I haven't RTFL, but I do know off the top of my head that the ABL is intended for theater missiles, SRBMs instead of ICBMs (SCUDs, not Minutemen). And even then it's intended to hit the missile in the boost phase (while it's still launching, shows up like a flare in IR and is still loaded with lots of explosive fuel), which means the 747 would pretty much have to be flying over Pyongyang in order to stop a DPRK missile of any range.
It's not National Missile Defense, it's air superiority with perks. It can't even catch an artillery shell, let alone a MIRV, nor is it intended to.
"IANAL, but I've read a lot of Groklaw, and from what I can understand Nintendo has never really cracked down on NES, SNES, or N64 roms"
Ehhh... it depends. Two years ago, as was all over Slashdot, Nintendo was among the companies that went after Lik Sang, particularly for selling Flash Advance Linkers that could download and upload GBA roms. I also remember the hooplah over UltraHLE, an N64 emulator that was released when the N64 was still current. All in all, though, it seems Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts have been pretty low-key, at least where obsolete consoles are concerned.
They could do some of the same things the RIAA and MPAA are doing, for the same reasons; ROMs aren't as prevalent in P2P networks as music and movies, but they are out there. They could hassle the folks who write ZSNES and Snes9x. They could try hunting down those few crackers who actually dumped those NES carts and transferred them to a PC (it's not like they could have just used their Super Wild Card or the Flash Advance Linker). But from what I've seen they aren't.
It's almost as if, so long as money isn't changing hands, Nintendo (if not the console gaming industry in general) has something of a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Consider the EarthBound "Zero" ROM. We have every reason to believe there is only copy of the (development) cartridge out in the wild. Money was paid to the person who owned the cartridge for the express purpose of dumping the image and putting it on the internet. And the Slashdot article I just linked to is about an interview with a Nintendo employee about whether the ROM is really the unreleased US version of Mother or just a fan translation of the Japanese version. And yet, to my knowledge, Nintendo's legal arm hasn't made a peep about the entire episode.
"I always thought that libertarianism was about individual freedoms, and not so much economic policy?"
Libertarian fiscal philosophy stems from their desire to have freedom from taxes. Sometimes the US Libertarian Party goes too far IMO (like Badnarik talking about doing away with the Federal Reserve and returning to a gold standard), but the general idea is to cut spending in order to avoid excuses for collecting and raising taxes.
"Some of the Game Cube knock-off hardware is incredible. They make the game console smaller, prettier, more see-through-ish, higher quality and cheaper."
You're assuming their GameCubes. Counterfeit Famicoms (i. e. NES) have been designed to look like anything from a Genesis/Megadrive to a PlayStation to a Dreamcast (you open the "disc drive" cover to find a cartridge slot) in the hopes of confusing unwary shoppers. Even if those "GameCubes" you saw accepted external media (instead of "500 built-in games"), I doubt they actually read and play GCN games.
"And the effect of windmills operating in the bottom 1/10th of a percent of the atmosphere would be almost nil."
Oh, come on. There were a number of things you could have taken me to task on for a post I wrote at oh-dark-thirty. Instead you decide to miss the word "exponentially?" When it comes to talking about the mass and density of a body of air, that 0.1% you talk about is actually closer to 50%.
"It's noise, on the level of planting a forest."
Didn't I cover this? The closest possible analogy isn't planting a forest but deliberately planting trees as an intended windbrake. And even then windmills would be more effective because everything about them is intended to remove as much energy from the (formerly) moving air as possible.
The entire thing is orchestrated for maximum effect on wind. It's not noise, it's Mozart.
"It's just ecoterrorist propaganda."
Yeah, that explains all my pro-nuke postings here... When last I checked, Greenpeace still doesn't agree with Patrick Moore on that one.
"Dowell likens it to leaving your garbage on the curb--anyone could conceivably go through it and take whatever is there for their own."
It's interesting to know that Bill Gates has been forced to go back to his roots...
The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.
"Windmills are maybe 100 meters high. The Earth's atmosphere is over 1000 times that thick (though it is, of course, thinner as you go up)."
