Well, so civil a reply deserves one in kind, even if no one is reading any more.
Your next issue is showing photo ID at voters booths. This, with all due respect, I feel is a radical belief if you do not feel that voters should show ID when they vote. You may speak about the "mythical" voting fraud that occurs (but everybody here has an opinion when the subject of electronic voting comes up), but if it doesn't exist (which I'm just giving you the benefit of the doubt), why allow the potential?
Just to make sure we're clear: vote fraud, of all sorts, is probably pretty common. Exactly how common is obviously unknown. But vote fraud by means of having unregistered people vote or people vote more than once is a vanishingly small problem. It's not just me saying this; there are no known election-changing cases of this happening in, at a minimum, decades, and it isn't particularly hard to detect after the fact if you go look. If you think about it, stealing an election by getting enough people to vote illegally and not getting caught is pretty difficult, certainly compared to other methods availible.
Now, I consider the vote sacred and election fraud to be high treason. I would be thrilled to ID everyone infallibly at the polls. But there aren't any freebies here; measures like this that attempt to catch fake voters are going to stop a much larger number of real voters from voting.
I don't know for sure, since my state (New York) requires you change your address on your license within 10 days of moving, but isn't this the case in Arizona? There is no fee to do this. I don't think this is a big request.
Changing your address is free, but actually getting a license with your new address - which is all that will help you - is not; I think it's $15. Little enough to you and me, maybe, but... And I don't think anyone seriously expects that students will replace their driver's licenses every September and June. Should they, legally? Sure. Will they? No. Is not getting to vote an appropriate penalty for that? Absolutely not.
By the way, one more thing, McCain is not a conservative, he is a liberal with an "R" on his name. I'm sure you'd say the opposite about former Senator Zell Miller, and I would agree
Well, that's a bit silly - McCain is a stout conservative on just about every issue of fundamental importance to conservatives; he just doesn't always march in step on more debatable issues. But its' beside the point; I was just picking a name/.ers would know. Almost all republicans holding elected office in AZ distanced themselves from Prop 200, though I admit some were just holding their tongues so's not to anger constituents.
How come we didn't hear about this five percent when Clinton was in office?
People who are in this game for purely partisan reasons are certainly making more noise about it these days, and DREs have raised the general conciousness about election problems in general, but plenty of groups interested purely in a legitimate election process - People for the American Way, say - have been pointing to this for a long time.
Quite frankly, I feel this is one of those "lies, damn lies, and statistics" polls.
This is pretty much hard data. We know the fraction of ballots that are 'spoiled' and never counted - varies widely, but worth 1-2% on average; from things like provisional ballots and records of people turned away at polls we know a lot about how many people try to vote and fail because of ID or address problems. 5% certainly isn't an exact figure, but it's the ballpark we're in; it's clearly more than the margin of many elections.
I don't see how anyone without a motive (and Democrats' motive is to make sure their poor, students, and non-English speakers vote without problems, no matter what fraud may occur) can think that the people disenfranchised by requiring a proper ID when you vote outweighs the potential fraud that is prevented. Honestly, it's not that hard to get a
Then the parent poster goes on to criticize Arizona's Prop 200, which says you must present proof of US Citizenship in order to vote. I'd love for anyone to point out how this would "create a problem" if you are a "USA citizen in good standing."
As a campaigner here in AZ against Prop 200, I suppose I have to answer, although it seldom appears that explaining this results in much information being absorbed. Warning: as some actual facts are included below, it's a fairly lengthy post.
First, prop 200 requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to register people. In the past, voter registration drives have generally been run (by both parties and nonpartisan groups) by going out to where people are, with a table or some clipboards, and getting them to sign up. This is no longer possible; people need to have a copy of their birth certificate, naturalization papers or passport with them, and attach a photocopy of it to their registration form. This pretty much means no one can register without planning to do so and going down to the county recorder's office during business hours. This isn't exactly a flat bias, either; it's much more difficult for people who are less likely to have their paperwork carefully filed away where they can get it (students, the poor, non-native-english-speakers) and those who have less free or flexible time to deal with the problem (pretty much the same list.) (Caveat: the big exception is that if you have a recent, Arizona driver's license, you've already dealt with the same problem at the DMV and don't need to again. That's many eligible voters but far from all. OTOH, if you have changed your name - usually because you married - you also need the documentation of that name change attached. Sorry, ladies!)
Then we get to actually voting. Now you need to bring proof of identity with you to the polls. These rules were only finalized a few weeks ago, so apologies if I get any details wrong. Your proof of ID has to be government-issued photo ID, or else the typical pain-in-the-ass of multiple utility bills or the like. In either case the address must match the address you're registered at, which legally has to be your current residence - moved since you got your driver's license five years ago? Sorry! A student in a dorm who doesn't get utility bills? Oops! The same groups, again, have a harder time voting. The alert Slashdot security geek, or anyone who has ever gotten into a bar with a fake ID, will note that this methodology isn't exactly a vast increase in security. It will, however, make lines at the polls a lot longer, particularly in places with high concentrations of - again - students, transient people, non-english-speakers. And it raises the bar for knowing the rules in advance. Who's least likely to get the information about the new rules? You guessed it. Who has the least flexibility in their lives to devote a couple of hours to the voting process? Yup.
We had to fight to get these rules as lenient as they are, actually; at least if you don't meet the ID requirement, you're supposed to be able to vote a provisional ballot, although the process for counting those leaves a great deal to be desired. It took a veto by our governor, gods bless her, to get that far - even though it would seem to be a basic, fundamental idea to anyone who actually cared about vote integrity: no ID? we'll check your status afterwards.
