Cut congressional pay to the median individual income level. Limit congressional staff to a single assistant per member of congress. Get rid of congressional benefits, including health care, pensions, the franking privilege, housing allowance, and travel reimbursement. That alone would cover the "fat" in the NSF budget.
That's a great example of just how stupid and evil FDR was. In the midst of the greatest economic depression the country had ever seen, he intervened to make food more expensive.
It needed to be more expensive because if the people who grow food starve to death (or just stop farming) because they have no income, everyone starves. Homeless people from the farms wander into the cities looking for jobs that aren't there. Crop price declines and the associated migration to the cities were major problems during the great depression.
Cheaper isn't always better. It's better to artificially raise prices rather than deal with the collapse of food production and the extreme inflation that would follow. If you don't understand the economics of that, you need go back to school. Libertarian ideology doesn't trump economic reality no matter how much you believe in it.
Yes, even Christian Scientists end up in the hospital. Tell one that they have cancer, and they just might decide to line up for chemo. They also arrive on ambulances. Family members might even dial 911 for them if they collapse. Or they might just be bleeding severely, and even Christian Scientist believe in bandages. They may, if conscious, refuse care when they get to the hospital. Even if they refuse care they might not be stable enough to be released and must be provided with a bed, food and hydration. The unconscious must always be treated unless it is shown that someone present has authority to limit care. That authority almost never exists unless durable power of attorney and a DNR have been filed in advance. If a DNR does not exist, it must be assumed that the desire is for all means of preventing death to be used.
So the claim does not evaporate. Nor has the government overstepped its authority. Of the four judges that have heard these cases, only one has reached the conclusion that it is unconstitutional.
It's more the opposite. Without that addition slaves would have counted for 0/5ths of a person. The 3/5 number increases legislative the power of the slave states at the expense of additional taxation. The slave states were unhappy with the taxation aspects of that. They would have preferred that slaves not count toward taxation, but count as a person for legislation.
It's more that they are closing the doors to see that the horses don't get back in.
Copying classified material to an insecure government computer is a federal crime, even if that copy just goes into your browser cache. And if get to a situation where just about everyone can be accused of a specific crime then it's difficult to accuse anyone of that crime, because the law is being enforced selectively.
Members of the services who live off base and own their own computer can still get to wikileaks material from there.
What law has Assange broken? Are you referring to the Espionage Act of 1917? Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years under that act. His crime was giving a speech opposing US entry into WWI in which he also quoted the first amendment. How dare he think he had a right to speak! The Espionage Act was unconstitutional then and it's unconstitutional now.
Or are you talking about the crime of refusing to submit to a test for STDs upon the demand of a past sex partner? That's poor character, but not a crime. But apparently in Sweden, it retroactively makes consensual sex into rape. I hear that not calling the next day is now considered to be arson in Sweden.
People making a hero of him are ignorant of the law and naive about the need for security.
People demonizing him are naive if they believe that every foreign government with an interest in those cables hadn't already purchased them from one of the 3.5 million poorly paid people that had access to them.
Re:youre on /., a geek or a nerd, and you dont car
on
Today's WikiLeaks News
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· Score: 1
Where's the WikiLeaks coverage of China's human rights issues? How about the Cambodian government's failure to address the problem of child sex workers?
Are any of those things secret? I hear reports about them all the time. But if you have any leaked government or corporate documents on the subject, send them to wikileaks, and I'm sure they'll be publicized.
Or are you claiming that wikileaks should be reporting on things that are already available elsewhere?
Not buying health insurance (commerce) is participating in commerce and therefore it is mandatory that you purchase a specific thing?
Not really. Already, you really don't have the choice of whether you are going to need healthcare. At some point you will. By law, hospitals are required to serve you whether you can pay or not. Again, no choice. Since unfunded healthcare has a major impact on interstate commerce and the federal budget, it's reasonable to require that people maintain a method of paying for such care and well within the bounds of the commerce clause.
If you disagree, were the requirements of the Militia Act of 1791 that men between the ages of 18 and 45 buy a firelock, musket, or rifle and associated provisions for the purposes of reporting to duty when called within the bounds of the "raise and support armies" clause of the same section? Even though a rifle might cost a year's wages for unskilled labor?
...if Filburn had not used home-grown wheat he would have had to buy wheat on the open market.
