Yup - there is a good article on the statue of westminster on wikipedia.
The Queen essentially holds a ceremonial post in a number of nations, but these duties are generally executed in accordance with the wishes of the parliament of the concerned nation. Sometimes the Queen's representative actually holds some form of power (this is the case in Canada at least), however the Queen appoints this role based on the request of the local parliament so it is effectively like any other ministerial post.
If the Queen decided to actuall abuse this discretion the result would be the same as if it happened in the UK. Everybody would just ignore it and quickly legislate away her authority. Other than being fodder for tabloids the royal family isn't nearly as capricious today as they have been at some points in the past - this isn't likely to change anytime soon.
1. The grandparent's position is completely contrary to the instructions of any judge I've served on juries under.
2. That I wouldn't hesitate to do exactly as the grandparent suggests if I felt that justice required me to do so.
I am bound by my conscience before I am bound by any law or instruction of the judge. Apparently the founders of the constitution agreed which is why courts have juries in the first place.
The beauty of nullification is that there is no way to prove that it happened. As long as a juror states that their decision was based on the facts of the case and not the law the courts simply need to accept the decision as-is, or just set aside the jury verdict entirely (which of course is a farce from a constitutional standpoint).
Don't get me wrong - jurors shouldn't be getting into endless debates over fine points of law - that is what the judge is for. I'd go as far as to say that jurors should almost always defer to the judge entirely on the law. However, I would never suggest that a juror ought to violate their conscience and pretend that their decision is just some simple evaluation of facts that clears them of any responsibility for what happens to the defendant next.
I would say that independent, out-of-court investigation, whose contents are not revealed completely to the parties, by jurors in support of it is equally problematic as such investigation in the jury's role as trier of fact, for the same reason: it brings arguments into the jury deliberations that have not been presented to the parties to the case and which the parties whose interests are harmed have no opportunity to rebut.
I can see the logic in this argument.
However, might a better solution be to have the parties present their arguments (as is currently done). Then the jury will elect a foreman who will moderate an inquiry where the jury can question the parties and any witnesses. After the inquiry the parties would be able to make an abbreviated statement. Further inquirys might come up during deliberation much as juries currently request the readback of testimony and clarifications from the judge/etc.
I take moral issue with the idea that jurors should be expected to make a judgement in the absence of facts where the juror is quite conscious that their judgement will have a huge impact on the lives of the accused and/or his past and future victims. If any juror wants to know a little more they should be able to ask. In most states jurors cannot question anybody other than the judge, and the only information they're going to get is a clarification of the law or a read-back of testimony.
Sorry - the team at CSI are the only ones qualified to do this kind of work. It just takes 3 clicks on a flashy gui displayed on a window mounted in the back of a hummer.
Frankly, I think half the problem is that the legal system resents the fact that jurors even exist.
Jurors should have the right to question every witness. They should also have the right to some form of discovery (within the limits of the 5th ammendment) - so that if evidence or testimony wasn't provided they can at least know what they're missing.
It seems like the goal of the courts is to essentially decide the case in motions and then present the jury with a precisely-determined picture so that they can reach the pre-determined conclusion. For "minor" offenses you aren't even entited to a jury trial even though almost any civil lawsuit qualifies for one. Sue somebody for $10k and you are guaranteed a jury trial. Get accused of 5 counts of a crime that carries a 4 month prison term and you aren't. That sure makes sense...
Also - I'd like to see courts less involved in a number of things they tend to get involved with. That would probably get rid of a number of problems people complain about with regard to "uneducated" juries.
I have to disagree with some of your points. For many students who struggle, simply working harder will not put them in an honors class (unless the definition of honors is changed to effort rather than achievement).
However, people who aren't in honors classes are hardly less "good" than an honors student. A person's value has nothing at all to do with their ability to get good grades, or even their ability to contribute to society at all. People have value because they are people.
Even so, that doesn't mean that companies will hire people simply because they are people. That is the disservice that schools foist upon their students - they encourage the student who can't handle basic trig to pursue a career in architechture, or the student who can't draw to be an artist. Sure, if you want to play guitar in your spare time by all means learn how, but don't think that just anybody can play in a top-10 band. Johnny might want to be an astronaut, but if they have a breathing problem they're not going to be one, even though there are lots of other related fields that they could excel in.
A person's value is not the same as their paycheck. A person's happiness also has little to do with their paycheck. Sure, we should try to get people to maximize their potential and their contribution to society, but we need to also teach people to be realistic about their expectations.
