she was driving in the fast lane at ~100 mph, as was typical for the road.
Really? The speed limit on motorways is 70mph and most of the time you are lucky if you can go that fast! Are you sure the computer wasn't acting out of self preservation?
There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene"
I don't see what genetics has to do with this. If she had a passenger in the car and they had suddenly said "stop the car NOW" I bet she would have done the same thing. The difference being that the passenger would have said "no you idiot not here in the fast lane pull over to the hard shoulder" whereas the computer did not have enough data to determine what she had done. That's the "problem" with technology: it makes each of us experience our own stupidity raw and undiluted!
You are partly right - I got the date wrong - but a census was conducted around that time: they WERE that stupid! Apparently it was ~6 A.D. when Quirinius became governor of Syria, although there are possible indications that there might have been something earlier see the discussion here.
In addition there is evidence from Chinese records that the star of Bethlehem was a particularly spectacular comet that was visible in 5BC. While it seems very clear that the gospels do not seem to get things quite correct. For example there was a 10 year gap between Herod's death and Quirinius becoming governor which suggests that if Jesus' birth did take place during the census Herod could not have still been king - although he would have been king at the time of the star of Bethlehem. But this is not really the point. The gospels were written several hundred years after the events surrounding Jesus' life so, as historical documents, it is not surprising that there may be some inconsistencies between them: just look at the myths surrounding the American revolution.
The point is that the background events mentioned in the Bible were real and did occur. Jesus is an historical figure: there is significant evidence that he did exist regardless of whether or not you believe he was the son of god. This is the same for most other religions e.g. you do not have to be a muslim to believe that Mohammed existed or a Jew to believe that Moses existed. However in the case of scientology their claims are completely contrary to known history i.e. the historical record can actually disprove them unlike other religions.
In Herod's case there is at least a tomb so we can be reasonably sure that he existed and was alive around the time of Jesus' birth (~5BC). Also many of the "background" events in the bible are known to be historically accurate e.g. the Romans really did require everyone to return to the town of their birth to be taxed around 5 B.C. So while there is certainly not proof of all the events in the Bible the historical setting at least has evidence to support it.
Where are the remains of the interplanetary craft? Where are the isotopes left over from the H bombs? The Hawaiian volcanoes were not even around 75 million years ago: the are only
11 million years old. If you don't even get the verifiable facts correct then what hope is there for the ones you cannot verify?
This is not relevant to the question of how many sexual partners I have. People who have only one lover can still have unplanned pregnancies. Even statistically, if I have two lovers but have sex with each only half as often as someone with one partner, the odds of pregnancy are the same.
Not quite: you cannot get "extra" pregnant when you are already pregnant so even if you have sex at the same frequency there will be an increase in children because two women can now give birth.
Amyway, if one of my lovers gets pregnant by me and chooses to have a child, then I will provide financial support. Heck, I'd proably get sued for child support anyway.
Yes and who will pay for the court case? In same cases it will end up being funded by legal aid or if not will you have enough money to pay support after the lawyers have taken their cut? With multiple women involved you have an increased risk of several children and to different women. Do you earn enough money to support two women living in different houses each with a child? Not only that but suppose it is the woman who has multiple partners. Who is the father? Yes you can do genetic testing but that requires finding the potential fathers and possibly taking them to court to force a DNA sample. Who will pay for all of this?
Aborting a pregnancy is a sure way to control births...
...and, despite the ethical arguments, who has to pay for this?
Do tell. Please, how exactly does my having more than one sexual relationship hurt anyone?
Easy - if it results in kids then who is going to look after them? Chances are it will end up with a single parent family that will need considerable support from society and that means that the rest of us end up paying for your behaviour.
...and before you say "oh but I am always careful about birth control". Birth control is not 100% effective even when properly used. Would you let people ride motorbikes without helmets if they promised to be careful and not have an accident knowing that public health care (at least outside the US) would be footing the bill if they did have an accident?
Now of course you could extend this type of argument to things like eating at McDonalds (at least in countries with public health care) so I am not AT ALL suggesting that laws should be changed outlaw such behaviour: everyone needs some freedom to choose their own life. However it is a fallacy to think that promiscuous behaviour cannot hurt society and so it is not unreasonable to expect other people to have an opinion about it.
That is a bad analogy. To kill someone, one generally needs to be in the same physical location as the victim.
