However, at least in the case of Catholic priests, I suspect that most would be willing to sit in prison indefinitely to avoid betraying a confidence given in confession. It is a fairly central tenet of the Catholic faith, and when you think about it Catholic priests give up quite a lot already so sitting in a prison cell isn't a great deal more (they'd probably just view it as another form of monasticism).
I'm not sure the same would be equally true of other popular US faiths. Catholicism is relatively unique among the branches of Christianity in that it considers confession generally required for the forgiveness of sin, and as a result it considers maintaining the confidence of a confession as one of a priest's most important duties.
Disclaimer - I'm not a Catholic, or a Lawyer. However, all a court can do (with current technology) is punish people for not testifying. They cannot yet truly compel testimony.
Congratulations - you just described 85% of the US population. How else do you explain our elections?
Ignorance is not the same as a lack of formal education. Obviously the two tend to be somewhat correlated, but I wouldn't be surprised if many Amish people at age 18 are far less ignorant than their 12-year-educated peers. Now, the areas that they are most knowledgable about are likely to be fairly different. If you were shipwrecked on an island who would you rather have with you - an 18-year-old Amish farmer who has participated in 14 home-building projects and can sew, or some 18-year-old brat whose main focus of expertise is the application of Skype, Facebook, and their iPhone, and who demonstrated that they can cram info for tests?
I'm sure many Amish are ignorant of many things, but the same is true of most groups. Since they don't have social security or accept welfare, I imagine the Amish can less afford ignorance than most (though I'm sure the disabled are cared for within the community).
On the topic of laws, however, I hear that OSHA is another area that the Amish tend to pay little regard to.
(for the purposes of drama you can imagine me standing in robes in front of an altar with longish white hair and long beard billowing in the wind, staff held aloft in my left hand, a long boney finger pointing at you from my right hand, and thunder and lighting raging in the background. Obv. I'm not... I'm just slumped in front of my computer in an ill-fitting t-shirt and jeans, but I read somewhere that image is everything. Or something.)
Yup. On longer trips I suspect that the slight risk from higher speed is offset by the reduced risk of exhaustion due to making a trip 12 hours instead of 16 hours, or whatever.
Yup, being right and winning a legal battle are only loosely correlated. Justice in the US costs money. That is a whole different problem and it certainly ought to be fixed.
I think the point is that nothing has changed except for detectability and actionability. There was likely about as much infidelity in the past but it wasn't a matter of public record to the same extent. Often it was successfully kept secret. When it wasn't kept secret the other party (usually a wife) would probably try to keep it quiet to avoid shame, or because they had little recourse (they were far more dependent on their husbands for financial well-being).
Marriage has changed quite a bit over the years. Parties in marriage are far more equal today than they were in the past. Additionally, in the current system if one party has a lot more income than the other then they tend to have a lot more to lose in the event of a divorce. Since having money tends to make somebody more attractive as an affair partner, it means that the people most likely to be the victims of the affair to have more incentive to take legal action. In theory that can work both ways, but usually it tends to mean that men have affairs and women divorce them over it.
Pull down menus at the top, a sidebar menu that is somewhat contextual, and a command line at the bottom. All surrounding the drawing area in the middle.
I've seen similar interfaces in a lot of other industry-specific hardware. I've seen lighting controllers (think robotic lights you see at concerts) that have interfaces like this (used more for setup/programming than in a live situation).
I know that I've used command line in some primitive CAD software (ages ago), since it was the only way to ensure (in that software) that lines were drawn at accurate lengths/angles/etc. This was a "CAD-lite" package that was somewhere between something like AutoCAD and Correl Draw.
I've also seen things like NMRs controlled by software that was a mix of menus and CLI. I think that this sort of thing is more common in industrial automation where you have highly trained technicians who need to get their hardware to do precise actions without filling out a bazillion dialog boxes. Scripting/macros/functions/etc are often suited to this. Such systems also tend to be notoriously difficult to learn, which is why you don't see it in consumer-oriented software. It makes sense to me that something like Pinnacle would have a different interface than whatever Peter Jackson uses to edit his 300 camera angles, 50 microphone feeds, and heaven knows how many special effects layers from some LOTR shot.
