In fact, it seems like the only ones defending this AGW position are those blessed by the priesthood of the climate scientists
True. Should that be surprising? Let's apply your "priesthood" logic to other fields and see where that leads us.
* The priesthood of biology refuses to bless creation science. * The priesthood of physics refuses to bless perpetual motion. * The priesthood of mathematics refuses to bless squaring the circle. * The priesthood of medicine refuses to bless homeopathy. * The priesthood of the Republican Party refuses to bless higher taxes on the wealthy. * The priesthood of the Democratic Party refuses to bless lower taxes on the wealthy.
What you seem to be implying that you can somehow refute an idea by demonstrating that the people who advocate it won't endorse the views of people who disagree with them.
Well, there's an issue of *scope* here. Counterfeit physical dollars are expensive to produce, almost impossible get absolutely perfect, and risky to put into circulation in large quantities. Counterfeit virtual dollars are digital; either they're perfect or they're completely useless.
Once you know *how* to create a fake digital dollar, your counterfeiting operation becomes cheaper and safer to scale. You could handle the whole operation from a laptopat a public wi-fi hotspot and have unlimited use of the full faith and credit of the Canadian government.
Should you? No. But if it's that or lose the job you're counting on to pay for little Timmy's operation, we'll understand.
I despise the idea that your employer, who has no loyalty to you, can make demands about how you live your private life, but it's a dirty, hypocritical world out there. Sometimes you have to make short term compromises. As such compromises go, this isn't exactly betraying Anne Frank to the SS.
But if you make it clear that you are uncomfortable doing this and they insist, I'd start looking for another job whether you decide to cave or not. The reason is that your employer does not respect you. It doesn't respect your privacy or value your honesty. You don't want to work for people like that, they''ll keep nibbling away at your dignity until accepting indignities becomes an ingrained habit.
If you're at all in a position to say "screw that", say it. If not, do what you must, but look for a better place to work.
I dunno. That doesn't sound like a lot of return activity, especially if it includes Christmas returns. What's he supposed to do with a three or four blu-ray disks he already owns? Also, it hardly makes sense to penalize someone for returning defective merchandise. And Retail Equation *clearly* takes into account returns of defective merchandise in labeling your customers as dishonest. What legitimate purpose could that serve?
This sounds like one of those cases where managers are suckers for snake oil based on their wishful thinking and innumeracy. Retail Equation promises its magic software will identify people likely to engage in fraudulent returns in the future. It fingers a bunch of customers, and management is delighted; they said they'd finger crooks and by golly they did! The question is: where is the proof that those people will commit the future offense? Or that they've committed any past offenses.
Suppose a vendor claims he can finger crooked customers with 99.9% accuracy. And suppose Best Buy has a million honest customers over the course of the year. That means one thousand people get incorrectly branded as dishonest. It'd be find if Best Buy refused to sell stuff to those customers, but it *doesn't do that*. It is happy to sell merchandise to those customers, but if the merchandise is defective it refuses to give the customer his money back. In that case the character of the customer has nothing to do with the transaction; he has a just claim to get his money back even if he is a crook.
At least one of the guys he is accused of outing was *not* a covert operative, and at the time he was "exposed" he was working for a consulting company that is publicly known to have developed the "enhanced interrogation" methods.
So what was revealed? That the guy he "outed", while a known CIA official, used the techniques his current known employer developed on someone.
1) It makes invalid extrapolations from valid science. 2) There is little empirical evidence for it, and what there is turns out to be tortuously misinterpreted. 3) The validity or definition of some of its core concepts is questionable, so many of its ideas are untestable. 4) It is statistically naive, ignoring things like regression to the mean.
You can't extrapolate between dogs and people; dogs are domestic animals, and people are wild animals. At the risk of making another list, there are two problems with doing that:
(A) Dogs are domestic animals; people are wild animals with far greater genetic diversity. Sexual reproduction is supposed to increase genetic diversity; only by starting with an artificially uniform genetic population can you breed for specific traits with any reliability. Look at several large human families and while you'll see some resemblance, it's far less than the resemblance of purebred puppies born in the same litter.
