Lying to congress is a crime even if you aren't under oath if you are lying about "administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to
the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch" or "any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate." 18 USC 1001
What would be the point of calling people to testify before congress if there aren't going to be penalties for lying? I pretty sure the penalties apply even if you cross your fingers behind your back while testifying.
I think you'd better turn in yours. I didn't suggest that alone. I also suggested blocking the IPs on state owned routers and firewalls. I'm not suggesting they cut off the whole state. I'm suggesting they cut of state government entities from access to Amazon. It means college students won't have access to amazon.com on campus. It means staff at every state institution will not have access at work. I think that alone will cost Amazon more than implementing tax collections would have.
I have no reason to believe what you are saying is true. I can find web sites that say Anthony Watts is on meth and funded by the mafia. You shouldn't believe that, either.
What Al Gore does for a living has nothing to do with whether anthropogenic global warming is real. The Pope believes in evolution, that doesn't make him a molecular biologist.
"this is important research and it needs more funding".
We've pretty much passed that point in global warming research. The research is settled. All we need to do now is track the change and update the models. We don't need more than a few researchers improving climate models. We don't need more than we already have collecting temperature and atmospheric composition data. The weather, earth observing and ocean monitoring satellites we do need, but not because of climate change. It's already too late for anyone to make it big in climate science. Unless, of course, they find something that contradicts current theories.
I've been a party to demolishing theories where I was the first person capable of making the observations required to confirm or disprove the theory. I've fought other researchers who have misinterpreted data because they didn't understand the instruments they were using. It has practically come to blows at conferences. Nobody ever gets well known without busting some heads. And even when you get well known, every grant application is a new fight. There's no guaranteed funding from government agencies. Oil companies, on the other hand... If I could come up with a significant flaw in AGW you can be damn sure I'd be on the phone with ExxonMobil.
Either you don't work at a Univeristy or you are dishonest. The amount of grant money one can bring is a significant part of your evaluations and status within the University and the science community as a whole.
Either you don't work at a University or you are dishonest. The amount of grant money one can bring in is related to the quality of the science you have done in the past, the likelihood that your current work will advance the state of knowledge in the field, and the significance that your findings may have. If you are a young faculty member want to get a grant in study of the Earth's climate, the last thing you would want to do is to submit a grant to broadly study global warming. It will get you nowhere because better people than you are already doing the broad based work. What you would do is to pick a small subfield and propose a simple investigation that will have some definite result. If you were to say in a grant proposal that I was reviewing that you were going to "prove" global warming or even "find evidence for it" I would throw you in the reject pile. If you said you were going to see if tree pollen distributions were a good temperature proxy in 10 different climates worldwide, that would be something else entirely. And since all of these programs are oversubscribed, there's only a 1 in 5 chance that your proposal would get funded.
If there were any scientist that could actually show that global warming was not anthropogenic in a manner that is scientifically viable, he would never have to worry about funding again. He could write his own ticket on oil company dollars. But you'll notice that nobody ever has.
why do you think that the "developed lifestyle we enjoy" requires constant tax increases?
Constant tax increases? Have you been asleep for 60 years? Federal income taxes are about the lowest they've been since before WW2. (I say "about" because it varies by tax bracket) They do need to be increased, but that's not about our lifestyle. That's about some fucking awful foreign policy decisions (two pointless and unwinnable wars) and some fucking stupid tax cuts that happened at the same time. State income taxes are high in California because the state receives less in federal benefits than other states, because we stupidly removed control of property tax rates and the destination of those taxes from localities, we've stupidly required 66% voter approval for any revenue changes, we stupidly funded every state function with voter approved bonds rather than with tax revenue changes, and because we've stupidly put a very large percentage of the population into an expensive prison system. Almost all of those problems are due to the stupid ballot initiative system in California.
