Well I don't know if/. is *supposed* to be libertarian, it's supposed to be geek, and geeks come from all over the political space.
I agree, go after the employers. In fact, I'd say go after the employers *first*, because they're linchpin of the whole hypocritical system. If you can't justify going after the employers, you can't justify going after the workers. If you can't justify others, the immigration laws are simply irrational. No employers hiring illegals means no more undocumented workers. It's that simple.
It's nuts that we coddle employers who hire undocumented workers for "creating wealth" while we criminalize the people do the actual work. If you're a Mexican living in what amounts to a hole in the ground with no running water -- in fact no clean water at all -- and come to the US so your family can have a roof over their head, you're a criminal. Well, maybe, but that's just a technicality if we make hiring you *de facto* legal. I can't get all enthusiastic about punishing you, or even sending you back to Mexico. Not while we turn a blind eye to the guy who hires you instead of an American and pockets the difference in wages.
What we're doing is criminalizing your desire to work harder and better yourself, then creating a system where unethical people can profit by exploiting your "illegal" status to offer you low wages and to skirt other laws because you're too afraid to stand up for yourself. Until we can treat the people who knowing benefit from undocumented workers as equally criminal, treating the undocumented as criminals simply advertises our hypocrisy. It sends a clear message: we want your labor, we just don't what to catch you.
Sure, if we have immigration laws, it makes sense to enforce them. If they're bad laws, if we're dependent on these immigrants, that'll force us to stop being hypocrites and change the law. This is bipartisan hypocrisy, by the way. The Democrats rail against the racism of enforcing immigration laws, but they don't change the laws because that'll make their union supporters mad.
And yes, we all have seen people who are almost certainly illegals around, so why not do the obvious thing and ask for their papers?
Because there are legal people who look and sound just like "obviously illegals."
So it all boils down to this question: is the inconvenience to the illegal-looking legals justified by the public good this law does? What amazes me is the people who are not going to bear that inconvenience dismissing it as trivial. How could anyone say something that arrogant with a straight face?
Look, you want me to say this is rasonable law? OK, here's how to change it. Make it apply to *everyone*. Everybody has to produce proof of legal residency, and no cheating about what kinds they have to produce. If a driver's license is acceptable for a white guy, it's acceptable for everyone.
*MANDATE THAT EVERYONE GETS THE SAME TREATMENT.*
Support a law like that, and I won't call you a hypocrite.
It doesn't just give the police powers. It gives them a legal duty to check the papers of somebody where there is reasonable suspicion. If I read correctly, they don't have to have a reason to stop somebody, suspicion *is* an adequate reason.
Now what is the definition of "reasonable suspicion"? For that matter, who gets to define "reasonable suspicion"? Well the law also allows anyone to sue their local police department if they think the police aren't being aggressive enough. So *anyone* can bend the local cop's definition of "reasonable" if he's motivated enough. This doesn't just give power to the police to enforce immigration laws -- it puts the interpretation of what immigration law might be in the hands of anyone with an ax to grind, regardless of their motives, educational qualifications, moral character or sanity.
I understand that's not the intent most people who support the law have. I understand they want the rule of law. But they're missing the most fundamental benefit of the rule of law: if a man stays on the broad and well defined highway of "legality", nobody can harass or interfere with him as he goes about his business.
The problem I see with this legislation is that to catch some law breakers, it undermines the most important reason the rest of us should support lawfulness. Does what somebody looks or sounds like have *any* part in determining "reasonable suspicion"? If it does, the people who "look illegal" are no longer safe from interference, even if they stay on the straight and narrow. That's the reason for the "ridiculous situation" of the "obvious illegals" not getting their asses arrested. It's not to protect the illegals. It's to protected the legals from any blockhead who might think they *look illegal*.
If you can decompose *look illegal* into a clear, objective set of criteria that reliably excludes people who are loegal, then this isn't a problem. But I don't think you can.
Now I'm a person of part Asian descent, born in the US to American citizen parents. I'm also brown skinned and I'm sometimes mistaken for a Latino. I used to do a lot of business and pleasure travel in Arizona, but not any more. It's not that I can't handle some bigoted cop who thinks I "look illegal". It's that I do not care to do business in a state where I'm a second class citizen because of the color of my skin, even if the second class citizenship is almost as good as first class citizenship.
You see, what you're asking is like "how do I handle all the fame and adulation after I become a rock star?" The hard part is finding good people. If you can find 'em, they're worth training because they're *trainable*.
So if you've got somebody who can do a great job and adds to the team, but doesn't know what the hell phishing is, don't worry about that. You can teach a good hire what phishing is. You can't teach a bad hire who knows what phishing is to be a good employee.
My presentation philosophy: the presentation is NOT the powerpoint document. It's me talking in a way that makes a point.
The powerpoint is there to give them something more interesting to look at than me, to help them keep track of what point we're on, and sometimes to provide an illustration or diagram.
If I have to alter what I'm going to say so it can fit powerpoint slides, I'll just hand out a stack of bumperstickers.
I don't know. Looking at what was reported, it looks like the pope said three things:
1) The new media gives more kinds of people a soap box. That is more egalitarian and pluralistic.
2) One side effect is to inflame the divisions between nations and people are inflamed.
3) Some people use their soapbox to promote moral relativism.
I think he's on solid ground on (1) and (2). Giving everyone a soapbox means the crazies and haters get one too. It's also the Era of Sorting. Back in the day, you had to live with people who had different opinions from you. One of the unexpected side effects of "virtual communities" is that it's never been easier to surround yourself with people who think just like you do. It's never been easier to transition from eccentric to full blown kook.
On (3), well, I don't think that statement means anything. I'm sure he's not talking about serious philosophical positions on the nature of ethics. I suspect he's talking about opinions he doesn't like.
The official Catholic position on morality is that it isn't based on divine commandment. That goes all the way back to Plato. But there's a huge loophole in this position: Human reason is inferior to Divine Wisdom, so while God's moral commandments have an objective justification, that justification isn't necessarily obvious.
That said, this is not the most opportune time to assert the Church's "magisterium". When the church can show it holds itself to at least basic, civilized standards of ethical behavior, it will be able to talk about "moral relativism" without provoking snickers.
The problem is that you don't know the difference between data and information. Information is what you get when you can cross reference two pieces of data.