Heck, fly from LA to New York City for a meeting and you'll burn 1.5 days for travel.
Lots of foreigners don't grasp just how big the USA is. An American could spend two weeks vacation in a different state every year and only get minimal exposure to the country as a whole. And the US isn't the largest country out there by far. A friend spent a week in Austrailia and commented that they were amazed at how much ocean-front property is completely uninhabited - in the US you couldn't find an inch of coastline that doesn't have some kind of house on it. The interior might as well be Mars for the most part.
You can travel across three countries in Europe in the time it takes to drive across a larger state in the US. And let's not even talk about Canada, China, or the Ukraine.
Couldn't agree more. I've been to Japan several times and on all but one trip I didn't see much outside of walking range from my hotel - which was in a small city of no particular significance (other than having a Shinkansen stop - for a reason none of the locals could fathom). One trip was two weeks in duration so I was able to spend the weekend in Tokyo and the vicinity sightseeing - friendly coworkers were definitely helpful there!
Now, one thing that I did like about the trip is that you get a completely different view of foreign culture just working in a country than sightseeing. I think I learned far more about Japanese culture just visting an ordinary shopping mall, fast food places, and walking down the streets than listing to tour guides go on about temples. I could go an entire day and not see anybody who was not ethnically Japanese, and while the locals (off the job site) certainly spoke English better than I spoke Japanese the language barrier was a definite challenge.
On the other hand, to go along with this I spent the years surrounding my few trips to Japan with countless meetings at 6-7AM or 10PM to accomodate the time differences. Quite a bit of work was accomplished with semi-productive email exchanges (send an email, get a response the next day, clarify your question, repeat...).
Work is about, well, work... As others have pointed out the junkets aren't all they're cracked up to be.
I couldn't agree more about the mindset issue. However, look at the cost of an education these days. $120k seems to be on the lower end unless you're talking about a community college or a very small state-funded school.
The only way parents pay that kind of money is if they're convinced their kids won't get a job as more than a janitor without it.
Universities encourage this mentality - they wouldn't be able to charge such high tuitions if they weren't perceived as the gateway to a nice career.
I look at college as a tool - if you know what you want to do with your life, and getting there calls for college then go to college. If you don't know what you want to do with your life, then there are MUCH cheaper and more effective ways to figure that out than to go to college. If you just want to have fun, there are also much more cost-effective ways of doing this as well.
True, but the beauty of it is that nobody is going to call to complain if their download takes three hours instead of two. You can still give people busting speeds for interactive use during those hours to placate the few folks checking their email at 2AM.
When cell phone companies institute these kinds of policies it doesn't bother them if there is a spike in usage at 9PM - the fact is that the spike is nowhere near what they see mid-day.
Give the customers incentives and get them to work WITH you and not against you.
With the need to trainsition care between shifts I can actually see justification for longer shifts in health care. However, I'd think that maybe 3 12-hour days per week (with a day off in-between) would be about the right level of work. Or maybe 10 hour days. If you have too many shifts in a day then you do run into the problem of lots of handoffs making for lower patient care.
36 hour shifts are just crazy - you can't tell me that people aren't getting killed by these kinds of policies.
There is a lot of traditionalism in medicine that is detrimental to care...
Even so, people do buy mp3 players JUST to install Rockbox on them. They fall into two categories:
1. People like you and me who read/. all day.
2. People with physical impairments.
Check out the rockbox mailing lists sometime. You'll be amazed at the number of posters looking for help who have almost no technical expertise at all. Somebody brings a rockbox to a school for the blind or whatever and suddenly 50 people want one - because there is almost no market for this sort of thing. I'd suggest creating a company to pre-install Rockbox on a suitable player, but I'm guessing when making devices for the blind there are 500 regulations to comply with (which don't apply if you just make some firmware and toss it on a website without specifically advertising it to blind people).
Look, Rockbox isn't the nicest packaged piece of software out there. However, in terms of feature set you're not going to find anything commercial that comes close. If somebody comes out with a Rockbox-based player for my android phone I'd use it without hesitation (my rockbox-based player just went through the dryer and is no more).
I agree. If something like this was happening 5 layers below him I could see some leeway. However, if a DIRECT REPORT is runnign this kind of a scam than he clearly isn't doing his job. An invalid expense report or two per year might certainly be easy to sneak by a boss, but nobody should be able to run a massive scam under their supervisor's nose...
Of course, then you'd need to explain why the matter and antimatter were so non-uniformly distributed that you can have entire galaxies composed of one or the other but not both separated by huge voids of empty space.