Exponentially thinner. Ignoring your arbitrary 100 km number, ever notice the way passenger jets that only go up 10 km max need to maintain a pressurized cabin, or how black the sky looks from that meager altitude? Most of the air we as humans on the surface worry about is far closer to the surface than you imply, and most weather paterns we see are brought about by differences in surface temperature.
"A windmill doesn't keep air from flowing even at the surface, it just slows it and disturbs it a little. Kind of like a tree. Are trees bad, too?"
Trees aren't designed to slow down the air as much as possible.
"There is just no way we could build enough windmills to affect the Earth's climate."
People say the same about burning fossil fuels.
"Even if you could affect climate that way, who knows what other factors would show up to change the result?"
You're assuming those other factors would be positive.
"Taking energy out of the air doesn't destroy the energy - it just moves it."
It moves it out of the air, in which it would affect weather.
"It'll get released into the atmosphere as heat somewhere else, eventually."
Localized convection currents aren't the same thing as global weather paterns. Instead of having a whole bunch of air moving from here to there, you'd be replacing it with random miniscule updrafts that would likely be too small to measure. The only way these windmills would have negligible effect on weather is if all the electricity from the windmills went towards powering fans pointed in the direction of the original air current, and even then you'll have to deal with transmission losses and inefficiencies in the electric motors.
That's the whole !@^$ing point! Fission reactors are glorified steam plants!
The towers are there to get the last bit of oomph from the steam before its no longer usable, and then it's cooled a little more before dumping it back into the river. You'll see the same kind of structures in any kind of power plant that relies on boiling water (i. e. any kind of power plant).
"but any unbiased study of the total global side effect of each kind of energy generation is going to show wind ranking far above nuclear."
Can you get enough electricity from wind to solve other problems beyond the electrical grid? One of the main advantages of nuclear energy is the obnoxiously high output, giving you a surplus that can be used to, say, crack water. Heck, one of the reasons new nuclear plants aren't being built is because they're overkill during off-peak hours. Sure, you'd be avoiding summer brown-outs, but there's nothing for the plant to do during the winter and the corporate mindset never sees beyond the current quarter.
Beyond certain kinds of mass transit I don't see wind having an impact on personal transport, at least not in the way nuclear can.
"You think wind farms (which are, after all, designed to let most of the wind pass) are going to have more effect than cities full of blocky buildings?"
Cities and the buildings within them generally aren't built to have maximum effect on the wind.
"You are comparing Ashcroft to Palmer and your point is, "hey it could have been worse!"? That is insane."
Actually, to me the point of the parent was "It was worse" in response to someone saying that Ashcroft was the "worst ever."
"The emergence of advanced technology and data centralization has a very real effect on how these laws affect our freedoms in more powerful ways then they did in the pre-World War I era."
If anything, I'd say the internet makes it more difficult. Without sounding too much like a 1990's idealist, it's kind of difficult to burn the internet compared to books and pamphlets. Facists and self-styled communists were more than able to set up an oppressive police state with Twentieth Century (or even Nineteenth Century in some cases) technology. It all hinges on a citizen's willingness to turn somebody else in, because even today, in order to keep an eye on 50% of US citizens would require the FBI to employ the other 50%.
"You don't live in fear of Mulah Omar leading a popular rebellion in which all of our property is seized and redistributed do you?"
Nor did we truly live in fear of such a socialist revolution. The high-water mark for the Socialist Party in the US was 1920, when presidential candidate Eugene Debs got 3.5% of the popular vote. It went downhill from there.
"Before I cease I will just say that I think if terrorists had these types of weapons they would attack Isreal, not NYC."
If that were true, NYC wouldn't have been attacked to begin with. Bin Laden doesn't really care about the Palestinian cause, if for no other reason than because he rejects the concept of the nation-state outright. Arab nations and Arab interests only hate Israel slightly more than they hate each other. His plans call for a pan-Islamic superstate stretching across at least one hemisphere, and the US, currently the world's most powerful nation-state, stands as a natural obstacle to this goal and will draw fire from him in and of itself, separate from its support of Israel.
