What if a GloFish is released into a fishing pond? Where it's likely to either be eaten by another fish, or worse, mate. We need to figure out if this GloFish has to be considered a polutant...
A) As another poster pointed out, that would be a matter for the EPA, not the FDA, but for some reason these guys are suing the FDA. The FDA doesn't regulate PCBs, yet you don't want to eat fish that ate them.
B) As to wether the EPA should ban them, there's little reason to ban these any more than any other aquarium fish. GloFish are tropical (I think zebra?) fish. If GloFish are likely to get into the population, then so are all sorts of other pet fish. The fact is that they don't. Asiatic clams are an issue. Tropical pet fish are not. These are not Snakeheads we're talking about.
C) Even if they were likely to get into the wild and survive, could they be dangerous? It is extremely unlikely. Numerous bioluminescent organisms currently live in our environment. Fireflies, certain fungi, lots of things are bioluminescent. Lots of things eat them, which could then get into the game-fish population, and nobody gets sick. These fish would use the same biological processes, and are therefore overwhelmingly unlikely to be harmful.
I'm all for caution. There is a good argument that some GM organisms may be bad. But there are so many threats to the environment that are much much more important than GloFish that these people are wasting resources that could be used to fight important battles. As such they are actually harming the environment by slowing down legitimate cases. Hell, their own suit regarding GM salmon is much more likely to pan out as a legitimate concern, and I support intelligent questioning of GM salmon. But if these guys are wasting their time on this, I begin to doubt whether any of their lawsuits are based on anything other than reactionary anti-GM nay-saying, with no basis in a real threat to the environment or people.
One of my brother's coworkers noticed that 15 GOP representatives bucked the party line and voted against the bill on principle.
John J. Duncan, Jr.
Walter B. Jones, Jr.
Roscoe G. Bartlett
Frank D. Lucas
Richard W. Pombo
C. L. (Butch) Otter
James A. Leach
Mike Pence
Zach Wamp
Donald A. Manzullo
Mike Simpson
Cliff Stearns
Ron Paul
Jeff Flake
Timothy V. Johnson
He went to PayDemocracy and set up a campaign to collect donations.
When this conference report came up for a vote, the vote broke down pretty much by party lines. What's remarkable, though, is that fifteen House Republicans broke ranks with their leadership to vote against the bill. That's remarkable because, in these times, voting against an intelligence appropriations bill, no matter how flawed, is something that could easily be used against them by an election-year opponent ("Congressman X voted against funding the War on Terrorism!"). Also, the House Republican leadership is known for pushing hard for loyalty within their caucus, so it's likely that these fifteen Members are feeling a lot of heat at the moment because of their vote.
That's why I started this "$15 for the Fifteen" campaign -- to send them a message that there's a constituency out there that wants to thank them for doing the right thing. We need to encourage acts of political courage like this, and the best way to do that is to show the politicians that there are people out there who will rally to their cause and back them up if they stand up for individual liberty. In our system, the way to be heard is with money -- so give $15 for the Fifteen and help make a statement that we're ready to support anyone who's got the backbone to defend our civil liberties!
This is true. However, its also worth pointing out that he would produce a number of prints which did have the right contrast and mood before making a print that he felt was 'right'.
His technology really was the state-of-the-art for bringing out the lighting effects that matched his view. He might very well use digital methods today to do the same things he did then with chemical processing.
Wether he'd succumb to the temptation to move the moon into a more 'artful' location in a picture is another question.
Found it. from teh 'How to rig an election' article:
All countries, in the interests of equal representation, adjust their electoral boundaries to reflect population changes. Most democracies hand over this job to independent commissions, which content themselves with tinkering with existing boundaries. In America, in all but a few states, that idea sounds elitist and undemocratic. So every ten years, after the census, politicians in state legislatures meet to draw new voting maps which are approved by the state governor. Since America's population is both faster-growing and more mobile than that of other old democracies, and since the Voting Rights Act actually requires minorities to have special "majority-minority districts" in order to get an equal chance to elect candidates of their choice (ie, their race), redistricters end up doing a lot more than tinker.
The results are as bizarre as you would expect. Florida's 22nd District is 90 miles long and never more than 3 miles wide. It consists of every beach house lining Route A1A along Florida's Gold Coast from West Palm Beach to Miami Beach. You could say about this district, as used to be said of the old Texas 6th (which was a road from Houston to Dallas), that you could kill most of the constituents by driving down the road with the car doors open. Other districts look like donuts, embryos or Rorschach tests.
The Economist has several articles over the past couple of years about this topic. Some probably require subscriptions, but they are excellent articles.
This really got kicked into high-gear once it was decided (and I forget exactly what the history is on who made the decision to do so) that minorities should get some majority districts. Since in most states this is a difficult proposition. Even where segregation is prevelant, it is too localized to make it easy to build geographic regions where any given minority has a clear majority. So complicated census databases were put to use, with all manner of data. As near as I can tell, (and I'm not electoral historian by any means) this is where the whole thing started.
Gerrymandering (named for a political cartoon from the early years of the US, where a particularly serpentine congressional district was given fangs, wings, and a forked tongue and called the 'Dread Gerry-Mander!' after the politician responsible for drawing that district) was fairly difficult and rare in American politics prior to this point, because people would point to a map and say 'that's ridiculous!' But once there were these minority districts, the politicians could accuse their accusers of racism, and go about happily shoring up their political futures.