However, you could very well be right - if you can imagine a mechanism that gives preference to one vs the other you could imagine that it might work differently in different enviornments.
Disclaimer - while I find this stuff quite fascinating I'm by no means an expert.
I've always wondered about whether dark matter could be explained by gravity leakage from other universes nearby in extra-dimensional space. If our universe started out in the vicinity of another universe and gravity could leak between them then you'd expect matter to clump up near concentrations of mass in the other universe. Galaxies in our universe might have been seeded by galaxies in other universes.
This could also explain stuff like the recent dark matter discoveries with the Bullet Cluster (the normal matter laged behind the dark matter due to electromagnetic interaction when the clusters collided). If one cluster was clumped around a mass in one universe, and the other cluster was clumped around a mass in a different universe, then the dark masses would just pass through each other since they were in different universes, but the matter in our own universe would interact. For all we know dark matter could be normal baryonic matter in a different universe.
Of course, this is all purely speculative. One nice thing about new high energy experiments is that it will at least add constraints to the crazy theories that can be cooked up...
I'd think that aerogel would tend to self-deorbit (unless it is VERY high up) due to its high drag:mass ratio.
Stuff punching holes in it isn't a big deal - each pass through the gel would reduce the velocity of the debris.
I think the real trick (besides making the gel in the first place) is putting up a big mass of it in orbit without taking out satellites. Keeping it oriented is an issue as well - drag would tend to turn it sideways. You might not want to put thrusters on it if your goal is to not risk putting up yet more junk.
I'm not sure that you even need aerogel - styrofoam might work just as well. We don't need to catch debris - we just need to slow it down. The right material is anything that puts up the biggest surface area for the smallest manufacture/launch cost.
Certainly the lax Chinese regulators need to be prodded on melamine any time the opportunity comes up. That was just crazy - and this was actually a deliberate attempt to circumvent regulation rather than a simple cost-cutting measure (the melamine interferes with the protein assay on watered down milk).
However, it wasn't all that long that people in the US were formulating drugs using ethylene glycol - which was a major driver for the creation of the US FDA.
The US and USSR have certainly put up their fair share of space junk. However, they haven't done things like intentionally blow up satellites in orbit. Fixing the problems is a bit more constructive than merely assigning blame, but certainly China should be expected to pay for some of the cleanup.
True. If the debris hits the Soyuz everybody is pretty likely to die no matter what.
However, sheltering in the Soyuz was probably still a wise move. The smaller craft has a lower cross section than the entire ISS which makes a collision less likely. If debris hit the ISS anywhere then anyplace on the ISS would be a bad place to be due to depressurization, induced rotation, electrical problems, etc. If you're in the Soyuz with the hatch closed then if anything happened on the ISS you could just undock and thrust away. It wouldn't be risk free if you have some kind of rotation and there is a risk of banging into things while maneuvering away, but at least you're in a pressurized craft designed for re-entry wearing space suits.
Even if you did a good job of sealing off every compartment in the ISS you could still end up being stock in compartment A with your ride home three depressurized compartments away with maybe a pressurized compartment with a fire in it tossed in for good measure. Just getting to the Soyuz could be very tricky even in a suit - better to already be sitting in it ready to detach...
Your other option would be to use phone services that allow you to set your caller-ID number. Most non-consumer VOIP services allow this. Google has an app for android which allows you to use your GrandCentral number as your caller ID.
However, none of this avoids the need to port my number. Sure, I understand the idea is that I don't give everybody my direct numbers and instead give them the GrandCentral number. However, the problem is that I've ALREADY given out these numbers and would just as soon have them ring to GrandCentral instead.
The problem with GrandCentral is that by the time they actually open it to the public (I've been on their waiting list for years) chances are the problem will no longer exist. Just giving out a cell phone number solves the problem 90% of the time, and I can see that improving over time.
A hybrid will have a decent sized motor in it (which can run as a generator), although most cars can brake with a LOT more force than they accellerate with. For starters your brakes are on all four wheels and I suspect most hybrids have only two wheels on the drive system. That means that any braking done by the non-drive wheels is going to be lost completely. Toss in resistance/etc you're only going to get so much regeneration on braking.
However, the problem clearly can be solved. I believe most electric trains use regenerative braking, and if there isn't sufficient demand on the local circuit to take up the power it gets shunted into a huge resistor bank. Dissipating thousands of watts as heat in this way causes less wear and tear than dissipating similar power mechanically into brake pads. A stopping train has a huge amount of kinetic energy to dispose of.
