Mislabeling it is not. If you sell 1MBps with a 25GB/month cap, then you need to be advertising your "1MBps peak bandwidth, 0.01MBps constant bandwidth" service, not misleading your prospective customers.
Practically every ISP should be overselling peak bandwidth; because people don't all use it at the same time, your only choices are to let them use as much as they can (overselling) or to throttle them. But both peak and aggregate bandwidth are important; if you're not providing much of the latter you shouldn't get to imply otherwise.
I suspect it would be pretty difficult to find anything in the constitution that would go against using money from a bill that passed Congress to do what the bill specified.
Try the Tenth Amendment.
Of course, even before the Bill of Rights it was understood that the Constitution was a "white list" of enumerated powers which didn't give the Federal government authority to do anything not spelled out explicitly. But some paranoid people thought that it would be necessary to make this philosophy clearer. Apparently they still weren't paranoid enough.
I don't mean to say that the Constitution's white list isn't too limited. Competing businesses and governments have "Prisoner's Dilemma" type incentives to slack off on basic research, making such funding an excellent candidate for Federal intervention. But it would have been nice to have an actual Constitutional amendment adding that power to the list. Our alternative strategy of reinterpreting the Constitution to read "Congress can pass any bill which, in their own opinion, promotes the general welfare" has had a history of backfiring badly.
I was all in favor of giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to poor impoverished bankers and investment brokers, but I didn't expect anything like this!
If you've been laid off, you've spent your retirement funds, you're car is about to be repossessed, and your house is about to be foreclosed, the *last* thing you want to do is go on that trip to the Bahamas you've been planning to take.
Yes... but if you can literally print money, if you're in a deflationary spiral that would overwhelm the inflation inherent in printing money, and if that deflationary spiral is making everything cheaper, then now might actually be a good time to pick up a few vacation bargains.
We have to balance the budget. Eventually. In a time-integrated sense. Now is probably the worst possible time to start.
On your other point: unless "privatization" is code for "use the same amount of government money to buy from the best private suppliers", then it would actually turn out to be code for "shut down the space program". There's enough Rich SOBs out there to support some Mach 2.5 suborbital hops, sure, but not enough unassisted to pay for actually getting anywhere at Mach 25+. Space sciences development has been more than worth the investment spent in it so far (and I'm just talking about communications, sensory, etc. satellites, not spinoffs), and I'm pretty sure that will continue to be true, but the timescale and investment magnitude involved is too big for any one company to risk funding the basic research themselves.
When my aunt stops getting checks from the government to NOT grow food on her farm, then I will start to worry about food shortages.
What makes you think that government policies which encourage more expensive food are incompatible with food shortages? Two of the iconic symbols of the Great Depression are starving poor people and government-mandated destruction of farm "overproduction".
While the press shakes a finger at the US the actual governments just shake their head in public and behind closed doors are probably glad that it is happening. Yea you will get some venting on Slashdot about how evil the US is but those people are not in political power.
So as long as we've got US-friendly governments in place, there's no need to worry about popular opinion? Well, I suppose that strategy's never backfired horribly on us before...
More regulations, judiciously applied, would have prevented this crisis.
Which regulations? Give details.
I'd personally be interested in regulation like "You can't offer to insure someone for $x or to borrow $x from them unless you keep y*$x on hand to pay them off if necessary. And yes, this applies to anything that will make you similarly financially liable to them, whether you call it 'banking' or 'savings and loan' or 'insurance' or a 'CDS' or a 'rose by another name'."
Sell people a specific argument like that and you might get surprising agreement - I'll bet you can even get some of the "No! Regulation evil!" libertarian types to insist that y should be 1.0 unless the customer signs a contract stipulating otherwise.
But the vague word "regulation" just tells people: "We need more economic decisions to be made by people who have no financial stake in making them correctly, and who just agreed to give hundreds of billions of your dollars to people who made them incorrectly." You can probably convince lots of people of that argument, too, as long as you phrase it more obscurely than I did. But you still won't be able to make it into a good idea.
