makes increasing our use of nukes more attractive. Fuel is going to be cheaper. When other nations start getting back into nuclear power to help cope with rising petroleum costs, our nuclear engineering industry will have a leg up with a new generation of safer designs.
We are assuming better designs, aren't we? Or are we entertaining the possibility of a crash construction program with old designs from the 1970s? If that's the case we'd be better off taking a pass along with everyone else.
Actually, the short answer is "yes". The long answer is "We could certainly phase out nuclear power with some economic sacrifice, but in the first place 'could we?' is the wrong question. The right question is 'should we?'"
Unfortunately, the answers to questions like "*should we*" tend to start with "It depends." Then they go on to raise a whole new set of questions like "What kinds of nuclear plants will we build to replace the existing ones as they are retired?" Not at all pithy, I'm afraid.
I once had this problem because of a collection agency. The problem was that they were robo-calling my cell phone two or three times a day. They left no contact information other than a website and voicemail phone number, both of which *only* had options for paying bills, not reporting errors. Using the domain registration data I finally discovered the name of the law firm that owned the collection agency. I called them up and told them the problem, but the calls continued. Finally threatened to sic the state attorney general's office on them, One of the benefits of living in the business "unfriendly" People's Republic of Massachusetts is that the AG's consumer affairs office isn't afraid to kick a little butt, especially on an out of state company. That got their attention and the robo calls stopped, but if they'd used one of the domain registration anonymity services I'd have have been SOL.
Usually when a company announces plans for a whizbang new campus, it's bad news for the stockholders.
I have a friend who many years ago worked for a high tech company that planned a beautiful new Utopian campus. For various reasons they were forced to reduce the size of the project. They decided to house management and marketing at the luxurious new campus and stick the engineers miles away in a big box full of cubicles. As for the engineers, keeping management and marketing out of their hair on a day to day basis easily made up for having to work in a giant cubicle farm. The downside was that management lost touch and began demanding silly things and not taking engineering advice seriously. The subsequent poor performance of the company turned the showcase campus into an expensive fiasco. The campus was abandoned a few years later when the company was forced to sell out to a competitor.
It sounds like Apple is doing the opposite here, bringing people who have to work together in a very nice environment. I'll bet there'll be ideas generated and knowledge transferred on strolls through this campus that wouldn't have happened in a formal meeting that required a drive across town. This really looks like a case for what architects often claim but seldom achieve: making buildings that work for the people who use them.
I think it's more likely that he screwed up by not anticipating this question. That's a blunder, of course, and may reflect a little hubris if he thought he had a couple of slam-dunk arguments. If he had a few minutes he probably could have come up with a concrete example, but you don't get a few minutes to think because hostile justices will continue peppering you with questions.
Well judging from the summary, the issue isn't copyright extension, but *retroactive* copyright extension. Taking a work that is *already* in the public domain away from the public domain entails many issues that don't arise when simply extending copyright. So one who believes in copyright extension might reasonably object to *retroactive* copyright extension. For example it restricts the property rights of people who, in good faith, make legal copies and derivative works while a work is in the public domain.
We can judge how sincere the "original intent" crowd is by how they treat this issue. I can't imagine that the framers ever intended for works to be removed from the public domain. Still, I suspect we'll see retroactive extension upheld, given that the two biggest logical extensions to Congress's Constitutional powers have already been accepted, namely (1) de facto perpetual copyright through unlimited rounds of copyright extension and (2) granting copyright to current copyright holders rather than to authors and inventors as explicitly granted in Article 1, Section 8. If you can accept that, that this in effect makes some public domain works to risky to use is a mere practical detail.
I think you need to develop an ontology of geekdom. The root class (the union of all kinds of geeks) are people whose interests are incomprehensible to most people. Beneath that overarching class that you have
(a) geeks that do unusual things (b) geeks that know unusual things (c) geeks that create unusual things
Membership in just one of these subclasses qualifies you as a geek, although naturally the subclasses overlap. To illustrate, let's take the Society for Creative Anachronism. Participating in SCA events qualifies you a geek that does. Knowing the history of Medieval fashion qualifies you as a geek who knows. And if you make medieval clothing that qualifies you as a geek who creates. If you sew your own costume based on your own research, then wear it to an SCA event, you're a hat trick geek.
Is an intellectual somebody who has memorized a lot of information, or is it somebody who is adept at learning?
Neither condition is sufficient or even strictly necessary. Somebody can be adept at learning and as a consequence have a great deal of knowledge at his fingertips, but that doesn't make him an intellectual. If he is just a passive recipient of information (a follower of an ideology say), he's not an intellectual. If he pursues knowledge purely for its practical utility (e.g. it will make him a lot of money), he's not an intellectual, although he may be quite bright and knowledgeable.
I would say that an intellectual is an active, critical participant in some culture of ideas. What I am calling a "culture of ideas" is a community of people who collectively develop and refine ideas in some field. The ideas can (and usually do) have utility, but they are valued by the community for their own sake, provided that they are consistent with the overall framework of ideas in that community. As an active, critical participant in a culture of ideas, an intellectual transforms, rejects, refines and adds to its body of ideas. Although he doesn't necessarily contribute his work back, if given a chance to he will at least debate the merits.
Suppose you are in a group that's into the design of programming languages. Chances are some of you are intellectuals by virtue of *how* you participate in the group, others are not. If you are exclusively interested in collecting knowledge so that you will know that language X supports some feature in case you ever have to use X, you're just a geek but not an intellectual. If you fancy yourself something of a philosopher of programming languages then you're a geek *and* an intellectual, although not necessarily more knowledgeable than your simple geek colleagues. The topic of programming languages is a utilitarian one, but your interest and participation transcends utility. Consider this test: imagine somebody created a programming language, not for actual use, but to prove a point. Would you consider learning that language?
