And of course that would be a once-in-a-lifetime of the Solar System opportunity. Venus and Earth are in many ways twin planets. There is no other candidate in which you could build a self-sustaining biosphere powered by the Sun yet protected from it.
Insofar as the future survival of the human race depends upon space exploration, the most likely scenario will in artificial space-borne structures. It's hard to see the advantages of living down inside the gravity well of a planet like Mars given that the atmosphere is incapable of supporting terrestrial life, and even if transformed to have Earth-like pressure will be unprotected from solar and cosmic radiation that will in the course of time strip it away. Why not simply build large space structures?
I find the argument that we need a human expedition to Mars to secure the survival of our species to be weak. That justification is neither a necessary nor sufficient case for manned Mars exploration. We should go to Mars to satisfy our curiosity about the universe; to indulge the human urge to explore; and to understand our own planet better. But make no mistake: we have no backup planet, nothing we could terraform into anything remotely as congenial to our survival as this one is. We need to preserve the Earth to preserve our genetic and cultural heritage, and for the younger among us to continue enjoying our planet's uniquely congenial and satisfying biological wealth well into unprecedented old age.
Anyone who calls a Domain Name an "Internet Address" probably doesn't know very much about either...
Prepare to lose on this one.
Take "broadband"... What is the antonym of "broadband"?
Why "narrowband", of course! Except according to the (unfortunately false) doctrine that the meaning of a word belongs to the community that coins it, the antonym of "broadband" ought to be "baseband". The "base" in "baseband" refers to zero hertz; a band that includes 0 Hz is the baseband in any kind of signal encoding scheme.
In our alternate world ruled by engineers, "broadband" refers to a signal that does not have to include 0Hz, and which thus can be frequency multiplexed on media such as coaxial cable or fiber optics. This allows us to make use of that medium's full transmission capacity, which means we can serve more people with greater transmission bandwidth.
The simplicity and precision of this way of using language warms my engineer's heart. A layer 1 signalling scheme that can be frequency shifted for multiplexing is "broadband"; one that cannot is "baseband". If you want to tell me a service is "fast", give me a number and a unit so I know whether you're talking throughput or latency.
But you can't expect people trained in marketing (whom I have nothing against by the way) to use language with this kind of beautiful precision. Marketers deal in imprecision, and like it or not they have much, much more influence on the direction of language than we do.
As soon as marketers wrapped their brains around "broadband" implying higher throughput on a shared medium, the term was pretty much destined, not just to lose its virginal purity, but to become their property as language pimps.
DNS exists so ordinary people don't have to deal with actual Internet addresses. It makes Internet Protocol invisible to them, so as far as they're concerned the term "Internet Address" is up for grabs. I always assume when someone who is not a techie says "Internet Address" he's talking about a domain name or URL.
You're saying that gayness is a cultural construct. Good for you, because it is.
However that's not quite the same as saying it's something you can ignore, any more than race is something you can ignore just because it's a scientifically bankrupt notion. You can't escape being imprinted by your formative experiences.
I do think the gay thing may be different in a few decades; millennials have a much more fluid notion of sexual orientation.
Trump won't do anything for gays because he's politically incompetent.
The way you win the general election is you unite your party, win over the independents, and split the other guy's party. You know, what Hillary has been doing -- not because she's a genius, because that's what everybody but Trump understands that you have to do. Trump keeps playing to his base, alienating independents, and making it hard for others in his party to support him. And whenever any Republican needs to distance himself from something Trump has said, the fool jumps on Twitter and burns bridges.
And there's Trump's ground game. He doesn't have one. Clinton does, and it is formidable, well-funded, and expertly organized. She's been planning her GOTV (get out the vote) operation for eight years. Why? Because decades of experience shows these operations work.
However if he has no basis to charge her for trespass, that argument falls down. Also, if she is covering the events as a journalist, she is by not "part of the group". So his argument is this: her reporting favorably on the group made her "part of the group". That's an asinine argument.
You are pulling arguments out of your bottom sphincter here. The AG didn't drop the criminal trespass charges out of the goodness of his heart. For whatever reason he couldn't make the misdemeanor trespass charges stick.
As for the security people defending themselves -- it's not at all clear that's what they were doing. What the final edited footage shows is a gross over-reaction: setting dogs on unarmed protesters, after which they arm themselves with wooden pulled up from fencing. Of course the raw footage could well have been edited to produce that impression.
If she was just a reporter covering the facts, why was she on the property at all?
The video footage shows her asking the security personnel their side of the story, which they decline to offer. Still, it's impossible to do that from a hundred yards away, or to show the fact that the guy denying he was pepper spraying anyone was holding a can of the stuff.