(B) A dog reaches sexual maturity in 6-12 months; humans in 12-14 years. In the course of a 40 career a dog breeder gets to work with 30-50 generations, a human breeder would only get 2-3. Even if you start by inbreeding a single human family, it'll take you centuries to get the kind of results a dog breeder can get in 20 years.
I'll leave off debunking eugenics here, because I'll have to start using roman numerals.
I inevitably run into those who say "Science wouldn't allow that" (like my friend who's still in the field).
Well, science is rather like democracy in that regard. It doesn't prevent mistakes, but what makes it better than other things people have tried is that it has a mechanism for correcting them.
Yes, the authors have managed to write a sentence that is incomprehensible to people who understand electronics and people who don't, but for different reasons.
Let me plays devil's advocate, though, and construe a speculative interpretation that might make sense.
This thing generates plasma -- from what? Probably the air. So my guess is that it applies a pulse of high voltage to ionize the air, producing a plasma. Now suppose the plasma is too hot, what would adding a resistor in series do?
Well, a resistance value could be chosen so high that if you *shorted* the air gap, the resistor itself would dissipate negligible power, yet that value could still be negligible compared to the resistance of an un-ionized [note 1] air gap. This would greatly limit the power dissipated by the arc (especially given that the arc's resistance *decreases* as the current flowing through it increases), while posing no barrier to the formation of the arc in the first place.
note 1: air can be ionized or not, but I have no idea whether it can unionize.
No, because resistors generate heat when current flows through them.
Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean the total heat dissipated increases. If you have a constant voltage supply (typical), adding a resistor in *series* with the load *reduces* the total power dissipated. Yes, the resistor generates heat, but that is more than offset by a reduction in the heat generated by the load.
If a resistor in series with the load reduces the current by 1/2, the power dissipated by the load is reduced to 1/4 what it would be without the load.
Constant voltage is the most common case, as it is supplied by outlets and batteries, but some power supplies provide constant current, in which case adding a resistor in series would not alter the load power dissipation, and (as you are asserting) the heat generated by the resistor would add to the net heat dissipation.
Supposing you're driving an LED (disclaimer, I am not an LED lighting engineer), you'd want to keep it in the correct current range, so you'd use a constant current power supply. If you put a second identical LED in series with the first, you'd double the load resistance [note 1], but the power supply's voltage would adjust so the current remains the same. The Captain Obvious result is that if you drive 2 serially connected LEDs off your constant current supply instead of 1, the power dissipated doubles. The somewhat less obvious result is that if you're using a constant voltage supply the total power dissipated drops, so the the power dissipated by each of the two LEDs is less than one half what a single LED would.
note 1: LEDs aren't linear in their response like a plain resistor, so this wouldn't necessarily be true if we were talking about a constant voltage supply like a battery.
Well, to play devil's advocate, the universe doesn't owe us a living. Species go extinct, societies and nations collapse; it's a fair bet our species will go extinct and our society will collapse some day. The trick is predicting *when*.
The problem with trying to put a date on it is all the "ceteris paribus" assumptions, the way we assume that things won't change. One consistent problem with Malthusian predictions is the assumption that agricultural productivity won't change. Historically it always has, but we can't count on that *indefinitely*. There are thermodynamic limits to how much food energy you can get out of an acre of land, although we aren't close to them yet.
The approach to a limit is not necessarily a disaster. There are three possible results: (1) the limit is relaxed; (2) soft landing, (3) hard landing. Because of the economics of consumption, the soft/hard landing depends on how suddenly we reach the limit. If we approach slowly there is more time for innovation and for people to moderate their consumption. So far the big gains agriculturally have come from relaxing limits, but you can't count on that happening, any more than you can count on it *not* happening. Certainly it argues for the importance of applied research whose potential returns are outside the range of normal business research investments.
Idiot Malthusians have predicted the imminent end of the world due to overpopulation for hundreds of years.
It has been 214 years since the publication of Malthus' "An Essay on the Principle of Population". That isn't a very long time, it roughly coincides with the start of the Industrial Revolution. Let's use the IR as the benchmark of our society's staying power.