An intellectual is necessarily a geek, since he has consuming interests that are incomprehensible to most people. But not all geeks are necessarily intellectuals. Mere collectors or conduits of information are not intellectuals, no matter how impressive the collection or compelling the presentation.
Still, I'd want to see evidence establishing that this technique is reliable before giving much credence to such expert testimony. For all we know people who are committing fraud commit more punctuation mistakes, or write more formally. If you can't show that this methodology has support in the peer reviewed literature, it's just amateur forensic speculation.
Why would the Chinese do that unless they are aware of the attack being carried out by their army/govt.
Well, I'll take a shot at this: Because they are paranoid about keeping up appearances. Remember the little girl who wasn't telegenic enough to sing at the Olympics ceremonies? Paranoia is by definition irrational. Reasonable concern over one's image and sensible steps to protect one's reputation don't count as paranoia.
I'm not saying the government isn't behind what happened. In fact, in a crony-capitalist government ruled by political expediency rather than law, there is a lot of willful turning of blind eyes to dodgy but politically or personally useful things.
I'd say she was as wrong on the essential facts as she could possibly without being entirely wrong. Gage wasn't after the individual colonists' arms (which were usually supplied by the militiaman and could reasonably be referred to as "our arms"). He was after the public stores of powder and arms stockpiled by local governments (or rather provisional governments).
In Palin's favor, General Gage was attempting to preempt an armed insurrection, and taking away the guns of the militiamen *would* have that effect *had he attempted that*. And had it been practical he surely would have done so, but Gage was no fool. He was trying to prevent insurrection without provoking the colonists any further than they had been already. His strategy was to quietly send task forces of regulars to seize public stockpiles of powder. The colonists weren't fools either, and they set up an early warning system to notify local militia of any such actions. The rest as they say, is history. Gage, attempting to evade the colonists' preparations, launched his Concord expedition well before dawn. That is how the colonists hit upon the lantern signal.
Here's the most compelling reason to view Palin as essentially wrong: she cast the conflict as one of preserving individual rights to bear arms, whereas the actual historical conflict was unquestionably triggered by disputes over *collective rights*. Parliament passed the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, abolishing many local self-government practices that were uncommon in the empire but had been long standing practice in Massachusetts. This included things like the appointment of magistrates by local government. Six months before the battle Gage sent crown appointed magistrates to Worcester, where they were run out of town by the local militia. This in turn touched off the dispute over powder stockpiles.
The groups stockpiling the powder did not view themselves as voluntary associations of private individuals. They functioned as de facto provisional governments with the authority to compel anyone to military service. This of course brings up the old dispute about the nature of the Second Amendment, in which one side claims it was about an individual right to bear arms, and another claims it is about a community right to form militias. I think the Battle of Lexington and Concord shows that both sides are talking hooey. The dichotomy doesn't even make sense in an Eighteenth Century context.
Of course "essentially right" is in the eye of the beholder. I don't think she was making a political argument buttressed by historical facts. She was appealing to love of personal liberty. Invoking Revere as a symbol of resistance to tyranny is *essentially right*. Invoking him as a symbol against *gun control* specifically is at best a wild historical extrapolation of what he *might* have thought.
We have such a law. It's called the 14th Amendment, without which the states would be free to do all kinds of things that infringe on Americans' rights. Here's the relevant bit:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Now the police can arrest these folks. They can (in certain circumstances) even kick the crap out of them. But they can't kick the crap out of them with the intent of denying them liberty or due process. Suppose there were a law that forbade videotaping the cops. Even *if* that law were to pass 14th Amendment scrutiny, the cops can't act as judge, jury and executioner. They'd have to confiscate the video, then prove it is illegal in a court of law.
The picture emerges is of a person who often had an important point to raise, but was more than a little creepy.
His antics as a resident aren't disturbing because they involve a dead body; they're disturbing because they involved a *live patient*. What is more, he seems utterly incapable of questioning the wisdom and ethics of doing something to a patient just to satisfy his curiosity. In fact he seems a little self-righteous about the whole affair, as if they *only* basis to objecting to the procedure is moral cowardice. As Aristotle would point out, the opposite of cowardice is rashness, not bravery; bravery is the reasonable mid-point between the vicious extremes.
So it wasn't Dr. Kevorkian's suicide machine that was scary, it was the man himself. He married a narrow-minded moral narcissism to a fascination with using human beings as experimental animals. I sometimes wonder whether he built the machine just because he was curious to see it in operation. As a pathologist he didn't deal with patients at all -- just tissues. An oncologist might be driven to build the machine because he saw the suffering of his patients; for Dr. Kevorkian the motivation came from someplace else, at best some place more abstract, at worst... who knows? It has no bearing on the validity of his views about euthanasia or human experimentation. Those ideas should stand or fall on their own merits.
Nonetheless he was a fascinating and somewhat disturbing character. Maybe it takes a character like that to see the medical ethics emperor has no clothes, but I'm more comfortable with somebody who occasionally sees two sides to a complex issue.