Seems we need to get a computer program, with no voting pattern databases, to solve the problem as an optimization problem.
Part of the goal is not to make you want a Jeep per-se. Its to make sure that if you want a Jeep/LandCruiser/LandRover/SUV, that you think about Jeeps, and don't go strait for a LandCruiser.
I didn't know Jeep had a new thing they were calling a Rubicon until they made the second Tomb Raider. I didn't end up seeing Tomb Raider II, and I wouldn't buy a Jeep on a dare. But I know its there if I'd want one, and probably wouldn't if it weren't for the joint marketing blitz.
I wonder what percentage of the Tivo owning public hasn't been missing 2/3 of commercials anyway, because they're the part of the market demographic (like me) that flips channels. They're probably losing less than 2/3s of commercials, since many were already being skipped/muted/ignored before. Still, I do remember commercials (I remember the Jeep Rubicon, which I don't want, being advertised with Tomb Raider II which I didn't see).
Then again, web advertising works, too. I saw an ad for a Honda on Suck.com or some such site while I was looking for a car, and ended up test-driving a Prelude after adding Honda to my list of possible cars. I wouldn't have known that the movie Scotland, PA (MacBeth in a diner) existed if it weren't for a banner ad on The Onion. All these jackasses that measure ad effectiveness by click-through are jackasses (as I may have mentioned earlier in this sentence).
Advertisers need to get their panties out of a wad.
Effectively, these people believe that their claim to these new territories is founded purely and simply in the lack of laws preventing it. Brute force will be required, they think, to say otherwise...
There is a lack of laws preventing it, and also a lack of laws protecting their claims. As of right now, brute force will be required to back up their claims, since no legal institution will support their rights.
If I decide to mine Eros for iridium and have the spacefaring capability to do so, then they can bitch all they want but they won't have any legal recourse through any government that can enforce their rights. As such, they'd have to enforce it themselves.
Technically RIAA could give a rat's rear quarters (sometimes referred to as 'Burbank') about you ripping off Beatle lyrics. Its ASCAP (or their alter-ego whose acronym temporarily escapes me) that would come after you for a musical publication.
Not only that, but it would be a losing proposition evolutionarily. Women select mates who are gonna do risky stuff, because it means they'll do risky stuff for them. This means they can live longer and care for our offspring better, so there we go.
Oh well. I'm not gonna stop doin' the dumb stuff I love just to live a couple of extra boring years.
a black box can record the order in which votes were cast, and *anybody* in the room knows the order in which voters came to the booth.
Well, in theory it might be possible to do that, but most precincts have many (10+) booths, and you'd have to do some pretty clever record-keeping to keep track of which booth folks go into. AFAIK, its not legal to videotape voting rooms (basically it is considered intimidating, and thus in violation of the Voting Rights Act or some such thing - I remember reading a news story about it in the '96 election), so somebody's gonna have to keep track of which booth every single person votes in.
There are easier ways to intimidate voters. Indeed, optical scan could hold the same capacity for order-count, since there are multiple booths but only scanner, which will hold the ballots in a stack inside. With only a single scanner per precinct, it would be easier to reconstruct the sequence of voters & votes from that than from the black-box method.
"votes must be independently counted" black-box == !record there is no way for the representants of any party to check by hand.
Now the 'no-record' problem is a stickier wicket. Here's my theoretical solution, that also resolves some of the 'butterfly ballot' issues that were problems in the Florida vote. Basically, after the voter has completed the vote process, the machine would print a copy of their ballot. The voter is then asked to check it for any errors. If they think its OK, they run it through a slot that goes to a bin that stores the hard-copy record of all the votes, and triggers the vote to be counted by the machine. If they made a mistake, then they run the hard-copy through a different slot that shreds the ballot and re-starts the voting process. This gives a hard-copy record for any re-count, and provides for people to check and make sure they didn't vote for Pat Buchannan when they meant to vote for Ralph Nader.
Does mars even have a sufficiently dense atmosphere to have a "color"?
There's enough of an atmosphere to have some color, although it will never have the bright sky we recognize on Earth. At very high altitudes on Earth, the atmosphere is roughly as thin as the Martian atmosphere at the surface (at least at very low points like Hellas Basin). There will be a very dark blue color, probably similar to twilight on Earth. On top of Olympus Mons, the atmosphere would probably be so thin that color would only be visible at dawn and sunset, when the sunlight is traveling through the atmosphere at a very oblique angle.
With dust you're not getting Rayliegh scattering, but rather Mie scattering. Mie scattering is the type of scattering that occurs when light hits particles much larger than the wavelength of light. There is little or no variation in the intensity of Mie scattering with wavelength, so red and blue light are scattered roughly equally. That's usually what you see with red sunsets, when water vapor in the air scatters the incoming light. The reason it appears to favor red light is that the blue and yellow light is being attenuated by Rayleigh scattering before it reaches the troposphere where the water vapor is present. Therefore there's more red light left in the spectrum.
A quick googling of Rayleigh Scattering came up with this very excellent expanation:
There's a reasonably good survey of the whole debacle in this weeks Economist. The metaphor they use to describe the whole thing is hilarious. I won't spoil it, but let's just say that Clarence Darrow would be on our side!