Also note that the Arab nation-states are also bin Laden's natural enemy, since they're the first ones that need to be dissolved into his vision of a kingdom of Allah on earth. For the most part, the lip-service he pays to the Palestinian cause is because it's popular and is one of the few things most Arabs and Muslims can agree on. By the same token, Palestinian support of bin Laden is only because he attacks an ally of Israel, not because they want to live in the same country as Jordanians or Syrians.
"This is what they claimed to get the voters who voted on "moral" values."
Seems to have backfired in Oregon and Michigan though, where they voted for Kerry as well as banning gay marriage.
"Although how Bush can take the high ground whilst sending thousands to their deaths,"
In an all volunteer army...
"defending torture"
By punishing torture through courts martial?
"preventing a large number of prisoners of war from getting their basic rights under the Geneva convention"
Long argument short: The Geneva conventions only applies to those who wear uniforms and openly carry their weapons. Deliberately trying to blend in to the civillian population places you wholly outside the realm of the Geneva conventions.
"The federal constitution supercedes state constitutions."
Only insofar as the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned as well as Congress' duty to maintain a republican form of government in each state. There is nothing in the United States Constitution that requires capital punishment, which means that it is left to the states by the Tenth Amendment.
Remember we are talking about a federal constution, not a centrallized one.
"However, cases in the federal government's jurisdiction are, by definition, not tried under state (or protectorate) law but under federal law."
But the feds still expect the states to do the executions for them. IIRC Ashcroft recently put New Hampshire (a full-fledged state) in a similar situation.
"See separation of powers..."
Hypocrite. If this were truly about "separation of powers" then the feds wouldn't be able to force states to do something, because those powers would be separated.
"Why are you letting this happen? If they tried it in New Zealand, we'd have 30-40% of the population on the streets."
When tyranny is established in the bosom of a small nation, it is more galling than elsewhere, because, as it acts within a narrow circle, every point of that circle is subject to its direct influence. It supplies the place of those great designs which it cannot entertain by a violent or an exasperating interference in a multitude of minute details; and it leaves the political world, to which it properly belongs, to meddle with the arrangements of domestic life. Tastes as well as actions are to be regulated at its pleasure; and the families of the citizens as well as the affairs of the State are to be governed by its decisions. This invasion of rights occurs, however, but seldom, and freedom is in truth the natural state of small communities. The temptations which the Government offers to ambition are too weak, and the resources of private individuals are too slender, for the sovereign power easily to fall within the grasp of a single citizen; and should such an event have occurred, the subjects of the State can without difficulty overthrow the tyrant and his oppression by a simultaneous effort.
(...)
All the passions which are most fatal to republican institutions spread with an increasing territory, whilst the virtues which maintain their dignity do not augment in the same proportion. The ambition of the citizens increases with the power of the State; the strength of parties with the importance of the ends they have in view; but that devotion to the common weal which is the surest check on destructive passions is not stronger in a large than in a small republic. It might, indeed, be proved without difficulty that it is less powerful and less sincere. The arrogance of wealth and the dejection of wretchedness, capital cities of unwonted extent, a lax morality, a vulgar egotism, and a great confusion of interests, are the dangers which almost invariably arise from the magnitude of States.
"the US government has done an EXCEPTIONAL job of keeping its people scared and ignorant."
I'm not sure which to comment on: the way you assume that only the US government could make people ignorant, or the way you believe that those who disagree with you are ignorant.
"Apparently, half of the US really IS made up of Jesus Freak, Nascar worshipping bigots."
What about the bigots in places like Michigan and Oregon that voted for Kerry on the same ballot on which they supported a "defense of marriage" amendment to their state constitutions? Would you say they were somehow more enlightened than those that voted for Bush?
Look, if you insist on living under a single, large representative government with these people you're going to have to learn how to get along better with them, at least able to think about them in a way that is a little more constructive than "Jesus Freak, Nascar worshipping bigots." Part of living under a democracy means having to put up with the will of the majority, whether you happen to be a part of it or not.
Personally, I think we might be able to get along better if we went back to living under 50 smaller representative governments instead of all of us fighting for control of a single large one, but uttering something like "states' rights" tends to get one labelled as a " Jesus Freak, Nascar worshipping bigot."
