Which is funny, because that's exactly the definition the U.S. anti-ballistic-missile program has been using...
Funny, but not exactly true. While the Army's system has had lots of issues, the maritime system - AEGIS BMD, SM-3, et. al. - has had many, many successful tests.
One frequently noted criticism of the system is that it's unknown how it would perform in the presence of countermeasures such as decoys. While there's some validity to this, it's not particularly relevant to the NK situation, as I think it's unlikely that they've got the technology to deploy such countermeasures. By the time they do, US ability to distinguish countermeasures from real warheads is likely to improve, so I think we'll stay ahead of the game there.
A more serious objection is whether the system is cost-effective - in other words, whether it's worth spending truly enormous amounts of money to defeat a threat that's not all that likely to materialize anyway. I don't know enough to say... but I have my doubts.
It was pretty routine for US surface ships in the Pacific to linger around the predicted impact area of Soviet test ICBM shots, in hopes of picking up pieces. It's not hard to track the missiles, and in fact the Russians pretty much always put out a Notice to Mariners, so it wasn't any big mystery to get at least the approximate target location.
A lot of 'qualified' and 'educated' scientists said that it was impossible to break the speed of sound 60 years ago.
I don't know where this idea keeps coming from. No, a bunch of qualified and educated scientists didn't think this. It was widely known that there were many aeronautical ENGINEERING problems that were making supersonic flight difficult, but the SCIENTISTS all understood that there were no underlying laws of physics that prevented it. If you think I'm wrong, well, as they say in Wikipedia... citation needed. Produce a quote from an "educated scientist" who said that supersonic flight was impossible (people of the caliber of the Time Cube guy don't count).
The situation with FTL travel is different - we know that because of relativity, you can't just blast your way to speeds in excess of c. The out of the detached spacetime bubble seems to be impossible now. And "Just figure out a way to bend space" is no more than question-begging.
Just like it was proved impossible for planes to fly.
Except that no one ever produced any "proof" that it was impossible for planes to fly. There was some spouting off to that effect (did they have Slashdot then?), but no proofs. Of course, we haven't "proved" this spacetime bubble concept wouldn't work either, but really, the burden of proof is the other way - FTL travel has to be considered an extraordinary claim, and anyone who wants people to believe it's possible needs to pony up some evidence. We've got a lot of good reason to believe that it's not possible.
When you do the math, it works out to be far cheaper and much less fuel to mine the moon for all the raw titanium and fuel you need, manufacture the parts and then robotically assemble them in orbit, than it would to launch from earth all the pre-manufactured component parts.
Color me unconvinced. 1) What "fuel" is there to mine on the moon? 2) If you intend to do all this mining, manufacturing, assembling, and so forth in space... that means you have to launch lots of large, heavy factory components up there to do all that stuff. Plus lots of life support equipment, buildings, food, etc, for the people who do the building. 3) No one has the first clue what it would cost to construct said factories, etc... but because of 2), it would be hideously expensive. 4) We don't have the technology to "robotically assemble in orbit" a giant telescope.
If you did some math that shows anything different, I'd really be interested in seeing it.
Calling Slashdot a game, even on April 1st, is somewhat disengaging for those of us coming here in an attempt to have an intellectually honest discussion
I find it impossible to comprehend the charging of a minor for possession of THEIR OWN PORNOGRAPHY!!!
I don't believe that's the situation here. If they kept possession of the images in question, I doubt the DA would have even found out. It seems the images were distributed to other kids in the school, and were found on some third party's confiscated phone.
What this means for the legal case, I'm not competent to judge. It doesn't change at all the fact that prosecution for this is ludicrous. The intent of the law is clearly to PROTECT children from those who'd prey upon them... not ruin their lives.