It may stop the whole world's economy on its tracks and send billions of people to unemployment and starvation, resulting in worldwide barbarism and war.
Yeah, that's what I've been hearing, from people who wanted to take a trillion tax dollars to hand to failed bankers so that they would be able to loan the money back to us without non-failed bankers getting in the way. So did you just fall for their line, or are you selling something too?
One group told the Finnish government that they would be able to count votes by harnessing the movement of subatomic particles to display ephemeral text and shapes, to automatically sense human touch, to follow a pre-programmed decision script written in advance and placed into microscopic internal storage, and to protect their results by encoding them mathematically.
Another group explained some of the reasons why this might not all work perfectly.
And it wasn't until the second group chimed in that some wiseass said "hey, that sounds like science fiction!"...
Well, I feel a little better about my own government now. That's kinda nice, I guess.
Every officer who looks vaguely like they're acting improperly gets terminated and criminally charged.
Interesting theory. Does every officer who looks vaguely like they're acting improperly get evidence rendered inadmissible? No? Then you've got an interesting, clearly incorrect theory.
The punishments are insufficient to deter,
I'd prefer that the punishment be: "whatever a non-cop would get for the same crime". Breaking and entering, wiretapping, etc. are crimes. If our anti-wiretapping laws are sufficient to deter blackmailers, for instance, they ought to also be sufficient to deter jackboots. If they aren't, then that's a separate problem that needs to be fixed regardless.
and every so often a cop takes a fall to get "that guy we just knew was dirty".
Could be. And then we either end up with a crooked cop and a criminal getting punished (good and good) or a crooked cop getting punished while a clean suspect gets reparations (good and not good). Sounds like a win or a wash to me.
Note that the cop doesn't have to know he or she is going to take the fall
So your third theory is that the cops have the ability to frame each other for crimes but not to frame suspects? After all, if you can get someone to take the fall for something they didn't do, why wouldn't a crooked cop just do that to the suspect and cut out the middleman?
I apologize for interrupting the false dilemma here, but would it be a reasonable option to prosecute both the criminal who was caught and the cop who violated the Constitution to catch him? I know, I know, we've got two guilty people on our hands, and our natural, rational instinct is "let them both go unpunished, then set fire to our own hair"... but perhaps there's a way to disincentivize police excesses without giving criminals a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I suppose there's an argument that anyone who would violate the Fourth Amendment can't be trusted as part of a chain of evidence... but in that case, shouldn't the guilty cop be kicked off the force entirely, not just distrusted regarding a single case?
Those are just thoughts in general, though, not necessarily a recommendation for this particular case. Even if it was admissible, I'm not sure I'd want to prosecute someone with evidence like "Look at what we found on his computer, thanks to the help of some guys who felt cheated by him, took his computer, reported incriminating files to us, and totally pinky swear that neither of them put them there themselves."
And does anything approach the singular time-wasting abilities of IMDB or Wikipedia?
Google for "TV Tropes". No, I'm not giving you a URL. If I had to go find the URL, I might accidentally look at the URL. And then I'd end up clicking some of the links there. But there's no way to read through a Trope page without being curious enough to click on at least two of the links there, and then two of the links on each of those, and then... well, I just put dinner in the oven and I do not want to suddenly snap out of a fascinated reverie an hour from now when the smoke from my kitchen burning down reminds me that I'm starving.
And the benefits (even on Flash 9 sites, without the new features in 10) are significant:
Better performance and smoother graphics The fullscreen video mode is no longer choppy
Unfortunately, there's a significant drawback as well:
Often crashes my browser as soon as I visit a page with Flash. (or at least crashes the plugin process, when using a browser smart enough to isolate plugins from the main system)
Obviously I got to enjoy Flash 10 for a while before it started dying on me. Wiping my.macromedia directory doesn't seem to restore the stable behavior. Neither does reinstalling flash. Did Hulu change their video format in some subtle way that breaks just my system? I don't know, but he official Flash 10 breaks too, not just the betas. Unless anyone here has any good ideas, back to 9 it is.