Slashdot Mirror
"Remember guys, they'd love a great game, but in the end, they don't really care as long as they get it out on time."
"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." It also seems like Valve knew about Miyamoto's wisdom during September of last year.
"The USSR is dead. North Korea has missiles..."
*sigh* Wrong missiles.
I haven't RTFL, but I do know off the top of my head that the ABL is intended for theater missiles, SRBMs instead of ICBMs (SCUDs, not Minutemen). And even then it's intended to hit the missile in the boost phase (while it's still launching, shows up like a flare in IR and is still loaded with lots of explosive fuel), which means the 747 would pretty much have to be flying over Pyongyang in order to stop a DPRK missile of any range.
It's not National Missile Defense, it's air superiority with perks. It can't even catch an artillery shell, let alone a MIRV, nor is it intended to.
No, that's a Swedish pop group from the 1970's.
"Its Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960's, often failed in crises."
:)
Well, duh! They forgot the third C in C3: communications.
"Ah yes, the Hulk - because BIG GREEN GUY with TORN PANTS is such a hugely original concept"
Solomon Grundy want pants, too!
"IANAL, but I've read a lot of Groklaw, and from what I can understand Nintendo has never really cracked down on NES, SNES, or N64 roms"
Ehhh... it depends. Two years ago, as was all over Slashdot, Nintendo was among the companies that went after Lik Sang, particularly for selling Flash Advance Linkers that could download and upload GBA roms. I also remember the hooplah over UltraHLE, an N64 emulator that was released when the N64 was still current. All in all, though, it seems Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts have been pretty low-key, at least where obsolete consoles are concerned.
They could do some of the same things the RIAA and MPAA are doing, for the same reasons; ROMs aren't as prevalent in P2P networks as music and movies, but they are out there. They could hassle the folks who write ZSNES and Snes9x. They could try hunting down those few crackers who actually dumped those NES carts and transferred them to a PC (it's not like they could have just used their Super Wild Card or the Flash Advance Linker). But from what I've seen they aren't.
It's almost as if, so long as money isn't changing hands, Nintendo (if not the console gaming industry in general) has something of a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Consider the EarthBound "Zero" ROM. We have every reason to believe there is only copy of the (development) cartridge out in the wild. Money was paid to the person who owned the cartridge for the express purpose of dumping the image and putting it on the internet. And the Slashdot article I just linked to is about an interview with a Nintendo employee about whether the ROM is really the unreleased US version of Mother or just a fan translation of the Japanese version. And yet, to my knowledge, Nintendo's legal arm hasn't made a peep about the entire episode.
"I always thought that libertarianism was about individual freedoms, and not so much economic policy?"
Libertarian fiscal philosophy stems from their desire to have freedom from taxes. Sometimes the US Libertarian Party goes too far IMO (like Badnarik talking about doing away with the Federal Reserve and returning to a gold standard), but the general idea is to cut spending in order to avoid excuses for collecting and raising taxes.
"Get with the program?" People like you are why there are minor parties and independents to begin with.
"Independent Ralph Nader is also asking for a recount"
:)
What, he can't believe Badnarik almost topped him?
"Some of the Game Cube knock-off hardware is incredible. They make the game console smaller, prettier, more see-through-ish, higher quality and cheaper."
You're assuming their GameCubes. Counterfeit Famicoms (i. e. NES) have been designed to look like anything from a Genesis/Megadrive to a PlayStation to a Dreamcast (you open the "disc drive" cover to find a cartridge slot) in the hopes of confusing unwary shoppers. Even if those "GameCubes" you saw accepted external media (instead of "500 built-in games"), I doubt they actually read and play GCN games.
"And the effect of windmills operating in the bottom 1/10th of a percent of the atmosphere would be almost nil."
Oh, come on. There were a number of things you could have taken me to task on for a post I wrote at oh-dark-thirty. Instead you decide to miss the word "exponentially?" When it comes to talking about the mass and density of a body of air, that 0.1% you talk about is actually closer to 50%.
"It's noise, on the level of planting a forest."