What about that point and click hunting website that some Texan nutter tried to (did?) set up? If someone got shot using that then where does juristiction lie?
If Linux were the mainstream desktop then there would be far more people looking for security problems and then fixing them. In fact this process would likely be faster since the same people looking for the problems can actually submit patches to fix them themselves! Also being mainstream projects like SELinux would likely become more mainstream as their user interfaces would be made more accessible and relevants to everyday tasks.
there would be some changes though - I imagine that security testing would be more of a priority for Linux apps than it is now.
Looking forward to seeing this take off. My Uni. uses WebCT which everyone seems to absolutely hate. We're a "paperless campus" too so we're forced to use that damn thing. In the long run we need open standards in schools across the board. Not one of my professors knows what an.odt document is let alone OpenOffice.
That's a shame! I use OpenOffice for all my lecture notes, slides, etc. and very few of my students know what it is or try it out (despite my encouragement at the start of term). I had hoped that my students would jump at the chance for something free! I did find out what I think the reason is though. Apparently the province has done some deal with MS for all schools and universities so that MS office only costs students (and profs apparently) ~$20.
On the course management side the University encouraged me to use the central WebCT server but on my first try several years ago with Firefox on Linux I got the message "Your browser is not supported, please upgrade to Internet Explorer". After I stopped laughing I looked for OpenSource equivalents and found Moodle which was trivial to install on my Linux desktop and which I now use for all my courses because I find it a LOT better than WebCT (as do my students according to several questionnaires).
Likewise Moodle is also a maturing project with various features being builtin.
Actually I would have said that Sakai is still maturing whereas Moodle is mature but still improving. I recently saw a Sakai vs. Moodle and was very disappointed with Sakai's progress. Despite having far more financial support flung at it than Moodle, Sakai is still missing basic functionality (like online quizzes), has a very clunky user interface (in my opinion) and misses out on several VERY nice features of Moodle (like the ability to render LaTeX inline).
On the plus side Sakai is Java based rather than PHP based, but in general I think that Moodle is a very much a better option than Sakai.
I'm not sure if you are looking for a pure administrative system or an educational one. If the latter then I can thoroughly recommend Moodle. It is one of the few times where I have seen a community OpenSource project wipe the floor with "professional" products (both OpenSource and commercial).
It is dead easy to set up (PHP and MySQL based) and VERY easy to get started with. I use it for all the courses (University level) which I teach and the students seem to greatly prefer it over the central admin's WebCT service.
Wow, how delightfully shallow! If we found out that Newton murdered someone we should all drop newtonian physics!
We already have dropped Newtonian physics. It's Einstein and Schroedinger we have to worry about now...although rumour has it that Schroedinger may have killed his cat.
I'd say that I'm sorry that the kids are being punished, but I'm not. This isn't about the school district doing anything inappropriate. It's about kids doing something that they knew was inappropriate and being punished appropriately.
Really? You think a 3 month suspension is appropriate for browsing the web in an unapproved manner? This seems unusually harsh as an initial response to not doing what you are told!
I'm all for discipline but this has to be based on clear, well thought out rules which are logically consistent and achieve their aim. What so often seems to happen particularly with IT in the US is that you get a dangerous mix of ignorance and self importance. This leads to a fear of being shown to be ignorant (so they can NEVER admit that they were wrong) coupled with a desire to force their own will on everyone rather than encourage discipline.
Since the goal should be to teach discipline why not give a detention and/or suspend computer privilege while, at the same time, listening to AND IMPLEMENTING their suggestions on how to improve security? That will teach them that they are a valued member of society but not above society's rules. What better lesson could you hope to give them?
I am talking about private clinics distributing the treatment without releasing it into the wild that is this IP infringing world.
Then how are you going to prove that it is safe and does as you claim? You can't and so there is no way to do this. You would have to convince regulators that your treatment will not harm people and that will require releasing information on what the treatment is. Even if you could so that somehow you are also still relying on society to prevent your perspective customers breaking in by force and stealing your secrets.
Besides, no gov't can prohibit a pharma firm openning a hospital to treat some specific disease while not providing the treatment with the general distribution channels.
