Show me a Democrat president who has ever grown the federal government's power as much as Bush
Too easy: FDR.
In addition to expanding the federal government's powers, spending, and bureaucracy, he attempted to expand the powers of the executive branch by packing the Supreme Court.
Want more? Arguments could also be made that the enactment of various Civil Rights legislation and expansion of departments like HUD under JFK & LBJ trampled further on state and individual rights by the Feds.
Living in Detroit, the one I hear about the most are the auto-makers. For example, in 2002 Ford went to its suppliers and indicated that their costs for parts must be lowered by 20% or their contracts would not be renewed. There was no negotiation of any kind. These weren't just part manufacturers, this also included personnel and service suppliers.
Lots of suppliers went under. Many layoffs. Not surprisingly though many (but not quite as many) new suppliers came on line, hired some of the laid off people.
When we were pairing around here (gave it up, not appropriate for this business model, etc...) we got over this in the first day.
Our Driver could type all of the mistakes he wanted to, but since the Navigator was doing the big picture stuff too (in addition to being an observer) he could indicate just before the driver switched functions/files/pages that there were problems. So your conversation would have gone more like:
Navigator: Modify that bit in Foo.bar() to do such-and-so. Driver:clickety-clickety Navigator: (Quetly noting mistakes.) Driver:clickety-clickety, fixing some mistakes he's noticed, making others Okay, now where? Navigator: Before we pop over to Class.method(), that variable should have an uppercase Z and you want to pass obj1 to method bar() not tmp1. Driver: Okay. clickety-clickety Going over to Class.method now.... mousey-mousey
The Navigator isn't backseat driving and the driver can type things any way he wants too as long as he doesn't leave a mess somewhere.
My pet theory is that humans are selected that way because for millions of years as hunter-gatherers women did the gathering and men did the hunting. (Presumably, because it's harder to hunt with an infant, but it really doesn't slow down your gathering.)
Women would need to be able to distinguish fine colors to tell plant features apart (poisonous, spoiled). If you make a bad choice, your group might get sick. Whereas men don't really need to distinguish colors as finely because an antelope is an antelope no matter what shade it is.
A color-blind male won't hurt the group much. A color-blind (or handicapped) female would.
My wife and I saw him in '93 at a Con in Massachusetts. We talked to him for a few moments in a hallway. He posed holding our newborn and chatted for a little bit, and seemed like a real pleasant man. He'll be missed.
If you pick up a map of the US Midwest & Plains, you'll notice that most of the states are dividied into counties, and those counties are mostly rectangular. I suppose this makes dividing resources easier if they're all roughly the same size, and rectangular makes the dividing easy. Where they're not rectangular there's usually a natural feature that makes a "close enough" dividing line that's easier to survey than an imaginary line in the dirt.
The counties are then (often) divided into townships or precincts -- again, rectangular mostly. Each county has a main city (or a "seat") where records are kept, courts are located, etc... The counties are then connected to each other by state roads. So a Midwest map looks... gridlike.
For example, I live in Michigan in Oakland County which is roughly a square. The county seat is Pontiac, which is almost centered in the county. The major Interstate freeways (built in the 50's and 60's) connect large cities directly (Pontiac, Lansing, Flint, Detroit) but the minor ones (state roads, 2 lane highways: M24, M15, M14, M53) are mostly north-south or east-west and quite straight except where they avoid lakes. A more sparesly populated county like Lapeer or Shiawassee is even more regular.
The US Midwest and Plains states were divvied up into political units by surveyors while they were still sparsely settled. Contrast to the US East where political boundaries had to be drawn around existing settlements and roads followed existing paths -- this results in irregularly shaped counties and roads that meander every which way.
I find it interesting that futurists (which is the role he's playing here) always talk about what life will be like for a 30-something who's married and has kids.
It's not interesting, it's convenience. This scenario's a nice literary device.