Didn't I cover this? The closest possible analogy isn't planting a forest but deliberately planting trees as an intended windbrake. And even then windmills would be more effective because everything about them is intended to remove as much energy from the (formerly) moving air as possible.
The entire thing is orchestrated for maximum effect on wind. It's not noise, it's Mozart.
"It's just ecoterrorist propaganda."
Yeah, that explains all my pro-nuke postings here... When last I checked, Greenpeace still doesn't agree with Patrick Moore on that one.
It's interesting to know that Bill Gates has been forced to go back to his roots...
"Could have saved everybody a lot of time and money"
Because "everybody" includes SCO. And everybody else can recoup their losses from SCO in future suits against SCO for filing such frivilous lawsuits.
IANAL, of course
"Windmills are maybe 100 meters high. The Earth's atmosphere is over 1000 times that thick (though it is, of course, thinner as you go up)."
Exponentially thinner. Ignoring your arbitrary 100 km number, ever notice the way passenger jets that only go up 10 km max need to maintain a pressurized cabin, or how black the sky looks from that meager altitude? Most of the air we as humans on the surface worry about is far closer to the surface than you imply, and most weather paterns we see are brought about by differences in surface temperature.
"A windmill doesn't keep air from flowing even at the surface, it just slows it and disturbs it a little. Kind of like a tree. Are trees bad, too?"
Trees aren't designed to slow down the air as much as possible.
"There is just no way we could build enough windmills to affect the Earth's climate."
People say the same about burning fossil fuels.
"Even if you could affect climate that way, who knows what other factors would show up to change the result?"
You're assuming those other factors would be positive.
"Taking energy out of the air doesn't destroy the energy - it just moves it."
It moves it out of the air, in which it would affect weather.
"It'll get released into the atmosphere as heat somewhere else, eventually."
Localized convection currents aren't the same thing as global weather paterns. Instead of having a whole bunch of air moving from here to there, you'd be replacing it with random miniscule updrafts that would likely be too small to measure. The only way these windmills would have negligible effect on weather is if all the electricity from the windmills went towards powering fans pointed in the direction of the original air current, and even then you'll have to deal with transmission losses and inefficiencies in the electric motors.
"A nuclear reactor produces huge amounts of heat"
That's the whole !@^$ing point! Fission reactors are glorified steam plants!
The towers are there to get the last bit of oomph from the steam before its no longer usable, and then it's cooled a little more before dumping it back into the river. You'll see the same kind of structures in any kind of power plant that relies on boiling water (i. e. any kind of power plant).
"but any unbiased study of the total global side effect of each kind of energy generation is going to show wind ranking far above nuclear."
Can you get enough electricity from wind to solve other problems beyond the electrical grid? One of the main advantages of nuclear energy is the obnoxiously high output, giving you a surplus that can be used to, say, crack water. Heck, one of the reasons new nuclear plants aren't being built is because they're overkill during off-peak hours. Sure, you'd be avoiding summer brown-outs, but there's nothing for the plant to do during the winter and the corporate mindset never sees beyond the current quarter.
Beyond certain kinds of mass transit I don't see wind having an impact on personal transport, at least not in the way nuclear can.
"You think wind farms (which are, after all, designed to let most of the wind pass) are going to have more effect than cities full of blocky buildings?"
Cities and the buildings within them generally aren't built to have maximum effect on the wind.
But how am I going to cool my AMD through all that lead shielding?
""like developing your own little operating system and saying, 'Well, I'm going to challenge Windows.' "
:)
Except that the Game Boy doesn't... you know... suck.
Personally, if I worked at Nintendo I'd be insulted by the comparison.
"You are comparing Ashcroft to Palmer and your point is, "hey it could have been worse!"? That is insane."
Actually, to me the point of the parent was "It was worse" in response to someone saying that Ashcroft was the "worst ever."
"The emergence of advanced technology and data centralization has a very real effect on how these laws affect our freedoms in more powerful ways then they did in the pre-World War I era."