Suppose you are Rome in the year 10CE. Your city has existed for five hundred years as a Republic, and about 40 years under the wise and moderate Augustus. You'd have plenty of reason to feel smug about the stability of your society, little suspecting that four years later you were going to be ruled by paranoid Tiberius and after him *Caligula*. The particular kid of rot that set in with Rome allowed it to chug along for a few more centuries, but the future was hardly the golden age you'd expect.
It's confirmation bias. When something horrible like this happens, we want a reassuring explanation, and when we settle on one we filter the information we receive and *re-transmit* to shore up that explanation. This applies to people whether they're liberal or conservative.
The thing about this phenomenon is that you don't need to *intend* to put your finger on the scales of truth to actually do it. Well meaning people twist the truth all the time.
No, that's freedom from prior restraint. It's part of the overall concept of free speech, but not the totality of it.
I understand that, but it's really the important bit. No concept of free speech works without freedom from prior restraint, and any concept of free speech that includes freedom from prior restraint can work, if people are willing to risk standing up to the government.
Freedom of Speech is poorly defined, but it generally means that you can say what you want, apart from a few specifically defined instances. Think of it as "default allow" for speech. Basically, if there are no laws against what you are saying, then the government can't punish you for saying it.
Unfortunately that's not much of a guide to what's allowed. To say something is allowed if it is not denied is logically equivalent to saying it's denied if it is not allowed. It'd be more precise to say that speech is allowed unless it does unreasonable harm or the government has a legitimate interest in restricting that speech. Unfortunately, you're still stuck with deciding what is "reasonable" or "legitimate".
In the end it boils with what people will put up with provided (and this is important) everything is out on the table. When the Pentagon Papers were published, they were top secret. The documents that showed the government had been lying to the American people about what it was up to in Vietnam, had expanded the war in various questionably Constitutional ways, and was continuing the war mainly to avoid the political embarrassment of defeat, rather than for any substantive national interest. Disclosing top secret documents is a felony, but once the government lost its bid to impose prior restraint, it was unable to mount a successful prosecution of the men responsible for the leak. They couldn't drop frightening hints about damage to national interests because what the Pentagon Papers revealed that national interests played almost no role in the continuation of the war. Any argument that the leak put troops in harm's way would have been ironic given that at the time the leak occurred US forces were suffering 45 casualties/week for no identifiable national purpose.
No, I define it as being free to speak, but not to be free from the consequences of my speech. Depending on the consequences that speech may be illegal. It isn't hard to come up with kinds of speech that are and should be illegal, but I can't stop you from engaging in them.
"Free speech" doesn't mean "speech privileged from legal consequences."
I can't keep you from having a website because you're a scuzzy little libeler, but when you *do* libel me I sure as hell can go after you for that.
Free speech doesn't give you the right to slander someone. It doesn't give you the right to disclose trade secrets, or publish intimate details of private persons' lives. It doesn't give you the right to disclose sensitive national defense information, or incite immediate violence against somebody (Spike Lee needs to learn this).
What free speech amounts to is the right to say what you have to say then dare the government to do something about it. Surprised? Well, that's freedom for you. It doesn't come without *risk*.
My wife is a public employee, so let me explain how this works. Every so often politicians get caught taking something from some special interest. Their response is to pass a tough new ethics bill. The catch is that it doesn't apply to *them*, it applies to public employees. So things get a little ridiculous.
When we bought our house, the realtor tried to buy us lunch and my wife had to refuse, because under state law for practical purposes she's not allowed to take gifts from anyone she's not related to.
It's *stupid*, but there you go. But let me tell you why this police case is important. What adherence to these stupid rules does is separate the scrupulously honest and conscientious employees from everyone else. When you are dealing with a question of public trust vs. private gain, if you don't understand you have to be above reproach, you don't understand enough to be responsible for that question.
Now working in private industry, I've often taken clients out for dinner or drinks. However I don't accept things (other than conference swag) from vendors. It's not that I think it's wrong, but I want to send the right message in each case. When I take a client out, the message is, "I'll take care of you." When I refuse to be taken out, the message is, "deliver the goods; I don't care about anything else."
High power lasers will smoke a typical mirror. There are reflective surfaces that could work, but you have to keep them perfectly clean. Not happening at sea for long...