Meanwhile, the real hole in the voting system - I don't consider this an actual problem, but certainly from a security geek standpoint it's the obvious point of attack - is voting by mail. Far easier to fake in quantity than it is at the actual polls, right? No ID requirement was added to VBM at all. Yup. Show up in person, you're lucky you don't have to take a DNA scan. Send in a piece of paper from anywhere in the world, no effort is made to verify its source whatsoever. Who's least likely to vote by mail? There we are again.
And if they weren't, they'd disappear behind the planet every 'night' for long periods. Hence, you've got a moon with huge long nights, freezing the planet, and long hot days.
As others have pointed out, there are a number of things which could moderate (or for that matter, extremize) this situation, including atmosphere, energy from the mother planet, internal energy, oceans, and so on.
But even a fairly extreme temperature range is not necessarily unsurvivable. Earth has a number of examples of life that goes dormant under extreme conditions, including high-altitude bacteria which essentially freeze solid every night and thaw out each morning. Desert spores, blossoming briefly during rare moments of moisture, are another instructive example. Of course, 'higher' life may be more limited- or not
; at this point we have very little basis for deciding.
Now here we have a bunch of astronomers who have been funded to find planets. They come up with a single observation technique that they reckon will prove the existence of planets. They have no way of correlating their findings. They look for this observation, expecting to find it. They find it. This proves the existence of planets.
Remind me, what would be the effects on the funding of this project if they hadn't "proven" both their technique and the existence of planets?
It's amazing how scientists, who work in a world of almost bizarre openness, are often subject to more suspicion than, say, corporate CEOs.
People were looking for extrasolar planets for a good five years before they refined their techniques enough to find one. Funding continued because it was good science. Their findings were immediately subject to intense scrutiny from a large community of astronomers. Independent observations were done and continue to be done. Alternative theories were proposed. Some supposed planets have been removed from the list; those that remain have, by and large, very clear signatures, well-defined periods, and no obvious alternative theories. One (which is about the number expected) has been extremely well-confirmed by observations of its transit. As a researcher in this field, believe me, mistakes are found quickly and fraud is extremely rare.
Incidentally, Geoff Marcy's team out in California has demonstrated precision in their observations to about 3 m/s- a good factor of three better than needed for this particular detection. The papers are all on-line and not even hard to find. It might be prudent to look at them before making vague accusations.
Furthermore, given that Jupiter orbits the Sun at 5.2 AU, preventing planet formation between 2 and 5 AU (cf. our asteroid belt), and that one is at 2.1 AU from its star, I don't see how an Earth-like planet could be within that star's habitable zone, between 1 and 1.5 AU.
There is considerable study going on at the present time in things like planetary in-migration. Just because a planet is currently at 2.1 AU, doesn't mean that it has always been there. Other possibilities include resonances and trojan points. It's quite hard to simulate this well, but at our present state of knowledge it is definitely not time to rule things out categorically.
Believe it or not, even the guys at NASDA know how to do math! Typically, though, they start with actual numbers, as opposed to those you've made up. I'm not even going to bother pointing out the errors in this analysis, but did you think of checking first?
Bob is a good guy and an excellent engineer, but he stacked the deck for this one. As I mentioned before, reducing current launch costs by an order of magnitude is forseeable within the very near future. Designs that could, for large launches, reduce it by two orders of magnitude are clearly within the reach of current technology. If launch costs aren't down by a factor of 100 by 2050, it'll be because we've been sleeping on the job.
See the sci.space.settlement FAQ for a detailed analysis of this and some other concerns, although they're oriented towards a slightly different problem. At any rate, Bob also shoots down SPS by requiring massive orbital colonies to support the power generators, a demand that is, to say the least, arguable.
If this is such a great idea, there oughta be zillions of dollars in it. It ought to be cheaper than our current energy sources. But it isn't. This is why the solar bugs keep demanding subsidy.
Do you honestly think that capitalism runs an absolutely perfect market in all respects? Solar and wind power require substantial investments of initial capital with an eye towards long-term return- here I mean on the scale of several decades. They face substantial risks, due to the existence of a competing industry that has substantial power in the federal government and massive amounts of capital.
This is where governments typically step in. Government support has been present at the founding of every significant American industry since America industrialized. They subsidized the hell out of the railroads with land grants and more. They subsidized steel. They subsidized oil most of all, letting oil interests massively affect foreign policy, and building a national highway system, not to mention things like inventing and subsidizing jets, which are a whole other oil market. This is what happens. It's perfectly logical. And every single time, previous industries that had built themselves off of subsidies, turned around and cried 'foul' when they feared being replaced by something superior.
And, of course, if we charged fair prices, solar power wouldn't need a subsidy after all- because in fact, every use of oil power is taking a free subsidy off the public resources of clean air and water. If everyone burning a fossil fuel were merely required to pay for the appropriate amount of CO2 scrubbing to maintain the atmosphere, and all the other environmental damage was ignored, clean power would be the biggest industry in America in ten years.
You could do something similar in space. Light pressure and temperature differentials could both be used to generate power, but so far as I know, no one thinks these would be nearly as easy to get efficient as photovoltaic cells. One of the critical things about a solar farm is that, for its size, it's extremely simple, needing little on-orbit servicing or anything.
It's probably worth mentioning that a solar satellite, generating electricity, has precious little (in terms of currently deployed technology) to do with oil drilling, which mainly fuels cars and some heating; which in turn has nothing to do with California's electricity problems, which are just a case of local poor planning (both engineering and economic)...
Wouldn't it make more sense to just deploy solar cells here on the ground? If you don't want to set up miles of cells that cover the ground, put them on the roofs of buildings...
Right now, it makes more sense to deploy solar cells on the ground. Or to build nuclear power plants, or wind generators, or electric themocouples. The economics of solar panels don't add up at current launch costs.
At some price point, launching becomes cheap enough that they do. What, exactly, that point is is debatable. It's probably more than one factor of ten below present costs and less than two; it's unquestionably less than three. We should be able to do one factor of ten for large launches by 2020- actually, we could do it by 2005 if there were sufficient demand. So if Japan is planning using this stuff for 2020, they are probably not drastically off-base, and they should certainly start small-scale experiments now.