They don't have to, they simply have to repeal any patent protection on the process. I have no problem with individuals and companies making a reasonable profit - after all if they did not where is the motivation to develop new cures going to come from? However the case I was responding to was someone clearly going overboard and using society's laws to the detriment of society. In those circumstances I think society has the right to say "no" and stop them, especially when they are rely on that society's rules (i.e. patents) to make the money!
Interesting - I started at Cambridge in 89. However I do seem to remember that the grades required varied between colleges and between subjects. I've also ended up in Canada though - you can't buy a house in the UK on a lecturer's salary!
I remember in school going as far back as some of the 70's A level papers for practice and all of us being extremely thankful that we did not have to face questions like those! On the other hand it was also somewhat sad to see how much dumbed down our papers were.
I do not see a single reason to allow anyone to copy my work without my permission and without being paid for it. In fact if I did find such a cure I wouldn't even sell it through pharma firms, I would open my own hospital, where I would accept those, who can afford the treatment only, and I would treat them at highest possible cost they can sustain while still willing to sustain it. I would make sure that noone can get their hands on the actual cure, the administration of cure would be done in high security facilities, everyone would be locked down until the moment they can leave.
That is why we have governments so that people like you can be forced to play fair with society. To develop a cure you clearly benefited from the education, healthcare, safe environment and opportunities provided by society so it is only right to think that you should contribute back. Sure you should be allowed to make money from it but not to the point of blackmailing patients who have no choice.
Oh, and before you claim that you "paid" for those services suppose that teachers took the same attitude as you and, instead of just teaching you for a fixed tution forced anyone getting a degree to agree to also signover 50% of the royalties from any invention they ever make? You might like to live in such a society but the rest of us don't...which is why we have governments to stop people like you from taking all the benefits and giving nothing back.
Theft, rape, and murder are crimes that affect people beyond the criminal. The laws against these crimes don't involve any kind of prior restraint on the populace, intended to prevent the crimes from happening.
No - probably because an A grade at maths A' level is not as good as it used to be. I'm guessing you pre-dated me at Cambridge because I needed to get S' or STEP level grades as well...and that was before the post-GCSE grade hyper inflation set in. In fact just before I left they converted the undergrad physics degree from 3 to 4 years so they could make up for all the stuff which they did not get taught at school.
Its gravity will keep heavier molecules escaping, but e.g. a CO2 molecule is nearly twice the weight of an N2 molecule
...but the predominant molecules in Venus' atmosphere are CO2 and H2SO4 so why is Mars not like Venus? Clearly there were different factors at play.
As for our system, it's not a sample size of one, it's a sample size of six planets of Venus size or greater.
No, it is a sample size of ONE SYSTEM. If you are trying to understand the conditions on planets in another system then you must consider events at the system level. For example why does Venus have a superdense atmosphere and the Earth and Mars do not? Is Earth the norm or Venus the norm? Does distance from the star make a difference etc. These are things which may depend very heavily on how the system is formed (unless you can show otherwise?).
Actually you can do it but you have to run Firefox in rosetta mode (so its performance is crap) and then you can use the PowerPC PDF plugin so it is not an acceptable solution.
I would broaden your request to "support for Safari plugins" because as well as PDF Java does not work properly under Firefox on a Mac. I understand it is possible to fix it by installing another Java distribution but that is a major pain.
Since this is likely to be a major undertaking why not take a leaf out of the Windows Firefox book and add a Safari tab?
Seems like a very big conclusion to leap to based on a sample size of one and even that single system contains an exception. Is there an underlying model which explains why planets above a certain mass must have dense atmospheres? Mars doesn't and I thought it's gravity was sufficient to stop heavier molecules escaping.
You seem to be of the opinion that no one should ever have to lay anything on the line for their principles. In this I disagree with you, and it is the basis for our disagreement.
No, you did not read carefully what I wrote. I said that effectively losing one's livelihood simply for asking a serious question to a person in public office was an unacceptable consequence.
Even you must draw the line somewhere otherwise you would have to conclude that free speech exists in, for example, North Korea. It is just that if you use it to criticize the government the consequence is that you get arrested and put in prison (or worse).
The question is: what are acceptable consequences for a given action and THAT is where we differ. Asking a sensible question in a reasonable way of an elected official should have no negative consequences on the questioner. If it does then how can a democracy possibly function? If there is no way to find out what your elected representative is really doing how do you know whether they are doing a good job?
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she was driving in the fast lane at ~100 mph, as was typical for the road.