Sure that existence of a person with first name "Joe" and last name "Shmoe" with phone number "555-1234" is public infomration. but as soon as you can connect that with another otherwise unconnected piece of public information (say the going price of a blow up love doll), you've got more information than the sum of the parts.
This, by the way, makes the ease and scope of data access a big issue. Take some information which is a public record -- say court records. Public access is not only benign, it's a good thing that anyone can walk down to the courthouse and get the transcript of a trial.
Now imagine you've got all the court records in the country accessible and indexed. You data mine them for people who meet certain profiles you've developed, then cross reference them with marketing databases that tell you all the trackable purchases they've made -- and that's probably most of them. You filter again and you spring for a background check on a couple of dozen. By looking at all the data sources you have on those couple of dozen people, you probably know things about them that their close friends don't. You may even know things about them they don't know themselves.
Somebody's phone number and address is a public record, but it's in a small, locally distributed database (the phone book) for the purpose of helping his friends and acquaintances can look him up. Turn that phone book into a database and suddenly the deal has changed. There's new applications for that data that weren't part of the original decision to have a listed number. The universe of new applications for that piece of expands with the size and geographic scope of the telephone database. Add cross referencing to other public records and then records the guy didn't realize were public, and the impact is much, much greater than having each of those information points available separately in small databases.
Privacy is not essentially about keeping sensitive data secret. Oh, that's important, but only a small part of the whole pictures. Privacy is really about control over your life. Many privacy concerns have little or nothing to do with sensitive information -- the neighbor who is noisy at 3AM. Other privacy concerns have to do with the impact of wrong information -- the bad record that keeps coming back like a bad penny and putting you on the TSA watch list.
But the real corker are the ways you can amass and filter data on huge volumes of people, then buy huge volumes of data about a small number of people off the shelf. That cuts both ways: there's things about you they can find out that you don't want them to know, and things about you they'll infer that won't go away. And you can't make the bad inference go away, because it's not data at all. It's the output of a model applied to "non-sensitive" data. And the people who use those models don't have incentive to fix your problem, because the model, statistically speaking, works well enough for them.
The problem is that the character is not recognizably Scotty. I'm not sure you could *make* a recognizable Scotty under the circumstances.
What was the essential thing about Scotty? It was that the Enterprise was his toy. He put up with the five year mission and the command officers running around mucking things up because that was the price he had to pay to have *all the important stuff* under his control. That's why he always lied about damage and repairs. Knowledge is power, and if he gave that to Kirk, Kirk would have kept taking and taking until nothing could get done because there'd be negative slack.
You take the Enterprise away from Scotty, and what's left?
Where the atmosphere is concerned, every model is flawed for some given value of "flaw". Sure, the dimensions of the ash plume were certainly exaggerated, but how much exaggerated and where?
Knowing you've overstated the aggregate risk to the public doesn't necessarily imply that the groundings were unnecessary, because you don't know *which* groundings averted disasters. Put another way, suppose you know that 90% some set of flights are safe, but you don't know *which* flights. Grounding 100% of those flights is necessary, even though ignoring the problem only endanger 10% of them.
If one of these events happened every year, you'd expect the people who decide these things to use the data to get more and more precise control. This is a once or twice a century event, so we can't expect to have precise information to act on. It's too bad that this is going to cost the airlines money, but in the middle of a rare, short term situation like this is not the time to question the computer models.
Sure, when everyone around you's wrong, it's understandable that you'd be wrong along with them. It's not an excuse, however.
The tendency to accept what everyone around you believes as necessarily true is one reason that the much maligned "multiculturalism" is important. People don't like that because it undermines their certainty about things, but sometimes that certainty *ought* to be undermined. Like the proverbial visitor from Mars, somebody from another culture can see things that are obviously wrong that you believe because everyone around believes too.
I remember reading a letter -- it was either from John Adams to Abigail or vice versa -- in which the writer recounts watching some maintenance task being done by a team of slaves, directed by an overseer. It went very slowly and poorly. No doubt the slave owners thought that the slaves were stupid and lazy, but what are you going to do? The job has to be done, and that's what slaves are for. It was perfectly clear to Adams that one man *working for himself* could do the work of a half dozen slaves being driven by an overseer, and do it faster and better.
There's a certain wisdom to the phrase "stick with what works", but that can be taken too far. Where would the human race be if that were our credo?
I have to agree on the packaging point... although I'm not nearly as dismissive as you appear to be. I'm impressed by the packaging of Apple products. It protects the contents without using too much material or making it hard for the consumer to open.
It's rare to find an artifact where the designer has done a really good job. *Somebody* worked hard to make that packaging so good, and deserves appreciation.
My point is you need to do a real controlled study that will determine the system's real capabilities. If you take a large enough sample you'll probably get a significant difference in mean frequency, but if you plot the spectrum the overlap will show that the dominant harmonic has little practical utility.
Your post inspired me to look up the literature on this, and the most credible papers analyze the signal spectrum, albeit usually by crude means. It may be possible to extract behavioral cues as well.
If you think about what a "species" is, it is obvious that a blanket claim of a percent accuracy in distinguishing species is scientifically meaningless. Take Culex pipiens and restuans. They are virtually identical species, and cross breed to produce viable offspring. Even if you could distinguish Cx. pipiens/restuans from a Cx species in a different subgenus, the decision to promote the distinction between pipiens and restuans to a species distinction rather than subspecies is purely arbitrary.
It would make more sense to build a matrix with species of concern on each axis. An expert could immediately tell which situation your device was useful in and which it was not.
In any case, if you want credibility, you should work with somebody at UC Davis or Rutgers and publish.
There's only one "serious" way of fighting corruption in my book: shining the light of openness on the places where corruption festers.
The exaggerated sentences are a sure sign that the regime *isn't* serious about fighting corruption. They go through the motions of "making an example" of the current offender, yet inevitably he'll have no shortage of successors.
So if the strategy doesn't work to reduce corruption, why do they keep doing it? Because it does something very useful to them. It makes the issue one of *personalities*. It's not the system that's broken, it's this apparently endless supply of bad apples. You make a show of punishing a bad apple, and that convinces the people that the higher-ups are honest men. If those men control the media, the police and the courts, how could they fail to create that impression?
When a wicked rebel finally overthrows the government, he immediately becomes the duly constituted government and the officials of the former government become criminals. That is the law of the medieval thinker. It is not *our* conception of law, except possibly international law. Our concept of law is not about personalities. It is a set of common rules that at once bind all of us and free us. Our ideal of law is not order or preservation of the current regime, it is this: so long as a man stays on the clearly marked road of legality, he is utterly unassailable. Granted our laws fall short of that, but that is overwhelming what we expect from the law, even if we don't expect perfection.