By the way taxes aren't about "whether or not everyone who pays in to these things wants them." They are about the "common good as decided by the people or their elected representative. You might not like paying for a Fire Department because you haven't had a fire. That doesn't mean you get to decide on your own whether to pay those taxes. A worse problem is programs the people have demanded, but are unwilling to pay taxes for.
"Amazon wants access to the Californian market"
Such thing does not exist when the market is a GLOBAL NETWORK.
Bullshit. Plain and simple. Do you think Amazon gets to avoid VAT on European sales? I think the State of California should block amazon.com from DNS resolution on state owned DNS servers, and block amazon.com's IP address at state owned routers. I think they should do it today, and promise the same for other tax evaders. I'm sure that amazon mp3 won't miss access to UC campuses. College students and faculty never buy books, right? I'm also sure that there aren't any government agencies that use amazon's cloud servers or cloud storage.
You're right. I guess I'm too used to arcsecond astronomy. If you don't need accuracy better than 15 arcseconds or absolute timings I guess you could have ignored the difference. Looking at some older coordinate code I see things that scare me. No UT1 correction and polynomial fits to precession that stopped being accurate in 1980. This one even does the modulo 24 on Right Ascension to soon resulting in RAs greater than 24. And I know some of my colleagues are probably still using it with an additional mod 24.
In other words, code that isn't downloading this file at least once a week, or using a parameterized version probably isn't going to be affected. Any code that doesn't require |UTC-UT1|>1 second will continue to work just fine. If you're not pointing a telescope, guiding a missile or a spaceship, or using a UT1 clock in an inertial reference system locked to GPS or TAI time, I can't conceive of a way this could affect you.
I agree entirely with your Y2K point. It was disaster avoided. But it also got a lot of people employed.
There have already been far more than two types of time, and we've survived. UTC will continue to be universal, and civil times will still be offsets of one hour from UTC (or half hour in those unusual cases). In some ways it will simplify things. GPS time, International Atomic Time (TAI), LORAN time, and Terrestrial Time (TT) will maintain a fixed offset from UTC that won't need to be adjusted for future leap seconds. All this does is breaks the link between the mean position of the sun and what time it is (civil time).
At the current drift rate (400 seconds per millennium) it'll be 4000 years before people start to get annoyed with how far the sun is from overhead at noon. Then if people are still around and use our system of time, it'll probably be easier for them to change the time zone definitions It's only people who have to know the position and orientation of the earth (or of astronomical objects) that are going to be annoyed by this change, or are coding for inertial guidance systems that need to know that information. So this isn't ever going to a problem for most people. I'm just complaining because I'm one of those people.
Maybe this change is a Y2K style jobs program. Nah, too few types of code are affected. It's not like my bank needs UT1 or barycentric dynamical time to the microsecond.
Back when a 20MB USB stick was $75, I could see the reason to plug one in to try to find the owner. Now that 8GB+ sticks are conference freebies I don't see the point, especially when the majority are just used to transport Word document to and from work for people who don't know how to use Dropbox. It's very unlikely that there is irreplaceable work on a random USB stick or that the owner will suffer financial hardship because of its loss.
When you are trying to time light arrival time from astronomical objects to the microsecond, or if want to know where something is in the sky to arcsecond (or better) accuracy, what time it is, where the earth is, and how its oriented become very important questions. Depending upon where you live, your house might be moving at a quarter mile a second (relative to the center of the earth). The less well I know the time or the orientation of the earth, the larger the asteroid I need to use to ensure that I destroy it.
We already have lots of containers of fuel mixed with a thickening agent. The containers are even built to be dropped from an airplane. They aren't designed to aid air conditioning, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Lying to congress is a crime even if you aren't under oath if you are lying about "administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch" or "any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate." 18 USC 1001
What would be the point of calling people to testify before congress if there aren't going to be penalties for lying? I pretty sure the penalties apply even if you cross your fingers behind your back while testifying.