Back in the late 90's, I was an officer on a large joint staff in Norfolk, VA. I came to work one day, fired up my SIPRNET (SECRET) system, looked at my e-mail, and saw this in my inbox:
FM: COL So N. So, USMC TO: Me
Subj: I LOVE YOU
I was pretty sure the Marine colonel upstairs didn't really love me, and if he did, I didn't want to know about it. Also, being a generally suspicious type, I didn't open the message. Later we found out that there was this new virus going around, and some dumbass (not the colonel) had moved files from the unclass network to the SIPRNET and infected it. It took forever to get our systems cleaned up, but having paid attention in computer security class, I didn't lose the use of my machine!
IT services are not the main mission of the armed forces - flying airplanes, driving ships, and pounding the ground are. It only makes sense that those are the guys who are going to be held in the highest esteem.
However, I think it's pretty dumb that you have to compete with the fly-boys for promotion. At least in the Navy, support types (supply guys, doctors, engineering duty types, etc) each had their own competitive pools, and if you were, say, a doctor, you could hope to be CO of a Naval hospital or something.
... you have to take a technical exam to get advanced, so you have to know at least something to get ahead. Just keeping your shoes polished and your hair cut to specs won't get you too far.
Fusion energy is never going to be effectively free. First of all, the fuel itself is deuterium and tritium (I think), which requires a rather expensive separation process from ordinary hydrogen. Of course, there are significant expenses in building your fusion plant. And you also have to pay for transmission of the resulting energy.
Reasonably priced fusion power seems at least possible. Free fusion power? Not happening.
HR only has a very vague idea of what the company wants, and they get tons of resumes. So to cut them down, they use various techniques which have little to do with how good you are.
Depends on how good your HR is. My recruiter really understands my business, and does a great job of feeding me qualified candidates. It makes interviewing a pleasure, because almost everyone I talk to is capable of doing the job.
I don't know about other places, but our HR folks are excellent. I post requisitions, and promptly get screened resumes for qualified folks. They give me great advice in dealing with employee problems. Pay and benefit issues are resolved promptly. In short, I couldn't be happier.
And I'm not just saying that because they're monitoring my web site use...:)
Sorry, but you're wrong. The new TOS allowed them not just to retain backups of your data, it allowed them to use it for any purpose whatsoever, including reselling it. That's a far cry from just keeping backups.
Nobody in the scientific world even TALKS about "Darwinism" - that's a creationist term. The idea that scientists make Darwin into a "sacred fetish" is a strawman that fundamentalist whackos made up entirely. Scientists didn't "turn Darwin into an 'ism'", so what the hell is the author even talking about? Oh, right, he's a concern troll!
Not very politely politely phrased, perhaps...
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 1
...but the parent should be modded back up. The GP post is ridiculous. You won't use GPL software because you can't understand the license without a patent lawyer? Then, of course, you must not use any software at all, because they ALL have licenses, and none of them are any less complex than the GPL. And with the GPL, you don't even have to accept the damn license to use the product! So it doesn't really matter whether you understand it or not.
Dad's on dialup, so suffice it to say that the only windows updates that happen, happen when I come to visit and set the computer to download all night.
I'm not a big fan of govt programs. They don't work and become mired in bureaucracy.
Yeah, the US military, what an ineffective government organization... well, not exactly. The point being that government programs that we make a priority can do just fine.
More often still they become pork-barrel rewards to those contributors who are prepared to navigate they byzantine contracting maze to their monetary reward.
Well, you got me there. But that doesn't mean that such programs are worthless... just that they need to be watched over.
Jesus, are you being purposely dense? Do you think the condoms hand themselves out? Do women insert their own IUDs? Prescribe themselves birth control pills? And those are just the jobs for the actual practitioners. There's additional employment for clinic maintenance, receptionists, etc, etc.
And the whole thing actually SAVES money by eliminating expenses involved in unwanted pregancy - child care, birth expenses, etc... much of which ends up getting paid for by taxpayers. But of course, these good effects can't possibly be allowed, because they interfere with the republican project to stigmatize people who have sex for any reason but procreation.
You can ALWAYS count on stimulating an economy of the US's size by reducing taxation.