Really? The speed limit on motorways is 70mph and most of the time you are lucky if you can go that fast! Are you sure the computer wasn't acting out of self preservation?
There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene"
I don't see what genetics has to do with this. If she had a passenger in the car and they had suddenly said "stop the car NOW" I bet she would have done the same thing. The difference being that the passenger would have said "no you idiot not here in the fast lane pull over to the hard shoulder" whereas the computer did not have enough data to determine what she had done. That's the "problem" with technology: it makes each of us experience our own stupidity raw and undiluted!
but the answer is yes! The cart track there is right on top of the cliff and not at all suitable for a car - although it makes a good walk.
You are partly right - I got the date wrong - but a census was conducted around that time: they WERE that stupid! Apparently it was ~6 A.D. when Quirinius became governor of Syria, although there are possible indications that there might have been something earlier see the discussion here.
In addition there is evidence from Chinese records that the star of Bethlehem was a particularly spectacular comet that was visible in 5BC. While it seems very clear that the gospels do not seem to get things quite correct. For example there was a 10 year gap between Herod's death and Quirinius becoming governor which suggests that if Jesus' birth did take place during the census Herod could not have still been king - although he would have been king at the time of the star of Bethlehem. But this is not really the point. The gospels were written several hundred years after the events surrounding Jesus' life so, as historical documents, it is not surprising that there may be some inconsistencies between them: just look at the myths surrounding the American revolution.
The point is that the background events mentioned in the Bible were real and did occur. Jesus is an historical figure: there is significant evidence that he did exist regardless of whether or not you believe he was the son of god. This is the same for most other religions e.g. you do not have to be a muslim to believe that Mohammed existed or a Jew to believe that Moses existed. However in the case of scientology their claims are completely contrary to known history i.e. the historical record can actually disprove them unlike other religions.
In Herod's case there is at least a tomb so we can be reasonably sure that he existed and was alive around the time of Jesus' birth (~5BC). Also many of the "background" events in the bible are known to be historically accurate e.g. the Romans really did require everyone to return to the town of their birth to be taxed around 5 B.C. So while there is certainly not proof of all the events in the Bible the historical setting at least has evidence to support it.
Where are the remains of the interplanetary craft? Where are the isotopes left over from the H bombs? The Hawaiian volcanoes were not even around 75 million years ago: the are only 11 million years old. If you don't even get the verifiable facts correct then what hope is there for the ones you cannot verify?
This is not relevant to the question of how many sexual partners I have. People who have only one lover can still have unplanned pregnancies. Even statistically, if I have two lovers but have sex with each only half as often as someone with one partner, the odds of pregnancy are the same.
...and, despite the ethical arguments, who has to pay for this?
Not quite: you cannot get "extra" pregnant when you are already pregnant so even if you have sex at the same frequency there will be an increase in children because two women can now give birth.
Amyway, if one of my lovers gets pregnant by me and chooses to have a child, then I will provide financial support. Heck, I'd proably get sued for child support anyway.
Yes and who will pay for the court case? In same cases it will end up being funded by legal aid or if not will you have enough money to pay support after the lawyers have taken their cut? With multiple women involved you have an increased risk of several children and to different women. Do you earn enough money to support two women living in different houses each with a child? Not only that but suppose it is the woman who has multiple partners. Who is the father? Yes you can do genetic testing but that requires finding the potential fathers and possibly taking them to court to force a DNA sample. Who will pay for all of this?
Aborting a pregnancy is a sure way to control births...
Do tell. Please, how exactly does my having more than one sexual relationship hurt anyone?
...and before you say "oh but I am always careful about birth control". Birth control is not 100% effective even when properly used. Would you let people ride motorbikes without helmets if they promised to be careful and not have an accident knowing that public health care (at least outside the US) would be footing the bill if they did have an accident?
Easy - if it results in kids then who is going to look after them? Chances are it will end up with a single parent family that will need considerable support from society and that means that the rest of us end up paying for your behaviour.
Now of course you could extend this type of argument to things like eating at McDonalds (at least in countries with public health care) so I am not AT ALL suggesting that laws should be changed outlaw such behaviour: everyone needs some freedom to choose their own life. However it is a fallacy to think that promiscuous behaviour cannot hurt society and so it is not unreasonable to expect other people to have an opinion about it.
That is a bad analogy. To kill someone, one generally needs to be in the same physical location as the victim.