The economics of getting rid of brake pad wear and tear on a car clearly aren't the same so we won't see 200 HP motors for braking anytime soon. However, I'm sure hybrids have room to improve.
That is correct, although nobody has pointed out the 10th ammendment (for what little power it still has left). While a federal law trumps state law, if the federal constitution makes the law illegal then it has no power at all. In theory federal laws can only cover areas provided for in the constitution. Unfortunately, one of those areas is regulation of interstate commerce, and that has been used to justify federal laws for just about anything...
Amazing that free software like MythTV can get this right and nobody pays more than $20/yr for the schedule data that makes it work.
It is very easy to configure MythTV to only record new episodes, or episodes only on a particular channel, etc. It is also smart enough to remember what you've deleted manually and not re-record those particular episodes (identified by a unique ID - not just title/etc). If a show doesn't completely record for whatever reason or if it is deleted to make room (per user preferences) then it will be re-recorded if it airs again.
Granted, the recording options for MythTV are a bit more than I can see being available in a commercial DVR. However, you could dress that up a bit with a separate advanced options screen and just make the defaults good enough for typical use.
Frankly I gave up on commercial DVRs when our DVRs would die and I'd end up with 120GB of encrypted video that we couldn't watch, and then the final straw was when our DVR started missing shows once there were more than about 20 recording schedules in it. Try having a family of four with diverse interests and getting by with only 20 different TV shows...
I think we're actually largely on the same page. Here is where we seem to disagree:
The problem is that this has not happened to any western power in any significant since 1939.... Al Queda and the Taliban were separate entities, thus the fight against them should have been separate.
After the 9/11 attacks the government of Afganistan refused to coorperate with delivering the Al Quaeda leaders to justice. Now, if they wanted to try/punish them on their own that is one thing, but they should have made a big show of doing it IMMEDIATELY. In failing to handle this HUGE political problem they became complicit in the eyes of the world and just about everybody supported the resulting invasion. Frankly, nobody was all that supportive of the Taliban in the first place, but harboring a terrorist leader is about as close to an act of war as you can get short of sending men in uniform with guns.
Of course, the current problem is Pakistan, and the US doesn't really want to get into a mess with them (particularly since they have nuclear arms). You could argue that the US did get the message across about harboring terrorists - even if Bin Laden is still around nobody is going to be bragging about having him over for dinner. Without state sponsorship it will be much harder for him to operate.
I agree completely with not fighting the "last war" - however I don't think that the solution is to just ignore state-sponsored terrorism. Non-state-sponsored terrorism is a different matter - the best response in this case is not a big invasion force. However, as soon as a foreign nation says "sure, I know the guys are living here, but you can't go hunting for them, and we won't hunt for them either" then they're effectively state sponsors and you need to deal with them accordingly. Where it gets messy is the situations in the middle - people who claim to be your friend and make a show of helping, but who aren't eager to actually catch anybody. Covert operations may be the most effective kind as long as the hosting nation isn't outright hostile to your operations. Such operations do tend to get messy, however.
I'm arguing for a retaliatory policy in response to state-sponsored terrorist strikes. The historical problems you cite have more to do with occupations and proxy wars.
The appropriate response to a state-sponsored terrorist strike is a focused military response. It might even involve an invasion and toppling the sponsoring government. However, the goal should be to get out of there quickly. Think Afganistan (better managed), and not Iraq.
Tibet, Chechnya, and Vietnam are completely different scenarios. In the first two you're talking about an independence movement, and in the last you're talking about a proxy war (and Vietnam never attacked US domestic interests).
As long as you don't stick around local resentment probably won't be much of an issue (it still isn't in Afganistan - which is why we need to finish the job and get out of there before it is). As long as you're responding to direct attacks international support won't be a problem either - nobody really objected to the invasion of Afganistan besides the Taliban. The message you want to send is "you leave us alone, we leave you alone" - when people realize that it isn't worth their while to attack US interests they'll be less inclined to attack. Sure, attacks will still happen, but as long as responses are rapid and measured and short in duration I think that they will be kept to a minimum.
True, but it is still fairly slow. As the other poster pointed out it is certainly not trivial to shoot one down, but if you have missiles with enough altitude reach they would probably not be hard to hit. The smaller size probably would help - build it out of low-reflective materials and combined with the slow speed it might even be hard to spot with radar.
I just find it hard to believe that the US traded the fastest plane on the planet for a UAV that cruises at maybe 350-450 knots. Maybe...