I've yet to see any evidence that such a ballistic missile would be able to hit a maneuvering target - especially with limited initial intelligence on position/movement.
The same things that make the missile hard to hit also make it hard for the missile to hit anything else. Ballistic warheads are coming in a VERY high speed and require huge amounts of delta-V to steer. If it has a small radar cross-section that also implies that it isn't radiating its own radar emissions, which means it is limited to IR for finding a target, which is also very limited and there are countermeasures.
Hitting a ship with a ballistic missile isn't as easy as it might sound.
Equipping an airliner with the ability to launch conventional missiles would probably be a lot easier and probably more effective. Of course, it as well as the plan you propose are in complete violation of the Geneva Conventions. Why not just lob nerve gas at Tel Aviv while you're at it?
One of Apple's key features is the longevity of their hardware, which works with and against them. If you buy an iPhone you'll get OS updates that work for 2-3 years, which means you can always run the newest software for that period of time (Siri being the main exception to-date, but that isn't really distributed on its own via the app store anyway). If you buy an Android phone, there is a decent chance you'll never get an update for it - often phones are sold long after they get their last update, and it is rare to get an update even one year after it FIRST goes on sale.
Android's willingness to obsolete old hardware means that they can almost completely abandon backwards compatibility at the hardware level. If a new UI doesn't run on six-month-old hardware then that hardware just doesn't get the new UI.
Apple on the other hand has built up a brand reputation and tends to support older phones, which means the newer phones often can't include dramatic improvements (maybe the camera captures more pixels, or the modem is faster, but not as many transformational changes).
I'm torn on what the best approach really is. I'd like to see Android offer longer-term support for its devices, but I don't want to give up the big improvements that this might cost. Going with Android means that I have a phone that feels cutting edge for the first year I own it, and a bit stale for the second year that I own it. On the other hand, I got a top-of-the-line phone that was less than a month old for zero dollars, and most likely I'd get a similar opportunity the next time I renew my contract. So, I think in the end it tends to balance out.
You just do a transition over time. Announce your intent to change. All new contributions get licensed as GPL2+, and you track those. You also ask as many people as possible to tag lines they've contributed as GPL2+. After some period of time you ask anybody who objects to relicensing their code to step forward and substantiate that their code is still included and indicate which lines they do not want relicensed. You rewrite their code so that it is no longer in the kernel. Then you make the switch. If somebody objects after that date you just do the same thing. The dead aren't too likely to sue you.
A solution doesn't need to be perfect to be workable.
Read line 296. The following lines are not the license for the kernel - they're instead instructions on how to use the GPL in your own software (instructions that the kernel itself does not follow).
Yup. Suggesting that fans need a mobile app seems like suggesting that they also need an IE-optimized version of their website for users running in 1024x768 resolution (a large segment of the web to be sure). The whole point of web standards is so that you can put up a single website and anybody can read it in a reasonable presentation. Why is it necessary to have an app corresponding to every website out there?
Now, for sites that are very complex/interactive I can see where an application could fit in.
In any case, I'd really like to see less clipart and more substance on candidate websites anyway. Then again, 99% of that would be empty promises anyway. I guess in the end I'm interested in what the candidates have to say, but I'm more interested in what they've actually done.
Elections are depressing - I feel like I'm watching episodes of "The Second Biggest Loser" or something like that. Plus I get to look forward to emails from all my friends about how the world is going to end if the biggest loser doesn't lose because of some issue that they perceive is the reason our country is going downhill.
I doubt they could have retrained the entire fleet to defeat the scenario in the span of a few days. So, instead they gave them something productive to do, and then went back to the drawing boards to figure out how to handle the situation in the long-term.
What would you recommend? That the fleet just declare it a loss for the blue force after a few hours and send everybody home early, after spending millions of dollars to arrange the event?