In China, the law is more vaguely drawn. It's brilliant in a way, because when you can't be sure when you've broken it you curb your behavior, but it's not law in our sense at all. It's just power.
The higher ups in the Chinese Communist Party are honest men in the same way the rebel who seizes power and recreates the old regime with a different cast of personalities is an honest man. At any point in time, these men are "honest" for a certain value of "honest" -- a value that they get to define to suit their interests at the moment.
What the Communist Party has done is give up on any pretense of socialism, replacing it by a pretense of a free market. You can't have a free market without a free society, and you can't have a free society without real laws. China is huge and full of talented people who would flourish under the rule of law. But the party only has to improve on its history of miserable failure to make things better. They can eliminate some of the things they did that were holding China back, and then take credit for the successes that follow, but that doesn't mean they aren't holding China back.
What the article basically amounts to is that Chinese research is like everything else the party fosters and protects. There's good, talented people doing good work, but the institution is shot full of corruption. Why does this keep happening? Because the party has not adopted the single principle of "modernization" that really matters: accountability.
That rule is for Jews only, like the rule against eating milk with meat. A gentile can eat a cheeseburger, or wear cotton-poly blends, without being unrighteous.
The milk rule has to do with a verse in Exodus listing some religious rituals Jews were commanded to perform and others that that were forbidden. One of the forbidden rituals was boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk. Aside from considerations of cruelty, 20th Century archeology discovered that the Ugarites, one of Israel's neighbors, practiced precisely such a ritual.
The prohibition against seething a kid in its mother's milk prevented the incorporation of this foreign ritual into Jewish life. Later, when that law was no longer needed, it was reinterpreted to forbid mixing milk and meat at all, even though each was allowed separately. It was a commandment, and since there is no mechanism for repealing a divine law, the Jews had to find a way to obey it. The prohibition on mixed fibers is probably of the same nature. It probably addressed a specific threat of cultural assimilation or religious syncretism.
The function of many of the commandments of Jewish religious law seems to be maintaining a distinct Jewish cultural identity. If the Pentateuch were still open to additions today, they'd probably add a prohibition against Jews setting up live trees in their house. To us, the intent would be clear: Jews should not let Christmas holiday practices creep into their culture. Two or three thousand years from now, long after people stop setting up Christmas trees, that prohibition might seem weird and arbitrary.
In an ironic way, it is the arbitrariness of such a law that justifies it. The entire point is to prevent the Jewish people from assimilating into the cultures that surround them. Laws against killing or bearing false witness are sensible laws for anyone, but were all Jews to follow only such laws, it would be doubtful that Jews would maintain their distinct cultural identity for thousands of years more.
The point of going to Mars without a base capability is that it is a necessary step towards gaining that capability. You're going to have to get good at Mars before you can even think of putting a base there.
It's not that different from Apollo, in a way. We went around the Moon with Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 doing a systems shakedown. The trip to Mars is immensely more complex and worth focusing on. It's on the critical path.
In the mean time, we should be doing *lots* of practice landing stuff on Mars and probably doing unmanned ascents. It'd be cheaper to land a long sequence of non man-rated Mars missions than man-rating a lunar lander, base and ascent vehicle and testing them, and we'd learn a lot more about landing on Mars. The Mars landing would be so perilous you'd certainly want to have a lot of instructive failures under your belt before you attempted it.
The possibility of rescuing a lunar base crew shows the flaw in the plan of using a lunar base as practice. Not only will you end up spending lots of money to build and test manned lunar systems that won't tell you as much about Mars as unmanned Mars missions, you'll have to plan and pay for a potential lunar rescue mission that you really don't want to mount at all.
It'd make much more sense to practice until we had Mars landing and ascent down cold, then stage enough supplies for a Mars crew to survive for several years if necessary.
Sorry you got troll rated, because "the American Dream" is what students of propaganda call a "glittering generality".
It's not so much *clever* as *unassailable*, because it means whatever the hearer choses to project on it, at least as far as specifics are concerned.
We associate certain broad values with the phrase, of course. Freedom of conscience and individual autonomy, for example. That makes the accusation that "so and so does not *share the American Dream*" ironic, because the implication is that the American Dream is *compulsory*. If the best you can do when attacking somebody is to say he "doesn't share the American dream",
I'd say that *you* don't *want him* to share the American dream. You don't think he's entitled to freedom. It amounts to calling him out for his lack of *conformity*.
You know, there's this theme that runs through some (I want to be very careful here) of the anti-Obama rhetoric that paints him as a creation of affirmative action, or the media or something like that. The common thread is that he does not have the ability to bring himself to where he is today, that somebody else must be orchestrating his career.
This, more than anything else I've seen in the last ten years, convinces me that racism is still alive in the US today. It's not that opposing Obama means you're a racist. It's the iron clad, unassailable assumption that he doesn't have the intelligence or talent to be in the political elite of this country by his own merits.
Listen to the guy in interviews and debates. He not only can think on his feet, he thinks on his feet *faster than the other guy*. Watch him. If someone is caught off guard it is almost never him. Part of that is self-composure, but he's usually a step ahead of the other guy. At the "health care summit" with the Republicans, a few of them may have scored some points, but he easily held his own against the entire Republican caucus. Part of that was his being the moderator, but a lot of it was an ability to command the details while shaping the thread of the debate. That takes an impressive working memory and fluid intelligence. I can't think of an recent president who could have done that.
Now if you're a racist, a brain like that wrapped in a black skin must be terrifying.
You might not agree with all of his positions -- I certainly don't. But you have to admit the guy is very, very smart. Intelligence doesn't always lead you to the right conclusion, but it sure helps you get ahead in life.
I worked in a lab doing stereo vision research once. There's a lot more than stereopsis going on in depth perception. About 5% of the general population does not have stereopsis; 10% at age 65 and generally increasing thereafter. Often people who have this condition don't even know it.
The research I assisted on was on the impact of cognitive load on peripheral vision acuity (answer: none that we could find), but I also tinkered with stereograms. It turns out you can make them out of flat pictures by presenting disparate shadows to each eye. I got so good at looking at sterograms I didn't need a streoscope. I could look at a strip of Lunar photos from the Ranger mission and merge them into stereo images without any optical assistance.