You get to explore a mature wage-earner's life, his spouse/significant other's, the lives of children, and (because he's 30-something) probably the lives of retirees because his probably still-living parents.
3 generations with varying viewpoints on the world, and he didn't have to stray more than 1 relationship from a central unnamed character. Yeah, that's handy.
Solar powered cars are not designed for the streets and really should not be on them.
And hummers were?
Actually they and other SUV's are. Having worked in the auto industry for engineers, I can tell you there are hundreds of engineers in all of the major manufacturers whose careers are dedicated to making sure these vehicles are safe to be on the roads.
Market pressures push the edges of safety envelopes (top-heavy rollovers being the most sensational for SUV's, crashworthiness for more "economical" cars, etc..) but they all have to eventually pass NHTSA standards, and those of the legal department.
Unlike, say, this solar car. How many of those were crashed into brick walls to test driver safety? Will the safety restraints secure a 4'5" 90lb woman and a 6'8" 300lb man? Will the safety restraints hold a child seat? Will it weave at 45 mph through an obstacle course without flipping? How many of these have been run into with another vehicle at a high rate of speed to test the passenger cage? (As of right now, one. And it failed.)
this will be a problem as more efficient, lighter cars share the road with Hummers.
Sure, lets blame the big, bad, SUV because your car is unsafe.
I agree. If the weight of safety cages, etc.. make solar powered cars impractical then they're impractical. Suck it up and figure out how to drive a heavy, safe car with solar power, and don't set your sights on highway driving till ya do. Continue making toy "carts" suitable for circular tracks, and practice on rural dirt roads and dry lakebeds.
Also, the summary writer was political trolling. There was no SUV involved, a "minivan" is hardly an SUV. And striking any lightweight, cheap car at highway speeds would have ripped through this solar "car" and likely killed the driver.
And about the car. The specs seem to have been pulled from the site, but the Internet Wayback Machine pulled this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20040214072418/www.blue skysolar.utoronto.ca/Car_Inside.html. (I'm sure this'll get pulled as well before the legal mess ensues.)
"Chassis: Composed of hollow aluminium tubes with sides only slightly thicker than a pop can." They're bragging about this? And running it on a highway?
Also from the IWM:
Blue Sky was also presented with the American Solar Challenge Safety Award for outstanding safety practices during the competition [2003 American Solar Challenge!]
I've always thought that a Dyson Sphere with "holes" in appropriate places might serve a dual purpose. The first is, of course, a place to live, collect the star's energy, etc...
Secondly, as the sphere rotates around the star the "holes" (notches, spaces, gaps, whatever) would -- from the outside -- appear to be blinking lights. Spaced at prime-number width intervals it'd serve as a nearly eternal beacon for other intelligent life. No maintenance, no machinery, and a broad-spectrum beacon as well.
Television needs more shows where the villians are the focus. For a change, it'd be fun to root for the Borg, Goa'uld, Overseers, Visitors, Cylons, or even Microsoft.
Short-sightedly (as the Bush government is *g*), there is no gain in this.
In the mid to long term, it could prove very helpful to aid in innovation (if there is more free knowledge spreading around that you can peek into and evolve even further).
Good point, but why the dig?
If any Administration does something that looks good in the long term, then it's short-sightedness and bad, mmkay. If any Administration does something that looks good in the short term, then it's the wrong thing to do now and bad, mmmkay.
The fact that it's good in the short *or* long term should be encouraging.
Moderators: feel free to mod this down as a counter-troll
Back in 1983 I took a typing class in high school. We learned on IBM Selectric typewriters.
What I remember most was that the size, shape, and layout of an Atari 800 computer is about the same as a Selectric typewriter.
When I "upgraded" to the the 130XE (for the memory) my biggest disappointment was that the keyboard was so poor. After years of broad, deep, responsive keyboarding on the Atari 800 and Selectric, the 130XE was absolutely anemic.
If the lists are any indication, I think at OSCON Parrot will be running a subset of Python. Not well enough to win the Pie-a-thon (google for it) but well enough to demonstrate that it's feasable.