IANAL, but I'll answer your questions to the best of my ability.
(1) Sure reporters can be charged with trespass -- when they actually commit trespass. Trespass is normally a tort and it is up to the land owner to pursue civil action; the AG has no standing in such cases. There is also criminal trespass, e.g., if you enter a property with the intent of committing certain crimes. It is a misdemeanor and the standards vary by jurisdiction; however it's pretty clear that the protesters' action did not meet the local standards for criminal trespass because the AG dropped those charges.
(2) To be a journalist you have to engage in journalism. It doesn't have to be good journalism, or even fair journalism. It has to be intended as gathering and reporting facts.
Why does that intent matter? Because intent is one of the key ingredients in establishing guilt for a crime. You can't accidentally murder someone, although you can be deliberately negligent for example. So let's imagine the protesters *did* riot. If you were along with the mob with the intent of being part of the mob, you share criminal responsibility for the riot. If you were along with the mob with the intent of documenting what the mob does, you only bear responsibility for your own actions (e.g. the trespass tort).
So the AG's argument amounts to this: the person in question was sympathetic to the protesters, therefore she was one of them.
Yeah, if I robbed a bank as part of a gang and told the police that I was only along for the ride as a journalist and should be immune from charges, I kinda expect they'd not let me go.
What if you were covering a protest as a journalist? As I mentioned elsewhere the AG has dropped trespassing charges against Goodman, so how he thinks he can make rioting charges stick is beyond me. Maybe he's hoping that the more sensational-sounding charge will result in reverse jury nullification.
Trespass is not equal to or tantamount to rioting, otherwise you wouldn't need two separate crimes.
In point of fact the AG dropped the trespass charge against Goodman. His argument for the riot charge is that she did not fairly (in his view) cover both sides and therefore was not engaged in journalism. You can judge for yourself by watching the video in question.
“She’s a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions,” said Erickson, adding that her coverage of the Sept. 3 protest did not mention that people trespassed during the incident or the alleged assaults on guards.
In other words, he doesn't believe this person covered the government's position fairly, and therefore doesn't deserve to be considered a journalist.
Projects like ISS aren't just one thing. You have many groups involved each with their agenda. One of those groups unquestionably is researchers. Would they rather have all the money spent on ISS go just to their research? Sure. But it's not going to happen. The PR value supports the research, just as it did with Apollo (but obviously on much, much smaller scale).
Likewise a lot of people would rather see the money that went into ISS go toward a Mars mission; but that would (at the time of ISS's planning) make hardly a dent in what would have been needed. ISS is a critical bridge to future manned exploration (if any) of the solar system. It's an achievable short-term program which maintains and advances practical hands-on experience with human spaceflight and space habitats.
This is how the real world works. You can't get everything you want, but you can get some of what you want by helping others get some of what they want.
Reasonable sample sizes depends on the nature of the study you are conducting. If you are looking for drug side effects, you want very large study sizes because very rare events can be show-stoppers for you. In most social science contexts, on the other hand, modest sample sizes are both more practical and desirable.
Smaller studies are not only more financially efficient, excessively large sample sizes can lead to results that are statistically significant but are not very practically interesting (i.e., you can disprove the null hypothesis at a p < 0.05 level but the magnitude of the effect you're looking at is so weak nobody should care about it).
So sample sizes in the 15-30 range are usually a pretty good choice for many social science purposes. If you design the study protocol correctly and choose the proper statistical tests you shouldn't get many spurious positive results from a modest sized sample. You will get many spurious negative results, but if the study is well-designed the effects you miss will be relatively weak. This is a reasonable tradeoff in a world with limited funding.
The bigger problem is getting a representative sample to test. You can't fix a skewed sampling methodology throwing even more oddball bodies into your study; in fact that makes problems worse. Better to conduct a modest sized study and then confirm it with a similarly sized study whose subjects are recruited in a different way.
Boredom is a great incentive for creativity. Social media is not exactly interesting, but it fills up your time in a way that you hardly notice it slipping through your fingers. You can easily spend all day checkout what people are saying about Trump, yet you figured out what you thought about him months ago.
Russians sometimes use methods that look crude to us because those methods are likely to work without costing fabulous amounts of money. It's Americans who set out to do overkill right from the drawing board.
As well we should. I mean, I do take solace that something like the GBR will probably form at some other place millions of years in the future, but that's not really a substitute for being able to see what they once were in my lifetime.
You can almost envy people like that. I had a friend in high school who believed all that kind of stuff: UFO abductions, crypto-biology, pyramid power, orgone energy. He once built a UFO detector which he assured me he knew worked perfectly because it went off all the time. If you went for a walk in the woods with him, he actually believed there was a chance you'd run across what I can only describe as fairies.