Yeah, that's why after the past 8 years of cutting taxes (for rich people), the economy's in such great shape now!
Here in the reality based world, there are actual working solutions to our economic problems that don't involve shoveling more money at the richest segment of society. Your argument that tax cuts would be a better stimulus are simply wrong - the tax rebate of last year had very little effect, as most of it went into savings.
... this has been shown to be much less stimulative than public works type projects, as people tend to save the money (or equivalently, pay down debt) instead of spend it. See here:
... is that the Senate is cutting out the parts that have the most immediate stimulative effect! They cut something like $40B in direct aid to states, which would have been used to avoid layoffs in public schools, firehouses, and police stations; to prevent deferral of road maintenance and construction projects; and similar stuff. Hopefully some of this stuff cut by centrist morons in the Senate will be restored in conference.
The link is from testimony to Congress about the stimulative effects of various measures (higher numbers are better). Looking particularly at the table on page 5, you can see that almost every type of spending beats almost every type of tax cut. And the guy giving the testimony (a guy by the name of Zandi, with Moody's - http://www.economy.com/dismal/bios.asp?author=25) is said to have been a McCain advisor, so it's not like this is a partisan thing.
We've been doing the tax cut thing for years. It didn't work. Now let's try something that does.
I do not hold the republicans solely @ fault here though. The dem side has sought to put plenty of wasteful pork like "Family Planning" crap in their bills as well. I also don't think much of Obama's idea to give 1K to the poor that don't even earn enough to pay taxes @ all. Give them jobs so they earn enough to pay taxes. Give them a shovel and a road to build. What's so hard about that?
Family planning is not "wasteful pork". The main reason for doing this is that it will STIMULATE THE ECONOMY. The doctors, nurses, receptionists, etc, etc, are all going to be more employed, and spend more money. The fact that it'll also reduce the number of unplanned/unwanted pregancies is a nice side effect.
The plan is not to give people $1k who are paying no taxes at all. It's to refund taxes to working poor people, who although they are paying little or no federal income tax, are paying plenty of payroll tax. Federal income tax != the entire tax burden, as much as the GOP would like you to think so. And the reason for doing this... wait for it... it STIMULATES THE ECONOMY. This measure puts money in the hand of people most likely to spend it right away, which the effect you want.
People need to stop going on and on about the amount of spending in the bill. Economic demand has fallen through the floor - in these circumstances, spending is the entire point. More is better, at least right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, but not exactly true. While the Army's system has had lots of issues, the maritime system - AEGIS BMD, SM-3, et. al. - has had many, many successful tests.
One frequently noted criticism of the system is that it's unknown how it would perform in the presence of countermeasures such as decoys. While there's some validity to this, it's not particularly relevant to the NK situation, as I think it's unlikely that they've got the technology to deploy such countermeasures. By the time they do, US ability to distinguish countermeasures from real warheads is likely to improve, so I think we'll stay ahead of the game there.
A more serious objection is whether the system is cost-effective - in other words, whether it's worth spending truly enormous amounts of money to defeat a threat that's not all that likely to materialize anyway. I don't know enough to say... but I have my doubts.
It was pretty routine for US surface ships in the Pacific to linger around the predicted impact area of Soviet test ICBM shots, in hopes of picking up pieces. It's not hard to track the missiles, and in fact the Russians pretty much always put out a Notice to Mariners, so it wasn't any big mystery to get at least the approximate target location.
I don't know where this idea keeps coming from. No, a bunch of qualified and educated scientists didn't think this. It was widely known that there were many aeronautical ENGINEERING problems that were making supersonic flight difficult, but the SCIENTISTS all understood that there were no underlying laws of physics that prevented it. If you think I'm wrong, well, as they say in Wikipedia... citation needed. Produce a quote from an "educated scientist" who said that supersonic flight was impossible (people of the caliber of the Time Cube guy don't count).