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Yup - there is a good article on the statue of westminster on wikipedia.
The Queen essentially holds a ceremonial post in a number of nations, but these duties are generally executed in accordance with the wishes of the parliament of the concerned nation. Sometimes the Queen's representative actually holds some form of power (this is the case in Canada at least), however the Queen appoints this role based on the request of the local parliament so it is effectively like any other ministerial post.
If the Queen decided to actuall abuse this discretion the result would be the same as if it happened in the UK. Everybody would just ignore it and quickly legislate away her authority. Other than being fodder for tabloids the royal family isn't nearly as capricious today as they have been at some points in the past - this isn't likely to change anytime soon.
I have, and I can confirm two things:
1. The grandparent's position is completely contrary to the instructions of any judge I've served on juries under.
2. That I wouldn't hesitate to do exactly as the grandparent suggests if I felt that justice required me to do so.
I am bound by my conscience before I am bound by any law or instruction of the judge. Apparently the founders of the constitution agreed which is why courts have juries in the first place.
The beauty of nullification is that there is no way to prove that it happened. As long as a juror states that their decision was based on the facts of the case and not the law the courts simply need to accept the decision as-is, or just set aside the jury verdict entirely (which of course is a farce from a constitutional standpoint).
Don't get me wrong - jurors shouldn't be getting into endless debates over fine points of law - that is what the judge is for. I'd go as far as to say that jurors should almost always defer to the judge entirely on the law. However, I would never suggest that a juror ought to violate their conscience and pretend that their decision is just some simple evaluation of facts that clears them of any responsibility for what happens to the defendant next.
I would say that independent, out-of-court investigation, whose contents are not revealed completely to the parties, by jurors in support of it is equally problematic as such investigation in the jury's role as trier of fact, for the same reason: it brings arguments into the jury deliberations that have not been presented to the parties to the case and which the parties whose interests are harmed have no opportunity to rebut.
I can see the logic in this argument.
However, might a better solution be to have the parties present their arguments (as is currently done). Then the jury will elect a foreman who will moderate an inquiry where the jury can question the parties and any witnesses. After the inquiry the parties would be able to make an abbreviated statement. Further inquirys might come up during deliberation much as juries currently request the readback of testimony and clarifications from the judge/etc.
I take moral issue with the idea that jurors should be expected to make a judgement in the absence of facts where the juror is quite conscious that their judgement will have a huge impact on the lives of the accused and/or his past and future victims. If any juror wants to know a little more they should be able to ask. In most states jurors cannot question anybody other than the judge, and the only information they're going to get is a clarification of the law or a read-back of testimony.
Sorry - the team at CSI are the only ones qualified to do this kind of work. It just takes 3 clicks on a flashy gui displayed on a window mounted in the back of a hummer.
Frankly, I think half the problem is that the legal system resents the fact that jurors even exist.
Jurors should have the right to question every witness. They should also have the right to some form of discovery (within the limits of the 5th ammendment) - so that if evidence or testimony wasn't provided they can at least know what they're missing.
It seems like the goal of the courts is to essentially decide the case in motions and then present the jury with a precisely-determined picture so that they can reach the pre-determined conclusion. For "minor" offenses you aren't even entited to a jury trial even though almost any civil lawsuit qualifies for one. Sue somebody for $10k and you are guaranteed a jury trial. Get accused of 5 counts of a crime that carries a 4 month prison term and you aren't. That sure makes sense...
Also - I'd like to see courts less involved in a number of things they tend to get involved with. That would probably get rid of a number of problems people complain about with regard to "uneducated" juries.
I have to disagree with some of your points. For many students who struggle, simply working harder will not put them in an honors class (unless the definition of honors is changed to effort rather than achievement).
However, people who aren't in honors classes are hardly less "good" than an honors student. A person's value has nothing at all to do with their ability to get good grades, or even their ability to contribute to society at all. People have value because they are people.
Even so, that doesn't mean that companies will hire people simply because they are people. That is the disservice that schools foist upon their students - they encourage the student who can't handle basic trig to pursue a career in architechture, or the student who can't draw to be an artist. Sure, if you want to play guitar in your spare time by all means learn how, but don't think that just anybody can play in a top-10 band. Johnny might want to be an astronaut, but if they have a breathing problem they're not going to be one, even though there are lots of other related fields that they could excel in.
A person's value is not the same as their paycheck. A person's happiness also has little to do with their paycheck. Sure, we should try to get people to maximize their potential and their contribution to society, but we need to also teach people to be realistic about their expectations.