The official story was that they didn't cheat for PR, but to give the troops more practice. It does make sense - if you plan an 8 hour RPG session with your friends and for whatever reason your party gets wiped out in 15 minutes, chances are you'll start over so that you can have another 7.5 hours of RPG fun rather than just talking about how lousy a day it was.
Hopefully the people in charge learned their lessons, but there was no harm after spending millions of dollars to set up an exercise to go ahead and let the troops have an exercise instead of all sailing home early because they're "dead."
While killing the leaders of Iran would be difficult, turning it into a non-functional state is pretty easy.
Within a few days of a real conflict any kind of long-distance communication system within the country would be destroyed. The leadership might be safe in their bunker, but nobody will be following their orders. Organizing even a fiberglass ship-building program under such conditions would be difficult. Couriers would be the only way of getting out messages.
Within a week or two you'd have ground troops occupying land between the capital and the coast, which means that even couriers aren't going to get through. At that point any loyalists in the ports will have a lot more to worry about than launching boat attacks.
The only thing the Iranians could really hope to do is kill enough sailors to make a war unpopular. However, killing a few thousand people in a day won't really accomplish that - it is like hitting a hornet's nest. What makes a war unpopular is sustained casualties over a long time. That will certainly happen if there is an occupation, but I doubt the boats will have much to do with it.
In any case, the strait is too important to give up attempts to secure it. If occupation is too difficult chances are they'd just draw a line in the sand 100 miles from the coast and just force everybody south of it to relocate.
Those are my favorite theaters to go to - I might prefer the sound a hair quieter but if I tried to watch a movie at home at a decent volume I'd get an endless string of complaints from family. At the theater I have no control over the volume, so I can't be yelled at when it is something I enjoy.
And with the louder sound I can't hear all the kids whining to their parents about being bored or whatever...
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
There are solutions that would actually work:
1. Increase the supply of doctors by licensing more medical schools. Right now there are too few seats for doctors in schools and this leads to an artificial shortage. By all means maintain standards for graduation, but get more people into the system.
2. Employ a triage system. Right now the medical profession basically involves doctors and everybody-else. There is no reason that the qualifications for somebody who screens kids for strep throat need to be the same as the guy treating some rare form of plague.
Both would get more people into the system and drive down wages/costs. The best would still make the money they make now, but they would only work on cases that required their expertise. Most people don't need House, and they shouldn't have to pay for it. What would the cost of car maintenance be like if you had to pass the maintenance supervisor qualifications for an A380 in order to do an oil change on a Ford Focus? I don't want the 20 minute lube guy doing an engine rebuild on my car, but I don't want to pay for top-level expertise to remove one bolt and add the right amount of replacement fluid.
You don't have to excel at finance to manage your own money.
Yes and no. I agree that most of money management is common sense. However, common sense isn't all that common. Just look at who they elect.
Do you really think the prevailing experts are that much better than the average person? Most of those experts are mainly good at making money flow to them.
Yes, they are better, but as you go on to say, they're better at serving their own interests. That is why the field needs regulation. I can buy that things got out of hand and a buyout was the lesser evil. However, if I were in charge I'd eminent domain the failing companies, use public money to get them into good shape, chop them up into little pieces, and then sell them for whatever they're worth to get them back out of government hands. Any money made off of the sale after paying back any money spent by the taxpayers would be paid out to the original shareholders as just compensation for the eminent domain. Most likely that would be little to nothing. While in government hands the companies would be run in the public interest with no regard to the well-being of the former shareholders. Also, while in government hands the company records would be extensively mined for evidence and the previous company officers would be criminally charged. I'd pay a law simply making it a crime to operate a company that ends up needing a takeover, so that the fact that a bailout took place would be sufficient to obtain a conviction, and no, the officers and board would have no say in whether a takeover takes place.
And yes, none of this is likely to happen - those in power seek to use that power for their own benefit.
Yeah, read that page you linked: "The maximum effective range of 30-mm gun systems is about 4500 m; systems with lighter projectiles have even shorter range."