Incidentally, Japan has somewhat greater energy problems than most places do. They have an extremely high industrial/urban population density; they lack internal energy resources (coal, oil, gas, uranium); they are more nervous than most about nuclear power, for both historical and geographical reasons (it'd be hard to put many power plants in enough isolation from major cities to feel very safe; also, the prevalence of earthquakes and tsunamis would make me rather nervous as a plant designer); and they don't have many wide open spaces to devote to solar cells on the ground. Also, a single generating point for electricity would do much more for the relatively compact nation than it would in the US, where transmission over long distances is a problem, and where we'd still use lots of gasoline anyhow. So it's not surprising that they're pioneering this.
In physics or economics, everything important is either written in English in the first place, or immediately translated, so there is no similar requirement).
I don't know about that... Most grad programs in physics have one sort or another of a foreign language requirement. After all, someone's got to do the translating, and it's probably better if someone also trained in physics is doing it... By no means are all papers translated, but unfortunately the problem is biggest in languages that are relatively unlike English, and few grad students are likely to have the time to take them on- it's a true pity more physicists don't speak Japanese or Russian, for instance.
the more I look in to it appears that the Russian Space Shuttle is a more practical Shuttle compared to the American Shuttle
Well, to be fair, the American Shuttle was more practical than the American Shuttle too... until we had to fly the thing regularly. It's not much use judging the specs Russia put out for the Buran, against everything we know about the Shuttle. No doubt they made both some improvements, and some mistakes, but without a comparable flight record, who knows how the balance came out.
It is all but certain that they were less cautious about safety than in the post-1986 Shuttle. Also some of theses points are pretty irrelevant; the flyback payload and the lift-drag, which just improves your flyback range, are not things the Shuttle was especially aiming for.
The Shuttle was proposed to be a horse of many colors because it's also very expensive to maintain and support multiple launch vehicles for multiple different roles.
Well, sure, but of course then we ended up maintaining them anyway; we kept the Titan program going, and such, because the Shuttle couldn't meet the launch demand once the turnaround times slipped, and then after Challenger they started instituting cargo rules anyhow. And, while it isn't a launch vehicle of course, we ended up building a fabulously expensive space station-lab to do, really, the same sorts of science the shuttle science-setup is supposed to do, and that's been on the drawing boards since 1981. So sure, if the Shuttle could have been built to meet every need, but certainly at this point- and if you look at what people wanted but couldn't get funded for, even at the point of its design- there are a lot of needs it's designed to meet but isn't really making the grade on.You're quite right that it isn't appropriate to rip on the shuttle designers from today's perspective. I think they did an astounding job working from a terribly limited engineering and (especially) political base.But I think we can agree that NASA's plans in more recent times for moving beyond the shuttle have been, well, less than fruitful...
this is a basic error in the assumptions behind CATS, they ignore the need for larger capabilities.
I don't think they do. I mean, the folks starting businesses designed low-payload or low-crew machines, because they had a hard enough time finding venture capital for those! But in terms of the talk around town, I think there's a pretty fair consensus that we should look for a lightweight satellite launcher designed to fit the current commercial market, a ferry-crew-to-orbit vehicle that's as simple as possible and has no other functions, an in-space tug, and an as-friggin'-big-as-possible launcher for projects like ISS and interplanetary missions (manned or not). Plenty of people have sketched out designs for the latter; Buzz Aldrin preaches one full-time these days, for example. They just have little hope of getting to build them, in the current climate.
Have a high-altitude jet aircraft take the shuttle up as far as possible, release it, and let a reusable sled which contains the boosters and fuel tank take it the rest of the way up (and re-enter upon completion). I am obviously not a rocket scientist, and im too tired to think properly right now, and i'm probably grossly overestimating the altitude potential of a jet aircraft capiable of lifting the shuttles bulk.
While there a number of plans out there for using the orbiter in other ways, I don't see this one... A 747, stripped of all unnecessary bits, can carry an empty orbiter. It sure as hell can't take off with a loaded one and the boosters it needs. I doubt that, even with bigger cargo planes, you could really manage this config without designing the plane from scratch. If you start designing massive planes for the purpose, well, you may as well bring the whole thing back to the drawing board, really.
That's really the trick with any large Shuttle upgrade. Since when you price these things, actual construction costs are absolutely trivial compared to design costs and operating costs, and since designing to match an existing (expensive, complicated) design is usually hardly cheaper than wiping the board clean, and since it probably makes more sense these days to build multiple one-purpose vehicles anyway, it just doesn't pay...
Sadly, the likely regime now is that we'll keep flying the shuttle for another 20 years, with a big chunk of the budget going into desperately trying to keep the things up to safety specs. It is possible that future Administrators will be more open to the idea of contracting out for launch services or for functional vehicles, as opposed to contracting out with exacting design specifications, and thus actually get competitive proposals and metal bent...
Okay, it's certainly true that with the Shuttle, as it is, NASA shouldn't be expected to be any less careful than it is. But it's also true that while the word 'reusable' does apply to the Shuttle, the extent of replacement and refurbishment required defeats much of the point of reusables in the first place. That is, the cost savings are, with the most optimistic sorts of accounting, moderate; the turnaround time is probably worse; and, with so many of the more dangerous parts being expendables or needing major referbs, the safety improvement is questionable. (And don't forget that the engineers think we're lucky we never got a catastrophe with the SSME's; we're finally going to upgrade those damned propeller blades...)
Bear in mind that when the shuttle was proposed, it was pitched as having two-week turnarounds and cost maybe a fifth as much per flight. NASA officials sold it this way because they were looking for a way to survive in the post-Kennedy/Johnson political climate. Myself I find it hard to blame them, but it certainly should be understood that it's much too hard a vehicle to fly and that we desperately need easier ones.