The thing was he ended up in a cult. I ran into him a few years after he'd been out of it and he was somehow... diminished. It's not that he didn't believe crazy shit anymore -- I don't think he was constitutionally capable of disbelieving it. It's just that his world seemed less pregnant with possibilities, and a lot more dangerous.
I dunno. The Russian have a different approach to these things than we do. If Russian engineering firms were baseball teams, they'd be small ball players and our guys would be sluggers. We tend to swing to swing for the fences and they concentrate on getting base hits.
If the Russians think they're on to something they tend to keep tinkering with it, making it incrementally better. The question isn't whether something is necessarily the most impressive thing in the world now, but whether it is practical and useful now.
You don't know much about nuclear EMP. A single multi megaton blast a thousand miles above Kansas optimized for gamma ray production (and thus EMP) would pretty much take out our entire civilian infrastructure coast to coast.
Well, I might not know much, but I know enough to recognize poorly researched fiction when I see it.
There are a large number of reasons why your scenario won't work. It's not necessarily physically impossible, it's just practically impossible. I'll give you just one. All high yield warheads (and all missile deliverable warheads) are thermonuclear; however the secondary stage of a thermonuclear warhead while contributing most of the blast yield adds relatively little to the EMP effects. So even if we assume you might be able to knock out the entire East Coast with a single multi-megaton warhead, it would have to be a pure fission warhead. There has never been a fission warhead even approaching that size; it would be enormous, containing over half a ton of plutonium, and it would have to be missile deliverable.
Such a warhead would not only be fabulously expensive, it would be of unique and novel design and would almost certainly have to be tested. A fizzle during an attempted attack would be fatal.
That's just one reason the EMP attack stories I've read have been malarkey. The chance of the Russians sucker-punching us with a super-EMP weapon is much, much less than our getting sucker punched by the Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
And of course that would be a once-in-a-lifetime of the Solar System opportunity. Venus and Earth are in many ways twin planets. There is no other candidate in which you could build a self-sustaining biosphere powered by the Sun yet protected from it.
Insofar as the future survival of the human race depends upon space exploration, the most likely scenario will in artificial space-borne structures. It's hard to see the advantages of living down inside the gravity well of a planet like Mars given that the atmosphere is incapable of supporting terrestrial life, and even if transformed to have Earth-like pressure will be unprotected from solar and cosmic radiation that will in the course of time strip it away. Why not simply build large space structures?
I find the argument that we need a human expedition to Mars to secure the survival of our species to be weak. That justification is neither a necessary nor sufficient case for manned Mars exploration. We should go to Mars to satisfy our curiosity about the universe; to indulge the human urge to explore; and to understand our own planet better. But make no mistake: we have no backup planet, nothing we could terraform into anything remotely as congenial to our survival as this one is. We need to preserve the Earth to preserve our genetic and cultural heritage, and for the younger among us to continue enjoying our planet's uniquely congenial and satisfying biological wealth well into unprecedented old age.
Anyone who calls a Domain Name an "Internet Address" probably doesn't know very much about either...
Prepare to lose on this one.
Take "broadband"... What is the antonym of "broadband"?
Why "narrowband", of course! Except according to the (unfortunately false) doctrine that the meaning of a word belongs to the community that coins it, the antonym of "broadband" ought to be "baseband". The "base" in "baseband" refers to zero hertz; a band that includes 0 Hz is the baseband in any kind of signal encoding scheme.
In our alternate world ruled by engineers, "broadband" refers to a signal that does not have to include 0Hz, and which thus can be frequency multiplexed on media such as coaxial cable or fiber optics. This allows us to make use of that medium's full transmission capacity, which means we can serve more people with greater transmission bandwidth.
The simplicity and precision of this way of using language warms my engineer's heart. A layer 1 signalling scheme that can be frequency shifted for multiplexing is "broadband"; one that cannot is "baseband". If you want to tell me a service is "fast", give me a number and a unit so I know whether you're talking throughput or latency.
But you can't expect people trained in marketing (whom I have nothing against by the way) to use language with this kind of beautiful precision. Marketers deal in imprecision, and like it or not they have much, much more influence on the direction of language than we do.
As soon as marketers wrapped their brains around "broadband" implying higher throughput on a shared medium, the term was pretty much destined, not just to lose its virginal purity, but to become their property as language pimps.
DNS exists so ordinary people don't have to deal with actual Internet addresses. It makes Internet Protocol invisible to them, so as far as they're concerned the term "Internet Address" is up for grabs. I always assume when someone who is not a techie says "Internet Address" he's talking about a domain name or URL.