That range is of course mostly horizontal. If you shoot upwards that range is going to be MUCH lower due to that whole gravity thing. Drones could cruise at 10,000 feet and be well outside the range of this sort of system. You'd need more conventional AAA, and that requires lots of large shells, radar guidance, and even then it isn't terribly effective above 10k feet (though a drone is slow and unlikely to evade fire).
Ammo for something like a CIWS probably wouldn't be too hard to come by, but I'd have to think that proximity-fused artillery shells are a bit harder to find.
Oh, and those things burn through ammo like there is no tomorrow (which is a good description of the fate of the ship that needs to fire a CIWS) - they'd probably empty their magazine before the first rounds made it to the target at long range. They're designed to be a last-ditch defense against misses that are 100 meters out and moving at mach 5, not things that are loitering 10k feet away.
I think AAA is typically effective only to about 10k feet. Then again, a drone doesn't move that fast and probably won't evade fire, so it could be effective much higher. As you say we're talking about military-grade AAA here and usually it is only effective with lots of gun and/or very good radar guidance, and the guns are very large. Back in WW2 you'd probably have 1000 guns firing at 200 planes and maybe 20 of them would get shot down in a 15 minute encounter (though no doubt it made the attackers less effective all the same). Oh, and I doubt they sell proximity fused artillery shells on amazon.
I'd say a missile is probably the only reliable way of downing a drone. I imagine you'd need to use radar - IR might work once you're close. Manually guiding a missile only works on video games - you probably couldn't even see the thing until you're 200 feet away moving at mach 10. SAMs aren't cheap, and fire control radar is even less so.
Jamming communications is likely the only practical solution if the Japanese Navy isn't willing to send an Arleigh Burke out (as if they want the US Congress debating banning military sales to Japan). This is likely to be much more effective against a Greenpeace drone as they probably don't use satellite communication. If they do, another option (that won't make you many friends) is jamming the satellite, or convincing the operator to cut them off. I doubt commercial satellites are equipped to handle decent jamming.
The publishers might make less money. Cry me a river.
So, I could care less about the publisher making money per-se. What I do care about is the ability of the author and editors to make money, since they add the value to the book in the first place. There is also value added from some publishing jobs even in the electronic world (formatting, hosting, etc), though it is relatively little.
We do need to reign in what we're spending on non-value-added functions (like being an executive at a big publishing house), and getting rid of the middle-men. On the other hand, we also need to create some incentive for people to write books - if they sell one copy for $20 and everybody else downloads a copy of it, then nobody will be able to make a career out of writing. Considering that you can fit every book ever written on a $150 hard drive, there has to be some kind of balance. SOPA obviously isn't it, but neither is a total free for all.
If most people are financially incompetent, rather than give in to that and have experts look after them, we should make financial literacy a core part of education curriculum.
You suggest that most people could be made competent through education. In my experience education is a relatively minor contributor to competence. Talent/ability is FAR more important. When you combine the two the results can be impressive, but you can't make up for a lack of talent simply by making people sit in classes and take tests.
Better to allow those who are skilled at finance to use their skills for the betterment of society, and not simply themselves.
No harm in educating people, but I suspect that most people will become as skilled at finance as I am at painting. There are many who would not excel at any of the skills you list. What is to be done with them?
Well, retirement policy is no different than other issues surrounding socialism.
Most people aren't able to do competent financial planning. Many people can. The people who can are almost certainly better off doing it themselves, and the majority who can't are better off if the government does it. However, socialism doesn't work if you can opt-out, since by its nature it requires transferring wealth from those who are more able to earn it to those who aren't.
The problem is that we want to have our cake and eat it too. We don't want to take wealth away from those who can earn it, but we also don't want to see people starving on the streets. As a result we implement a half-baked form of socialism that tends to cost a lot of money and lead to a LOT of debt. One generation is basically raising their standard of living at the expense of the next.
The main problem with socialism as I see it is that it leads to a form of reverse Darwinism that over time destroys the ability of society to produce (which was the start of your argument). I suspect that the only way it can be made sustainable is to essentially combine it with some kind of artificial selection process to counter that (which means regulating procreation - a VERY touchy subject).
Slashdot Mirror
Yup.