In any case real world stereopsis only works at close range -- 25 meters or so is the max. As you approach that limit other cues become more important, including movement parallax, which is what this system exploits. If you looked at an image of something apparently fifty feet away or so, the fact that moving from side to side affects its apparent position and moving forward and back affects its size has a much stronger impact on your perception of depth and distance than stereopsis, even though stereopsis is theoretically operational at this distance. I'd bet the virtual object's distance would have to be quite close, say four meters or less, before your brain really starts to object.
So as far as a vista from your window -- say a view of the Golden Gate bridge -- stereopsis has absolutely no effect at all on the perception of 3D.
Note this *does* seem to imply the possibility of distinguishing genera. There is one paper I found that claims a 72% success rate in distinguishing Ae solicitans, Cx pipiens pallus and Cx pipiens quinquefasciatus, but it is not published in a biology journal. I don't find the distinguishing of Cx pipiens subspecies plausible, since where their ranges overlap they readily hybridize. That means the hypothesis of recognition by acoustic signature has no function. Also, I doubt many researchers outside the mosquito field are qualified to distinguish between the pipiens subspecies.
In any case, there's no reason to believe that mosquitoes recognize each other by anything so simple as wing beat frequency; harmonics, possibly but it doesn't have to be good enough to be an exclusive cue. There are probably behavioral cues as well.
UC Davis or Rutgers are the major research centers for mosquito biology in the US. If you want credibility, you should invite somebody there to prove you wrong, on your own dime of course.
Jordin -- That's *exactly* the same claim that has been made since the 1950s and *repeatedly* been shown to be bogus. Wing beat frequency has never been shown to be statistically distinct between species or even genera.
Even distinction to genera would be highly valuable because you could tell by context what species. If you had a residential neighborhood next to a salt marsh and you detected Aedes after a spring tide, you'd be reasonably certain that you were dealing with Ae. taeniorhynchus or Ae solicitans depending on on your latitude. If it were Culex, it might be Cx pipiens or Cx restuans, which breed in containers or catch basins. This distinction is worth millions of dollars, because you can do aerial spraying to control taeniorhynchus but not pipiens: spraying is only done at night or in the early morning because convection currents carry the pesticide away in the afternoon, times when pipiens is less active.
I'm not saying you are deliberately dishonest. Supposing you had that capability, *proving it empirically* is much trickier than you'd think. In the dozen or so years I went to mosquito conferences, I ran into several intelligent, enthusiastic inventors who had a wing beat based mosquito ID system. In every case experimental flaws deceived them into thinking they'd made a breakthrough that eluded all the other people working in the field. These, by the way, included a number of military scientists; control of arthropod borne diseases is a major operational concern in the military.
It's very easy to get a false confirmation of such a capability, which has fooled many an honest man in the past. You need specimens of different species whose classification has been confirmed by somebody trained in mosquito systematics. You need a statistically valid experimental protocol. Then you need to show the device works in the field and does not misidentify other diptera in the field.
You have to have a competent scientist validate your findings before anyone will believe you. You'll have to be extra nice because they'll be certain to think you're a crackpot.
There's one interesting wrinkle in this that has not been studied in the literature. We know that mosquito species cannot be identified by the dominant frequency in their wingbeats. That's as certain as anything in mosquito biology. What has never been investigated is harmonics. If you were to do an FFT of the acoustic signal, you *might* be able to distinguish mosquitoes by the harmonic signature in the same way you can tell the difference between a cello and an oboe playing the same note. There was one guy who actually took this approach. I discussed with my friend Bruce Elderige, who is the editor emeritus of the foremost North American journal of mosquito biology, and he didn't want to even think about this. It was too close to the wing beat hypothesis, and his reaction was the same as a physicist who is asked to consider the latest perpetual motion machine.
I'm not optimistic about the frequency domain idea. The anatomical differences between many species is tiny, even where one is a major difference in human concern about the species.
This notion that people are simply being fooled into buying Apples devices is interesting, but doesn't quite jibe with the customer satisfaction level of the iPhone, for example.
It's an easy for people to assert that because if they believe that at this point it's a non-negatable hypothesis as far as they're concerned.
I have among other devices an iPod touch, and Android phone and a Lenvo tablet style netbook. The Android phone is very good, but judging from the iPod touch I'd guess the iPhone provides a superior user interface. The iPod touch is easily the most annoyance free user interface I've ever used on a mobile device. I prefer Android for my phone because I can set it up to work the way *I* want it to work. I bought the Android phone because I didn't want a device that was built around helping sell carrier services, and the integration of the phone with Google services and Google voice especially rocks. Android is a good enough and is open. The iPhone is more polished, but closed.
My experience with the Lenovo tablet are largely negative. It's a great device, but the tablet functions, even with the Windows 7 Premium upgrade, are dreadful. Practically every touch in tablet mode is a small, soul-sucking struggle. The iPod has it's UI faults in some areas, but where the finger meets the screen it is just about perfect.
What this tells me is that creating an iPad clone is far from easy. These days the *hardware* is easy. You use the same components and far eastern manufacturers as everyone else. The product design and user interface are very, very hard -- not something you can gin up in a couple of months. Apple has a multi-year lead in this, already achieving success with the iPhone.
In any case, I worked in the mosquito control field for years, and his claims for the fence were not only bogus, they were *typically* bogus: " The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.'"
Right. That's one of the standard claims of the mosquito control crackpot. People have been making this claim for decades, but there's only one known way to identify a mosquito species: you put the specimen under a microscope and have somebody trained in mosquito taxonomy study it. This is done *routinely* by mosquito control districts who set up trap networks to assess human exposure. A system that could identify mosquito species electronically in real time would be worth tens of millions of dollars per year in the US alone.
If he could prove that one capability alone, I'd gladly mortgage my house for a stake in a business to produce *just the identification piece* -- much less the mosquito killing laser. But it's obviously the kind of claim a crackpot would make. I'm not saying that it is physically impossible to do what he claims, but it is so far beyond the capability of current technology that I'd have to conclude this guy is a crackpot.
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Well I don't know if /. is *supposed* to be libertarian, it's supposed to be geek, and geeks come from all over the political space.
I agree, go after the employers. In fact, I'd say go after the employers *first*, because they're linchpin of the whole hypocritical system. If you can't justify going after the employers, you can't justify going after the workers. If you can't justify others, the immigration laws are simply irrational. No employers hiring illegals means no more undocumented workers. It's that simple.
