribe their friends (more handouts, lower taxes) and punish their enemies (higher taxes, inconvenient audits).
This kind of thing will go away when we start respecting the ninth and tenth amendments again.
Until then, exercise your first and second amendment rights and teach your children to do
the same.
jafager
German *citizens* retained the right to bear arms. Of course, Hitler promptly declared that Jews and other undesirables were not German citizens. Oops...
Most of the conflicts that one would envision between US citizens and the government do not involve tanks, air strikes, and heavy mounted machine guns. The arms and armor used would be fairly close to what the dedicated armchair warrior could obtain legally.
However, the opposing force would probably be small, highly trained teams of commando types. These people are generally all-around bad motherfsckers who are stronger than you, faster than you, work better as a team, and have a full range of recon and intelligence assets to back them up.
Until the bulk of the American citizenry are ready to pick up guns and stand behind you, armed conflict with the government is a purely symbolic gesture.
Here in America, you don't the name pronounce Linus like "Lynn-us," you pronounce it like "Line-us." For God's sakes, man, didn't you ever watch Peanuts as a kid?
Especially the movie where they went on a rafting trip. Scared the crap out of me, and I'm still not sure why (g). Caught a few minutes of the half-hour show, Linus on Omaha Beach recounting the story of the D-Day invasion. Good stuff, esp. by today's standards. But I digress...
I remember the Great Linux Pronunciation War. IIRC, the two sides agreed to disagree, as it were. Then the media picked up on it, and suddenly "lynn-ucks" was the correct pronunciation as defined by the WSJ, et al. I think it was the luck of the draw that the first thing they heard was the soft "i" version.
Personally, I think the hard "i" is more masculine/forceful, as in:
"I just killed a man with a two-handed Lie-knucks." "Hear that roar? That's the sound of a 400-horsepower, 5.0-liter Lie-knucks." "The front and rear of this main battle tank are protected by 120mm Lie-knucks plating."
Whereas the soft "i" is weaker, more feminine:
"Pardon miss, your Lynn-ucks is showing." "Do these Lynn-ucks go with my red leather pumps?" "I would have played tennis, but I was waiting for my Lynn-ucks to dry."
Having said that, I feel the choice is obvious (g).
Second, a link can be very damaging to a server. I used to run a small ftp server which I used to let my friends get sounds and files from my University-networked machine.
They have this wonderful new invention. It has a funny name, so try not to laugh. It's called "authentication".
You set up an anonymous FTP server and got rolled for your goodies. Why do you find that surprising?
Finally, there's a real important point here - this is UNIVERSAL's content. If they don't want anyone linking to it, then no one should. Intellectual Property, people - if you want their product/service, do it their way or not at all.
I don't understand how Universal's IP rights are violated. They put those materials on the Web for public consumption, and the public is consuming them. If you want to funnel people through your advertising blitz, there are a wide variety of technical solutions to do just that.
Supermarkets are carefully designed to put you face-to-face with hundreds of expensive luxury items (junk food, etc.) while collecting your necessities (milk, bread, etc.). If I give people a map that routes them around the junk food displays and sends them right to the staples, am I infringing on their right to influence how people walk around their store?
Universal is just being lazy. They're losing hits because someone is doing a better job of indexing their content than they are.
Neither is it harmless if handled without care. The point is that it is far less harmless and far more efficient than the alternatives.
It has the potential to be less harmful and more efficient than fossil fuels. It also has the potential to be much, much more harmful and much, much less efficient, if handled without the proper care. Call it paranoia if you like, but I just can't summon sufficient faith to make me comfortable with the idea of putting a private company (not that the government is necessarily any better {g}) in charge of something as potentially deadly as a nuclear reactor.
My point is that Nuclear Power, while not the perfect solution, is better than the alternatives (unless you get lots of eating money from people by running around shouting that it's unsafe).
No, I get my money in the traditional American fashion: by playing gofer to a greedy, soulless mega-conglomerate. But hey, I'm not bitter or anything...{g}
If I have anything approaching a hidden agenda, it is to keep people from thinking that fission power is where we want to be tomorrow. That's the kind of thinking that will keep us out of superior technologies (hot and cold fusion, the Patterson power cell, etc.) for another fifty years.