While I agree with your conclusions, I don't think much of your arguments. In some cases they are red herrings (the amount of solar radiation received over the entire earth's surface is impressive, but irrelevant; the list of red herrings goes on). In other cases they are factually wrong (cell phones do not emit on a single frequency) or imply things that are factually wrong (e.g. that we get more radiation from the Sun in the 1.8GHz band than we would from regular cell phone use). The claim that physics rules out *any* possible interaction is overstated to the point it becomes unsupportable. It would be better to say that physics rules out the easily hypothesized mechanisms of causation. In absence of any proof a link exists, that's more than enough justification to doubt; but if a link were demonstrated to exist then we'd be forced to look for causes that were more plausible.
That, by the way, is where the proof of any cell phone/brain cancer link actually fails: demonstrable existence.The case *against* the link hypothesis amounts to this:
(A) the claim is based on a meta-study and doesn't control for confounding factors enough to be conclusive. (B) the reasoning and evidence supporting the claim is preliminary, and further scrutiny is certain to reveal methodological flaws (this is true even when the conclusion eventually pans out, but not all conclusions do). (C) were the link to be proven, it would point to significant holes in our knowledge in areas of physics or anatomy where we are pretty confident there are no such holes.
Taken together, this is strong justification to doubt the hypothesis. I'd go further than that and say that were it not for the panic invoked by reporting, this probably wouldn't be worth pursuing. But do we have something that could be called disproof? I don't think so. The world is full of possibilities like this; things we can't categorically rule out, but which we have no compelling reason to believe.
This is just another case where the null hypothesis happens to be more credible than the hypothesis.
I was listening to a foreign policy expert on the radio explaining why Muammar Ghadaffi was able to control Libya so easily. He said that the easiest kind of country for a despot to rule is a rich country with a small population. Libya's petroleum based per capita GDP of almost $14K ($13,800 to be exact) puts it ahead of some European countries.
It's not a simple deterministic equation of small population, big GDP == despotism; it's that oppression costs like anything else. Small populations are more affordable for a despot to oppress, and in small, rich ones it's cost effective. When wealth comes out of the ground rather than out of the people, there are no downsides to shooting random people or disappearing the more talented and outspoken ones.
Now here's the interesting thought that occurred to me. Is it possible that if a nation becomes sufficiently wealthy, that that enable attacks on liberty regardless of the size of that nation? Is it possible that if a nation accumulates enough wealth, that there is an incentive to extract that wealth in a way that may be different in its mechanism than extracting oil or gold, but similar in effect?
The problem with many neat sounding water recycling schemes is that they ignore a basic fact exploited by all large scale water works: water flows downhill. Furthermore, we build large centralized water treatment facilities because of economy of scale. If economy of scale didn't come into play, you'd make every individual dwelling treat its wastewater rather than letting it discharge contaminated water into a common sewer. That leaves these wonderful schemes stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. The cost of hundreds of small treatment plants is bound to be greater than one giant plant. Keep in mind that when Boston built such a giant plant a couple decades ago, it cost just shy of four billion dollars.
It's not issues of physical feasibility that prevent many cool sounding public works projects from happening; it's economic feasibility. I don't mean in a "gee our water bill went up by $20 a month" way, I mean in a "gee we're spending 20% of our income on water" way. Closed loop is ultimately the way to go, and the water flows downhill thing means that it ought to be done on smaller scales like a city block or housing development. But we won't see such things happen until cities have grown to the point where they simply can't find any more water and people *do* spend almost as much on water as housing.
Well before the point where we start doing fancy things to combine and un-combine crap with drinking water, it'd make a lot more sense just to convert to composting toilets. These are nothing like an outhouse or porta-johnnie. My wife's architect uncle (who was a hippie before the word was invented) had one in his house, and it was *less* smelly than an ordinary toilet. You throw in pee, poop, table scraps and the occasional handful of sawdust (for body) in one end, and it emerges from the other end a few months later as rich, beautiful, not-at-all-disgusting compost. You can buy small capacity models (serving 1-2 adults) for as little as $2000 these days. It's not by any means an insane investment, but only if you care about externalities. The seven thousand gallons per year such a toilet saves cost the average American less than $15. That's why you're most likely to find a composting toilet in national parks where providing an disposing of several gallons of water per day per visitor is impractical.
In any case, I don't think sewage is as big a source of methane as you think it is. I've read about some sewage treatment plants that are partially powered by methane, which is a good thing, but compared to the energy use of all the people contributing to that methane, it's not a significant energy savings. More important is to capture the nitrogen in the wastewater as fertilizer, as some wastewater agencies do.
Still photos, but of shorter wavelength. Shorter wavelength == finer resolution.
Imagine you are blindfolded and are trying to determine the shape of some three dimensional object that you can't touch. You'd get a finer picture of the thing if you probed it with the tip of a pencil than if you felt it through a boxing glove.
Although the psychological phenomenon you note exists and no doubt comes into play in the politics of nuclear power, that doesn't mean that critiques of nuclear power are necessarily irrational. There can be rational bases for opposition as well. I'll note four here, but first let me state that I am for increasing the use of nuclear power. If you can't treat reasonable objections as reasonable, you have no hope of winning over people you disagree with.
First objection: while the average risk of loss from a nuclear accident is low, the average is not a good measure to use because the risk is not evenly distributed. Consider Fukushima. On a global scale, its reduction of well-being to the *average* human being is probably too small to measure. For those lived or had a business within 20km of Fukushima, the impact on their lives is huge. Of course anthropogenic climate change is probably worse, however using the *average* risk imposed by climate change makes more sense because it's impossible to pin any one meteorological event on climate change.