It's nuts that we coddle employers who hire undocumented workers for "creating wealth" while we criminalize the people do the actual work. If you're a Mexican living in what amounts to a hole in the ground with no running water -- in fact no clean water at all -- and come to the US so your family can have a roof over their head, you're a criminal. Well, maybe, but that's just a technicality if we make hiring you *de facto* legal. I can't get all enthusiastic about punishing you, or even sending you back to Mexico. Not while we turn a blind eye to the guy who hires you instead of an American and pockets the difference in wages.
What we're doing is criminalizing your desire to work harder and better yourself, then creating a system where unethical people can profit by exploiting your "illegal" status to offer you low wages and to skirt other laws because you're too afraid to stand up for yourself. Until we can treat the people who knowing benefit from undocumented workers as equally criminal, treating the undocumented as criminals simply advertises our hypocrisy. It sends a clear message: we want your labor, we just don't what to catch you.
Sure, if we have immigration laws, it makes sense to enforce them. If they're bad laws, if we're dependent on these immigrants, that'll force us to stop being hypocrites and change the law. This is bipartisan hypocrisy, by the way. The Democrats rail against the racism of enforcing immigration laws, but they don't change the laws because that'll make their union supporters mad.
And yes, we all have seen people who are almost certainly illegals around, so why not do the obvious thing and ask for their papers?
Because there are legal people who look and sound just like "obviously illegals."
So it all boils down to this question: is the inconvenience to the illegal-looking legals justified by the public good this law does? What amazes me is the people who are not going to bear that inconvenience dismissing it as trivial. How could anyone say something that arrogant with a straight face?
Look, you want me to say this is rasonable law? OK, here's how to change it. Make it apply to *everyone*. Everybody has to produce proof of legal residency, and no cheating about what kinds they have to produce. If a driver's license is acceptable for a white guy, it's acceptable for everyone.
*MANDATE THAT EVERYONE GETS THE SAME TREATMENT.*
Support a law like that, and I won't call you a hypocrite.
It doesn't just give the police powers. It gives them a legal duty to check the papers of somebody where there is reasonable suspicion. If I read correctly, they don't have to have a reason to stop somebody, suspicion *is* an adequate reason.
Now what is the definition of "reasonable suspicion"? For that matter, who gets to define "reasonable suspicion"? Well the law also allows anyone to sue their local police department if they think the police aren't being aggressive enough. So *anyone* can bend the local cop's definition of "reasonable" if he's motivated enough. This doesn't just give power to the police to enforce immigration laws -- it puts the interpretation of what immigration law might be in the hands of anyone with an ax to grind, regardless of their motives, educational qualifications, moral character or sanity.
I understand that's not the intent most people who support the law have. I understand they want the rule of law. But they're missing the most fundamental benefit of the rule of law: if a man stays on the broad and well defined highway of "legality", nobody can harass or interfere with him as he goes about his business.
The problem I see with this legislation is that to catch some law breakers, it undermines the most important reason the rest of us should support lawfulness. Does what somebody looks or sounds like have *any* part in determining "reasonable suspicion"? If it does, the people who "look illegal" are no longer safe from interference, even if they stay on the straight and narrow. That's the reason for the "ridiculous situation" of the "obvious illegals" not getting their asses arrested. It's not to protect the illegals. It's to protected the legals from any blockhead who might think they *look illegal*.
If you can decompose *look illegal* into a clear, objective set of criteria that reliably excludes people who are loegal, then this isn't a problem. But I don't think you can.
Now I'm a person of part Asian descent, born in the US to American citizen parents. I'm also brown skinned and I'm sometimes mistaken for a Latino. I used to do a lot of business and pleasure travel in Arizona, but not any more. It's not that I can't handle some bigoted cop who thinks I "look illegal". It's that I do not care to do business in a state where I'm a second class citizen because of the color of my skin, even if the second class citizenship is almost as good as first class citizenship.
Hire *good* people.
Step 2: work on developing their skills.
You see, what you're asking is like "how do I handle all the fame and adulation after I become a rock star?" The hard part is finding good people. If you can find 'em, they're worth training because they're *trainable*.
So if you've got somebody who can do a great job and adds to the team, but doesn't know what the hell phishing is, don't worry about that. You can teach a good hire what phishing is. You can't teach a bad hire who knows what phishing is to be a good employee.
My presentation philosophy: the presentation is NOT the powerpoint document. It's me talking in a way that makes a point.
The powerpoint is there to give them something more interesting to look at than me, to help them keep track of what point we're on, and sometimes to provide an illustration or diagram.
If I have to alter what I'm going to say so it can fit powerpoint slides, I'll just hand out a stack of bumperstickers.
Well, sure. But it's going to be hell for people who *look* illegal. That's the mischief in the thing.
I don't know. Looking at what was reported, it looks like the pope said three things:
1) The new media gives more kinds of people a soap box. That is more egalitarian and pluralistic.
2) One side effect is to inflame the divisions between nations and people are inflamed.
3) Some people use their soapbox to promote moral relativism.
I think he's on solid ground on (1) and (2). Giving everyone a soapbox means the crazies and haters get one too. It's also the Era of Sorting. Back in the day, you had to live with people who had different opinions from you. One of the unexpected side effects of "virtual communities" is that it's never been easier to surround yourself with people who think just like you do. It's never been easier to transition from eccentric to full blown kook.
On (3), well, I don't think that statement means anything. I'm sure he's not talking about serious philosophical positions on the nature of ethics. I suspect he's talking about opinions he doesn't like.
The official Catholic position on morality is that it isn't based on divine commandment. That goes all the way back to Plato. But there's a huge loophole in this position: Human reason is inferior to Divine Wisdom, so while God's moral commandments have an objective justification, that justification isn't necessarily obvious.
That said, this is not the most opportune time to assert the Church's "magisterium". When the church can show it holds itself to at least basic, civilized standards of ethical behavior, it will be able to talk about "moral relativism" without provoking snickers.
The problem is that you don't know the difference between data and information. Information is what you get when you can cross reference two pieces of data.
Sure that existence of a person with first name "Joe" and last name "Shmoe" with phone number "555-1234" is public infomration. but as soon as you can connect that with another otherwise unconnected piece of public information (say the going price of a blow up love doll), you've got more information than the sum of the parts.