Perfect defense against the laser isn't really the point. There's a range of conditions under which a laser of a given power can work fast enough to be effective against a quick moving target. Even painting something white would tend to narrow those conditions. Tests done in the 50s with nuclear heat flash showed that structures painted white survived while adjacent unpainted structures burst into flame.
Look at the the video in TFA. Note especially the cut in the editing; it would appear that it took some time for one of the black outboard engines of a stationary boat bursts into flames. The laser they're talking about building is only 7x as powerful as the one used in the demonstration. It's questionable whether such a laser could have that particular effect against a fast moving boat, much less something like a missile.
According to TFA, the point of the program is to get useful lasers onto ships earlier, but I question whether that's the right objective. What does the space, money, and manpower needed to mount such a weapon on a ship displace? Might it make more sense to spend that on something else while we continue research into lasers in a power range that would actually confer some kind of advantage when installed on a ship?
Well, it feels like a lawyer-bureaucrat decision to me. It wouldn't be unreasonable for them (aside from the excessive copyright term) to block production of the fan series entirely. Allowing New Voyages to go forward is a rare example of enlightened self-interest by a corporate copyright holder.
The curious thing here is that it's hard to imagine any rationale for blocking the use of the script in question that wouldn't also justify blocking the whole New Voyages enterprise. After all they're using characters from TOS, building on stories that actually aired, and working with writers and actors who were involved with TOS.
I suppose legal departments are like guard dogs. If the dog is used to one milkman and another takes over the route, the dog doesn't think, "oh, look it's a new milkman," and let him pass. He'll bark at the guy until he goes away. If you wave a possible copyright violation in front of a corporate attorney, he's not going to say, "oh, look, a new fan project," and let it pass. He'll bark at it until it goes away.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, it seems like the only ones defending this AGW position are those blessed by the priesthood of the climate scientists
True. Should that be surprising? Let's apply your "priesthood" logic to other fields and see where that leads us.
* The priesthood of biology refuses to bless creation science.
* The priesthood of physics refuses to bless perpetual motion.
* The priesthood of mathematics refuses to bless squaring the circle.
* The priesthood of medicine refuses to bless homeopathy.
* The priesthood of the Republican Party refuses to bless higher taxes on the wealthy.
* The priesthood of the Democratic Party refuses to bless lower taxes on the wealthy.
What you seem to be implying that you can somehow refute an idea by demonstrating that the people who advocate it won't endorse the views of people who disagree with them.
Nor were they true Scotsmen.
Well, there's an issue of *scope* here. Counterfeit physical dollars are expensive to produce, almost impossible get absolutely perfect, and risky to put into circulation in large quantities. Counterfeit virtual dollars are digital; either they're perfect or they're completely useless.
Once you know *how* to create a fake digital dollar, your counterfeiting operation becomes cheaper and safer to scale. You could handle the whole operation from a laptopat a public wi-fi hotspot and have unlimited use of the full faith and credit of the Canadian government.
Should you? No. But if it's that or lose the job you're counting on to pay for little Timmy's operation, we'll understand.
I despise the idea that your employer, who has no loyalty to you, can make demands about how you live your private life, but it's a dirty, hypocritical world out there. Sometimes you have to make short term compromises. As such compromises go, this isn't exactly betraying Anne Frank to the SS.
But if you make it clear that you are uncomfortable doing this and they insist, I'd start looking for another job whether you decide to cave or not. The reason is that your employer does not respect you. It doesn't respect your privacy or value your honesty. You don't want to work for people like that, they''ll keep nibbling away at your dignity until accepting indignities becomes an ingrained habit.
If you're at all in a position to say "screw that", say it. If not, do what you must, but look for a better place to work.
I dunno. That doesn't sound like a lot of return activity, especially if it includes Christmas returns. What's he supposed to do with a three or four blu-ray disks he already owns? Also, it hardly makes sense to penalize someone for returning defective merchandise. And Retail Equation *clearly* takes into account returns of defective merchandise in labeling your customers as dishonest. What legitimate purpose could that serve?