Hey this is a bit O/T, but I was looking at the space.com article, and really liked the fact that they had a 'normal' version of the picture, and then a version with major land features (hellas basin, Arabia terrain, etc). Ever since reading the RGB Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, I've been interested in the geography of Mars. For whatever reason, I've had real trouble getting it in my head from the lat/long maps that I've seen. I'd really like to have a globe of Mars to help keep this strait. I know there are globes depicting the features of the Moon, but does anybody know if there are Mars globes available?
While I wouldn't 100% put it past NASA to do a little color-correcting (REAL easy to do with RGB imagery) it's entirely plausible that the Martian sky could vary all the way from an Earth-style high-altitude deep blue to a total-sunset deep red. The big governing factor will be the dust content of the air.
The dust content, of course, will be highly variable from total during a dust storm, to fairly little. I'm not sure (and perhaps no one is) whether there are ever 'dust free' days on Mars, or if there is always some small amount of dust sufficient to keep some reddish hue 24/7/365. Or rather 24.8/7/580 or whatever (I forget the number of Martian days in a Martian year).
But to expand a bit on Mr Birdman's explanation, all normal gasses (O2, N2, CO2, probably even H2S and H2O in gas form, but not in aerosol form) will look blue, due to the aforementioned 'Rayleigh scattering'. Basically light (and all other forms of EM radiation) is scattered if it hits any object that is near or larger than its wavelength. Blue light, with its shorter wavelength, is scattered more by air molecules, so you see more blue light from the sky than red. This will happen in the upper atmosphere.
If there's also dust, which will scatter red light as well as blue, you will see more red than blue. This is because the there is a higher intensity of red light in sunlight than blue, coupled with the fact that shorter wavelengths are getting scattered away and losing intensity before they reach the lower atmosphere where the dust resides. Aerosols in the atmosphere will act much like dust.
Disclaimer: I'm pretty much going on memory here, and didn't google this to check my facts. I am especially unsure of my explanation of why dust and aerosols look red. There may be more to it than that.
Haymaker is unfamiliar to me right off the bat, so I can't respond on that one, and won't discuss it.
Shays' Rebellion was not peaceful protest, but armed protest. They didn't need to make bombs because they had muskets and/or rifles.
At Kent State, if you wanted to change the number of casualties from a handful to a statistic, the fastest way to do that would be to start lobbing bombs at the National Guard types. The ones who really were shooting over the heads of protesters would have started to take aimed shots, and if they didn't have someone holding a bomb in their sights, then they would have aimed at anyone not running away. And seeing a couple of guys down the line take shrapnel from a pipe-bomb, they probably wouldn't be to careful to check if they were running away.
In the modern government age, a better self defense against government brutality is well-drilled non-violence. You want sympathy on your side, and adolescent displays of bravado don't go over well with the American public (unless you're president). Ultimately if you really feel you're in need of armed resistance, you'd need to do that with a large contingent armed with rifles, not a few guys hurling pipe-bombs or molatovs.
Ultimately pipe-bombs, due to their indiscriminant area-of-effect nature, are most effective in instilling fear in the untrained, rather than breaking the ranks of well-trained police/military anti-riot groups. He's more likely to kill his friends than his enemies. Of course, his motives might be to demonize the cops by upping the death-toll at his rallies. If so, then
You have the right to kill a police officer if they are killing your people, shooting at your protest groups
I assume that you mean that the police officer in question is not being threatened with physical harm himself. There haven't been any fatalities in globalization protests since Italy, and in that case the officer in question was being threatened by a guy swinging a fire-extinguisher. When have live rounds been fired at protesters since Kent State?
Ultimately, his desired methods are too reminiscent of Greensboro (you know, when the Klan managed to 'respond to fire' from some black trade unionists) to gain much sympathy from me.
The 2nd Amendment is essentially the codification of the right to armed insurection, but bombs are bad tactics, and too likely to end up in innocent lives lost.
By the way. If there had been casualties among the National Guard types at Kent State, do you think it weigh on the national conscience like it does? Most people would assume that the bombs were thrown first. The Kent State protesters would have lost the moral high ground, and their deaths would have had half the impact. And there'd be a lot more deaths.
Never cede the high ground. You're out for popular opinion, and there's nothing like a ten-to-nothing casualty ratio to prove the cops shot first. If anyone had taken this guy's advice and started tossing bombs, he'd have gotten a bunch of protesters killed, and be seen to have justified the police brutality in the process.
Still not 100% sure he should have gone to jail, but his words are close enough to an exhortation to violence - a punishible act commonly used by the reactionary right (Klan and Operation Rescue et al) - that good people could disagree on his sentence.
You're right that not all civil disobedience was peaceful. Its also true that there was a great deal of civil disobedience that was very noble in aim. There was also a great deal more that was, in the parlance of our Pres, evil.
In most parts of the country it is now illegal to burn a cross. This is because in most cases the burning cross was effectively a death threat. It was speech, and might even be considered protected political speech under some circumstances, but it is also intended to dissuade people from excercising their rights through acts or threats of physical harm.
I have not read his website, but most descriptions in the articles listed here seem to indicate he was advocating the overthrow of the US government, and linking to bomb-making instructions. This could easily be interpreted as exhorting people to plant bombs to disrupt, what? Elections? Courts? I vote in a predominantly Republican area. If his friends, or some ELF or ALF types want to discourage people from voting GOP, would they set off a bomb in my precinct? (probably not, becuase mine is not nearly high-enough income to attract their attention, but its a useful thought experiment)
His motives are 'populist' and 'left-wing' and may be aligned with the motives of many here, but his actions are very similar to those of the folks out in western North Carolina who have just recently had to take down their 'Run Eric Run' signs from their front yards. He's not Eric Rudolph, but his actions are only different from some of Eric's supporters if you think along the lines of 'its OK for US, but not for THEM.'