I don't think so. Remember that it isn't enough to merely change votes; that just wins you a quick ticket to prison. The criminals' goal is to change votes without being caught by any election observers who are watching the polls. And what system makes that goal easier to achieve? Creating an electronic voting machine that can change digital ballots undetected just requires basic programming skills and access to the machine. Creating a ballot box that can change paper and pencil ballots undetected requires magic.
Or to look at honest goals instead: securing a paper ballot box requires that you send someone who you can trust to watch every ballot going into it. Securing an electronic ballot box requires that you send someone who you can trust to watch the voltage on every transistor. Only the former can be accomplished by human eyes.
If you didn't recognize any personal attacks, how is it that you managed to successfully delete them so precisely? Did you just skim over "The dimmer / less educated members of society" before deciding to only quote words following it? If not, why would you criticize me for bringing up education when it was clearly only necessary to respond to that "less educated" crack?
"You should believe these people because they have economics Ph.D.s" would have been an argument from authority. "Only the less educated people believe this" followed by "No, here are many counterexamples" is not. I was making the latter argument, not the former.
If you didn't find more than one of the good arguments in the linked articles, I have to wonder if providing more would be an efficient use of my time. But as long as I'm correcting logical fallacies I might as well bring up one more of those: the burden of proof. When proposing an idea like "I'd like to take hundreds of billions of dollars from innocent taxpayers and use it to buy things for more than they're worth from irresponsible bankers", the burden of proof is *not* on your proposed victims to answer "Why shouldn't I?"
the dimmer / less educated members of society (those currently saying things like "Why are we paying billions to bankers when small businesses don't get bailed out?)
My education taught me about the ad hominem attack in grade school, and hopefully exempted me from this one somewhere between the Bachelor's and the Ph.D. Or does the Ph.D. need to be in economics to count? I can find a few of themwhoagree with me too.
So rather than slandering the question, would you care to propose your idea of the "brighter / more educated" answer? Make sure it covers the followup question, "Instead of rewarding failed decision makers, why don't we let them go bankrupt so that their more responsible competitors can take over?"
How do you "corrupt government officials"? Please explain.
I'll want some explanations too - I've heard that if you pay a hitman, you can be convicted of murder, even if you didn't pull the trigger yourself! It's all so confusing.
I hate to risk fueling the conspiracy theory fodder in your other reply, but:
Does anyone know if there's a copy of the US Code (preferably online) that includes a revision history? I think it would be fascinating to see the changelog behind some of our current laws.
Not like the Millenium Prize problems, certainly. They're broad fields, some of which aren't even primarily mathematical and some of which already have some existing answers. That web page appears to be quoting the DARPA.doc precisely, but it reads as if it were a brief summary of a real RFP.
Just looking at the first few examples:
A predictive theory of the brain? That'll be a fantastic biological breakthrough, but I doubt it'll require any new mathematics.
I'm happy to see that "persistence in stochastic environments" is considered a hot topic by others, too, but they could be a little less vague about what they mean by it. The hyperlinked article there seems unrelated.
Foams, suspensions, gels, liquid crystals, etc. can be modeled with the same conservation equations as Navier-Stokes, just with more complex constitutive laws. Getting those laws right sometimes involves new mathematics (e.g. "homogenization") but often just requires getting better experimental measurements of the material you're interested in.
"Biological Quantum Field Theory" sounds like another "we've got the right algorithms but just need more biological data to scale them up with" situation, but maybe this is a case where the algorithms don't yet scale optimally?
"Duality in Mathematics" includes still-developing fields... but the answer to "Can it be extended to develop principled computational techniques where duality and geometry are the basis for novel algorithms?" is "Yes, and it has been for at least a decade or two."
If this were a private company, they'd throw both candidates' resumes in the trash and keep looking.