This sounds like one of those cases where managers are suckers for snake oil based on their wishful thinking and innumeracy. Retail Equation promises its magic software will identify people likely to engage in fraudulent returns in the future. It fingers a bunch of customers, and management is delighted; they said they'd finger crooks and by golly they did! The question is: where is the proof that those people will commit the future offense? Or that they've committed any past offenses.
Suppose a vendor claims he can finger crooked customers with 99.9% accuracy. And suppose Best Buy has a million honest customers over the course of the year. That means one thousand people get incorrectly branded as dishonest. It'd be find if Best Buy refused to sell stuff to those customers, but it *doesn't do that*. It is happy to sell merchandise to those customers, but if the merchandise is defective it refuses to give the customer his money back. In that case the character of the customer has nothing to do with the transaction; he has a just claim to get his money back even if he is a crook.
At least one of the guys he is accused of outing was *not* a covert operative, and at the time he was "exposed" he was working for a consulting company that is publicly known to have developed the "enhanced interrogation" methods.
So what was revealed? That the guy he "outed", while a known CIA official, used the techniques his current known employer developed on someone.
I am the only one who thinks that sounds like a summer movie?
Eugenics is junk science for four reasons:
1) It makes invalid extrapolations from valid science.
2) There is little empirical evidence for it, and what there is turns out to be tortuously misinterpreted.
3) The validity or definition of some of its core concepts is questionable, so many of its ideas are untestable.
4) It is statistically naive, ignoring things like regression to the mean.
You can't extrapolate between dogs and people; dogs are domestic animals, and people are wild animals. At the risk of making another list, there are two problems with doing that:
(A) Dogs are domestic animals; people are wild animals with far greater genetic diversity. Sexual reproduction is supposed to increase genetic diversity; only by starting with an artificially uniform genetic population can you breed for specific traits with any reliability. Look at several large human families and while you'll see some resemblance, it's far less than the resemblance of purebred puppies born in the same litter.
(B) A dog reaches sexual maturity in 6-12 months; humans in 12-14 years. In the course of a 40 career a dog breeder gets to work with 30-50 generations, a human breeder would only get 2-3. Even if you start by inbreeding a single human family, it'll take you centuries to get the kind of results a dog breeder can get in 20 years.
I'll leave off debunking eugenics here, because I'll have to start using roman numerals.
I inevitably run into those who say "Science wouldn't allow that" (like my friend who's still in the field).
Well, science is rather like democracy in that regard. It doesn't prevent mistakes, but what makes it better than other things people have tried is that it has a mechanism for correcting them.
Yes, the authors have managed to write a sentence that is incomprehensible to people who understand electronics and people who don't, but for different reasons.
Let me plays devil's advocate, though, and construe a speculative interpretation that might make sense.
This thing generates plasma -- from what? Probably the air. So my guess is that it applies a pulse of high voltage to ionize the air, producing a plasma. Now suppose the plasma is too hot, what would adding a resistor in series do?
Well, a resistance value could be chosen so high that if you *shorted* the air gap, the resistor itself would dissipate negligible power, yet that value could still be negligible compared to the resistance of an un-ionized [note 1] air gap. This would greatly limit the power dissipated by the arc (especially given that the arc's resistance *decreases* as the current flowing through it increases), while posing no barrier to the formation of the arc in the first place.
note 1: air can be ionized or not, but I have no idea whether it can unionize.
No, because resistors generate heat when current flows through them.
Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean the total heat dissipated increases. If you have a constant voltage supply (typical), adding a resistor in *series* with the load *reduces* the total power dissipated. Yes, the resistor generates heat, but that is more than offset by a reduction in the heat generated by the load.
If a resistor in series with the load reduces the current by 1/2, the power dissipated by the load is reduced to 1/4 what it would be without the load.
Constant voltage is the most common case, as it is supplied by outlets and batteries, but some power supplies provide constant current, in which case adding a resistor in series would not alter the load power dissipation, and (as you are asserting) the heat generated by the resistor would add to the net heat dissipation.