Heck, fly from LA to New York City for a meeting and you'll burn 1.5 days for travel.
Lots of foreigners don't grasp just how big the USA is. An American could spend two weeks vacation in a different state every year and only get minimal exposure to the country as a whole. And the US isn't the largest country out there by far. A friend spent a week in Austrailia and commented that they were amazed at how much ocean-front property is completely uninhabited - in the US you couldn't find an inch of coastline that doesn't have some kind of house on it. The interior might as well be Mars for the most part.
You can travel across three countries in Europe in the time it takes to drive across a larger state in the US. And let's not even talk about Canada, China, or the Ukraine.
Couldn't agree more. I've been to Japan several times and on all but one trip I didn't see much outside of walking range from my hotel - which was in a small city of no particular significance (other than having a Shinkansen stop - for a reason none of the locals could fathom). One trip was two weeks in duration so I was able to spend the weekend in Tokyo and the vicinity sightseeing - friendly coworkers were definitely helpful there!
Now, one thing that I did like about the trip is that you get a completely different view of foreign culture just working in a country than sightseeing. I think I learned far more about Japanese culture just visting an ordinary shopping mall, fast food places, and walking down the streets than listing to tour guides go on about temples. I could go an entire day and not see anybody who was not ethnically Japanese, and while the locals (off the job site) certainly spoke English better than I spoke Japanese the language barrier was a definite challenge.
On the other hand, to go along with this I spent the years surrounding my few trips to Japan with countless meetings at 6-7AM or 10PM to accomodate the time differences. Quite a bit of work was accomplished with semi-productive email exchanges (send an email, get a response the next day, clarify your question, repeat...).
Work is about, well, work... As others have pointed out the junkets aren't all they're cracked up to be.
I couldn't agree more about the mindset issue. However, look at the cost of an education these days. $120k seems to be on the lower end unless you're talking about a community college or a very small state-funded school.
The only way parents pay that kind of money is if they're convinced their kids won't get a job as more than a janitor without it.
Universities encourage this mentality - they wouldn't be able to charge such high tuitions if they weren't perceived as the gateway to a nice career.
I look at college as a tool - if you know what you want to do with your life, and getting there calls for college then go to college. If you don't know what you want to do with your life, then there are MUCH cheaper and more effective ways to figure that out than to go to college. If you just want to have fun, there are also much more cost-effective ways of doing this as well.
True, but the beauty of it is that nobody is going to call to complain if their download takes three hours instead of two. You can still give people busting speeds for interactive use during those hours to placate the few folks checking their email at 2AM.
When cell phone companies institute these kinds of policies it doesn't bother them if there is a spike in usage at 9PM - the fact is that the spike is nowhere near what they see mid-day.
Give the customers incentives and get them to work WITH you and not against you.
With the need to trainsition care between shifts I can actually see justification for longer shifts in health care. However, I'd think that maybe 3 12-hour days per week (with a day off in-between) would be about the right level of work. Or maybe 10 hour days. If you have too many shifts in a day then you do run into the problem of lots of handoffs making for lower patient care.
36 hour shifts are just crazy - you can't tell me that people aren't getting killed by these kinds of policies.
There is a lot of traditionalism in medicine that is detrimental to care...
Even so, people do buy mp3 players JUST to install Rockbox on them. They fall into two categories:
1. People like you and me who read /. all day.
2. People with physical impairments.
Check out the rockbox mailing lists sometime. You'll be amazed at the number of posters looking for help who have almost no technical expertise at all. Somebody brings a rockbox to a school for the blind or whatever and suddenly 50 people want one - because there is almost no market for this sort of thing. I'd suggest creating a company to pre-install Rockbox on a suitable player, but I'm guessing when making devices for the blind there are 500 regulations to comply with (which don't apply if you just make some firmware and toss it on a website without specifically advertising it to blind people).
Look, Rockbox isn't the nicest packaged piece of software out there. However, in terms of feature set you're not going to find anything commercial that comes close. If somebody comes out with a Rockbox-based player for my android phone I'd use it without hesitation (my rockbox-based player just went through the dryer and is no more).
I agree. If something like this was happening 5 layers below him I could see some leeway. However, if a DIRECT REPORT is runnign this kind of a scam than he clearly isn't doing his job. An invalid expense report or two per year might certainly be easy to sneak by a boss, but nobody should be able to run a massive scam under their supervisor's nose...
Of course, then you'd need to explain why the matter and antimatter were so non-uniformly distributed that you can have entire galaxies composed of one or the other but not both separated by huge voids of empty space.