That depends on how urgently the company needed a position to be filled; sometimes even a bad employee is better than no employee. And "President of the United States of America" is a very critical position! If there wasn't anyone around to sign bills into law, then the next time we discovered the need to spend a trillion taxpayer dollars buying bad mortgages from corrupt financiers, we wouldn't be able to...
hmmmm...
Are you sure the trash can is good enough? I've got a paper shredder too.
There could be a major breakthrough in (non-chemical) propulsion
If rocket improvements are going to compare to transistor improvements, you're right - there's just no room for a half dozen orders of magnitude improvement with currently foreseeable rocket technology.
But wouldn't just a couple orders of magnitude in price reduction be pretty nice? Most of the cost of spaceflight isn't directly due to propulsion. You can literally manufacture most of your rocket fuel out of thin air, and even the rest is cheap enough to be negligible compared the the rest of your flight costs. What's historically been expensive has been the armies of engineers needed to design and operate orbital rockets, as well as the manufacturing costs of building or rebuilding a vehicle for every flight. SpaceX's actions have just proven that they've got a good shot at fixing the first problem, and their statements prove that they're at least working on fixing the second.
If a statewide recount of all disqualified ballots was undertaken using the standards that each county's election officials have said they would use in a recount.
Winner: Al Gore, by 171 votes
neither has any facts to sustain it.
Just because you don't like the facts doesn't mean they don't exist.
That's because there wasn't one. "They mixed telecom immunity in with another bill" isn't a changing circumstance, it's a centuries-old political ploy that could have been seen a mile away and could have been countered easily: by both filibustering the poisoned bill (as he promised, for those of us who care about such things) and introducing an unpoisoned alternative.
This mathematician is used to the word "if" having only a subset of the meaning of the phrase "if and only if", and interpreting that statute with the former meaning but not the latter would mean that Barr doesn't have a case.
But clearly law doesn't translate into English quite as clearly as I'm used to (can I assume that semicolon after 192.031.2 means "and"?), so it would be nice to hear from someone who speaks the lingo.
Slashdot Mirror
Mislabeling it is not. If you sell 1MBps with a 25GB/month cap, then you need to be advertising your "1MBps peak bandwidth, 0.01MBps constant bandwidth" service, not misleading your prospective customers.
Practically every ISP should be overselling peak bandwidth; because people don't all use it at the same time, your only choices are to let them use as much as they can (overselling) or to throttle them. But both peak and aggregate bandwidth are important; if you're not providing much of the latter you shouldn't get to imply otherwise.
I suspect it would be pretty difficult to find anything in the constitution that would go against using money from a bill that passed Congress to do what the bill specified.
Try the Tenth Amendment.
Of course, even before the Bill of Rights it was understood that the Constitution was a "white list" of enumerated powers which didn't give the Federal government authority to do anything not spelled out explicitly. But some paranoid people thought that it would be necessary to make this philosophy clearer. Apparently they still weren't paranoid enough.
I don't mean to say that the Constitution's white list isn't too limited. Competing businesses and governments have "Prisoner's Dilemma" type incentives to slack off on basic research, making such funding an excellent candidate for Federal intervention. But it would have been nice to have an actual Constitutional amendment adding that power to the list. Our alternative strategy of reinterpreting the Constitution to read "Congress can pass any bill which, in their own opinion, promotes the general welfare" has had a history of backfiring badly.
I was all in favor of giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to poor impoverished bankers and investment brokers, but I didn't expect anything like this!
If you've been laid off, you've spent your retirement funds, you're car is about to be repossessed, and your house is about to be foreclosed, the *last* thing you want to do is go on that trip to the Bahamas you've been planning to take.
Yes... but if you can literally print money, if you're in a deflationary spiral that would overwhelm the inflation inherent in printing money, and if that deflationary spiral is making everything cheaper, then now might actually be a good time to pick up a few vacation bargains.
We have to balance the budget. Eventually. In a time-integrated sense. Now is probably the worst possible time to start.