Second objection: risk estimates provided by the nuclear power industry are questionable. While nuclear accidents are exceedingly rare, the unhappy corollary is that you can't really know for sure how any design will actually function in these rare events. This is no mere appeal to ignorance as the Fukushima disaster demonstrates. The initial weeks of the event were a parade of unexpected developments with (at the time) no clear explanation. This points to a less robust understanding of system behavior under disaster conditions than is typically boasted. At the very least this argues for putting some fat error bars around any risk estimates put forth by designers of nuclear plants. Fukushima tells us that we should revisit the notion that redundant safety systems == failsafe. Otherwise independent safety systems can unexpectedly share the same single point of failure: the management that maintains them. That undermines the independent event assumption used to arrive at a risk figure.
Third concern: problems, other than radiological disaster, entailed with further pursuit of nuclear power. Examples include weapons proliferation, plant decommissioning, and nuclear waste management. These are all technologically manageable concerns, but that we have not addressed them yet shows they may be politically unmanageable. There is not much practical difference between problems we can't manage and problems we *won't*.
Fourth concern: if we let our future become dependent upon nuclear technology, any critical examination of that technology becomes politically intolerable. This, by the way, is why I'm *for* developing and fielding new reactor designs. I believe greater use of nuclear power is bound to happen in the mid-term. Better that we get started now in a modest way before critiquing a widely used design brands you as a Luddite.
If we had a perfect, critical examination of risks of far greater reliance on nuclear power, it would almost certainly show that even in the worst case it poses a risk that is within a range overlapping many risks we take for granted. Automobiles, in fact, are far worse than anything we can expect from future nuclear plants. They're practically an ongoing holocaust, but we accept them because of their obvious benefits. If we could get the risk of automobile use down to the risk of ubiquitous nuclear power, that would be an unheard of improvement. But that doesn't mean that a critique of nuclear safety is on the face of it *irrational*. The parallel with cars is worth examining, but it is far from an exact. As of yet we don't have any acceptable substitute for them. We haven't reached that point with nuclear power. That's why now is a good time work out the kinks in the technology.
I was going to point out Scripps' awesome FLIP platform, which works on the same principle. You start what amounts to a long section of pipe, flood one end of the pipe. When it flips into the vertical position you have a floating stanchion whose buoyancy is dominated by the part that's well below the level of wave action. Of course the submersible part of FLIP is some 100m long, but for the purposes of launching a rocket the platform probably doesn't have to be as stable as FLIP.
IIRC, the Copenhagen Suborbitals group used a submarine they'd successfully designed and built as a tug to position their launch platform. From that I'd have to conclude they have the engineering capability to produce an inertially stable launch platform. If they haven't, it's most likely because it's not needed for this vehicle and mission.
Well, in science even what "everyone knows" doesn't count until it's published and somebody's rivals can kick the crap out it. A necessary first step to getting beyond common sense is putting common sense to the test. Sometimes common sense is just wrong. If you flip a coin and get heads three times in a row, your chance of getting a head on the next flip is 50%. Rockets with motors on the top aren't more stable than ones with motors on the bottom, and disconnecting the front brakes of a tractor trailer truck doesn't make it more stable in a dynamic braking situation.
The list of mathematical or physical common sense intuitions that are provably wrong is long. With issues of psychology it's a lot harder to put commonsense notions to the test, because they involve fuzzily defined concepts, like "personality".
Since the first step is disproving common sense, no doubt disproof is sometimes found simply because people are looking for it. So what is "unexpected" in the literature might well be predicted by common sense. Science doesn't pile up truths like a stack of coconuts; it approaches the truth by successive approximations.
Well, tobacco is a special case, because it's been a target of moralists for centuries. It reminds me of Lord Macaulay's *History of England* in which he remarks that Cromwell's religiously fanatical government condemned bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. [I highly recommend that book, by the way; it may not be the most up to date historical view of the English Civil War, but it remains the most entertaining.]
Consequently there have been those all along who have been eager to promote the idea that tobacco is bad for your health, long before there was a shred of scientific evidence for this. They promoted this view entirely on the basis that it would be awfully convenient to their moral agenda were it to be true. It so happens they were right about tobacco, but wrong about masturbation and marijuana.
The early 20th C saw the first clinical suspicion of a link between tobacco and lung cancer, with early scientific evidence emerging in the late 20s. It was in the mid 50s when the evidence became overwhelming, but it wasn't until the 70s that the public was largely won over. I think the cultural association of anti-tobacco propaganda with priggish, interfering moral busybodies actually delayed acceptance of the scientific evidence by decades. That objection of errant moral priggery still alive today, and not entirely without reason: meddling in private morality is as popular today as it's ever been any time in the last century.
Except the spokesman, whether or not he is speaking truthfully, is describing the way things *should* be. Policies and procedures should not be built around the assumption that everything *works*. They should assume that at any given time something or things might not be working.
Anyone familiar with MySQL's permissions systems knows that one of the niftier things about it is that you can differentiate between the rights you give a user depending on the IP address or network his session originates from. You may only allow certain things to be done (typically administrative things) if the user is physically working on a specific machine (typically the server host). Of course it's up to you to think through whether you should allow ssh access to that machine. But this is an example of the philosophy I'm talking about. You don't assume that credentials (e.g., user name and password) can be relied upon without fail. You assume they're going to fail, and make the tradeoff between convenience (authorizing everything based on credentials alone) and security (only allowing admins to log in from the physical server) accordingly.
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makes increasing our use of nukes more attractive. Fuel is going to be cheaper. When other nations start getting back into nuclear power to help cope with rising petroleum costs, our nuclear engineering industry will have a leg up with a new generation of safer designs.