This guy is in one of those nasty little gray areas that make public policy a difficult thing, but I do think its a bit easier to make these distinctions when you realize that 'those harmless kids who want to make the world a better place' are not so different from 'those neanderthal right-wing reactionary muther-f*$kers'. They use a lot of the same rhetoric that this guy uses. Just the book their quoting to justify their actions has a black cover, not a red one.
Remember, I'm not calling this guy Eric Rudolph. And certainly he shouldn't be given a 20 year terrorist sentence - indeed I think the judge was wrong for superceding the prosecutor's recomendation of 4 months. However, this guy was real close to the boundary between harmless and horrific.
I was just poking around looking for this on the sprint website. In the 'my plan' or 'change my plan' section they don't mention 'Free and Clear America' just 'Free and Clear' which does NOT allow off-network roaming (or more accurately charges $.50 to $.75 per minute for roaming!). I did find reference to it in an ad off to the side. Looks like they want to cut it off by August 10th. No real info on whether current sprint users could really jump on that particular bandwagon.
I really need to try this out and see if it solves my Incredibly Frequent Dropped and Missed Calls Problems. These IFDMCPs are about to drive me to another network, especially when I can port my number over. If I can just roam to another network when Sprint's majick ebbs from my house, that might solve things.
By the way, anybody heard of a software change that sprint can do on phones that changes its threshold for jumping to a different tower? I remember hearing or reading somewhere about someone solving IFDMCPs through a software fix at the the Sprint Store. I'd go to a sprint store and ask, but its a 20 minute drive, and I don't really trust the high-school graduates behind the counter there. Of course that implies that I trust John Q Slashdot, but where would America be without unreliable internet hearsay?
By the way, Sprint's coverage in east Richardson & NW Garland (Dallas suburbs) is piss-poor. Not holes, per-se but just incredibly bad call quality/reliability.
Yeah, water compresses very very slightly. However, the gravity signature of the sub would be way below the noise level. It would be a signature probably much much smaller than a microGal - probably nanoGals (off the cuff estimate). MicroGals are very difficult to measure on land in perfect conditions. In the air over the ocean it would be impossible.
As for doing it with Grace, the data will be far too coarse to detect the sub's anomaly. The anomaly of a sub at periscope depth would be strongest, but the wavelength would only be about as long as the boat. To model it well enough to detect it, you'd have to sample several times across the wavelength. Grace is more likely to have a sample interval measured in kilometers than tens of meters. It would never detect a sub, even if it had a high-amplitude anomaly. It would be noise.
That said, there is no reason why we can't us other things like detecting the change in magnetic flows because a large nuclear reactor just went underneath, and things like that
You're right. Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) is a common method for detecting submarines, although it's generally only used to pinpoint the location of a sub that's already been detected by passive sonar. Of course, it's the iron in the hull you're detecting, not the reactor (or atleast not the nuclear parts of the reactor, but the steel parts). It works just as well for Diesel/Electric submarines as it does for nuke boats.
Sub-hunter helicopters have magnetometers in a 'bird' that they lower on a cable (to get it away from the airship's magnetic signature). Fixed wing planes like the P-3 Orion have their magnetometers in odd-looking 'booms' sticking out the back of the plane. Look a bit like the plane's got a stinger.
Interestingly, there were rumors floating about that the Russians built their Alpha class subs (predecessor to the Sierra and Akula classes) with titanium hulls, which, not being ferromagnetic, doesn't have nearly as big a MAD signature. The titanium was for a stronger hull, rather than the magnetic properties, though. Dunno if that was true or not, but sounded like a cool idea.
You wouldn't know from the phone system. You don't have to use international dialing to get Canada. Its just one more area code (or more accurately, several more). Go figure.
Assume that the police can do so without . . . having any impact on your life whatsoever, save for being caught if you're committing crimes.
Now, what's wrong with this?
What's wrong with this is that we're rarely sure that someone is committing crimes. Language can often be interpreted in different ways. FBI agents reading the transcript or hearing a phone conversation cannot have all the context. Even hearing the entire conversation will leave him unable to know what has been said away from that phone call, or what sorts of 'in-jokes' may be used.
In reality prosecutions based on this evidence would rely heavily on interpretations of intercepted conversations. By the very nature of terrorist attempts to disguise their conversations as normal, most of the evidence from these intercepts would be highly ambiguous. I certainly don't want the Feds going through the entire record of everything I've ever said looking for things that could be interpreted as criminal! I'd be locked up in a heartbeat.
But even if you don't buy that the Feds might make mistakes, there's one very important thing wrong with it. It is expressly unconstitutional.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This expressly forbids general searches. It states that you have to have a reason to search ahead of time, supported by either explicit witness testimony or by direct evidence. And it states that you must limit your search to only those places specified in the warrant.
This was recently upheld by the Supreme Court. Police were using infrared scanners to non-invasively measure heat output from every house in a neighborhood. They found one house with unusually high heat output. They assumed that marijuana was being grown there, and searched. Sure enough, the heat was coming from UV lamps used to grow pot. However the Court ruled that the mass search of all homes in a neighborhood via infrared scanning was unconistitutional, becuase there was no specific cause to do so, and that it did not target a specific place. The police were just trolling for pot growers.