However, at least in the case of Catholic priests, I suspect that most would be willing to sit in prison indefinitely to avoid betraying a confidence given in confession. It is a fairly central tenet of the Catholic faith, and when you think about it Catholic priests give up quite a lot already so sitting in a prison cell isn't a great deal more (they'd probably just view it as another form of monasticism).
I'm not sure the same would be equally true of other popular US faiths. Catholicism is relatively unique among the branches of Christianity in that it considers confession generally required for the forgiveness of sin, and as a result it considers maintaining the confidence of a confession as one of a priest's most important duties.
Disclaimer - I'm not a Catholic, or a Lawyer. However, all a court can do (with current technology) is punish people for not testifying. They cannot yet truly compel testimony.
They actually are uneducated, and by choice too.
Congratulations - you just described 85% of the US population. How else do you explain our elections?
Ignorance is not the same as a lack of formal education. Obviously the two tend to be somewhat correlated, but I wouldn't be surprised if many Amish people at age 18 are far less ignorant than their 12-year-educated peers. Now, the areas that they are most knowledgable about are likely to be fairly different. If you were shipwrecked on an island who would you rather have with you - an 18-year-old Amish farmer who has participated in 14 home-building projects and can sew, or some 18-year-old brat whose main focus of expertise is the application of Skype, Facebook, and their iPhone, and who demonstrated that they can cram info for tests?
I'm sure many Amish are ignorant of many things, but the same is true of most groups. Since they don't have social security or accept welfare, I imagine the Amish can less afford ignorance than most (though I'm sure the disabled are cared for within the community).
On the topic of laws, however, I hear that OSHA is another area that the Amish tend to pay little regard to.
(for the purposes of drama you can imagine me standing in robes in front of an altar with longish white hair and long beard billowing in the wind, staff held aloft in my left hand, a long boney finger pointing at you from my right hand, and thunder and lighting raging in the background. Obv. I'm not... I'm just slumped in front of my computer in an ill-fitting t-shirt and jeans, but I read somewhere that image is everything. Or something.)
Like this?
Yup. On longer trips I suspect that the slight risk from higher speed is offset by the reduced risk of exhaustion due to making a trip 12 hours instead of 16 hours, or whatever.
Yup, being right and winning a legal battle are only loosely correlated. Justice in the US costs money. That is a whole different problem and it certainly ought to be fixed.
I think the point is that nothing has changed except for detectability and actionability. There was likely about as much infidelity in the past but it wasn't a matter of public record to the same extent. Often it was successfully kept secret. When it wasn't kept secret the other party (usually a wife) would probably try to keep it quiet to avoid shame, or because they had little recourse (they were far more dependent on their husbands for financial well-being).
Marriage has changed quite a bit over the years. Parties in marriage are far more equal today than they were in the past. Additionally, in the current system if one party has a lot more income than the other then they tend to have a lot more to lose in the event of a divorce. Since having money tends to make somebody more attractive as an affair partner, it means that the people most likely to be the victims of the affair to have more incentive to take legal action. In theory that can work both ways, but usually it tends to mean that men have affairs and women divorce them over it.
Pull down menus at the top, a sidebar menu that is somewhat contextual, and a command line at the bottom. All surrounding the drawing area in the middle.
I've seen similar interfaces in a lot of other industry-specific hardware. I've seen lighting controllers (think robotic lights you see at concerts) that have interfaces like this (used more for setup/programming than in a live situation).
I know that I've used command line in some primitive CAD software (ages ago), since it was the only way to ensure (in that software) that lines were drawn at accurate lengths/angles/etc. This was a "CAD-lite" package that was somewhere between something like AutoCAD and Correl Draw.
I've also seen things like NMRs controlled by software that was a mix of menus and CLI. I think that this sort of thing is more common in industrial automation where you have highly trained technicians who need to get their hardware to do precise actions without filling out a bazillion dialog boxes. Scripting/macros/functions/etc are often suited to this. Such systems also tend to be notoriously difficult to learn, which is why you don't see it in consumer-oriented software. It makes sense to me that something like Pinnacle would have a different interface than whatever Peter Jackson uses to edit his 300 camera angles, 50 microphone feeds, and heaven knows how many special effects layers from some LOTR shot.