What the hell? Do chickens ONLY eat wheat? If he grew corn to feed his chickens, would that be OK?
The purpose of the law was to raise wheat prices (and most wheat farmers were happy to restrict their production for that purpose and voted to approve the law.) So growing corn, barley, oats, etc. would have been just fine. Buying wheat from his neighbor would be fine, because the supply restriction would cross state lines. Not defending the decision, just clarifying.
Of course, more than doubling his allotted production leads me to suspect that he intended to sell it, and that the "it's for my chickens" excuse was what he at prepared for if he got caught. Not that that has anything to do with whether the law was constitutional.
The history of civil rights is too long and complex to argue about on Slashdot. Most of what people think they know about slavery is wrong, because they were taught lies in school. For example, the 3/5 rule for representation.
I'm not sure what you mean... Do you mean there's no 3/5 rule for representation? If not, you'll have to explain Article I, Section 2, Paragraph 3 to me.
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Thank you. That was the correct key. The Militia Act of 1792.
That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia. . . .
That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service.
And so the concept that forcing people to buy something from a private company is "unprecedented" flies out the window. AFAIK, this act has never been found unconstitutional.
That does not, however, give the government a blank check to decide to spend on anything an overwhelming majority of the American people sees fit to ask the government to spend for.
The "individual mandate" is the most controversial part of obamacare, and it's unprecedented. "You breathe therefore you must buy X" has NEVER been tried before.
I could have sworn that at some point in our history all adult males were required to own a rifle or musket (which could cost a couple years' income for a laborer.) I can't seem to find anything about it right now. Maybe is was a single state under the Articles of Confederation rather than a post ratification federal law.
car insurance is not mandatory in the US. Lots of us dont have it.
Those of us who do have insurance pay the bill for the insurance that the rest of us don't have. It's called "Uninsured Driver Coverage." In that way it's like health insurance, except that it shows up clearly in the coverage statement. "Uninsured sick idiot/asshole" coverage gets deducted directly from our paychecks and added to the prices the uninsured pay.
On NASA missions, it's unlikely that they would allow even a "nice to have but not mission critical" camera to be of low reliability. Management is very wary of the word "failure" even if it is failure of a non-critical piece. Management would push for it either to be fully qualified for the duration of the mission, or they would push to have it removed as unnecessary and not worth the risk to the mission.
Imagine what would happen if the camera broke into pieces on ascent and one of the pieces punctured a propellant tank. Or what would happen if it shorted out in a way that increased power draw to the point where the batteries would discharge too much during eclipse? Nope, you're going to get a camera with a complete mechanical and thermal finite elements analysis, flight qualified at 13g RMS of random vibration with a spectrum matching the what is expected when launch vehicle input passes through all the structures to get to the camera. You'll might need an acoustic analysis and test as well. And there will be a lens cover mechanism and possibly focusing actuators to qualify. Oh, and you'll need a spare, too. If you really want to do it on the cheap, I'd put it at $250K for qualifying the camera. That doesn't include anything spent on designing or building the camera. And you'll need a qualified interface for reading the data out, too. I don't know if anyone has flown USB.
My parents in rural Wisconsin (pop density 8 per square mile [3 per square km]) have fiber to their home. But they get both their phone and internet from a telephone cooperative. Maybe a cooperative without profit motive has more impetus to keep their client-owners happy.
See what socialism gets you?
Out here in California, I'm paying over $50/mo for 6Mbps (burst) down, 1Mbps up. SBC doesn't seem to be in a hurry to run fiber. Comcast has a lock on the the place because SBC doesn't offer anything above 1M/128k in our neighborhood. Verizon won't come in because we're a working class area. Thank god for profit motive or I'd be surfing the web like my parents.
Events like summer's drought/fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, drought in China, and a few dozen smaller scale disasters that happened this year are still going to be much more common after 1.6C of warming. It's still going to be tragic. Just a little less tragic than 2C of warming. But of course we're going to blow right through 720ppm of CO2, because we're doing nothing to curb emissions.
but at the same time, the meteorological institute is reporting that 2010 has been one of the warmest years ever - depending on what December does it may even become THE warmest.
Which will be screamed in the headlines until some oil company funded denialist lies about there being an error in the data and claims some year in the 1930s was warmer. These claims will be repeated ad nauseum on Fox News long after they are shown to be false.