Now if you think that the Fourth Amendment is no longer relevant, you can always get it changed. All you have to do is write an amendment (perhaps worded "The government shall have the power to search everywhere and anywhere, so long as only criminals are inconvenienced. This supercedes and nullifies Amendment IV."). Then you just have to get both the House of Representatives and Senate to pass it by a supermajority, and then have the legislatures of a supermajority of states to pass it, probably by a supermajority. No problem, dude!
Slashdot Mirror
What if a GloFish is released into a fishing pond? Where it's likely to either be eaten by another fish, or worse, mate. We need to figure out if this GloFish has to be considered a polutant...
A) As another poster pointed out, that would be a matter for the EPA, not the FDA, but for some reason these guys are suing the FDA. The FDA doesn't regulate PCBs, yet you don't want to eat fish that ate them.
B) As to wether the EPA should ban them, there's little reason to ban these any more than any other aquarium fish. GloFish are tropical (I think zebra?) fish. If GloFish are likely to get into the population, then so are all sorts of other pet fish. The fact is that they don't. Asiatic clams are an issue. Tropical pet fish are not. These are not Snakeheads we're talking about.
C) Even if they were likely to get into the wild and survive, could they be dangerous? It is extremely unlikely. Numerous bioluminescent organisms currently live in our environment. Fireflies, certain fungi, lots of things are bioluminescent. Lots of things eat them, which could then get into the game-fish population, and nobody gets sick. These fish would use the same biological processes, and are therefore overwhelmingly unlikely to be harmful.
I'm all for caution. There is a good argument that some GM organisms may be bad. But there are so many threats to the environment that are much much more important than GloFish that these people are wasting resources that could be used to fight important battles. As such they are actually harming the environment by slowing down legitimate cases. Hell, their own suit regarding GM salmon is much more likely to pan out as a legitimate concern, and I support intelligent questioning of GM salmon. But if these guys are wasting their time on this, I begin to doubt whether any of their lawsuits are based on anything other than reactionary anti-GM nay-saying, with no basis in a real threat to the environment or people.
Uhh, and here's the URL. If only I'd been paying attention...
http://www.paydemocracy.com/campaigns/1030
He went to PayDemocracy and set up a campaign to collect donations.
This is true. However, its also worth pointing out that he would produce a number of prints which did have the right contrast and mood before making a print that he felt was 'right'.
His technology really was the state-of-the-art for bringing out the lighting effects that matched his view. He might very well use digital methods today to do the same things he did then with chemical processing.
Wether he'd succumb to the temptation to move the moon into a more 'artful' location in a picture is another question.
Found it. from teh 'How to rig an election' article:
All countries, in the interests of equal representation, adjust their electoral boundaries to reflect population changes. Most democracies hand over this job to independent commissions, which content themselves with tinkering with existing boundaries. In America, in all but a few states, that idea sounds elitist and undemocratic. So every ten years, after the census, politicians in state legislatures meet to draw new voting maps which are approved by the state governor. Since America's population is both faster-growing and more mobile than that of other old democracies, and since the Voting Rights Act actually requires minorities to have special "majority-minority districts" in order to get an equal chance to elect candidates of their choice (ie, their race), redistricters end up doing a lot more than tinker.
The results are as bizarre as you would expect. Florida's 22nd District is 90 miles long and never more than 3 miles wide. It consists of every beach house lining Route A1A along Florida's Gold Coast from West Palm Beach to Miami Beach. You could say about this district, as used to be said of the old Texas 6th (which was a road from Houston to Dallas), that you could kill most of the constituents by driving down the road with the car doors open. Other districts look like donuts, embryos or Rorschach tests.
The Economist has several articles over the past couple of years about this topic. Some probably require subscriptions, but they are excellent articles.
Tom DeLay's chef d'oeuvre
How to rig an election
This really got kicked into high-gear once it was decided (and I forget exactly what the history is on who made the decision to do so) that minorities should get some majority districts. Since in most states this is a difficult proposition. Even where segregation is prevelant, it is too localized to make it easy to build geographic regions where any given minority has a clear majority. So complicated census databases were put to use, with all manner of data. As near as I can tell, (and I'm not electoral historian by any means) this is where the whole thing started.
Gerrymandering (named for a political cartoon from the early years of the US, where a particularly serpentine congressional district was given fangs, wings, and a forked tongue and called the 'Dread Gerry-Mander!' after the politician responsible for drawing that district) was fairly difficult and rare in American politics prior to this point, because people would point to a map and say 'that's ridiculous!' But once there were these minority districts, the politicians could accuse their accusers of racism, and go about happily shoring up their political futures.
Seems we need to get a computer program, with no voting pattern databases, to solve the problem as an optimization problem.
Part of the goal is not to make you want a Jeep per-se. Its to make sure that if you want a Jeep/LandCruiser/LandRover/SUV, that you think about Jeeps, and don't go strait for a LandCruiser.
I didn't know Jeep had a new thing they were calling a Rubicon until they made the second Tomb Raider. I didn't end up seeing Tomb Raider II, and I wouldn't buy a Jeep on a dare. But I know its there if I'd want one, and probably wouldn't if it weren't for the joint marketing blitz.