I've yet to see any evidence that such a ballistic missile would be able to hit a maneuvering target - especially with limited initial intelligence on position/movement.
The same things that make the missile hard to hit also make it hard for the missile to hit anything else. Ballistic warheads are coming in a VERY high speed and require huge amounts of delta-V to steer. If it has a small radar cross-section that also implies that it isn't radiating its own radar emissions, which means it is limited to IR for finding a target, which is also very limited and there are countermeasures.
Hitting a ship with a ballistic missile isn't as easy as it might sound.
Equipping an airliner with the ability to launch conventional missiles would probably be a lot easier and probably more effective. Of course, it as well as the plan you propose are in complete violation of the Geneva Conventions. Why not just lob nerve gas at Tel Aviv while you're at it?
One of Apple's key features is the longevity of their hardware, which works with and against them. If you buy an iPhone you'll get OS updates that work for 2-3 years, which means you can always run the newest software for that period of time (Siri being the main exception to-date, but that isn't really distributed on its own via the app store anyway). If you buy an Android phone, there is a decent chance you'll never get an update for it - often phones are sold long after they get their last update, and it is rare to get an update even one year after it FIRST goes on sale.
Android's willingness to obsolete old hardware means that they can almost completely abandon backwards compatibility at the hardware level. If a new UI doesn't run on six-month-old hardware then that hardware just doesn't get the new UI.
Apple on the other hand has built up a brand reputation and tends to support older phones, which means the newer phones often can't include dramatic improvements (maybe the camera captures more pixels, or the modem is faster, but not as many transformational changes).
I'm torn on what the best approach really is. I'd like to see Android offer longer-term support for its devices, but I don't want to give up the big improvements that this might cost. Going with Android means that I have a phone that feels cutting edge for the first year I own it, and a bit stale for the second year that I own it. On the other hand, I got a top-of-the-line phone that was less than a month old for zero dollars, and most likely I'd get a similar opportunity the next time I renew my contract. So, I think in the end it tends to balance out.
You just do a transition over time. Announce your intent to change. All new contributions get licensed as GPL2+, and you track those. You also ask as many people as possible to tag lines they've contributed as GPL2+. After some period of time you ask anybody who objects to relicensing their code to step forward and substantiate that their code is still included and indicate which lines they do not want relicensed. You rewrite their code so that it is no longer in the kernel. Then you make the switch. If somebody objects after that date you just do the same thing. The dead aren't too likely to sue you.
A solution doesn't need to be perfect to be workable.
Read line 296. The following lines are not the license for the kernel - they're instead instructions on how to use the GPL in your own software (instructions that the kernel itself does not follow).
Yup. Suggesting that fans need a mobile app seems like suggesting that they also need an IE-optimized version of their website for users running in 1024x768 resolution (a large segment of the web to be sure). The whole point of web standards is so that you can put up a single website and anybody can read it in a reasonable presentation. Why is it necessary to have an app corresponding to every website out there?
Now, for sites that are very complex/interactive I can see where an application could fit in.
In any case, I'd really like to see less clipart and more substance on candidate websites anyway. Then again, 99% of that would be empty promises anyway. I guess in the end I'm interested in what the candidates have to say, but I'm more interested in what they've actually done.
Elections are depressing - I feel like I'm watching episodes of "The Second Biggest Loser" or something like that. Plus I get to look forward to emails from all my friends about how the world is going to end if the biggest loser doesn't lose because of some issue that they perceive is the reason our country is going downhill.
I doubt they could have retrained the entire fleet to defeat the scenario in the span of a few days. So, instead they gave them something productive to do, and then went back to the drawing boards to figure out how to handle the situation in the long-term.
What would you recommend? That the fleet just declare it a loss for the blue force after a few hours and send everybody home early, after spending millions of dollars to arrange the event?