The various 'low end' transports generally cut their costs by being simpler and relying on easier technologies whenever possible. While some of the operating savings are intended to come from, say, cheaper fuels, the bulk of them have more to do with things like the number of people you need to do a launch, the redundancy and safety measures you NEED based on the reliability of your equipment, understanding how long you can expect different pieces of equipment to survive, and so on. It's an engineering design problem. A very difficult one, to be sure, but not one so far on the bleeding edge that we can't understand the problems and costs involved.And of course, we understand them rather better than we did in 1978, and we have better ways of dealing with them. (Also, not running a few billion dollars in debt on development costs for unneccessary technologies helps keep the op costs down. Venturestar, anyone?)
As for cutting capabilities- well, the big problem with the shuttle is, that because NASA knew when they were building it that they would have no money for other programs for a long time, it had to be rather a horse of all colors. Human ferry-er, cargo ferry-er, space science lab (for eight completely different kinds of science,), in space manuevering ability, DoD was told they needed to do all their launches on the Shuttle so then they had a bunch of cargo specs to add, trying to get an impossible combination of cost and turnaround time, and all of this on technology that was barely capable of it at all... It's appropriate for the next generation of launchers to be much more specialized. We don't need to use only one to do everything. If that's 'low-end', well, sign me up...
The more modern a nuke, the less powerful it is. As the guidance technology improves, you no longer need big megatonners, a
few kilotons will do because you can get a direct hit.
Well, okay, true, but the bulk of our arsenal, and certainly of the Russian arsenal, remains fairly big weapons. I meant 'modern' mainly in the sense of 'big H-bomb, not little Hiroshima-style bomb'. Much of the US arsenal is in the hundreds-of-kilotons range, and the Russian arsenal is generally believed to be skewed much higher, into tens-of-megatons payloads.
If you
airburst all of them over cities, you might kill half the people in cities on the planet, which, since about half the population of
the Earth resides in cities, means that you'll kill perhaps 25% of the people on Earth as a maximum
I agree with everything else you said, but... the area a modern, 50-100 megaton H-bomb takes out is considerable. I'm posting in Philadelphia; if someone did an airburst of a major nuke in the middle of New Jersey, they'd take out Philly, New York, and all the suburbanites around; New Haven would probably be an uncomfortable place to be, too. A bomb targeted at a city is going to take out much more than just that city.
Fatalities would probably be much higher than 50% per city in the event of a global war; the complete breakdown of almost all social supports means that not only do the injured or buried have just about no chance of getting aid, but anyone in a big city is going to start getting really hungry pretty soon. Few big cities have as much as three day's food supplies or a day's water in stock; with the electricity out, bridges down, roads a mess, things on fire, water pipes wrecked, and the like, the basic tools of survival are going to get pretty rare. FEMA isn't going to be much help as they've been blown up too, so...
As for missiles working... well, the missiles have certainly been tested a lot with no payload, and they seem pretty reliable. Many are the same ones used for space launches- the Titan series, for instance- and they launch on target about 95% of the time. The bombs have been tested quite a bit on deserted islands and such. Admittedly, the bombs and the missiles haven't been tested in concert, but that seems like a pretty simple rig-up to me.
Whether nukes would fragment the asteroid or not depends on the nature of the rock. A highly fragmented asteroid would probably be preferable to a single large impact, because each piece will lose part of its mass in the atmosphere. An iron-rich asteroid might not fragment at all. As for blasting it sideways with a nuke, I think that's agreed to be a pretty sketchy, last-resort kind of idea; if you don't know the geology of the asteroid, and you can't guarantee the targeting of the nuke... besides which, that's a very inefficient way to change an orbit even in the best-case.
What you want to be able to do is get a good bit of early warning, then land your favorite kind of large engine on the asteroid- ion-drive, Orion-type, solar sail (okay, that's not an engine, I know, I know) or whatever. Then you can alter the orbit in a controlled fashion. Landing on an asteroid isn't incredibly hard; it's in several current mission plans and proposals; so the bigger worry is really getting detection up to snuff.
For a really good detection system, we want scopes in a couple of positions, not just on earth; as it is right now, it's far too much of a pain to work out orbits...
Incidentall, did Nasa have to file flight plans during the shuttle launches? They'd be interesting to see.
They certainly do file flight plans for the period the shuttle is in the lower atmosphere. They get very big no-fly zones for it, too; I forget the exact number, but they really clear all planes from the area.
It's all about control systems, really. In order to use any of the tricks that birds or insects do, especially scaled up to carrying humans, you need a ton of sensors, feeding into something that can then make decisions. So it's more about programming, in a way, than anything else... the other critical piece is probably materials physics; imitating feathers or insect wings is pretty hard.
I meant to add- I was next door in the Tate building last summer, doing astronomy. It's a terrific campus, and a really nice town. Too long a walk from the building to the nearest place for lunch, in the summer heat, though!
CERN and Cal Tech put together a system that works pretty well. It's called VRVS, for virtual room videoconferencing system. The high-energy physics types, who often have several hundred people around the world collaborating on one experiment, probably have very much the same needs you do. And yes, Slashdot readers, it runs on linux!
I don't know exactly how it will compare in price to other solutions, but it was intended to be low-cost. I used it to get a lecture from a prof when he had to head over to CERN once; we were all entirely too distracted by playing with the cameras, but it worked very well. We didn't use the whiteboard, though, just the "point camera at blackboard" method.
Even better- I poked around a bit, and it looks like they might have an installation over at U of M that you could check out, though it's not clear they're still using it. Good luck. Congrats on the position!