However, you could very well be right - if you can imagine a mechanism that gives preference to one vs the other you could imagine that it might work differently in different enviornments.
Disclaimer - while I find this stuff quite fascinating I'm by no means an expert.
I've always wondered about whether dark matter could be explained by gravity leakage from other universes nearby in extra-dimensional space. If our universe started out in the vicinity of another universe and gravity could leak between them then you'd expect matter to clump up near concentrations of mass in the other universe. Galaxies in our universe might have been seeded by galaxies in other universes.
This could also explain stuff like the recent dark matter discoveries with the Bullet Cluster (the normal matter laged behind the dark matter due to electromagnetic interaction when the clusters collided). If one cluster was clumped around a mass in one universe, and the other cluster was clumped around a mass in a different universe, then the dark masses would just pass through each other since they were in different universes, but the matter in our own universe would interact. For all we know dark matter could be normal baryonic matter in a different universe.
Of course, this is all purely speculative. One nice thing about new high energy experiments is that it will at least add constraints to the crazy theories that can be cooked up...
I'd think that aerogel would tend to self-deorbit (unless it is VERY high up) due to its high drag:mass ratio.
Stuff punching holes in it isn't a big deal - each pass through the gel would reduce the velocity of the debris.
I think the real trick (besides making the gel in the first place) is putting up a big mass of it in orbit without taking out satellites. Keeping it oriented is an issue as well - drag would tend to turn it sideways. You might not want to put thrusters on it if your goal is to not risk putting up yet more junk.
I'm not sure that you even need aerogel - styrofoam might work just as well. We don't need to catch debris - we just need to slow it down. The right material is anything that puts up the biggest surface area for the smallest manufacture/launch cost.
Certainly the lax Chinese regulators need to be prodded on melamine any time the opportunity comes up. That was just crazy - and this was actually a deliberate attempt to circumvent regulation rather than a simple cost-cutting measure (the melamine interferes with the protein assay on watered down milk).
However, it wasn't all that long that people in the US were formulating drugs using ethylene glycol - which was a major driver for the creation of the US FDA.
The US and USSR have certainly put up their fair share of space junk. However, they haven't done things like intentionally blow up satellites in orbit. Fixing the problems is a bit more constructive than merely assigning blame, but certainly China should be expected to pay for some of the cleanup.
True. If the debris hits the Soyuz everybody is pretty likely to die no matter what.
However, sheltering in the Soyuz was probably still a wise move. The smaller craft has a lower cross section than the entire ISS which makes a collision less likely. If debris hit the ISS anywhere then anyplace on the ISS would be a bad place to be due to depressurization, induced rotation, electrical problems, etc. If you're in the Soyuz with the hatch closed then if anything happened on the ISS you could just undock and thrust away. It wouldn't be risk free if you have some kind of rotation and there is a risk of banging into things while maneuvering away, but at least you're in a pressurized craft designed for re-entry wearing space suits.
Even if you did a good job of sealing off every compartment in the ISS you could still end up being stock in compartment A with your ride home three depressurized compartments away with maybe a pressurized compartment with a fire in it tossed in for good measure. Just getting to the Soyuz could be very tricky even in a suit - better to already be sitting in it ready to detach...
Your other option would be to use phone services that allow you to set your caller-ID number. Most non-consumer VOIP services allow this. Google has an app for android which allows you to use your GrandCentral number as your caller ID.
However, none of this avoids the need to port my number. Sure, I understand the idea is that I don't give everybody my direct numbers and instead give them the GrandCentral number. However, the problem is that I've ALREADY given out these numbers and would just as soon have them ring to GrandCentral instead.
The problem with GrandCentral is that by the time they actually open it to the public (I've been on their waiting list for years) chances are the problem will no longer exist. Just giving out a cell phone number solves the problem 90% of the time, and I can see that improving over time.
A hybrid will have a decent sized motor in it (which can run as a generator), although most cars can brake with a LOT more force than they accellerate with. For starters your brakes are on all four wheels and I suspect most hybrids have only two wheels on the drive system. That means that any braking done by the non-drive wheels is going to be lost completely. Toss in resistance/etc you're only going to get so much regeneration on braking.
However, the problem clearly can be solved. I believe most electric trains use regenerative braking, and if there isn't sufficient demand on the local circuit to take up the power it gets shunted into a huge resistor bank. Dissipating thousands of watts as heat in this way causes less wear and tear than dissipating similar power mechanically into brake pads. A stopping train has a huge amount of kinetic energy to dispose of.