Supposing you're driving an LED (disclaimer, I am not an LED lighting engineer), you'd want to keep it in the correct current range, so you'd use a constant current power supply. If you put a second identical LED in series with the first, you'd double the load resistance [note 1], but the power supply's voltage would adjust so the current remains the same. The Captain Obvious result is that if you drive 2 serially connected LEDs off your constant current supply instead of 1, the power dissipated doubles. The somewhat less obvious result is that if you're using a constant voltage supply the total power dissipated drops, so the the power dissipated by each of the two LEDs is less than one half what a single LED would.
note 1: LEDs aren't linear in their response like a plain resistor, so this wouldn't necessarily be true if we were talking about a constant voltage supply like a battery.
Well, to play devil's advocate, the universe doesn't owe us a living. Species go extinct, societies and nations collapse; it's a fair bet our species will go extinct and our society will collapse some day. The trick is predicting *when*.
The problem with trying to put a date on it is all the "ceteris paribus" assumptions, the way we assume that things won't change. One consistent problem with Malthusian predictions is the assumption that agricultural productivity won't change. Historically it always has, but we can't count on that *indefinitely*. There are thermodynamic limits to how much food energy you can get out of an acre of land, although we aren't close to them yet.
The approach to a limit is not necessarily a disaster. There are three possible results: (1) the limit is relaxed; (2) soft landing, (3) hard landing. Because of the economics of consumption, the soft/hard landing depends on how suddenly we reach the limit. If we approach slowly there is more time for innovation and for people to moderate their consumption. So far the big gains agriculturally have come from relaxing limits, but you can't count on that happening, any more than you can count on it *not* happening. Certainly it argues for the importance of applied research whose potential returns are outside the range of normal business research investments.
Idiot Malthusians have predicted the imminent end of the world due to overpopulation for hundreds of years.
It has been 214 years since the publication of Malthus' "An Essay on the Principle of Population". That isn't a very long time, it roughly coincides with the start of the Industrial Revolution. Let's use the IR as the benchmark of our society's staying power.
Suppose you are Rome in the year 10CE. Your city has existed for five hundred years as a Republic, and about 40 years under the wise and moderate Augustus. You'd have plenty of reason to feel smug about the stability of your society, little suspecting that four years later you were going to be ruled by paranoid Tiberius and after him *Caligula*. The particular kid of rot that set in with Rome allowed it to chug along for a few more centuries, but the future was hardly the golden age you'd expect.
Design, print and assemble the robot myself? Meh. Can't they get a machine to do that for me?
I also don't understand the conservative backlash against this car.
Maybe because it's new?
It's confirmation bias. When something horrible like this happens, we want a reassuring explanation, and when we settle on one we filter the information we receive and *re-transmit* to shore up that explanation. This applies to people whether they're liberal or conservative.
The thing about this phenomenon is that you don't need to *intend* to put your finger on the scales of truth to actually do it. Well meaning people twist the truth all the time.
No, that's freedom from prior restraint. It's part of the overall concept of free speech, but not the totality of it.
I understand that, but it's really the important bit. No concept of free speech works without freedom from prior restraint, and any concept of free speech that includes freedom from prior restraint can work, if people are willing to risk standing up to the government.
Freedom of Speech is poorly defined, but it generally means that you can say what you want, apart from a few specifically defined instances. Think of it as "default allow" for speech. Basically, if there are no laws against what you are saying, then the government can't punish you for saying it.
Unfortunately that's not much of a guide to what's allowed. To say something is allowed if it is not denied is logically equivalent to saying it's denied if it is not allowed. It'd be more precise to say that speech is allowed unless it does unreasonable harm or the government has a legitimate interest in restricting that speech. Unfortunately, you're still stuck with deciding what is "reasonable" or "legitimate".
In the end it boils with what people will put up with provided (and this is important) everything is out on the table. When the Pentagon Papers were published, they were top secret. The documents that showed the government had been lying to the American people about what it was up to in Vietnam, had expanded the war in various questionably Constitutional ways, and was continuing the war mainly to avoid the political embarrassment of defeat, rather than for any substantive national interest. Disclosing top secret documents is a felony, but once the government lost its bid to impose prior restraint, it was unable to mount a successful prosecution of the men responsible for the leak. They couldn't drop frightening hints about damage to national interests because what the Pentagon Papers revealed that national interests played almost no role in the continuation of the war. Any argument that the leak put troops in harm's way would have been ironic given that at the time the leak occurred US forces were suffering 45 casualties/week for no identifiable national purpose.