Well, the reality is that most of the sort of major technological developments in the computer world were pioneered, not in BSD or Linux or Windows or SunOS or anything else, but in academia or major research labs. I mean, the researchers might have been working at HP, but they weren't working on the OS. A lot of this stuff had the original research done twenty years ago, as is true with most kinds of technology.
The folks writing operating systems, or software intended for the public, are usually trying to take the stuff coming out of academia and optimize it, get it relatively bug-free, package it up in a reasonably friendly fashion, things like that. Linux developers are certainly not always the first to do this, but then again, given that there are eight or ten OSes people are developing for, we wouldn't expect them to be.
Nor is Linux necessarily the best environment to pioneer for. If I'm the first guy trying to write a clustering system fit for ditributing to the world, I may well want to do it on a simpler sort of system- something written with the idea of being very stable and well-organized, say, like NetBSD, as opposed to something written with the idea of being very hardware-supporting and practical, like Linux. That doesn't mean that 'NetBSD is doing the innvoation' and 'Linux is copying it later'. The 'Linux community' isn't some sort of absolute, to which you have either given your soul or have no part in.
To the extent that the 'Linux community' does exist, it has given a great many things to the larger IT community. That it is often focused on writing open-source or portable things that have existed in more closed form before, does not particularly seem to me like a mark against the importance of its efforts.
Protected speech does not include speech that has as its "object" distinctly illegal content which is then acted
upon.
For example, if I say, "Kill all the people living south of Main Street" and then I (or someone else) goes and does
this (as a result of my speech), I cannot claim that my speech is protected under the first amendment. ("Hey, I
was just saying stuff!")
IANL, but that is not exactly the standard. This sort of speech is-unprotected by the courts because it is 'inciteful'. The law seems to agree fairly well that this speech is only prosecutable when you actually tell someone to go do something, and then only when it can be shown that they then went and did it because of you- both standards that the 2600 case fails on. There's a great deal of leeway under the first amendment to say all kinds of things like "We should all hate people with green eyes" as long as no fairly specific incitement to action exists. Furthermore, to my knowledge restrictions of this kind on speech are only applied to criminal law in which there is a really compelling social interest- murder, riot, things like that; I know of no case in which it's been applied to "Let's all jaywalk", or "Let's all share VHS tapes", or even "Let's all do pot." The standard is quite high.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, so civil a reply deserves one in kind, even if no one is reading any more.
/.ers would know. Almost all republicans holding elected office in AZ distanced themselves from Prop 200, though I admit some were just holding their tongues so's not to anger constituents.
Your next issue is showing photo ID at voters booths. This, with all due respect, I feel is a radical belief if you do not feel that voters should show ID when they vote. You may speak about the "mythical" voting fraud that occurs (but everybody here has an opinion when the subject of electronic voting comes up), but if it doesn't exist (which I'm just giving you the benefit of the doubt), why allow the potential?
Just to make sure we're clear: vote fraud, of all sorts, is probably pretty common. Exactly how common is obviously unknown. But vote fraud by means of having unregistered people vote or people vote more than once is a vanishingly small problem. It's not just me saying this; there are no known election-changing cases of this happening in, at a minimum, decades, and it isn't particularly hard to detect after the fact if you go look. If you think about it, stealing an election by getting enough people to vote illegally and not getting caught is pretty difficult, certainly compared to other methods availible.
Now, I consider the vote sacred and election fraud to be high treason. I would be thrilled to ID everyone infallibly at the polls. But there aren't any freebies here; measures like this that attempt to catch fake voters are going to stop a much larger number of real voters from voting.
I don't know for sure, since my state (New York) requires you change your address on your license within 10 days of moving, but isn't this the case in Arizona? There is no fee to do this. I don't think this is a big request.
Changing your address is free, but actually getting a license with your new address - which is all that will help you - is not; I think it's $15. Little enough to you and me, maybe, but... And I don't think anyone seriously expects that students will replace their driver's licenses every September and June. Should they, legally? Sure. Will they? No. Is not getting to vote an appropriate penalty for that? Absolutely not.
By the way, one more thing, McCain is not a conservative, he is a liberal with an "R" on his name. I'm sure you'd say the opposite about former Senator Zell Miller, and I would agree
Well, that's a bit silly - McCain is a stout conservative on just about every issue of fundamental importance to conservatives; he just doesn't always march in step on more debatable issues. But its' beside the point; I was just picking a name
How come we didn't hear about this five percent when Clinton was in office?
People who are in this game for purely partisan reasons are certainly making more noise about it these days, and DREs have raised the general conciousness about election problems in general, but plenty of groups interested purely in a legitimate election process - People for the American Way, say - have been pointing to this for a long time.
Quite frankly, I feel this is one of those "lies, damn lies, and statistics" polls.
This is pretty much hard data. We know the fraction of ballots that are 'spoiled' and never counted - varies widely, but worth 1-2% on average; from things like provisional ballots and records of people turned away at polls we know a lot about how many people try to vote and fail because of ID or address problems. 5% certainly isn't an exact figure, but it's the ballpark we're in; it's clearly more than the margin of many elections.
I don't see how anyone without a motive (and Democrats' motive is to make sure their poor, students, and non-English speakers vote without problems, no matter what fraud may occur) can think that the people disenfranchised by requiring a proper ID when you vote outweighs the potential fraud that is prevented. Honestly, it's not that hard to get a
As a campaigner here in AZ against Prop 200, I suppose I have to answer, although it seldom appears that explaining this results in much information being absorbed. Warning: as some actual facts are included below, it's a fairly lengthy post.