The situation with FTL travel is different - we know that because of relativity, you can't just blast your way to speeds in excess of c. The out of the detached spacetime bubble seems to be impossible now. And "Just figure out a way to bend space" is no more than question-begging.
Except that no one ever produced any "proof" that it was impossible for planes to fly. There was some spouting off to that effect (did they have Slashdot then?), but no proofs. Of course, we haven't "proved" this spacetime bubble concept wouldn't work either, but really, the burden of proof is the other way - FTL travel has to be considered an extraordinary claim, and anyone who wants people to believe it's possible needs to pony up some evidence. We've got a lot of good reason to believe that it's not possible.
Color me unconvinced. 1) What "fuel" is there to mine on the moon? 2) If you intend to do all this mining, manufacturing, assembling, and so forth in space... that means you have to launch lots of large, heavy factory components up there to do all that stuff. Plus lots of life support equipment, buildings, food, etc, for the people who do the building. 3) No one has the first clue what it would cost to construct said factories, etc... but because of 2), it would be hideously expensive. 4) We don't have the technology to "robotically assemble in orbit" a giant telescope.
If you did some math that shows anything different, I'd really be interested in seeing it.
You must be new here.
... in terms of how many "library of Congress" equivalents it represents.
I, for one, welcome our new high-achieving overlords.
I don't believe that's the situation here. If they kept possession of the images in question, I doubt the DA would have even found out. It seems the images were distributed to other kids in the school, and were found on some third party's confiscated phone.
What this means for the legal case, I'm not competent to judge. It doesn't change at all the fact that prosecution for this is ludicrous. The intent of the law is clearly to PROTECT children from those who'd prey upon them... not ruin their lives.
Back in the late 90's, I was an officer on a large joint staff in Norfolk, VA. I came to work one day, fired up my SIPRNET (SECRET) system, looked at my e-mail, and saw this in my inbox:
FM: COL So N. So, USMC
TO: Me
Subj: I LOVE YOU
I was pretty sure the Marine colonel upstairs didn't really love me, and if he did, I didn't want to know about it. Also, being a generally suspicious type, I didn't open the message. Later we found out that there was this new virus going around, and some dumbass (not the colonel) had moved files from the unclass network to the SIPRNET and infected it. It took forever to get our systems cleaned up, but having paid attention in computer security class, I didn't lose the use of my machine!
IT services are not the main mission of the armed forces - flying airplanes, driving ships, and pounding the ground are. It only makes sense that those are the guys who are going to be held in the highest esteem.
However, I think it's pretty dumb that you have to compete with the fly-boys for promotion. At least in the Navy, support types (supply guys, doctors, engineering duty types, etc) each had their own competitive pools, and if you were, say, a doctor, you could hope to be CO of a Naval hospital or something.
... you have to take a technical exam to get advanced, so you have to know at least something to get ahead. Just keeping your shoes polished and your hair cut to specs won't get you too far.
Fusion energy is never going to be effectively free. First of all, the fuel itself is deuterium and tritium (I think), which requires a rather expensive separation process from ordinary hydrogen. Of course, there are significant expenses in building your fusion plant. And you also have to pay for transmission of the resulting energy.
Reasonably priced fusion power seems at least possible. Free fusion power? Not happening.
Depends on how good your HR is. My recruiter really understands my business, and does a great job of feeding me qualified candidates. It makes interviewing a pleasure, because almost everyone I talk to is capable of doing the job.
I don't know about other places, but our HR folks are excellent. I post requisitions, and promptly get screened resumes for qualified folks. They give me great advice in dealing with employee problems. Pay and benefit issues are resolved promptly. In short, I couldn't be happier.
And I'm not just saying that because they're monitoring my web site use... :)
Sorry, but you're wrong. The new TOS allowed them not just to retain backups of your data, it allowed them to use it for any purpose whatsoever, including reselling it. That's a far cry from just keeping backups.