But nobody is putting a gun to the heads of people and saying "you're going to be an astronaut and fly into space in a tin can."
No, but when things go horribly wrong and NASA winds up crop dusting Texas with astronaut bits all hell breaks loose.
Months and years of congressional investigations, vendor interrogations, cost overruns for safety redesigns. Just because I think astronauts are expendable smart chimps doesn't mean the rest of the public will think so as well. The public thinks these suicidal maniacs lives are worth protecting with the full force and measure of a Congressional Investigation Committee, a Presidental Blue Ribbon Panel, and several billion in spending for astronaut safety.
Me, not so much.
Every time astronauts go up, they're holding a gun to the taxpayer's heads.
Any "sport" that you can drink beer while playing is not a sport. This eliminates darts, poker, rec league softball, bowling, golf, horseshoes, bocci, billiards, and, yes, math.
Asimov's phrase, "allow a human being to come to harm," if implemented fully, would turn humanity into a clutch of coddled infants, perpetually protected from harm, both physical and mental.
In evaluating what constitutes "mental harm", it seems to me that one must apply a cultural standard
This was explored in Asimov's "Spacer" stories.
The Spacer robots were used to dealing with one owner (or a *very* small family) whose massive estate is run entirely by robots and where personal contact is rare. Whereas Earth robots are used to dealing with huge numbers of people crammed into small areas living under domes -- never going outside, and where eating in private is a privilege.
Spacer robots treated detective Bailey appropriately by shielding him from others and others from him (much to his annoyance). In deference to him, they tried to keep him indoors and covered up so as not to set off his fear of open spaces. In areas like food, clothing, and other personal habits the Spacer robots tried very hard to integrate Elija Bailey's comforts into a local setting.
We cannot even make software now which is safe from low level, machine representable things like buffer overruns.
We also can't make people completely immune from psycological problems either. Panic attacks could be equated to buffer overruns if you wanted.
In quite a few of Asimov's stories, he shows the results of tormented Robots where laws are being twisted around them setting up contraditions.
These were explained as "positronic potentials" and the higher laws (#1) had a higher potential than the lower ones (#2, 3). For example, a robot having to save someone's life *against* the orders of a human would of course, save the life. But not without cost. Even with the "unless" clause of the Second Law, there's still potential there causing conflict to the Asmovian Robot. Many thousands of people ordering a robot would set up a higher Second Law force -- still not enough to override the first -- but enough to cause severe damage.
Some conflict-caused damage that could be undone with robopsychology (Dr. Calvin). Other times the conflict would be so severe as to completely disable the robot. R. Daneel Olivaw spoke often and eloquently about internal conflicts that would disable lesser robots ill equipped to properly evaluate.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to expanding the federal government's powers, spending, and bureaucracy, he attempted to expand the powers of the executive branch by packing the Supreme Court.
Want more? Arguments could also be made that the enactment of various Civil Rights legislation and expansion of departments like HUD under JFK & LBJ trampled further on state and individual rights by the Feds.
Many industries do this.
Living in Detroit, the one I hear about the most are the auto-makers. For example, in 2002 Ford went to its suppliers and indicated that their costs for parts must be lowered by 20% or their contracts would not be renewed. There was no negotiation of any kind. These weren't just part manufacturers, this also included personnel and service suppliers.
Lots of suppliers went under. Many layoffs. Not surprisingly though many (but not quite as many) new suppliers came on line, hired some of the laid off people.
When we were pairing around here (gave it up, not appropriate for this business model, etc...) we got over this in the first day.
Our Driver could type all of the mistakes he wanted to, but since the Navigator was doing the big picture stuff too (in addition to being an observer) he could indicate just before the driver switched functions/files/pages that there were problems. So your conversation would have gone more like:
Navigator: Modify that bit in Foo.bar() to do such-and-so.
Driver: clickety-clickety
Navigator: (Quetly noting mistakes.)