I think you'd better turn in yours. I didn't suggest that alone. I also suggested blocking the IPs on state owned routers and firewalls. I'm not suggesting they cut off the whole state. I'm suggesting they cut of state government entities from access to Amazon. It means college students won't have access to amazon.com on campus. It means staff at every state institution will not have access at work. I think that alone will cost Amazon more than implementing tax collections would have.
I have no reason to believe what you are saying is true. I can find web sites that say Anthony Watts is on meth and funded by the mafia. You shouldn't believe that, either.
What Al Gore does for a living has nothing to do with whether anthropogenic global warming is real. The Pope believes in evolution, that doesn't make him a molecular biologist.
"this is important research and it needs more funding".
We've pretty much passed that point in global warming research. The research is settled. All we need to do now is track the change and update the models. We don't need more than a few researchers improving climate models. We don't need more than we already have collecting temperature and atmospheric composition data. The weather, earth observing and ocean monitoring satellites we do need, but not because of climate change. It's already too late for anyone to make it big in climate science. Unless, of course, they find something that contradicts current theories.
I've been a party to demolishing theories where I was the first person capable of making the observations required to confirm or disprove the theory. I've fought other researchers who have misinterpreted data because they didn't understand the instruments they were using. It has practically come to blows at conferences. Nobody ever gets well known without busting some heads. And even when you get well known, every grant application is a new fight. There's no guaranteed funding from government agencies. Oil companies, on the other hand... If I could come up with a significant flaw in AGW you can be damn sure I'd be on the phone with ExxonMobil.
Either you don't work at a Univeristy or you are dishonest. The amount of grant money one can bring is a significant part of your evaluations and status within the University and the science community as a whole.
Either you don't work at a University or you are dishonest. The amount of grant money one can bring in is related to the quality of the science you have done in the past, the likelihood that your current work will advance the state of knowledge in the field, and the significance that your findings may have. If you are a young faculty member want to get a grant in study of the Earth's climate, the last thing you would want to do is to submit a grant to broadly study global warming. It will get you nowhere because better people than you are already doing the broad based work. What you would do is to pick a small subfield and propose a simple investigation that will have some definite result. If you were to say in a grant proposal that I was reviewing that you were going to "prove" global warming or even "find evidence for it" I would throw you in the reject pile. If you said you were going to see if tree pollen distributions were a good temperature proxy in 10 different climates worldwide, that would be something else entirely. And since all of these programs are oversubscribed, there's only a 1 in 5 chance that your proposal would get funded.
If there were any scientist that could actually show that global warming was not anthropogenic in a manner that is scientifically viable, he would never have to worry about funding again. He could write his own ticket on oil company dollars. But you'll notice that nobody ever has.
And which right wing think tank is sending out that bullshit?
Al Gore isn't a climate scientist.
Other than the fact that that is a lie promulgated by conservative talk radio hosts, it would be a good point.
You've got a lower UID than I do, so I can't be that much older.
I remember when lying to Congress used to be a crime. Now it's just an alternative lifestyle.
why do you think that the "developed lifestyle we enjoy" requires constant tax increases?
Constant tax increases? Have you been asleep for 60 years? Federal income taxes are about the lowest they've been since before WW2. (I say "about" because it varies by tax bracket) They do need to be increased, but that's not about our lifestyle. That's about some fucking awful foreign policy decisions (two pointless and unwinnable wars) and some fucking stupid tax cuts that happened at the same time. State income taxes are high in California because the state receives less in federal benefits than other states, because we stupidly removed control of property tax rates and the destination of those taxes from localities, we've stupidly required 66% voter approval for any revenue changes, we stupidly funded every state function with voter approved bonds rather than with tax revenue changes, and because we've stupidly put a very large percentage of the population into an expensive prison system. Almost all of those problems are due to the stupid ballot initiative system in California.
By the way taxes aren't about "whether or not everyone who pays in to these things wants them." They are about the "common good as decided by the people or their elected representative. You might not like paying for a Fire Department because you haven't had a fire. That doesn't mean you get to decide on your own whether to pay those taxes. A worse problem is programs the people have demanded, but are unwilling to pay taxes for.