I wonder what percentage of the Tivo owning public hasn't been missing 2/3 of commercials anyway, because they're the part of the market demographic (like me) that flips channels. They're probably losing less than 2/3s of commercials, since many were already being skipped/muted/ignored before. Still, I do remember commercials (I remember the Jeep Rubicon, which I don't want, being advertised with Tomb Raider II which I didn't see).
Then again, web advertising works, too. I saw an ad for a Honda on Suck.com or some such site while I was looking for a car, and ended up test-driving a Prelude after adding Honda to my list of possible cars. I wouldn't have known that the movie Scotland, PA (MacBeth in a diner) existed if it weren't for a banner ad on The Onion. All these jackasses that measure ad effectiveness by click-through are jackasses (as I may have mentioned earlier in this sentence).
Advertisers need to get their panties out of a wad.
Effectively, these people believe that their claim to these new territories is founded purely and simply in the lack of laws preventing it. Brute force will be required, they think, to say otherwise...
There is a lack of laws preventing it, and also a lack of laws protecting their claims. As of right now, brute force will be required to back up their claims, since no legal institution will support their rights.
If I decide to mine Eros for iridium and have the spacefaring capability to do so, then they can bitch all they want but they won't have any legal recourse through any government that can enforce their rights. As such, they'd have to enforce it themselves.
Technically RIAA could give a rat's rear quarters (sometimes referred to as 'Burbank') about you ripping off Beatle lyrics. Its ASCAP (or their alter-ego whose acronym temporarily escapes me) that would come after you for a musical publication.
There are risky things that have to get done. The males do them, such that the females are not placed at risk.
Not only that, but it would be a losing proposition evolutionarily. Women select mates who are gonna do risky stuff, because it means they'll do risky stuff for them. This means they can live longer and care for our offspring better, so there we go.
Oh well. I'm not gonna stop doin' the dumb stuff I love just to live a couple of extra boring years.
No way. I'm totally supporting the Benji Mouse/Frankie Mouse 2004 Campaign! They've got the Answer!
Better Things for Better Living, Through Chat-Shows!
a black box can record the order in which votes were cast, and *anybody* in the room knows the order in which voters came to the booth.
Well, in theory it might be possible to do that, but most precincts have many (10+) booths, and you'd have to do some pretty clever record-keeping to keep track of which booth folks go into. AFAIK, its not legal to videotape voting rooms (basically it is considered intimidating, and thus in violation of the Voting Rights Act or some such thing - I remember reading a news story about it in the '96 election), so somebody's gonna have to keep track of which booth every single person votes in.
There are easier ways to intimidate voters. Indeed, optical scan could hold the same capacity for order-count, since there are multiple booths but only scanner, which will hold the ballots in a stack inside. With only a single scanner per precinct, it would be easier to reconstruct the sequence of voters & votes from that than from the black-box method.
"votes must be independently counted" black-box == !record there is no way for the representants of any party to check by hand.
Now the 'no-record' problem is a stickier wicket. Here's my theoretical solution, that also resolves some of the 'butterfly ballot' issues that were problems in the Florida vote. Basically, after the voter has completed the vote process, the machine would print a copy of their ballot. The voter is then asked to check it for any errors. If they think its OK, they run it through a slot that goes to a bin that stores the hard-copy record of all the votes, and triggers the vote to be counted by the machine. If they made a mistake, then they run the hard-copy through a different slot that shreds the ballot and re-starts the voting process. This gives a hard-copy record for any re-count, and provides for people to check and make sure they didn't vote for Pat Buchannan when they meant to vote for Ralph Nader.
Does mars even have a sufficiently dense atmosphere to have a "color"?
s /b lusky.html#c3
There's enough of an atmosphere to have some color, although it will never have the bright sky we recognize on Earth. At very high altitudes on Earth, the atmosphere is roughly as thin as the Martian atmosphere at the surface (at least at very low points like Hellas Basin). There will be a very dark blue color, probably similar to twilight on Earth. On top of Olympus Mons, the atmosphere would probably be so thin that color would only be visible at dawn and sunset, when the sunlight is traveling through the atmosphere at a very oblique angle.
With dust you're not getting Rayliegh scattering, but rather Mie scattering. Mie scattering is the type of scattering that occurs when light hits particles much larger than the wavelength of light. There is little or no variation in the intensity of Mie scattering with wavelength, so red and blue light are scattered roughly equally. That's usually what you see with red sunsets, when water vapor in the air scatters the incoming light. The reason it appears to favor red light is that the blue and yellow light is being attenuated by Rayleigh scattering before it reaches the troposphere where the water vapor is present. Therefore there's more red light left in the spectrum.
A quick googling of Rayleigh Scattering came up with this very excellent expanation:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmo
There's a reasonably good survey of the whole debacle in this weeks Economist. The metaphor they use to describe the whole thing is hilarious. I won't spoil it, but let's just say that Clarence Darrow would be on our side!
Hey this is a bit O/T, but I was looking at the space.com article, and really liked the fact that they had a 'normal' version of the picture, and then a version with major land features (hellas basin, Arabia terrain, etc). Ever since reading the RGB Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, I've been interested in the geography of Mars. For whatever reason, I've had real trouble getting it in my head from the lat/long maps that I've seen. I'd really like to have a globe of Mars to help keep this strait. I know there are globes depicting the features of the Moon, but does anybody know if there are Mars globes available?
While I wouldn't 100% put it past NASA to do a little color-correcting (REAL easy to do with RGB imagery) it's entirely plausible that the Martian sky could vary all the way from an Earth-style high-altitude deep blue to a total-sunset deep red. The big governing factor will be the dust content of the air.