Modern US plants can tolerate a large jet crashing into them. If a terrorist can produce and launch a device big enough to rupture a nuclear plant, they won't be that stupid. They will hit the White House, Congress, a large bridge, or the SuperBowl stadium instead. (they lose destructive effect if the hit an unpopulated power plant)
As a general rule, Mother Nature and acts of God don't seek out and exploit weaknesses. They use a large amount of force spread evenly (or randomly) across a large area. Deliberate attacks would concentrate a small amount of force in a small (and carefully selected) area. Maybe it can't be done, but I've never seen the facts to prove it.
He is right. Coal plants kill many people. You have coal miners dying of black lung and mine collapses, coal handlers dying in coal dust explosions and fires, and the general population dying of lung cancer caused by the particles and radioactivity. Yep. Coal plants, by sheer volume of crap spewed out, give off more radioactive waste than nuclear plants do.
Ever read about the effects of uranium mining and processing? Granted, there are fewer uranium mines than coal mines, but they can be just as hazardous to the local populace (perhaps more so).
I'll take a few pounds of high-level waste in a pond or cave over thousands of tons of low-level waste (coal smoke) spewed into the air.
I'm not saying that fossil fuels are necessarily a Good Thing (tm) -- I will dispute the idea that nuclear power is some kind of harmless, magical energy source that will solve all the world's energy problems. I'm banking on cold fusion for that (g).
I recognize that there is no weapons-grade material in a conventional nuclear power facility (I'm not sure how the MOX plan works, but I doubt they'll be shipping anything weapons-grade long distances). There are large quantities of radioactive isotopes. The release of those materials over a wide area (see Chernobyl) would be a massive ecological and humanitarian disaster (see Chernobyl). Perhaps modern reactor design takes threats of war and of terrorism into account, but I haven't seen any mention of those preventive measures in any literature I've run across. If anyone can provide citations, I would be highly grateful.
Through the history of nuclear power, there have been accidents but they have not even approached the loss of human life and resources caused by _traditional_ power plants during that time. A coal furnace is far more dangerous than a modern nuclear reactor.
I would also be very interested in seeing facts to back this up. Keep in mind that fossil fuel power has been around for much longer than nuclear power, that it is used on a wider scale, and that there is no hard data available on the long-term consequences of nuclear waste storage/disposal, because no one has figured out what to do with it yet. You can't keep piling it in the duck pond in front of the reactor complex forever -- ask the Russians about that.
First, it should be observed that there have not been any problems with the nuclear industry in the US despite well over 50 years of nuclear power generation. Yes, Three Mile Island had a partial meltdown, but the total radiation exposure for the residents of the surrounding area as a result of the meltdown was far less than the total radiation exposure of the residents of Colorado during the same period of time.
"We haven't had any problems. Okay, we did have one problem, but it wasn't serious. Okay, it was serious, but it could have been worse. Hey, anything's better than Chernobyl, right?" WTF kind of statement is this?
I've studied this issue up and down, and the only reasonable conclusion is that with proper safeguards, nuclear power is completely harmless and totally efficient. Note that I said proper safeguard. The Chernobyl disaster is an example of not using proper safeguards. In the US, not only do plants have safeguards in place, but due to the irrational fears encouraged by the anti-nuclear activists, the NRC has actually put in place measures that are overly tight.
This is extremely laughable. "Totally efficient"? Fissile materials are extremely expensive to mine, process, and ship. Factor in the cost of waste shipment, storage, and security (for which no viable long-term plan has been devised), the eventual decommission of one or more reactors (for which no cost estimate has been agreed upon), and the cost of complying with the NRC's draconian safety and security standards, and your "totally efficient" process becomes hard pressed even to pay for itself.
"Completely harmless"?! How can you make an assertion like this? Nuclear power plants are run by corporations. As history has shown time and time again, corporations are entirely self-serving and committed only to a) the bottom line, and b) the health, wealth, and reputation of their top executives. These are the people you want in charge of some of the deadliest materials and processes known to man? All the accounts of the TMI meltdown that I've seen paint a very negative picture of the people running that plant. True to form, they were terrified of being forced to go public with the fact that there was a problem, so they put it off and put it off in the hope that everything would come up daisies.