The official story was that they didn't cheat for PR, but to give the troops more practice. It does make sense - if you plan an 8 hour RPG session with your friends and for whatever reason your party gets wiped out in 15 minutes, chances are you'll start over so that you can have another 7.5 hours of RPG fun rather than just talking about how lousy a day it was.
Hopefully the people in charge learned their lessons, but there was no harm after spending millions of dollars to set up an exercise to go ahead and let the troops have an exercise instead of all sailing home early because they're "dead."
While killing the leaders of Iran would be difficult, turning it into a non-functional state is pretty easy.
Within a few days of a real conflict any kind of long-distance communication system within the country would be destroyed. The leadership might be safe in their bunker, but nobody will be following their orders. Organizing even a fiberglass ship-building program under such conditions would be difficult. Couriers would be the only way of getting out messages.
Within a week or two you'd have ground troops occupying land between the capital and the coast, which means that even couriers aren't going to get through. At that point any loyalists in the ports will have a lot more to worry about than launching boat attacks.
The only thing the Iranians could really hope to do is kill enough sailors to make a war unpopular. However, killing a few thousand people in a day won't really accomplish that - it is like hitting a hornet's nest. What makes a war unpopular is sustained casualties over a long time. That will certainly happen if there is an occupation, but I doubt the boats will have much to do with it.
In any case, the strait is too important to give up attempts to secure it. If occupation is too difficult chances are they'd just draw a line in the sand 100 miles from the coast and just force everybody south of it to relocate.
Those are my favorite theaters to go to - I might prefer the sound a hair quieter but if I tried to watch a movie at home at a decent volume I'd get an endless string of complaints from family. At the theater I have no control over the volume, so I can't be yelled at when it is something I enjoy.
And with the louder sound I can't hear all the kids whining to their parents about being bored or whatever...
There are solutions that would actually work:
1. Increase the supply of doctors by licensing more medical schools. Right now there are too few seats for doctors in schools and this leads to an artificial shortage. By all means maintain standards for graduation, but get more people into the system.
2. Employ a triage system. Right now the medical profession basically involves doctors and everybody-else. There is no reason that the qualifications for somebody who screens kids for strep throat need to be the same as the guy treating some rare form of plague.
Both would get more people into the system and drive down wages/costs. The best would still make the money they make now, but they would only work on cases that required their expertise. Most people don't need House, and they shouldn't have to pay for it. What would the cost of car maintenance be like if you had to pass the maintenance supervisor qualifications for an A380 in order to do an oil change on a Ford Focus? I don't want the 20 minute lube guy doing an engine rebuild on my car, but I don't want to pay for top-level expertise to remove one bolt and add the right amount of replacement fluid.
You don't have to excel at finance to manage your own money.
Yes and no. I agree that most of money management is common sense. However, common sense isn't all that common. Just look at who they elect.
Do you really think the prevailing experts are that much better than the average person? Most of those experts are mainly good at making money flow to them.
Yes, they are better, but as you go on to say, they're better at serving their own interests. That is why the field needs regulation. I can buy that things got out of hand and a buyout was the lesser evil. However, if I were in charge I'd eminent domain the failing companies, use public money to get them into good shape, chop them up into little pieces, and then sell them for whatever they're worth to get them back out of government hands. Any money made off of the sale after paying back any money spent by the taxpayers would be paid out to the original shareholders as just compensation for the eminent domain. Most likely that would be little to nothing. While in government hands the companies would be run in the public interest with no regard to the well-being of the former shareholders. Also, while in government hands the company records would be extensively mined for evidence and the previous company officers would be criminally charged. I'd pay a law simply making it a crime to operate a company that ends up needing a takeover, so that the fact that a bailout took place would be sufficient to obtain a conviction, and no, the officers and board would have no say in whether a takeover takes place.
And yes, none of this is likely to happen - those in power seek to use that power for their own benefit.
Yeah, read that page you linked: "The maximum effective range of 30-mm gun systems is about 4500 m; systems with lighter projectiles have even shorter range."