First, prop 200 requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to register people. In the past, voter registration drives have generally been run (by both parties and nonpartisan groups) by going out to where people are, with a table or some clipboards, and getting them to sign up. This is no longer possible; people need to have a copy of their birth certificate, naturalization papers or passport with them, and attach a photocopy of it to their registration form. This pretty much means no one can register without planning to do so and going down to the county recorder's office during business hours. This isn't exactly a flat bias, either; it's much more difficult for people who are less likely to have their paperwork carefully filed away where they can get it (students, the poor, non-native-english-speakers) and those who have less free or flexible time to deal with the problem (pretty much the same list.) (Caveat: the big exception is that if you have a recent, Arizona driver's license, you've already dealt with the same problem at the DMV and don't need to again. That's many eligible voters but far from all. OTOH, if you have changed your name - usually because you married - you also need the documentation of that name change attached. Sorry, ladies!)
Then we get to actually voting. Now you need to bring proof of identity with you to the polls. These rules were only finalized a few weeks ago, so apologies if I get any details wrong. Your proof of ID has to be government-issued photo ID, or else the typical pain-in-the-ass of multiple utility bills or the like. In either case the address must match the address you're registered at, which legally has to be your current residence - moved since you got your driver's license five years ago? Sorry! A student in a dorm who doesn't get utility bills? Oops! The same groups, again, have a harder time voting. The alert Slashdot security geek, or anyone who has ever gotten into a bar with a fake ID, will note that this methodology isn't exactly a vast increase in security. It will, however, make lines at the polls a lot longer, particularly in places with high concentrations of - again - students, transient people, non-english-speakers. And it raises the bar for knowing the rules in advance. Who's least likely to get the information about the new rules? You guessed it. Who has the least flexibility in their lives to devote a couple of hours to the voting process? Yup.
We had to fight to get these rules as lenient as they are, actually; at least if you don't meet the ID requirement, you're supposed to be able to vote a provisional ballot, although the process for counting those leaves a great deal to be desired. It took a veto by our governor, gods bless her, to get that far - even though it would seem to be a basic, fundamental idea to anyone who actually cared about vote integrity: no ID? we'll check your status afterwards.
Meanwhile, the real hole in the voting system - I don't consider this an actual problem, but certainly from a security geek standpoint it's the obvious point of attack - is voting by mail. Far easier to fake in quantity than it is at the actual polls, right? No ID requirement was added to VBM at all. Yup. Show up in person, you're lucky you don't have to take a DNA scan. Send in a piece of paper from anywhere in the world, no effort is made to verify its source whatsoever. Who's least likely to vote by mail? There we are again.
The list of peop
As others have pointed out, there are a number of things which could moderate (or for that matter, extremize) this situation, including atmosphere, energy from the mother planet, internal energy, oceans, and so on.
But even a fairly extreme temperature range is not necessarily unsurvivable. Earth has a number of examples of life that goes dormant under extreme conditions, including high-altitude bacteria which essentially freeze solid every night and thaw out each morning. Desert spores, blossoming briefly during rare moments of moisture, are another instructive example. Of course, 'higher' life may be more limited- or not ; at this point we have very little basis for deciding.
Remind me, what would be the effects on the funding of this project if they hadn't "proven" both their technique and the existence of planets?
It's amazing how scientists, who work in a world of almost bizarre openness, are often subject to more suspicion than, say, corporate CEOs.
People were looking for extrasolar planets for a good five years before they refined their techniques enough to find one. Funding continued because it was good science. Their findings were immediately subject to intense scrutiny from a large community of astronomers. Independent observations were done and continue to be done. Alternative theories were proposed. Some supposed planets have been removed from the list; those that remain have, by and large, very clear signatures, well-defined periods, and no obvious alternative theories. One (which is about the number expected) has been extremely well-confirmed by observations of its transit. As a researcher in this field, believe me, mistakes are found quickly and fraud is extremely rare.
Incidentally, Geoff Marcy's team out in California has demonstrated precision in their observations to about 3 m/s- a good factor of three better than needed for this particular detection. The papers are all on-line and not even hard to find. It might be prudent to look at them before making vague accusations.
There is considerable study going on at the present time in things like planetary in-migration. Just because a planet is currently at 2.1 AU, doesn't mean that it has always been there. Other possibilities include resonances and trojan points. It's quite hard to simulate this well, but at our present state of knowledge it is definitely not time to rule things out categorically.
Believe it or not, even the guys at NASDA know how to do math! Typically, though, they start with actual numbers, as opposed to those you've made up. I'm not even going to bother pointing out the errors in this analysis, but did you think of checking first?
Bob is a good guy and an excellent engineer, but he stacked the deck for this one. As I mentioned before, reducing current launch costs by an order of magnitude is forseeable within the very near future. Designs that could, for large launches, reduce it by two orders of magnitude are clearly within the reach of current technology. If launch costs aren't down by a factor of 100 by 2050, it'll be because we've been sleeping on the job.
See the sci.space.settlement FAQ for a detailed analysis of this and some other concerns, although they're oriented towards a slightly different problem. At any rate, Bob also shoots down SPS by requiring massive orbital colonies to support the power generators, a demand that is, to say the least, arguable.
Do you honestly think that capitalism runs an absolutely perfect market in all respects? Solar and wind power require substantial investments of initial capital with an eye towards long-term return- here I mean on the scale of several decades. They face substantial risks, due to the existence of a competing industry that has substantial power in the federal government and massive amounts of capital.
This is where governments typically step in. Government support has been present at the founding of every significant American industry since America industrialized. They subsidized the hell out of the railroads with land grants and more. They subsidized steel. They subsidized oil most of all, letting oil interests massively affect foreign policy, and building a national highway system, not to mention things like inventing and subsidizing jets, which are a whole other oil market. This is what happens. It's perfectly logical. And every single time, previous industries that had built themselves off of subsidies, turned around and cried 'foul' when they feared being replaced by something superior.
And, of course, if we charged fair prices, solar power wouldn't need a subsidy after all- because in fact, every use of oil power is taking a free subsidy off the public resources of clean air and water. If everyone burning a fossil fuel were merely required to pay for the appropriate amount of CO2 scrubbing to maintain the atmosphere, and all the other environmental damage was ignored, clean power would be the biggest industry in America in ten years.