Driver: clickety-clickety, fixing some mistakes he's noticed, making others Okay, now where?
Navigator: Before we pop over to Class.method(), that variable should have an uppercase Z and you want to pass obj1 to method bar() not tmp1.
Driver: Okay. clickety-clickety Going over to Class.method now.... mousey-mousey
The Navigator isn't backseat driving and the driver can type things any way he wants too as long as he doesn't leave a mess somewhere.
My pet theory is that humans are selected that way because for millions of years as hunter-gatherers women did the gathering and men did the hunting. (Presumably, because it's harder to hunt with an infant, but it really doesn't slow down your gathering.)
Women would need to be able to distinguish fine colors to tell plant features apart (poisonous, spoiled). If you make a bad choice, your group might get sick. Whereas men don't really need to distinguish colors as finely because an antelope is an antelope no matter what shade it is.
A color-blind male won't hurt the group much. A color-blind (or handicapped) female would.
The canonical announcement for this kind of event is "Wow!".
My wife and I saw him in '93 at a Con in Massachusetts. We talked to him for a few moments in a hallway. He posed holding our newborn and chatted for a little bit, and seemed like a real pleasant man. He'll be missed.
If you pick up a map of the US Midwest & Plains, you'll notice that most of the states are dividied into counties, and those counties are mostly rectangular. I suppose this makes dividing resources easier if they're all roughly the same size, and rectangular makes the dividing easy. Where they're not rectangular there's usually a natural feature that makes a "close enough" dividing line that's easier to survey than an imaginary line in the dirt.
... gridlike.
The counties are then (often) divided into townships or precincts -- again, rectangular mostly. Each county has a main city (or a "seat") where records are kept, courts are located, etc... The counties are then connected to each other by state roads. So a Midwest map looks
For example, I live in Michigan in Oakland County which is roughly a square. The county seat is Pontiac, which is almost centered in the county. The major Interstate freeways (built in the 50's and 60's) connect large cities directly (Pontiac, Lansing, Flint, Detroit) but the minor ones (state roads, 2 lane highways: M24, M15, M14, M53) are mostly north-south or east-west and quite straight except where they avoid lakes. A more sparesly populated county like Lapeer or Shiawassee is even more regular.
The US Midwest and Plains states were divvied up into political units by surveyors while they were still sparsely settled. Contrast to the US East where political boundaries had to be drawn around existing settlements and roads followed existing paths -- this results in irregularly shaped counties and roads that meander every which way.
You get to explore a mature wage-earner's life, his spouse/significant other's, the lives of children, and (because he's 30-something) probably the lives of retirees because his probably still-living parents.
3 generations with varying viewpoints on the world, and he didn't have to stray more than 1 relationship from a central unnamed character. Yeah, that's handy.
"May your knife chip and shatter!"
Uh-huh. Maybe he was committing fraud and came in every weekend "just to cook the data" a bit to make sure he wasn't going to get caught.
In some "secure" industries, vacations are mandatory for this reason (and others). If you're gone for a week, it's harder to keep the books cooked.
Market pressures push the edges of safety envelopes (top-heavy rollovers being the most sensational for SUV's, crashworthiness for more "economical" cars, etc..) but they all have to eventually pass NHTSA standards, and those of the legal department.
Unlike, say, this solar car. How many of those were crashed into brick walls to test driver safety? Will the safety restraints secure a 4'5" 90lb woman and a 6'8" 300lb man? Will the safety restraints hold a child seat? Will it weave at 45 mph through an obstacle course without flipping? How many of these have been run into with another vehicle at a high rate of speed to test the passenger cage? (As of right now, one. And it failed.)
Also, the summary writer was political trolling. There was no SUV involved, a "minivan" is hardly an SUV. And striking any lightweight, cheap car at highway speeds would have ripped through this solar "car" and likely killed the driver.