You're saying that gayness is a cultural construct. Good for you, because it is.
However that's not quite the same as saying it's something you can ignore, any more than race is something you can ignore just because it's a scientifically bankrupt notion. You can't escape being imprinted by your formative experiences.
I do think the gay thing may be different in a few decades; millennials have a much more fluid notion of sexual orientation.
Trump won't do anything for gays because he's politically incompetent.
The way you win the general election is you unite your party, win over the independents, and split the other guy's party. You know, what Hillary has been doing -- not because she's a genius, because that's what everybody but Trump understands that you have to do. Trump keeps playing to his base, alienating independents, and making it hard for others in his party to support him. And whenever any Republican needs to distance himself from something Trump has said, the fool jumps on Twitter and burns bridges.
And there's Trump's ground game. He doesn't have one. Clinton does, and it is formidable, well-funded, and expertly organized. She's been planning her GOTV (get out the vote) operation for eight years. Why? Because decades of experience shows these operations work.
Yes, the timing is suspiciously coincidental. But if it *is* a US covert sanction, it makes you wonder exactly how it was worked.
According to the local paper.
However if he has no basis to charge her for trespass, that argument falls down. Also, if she is covering the events as a journalist, she is by not "part of the group". So his argument is this: her reporting favorably on the group made her "part of the group". That's an asinine argument.
You are pulling arguments out of your bottom sphincter here. The AG didn't drop the criminal trespass charges out of the goodness of his heart. For whatever reason he couldn't make the misdemeanor trespass charges stick.
As for the security people defending themselves -- it's not at all clear that's what they were doing. What the final edited footage shows is a gross over-reaction: setting dogs on unarmed protesters, after which they arm themselves with wooden pulled up from fencing. Of course the raw footage could well have been edited to produce that impression.
If she was just a reporter covering the facts, why was she on the property at all?
The video footage shows her asking the security personnel their side of the story, which they decline to offer. Still, it's impossible to do that from a hundred yards away, or to show the fact that the guy denying he was pepper spraying anyone was holding a can of the stuff.
In other words the AG is grasping at straws.
IANAL, but I'll answer your questions to the best of my ability.
(1) Sure reporters can be charged with trespass -- when they actually commit trespass. Trespass is normally a tort and it is up to the land owner to pursue civil action; the AG has no standing in such cases. There is also criminal trespass, e.g., if you enter a property with the intent of committing certain crimes. It is a misdemeanor and the standards vary by jurisdiction; however it's pretty clear that the protesters' action did not meet the local standards for criminal trespass because the AG dropped those charges.
(2) To be a journalist you have to engage in journalism. It doesn't have to be good journalism, or even fair journalism. It has to be intended as gathering and reporting facts.
Why does that intent matter? Because intent is one of the key ingredients in establishing guilt for a crime. You can't accidentally murder someone, although you can be deliberately negligent for example. So let's imagine the protesters *did* riot. If you were along with the mob with the intent of being part of the mob, you share criminal responsibility for the riot. If you were along with the mob with the intent of documenting what the mob does, you only bear responsibility for your own actions (e.g. the trespass tort).
So the AG's argument amounts to this: the person in question was sympathetic to the protesters, therefore she was one of them.
I wrote:
As I mentioned elsewhere the AG has dropped trespassing charges
You wrote:
Sounds like she wasn't charged with being in a protest, which is a legal activity. She was charged with trespassing and rioting.
Sounds like you hear what you want to be true.
Yeah, if I robbed a bank as part of a gang and told the police that I was only along for the ride as a journalist and should be immune from charges, I kinda expect they'd not let me go.
What if you were covering a protest as a journalist? As I mentioned elsewhere the AG has dropped trespassing charges against Goodman, so how he thinks he can make rioting charges stick is beyond me. Maybe he's hoping that the more sensational-sounding charge will result in reverse jury nullification.
Trespass is not equal to or tantamount to rioting, otherwise you wouldn't need two separate crimes.
In point of fact the AG dropped the trespass charge against Goodman. His argument for the riot charge is that she did not fairly (in his view) cover both sides and therefore was not engaged in journalism. You can judge for yourself by watching the video in question.
Well, here is what the AG told the local paper:
“She’s a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions,” said Erickson, adding that her coverage of the Sept. 3 protest did not mention that people trespassed during the incident or the alleged assaults on guards.
In other words, he doesn't believe this person covered the government's position fairly, and therefore doesn't deserve to be considered a journalist.