If anything, I'd say the internet makes it more difficult. Without sounding too much like a 1990's idealist, it's kind of difficult to burn the internet compared to books and pamphlets. Facists and self-styled communists were more than able to set up an oppressive police state with Twentieth Century (or even Nineteenth Century in some cases) technology. It all hinges on a citizen's willingness to turn somebody else in, because even today, in order to keep an eye on 50% of US citizens would require the FBI to employ the other 50%.
"You don't live in fear of Mulah Omar leading a popular rebellion in which all of our property is seized and redistributed do you?"
Nor did we truly live in fear of such a socialist revolution. The high-water mark for the Socialist Party in the US was 1920, when presidential candidate Eugene Debs got 3.5% of the popular vote. It went downhill from there.
"Before I cease I will just say that I think if terrorists had these types of weapons they would attack Isreal, not NYC."
If that were true, NYC wouldn't have been attacked to begin with. Bin Laden doesn't really care about the Palestinian cause, if for no other reason than because he rejects the concept of the nation-state outright. Arab nations and Arab interests only hate Israel slightly more than they hate each other. His plans call for a pan-Islamic superstate stretching across at least one hemisphere, and the US, currently the world's most powerful nation-state, stands as a natural obstacle to this goal and will draw fire from him in and of itself, separate from its support of Israel.
Also note that the Arab nation-states are also bin Laden's natural enemy, since they're the first ones that need to be dissolved into his vision of a kingdom of Allah on earth. For the most part, the lip-service he pays to the Palestinian cause is because it's popular and is one of the few things most Arabs and Muslims can agree on. By the same token, Palestinian support of bin Laden is only because he attacks an ally of Israel, not because they want to live in the same country as Jordanians or Syrians.
"This is what they claimed to get the voters who voted on "moral" values."
Seems to have backfired in Oregon and Michigan though, where they voted for Kerry as well as banning gay marriage.
"Although how Bush can take the high ground whilst sending thousands to their deaths,"
In an all volunteer army...
"defending torture"
By punishing torture through courts martial?
"preventing a large number of prisoners of war from getting their basic rights under the Geneva convention"
Long argument short: The Geneva conventions only applies to those who wear uniforms and openly carry their weapons. Deliberately trying to blend in to the civillian population places you wholly outside the realm of the Geneva conventions.
"The federal constitution supercedes state constitutions."
Only insofar as the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned as well as Congress' duty to maintain a republican form of government in each state. There is nothing in the United States Constitution that requires capital punishment, which means that it is left to the states by the Tenth Amendment.
Remember we are talking about a federal constution, not a centrallized one.
"However, cases in the federal government's jurisdiction are, by definition, not tried under state (or protectorate) law but under federal law."
But the feds still expect the states to do the executions for them. IIRC Ashcroft recently put New Hampshire (a full-fledged state) in a similar situation.
"See separation of powers..."
Hypocrite. If this were truly about "separation of powers" then the feds wouldn't be able to force states to do something, because those powers would be separated.
Read me.
"This same cocoon paints Kerry, a man whose been fighting terrorists his whole life, and his voters as terrorists sympathizers"
And this meant how much to all those voters that said they were voting based on "moral values" as opposed to the "war on terrorism?"
"the US government has done an EXCEPTIONAL job of keeping its people scared and ignorant."
I'm not sure which to comment on: the way you assume that only the US government could make people ignorant, or the way you believe that those who disagree with you are ignorant.
"Apparently, half of the US really IS made up of Jesus Freak, Nascar worshipping bigots."
What about the bigots in places like Michigan and Oregon that voted for Kerry on the same ballot on which they supported a "defense of marriage" amendment to their state constitutions? Would you say they were somehow more enlightened than those that voted for Bush?
Look, if you insist on living under a single, large representative government with these people you're going to have to learn how to get along better with them, at least able to think about them in a way that is a little more constructive than "Jesus Freak, Nascar worshipping bigots." Part of living under a democracy means having to put up with the will of the majority, whether you happen to be a part of it or not.
Personally, I think we might be able to get along better if we went back to living under 50 smaller representative governments instead of all of us fighting for control of a single large one, but uttering something like "states' rights" tends to get one labelled as a " Jesus Freak, Nascar worshipping bigot."
It depends: will that letter eventually end up in a glass case in a musemum somewhere?