"Amazon wants access to the Californian market" Such thing does not exist when the market is a GLOBAL NETWORK.
Bullshit. Plain and simple. Do you think Amazon gets to avoid VAT on European sales? I think the State of California should block amazon.com from DNS resolution on state owned DNS servers, and block amazon.com's IP address at state owned routers. I think they should do it today, and promise the same for other tax evaders. I'm sure that amazon mp3 won't miss access to UC campuses. College students and faculty never buy books, right? I'm also sure that there aren't any government agencies that use amazon's cloud servers or cloud storage.
You're right. I guess I'm too used to arcsecond astronomy. If you don't need accuracy better than 15 arcseconds or absolute timings I guess you could have ignored the difference. Looking at some older coordinate code I see things that scare me. No UT1 correction and polynomial fits to precession that stopped being accurate in 1980. This one even does the modulo 24 on Right Ascension to soon resulting in RAs greater than 24. And I know some of my colleagues are probably still using it with an additional mod 24.
In other words, code that isn't downloading this file at least once a week, or using a parameterized version probably isn't going to be affected. Any code that doesn't require |UTC-UT1|>1 second will continue to work just fine. If you're not pointing a telescope, guiding a missile or a spaceship, or using a UT1 clock in an inertial reference system locked to GPS or TAI time, I can't conceive of a way this could affect you.
I agree entirely with your Y2K point. It was disaster avoided. But it also got a lot of people employed.
There have already been far more than two types of time, and we've survived. UTC will continue to be universal, and civil times will still be offsets of one hour from UTC (or half hour in those unusual cases). In some ways it will simplify things. GPS time, International Atomic Time (TAI), LORAN time, and Terrestrial Time (TT) will maintain a fixed offset from UTC that won't need to be adjusted for future leap seconds. All this does is breaks the link between the mean position of the sun and what time it is (civil time).
At the current drift rate (400 seconds per millennium) it'll be 4000 years before people start to get annoyed with how far the sun is from overhead at noon. Then if people are still around and use our system of time, it'll probably be easier for them to change the time zone definitions It's only people who have to know the position and orientation of the earth (or of astronomical objects) that are going to be annoyed by this change, or are coding for inertial guidance systems that need to know that information. So this isn't ever going to a problem for most people. I'm just complaining because I'm one of those people.
Maybe this change is a Y2K style jobs program. Nah, too few types of code are affected. It's not like my bank needs UT1 or barycentric dynamical time to the microsecond.
You would think they would host in some small island nation just for protection from copyright and patent related lawsuits.
Back when a 20MB USB stick was $75, I could see the reason to plug one in to try to find the owner. Now that 8GB+ sticks are conference freebies I don't see the point, especially when the majority are just used to transport Word document to and from work for people who don't know how to use Dropbox. It's very unlikely that there is irreplaceable work on a random USB stick or that the owner will suffer financial hardship because of its loss.
If they didn't cool their tents with diesel, the oilfield wouldn't be worth defending.
When you are trying to time light arrival time from astronomical objects to the microsecond, or if want to know where something is in the sky to arcsecond (or better) accuracy, what time it is, where the earth is, and how its oriented become very important questions. Depending upon where you live, your house might be moving at a quarter mile a second (relative to the center of the earth). The less well I know the time or the orientation of the earth, the larger the asteroid I need to use to ensure that I destroy it.
You have no idea how much code I'll have to look through to make sure that it doesn't assume |UTC-UT1| < 1.
Yeah, it was supposed to have four, but they let officers build it.
A gallon of diesel fuel at the front lines in Afghanistan costs the military something like $400
$4 for the diesel fuel. And $396 for someone at KBR to sign a piece of paper claiming they delivered it.
We already have lots of containers of fuel mixed with a thickening agent. The containers are even built to be dropped from an airplane. They aren't designed to aid air conditioning, though.