This, by the way, makes the ease and scope of data access a big issue. Take some information which is a public record -- say court records. Public access is not only benign, it's a good thing that anyone can walk down to the courthouse and get the transcript of a trial.
Now imagine you've got all the court records in the country accessible and indexed. You data mine them for people who meet certain profiles you've developed, then cross reference them with marketing databases that tell you all the trackable purchases they've made -- and that's probably most of them. You filter again and you spring for a background check on a couple of dozen. By looking at all the data sources you have on those couple of dozen people, you probably know things about them that their close friends don't. You may even know things about them they don't know themselves.
Somebody's phone number and address is a public record, but it's in a small, locally distributed database (the phone book) for the purpose of helping his friends and acquaintances can look him up. Turn that phone book into a database and suddenly the deal has changed. There's new applications for that data that weren't part of the original decision to have a listed number. The universe of new applications for that piece of expands with the size and geographic scope of the telephone database. Add cross referencing to other public records and then records the guy didn't realize were public, and the impact is much, much greater than having each of those information points available separately in small databases.
Privacy is not essentially about keeping sensitive data secret. Oh, that's important, but only a small part of the whole pictures. Privacy is really about control over your life. Many privacy concerns have little or nothing to do with sensitive information -- the neighbor who is noisy at 3AM. Other privacy concerns have to do with the impact of wrong information -- the bad record that keeps coming back like a bad penny and putting you on the TSA watch list.
But the real corker are the ways you can amass and filter data on huge volumes of people, then buy huge volumes of data about a small number of people off the shelf. That cuts both ways: there's things about you they can find out that you don't want them to know, and things about you they'll infer that won't go away. And you can't make the bad inference go away, because it's not data at all. It's the output of a model applied to "non-sensitive" data. And the people who use those models don't have incentive to fix your problem, because the model, statistically speaking, works well enough for them.
The problem is that the character is not recognizably Scotty. I'm not sure you could *make* a recognizable Scotty under the circumstances.
What was the essential thing about Scotty? It was that the Enterprise was his toy. He put up with the five year mission and the command officers running around mucking things up because that was the price he had to pay to have *all the important stuff* under his control. That's why he always lied about damage and repairs. Knowledge is power, and if he gave that to Kirk, Kirk would have kept taking and taking until nothing could get done because there'd be negative slack.
You take the Enterprise away from Scotty, and what's left?
Where the atmosphere is concerned, every model is flawed for some given value of "flaw". Sure, the dimensions of the ash plume were certainly exaggerated, but how much exaggerated and where?
Knowing you've overstated the aggregate risk to the public doesn't necessarily imply that the groundings were unnecessary, because you don't know *which* groundings averted disasters. Put another way, suppose you know that 90% some set of flights are safe, but you don't know *which* flights. Grounding 100% of those flights is necessary, even though ignoring the problem only endanger 10% of them.
If one of these events happened every year, you'd expect the people who decide these things to use the data to get more and more precise control. This is a once or twice a century event, so we can't expect to have precise information to act on. It's too bad that this is going to cost the airlines money, but in the middle of a rare, short term situation like this is not the time to question the computer models.
Sure, when everyone around you's wrong, it's understandable that you'd be wrong along with them. It's not an excuse, however.
The tendency to accept what everyone around you believes as necessarily true is one reason that the much maligned "multiculturalism" is important. People don't like that because it undermines their certainty about things, but sometimes that certainty *ought* to be undermined. Like the proverbial visitor from Mars, somebody from another culture can see things that are obviously wrong that you believe because everyone around believes too.
I remember reading a letter -- it was either from John Adams to Abigail or vice versa -- in which the writer recounts watching some maintenance task being done by a team of slaves, directed by an overseer. It went very slowly and poorly. No doubt the slave owners thought that the slaves were stupid and lazy, but what are you going to do? The job has to be done, and that's what slaves are for. It was perfectly clear to Adams that one man *working for himself* could do the work of a half dozen slaves being driven by an overseer, and do it faster and better.
There's a certain wisdom to the phrase "stick with what works", but that can be taken too far. Where would the human race be if that were our credo?
I have to agree on the packaging point ... although I'm not nearly as dismissive as you appear to be. I'm impressed by the packaging of Apple products. It protects the contents without using too much material or making it hard for the consumer to open.
It's rare to find an artifact where the designer has done a really good job. *Somebody* worked hard to make that packaging so good, and deserves appreciation.
My point is you need to do a real controlled study that will determine the system's real capabilities. If you take a large enough sample you'll probably get a significant difference in mean frequency, but if you plot the spectrum the overlap will show that the dominant harmonic has little practical utility.
Your post inspired me to look up the literature on this, and the most credible papers analyze the signal spectrum, albeit usually by crude means. It may be possible to extract behavioral cues as well.
If you think about what a "species" is, it is obvious that a blanket claim of a percent accuracy in distinguishing species is scientifically meaningless. Take Culex pipiens and restuans. They are virtually identical species, and cross breed to produce viable offspring. Even if you could distinguish Cx. pipiens/restuans from a Cx species in a different subgenus, the decision to promote the distinction between pipiens and restuans to a species distinction rather than subspecies is purely arbitrary.
It would make more sense to build a matrix with species of concern on each axis. An expert could immediately tell which situation your device was useful in and which it was not.
In any case, if you want credibility, you should work with somebody at UC Davis or Rutgers and publish.
Serious about fighting corruption?
There's only one "serious" way of fighting corruption in my book: shining the light of openness on the places where corruption festers.
The exaggerated sentences are a sure sign that the regime *isn't* serious about fighting corruption. They go through the motions of "making an example" of the current offender, yet inevitably he'll have no shortage of successors.
So if the strategy doesn't work to reduce corruption, why do they keep doing it? Because it does something very useful to them. It makes the issue one of *personalities*. It's not the system that's broken, it's this apparently endless supply of bad apples. You make a show of punishing a bad apple, and that convinces the people that the higher-ups are honest men. If those men control the media, the police and the courts, how could they fail to create that impression?
When a wicked rebel finally overthrows the government, he immediately becomes the duly constituted government and the officials of the former government become criminals. That is the law of the medieval thinker. It is not *our* conception of law, except possibly international law. Our concept of law is not about personalities. It is a set of common rules that at once bind all of us and free us. Our ideal of law is not order or preservation of the current regime, it is this: so long as a man stays on the clearly marked road of legality, he is utterly unassailable. Granted our laws fall short of that, but that is overwhelming what we expect from the law, even if we don't expect perfection.