On your other point: unless "privatization" is code for "use the same amount of government money to buy from the best private suppliers", then it would actually turn out to be code for "shut down the space program". There's enough Rich SOBs out there to support some Mach 2.5 suborbital hops, sure, but not enough unassisted to pay for actually getting anywhere at Mach 25+. Space sciences development has been more than worth the investment spent in it so far (and I'm just talking about communications, sensory, etc. satellites, not spinoffs), and I'm pretty sure that will continue to be true, but the timescale and investment magnitude involved is too big for any one company to risk funding the basic research themselves.
When my aunt stops getting checks from the government to NOT grow food on her farm, then I will start to worry about food shortages.
What makes you think that government policies which encourage more expensive food are incompatible with food shortages? Two of the iconic symbols of the Great Depression are starving poor people and government-mandated destruction of farm "overproduction".
While the press shakes a finger at the US the actual governments just shake their head in public and behind closed doors are probably glad that it is happening.
Yea you will get some venting on Slashdot about how evil the US is but those people are not in political power.
So as long as we've got US-friendly governments in place, there's no need to worry about popular opinion? Well, I suppose that strategy's never backfired horribly on us before...
More regulations, judiciously applied, would have prevented this crisis.
Which regulations? Give details.
I'd personally be interested in regulation like "You can't offer to insure someone for $x or to borrow $x from them unless you keep y*$x on hand to pay them off if necessary. And yes, this applies to anything that will make you similarly financially liable to them, whether you call it 'banking' or 'savings and loan' or 'insurance' or a 'CDS' or a 'rose by another name'."
Sell people a specific argument like that and you might get surprising agreement - I'll bet you can even get some of the "No! Regulation evil!" libertarian types to insist that y should be 1.0 unless the customer signs a contract stipulating otherwise.
But the vague word "regulation" just tells people: "We need more economic decisions to be made by people who have no financial stake in making them correctly, and who just agreed to give hundreds of billions of your dollars to people who made them incorrectly." You can probably convince lots of people of that argument, too, as long as you phrase it more obscurely than I did. But you still won't be able to make it into a good idea.
It may stop the whole world's economy on its tracks and send billions of people to unemployment and starvation, resulting in worldwide barbarism and war.
Yeah, that's what I've been hearing, from people who wanted to take a trillion tax dollars to hand to failed bankers so that they would be able to loan the money back to us without non-failed bankers getting in the way. So did you just fall for their line, or are you selling something too?
One group told the Finnish government that they would be able to count votes by harnessing the movement of subatomic particles to display ephemeral text and shapes, to automatically sense human touch, to follow a pre-programmed decision script written in advance and placed into microscopic internal storage, and to protect their results by encoding them mathematically.
Another group explained some of the reasons why this might not all work perfectly.
And it wasn't until the second group chimed in that some wiseass said "hey, that sounds like science fiction!" ...
Well, I feel a little better about my own government now. That's kinda nice, I guess.
Every officer who looks vaguely like they're acting improperly gets terminated and criminally charged.
Interesting theory. Does every officer who looks vaguely like they're acting improperly get evidence rendered inadmissible? No? Then you've got an interesting, clearly incorrect theory.
The punishments are insufficient to deter,
I'd prefer that the punishment be: "whatever a non-cop would get for the same crime". Breaking and entering, wiretapping, etc. are crimes. If our anti-wiretapping laws are sufficient to deter blackmailers, for instance, they ought to also be sufficient to deter jackboots. If they aren't, then that's a separate problem that needs to be fixed regardless.
and every so often a cop takes a fall to get "that guy we just knew was dirty".
Could be. And then we either end up with a crooked cop and a criminal getting punished (good and good) or a crooked cop getting punished while a clean suspect gets reparations (good and not good). Sounds like a win or a wash to me.
Note that the cop doesn't have to know he or she is going to take the fall
So your third theory is that the cops have the ability to frame each other for crimes but not to frame suspects? After all, if you can get someone to take the fall for something they didn't do, why wouldn't a crooked cop just do that to the suspect and cut out the middleman?