The economics of getting rid of brake pad wear and tear on a car clearly aren't the same so we won't see 200 HP motors for braking anytime soon. However, I'm sure hybrids have room to improve.
That is correct, although nobody has pointed out the 10th ammendment (for what little power it still has left). While a federal law trumps state law, if the federal constitution makes the law illegal then it has no power at all. In theory federal laws can only cover areas provided for in the constitution. Unfortunately, one of those areas is regulation of interstate commerce, and that has been used to justify federal laws for just about anything...
Amazing that free software like MythTV can get this right and nobody pays more than $20/yr for the schedule data that makes it work.
It is very easy to configure MythTV to only record new episodes, or episodes only on a particular channel, etc. It is also smart enough to remember what you've deleted manually and not re-record those particular episodes (identified by a unique ID - not just title/etc). If a show doesn't completely record for whatever reason or if it is deleted to make room (per user preferences) then it will be re-recorded if it airs again.
Granted, the recording options for MythTV are a bit more than I can see being available in a commercial DVR. However, you could dress that up a bit with a separate advanced options screen and just make the defaults good enough for typical use.
Frankly I gave up on commercial DVRs when our DVRs would die and I'd end up with 120GB of encrypted video that we couldn't watch, and then the final straw was when our DVR started missing shows once there were more than about 20 recording schedules in it. Try having a family of four with diverse interests and getting by with only 20 different TV shows...
I think we're actually largely on the same page. Here is where we seem to disagree:
The problem is that this has not happened to any western power in any significant since 1939. ...
Al Queda and the Taliban were separate entities, thus the fight against them should have been separate.
After the 9/11 attacks the government of Afganistan refused to coorperate with delivering the Al Quaeda leaders to justice. Now, if they wanted to try/punish them on their own that is one thing, but they should have made a big show of doing it IMMEDIATELY. In failing to handle this HUGE political problem they became complicit in the eyes of the world and just about everybody supported the resulting invasion. Frankly, nobody was all that supportive of the Taliban in the first place, but harboring a terrorist leader is about as close to an act of war as you can get short of sending men in uniform with guns.
Of course, the current problem is Pakistan, and the US doesn't really want to get into a mess with them (particularly since they have nuclear arms). You could argue that the US did get the message across about harboring terrorists - even if Bin Laden is still around nobody is going to be bragging about having him over for dinner. Without state sponsorship it will be much harder for him to operate.
I agree completely with not fighting the "last war" - however I don't think that the solution is to just ignore state-sponsored terrorism. Non-state-sponsored terrorism is a different matter - the best response in this case is not a big invasion force. However, as soon as a foreign nation says "sure, I know the guys are living here, but you can't go hunting for them, and we won't hunt for them either" then they're effectively state sponsors and you need to deal with them accordingly. Where it gets messy is the situations in the middle - people who claim to be your friend and make a show of helping, but who aren't eager to actually catch anybody. Covert operations may be the most effective kind as long as the hosting nation isn't outright hostile to your operations. Such operations do tend to get messy, however.
I'm arguing for a retaliatory policy in response to state-sponsored terrorist strikes. The historical problems you cite have more to do with occupations and proxy wars.
The appropriate response to a state-sponsored terrorist strike is a focused military response. It might even involve an invasion and toppling the sponsoring government. However, the goal should be to get out of there quickly. Think Afganistan (better managed), and not Iraq.
Tibet, Chechnya, and Vietnam are completely different scenarios. In the first two you're talking about an independence movement, and in the last you're talking about a proxy war (and Vietnam never attacked US domestic interests).
As long as you don't stick around local resentment probably won't be much of an issue (it still isn't in Afganistan - which is why we need to finish the job and get out of there before it is). As long as you're responding to direct attacks international support won't be a problem either - nobody really objected to the invasion of Afganistan besides the Taliban. The message you want to send is "you leave us alone, we leave you alone" - when people realize that it isn't worth their while to attack US interests they'll be less inclined to attack. Sure, attacks will still happen, but as long as responses are rapid and measured and short in duration I think that they will be kept to a minimum.
True, but it is still fairly slow. As the other poster pointed out it is certainly not trivial to shoot one down, but if you have missiles with enough altitude reach they would probably not be hard to hit. The smaller size probably would help - build it out of low-reflective materials and combined with the slow speed it might even be hard to spot with radar.
I just find it hard to believe that the US traded the fastest plane on the planet for a UAV that cruises at maybe 350-450 knots. Maybe...