The dust content, of course, will be highly variable from total during a dust storm, to fairly little. I'm not sure (and perhaps no one is) whether there are ever 'dust free' days on Mars, or if there is always some small amount of dust sufficient to keep some reddish hue 24/7/365. Or rather 24.8/7/580 or whatever (I forget the number of Martian days in a Martian year).
But to expand a bit on Mr Birdman's explanation, all normal gasses (O2, N2, CO2, probably even H2S and H2O in gas form, but not in aerosol form) will look blue, due to the aforementioned 'Rayleigh scattering'. Basically light (and all other forms of EM radiation) is scattered if it hits any object that is near or larger than its wavelength. Blue light, with its shorter wavelength, is scattered more by air molecules, so you see more blue light from the sky than red. This will happen in the upper atmosphere.
If there's also dust, which will scatter red light as well as blue, you will see more red than blue. This is because the there is a higher intensity of red light in sunlight than blue, coupled with the fact that shorter wavelengths are getting scattered away and losing intensity before they reach the lower atmosphere where the dust resides. Aerosols in the atmosphere will act much like dust.
Disclaimer: I'm pretty much going on memory here, and didn't google this to check my facts. I am especially unsure of my explanation of why dust and aerosols look red. There may be more to it than that.
Haymaker is unfamiliar to me right off the bat, so I can't respond on that one, and won't discuss it.
Shays' Rebellion was not peaceful protest, but armed protest. They didn't need to make bombs because they had muskets and/or rifles.
At Kent State, if you wanted to change the number of casualties from a handful to a statistic, the fastest way to do that would be to start lobbing bombs at the National Guard types. The ones who really were shooting over the heads of protesters would have started to take aimed shots, and if they didn't have someone holding a bomb in their sights, then they would have aimed at anyone not running away. And seeing a couple of guys down the line take shrapnel from a pipe-bomb, they probably wouldn't be to careful to check if they were running away.
In the modern government age, a better self defense against government brutality is well-drilled non-violence. You want sympathy on your side, and adolescent displays of bravado don't go over well with the American public (unless you're president). Ultimately if you really feel you're in need of armed resistance, you'd need to do that with a large contingent armed with rifles, not a few guys hurling pipe-bombs or molatovs.
Ultimately pipe-bombs, due to their indiscriminant area-of-effect nature, are most effective in instilling fear in the untrained, rather than breaking the ranks of well-trained police/military anti-riot groups. He's more likely to kill his friends than his enemies. Of course, his motives might be to demonize the cops by upping the death-toll at his rallies. If so, then
You have the right to kill a police officer if they are killing your people, shooting at your protest groups
I assume that you mean that the police officer in question is not being threatened with physical harm himself. There haven't been any fatalities in globalization protests since Italy, and in that case the officer in question was being threatened by a guy swinging a fire-extinguisher. When have live rounds been fired at protesters since Kent State?
Ultimately, his desired methods are too reminiscent of Greensboro (you know, when the Klan managed to 'respond to fire' from some black trade unionists) to gain much sympathy from me.
The 2nd Amendment is essentially the codification of the right to armed insurection, but bombs are bad tactics, and too likely to end up in innocent lives lost.
By the way. If there had been casualties among the National Guard types at Kent State, do you think it weigh on the national conscience like it does? Most people would assume that the bombs were thrown first. The Kent State protesters would have lost the moral high ground, and their deaths would have had half the impact. And there'd be a lot more deaths.
Never cede the high ground. You're out for popular opinion, and there's nothing like a ten-to-nothing casualty ratio to prove the cops shot first. If anyone had taken this guy's advice and started tossing bombs, he'd have gotten a bunch of protesters killed, and be seen to have justified the police brutality in the process.
Still not 100% sure he should have gone to jail, but his words are close enough to an exhortation to violence - a punishible act commonly used by the reactionary right (Klan and Operation Rescue et al) - that good people could disagree on his sentence.
You're right that not all civil disobedience was peaceful. Its also true that there was a great deal of civil disobedience that was very noble in aim. There was also a great deal more that was, in the parlance of our Pres, evil.
In most parts of the country it is now illegal to burn a cross. This is because in most cases the burning cross was effectively a death threat. It was speech, and might even be considered protected political speech under some circumstances, but it is also intended to dissuade people from excercising their rights through acts or threats of physical harm.
I have not read his website, but most descriptions in the articles listed here seem to indicate he was advocating the overthrow of the US government, and linking to bomb-making instructions. This could easily be interpreted as exhorting people to plant bombs to disrupt, what? Elections? Courts? I vote in a predominantly Republican area. If his friends, or some ELF or ALF types want to discourage people from voting GOP, would they set off a bomb in my precinct? (probably not, becuase mine is not nearly high-enough income to attract their attention, but its a useful thought experiment)
His motives are 'populist' and 'left-wing' and may be aligned with the motives of many here, but his actions are very similar to those of the folks out in western North Carolina who have just recently had to take down their 'Run Eric Run' signs from their front yards. He's not Eric Rudolph, but his actions are only different from some of Eric's supporters if you think along the lines of 'its OK for US, but not for THEM.'
This guy is in one of those nasty little gray areas that make public policy a difficult thing, but I do think its a bit easier to make these distinctions when you realize that 'those harmless kids who want to make the world a better place' are not so different from 'those neanderthal right-wing reactionary muther-f*$kers'. They use a lot of the same rhetoric that this guy uses. Just the book their quoting to justify their actions has a black cover, not a red one.