We are assuming better designs, aren't we? Or are we entertaining the possibility of a crash construction program with old designs from the 1970s? If that's the case we'd be better off taking a pass along with everyone else.
Actually, the short answer is "yes". The long answer is "We could certainly phase out nuclear power with some economic sacrifice, but in the first place 'could we?' is the wrong question. The right question is 'should we?'"
Unfortunately, the answers to questions like "*should we*" tend to start with "It depends." Then they go on to raise a whole new set of questions like "What kinds of nuclear plants will we build to replace the existing ones as they are retired?" Not at all pithy, I'm afraid.
I once had this problem because of a collection agency. The problem was that they were robo-calling my cell phone two or three times a day. They left no contact information other than a website and voicemail phone number, both of which *only* had options for paying bills, not reporting errors. Using the domain registration data I finally discovered the name of the law firm that owned the collection agency. I called them up and told them the problem, but the calls continued. Finally threatened to sic the state attorney general's office on them, One of the benefits of living in the business "unfriendly" People's Republic of Massachusetts is that the AG's consumer affairs office isn't afraid to kick a little butt, especially on an out of state company. That got their attention and the robo calls stopped, but if they'd used one of the domain registration anonymity services I'd have have been SOL.
Usually when a company announces plans for a whizbang new campus, it's bad news for the stockholders.
I have a friend who many years ago worked for a high tech company that planned a beautiful new Utopian campus. For various reasons they were forced to reduce the size of the project. They decided to house management and marketing at the luxurious new campus and stick the engineers miles away in a big box full of cubicles. As for the engineers, keeping management and marketing out of their hair on a day to day basis easily made up for having to work in a giant cubicle farm. The downside was that management lost touch and began demanding silly things and not taking engineering advice seriously. The subsequent poor performance of the company turned the showcase campus into an expensive fiasco. The campus was abandoned a few years later when the company was forced to sell out to a competitor.
It sounds like Apple is doing the opposite here, bringing people who have to work together in a very nice environment. I'll bet there'll be ideas generated and knowledge transferred on strolls through this campus that wouldn't have happened in a formal meeting that required a drive across town. This really looks like a case for what architects often claim but seldom achieve: making buildings that work for the people who use them.
Weird. I posted that article and nine years laster people are still linking to it.
I think it's more likely that he screwed up by not anticipating this question. That's a blunder, of course, and may reflect a little hubris if he thought he had a couple of slam-dunk arguments. If he had a few minutes he probably could have come up with a concrete example, but you don't get a few minutes to think because hostile justices will continue peppering you with questions.
Well judging from the summary, the issue isn't copyright extension, but *retroactive* copyright extension. Taking a work that is *already* in the public domain away from the public domain entails many issues that don't arise when simply extending copyright. So one who believes in copyright extension might reasonably object to *retroactive* copyright extension. For example it restricts the property rights of people who, in good faith, make legal copies and derivative works while a work is in the public domain.
We can judge how sincere the "original intent" crowd is by how they treat this issue. I can't imagine that the framers ever intended for works to be removed from the public domain. Still, I suspect we'll see retroactive extension upheld, given that the two biggest logical extensions to Congress's Constitutional powers have already been accepted, namely (1) de facto perpetual copyright through unlimited rounds of copyright extension and (2) granting copyright to current copyright holders rather than to authors and inventors as explicitly granted in Article 1, Section 8. If you can accept that, that this in effect makes some public domain works to risky to use is a mere practical detail.
I think you need to develop an ontology of geekdom. The root class (the union of all kinds of geeks) are people whose interests are incomprehensible to most people. Beneath that overarching class that you have
(a) geeks that do unusual things
(b) geeks that know unusual things
(c) geeks that create unusual things
Membership in just one of these subclasses qualifies you as a geek, although naturally the subclasses overlap. To illustrate, let's take the Society for Creative Anachronism. Participating in SCA events qualifies you a geek that does. Knowing the history of Medieval fashion qualifies you as a geek who knows. And if you make medieval clothing that qualifies you as a geek who creates. If you sew your own costume based on your own research, then wear it to an SCA event, you're a hat trick geek.
Is an intellectual somebody who has memorized a lot of information, or is it somebody who is adept at learning?
Neither condition is sufficient or even strictly necessary. Somebody can be adept at learning and as a consequence have a great deal of knowledge at his fingertips, but that doesn't make him an intellectual. If he is just a passive recipient of information (a follower of an ideology say), he's not an intellectual. If he pursues knowledge purely for its practical utility (e.g. it will make him a lot of money), he's not an intellectual, although he may be quite bright and knowledgeable.
I would say that an intellectual is an active, critical participant in some culture of ideas. What I am calling a "culture of ideas" is a community of people who collectively develop and refine ideas in some field. The ideas can (and usually do) have utility, but they are valued by the community for their own sake, provided that they are consistent with the overall framework of ideas in that community. As an active, critical participant in a culture of ideas, an intellectual transforms, rejects, refines and adds to its body of ideas. Although he doesn't necessarily contribute his work back, if given a chance to he will at least debate the merits.
Suppose you are in a group that's into the design of programming languages. Chances are some of you are intellectuals by virtue of *how* you participate in the group, others are not. If you are exclusively interested in collecting knowledge so that you will know that language X supports some feature in case you ever have to use X, you're just a geek but not an intellectual. If you fancy yourself something of a philosopher of programming languages then you're a geek *and* an intellectual, although not necessarily more knowledgeable than your simple geek colleagues. The topic of programming languages is a utilitarian one, but your interest and participation transcends utility. Consider this test: imagine somebody created a programming language, not for actual use, but to prove a point. Would you consider learning that language?