Slashdot Mirror
Cut congressional pay to the median individual income level. Limit congressional staff to a single assistant per member of congress. Get rid of congressional benefits, including health care, pensions, the franking privilege, housing allowance, and travel reimbursement. That alone would cover the "fat" in the NSF budget.
Which local phone company do you have?
That's a great example of just how stupid and evil FDR was. In the midst of the greatest economic depression the country had ever seen, he intervened to make food more expensive.
It needed to be more expensive because if the people who grow food starve to death (or just stop farming) because they have no income, everyone starves. Homeless people from the farms wander into the cities looking for jobs that aren't there. Crop price declines and the associated migration to the cities were major problems during the great depression.
Cheaper isn't always better. It's better to artificially raise prices rather than deal with the collapse of food production and the extreme inflation that would follow. If you don't understand the economics of that, you need go back to school. Libertarian ideology doesn't trump economic reality no matter how much you believe in it.
Yes, even Christian Scientists end up in the hospital. Tell one that they have cancer, and they just might decide to line up for chemo. They also arrive on ambulances. Family members might even dial 911 for them if they collapse. Or they might just be bleeding severely, and even Christian Scientist believe in bandages. They may, if conscious, refuse care when they get to the hospital. Even if they refuse care they might not be stable enough to be released and must be provided with a bed, food and hydration. The unconscious must always be treated unless it is shown that someone present has authority to limit care. That authority almost never exists unless durable power of attorney and a DNR have been filed in advance. If a DNR does not exist, it must be assumed that the desire is for all means of preventing death to be used.
So the claim does not evaporate. Nor has the government overstepped its authority. Of the four judges that have heard these cases, only one has reached the conclusion that it is unconstitutional.
It's more the opposite. Without that addition slaves would have counted for 0/5ths of a person. The 3/5 number increases legislative the power of the slave states at the expense of additional taxation. The slave states were unhappy with the taxation aspects of that. They would have preferred that slaves not count toward taxation, but count as a person for legislation.
It's more that they are closing the doors to see that the horses don't get back in.
Copying classified material to an insecure government computer is a federal crime, even if that copy just goes into your browser cache. And if get to a situation where just about everyone can be accused of a specific crime then it's difficult to accuse anyone of that crime, because the law is being enforced selectively.
Members of the services who live off base and own their own computer can still get to wikileaks material from there.
What law has Assange broken? Are you referring to the Espionage Act of 1917? Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years under that act. His crime was giving a speech opposing US entry into WWI in which he also quoted the first amendment. How dare he think he had a right to speak! The Espionage Act was unconstitutional then and it's unconstitutional now.
Or are you talking about the crime of refusing to submit to a test for STDs upon the demand of a past sex partner? That's poor character, but not a crime. But apparently in Sweden, it retroactively makes consensual sex into rape. I hear that not calling the next day is now considered to be arson in Sweden.
People making a hero of him are ignorant of the law and naive about the need for security.
People demonizing him are naive if they believe that every foreign government with an interest in those cables hadn't already purchased them from one of the 3.5 million poorly paid people that had access to them.
Where's the WikiLeaks coverage of China's human rights issues? How about the Cambodian government's failure to address the problem of child sex workers?
Are any of those things secret? I hear reports about them all the time. But if you have any leaked government or corporate documents on the subject, send them to wikileaks, and I'm sure they'll be publicized.
Or are you claiming that wikileaks should be reporting on things that are already available elsewhere?
Not buying health insurance (commerce) is participating in commerce and therefore it is mandatory that you purchase a specific thing?
Not really. Already, you really don't have the choice of whether you are going to need healthcare. At some point you will. By law, hospitals are required to serve you whether you can pay or not. Again, no choice. Since unfunded healthcare has a major impact on interstate commerce and the federal budget, it's reasonable to require that people maintain a method of paying for such care and well within the bounds of the commerce clause.
If you disagree, were the requirements of the Militia Act of 1791 that men between the ages of 18 and 45 buy a firelock, musket, or rifle and associated provisions for the purposes of reporting to duty when called within the bounds of the "raise and support armies" clause of the same section? Even though a rifle might cost a year's wages for unskilled labor?
...if Filburn had not used home-grown wheat he would have had to buy wheat on the open market.
What the hell? Do chickens ONLY eat wheat? If he grew corn to feed his chickens, would that be OK?