Even if you assume that the company running the plant is on the level, the employees aren't slacking off, and the NRC's safety measures are sufficient to handle any unforeseen events, a nuclear plant is still an extremely tempting target for terrorists and enemy bombers or missiles. Why should Iraq or North Korea or communist China build nuclear warheads when the same effect can be achieved by dropping a few tons of conventional explosives on a nice inviting reactor dome?
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations, you have just reconstructed the argument behind re-legalizing concealed carry.
"An honest society has 270 million policemen. A dishonest society cannot ever have enough."
jafager
>The US won't be subject to this sort of lobbyist >terrorism, as the Supreme Court would eventually >strike this sort of thing down as taxation >without representation. ROFL! You don't actually believe that, do you? The government ends up with 47% of what you earn -- subtract the amount that comes out of your paycheck and think about where the rest of that money comes from. >...the real war to undermine the constitution >will take place over this taxation issue. Once >they've curcumvented that part of the >constitution, the damage to the dynamic on >capitol hill will be the foothold they need to >bring about whatever changes they desire. The *sole purpose* of taxation is to allow the politically-connected to bribe their friends (more handouts, lower taxes) and punish their enemies (higher taxes, inconvenient audits). This kind of thing will go away when we start respecting the ninth and tenth amendments again. Until then, exercise your first and second amendment rights and teach your children to do the same. jafager
German *citizens* retained the right to bear arms. Of course, Hitler promptly declared that Jews and other undesirables were not German citizens. Oops...
Most of the conflicts that one would envision between US citizens and the government do not involve tanks, air strikes, and heavy mounted machine guns. The arms and armor used would be fairly close to what the dedicated armchair warrior could obtain legally.
However, the opposing force would probably be small, highly trained teams of commando types. These people are generally all-around bad motherfsckers who are stronger than you, faster than you, work better as a team, and have a full range of recon and intelligence assets to back them up.
Until the bulk of the American citizenry are ready to pick up guns and stand behind you, armed conflict with the government is a purely symbolic gesture.
Especially the movie where they went on a rafting trip. Scared the crap out of me, and I'm still not sure why (g). Caught a few minutes of the half-hour show, Linus on Omaha Beach recounting the story of the D-Day invasion. Good stuff, esp. by today's standards. But I digress...
I remember the Great Linux Pronunciation War. IIRC, the two sides agreed to disagree, as it were. Then the media picked up on it, and suddenly "lynn-ucks" was the correct pronunciation as defined by the WSJ, et al. I think it was the luck of the draw that the first thing they heard was the soft "i" version.
Personally, I think the hard "i" is more masculine/forceful, as in:
"I just killed a man with a two-handed Lie-knucks."
"Hear that roar? That's the sound of a 400-horsepower, 5.0-liter Lie-knucks."
"The front and rear of this main battle tank are protected by 120mm Lie-knucks plating."
Whereas the soft "i" is weaker, more feminine:
"Pardon miss, your Lynn-ucks is showing."
"Do these Lynn-ucks go with my red leather pumps?"
"I would have played tennis, but I was waiting for my Lynn-ucks to dry."
Having said that, I feel the choice is obvious (g).
jafager
They have this wonderful new invention. It has a funny name, so try not to laugh. It's called "authentication".
You set up an anonymous FTP server and got rolled for your goodies. Why do you find that surprising?
Finally, there's a real important point here - this is UNIVERSAL's content. If they don't want anyone linking to it, then no one should. Intellectual Property, people - if you want their product/service, do it their way or not at all.
I don't understand how Universal's IP rights are violated. They put those materials on the Web for public consumption, and the public is consuming them. If you want to funnel people through your advertising blitz, there are a wide variety of technical solutions to do just that.
Supermarkets are carefully designed to put you face-to-face with hundreds of expensive luxury items (junk food, etc.) while collecting your necessities (milk, bread, etc.). If I give people a map that routes them around the junk food displays and sends them right to the staples, am I infringing on their right to influence how people walk around their store?
Universal is just being lazy. They're losing hits because someone is doing a better job of indexing their content than they are.
"I think there is a demand for maybe five computers, world-wide."
"640k is enough for anybody."
I'm glad you're enjoying the twentieth century, Bruce. Too bad it's almost over.