An intellectual is necessarily a geek, since he has consuming interests that are incomprehensible to most people. But not all geeks are necessarily intellectuals. Mere collectors or conduits of information are not intellectuals, no matter how impressive the collection or compelling the presentation.
Still, I'd want to see evidence establishing that this technique is reliable before giving much credence to such expert testimony. For all we know people who are committing fraud commit more punctuation mistakes, or write more formally. If you can't show that this methodology has support in the peer reviewed literature, it's just amateur forensic speculation.
I count only one metaphor, and one pleonasm. I would say a "redundant pleonasm" were this not such an irony-deficient world.
Why would the Chinese do that unless they are aware of the attack being carried out by their army/govt.
Well, I'll take a shot at this: Because they are paranoid about keeping up appearances. Remember the little girl who wasn't telegenic enough to sing at the Olympics ceremonies? Paranoia is by definition irrational. Reasonable concern over one's image and sensible steps to protect one's reputation don't count as paranoia.
I'm not saying the government isn't behind what happened. In fact, in a crony-capitalist government ruled by political expediency rather than law, there is a lot of willful turning of blind eyes to dodgy but politically or personally useful things.
I'd say she was as wrong on the essential facts as she could possibly without being entirely wrong. Gage wasn't after the individual colonists' arms (which were usually supplied by the militiaman and could reasonably be referred to as "our arms"). He was after the public stores of powder and arms stockpiled by local governments (or rather provisional governments).
In Palin's favor, General Gage was attempting to preempt an armed insurrection, and taking away the guns of the militiamen *would* have that effect *had he attempted that*. And had it been practical he surely would have done so, but Gage was no fool. He was trying to prevent insurrection without provoking the colonists any further than they had been already. His strategy was to quietly send task forces of regulars to seize public stockpiles of powder. The colonists weren't fools either, and they set up an early warning system to notify local militia of any such actions. The rest as they say, is history. Gage, attempting to evade the colonists' preparations, launched his Concord expedition well before dawn. That is how the colonists hit upon the lantern signal.
Here's the most compelling reason to view Palin as essentially wrong: she cast the conflict as one of preserving individual rights to bear arms, whereas the actual historical conflict was unquestionably triggered by disputes over *collective rights*. Parliament passed the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, abolishing many local self-government practices that were uncommon in the empire but had been long standing practice in Massachusetts. This included things like the appointment of magistrates by local government. Six months before the battle Gage sent crown appointed magistrates to Worcester, where they were run out of town by the local militia. This in turn touched off the dispute over powder stockpiles.
The groups stockpiling the powder did not view themselves as voluntary associations of private individuals. They functioned as de facto provisional governments with the authority to compel anyone to military service. This of course brings up the old dispute about the nature of the Second Amendment, in which one side claims it was about an individual right to bear arms, and another claims it is about a community right to form militias. I think the Battle of Lexington and Concord shows that both sides are talking hooey. The dichotomy doesn't even make sense in an Eighteenth Century context.
Of course "essentially right" is in the eye of the beholder. I don't think she was making a political argument buttressed by historical facts. She was appealing to love of personal liberty. Invoking Revere as a symbol of resistance to tyranny is *essentially right*. Invoking him as a symbol against *gun control* specifically is at best a wild historical extrapolation of what he *might* have thought.
We have such a law. It's called the 14th Amendment, without which the states would be free to do all kinds of things that infringe on Americans' rights. Here's the relevant bit:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Now the police can arrest these folks. They can (in certain circumstances) even kick the crap out of them. But they can't kick the crap out of them with the intent of denying them liberty or due process. Suppose there were a law that forbade videotaping the cops. Even *if* that law were to pass 14th Amendment scrutiny, the cops can't act as judge, jury and executioner. They'd have to confiscate the video, then prove it is illegal in a court of law.
The picture emerges is of a person who often had an important point to raise, but was more than a little creepy.
His antics as a resident aren't disturbing because they involve a dead body; they're disturbing because they involved a *live patient*. What is more, he seems utterly incapable of questioning the wisdom and ethics of doing something to a patient just to satisfy his curiosity. In fact he seems a little self-righteous about the whole affair, as if they *only* basis to objecting to the procedure is moral cowardice. As Aristotle would point out, the opposite of cowardice is rashness, not bravery; bravery is the reasonable mid-point between the vicious extremes.
So it wasn't Dr. Kevorkian's suicide machine that was scary, it was the man himself. He married a narrow-minded moral narcissism to a fascination with using human beings as experimental animals. I sometimes wonder whether he built the machine just because he was curious to see it in operation. As a pathologist he didn't deal with patients at all -- just tissues. An oncologist might be driven to build the machine because he saw the suffering of his patients; for Dr. Kevorkian the motivation came from someplace else, at best some place more abstract, at worst ... who knows? It has no bearing on the validity of his views about euthanasia or human experimentation. Those ideas should stand or fall on their own merits.
Nonetheless he was a fascinating and somewhat disturbing character. Maybe it takes a character like that to see the medical ethics emperor has no clothes, but I'm more comfortable with somebody who occasionally sees two sides to a complex issue.