It's probably worth mentioning that a solar satellite, generating electricity, has precious little (in terms of currently deployed technology) to do with oil drilling, which mainly fuels cars and some heating; which in turn has nothing to do with California's electricity problems, which are just a case of local poor planning (both engineering and economic)...
Right now, it makes more sense to deploy solar cells on the ground. Or to build nuclear power plants, or wind generators, or electric themocouples. The economics of solar panels don't add up at current launch costs.
At some price point, launching becomes cheap enough that they do. What, exactly, that point is is debatable. It's probably more than one factor of ten below present costs and less than two; it's unquestionably less than three. We should be able to do one factor of ten for large launches by 2020- actually, we could do it by 2005 if there were sufficient demand. So if Japan is planning using this stuff for 2020, they are probably not drastically off-base, and they should certainly start small-scale experiments now.
Incidentally, Japan has somewhat greater energy problems than most places do. They have an extremely high industrial/urban population density; they lack internal energy resources (coal, oil, gas, uranium); they are more nervous than most about nuclear power, for both historical and geographical reasons (it'd be hard to put many power plants in enough isolation from major cities to feel very safe; also, the prevalence of earthquakes and tsunamis would make me rather nervous as a plant designer); and they don't have many wide open spaces to devote to solar cells on the ground. Also, a single generating point for electricity would do much more for the relatively compact nation than it would in the US, where transmission over long distances is a problem, and where we'd still use lots of gasoline anyhow. So it's not surprising that they're pioneering this.
I don't know about that... Most grad programs in physics have one sort or another of a foreign language requirement. After all, someone's got to do the translating, and it's probably better if someone also trained in physics is doing it... By no means are all papers translated, but unfortunately the problem is biggest in languages that are relatively unlike English, and few grad students are likely to have the time to take them on- it's a true pity more physicists don't speak Japanese or Russian, for instance.
Well, to be fair, the American Shuttle was more practical than the American Shuttle too... until we had to fly the thing regularly. It's not much use judging the specs Russia put out for the Buran, against everything we know about the Shuttle. No doubt they made both some improvements, and some mistakes, but without a comparable flight record, who knows how the balance came out.
It is all but certain that they were less cautious about safety than in the post-1986 Shuttle. Also some of theses points are pretty irrelevant; the flyback payload and the lift-drag, which just improves your flyback range, are not things the Shuttle was especially aiming for.
Well, sure, but of course then we ended up maintaining them anyway; we kept the Titan program going, and such, because the Shuttle couldn't meet the launch demand once the turnaround times slipped, and then after Challenger they started instituting cargo rules anyhow. And, while it isn't a launch vehicle of course, we ended up building a fabulously expensive space station-lab to do, really, the same sorts of science the shuttle science-setup is supposed to do, and that's been on the drawing boards since 1981. So sure, if the Shuttle could have been built to meet every need, but certainly at this point- and if you look at what people wanted but couldn't get funded for, even at the point of its design- there are a lot of needs it's designed to meet but isn't really making the grade on.You're quite right that it isn't appropriate to rip on the shuttle designers from today's perspective. I think they did an astounding job working from a terribly limited engineering and (especially) political base.But I think we can agree that NASA's plans in more recent times for moving beyond the shuttle have been, well, less than fruitful...
this is a basic error in the assumptions behind CATS, they ignore the need for larger capabilities.
I don't think they do. I mean, the folks starting businesses designed low-payload or low-crew machines, because they had a hard enough time finding venture capital for those! But in terms of the talk around town, I think there's a pretty fair consensus that we should look for a lightweight satellite launcher designed to fit the current commercial market, a ferry-crew-to-orbit vehicle that's as simple as possible and has no other functions, an in-space tug, and an as-friggin'-big-as-possible launcher for projects like ISS and interplanetary missions (manned or not). Plenty of people have sketched out designs for the latter; Buzz Aldrin preaches one full-time these days, for example. They just have little hope of getting to build them, in the current climate.
While there a number of plans out there for using the orbiter in other ways, I don't see this one... A 747, stripped of all unnecessary bits, can carry an empty orbiter. It sure as hell can't take off with a loaded one and the boosters it needs. I doubt that, even with bigger cargo planes, you could really manage this config without designing the plane from scratch. If you start designing massive planes for the purpose, well, you may as well bring the whole thing back to the drawing board, really.
That's really the trick with any large Shuttle upgrade. Since when you price these things, actual construction costs are absolutely trivial compared to design costs and operating costs, and since designing to match an existing (expensive, complicated) design is usually hardly cheaper than wiping the board clean, and since it probably makes more sense these days to build multiple one-purpose vehicles anyway, it just doesn't pay...
Sadly, the likely regime now is that we'll keep flying the shuttle for another 20 years, with a big chunk of the budget going into desperately trying to keep the things up to safety specs. It is possible that future Administrators will be more open to the idea of contracting out for launch services or for functional vehicles, as opposed to contracting out with exacting design specifications, and thus actually get competitive proposals and metal bent...
Bear in mind that when the shuttle was proposed, it was pitched as having two-week turnarounds and cost maybe a fifth as much per flight. NASA officials sold it this way because they were looking for a way to survive in the post-Kennedy/Johnson political climate. Myself I find it hard to blame them, but it certainly should be understood that it's much too hard a vehicle to fly and that we desperately need easier ones.
The various 'low end' transports generally cut their costs by being simpler and relying on easier technologies whenever possible. While some of the operating savings are intended to come from, say, cheaper fuels, the bulk of them have more to do with things like the number of people you need to do a launch, the redundancy and safety measures you NEED based on the reliability of your equipment, understanding how long you can expect different pieces of equipment to survive, and so on. It's an engineering design problem. A very difficult one, to be sure, but not one so far on the bleeding edge that we can't understand the problems and costs involved.And of course, we understand them rather better than we did in 1978, and we have better ways of dealing with them. (Also, not running a few billion dollars in debt on development costs for unneccessary technologies helps keep the op costs down. Venturestar, anyone?)