Projects like ISS aren't just one thing. You have many groups involved each with their agenda. One of those groups unquestionably is researchers. Would they rather have all the money spent on ISS go just to their research? Sure. But it's not going to happen. The PR value supports the research, just as it did with Apollo (but obviously on much, much smaller scale).
Likewise a lot of people would rather see the money that went into ISS go toward a Mars mission; but that would (at the time of ISS's planning) make hardly a dent in what would have been needed. ISS is a critical bridge to future manned exploration (if any) of the solar system. It's an achievable short-term program which maintains and advances practical hands-on experience with human spaceflight and space habitats.
This is how the real world works. You can't get everything you want, but you can get some of what you want by helping others get some of what they want.
Reasonable sample sizes depends on the nature of the study you are conducting. If you are looking for drug side effects, you want very large study sizes because very rare events can be show-stoppers for you. In most social science contexts, on the other hand, modest sample sizes are both more practical and desirable.
Smaller studies are not only more financially efficient, excessively large sample sizes can lead to results that are statistically significant but are not very practically interesting (i.e., you can disprove the null hypothesis at a p < 0.05 level but the magnitude of the effect you're looking at is so weak nobody should care about it).
So sample sizes in the 15-30 range are usually a pretty good choice for many social science purposes. If you design the study protocol correctly and choose the proper statistical tests you shouldn't get many spurious positive results from a modest sized sample. You will get many spurious negative results, but if the study is well-designed the effects you miss will be relatively weak. This is a reasonable tradeoff in a world with limited funding.
The bigger problem is getting a representative sample to test. You can't fix a skewed sampling methodology throwing even more oddball bodies into your study; in fact that makes problems worse. Better to conduct a modest sized study and then confirm it with a similarly sized study whose subjects are recruited in a different way.
Boredom is a great incentive for creativity. Social media is not exactly interesting, but it fills up your time in a way that you hardly notice it slipping through your fingers. You can easily spend all day checkout what people are saying about Trump, yet you figured out what you thought about him months ago.
So you're saying it's legal in Russian, the way invading Russia was legal in German in 1941.
Ultimately what laws amount to is everyone else ganging up on you because you're acting like a dick.
Russians sometimes use methods that look crude to us because those methods are likely to work without costing fabulous amounts of money. It's Americans who set out to do overkill right from the drawing board.
The rate at which change happens matters; as to the geographic extent over which changes take place.
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As well we should. I mean, I do take solace that something like the GBR will probably form at some other place millions of years in the future, but that's not really a substitute for being able to see what they once were in my lifetime.
You know, irony usually ends badly around here.
You can almost envy people like that. I had a friend in high school who believed all that kind of stuff: UFO abductions, crypto-biology, pyramid power, orgone energy. He once built a UFO detector which he assured me he knew worked perfectly because it went off all the time. If you went for a walk in the woods with him, he actually believed there was a chance you'd run across what I can only describe as fairies.
The thing was he ended up in a cult. I ran into him a few years after he'd been out of it and he was somehow... diminished. It's not that he didn't believe crazy shit anymore -- I don't think he was constitutionally capable of disbelieving it. It's just that his world seemed less pregnant with possibilities, and a lot more dangerous.
I dunno. The Russian have a different approach to these things than we do. If Russian engineering firms were baseball teams, they'd be small ball players and our guys would be sluggers. We tend to swing to swing for the fences and they concentrate on getting base hits.
If the Russians think they're on to something they tend to keep tinkering with it, making it incrementally better. The question isn't whether something is necessarily the most impressive thing in the world now, but whether it is practical and useful now.
You don't know much about nuclear EMP. A single multi megaton blast a thousand miles above Kansas optimized for gamma ray production (and thus EMP) would pretty much take out our entire civilian infrastructure coast to coast.
Well, I might not know much, but I know enough to recognize poorly researched fiction when I see it.
There are a large number of reasons why your scenario won't work. It's not necessarily physically impossible, it's just practically impossible. I'll give you just one. All high yield warheads (and all missile deliverable warheads) are thermonuclear; however the secondary stage of a thermonuclear warhead while contributing most of the blast yield adds relatively little to the EMP effects. So even if we assume you might be able to knock out the entire East Coast with a single multi-megaton warhead, it would have to be a pure fission warhead. There has never been a fission warhead even approaching that size; it would be enormous, containing over half a ton of plutonium, and it would have to be missile deliverable.
Such a warhead would not only be fabulously expensive, it would be of unique and novel design and would almost certainly have to be tested. A fizzle during an attempted attack would be fatal.
That's just one reason the EMP attack stories I've read have been malarkey. The chance of the Russians sucker-punching us with a super-EMP weapon is much, much less than our getting sucker punched by the Sun.