And about the car. The specs seem to have been pulled from the site, but the Internet Wayback Machine pulled this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20040214072418/www.blu
"Chassis: Composed of hollow aluminium tubes with sides only slightly thicker than a pop can." They're bragging about this? And running it on a highway?
A little premature, I think.
I've always thought that a Dyson Sphere with "holes" in appropriate places might serve a dual purpose. The first is, of course, a place to live, collect the star's energy, etc...
Secondly, as the sphere rotates around the star the "holes" (notches, spaces, gaps, whatever) would -- from the outside -- appear to be blinking lights. Spaced at prime-number width intervals it'd serve as a nearly eternal beacon for other intelligent life. No maintenance, no machinery, and a broad-spectrum beacon as well.
I could picture Phlox reading this story to one of his grandkids. His species is *much* more open about these matters...
I'd watch it too.
Television needs more shows where the villians are the focus. For a change, it'd be fun to root for the Borg, Goa'uld, Overseers, Visitors, Cylons, or even Microsoft.
And the difference between this and a cruise missile is what exactly?Cruise missles aren't designed to land and take off again another day.
If any Administration does something that looks good in the long term, then it's short-sightedness and bad, mmkay. If any Administration does something that looks good in the short term, then it's the wrong thing to do now and bad, mmmkay.
The fact that it's good in the short *or* long term should be encouraging.
Moderators: feel free to mod this down as a counter-troll
Back in 1983 I took a typing class in high school. We learned on IBM Selectric typewriters.
What I remember most was that the size, shape, and layout of an Atari 800 computer is about the same as a Selectric typewriter.
When I "upgraded" to the the 130XE (for the memory) my biggest disappointment was that the keyboard was so poor. After years of broad, deep, responsive keyboarding on the Atari 800 and Selectric, the 130XE was absolutely anemic.
If the lists are any indication, I think at OSCON Parrot will be running a subset of Python. Not well enough to win the Pie-a-thon (google for it) but well enough to demonstrate that it's feasable.
Months and years of congressional investigations, vendor interrogations, cost overruns for safety redesigns. Just because I think astronauts are expendable smart chimps doesn't mean the rest of the public will think so as well. The public thinks these suicidal maniacs lives are worth protecting with the full force and measure of a Congressional Investigation Committee, a Presidental Blue Ribbon Panel, and several billion in spending for astronaut safety.
Me, not so much.
Every time astronauts go up, they're holding a gun to the taxpayer's heads.
And on the third hand, they get their name mentioned over and over again in the industry press.
There's no such thing as bad publicity.
Any "sport" that you can drink beer while playing is not a sport. This eliminates darts, poker, rec league softball, bowling, golf, horseshoes, bocci, billiards, and, yes, math.
The Spacer robots were used to dealing with one owner (or a *very* small family) whose massive estate is run entirely by robots and where personal contact is rare. Whereas Earth robots are used to dealing with huge numbers of people crammed into small areas living under domes -- never going outside, and where eating in private is a privilege.
Spacer robots treated detective Bailey appropriately by shielding him from others and others from him (much to his annoyance). In deference to him, they tried to keep him indoors and covered up so as not to set off his fear of open spaces. In areas like food, clothing, and other personal habits the Spacer robots tried very hard to integrate Elija Bailey's comforts into a local setting.
These were explained as "positronic potentials" and the higher laws (#1) had a higher potential than the lower ones (#2, 3). For example, a robot having to save someone's life *against* the orders of a human would of course, save the life. But not without cost. Even with the "unless" clause of the Second Law, there's still potential there causing conflict to the Asmovian Robot. Many thousands of people ordering a robot would set up a higher Second Law force -- still not enough to override the first -- but enough to cause severe damage.
Some conflict-caused damage that could be undone with robopsychology (Dr. Calvin). Other times the conflict would be so severe as to completely disable the robot. R. Daneel Olivaw spoke often and eloquently about internal conflicts that would disable lesser robots ill equipped to properly evaluate.
Sounds very human to me.