No, I define it as being free to speak, but not to be free from the consequences of my speech. Depending on the consequences that speech may be illegal. It isn't hard to come up with kinds of speech that are and should be illegal, but I can't stop you from engaging in them.
"Free speech" doesn't mean "speech privileged from legal consequences."
I can't keep you from having a website because you're a scuzzy little libeler, but when you *do* libel me I sure as hell can go after you for that.
Free speech doesn't give you the right to slander someone. It doesn't give you the right to disclose trade secrets, or publish intimate details of private persons' lives. It doesn't give you the right to disclose sensitive national defense information, or incite immediate violence against somebody (Spike Lee needs to learn this).
What free speech amounts to is the right to say what you have to say then dare the government to do something about it. Surprised? Well, that's freedom for you. It doesn't come without *risk*.
My wife is a public employee, so let me explain how this works. Every so often politicians get caught taking something from some special interest. Their response is to pass a tough new ethics bill. The catch is that it doesn't apply to *them*, it applies to public employees. So things get a little ridiculous.
When we bought our house, the realtor tried to buy us lunch and my wife had to refuse, because under state law for practical purposes she's not allowed to take gifts from anyone she's not related to.
It's *stupid*, but there you go. But let me tell you why this police case is important. What adherence to these stupid rules does is separate the scrupulously honest and conscientious employees from everyone else. When you are dealing with a question of public trust vs. private gain, if you don't understand you have to be above reproach, you don't understand enough to be responsible for that question.
Now working in private industry, I've often taken clients out for dinner or drinks. However I don't accept things (other than conference swag) from vendors. It's not that I think it's wrong, but I want to send the right message in each case. When I take a client out, the message is, "I'll take care of you." When I refuse to be taken out, the message is, "deliver the goods; I don't care about anything else."
Are MS shills incapable of reading? Actually, that would explain a lot.
That's just stupid. The profit comes from getting paid for providing the care.
In a single payer system,sure, but you're forgetting about how insurance companies make profits.
High power lasers will smoke a typical mirror. There are reflective surfaces that could work, but you have to keep them perfectly clean. Not happening at sea for long...
Perfect defense against the laser isn't really the point. There's a range of conditions under which a laser of a given power can work fast enough to be effective against a quick moving target. Even painting something white would tend to narrow those conditions. Tests done in the 50s with nuclear heat flash showed that structures painted white survived while adjacent unpainted structures burst into flame.
Look at the the video in TFA. Note especially the cut in the editing; it would appear that it took some time for one of the black outboard engines of a stationary boat bursts into flames. The laser they're talking about building is only 7x as powerful as the one used in the demonstration. It's questionable whether such a laser could have that particular effect against a fast moving boat, much less something like a missile.
According to TFA, the point of the program is to get useful lasers onto ships earlier, but I question whether that's the right objective. What does the space, money, and manpower needed to mount such a weapon on a ship displace? Might it make more sense to spend that on something else while we continue research into lasers in a power range that would actually confer some kind of advantage when installed on a ship?
Laws and legal liability are a subset of social ethics. Just because you can do something legally isn't a vindication that you should do it.
Laws and legal liability *intersect* social ethics. There are cases where complying with law or regulations would be unethical.
Get a dog
Unless the thing you're guarding is a tinderbox.
Well, it feels like a lawyer-bureaucrat decision to me. It wouldn't be unreasonable for them (aside from the excessive copyright term) to block production of the fan series entirely. Allowing New Voyages to go forward is a rare example of enlightened self-interest by a corporate copyright holder.
The curious thing here is that it's hard to imagine any rationale for blocking the use of the script in question that wouldn't also justify blocking the whole New Voyages enterprise. After all they're using characters from TOS, building on stories that actually aired, and working with writers and actors who were involved with TOS.
I suppose legal departments are like guard dogs. If the dog is used to one milkman and another takes over the route, the dog doesn't think, "oh, look it's a new milkman," and let him pass. He'll bark at the guy until he goes away. If you wave a possible copyright violation in front of a corporate attorney, he's not going to say, "oh, look, a new fan project," and let it pass. He'll bark at it until it goes away.