As for cutting capabilities- well, the big problem with the shuttle is, that because NASA knew when they were building it that they would have no money for other programs for a long time, it had to be rather a horse of all colors. Human ferry-er, cargo ferry-er, space science lab (for eight completely different kinds of science,), in space manuevering ability, DoD was told they needed to do all their launches on the Shuttle so then they had a bunch of cargo specs to add, trying to get an impossible combination of cost and turnaround time, and all of this on technology that was barely capable of it at all... It's appropriate for the next generation of launchers to be much more specialized. We don't need to use only one to do everything. If that's 'low-end', well, sign me up...
Well, okay, true, but the bulk of our arsenal, and certainly of the Russian arsenal, remains fairly big weapons. I meant 'modern' mainly in the sense of 'big H-bomb, not little Hiroshima-style bomb'. Much of the US arsenal is in the hundreds-of-kilotons range, and the Russian arsenal is generally believed to be skewed much higher, into tens-of-megatons payloads.
I agree with everything else you said, but... the area a modern, 50-100 megaton H-bomb takes out is considerable. I'm posting in Philadelphia; if someone did an airburst of a major nuke in the middle of New Jersey, they'd take out Philly, New York, and all the suburbanites around; New Haven would probably be an uncomfortable place to be, too. A bomb targeted at a city is going to take out much more than just that city.
Fatalities would probably be much higher than 50% per city in the event of a global war; the complete breakdown of almost all social supports means that not only do the injured or buried have just about no chance of getting aid, but anyone in a big city is going to start getting really hungry pretty soon. Few big cities have as much as three day's food supplies or a day's water in stock; with the electricity out, bridges down, roads a mess, things on fire, water pipes wrecked, and the like, the basic tools of survival are going to get pretty rare. FEMA isn't going to be much help as they've been blown up too, so...
As for missiles working... well, the missiles have certainly been tested a lot with no payload, and they seem pretty reliable. Many are the same ones used for space launches- the Titan series, for instance- and they launch on target about 95% of the time. The bombs have been tested quite a bit on deserted islands and such. Admittedly, the bombs and the missiles haven't been tested in concert, but that seems like a pretty simple rig-up to me.
What you want to be able to do is get a good bit of early warning, then land your favorite kind of large engine on the asteroid- ion-drive, Orion-type, solar sail (okay, that's not an engine, I know, I know) or whatever. Then you can alter the orbit in a controlled fashion. Landing on an asteroid isn't incredibly hard; it's in several current mission plans and proposals; so the bigger worry is really getting detection up to snuff.
For a really good detection system, we want scopes in a couple of positions, not just on earth; as it is right now, it's far too much of a pain to work out orbits...
That sort of thing, of course, then ends up really hurting investment in the industry, when money goes down the tubes, as it did with AI.
They certainly do file flight plans for the period the shuttle is in the lower atmosphere. They get very big no-fly zones for it, too; I forget the exact number, but they really clear all planes from the area.
It's all about control systems, really. In order to use any of the tricks that birds or insects do, especially scaled up to carrying humans, you need a ton of sensors, feeding into something that can then make decisions. So it's more about programming, in a way, than anything else... the other critical piece is probably materials physics; imitating feathers or insect wings is pretty hard.
I meant to add- I was next door in the Tate building last summer, doing astronomy. It's a terrific campus, and a really nice town. Too long a walk from the building to the nearest place for lunch, in the summer heat, though!
I don't know exactly how it will compare in price to other solutions, but it was intended to be low-cost. I used it to get a lecture from a prof when he had to head over to CERN once; we were all entirely too distracted by playing with the cameras, but it worked very well. We didn't use the whiteboard, though, just the "point camera at blackboard" method.
Even better- I poked around a bit, and it looks like they might have an installation over at U of M that you could check out, though it's not clear they're still using it. Good luck. Congrats on the position!
The folks writing operating systems, or software intended for the public, are usually trying to take the stuff coming out of academia and optimize it, get it relatively bug-free, package it up in a reasonably friendly fashion, things like that. Linux developers are certainly not always the first to do this, but then again, given that there are eight or ten OSes people are developing for, we wouldn't expect them to be.
Nor is Linux necessarily the best environment to pioneer for. If I'm the first guy trying to write a clustering system fit for ditributing to the world, I may well want to do it on a simpler sort of system- something written with the idea of being very stable and well-organized, say, like NetBSD, as opposed to something written with the idea of being very hardware-supporting and practical, like Linux. That doesn't mean that 'NetBSD is doing the innvoation' and 'Linux is copying it later'. The 'Linux community' isn't some sort of absolute, to which you have either given your soul or have no part in.
To the extent that the 'Linux community' does exist, it has given a great many things to the larger IT community. That it is often focused on writing open-source or portable things that have existed in more closed form before, does not particularly seem to me like a mark against the importance of its efforts.
IANL, but that is not exactly the standard. This sort of speech is-unprotected by the courts because it is 'inciteful'. The law seems to agree fairly well that this speech is only prosecutable when you actually tell someone to go do something, and then only when it can be shown that they then went and did it because of you- both standards that the 2600 case fails on. There's a great deal of leeway under the first amendment to say all kinds of things like "We should all hate people with green eyes" as long as no fairly specific incitement to action exists. Furthermore, to my knowledge restrictions of this kind on speech are only applied to criminal law in which there is a really compelling social interest- murder, riot, things like that; I know of no case in which it's been applied to "Let's all jaywalk", or "Let's all share VHS tapes", or even "Let's all do pot." The standard is quite high.