What about that point and click hunting website that some Texan nutter tried to (did?) set up? If someone got shot using that then where does juristiction lie?
If Linux were the mainstream desktop then there would be far more people looking for security problems and then fixing them. In fact this process would likely be faster since the same people looking for the problems can actually submit patches to fix them themselves! Also being mainstream projects like SELinux would likely become more mainstream as their user interfaces would be made more accessible and relevants to everyday tasks. there would be some changes though - I imagine that security testing would be more of a priority for Linux apps than it is now.
It can at least play C and C#.
Looking forward to seeing this take off. My Uni. uses WebCT which everyone seems to absolutely hate. We're a "paperless campus" too so we're forced to use that damn thing. In the long run we need open standards in schools across the board. Not one of my professors knows what an .odt document is let alone OpenOffice.
That's a shame! I use OpenOffice for all my lecture notes, slides, etc. and very few of my students know what it is or try it out (despite my encouragement at the start of term). I had hoped that my students would jump at the chance for something free! I did find out what I think the reason is though. Apparently the province has done some deal with MS for all schools and universities so that MS office only costs students (and profs apparently) ~$20.
On the course management side the University encouraged me to use the central WebCT server but on my first try several years ago with Firefox on Linux I got the message "Your browser is not supported, please upgrade to Internet Explorer". After I stopped laughing I looked for OpenSource equivalents and found Moodle which was trivial to install on my Linux desktop and which I now use for all my courses because I find it a LOT better than WebCT (as do my students according to several questionnaires).
Likewise Moodle is also a maturing project with various features being builtin.
Actually I would have said that Sakai is still maturing whereas Moodle is mature but still improving. I recently saw a Sakai vs. Moodle and was very disappointed with Sakai's progress. Despite having far more financial support flung at it than Moodle, Sakai is still missing basic functionality (like online quizzes), has a very clunky user interface (in my opinion) and misses out on several VERY nice features of Moodle (like the ability to render LaTeX inline).
On the plus side Sakai is Java based rather than PHP based, but in general I think that Moodle is a very much a better option than Sakai.
I'm not sure if you are looking for a pure administrative system or an educational one. If the latter then I can thoroughly recommend Moodle. It is one of the few times where I have seen a community OpenSource project wipe the floor with "professional" products (both OpenSource and commercial).
It is dead easy to set up (PHP and MySQL based) and VERY easy to get started with. I use it for all the courses (University level) which I teach and the students seem to greatly prefer it over the central admin's WebCT service.
Wow, how delightfully shallow! If we found out that Newton murdered someone we should all drop newtonian physics!
We already have dropped Newtonian physics. It's Einstein and Schroedinger we have to worry about now...although rumour has it that Schroedinger may have killed his cat.
I'd say that I'm sorry that the kids are being punished, but I'm not. This isn't about the school district doing anything inappropriate. It's about kids doing something that they knew was inappropriate and being punished appropriately.
Really? You think a 3 month suspension is appropriate for browsing the web in an unapproved manner? This seems unusually harsh as an initial response to not doing what you are told!
I'm all for discipline but this has to be based on clear, well thought out rules which are logically consistent and achieve their aim. What so often seems to happen particularly with IT in the US is that you get a dangerous mix of ignorance and self importance. This leads to a fear of being shown to be ignorant (so they can NEVER admit that they were wrong) coupled with a desire to force their own will on everyone rather than encourage discipline.
Since the goal should be to teach discipline why not give a detention and/or suspend computer privilege while, at the same time, listening to AND IMPLEMENTING their suggestions on how to improve security? That will teach them that they are a valued member of society but not above society's rules. What better lesson could you hope to give them?
I am talking about private clinics distributing the treatment without releasing it into the wild that is this IP infringing world.
Then how are you going to prove that it is safe and does as you claim? You can't and so there is no way to do this. You would have to convince regulators that your treatment will not harm people and that will require releasing information on what the treatment is. Even if you could so that somehow you are also still relying on society to prevent your perspective customers breaking in by force and stealing your secrets.
Besides, no gov't can prohibit a pharma firm openning a hospital to treat some specific disease while not providing the treatment with the general distribution channels.