Remember, I'm not calling this guy Eric Rudolph. And certainly he shouldn't be given a 20 year terrorist sentence - indeed I think the judge was wrong for superceding the prosecutor's recomendation of 4 months. However, this guy was real close to the boundary between harmless and horrific.
A keyboard with one key? You mean like a Mac mouse?
I was just poking around looking for this on the sprint website. In the 'my plan' or 'change my plan' section they don't mention 'Free and Clear America' just 'Free and Clear' which does NOT allow off-network roaming (or more accurately charges $.50 to $.75 per minute for roaming!). I did find reference to it in an ad off to the side. Looks like they want to cut it off by August 10th. No real info on whether current sprint users could really jump on that particular bandwagon.
I really need to try this out and see if it solves my Incredibly Frequent Dropped and Missed Calls Problems. These IFDMCPs are about to drive me to another network, especially when I can port my number over. If I can just roam to another network when Sprint's majick ebbs from my house, that might solve things.
By the way, anybody heard of a software change that sprint can do on phones that changes its threshold for jumping to a different tower? I remember hearing or reading somewhere about someone solving IFDMCPs through a software fix at the the Sprint Store. I'd go to a sprint store and ask, but its a 20 minute drive, and I don't really trust the high-school graduates behind the counter there. Of course that implies that I trust John Q Slashdot, but where would America be without unreliable internet hearsay?
By the way, Sprint's coverage in east Richardson & NW Garland (Dallas suburbs) is piss-poor. Not holes, per-se but just incredibly bad call quality/reliability.
Yeah, water compresses very very slightly. However, the gravity signature of the sub would be way below the noise level. It would be a signature probably much much smaller than a microGal - probably nanoGals (off the cuff estimate). MicroGals are very difficult to measure on land in perfect conditions. In the air over the ocean it would be impossible.
As for doing it with Grace, the data will be far too coarse to detect the sub's anomaly. The anomaly of a sub at periscope depth would be strongest, but the wavelength would only be about as long as the boat. To model it well enough to detect it, you'd have to sample several times across the wavelength. Grace is more likely to have a sample interval measured in kilometers than tens of meters. It would never detect a sub, even if it had a high-amplitude anomaly. It would be noise.
That said, there is no reason why we can't us other things like detecting the change in magnetic flows because a large nuclear reactor just went underneath, and things like that
You're right. Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) is a common method for detecting submarines, although it's generally only used to pinpoint the location of a sub that's already been detected by passive sonar. Of course, it's the iron in the hull you're detecting, not the reactor (or atleast not the nuclear parts of the reactor, but the steel parts). It works just as well for Diesel/Electric submarines as it does for nuke boats.
Sub-hunter helicopters have magnetometers in a 'bird' that they lower on a cable (to get it away from the airship's magnetic signature). Fixed wing planes like the P-3 Orion have their magnetometers in odd-looking 'booms' sticking out the back of the plane. Look a bit like the plane's got a stinger.
Interestingly, there were rumors floating about that the Russians built their Alpha class subs (predecessor to the Sierra and Akula classes) with titanium hulls, which, not being ferromagnetic, doesn't have nearly as big a MAD signature. The titanium was for a stronger hull, rather than the magnetic properties, though. Dunno if that was true or not, but sounded like a cool idea.
You wouldn't know from the phone system. You don't have to use international dialing to get Canada. Its just one more area code (or more accurately, several more). Go figure.
Now, what's wrong with this?
What's wrong with this is that we're rarely sure that someone is committing crimes. Language can often be interpreted in different ways. FBI agents reading the transcript or hearing a phone conversation cannot have all the context. Even hearing the entire conversation will leave him unable to know what has been said away from that phone call, or what sorts of 'in-jokes' may be used.
In reality prosecutions based on this evidence would rely heavily on interpretations of intercepted conversations. By the very nature of terrorist attempts to disguise their conversations as normal, most of the evidence from these intercepts would be highly ambiguous. I certainly don't want the Feds going through the entire record of everything I've ever said looking for things that could be interpreted as criminal! I'd be locked up in a heartbeat.
But even if you don't buy that the Feds might make mistakes, there's one very important thing wrong with it. It is expressly unconstitutional.
This expressly forbids general searches. It states that you have to have a reason to search ahead of time, supported by either explicit witness testimony or by direct evidence. And it states that you must limit your search to only those places specified in the warrant.
This was recently upheld by the Supreme Court. Police were using infrared scanners to non-invasively measure heat output from every house in a neighborhood. They found one house with unusually high heat output. They assumed that marijuana was being grown there, and searched. Sure enough, the heat was coming from UV lamps used to grow pot. However the Court ruled that the mass search of all homes in a neighborhood via infrared scanning was unconistitutional, becuase there was no specific cause to do so, and that it did not target a specific place. The police were just trolling for pot growers.
Now if you think that the Fourth Amendment is no longer relevant, you can always get it changed. All you have to do is write an amendment (perhaps worded "The government shall have the power to search everywhere and anywhere, so long as only criminals are inconvenienced. This supercedes and nullifies Amendment IV."). Then you just have to get both the House of Representatives and Senate to pass it by a supermajority, and then have the legislatures of a supermajority of states to pass it, probably by a supermajority. No problem, dude!