In China, the law is more vaguely drawn. It's brilliant in a way, because when you can't be sure when you've broken it you curb your behavior, but it's not law in our sense at all. It's just power.
The higher ups in the Chinese Communist Party are honest men in the same way the rebel who seizes power and recreates the old regime with a different cast of personalities is an honest man. At any point in time, these men are "honest" for a certain value of "honest" -- a value that they get to define to suit their interests at the moment.
What the Communist Party has done is give up on any pretense of socialism, replacing it by a pretense of a free market. You can't have a free market without a free society, and you can't have a free society without real laws. China is huge and full of talented people who would flourish under the rule of law. But the party only has to improve on its history of miserable failure to make things better. They can eliminate some of the things they did that were holding China back, and then take credit for the successes that follow, but that doesn't mean they aren't holding China back.
What the article basically amounts to is that Chinese research is like everything else the party fosters and protects. There's good, talented people doing good work, but the institution is shot full of corruption. Why does this keep happening? Because the party has not adopted the single principle of "modernization" that really matters: accountability.
Oh, I didn't miss the joke. I'm still a little fuzzy on the humor.
That rule is for Jews only, like the rule against eating milk with meat. A gentile can eat a cheeseburger, or wear cotton-poly blends, without being unrighteous.
The milk rule has to do with a verse in Exodus listing some religious rituals Jews were commanded to perform and others that that were forbidden. One of the forbidden rituals was boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk. Aside from considerations of cruelty, 20th Century archeology discovered that the Ugarites, one of Israel's neighbors, practiced precisely such a ritual.
The prohibition against seething a kid in its mother's milk prevented the incorporation of this foreign ritual into Jewish life. Later, when that law was no longer needed, it was reinterpreted to forbid mixing milk and meat at all, even though each was allowed separately. It was a commandment, and since there is no mechanism for repealing a divine law, the Jews had to find a way to obey it. The prohibition on mixed fibers is probably of the same nature. It probably addressed a specific threat of cultural assimilation or religious syncretism.
The function of many of the commandments of Jewish religious law seems to be maintaining a distinct Jewish cultural identity. If the Pentateuch were still open to additions today, they'd probably add a prohibition against Jews setting up live trees in their house. To us, the intent would be clear: Jews should not let Christmas holiday practices creep into their culture. Two or three thousand years from now, long after people stop setting up Christmas trees, that prohibition might seem weird and arbitrary.
In an ironic way, it is the arbitrariness of such a law that justifies it. The entire point is to prevent the Jewish people from assimilating into the cultures that surround them. Laws against killing or bearing false witness are sensible laws for anyone, but were all Jews to follow only such laws, it would be doubtful that Jews would maintain their distinct cultural identity for thousands of years more.
The point of going to Mars without a base capability is that it is a necessary step towards gaining that capability. You're going to have to get good at Mars before you can even think of putting a base there.
It's not that different from Apollo, in a way. We went around the Moon with Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 doing a systems shakedown. The trip to Mars is immensely more complex and worth focusing on. It's on the critical path.
In the mean time, we should be doing *lots* of practice landing stuff on Mars and probably doing unmanned ascents. It'd be cheaper to land a long sequence of non man-rated Mars missions than man-rating a lunar lander, base and ascent vehicle and testing them, and we'd learn a lot more about landing on Mars. The Mars landing would be so perilous you'd certainly want to have a lot of instructive failures under your belt before you attempted it.
The possibility of rescuing a lunar base crew shows the flaw in the plan of using a lunar base as practice. Not only will you end up spending lots of money to build and test manned lunar systems that won't tell you as much about Mars as unmanned Mars missions, you'll have to plan and pay for a potential lunar rescue mission that you really don't want to mount at all.
It'd make much more sense to practice until we had Mars landing and ascent down cold, then stage enough supplies for a Mars crew to survive for several years if necessary.
Sorry you got troll rated, because "the American Dream" is what students of propaganda call a "glittering generality".
It's not so much *clever* as *unassailable*, because it means whatever the hearer choses to project on it, at least as far as specifics are concerned.
We associate certain broad values with the phrase, of course. Freedom of conscience and individual autonomy, for example. That makes the accusation that "so and so does not *share the American Dream*" ironic, because the implication is that the American Dream is *compulsory*. If the best you can do when attacking somebody is to say he "doesn't share the American dream",
I'd say that *you* don't *want him* to share the American dream. You don't think he's entitled to freedom. It amounts to calling him out for his lack of *conformity*.
You know, there's this theme that runs through some (I want to be very careful here) of the anti-Obama rhetoric that paints him as a creation of affirmative action, or the media or something like that. The common thread is that he does not have the ability to bring himself to where he is today, that somebody else must be orchestrating his career.
This, more than anything else I've seen in the last ten years, convinces me that racism is still alive in the US today. It's not that opposing Obama means you're a racist. It's the iron clad, unassailable assumption that he doesn't have the intelligence or talent to be in the political elite of this country by his own merits.
Listen to the guy in interviews and debates. He not only can think on his feet, he thinks on his feet *faster than the other guy*. Watch him. If someone is caught off guard it is almost never him. Part of that is self-composure, but he's usually a step ahead of the other guy. At the "health care summit" with the Republicans, a few of them may have scored some points, but he easily held his own against the entire Republican caucus. Part of that was his being the moderator, but a lot of it was an ability to command the details while shaping the thread of the debate. That takes an impressive working memory and fluid intelligence. I can't think of an recent president who could have done that.
Now if you're a racist, a brain like that wrapped in a black skin must be terrifying.
You might not agree with all of his positions -- I certainly don't. But you have to admit the guy is very, very smart. Intelligence doesn't always lead you to the right conclusion, but it sure helps you get ahead in life.
I worked in a lab doing stereo vision research once. There's a lot more than stereopsis going on in depth perception. About 5% of the general population does not have stereopsis; 10% at age 65 and generally increasing thereafter. Often people who have this condition don't even know it.
The research I assisted on was on the impact of cognitive load on peripheral vision acuity (answer: none that we could find), but I also tinkered with stereograms. It turns out you can make them out of flat pictures by presenting disparate shadows to each eye. I got so good at looking at sterograms I didn't need a streoscope. I could look at a strip of Lunar photos from the Ranger mission and merge them into stereo images without any optical assistance.