They don't have to, they simply have to repeal any patent protection on the process. I have no problem with individuals and companies making a reasonable profit - after all if they did not where is the motivation to develop new cures going to come from? However the case I was responding to was someone clearly going overboard and using society's laws to the detriment of society. In those circumstances I think society has the right to say "no" and stop them, especially when they are rely on that society's rules (i.e. patents) to make the money!
Interesting - I started at Cambridge in 89. However I do seem to remember that the grades required varied between colleges and between subjects. I've also ended up in Canada though - you can't buy a house in the UK on a lecturer's salary!
I remember in school going as far back as some of the 70's A level papers for practice and all of us being extremely thankful that we did not have to face questions like those! On the other hand it was also somewhat sad to see how much dumbed down our papers were.
I do not see a single reason to allow anyone to copy my work without my permission and without being paid for it. In fact if I did find such a cure I wouldn't even sell it through pharma firms, I would open my own hospital, where I would accept those, who can afford the treatment only, and I would treat them at highest possible cost they can sustain while still willing to sustain it. I would make sure that noone can get their hands on the actual cure, the administration of cure would be done in high security facilities, everyone would be locked down until the moment they can leave.
That is why we have governments so that people like you can be forced to play fair with society. To develop a cure you clearly benefited from the education, healthcare, safe environment and opportunities provided by society so it is only right to think that you should contribute back. Sure you should be allowed to make money from it but not to the point of blackmailing patients who have no choice.
Oh, and before you claim that you "paid" for those services suppose that teachers took the same attitude as you and, instead of just teaching you for a fixed tution forced anyone getting a degree to agree to also signover 50% of the royalties from any invention they ever make? You might like to live in such a society but the rest of us don't...which is why we have governments to stop people like you from taking all the benefits and giving nothing back.
Theft, rape, and murder are crimes that affect people beyond the criminal. The laws against these crimes don't involve any kind of prior restraint on the populace, intended to prevent the crimes from happening.
What about the conspiracy laws then?
No - probably because an A grade at maths A' level is not as good as it used to be. I'm guessing you pre-dated me at Cambridge because I needed to get S' or STEP level grades as well...and that was before the post-GCSE grade hyper inflation set in. In fact just before I left they converted the undergrad physics degree from 3 to 4 years so they could make up for all the stuff which they did not get taught at school.
Its gravity will keep heavier molecules escaping, but e.g. a CO2 molecule is nearly twice the weight of an N2 molecule
...but the predominant molecules in Venus' atmosphere are CO2 and H2SO4 so why is Mars not like Venus? Clearly there were different factors at play.
As for our system, it's not a sample size of one, it's a sample size of six planets of Venus size or greater.
No, it is a sample size of ONE SYSTEM. If you are trying to understand the conditions on planets in another system then you must consider events at the system level. For example why does Venus have a superdense atmosphere and the Earth and Mars do not? Is Earth the norm or Venus the norm? Does distance from the star make a difference etc. These are things which may depend very heavily on how the system is formed (unless you can show otherwise?).
Actually you can do it but you have to run Firefox in rosetta mode (so its performance is crap) and then you can use the PowerPC PDF plugin so it is not an acceptable solution. I would broaden your request to "support for Safari plugins" because as well as PDF Java does not work properly under Firefox on a Mac. I understand it is possible to fix it by installing another Java distribution but that is a major pain. Since this is likely to be a major undertaking why not take a leaf out of the Windows Firefox book and add a Safari tab?
Based on our system...
Seems like a very big conclusion to leap to based on a sample size of one and even that single system contains an exception. Is there an underlying model which explains why planets above a certain mass must have dense atmospheres? Mars doesn't and I thought it's gravity was sufficient to stop heavier molecules escaping.
You seem to be of the opinion that no one should ever have to lay anything on the line for their principles. In this I disagree with you, and it is the basis for our disagreement.
No, you did not read carefully what I wrote. I said that effectively losing one's livelihood simply for asking a serious question to a person in public office was an unacceptable consequence.
Even you must draw the line somewhere otherwise you would have to conclude that free speech exists in, for example, North Korea. It is just that if you use it to criticize the government the consequence is that you get arrested and put in prison (or worse).
The question is: what are acceptable consequences for a given action and THAT is where we differ. Asking a sensible question in a reasonable way of an elected official should have no negative consequences on the questioner. If it does then how can a democracy possibly function? If there is no way to find out what your elected representative is really doing how do you know whether they are doing a good job?