The purpose of the law was to raise wheat prices (and most wheat farmers were happy to restrict their production for that purpose and voted to approve the law.) So growing corn, barley, oats, etc. would have been just fine. Buying wheat from his neighbor would be fine, because the supply restriction would cross state lines. Not defending the decision, just clarifying.
Of course, more than doubling his allotted production leads me to suspect that he intended to sell it, and that the "it's for my chickens" excuse was what he at prepared for if he got caught. Not that that has anything to do with whether the law was constitutional.
The history of civil rights is too long and complex to argue about on Slashdot. Most of what people think they know about slavery is wrong, because they were taught lies in school. For example, the 3/5 rule for representation.
I'm not sure what you mean... Do you mean there's no 3/5 rule for representation? If not, you'll have to explain Article I, Section 2, Paragraph 3 to me.
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia. . . . That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service.
And so the concept that forcing people to buy something from a private company is "unprecedented" flies out the window. AFAIK, this act has never been found unconstitutional.
You are REALLY good at CAPITALIZING random words in YOUR posts.
That does not, however, give the government a blank check to decide to spend on anything an overwhelming majority of the American people sees fit to ask the government to spend for.
FTFY.
The "individual mandate" is the most controversial part of obamacare, and it's unprecedented. "You breathe therefore you must buy X" has NEVER been tried before.
I could have sworn that at some point in our history all adult males were required to own a rifle or musket (which could cost a couple years' income for a laborer.) I can't seem to find anything about it right now. Maybe is was a single state under the Articles of Confederation rather than a post ratification federal law.
car insurance is not mandatory in the US. Lots of us dont have it.
Those of us who do have insurance pay the bill for the insurance that the rest of us don't have. It's called "Uninsured Driver Coverage." In that way it's like health insurance, except that it shows up clearly in the coverage statement. "Uninsured sick idiot/asshole" coverage gets deducted directly from our paychecks and added to the prices the uninsured pay.
The judge is an idiot.
Not an idiot. Just partisan. That's why this judge was chosen.
What do you expect from an Anonymous Coward hiding under a bridge?
It is possible to turn off instant search. Why don't you try that?
On NASA missions, it's unlikely that they would allow even a "nice to have but not mission critical" camera to be of low reliability. Management is very wary of the word "failure" even if it is failure of a non-critical piece. Management would push for it either to be fully qualified for the duration of the mission, or they would push to have it removed as unnecessary and not worth the risk to the mission.
Imagine what would happen if the camera broke into pieces on ascent and one of the pieces punctured a propellant tank. Or what would happen if it shorted out in a way that increased power draw to the point where the batteries would discharge too much during eclipse? Nope, you're going to get a camera with a complete mechanical and thermal finite elements analysis, flight qualified at 13g RMS of random vibration with a spectrum matching the what is expected when launch vehicle input passes through all the structures to get to the camera. You'll might need an acoustic analysis and test as well. And there will be a lens cover mechanism and possibly focusing actuators to qualify. Oh, and you'll need a spare, too. If you really want to do it on the cheap, I'd put it at $250K for qualifying the camera. That doesn't include anything spent on designing or building the camera. And you'll need a qualified interface for reading the data out, too. I don't know if anyone has flown USB.
I think he was confusing round trip and one way light travel times.
My parents in rural Wisconsin (pop density 8 per square mile [3 per square km]) have fiber to their home. But they get both their phone and internet from a telephone cooperative. Maybe a cooperative without profit motive has more impetus to keep their client-owners happy.
See what socialism gets you?
Out here in California, I'm paying over $50/mo for 6Mbps (burst) down, 1Mbps up. SBC doesn't seem to be in a hurry to run fiber. Comcast has a lock on the the place because SBC doesn't offer anything above 1M/128k in our neighborhood. Verizon won't come in because we're a working class area. Thank god for profit motive or I'd be surfing the web like my parents.
Events like summer's drought/fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, drought in China, and a few dozen smaller scale disasters that happened this year are still going to be much more common after 1.6C of warming. It's still going to be tragic. Just a little less tragic than 2C of warming. But of course we're going to blow right through 720ppm of CO2, because we're doing nothing to curb emissions.
Which will be screamed in the headlines until some oil company funded denialist lies about there being an error in the data and claims some year in the 1930s was warmer. These claims will be repeated ad nauseum on Fox News long after they are shown to be false.
FTFY