In any case real world stereopsis only works at close range -- 25 meters or so is the max. As you approach that limit other cues become more important, including movement parallax, which is what this system exploits. If you looked at an image of something apparently fifty feet away or so, the fact that moving from side to side affects its apparent position and moving forward and back affects its size has a much stronger impact on your perception of depth and distance than stereopsis, even though stereopsis is theoretically operational at this distance. I'd bet the virtual object's distance would have to be quite close, say four meters or less, before your brain really starts to object.
So as far as a vista from your window -- say a view of the Golden Gate bridge -- stereopsis has absolutely no effect at all on the perception of 3D.
This is a recent paper from UC Davis on distinguishing Anopheles (the genus that spreads malaria) by spectral analysis: The “Wingbeat Hypothesis” of Reproductive Isolation Between Members of the Anopheles gambiae Complex (Diptera: Culicidae) Does Not Fly.
Note this *does* seem to imply the possibility of distinguishing genera. There is one paper I found that claims a 72% success rate in distinguishing Ae solicitans, Cx pipiens pallus and Cx pipiens quinquefasciatus, but it is not published in a biology journal. I don't find the distinguishing of Cx pipiens subspecies plausible, since where their ranges overlap they readily hybridize. That means the hypothesis of recognition by acoustic signature has no function. Also, I doubt many researchers outside the mosquito field are qualified to distinguish between the pipiens subspecies.
In any case, there's no reason to believe that mosquitoes recognize each other by anything so simple as wing beat frequency; harmonics, possibly but it doesn't have to be good enough to be an exclusive cue. There are probably behavioral cues as well.
UC Davis or Rutgers are the major research centers for mosquito biology in the US. If you want credibility, you should invite somebody there to prove you wrong, on your own dime of course.
Jordin -- That's *exactly* the same claim that has been made since the 1950s and *repeatedly* been shown to be bogus. Wing beat frequency has never been shown to be statistically distinct between species or even genera.
Even distinction to genera would be highly valuable because you could tell by context what species. If you had a residential neighborhood next to a salt marsh and you detected Aedes after a spring tide, you'd be reasonably certain that you were dealing with Ae. taeniorhynchus or Ae solicitans depending on on your latitude. If it were Culex, it might be Cx pipiens or Cx restuans, which breed in containers or catch basins. This distinction is worth millions of dollars, because you can do aerial spraying to control taeniorhynchus but not pipiens: spraying is only done at night or in the early morning because convection currents carry the pesticide away in the afternoon, times when pipiens is less active.
I'm not saying you are deliberately dishonest. Supposing you had that capability, *proving it empirically* is much trickier than you'd think. In the dozen or so years I went to mosquito conferences, I ran into several intelligent, enthusiastic inventors who had a wing beat based mosquito ID system. In every case experimental flaws deceived them into thinking they'd made a breakthrough that eluded all the other people working in the field. These, by the way, included a number of military scientists; control of arthropod borne diseases is a major operational concern in the military.
It's very easy to get a false confirmation of such a capability, which has fooled many an honest man in the past. You need specimens of different species whose classification has been confirmed by somebody trained in mosquito systematics. You need a statistically valid experimental protocol. Then you need to show the device works in the field and does not misidentify other diptera in the field.
You have to have a competent scientist validate your findings before anyone will believe you. You'll have to be extra nice because they'll be certain to think you're a crackpot.
There's one interesting wrinkle in this that has not been studied in the literature. We know that mosquito species cannot be identified by the dominant frequency in their wingbeats. That's as certain as anything in mosquito biology. What has never been investigated is harmonics. If you were to do an FFT of the acoustic signal, you *might* be able to distinguish mosquitoes by the harmonic signature in the same way you can tell the difference between a cello and an oboe playing the same note. There was one guy who actually took this approach. I discussed with my friend Bruce Elderige, who is the editor emeritus of the foremost North American journal of mosquito biology, and he didn't want to even think about this. It was too close to the wing beat hypothesis, and his reaction was the same as a physicist who is asked to consider the latest perpetual motion machine.
I'm not optimistic about the frequency domain idea. The anatomical differences between many species is tiny, even where one is a major difference in human concern about the species.
This notion that people are simply being fooled into buying Apples devices is interesting, but doesn't quite jibe with the customer satisfaction level of the iPhone, for example.
It's an easy for people to assert that because if they believe that at this point it's a non-negatable hypothesis as far as they're concerned.
I have among other devices an iPod touch, and Android phone and a Lenvo tablet style netbook. The Android phone is very good, but judging from the iPod touch I'd guess the iPhone provides a superior user interface. The iPod touch is easily the most annoyance free user interface I've ever used on a mobile device. I prefer Android for my phone because I can set it up to work the way *I* want it to work. I bought the Android phone because I didn't want a device that was built around helping sell carrier services, and the integration of the phone with Google services and Google voice especially rocks. Android is a good enough and is open. The iPhone is more polished, but closed.
My experience with the Lenovo tablet are largely negative. It's a great device, but the tablet functions, even with the Windows 7 Premium upgrade, are dreadful. Practically every touch in tablet mode is a small, soul-sucking struggle. The iPod has it's UI faults in some areas, but where the finger meets the screen it is just about perfect.
What this tells me is that creating an iPad clone is far from easy. These days the *hardware* is easy. You use the same components and far eastern manufacturers as everyone else. The product design and user interface are very, very hard -- not something you can gin up in a couple of months. Apple has a multi-year lead in this, already achieving success with the iPhone.
Was I the only one who read that as Ted Nugent?
In any case, I worked in the mosquito control field for years, and his claims for the fence were not only bogus, they were *typically* bogus: " The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.'"
Right. That's one of the standard claims of the mosquito control crackpot. People have been making this claim for decades, but there's only one known way to identify a mosquito species: you put the specimen under a microscope and have somebody trained in mosquito taxonomy study it. This is done *routinely* by mosquito control districts who set up trap networks to assess human exposure. A system that could identify mosquito species electronically in real time would be worth tens of millions of dollars per year in the US alone.
If he could prove that one capability alone, I'd gladly mortgage my house for a stake in a business to produce *just the identification piece* -- much less the mosquito killing laser. But it's obviously the kind of claim a crackpot would make. I'm not saying that it is physically impossible to do what he claims, but it is so far beyond the capability of current technology that I'd have to conclude this guy is a crackpot.
A city with the sprawling suburban charm of San Jose with ... Russian weather?
Where do I sign up?