I apologize for interrupting the false dilemma here, but would it be a reasonable option to prosecute both the criminal who was caught and the cop who violated the Constitution to catch him? I know, I know, we've got two guilty people on our hands, and our natural, rational instinct is "let them both go unpunished, then set fire to our own hair"... but perhaps there's a way to disincentivize police excesses without giving criminals a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I suppose there's an argument that anyone who would violate the Fourth Amendment can't be trusted as part of a chain of evidence... but in that case, shouldn't the guilty cop be kicked off the force entirely, not just distrusted regarding a single case?
Those are just thoughts in general, though, not necessarily a recommendation for this particular case. Even if it was admissible, I'm not sure I'd want to prosecute someone with evidence like "Look at what we found on his computer, thanks to the help of some guys who felt cheated by him, took his computer, reported incriminating files to us, and totally pinky swear that neither of them put them there themselves."
And does anything approach the singular time-wasting abilities of IMDB or Wikipedia?
Google for "TV Tropes". No, I'm not giving you a URL. If I had to go find the URL, I might accidentally look at the URL. And then I'd end up clicking some of the links there. But there's no way to read through a Trope page without being curious enough to click on at least two of the links there, and then two of the links on each of those, and then... well, I just put dinner in the oven and I do not want to suddenly snap out of a fascinated reverie an hour from now when the smoke from my kitchen burning down reminds me that I'm starving.
And the benefits (even on Flash 9 sites, without the new features in 10) are significant:
Better performance and smoother graphics
The fullscreen video mode is no longer choppy
Unfortunately, there's a significant drawback as well:
Often crashes my browser as soon as I visit a page with Flash.
(or at least crashes the plugin process, when using a browser smart enough to isolate plugins from the main system)
Obviously I got to enjoy Flash 10 for a while before it started dying on me. Wiping my .macromedia directory doesn't seem to restore the stable behavior. Neither does reinstalling flash. Did Hulu change their video format in some subtle way that breaks just my system? I don't know, but he official Flash 10 breaks too, not just the betas. Unless anyone here has any good ideas, back to 9 it is.
I don't think so. Remember that it isn't enough to merely change votes; that just wins you a quick ticket to prison. The criminals' goal is to change votes without being caught by any election observers who are watching the polls. And what system makes that goal easier to achieve? Creating an electronic voting machine that can change digital ballots undetected just requires basic programming skills and access to the machine. Creating a ballot box that can change paper and pencil ballots undetected requires magic.
Or to look at honest goals instead: securing a paper ballot box requires that you send someone who you can trust to watch every ballot going into it. Securing an electronic ballot box requires that you send someone who you can trust to watch the voltage on every transistor. Only the former can be accomplished by human eyes.
Again, I would like to see a well-written, well-supported critique of this bailout,
Try this one.
If you didn't recognize any personal attacks, how is it that you managed to successfully delete them so precisely? Did you just skim over "The dimmer / less educated members of society" before deciding to only quote words following it? If not, why would you criticize me for bringing up education when it was clearly only necessary to respond to that "less educated" crack?
"You should believe these people because they have economics Ph.D.s" would have been an argument from authority. "Only the less educated people believe this" followed by "No, here are many counterexamples" is not. I was making the latter argument, not the former.
If you didn't find more than one of the good arguments in the linked articles, I have to wonder if providing more would be an efficient use of my time. But as long as I'm correcting logical fallacies I might as well bring up one more of those: the burden of proof. When proposing an idea like "I'd like to take hundreds of billions of dollars from innocent taxpayers and use it to buy things for more than they're worth from irresponsible bankers", the burden of proof is *not* on your proposed victims to answer "Why shouldn't I?"
the dimmer / less educated members of society (those currently saying things like "Why are we paying billions to bankers when small businesses don't get bailed out?)
My education taught me about the ad hominem attack in grade school, and hopefully exempted me from this one somewhere between the Bachelor's and the Ph.D. Or does the Ph.D. need to be in economics to count? I can find a few of them who agree with me too.