Nobody in the scientific world even TALKS about "Darwinism" - that's a creationist term. The idea that scientists make Darwin into a "sacred fetish" is a strawman that fundamentalist whackos made up entirely. Scientists didn't "turn Darwin into an 'ism'", so what the hell is the author even talking about? Oh, right, he's a concern troll!
...but the parent should be modded back up. The GP post is ridiculous. You won't use GPL software because you can't understand the license without a patent lawyer? Then, of course, you must not use any software at all, because they ALL have licenses, and none of them are any less complex than the GPL. And with the GPL, you don't even have to accept the damn license to use the product! So it doesn't really matter whether you understand it or not.
Dad's on dialup, so suffice it to say that the only windows updates that happen, happen when I come to visit and set the computer to download all night.
Yeah, the US military, what an ineffective government organization... well, not exactly. The point being that government programs that we make a priority can do just fine.
Well, you got me there. But that doesn't mean that such programs are worthless... just that they need to be watched over.
Jesus, are you being purposely dense? Do you think the condoms hand themselves out? Do women insert their own IUDs? Prescribe themselves birth control pills? And those are just the jobs for the actual practitioners. There's additional employment for clinic maintenance, receptionists, etc, etc.
And the whole thing actually SAVES money by eliminating expenses involved in unwanted pregancy - child care, birth expenses, etc... much of which ends up getting paid for by taxpayers. But of course, these good effects can't possibly be allowed, because they interfere with the republican project to stigmatize people who have sex for any reason but procreation.
...never ceases to amaze me.
Yeah, that's why after the past 8 years of cutting taxes (for rich people), the economy's in such great shape now!
Here in the reality based world, there are actual working solutions to our economic problems that don't involve shoveling more money at the richest segment of society. Your argument that tax cuts would be a better stimulus are simply wrong - the tax rebate of last year had very little effect, as most of it went into savings.
... this has been shown to be much less stimulative than public works type projects, as people tend to save the money (or equivalently, pay down debt) instead of spend it. See here:
http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.house.gov%2Fsmbiz%2Fhearings%2Fhearing-07-24-08-stimulus%2FZandi.pdf%23page%3D4
... is that the Senate is cutting out the parts that have the most immediate stimulative effect! They cut something like $40B in direct aid to states, which would have been used to avoid layoffs in public schools, firehouses, and police stations; to prevent deferral of road maintenance and construction projects; and similar stuff. Hopefully some of this stuff cut by centrist morons in the Senate will be restored in conference.
The problem is that tax cuts are not very stimulative when compared to federal spending:
http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.house.gov%2Fsmbiz%2Fhearings%2Fhearing-07-24-08-stimulus%2FZandi.pdf%23page%3D4
The link is from testimony to Congress about the stimulative effects of various measures (higher numbers are better). Looking particularly at the table on page 5, you can see that almost every type of spending beats almost every type of tax cut. And the guy giving the testimony (a guy by the name of Zandi, with Moody's - http://www.economy.com/dismal/bios.asp?author=25) is said to have been a McCain advisor, so it's not like this is a partisan thing.
We've been doing the tax cut thing for years. It didn't work. Now let's try something that does.
Family planning is not "wasteful pork". The main reason for doing this is that it will STIMULATE THE ECONOMY. The doctors, nurses, receptionists, etc, etc, are all going to be more employed, and spend more money. The fact that it'll also reduce the number of unplanned/unwanted pregancies is a nice side effect.
The plan is not to give people $1k who are paying no taxes at all. It's to refund taxes to working poor people, who although they are paying little or no federal income tax, are paying plenty of payroll tax. Federal income tax != the entire tax burden, as much as the GOP would like you to think so. And the reason for doing this... wait for it... it STIMULATES THE ECONOMY. This measure puts money in the hand of people most likely to spend it right away, which the effect you want.
People need to stop going on and on about the amount of spending in the bill. Economic demand has fallen through the floor - in these circumstances, spending is the entire point. More is better, at least right now.