It has the potential to be less harmful and more efficient than fossil fuels. It also has the potential to be much, much more harmful and much, much less efficient, if handled without the proper care. Call it paranoia if you like, but I just can't summon sufficient faith to make me comfortable with the idea of putting a private company (not that the government is necessarily any better {g}) in charge of something as potentially deadly as a nuclear reactor.
My point is that Nuclear Power, while not the perfect solution, is better than the alternatives (unless you get lots of eating money from people by running around shouting that it's unsafe).
No, I get my money in the traditional American fashion: by playing gofer to a greedy, soulless mega-conglomerate. But hey, I'm not bitter or anything...{g}
If I have anything approaching a hidden agenda, it is to keep people from thinking that fission power is where we want to be tomorrow. That's the kind of thinking that will keep us out of superior technologies (hot and cold fusion, the Patterson power cell, etc.) for another fifty years.
As a general rule, Mother Nature and acts of God don't seek out and exploit weaknesses. They use a large amount of force spread evenly (or randomly) across a large area. Deliberate attacks would concentrate a small amount of force in a small (and carefully selected) area. Maybe it can't be done, but I've never seen the facts to prove it.
He is right. Coal plants kill many people. You have coal miners dying of black lung and mine collapses, coal handlers dying in coal dust explosions and fires, and the general population dying of lung cancer caused by the particles and radioactivity. Yep. Coal plants, by sheer volume of crap spewed out, give off more radioactive waste than nuclear plants do.
Ever read about the effects of uranium mining and processing? Granted, there are fewer uranium mines than coal mines, but they can be just as hazardous to the local populace (perhaps more so).
I'll take a few pounds of high-level waste in a pond or cave over thousands of tons of low-level waste (coal smoke) spewed into the air.
I'm not saying that fossil fuels are necessarily a Good Thing (tm) -- I will dispute the idea that nuclear power is some kind of harmless, magical energy source that will solve all the world's energy problems. I'm banking on cold fusion for that (g).
Through the history of nuclear power, there have been accidents but they have not even approached the loss of human life and resources caused by _traditional_ power plants during that time. A coal furnace is far more dangerous than a modern nuclear reactor.
I would also be very interested in seeing facts to back this up. Keep in mind that fossil fuel power has been around for much longer than nuclear power, that it is used on a wider scale, and that there is no hard data available on the long-term consequences of nuclear waste storage/disposal, because no one has figured out what to do with it yet. You can't keep piling it in the duck pond in front of the reactor complex forever -- ask the Russians about that.
"We haven't had any problems. Okay, we did have one problem, but it wasn't serious. Okay, it was serious, but it could have been worse. Hey, anything's better than Chernobyl, right?" WTF kind of statement is this?
I've studied this issue up and down, and the only reasonable conclusion is that with proper safeguards, nuclear power is completely harmless and totally efficient. Note that I said proper safeguard. The Chernobyl disaster is an example of not using proper safeguards. In the US, not only do plants have safeguards in place, but due to the irrational fears encouraged by the anti-nuclear activists, the NRC has actually put in place measures that are overly tight.
This is extremely laughable. "Totally efficient"? Fissile materials are extremely expensive to mine, process, and ship. Factor in the cost of waste shipment, storage, and security (for which no viable long-term plan has been devised), the eventual decommission of one or more reactors (for which no cost estimate has been agreed upon), and the cost of complying with the NRC's draconian safety and security standards, and your "totally efficient" process becomes hard pressed even to pay for itself.
"Completely harmless"?! How can you make an assertion like this? Nuclear power plants are run by corporations. As history has shown time and time again, corporations are entirely self-serving and committed only to a) the bottom line, and b) the health, wealth, and reputation of their top executives. These are the people you want in charge of some of the deadliest materials and processes known to man? All the accounts of the TMI meltdown that I've seen paint a very negative picture of the people running that plant. True to form, they were terrified of being forced to go public with the fact that there was a problem, so they put it off and put it off in the hope that everything would come up daisies.
Even if you assume that the company running the plant is on the level, the employees aren't slacking off, and the NRC's safety measures are sufficient to handle any unforeseen events, a nuclear plant is still an extremely tempting target for terrorists and enemy bombers or missiles. Why should Iraq or North Korea or communist China build nuclear warheads when the same effect can be achieved by dropping a few tons of conventional explosives on a nice inviting reactor dome?