While I agree with your conclusions, I don't think much of your arguments. In some cases they are red herrings (the amount of solar radiation received over the entire earth's surface is impressive, but irrelevant; the list of red herrings goes on). In other cases they are factually wrong (cell phones do not emit on a single frequency) or imply things that are factually wrong (e.g. that we get more radiation from the Sun in the 1.8GHz band than we would from regular cell phone use). The claim that physics rules out *any* possible interaction is overstated to the point it becomes unsupportable. It would be better to say that physics rules out the easily hypothesized mechanisms of causation. In absence of any proof a link exists, that's more than enough justification to doubt; but if a link were demonstrated to exist then we'd be forced to look for causes that were more plausible.
That, by the way, is where the proof of any cell phone/brain cancer link actually fails: demonstrable existence.The case *against* the link hypothesis amounts to this:
(A) the claim is based on a meta-study and doesn't control for confounding factors enough to be conclusive.
(B) the reasoning and evidence supporting the claim is preliminary, and further scrutiny is certain to reveal methodological flaws (this is true even when the conclusion eventually pans out, but not all conclusions do).
(C) were the link to be proven, it would point to significant holes in our knowledge in areas of physics or anatomy where we are pretty confident there are no such holes.
Taken together, this is strong justification to doubt the hypothesis. I'd go further than that and say that were it not for the panic invoked by reporting, this probably wouldn't be worth pursuing. But do we have something that could be called disproof? I don't think so. The world is full of possibilities like this; things we can't categorically rule out, but which we have no compelling reason to believe.
This is just another case where the null hypothesis happens to be more credible than the hypothesis.
I was listening to a foreign policy expert on the radio explaining why Muammar Ghadaffi was able to control Libya so easily. He said that the easiest kind of country for a despot to rule is a rich country with a small population. Libya's petroleum based per capita GDP of almost $14K ($13,800 to be exact) puts it ahead of some European countries.
It's not a simple deterministic equation of small population, big GDP == despotism; it's that oppression costs like anything else. Small populations are more affordable for a despot to oppress, and in small, rich ones it's cost effective. When wealth comes out of the ground rather than out of the people, there are no downsides to shooting random people or disappearing the more talented and outspoken ones.
Now here's the interesting thought that occurred to me. Is it possible that if a nation becomes sufficiently wealthy, that that enable attacks on liberty regardless of the size of that nation? Is it possible that if a nation accumulates enough wealth, that there is an incentive to extract that wealth in a way that may be different in its mechanism than extracting oil or gold, but similar in effect?
The problem with many neat sounding water recycling schemes is that they ignore a basic fact exploited by all large scale water works: water flows downhill. Furthermore, we build large centralized water treatment facilities because of economy of scale. If economy of scale didn't come into play, you'd make every individual dwelling treat its wastewater rather than letting it discharge contaminated water into a common sewer. That leaves these wonderful schemes stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. The cost of hundreds of small treatment plants is bound to be greater than one giant plant. Keep in mind that when Boston built such a giant plant a couple decades ago, it cost just shy of four billion dollars.
It's not issues of physical feasibility that prevent many cool sounding public works projects from happening; it's economic feasibility. I don't mean in a "gee our water bill went up by $20 a month" way, I mean in a "gee we're spending 20% of our income on water" way. Closed loop is ultimately the way to go, and the water flows downhill thing means that it ought to be done on smaller scales like a city block or housing development. But we won't see such things happen until cities have grown to the point where they simply can't find any more water and people *do* spend almost as much on water as housing.
Well before the point where we start doing fancy things to combine and un-combine crap with drinking water, it'd make a lot more sense just to convert to composting toilets. These are nothing like an outhouse or porta-johnnie. My wife's architect uncle (who was a hippie before the word was invented) had one in his house, and it was *less* smelly than an ordinary toilet. You throw in pee, poop, table scraps and the occasional handful of sawdust (for body) in one end, and it emerges from the other end a few months later as rich, beautiful, not-at-all-disgusting compost. You can buy small capacity models (serving 1-2 adults) for as little as $2000 these days. It's not by any means an insane investment, but only if you care about externalities. The seven thousand gallons per year such a toilet saves cost the average American less than $15. That's why you're most likely to find a composting toilet in national parks where providing an disposing of several gallons of water per day per visitor is impractical.
In any case, I don't think sewage is as big a source of methane as you think it is. I've read about some sewage treatment plants that are partially powered by methane, which is a good thing, but compared to the energy use of all the people contributing to that methane, it's not a significant energy savings. More important is to capture the nitrogen in the wastewater as fertilizer, as some wastewater agencies do.
Still photos, but of shorter wavelength. Shorter wavelength == finer resolution.
Imagine you are blindfolded and are trying to determine the shape of some three dimensional object that you can't touch. You'd get a finer picture of the thing if you probed it with the tip of a pencil than if you felt it through a boxing glove.
Although the psychological phenomenon you note exists and no doubt comes into play in the politics of nuclear power, that doesn't mean that critiques of nuclear power are necessarily irrational. There can be rational bases for opposition as well. I'll note four here, but first let me state that I am for increasing the use of nuclear power. If you can't treat reasonable objections as reasonable, you have no hope of winning over people you disagree with.
First objection: while the average risk of loss from a nuclear accident is low, the average is not a good measure to use because the risk is not evenly distributed. Consider Fukushima. On a global scale, its reduction of well-being to the *average* human being is probably too small to measure. For those lived or had a business within 20km of Fukushima, the impact on their lives is huge. Of course anthropogenic climate change is probably worse, however using the *average* risk imposed by climate change makes more sense because it's impossible to pin any one meteorological event on climate change.