That range is of course mostly horizontal. If you shoot upwards that range is going to be MUCH lower due to that whole gravity thing. Drones could cruise at 10,000 feet and be well outside the range of this sort of system. You'd need more conventional AAA, and that requires lots of large shells, radar guidance, and even then it isn't terribly effective above 10k feet (though a drone is slow and unlikely to evade fire).
Ammo for something like a CIWS probably wouldn't be too hard to come by, but I'd have to think that proximity-fused artillery shells are a bit harder to find.
Oh, and those things burn through ammo like there is no tomorrow (which is a good description of the fate of the ship that needs to fire a CIWS) - they'd probably empty their magazine before the first rounds made it to the target at long range. They're designed to be a last-ditch defense against misses that are 100 meters out and moving at mach 5, not things that are loitering 10k feet away.
I think AAA is typically effective only to about 10k feet. Then again, a drone doesn't move that fast and probably won't evade fire, so it could be effective much higher. As you say we're talking about military-grade AAA here and usually it is only effective with lots of gun and/or very good radar guidance, and the guns are very large. Back in WW2 you'd probably have 1000 guns firing at 200 planes and maybe 20 of them would get shot down in a 15 minute encounter (though no doubt it made the attackers less effective all the same). Oh, and I doubt they sell proximity fused artillery shells on amazon.
I'd say a missile is probably the only reliable way of downing a drone. I imagine you'd need to use radar - IR might work once you're close. Manually guiding a missile only works on video games - you probably couldn't even see the thing until you're 200 feet away moving at mach 10. SAMs aren't cheap, and fire control radar is even less so.
Jamming communications is likely the only practical solution if the Japanese Navy isn't willing to send an Arleigh Burke out (as if they want the US Congress debating banning military sales to Japan). This is likely to be much more effective against a Greenpeace drone as they probably don't use satellite communication. If they do, another option (that won't make you many friends) is jamming the satellite, or convincing the operator to cut them off. I doubt commercial satellites are equipped to handle decent jamming.
The publishers might make less money. Cry me a river.
So, I could care less about the publisher making money per-se. What I do care about is the ability of the author and editors to make money, since they add the value to the book in the first place. There is also value added from some publishing jobs even in the electronic world (formatting, hosting, etc), though it is relatively little.
We do need to reign in what we're spending on non-value-added functions (like being an executive at a big publishing house), and getting rid of the middle-men. On the other hand, we also need to create some incentive for people to write books - if they sell one copy for $20 and everybody else downloads a copy of it, then nobody will be able to make a career out of writing. Considering that you can fit every book ever written on a $150 hard drive, there has to be some kind of balance. SOPA obviously isn't it, but neither is a total free for all.
If most people are financially incompetent, rather than give in to that and have experts look after them, we should make financial literacy a core part of education curriculum.
You suggest that most people could be made competent through education. In my experience education is a relatively minor contributor to competence. Talent/ability is FAR more important. When you combine the two the results can be impressive, but you can't make up for a lack of talent simply by making people sit in classes and take tests.
Better to allow those who are skilled at finance to use their skills for the betterment of society, and not simply themselves.
No harm in educating people, but I suspect that most people will become as skilled at finance as I am at painting. There are many who would not excel at any of the skills you list. What is to be done with them?
Well, retirement policy is no different than other issues surrounding socialism.
Most people aren't able to do competent financial planning. Many people can. The people who can are almost certainly better off doing it themselves, and the majority who can't are better off if the government does it. However, socialism doesn't work if you can opt-out, since by its nature it requires transferring wealth from those who are more able to earn it to those who aren't.
The problem is that we want to have our cake and eat it too. We don't want to take wealth away from those who can earn it, but we also don't want to see people starving on the streets. As a result we implement a half-baked form of socialism that tends to cost a lot of money and lead to a LOT of debt. One generation is basically raising their standard of living at the expense of the next.
The main problem with socialism as I see it is that it leads to a form of reverse Darwinism that over time destroys the ability of society to produce (which was the start of your argument). I suspect that the only way it can be made sustainable is to essentially combine it with some kind of artificial selection process to counter that (which means regulating procreation - a VERY touchy subject).