So rather than slandering the question, would you care to propose your idea of the "brighter / more educated" answer? Make sure it covers the followup question, "Instead of rewarding failed decision makers, why don't we let them go bankrupt so that their more responsible competitors can take over?"
How do you "corrupt government officials"? Please explain.
I'll want some explanations too - I've heard that if you pay a hitman, you can be convicted of murder, even if you didn't pull the trigger yourself! It's all so confusing.
I hate to risk fueling the conspiracy theory fodder in your other reply, but:
Does anyone know if there's a copy of the US Code (preferably online) that includes a revision history? I think it would be fascinating to see the changelog behind some of our current laws.
Not like the Millenium Prize problems, certainly. They're broad fields, some of which aren't even primarily mathematical and some of which already have some existing answers. That web page appears to be quoting the DARPA .doc precisely, but it reads as if it were a brief summary of a real RFP.
Just looking at the first few examples:
A predictive theory of the brain? That'll be a fantastic biological breakthrough, but I doubt it'll require any new mathematics.
I'm happy to see that "persistence in stochastic environments" is considered a hot topic by others, too, but they could be a little less vague about what they mean by it. The hyperlinked article there seems unrelated.
Foams, suspensions, gels, liquid crystals, etc. can be modeled with the same conservation equations as Navier-Stokes, just with more complex constitutive laws. Getting those laws right sometimes involves new mathematics (e.g. "homogenization") but often just requires getting better experimental measurements of the material you're interested in.
"Biological Quantum Field Theory" sounds like another "we've got the right algorithms but just need more biological data to scale them up with" situation, but maybe this is a case where the algorithms don't yet scale optimally?
"Duality in Mathematics" includes still-developing fields... but the answer to "Can it be extended to develop principled computational techniques where duality and geometry are the basis for novel algorithms?" is "Yes, and it has been for at least a decade or two."
If this were a private company, they'd throw both candidates' resumes in the trash and keep looking.
That depends on how urgently the company needed a position to be filled; sometimes even a bad employee is better than no employee. And "President of the United States of America" is a very critical position! If there wasn't anyone around to sign bills into law, then the next time we discovered the need to spend a trillion taxpayer dollars buying bad mortgages from corrupt financiers, we wouldn't be able to...
hmmmm...
Are you sure the trash can is good enough? I've got a paper shredder too.
There could be a major breakthrough in (non-chemical) propulsion
If rocket improvements are going to compare to transistor improvements, you're right - there's just no room for a half dozen orders of magnitude improvement with currently foreseeable rocket technology.
But wouldn't just a couple orders of magnitude in price reduction be pretty nice? Most of the cost of spaceflight isn't directly due to propulsion. You can literally manufacture most of your rocket fuel out of thin air, and even the rest is cheap enough to be negligible compared the the rest of your flight costs. What's historically been expensive has been the armies of engineers needed to design and operate orbital rockets, as well as the manufacturing costs of building or rebuilding a vehicle for every flight. SpaceX's actions have just proven that they've got a good shot at fixing the first problem, and their statements prove that they're at least working on fixing the second.
http://www.nytimes.com/images/2001/11/12/politics/recount/results/preset-v4.html
neither has any facts to sustain it.
Just because you don't like the facts doesn't mean they don't exist.
That's because there wasn't one. "They mixed telecom immunity in with another bill" isn't a changing circumstance, it's a centuries-old political ploy that could have been seen a mile away and could have been countered easily: by both filibustering the poisoned bill (as he promised, for those of us who care about such things) and introducing an unpoisoned alternative.
This mathematician is used to the word "if" having only a subset of the meaning of the phrase "if and only if", and interpreting that statute with the former meaning but not the latter would mean that Barr doesn't have a case.
But clearly law doesn't translate into English quite as clearly as I'm used to (can I assume that semicolon after 192.031.2 means "and"?), so it would be nice to hear from someone who speaks the lingo.