Second objection: risk estimates provided by the nuclear power industry are questionable. While nuclear accidents are exceedingly rare, the unhappy corollary is that you can't really know for sure how any design will actually function in these rare events. This is no mere appeal to ignorance as the Fukushima disaster demonstrates. The initial weeks of the event were a parade of unexpected developments with (at the time) no clear explanation. This points to a less robust understanding of system behavior under disaster conditions than is typically boasted. At the very least this argues for putting some fat error bars around any risk estimates put forth by designers of nuclear plants. Fukushima tells us that we should revisit the notion that redundant safety systems == failsafe. Otherwise independent safety systems can unexpectedly share the same single point of failure: the management that maintains them. That undermines the independent event assumption used to arrive at a risk figure.
Third concern: problems, other than radiological disaster, entailed with further pursuit of nuclear power. Examples include weapons proliferation, plant decommissioning, and nuclear waste management. These are all technologically manageable concerns, but that we have not addressed them yet shows they may be politically unmanageable. There is not much practical difference between problems we can't manage and problems we *won't*.
Fourth concern: if we let our future become dependent upon nuclear technology, any critical examination of that technology becomes politically intolerable. This, by the way, is why I'm *for* developing and fielding new reactor designs. I believe greater use of nuclear power is bound to happen in the mid-term. Better that we get started now in a modest way before critiquing a widely used design brands you as a Luddite.
If we had a perfect, critical examination of risks of far greater reliance on nuclear power, it would almost certainly show that even in the worst case it poses a risk that is within a range overlapping many risks we take for granted. Automobiles, in fact, are far worse than anything we can expect from future nuclear plants. They're practically an ongoing holocaust, but we accept them because of their obvious benefits. If we could get the risk of automobile use down to the risk of ubiquitous nuclear power, that would be an unheard of improvement. But that doesn't mean that a critique of nuclear safety is on the face of it *irrational*. The parallel with cars is worth examining, but it is far from an exact. As of yet we don't have any acceptable substitute for them. We haven't reached that point with nuclear power. That's why now is a good time work out the kinks in the technology.
I was going to point out Scripps' awesome FLIP platform, which works on the same principle. You start what amounts to a long section of pipe, flood one end of the pipe. When it flips into the vertical position you have a floating stanchion whose buoyancy is dominated by the part that's well below the level of wave action. Of course the submersible part of FLIP is some 100m long, but for the purposes of launching a rocket the platform probably doesn't have to be as stable as FLIP.
IIRC, the Copenhagen Suborbitals group used a submarine they'd successfully designed and built as a tug to position their launch platform. From that I'd have to conclude they have the engineering capability to produce an inertially stable launch platform. If they haven't, it's most likely because it's not needed for this vehicle and mission.
Well, if we accept the results of this study, then we'd have to conclude that having "normal" preferences like yours technically makes you a pervert.
Well, in science even what "everyone knows" doesn't count until it's published and somebody's rivals can kick the crap out it. A necessary first step to getting beyond common sense is putting common sense to the test. Sometimes common sense is just wrong. If you flip a coin and get heads three times in a row, your chance of getting a head on the next flip is 50%. Rockets with motors on the top aren't more stable than ones with motors on the bottom, and disconnecting the front brakes of a tractor trailer truck doesn't make it more stable in a dynamic braking situation.
The list of mathematical or physical common sense intuitions that are provably wrong is long. With issues of psychology it's a lot harder to put commonsense notions to the test, because they involve fuzzily defined concepts, like "personality".
Since the first step is disproving common sense, no doubt disproof is sometimes found simply because people are looking for it. So what is "unexpected" in the literature might well be predicted by common sense. Science doesn't pile up truths like a stack of coconuts; it approaches the truth by successive approximations.
Well, tobacco is a special case, because it's been a target of moralists for centuries. It reminds me of Lord Macaulay's *History of England* in which he remarks that Cromwell's religiously fanatical government condemned bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. [I highly recommend that book, by the way; it may not be the most up to date historical view of the English Civil War, but it remains the most entertaining.]
Consequently there have been those all along who have been eager to promote the idea that tobacco is bad for your health, long before there was a shred of scientific evidence for this. They promoted this view entirely on the basis that it would be awfully convenient to their moral agenda were it to be true. It so happens they were right about tobacco, but wrong about masturbation and marijuana.
The early 20th C saw the first clinical suspicion of a link between tobacco and lung cancer, with early scientific evidence emerging in the late 20s. It was in the mid 50s when the evidence became overwhelming, but it wasn't until the 70s that the public was largely won over. I think the cultural association of anti-tobacco propaganda with priggish, interfering moral busybodies actually delayed acceptance of the scientific evidence by decades. That objection of errant moral priggery still alive today, and not entirely without reason: meddling in private morality is as popular today as it's ever been any time in the last century.
Except the spokesman, whether or not he is speaking truthfully, is describing the way things *should* be. Policies and procedures should not be built around the assumption that everything *works*. They should assume that at any given time something or things might not be working.
Anyone familiar with MySQL's permissions systems knows that one of the niftier things about it is that you can differentiate between the rights you give a user depending on the IP address or network his session originates from. You may only allow certain things to be done (typically administrative things) if the user is physically working on a specific machine (typically the server host). Of course it's up to you to think through whether you should allow ssh access to that machine. But this is an example of the philosophy I'm talking about. You don't assume that credentials (e.g., user name and password) can be relied upon without fail. You assume they're going to fail, and make the tradeoff between convenience (authorizing everything based on credentials alone) and security (only allowing admins to log in from the physical server) accordingly.