The Feds do legitimately have the right to regulate interstate travel.
This isn't travel.
This would fit very clearly and legitimately within the Interstate Commerce clause.
Yes, in the modern world where everything fits under the ICC, it does, but in a world where words have meaning and actions have consequences it certainly does not. The Feds do NOT have the right to levy a state sales tax, nor do they have the right to prohibit a state from levying one.
I would guess that consumers and retailers would very quickly put a huge amount of pressure on their local representatives to stick to the Federal sales tax guidelines.
I would guess that you'd have 50 state attorneys-general in federal court suing to overturn such a ridiculous power grab on the part of the feds before the consumers could even say "boo".
The members of staff who had loaned the laptops were asked to make sure that these machines were always chained to their desks.
So the fault was with the people who loaned the laptops for not keeping them chained up. It's hard to loan someone something if you've chained it to your desk, but that's the best security if you don't trust the people you loan things to, I guess.
So, in the long run, it is likely to save consumers money.
What a ridiculous assumption.
Your proposal falls so far outside the authority of the federal government under the Constitution that I imagine that Jefferson et.al. are spinning in their graves. The federal government simply does not have the authority to define for the states what their sales tax will be and parcel it out for them.
There are no advantages to either the consumer or the businesses in your plan. The state of California, one of the most bankrupt states in the country, would lose a lot of money under this plan, and the ability to create a more stable revenue system. In most of the other states, consumers would see the cost of everything go up, because they pay less that 7% in sales tax. This is hardly a revenue-neutral system as you pretend.
As for the advantages of mail-order over brick-and-mortar, well, two things. First, mail-order outfits don't use the local services as heavily as the brick and mortars (how many firemen in Tennessee report to a fire at the Amazon.com Washington facility when there is a fire?). Second, the brick-and-mortars have chosen their playground knowing the rules. It's really disengenuous of them (or for people on their behalf) to whine about how unfair the rules are. Nobody worries about the unfairness of the rules that say a mail-order outfit that uses USPS for delivery falls under the rules of the Postmaster for things like mail fraud (a federal offense), but a local brick and mortar doesn't. Why is one unfair advantage good but the other one bad?
That said, the whole thing has been debunked already,
Yeah, the girl was only provided extra food at cost and it wasn't actually stuffed down her throat to make her eat it. That's so much better. I don't think anyone was saying it was stuffed down her throat or she was forced to eat it, so you have won a phyrric victory.
As for "two different notes", you at least admit the existance of a note that let the mother know that her child wasn't being properly provided for at home, in the opinion of the state. You call it "effectively a receipt" as a way of handwaving it away. It's still preposterous that it happened at all. When a parent provides a lunch, they are assuming responsibility for what their child eats. The state should stick their nose out of it.
That is kind of the point of a nationwide identical tax on things, allowing stores to write out price stickers showing exactly what you're paying without having to calculate which part is tax etc.
Thus hiding the amount of tax that a taxpayer is actually giving up to the government.
You realize that the only thing that really keeps people from objecting to the high income tax rates is that the taxation takes place almost invisibly. I.e., you get a line item on your pay stub that you probably never look at. Then in April, you get free money from the government! (If you get a refund.)
This whole thing America has with having to manually add taxes and tips at restaurants is a real head-shaker for many Europeans.
The ready acceptance of higher and higher taxes at what many in America would consider confiscatory rates is a real head-shaker for many Americans. Once they realize that your VAT and many other taxes are hidden from you, it makes sense.
We only give a tip if we've been treated above and beyond the ordinary, since the serving staff at a given restaurant actually collects a paycheck.
As I've already said in other replies, the note is questionable as to when it was sent home. The article linked to from this story did not specify that the note regarding the school checking lunches was received the same day; it could have been a policy note that was sent home earlier.
The note was specific about the charge "in her case". It's hard to imagine that a note sent home two months ago would tell a mother that her child would not bring a sufficiently healthy lunch and thus be required to pay $1.25 on Jan. 30 of the next year. That makes the argument that is was a "form letter" sent home "earlier" hard to accept.
The receipt for the chicken nuggets only shows that the girl bought chicken nuggets. It does not, however, support the allegations that she was ordered to not eat her own lunch and have instead only the chicken nuggets as many "news" sites want us to believe.
I think the fact that there has been an admission from DHHS that someone did inspect lunches and order them not to be eaten, but won't or cannot identify who specifically did it, is pretty good evidence that someone did tell her not to eat her lunch, and DHHS doesn't have the courage to say who.
Of course, this ignores the overarching question of why state inspectors are required to force children to eat every food group during their lunch. The USDA food pyramid shows only 2-3 servings from both the dairy and fruit groups. One at breakfast, one at dinner, you got all you need. None at lunch are required. The state is forcing requirements outside the USDA suggestions onto children and implying to them that their parents aren't taking good care of them.
If the state wants to regulate what the cafeteria sells, that's one thing. To regulate what a parent provides for their child's lunch is preposterous. What's next, forcing every child to eat their lunch under the direct supervision of a state inspector so the state will know that the child actually ate each mandated item?
Dude, I followed your link and have seen you make the same claim twice. Your link doesn't point to the law, it points to the discussion in the Federal Register. I quoted the law earlier, and it says NOTHING about GM foods.
and has a link to the entire rule.
To a discussion of the rule, but not the rule itself.
The law doesn't need specifics, the USDA defines the specifics based on the law.
Dude, the law defines what the USDA can do, and unless there is actually a federal law that says "GM doesn't count", it counts.
Well according to the USDA, it's a lot more than that. They won't certify anything genetically modified by any laboratory methods as "organic". Check out my other post.
Do you have a reference to any section of the federal law regarding the use of the USDA organic label that would prohibit the use on anything with GM content? The section I quoted that defines what can be called organic doesn't mention anything about genetic modifications.
That's not curtailing their freedom, that's providing structure so the game can be played at all.
Providing structure is inherently limiting freedom. "You can't do that" said to a game player to keep him "in bounds" is, by definition, limiting his freedom to "do that" or go "out of bounds". You say "potato", I say "starchy tuber".
We as a society have an interest in holding these competitions, and keeping contests as fair and non-destructive as practical.
Do we? Doesn't society benefit when a company reaches a size that it can offer significant price breaks to consumers through economies of scale, even though this is clearly not fair to small competitors? Note that I am specifically not talking about Walmart, where there is a considerable amount of other baggage that clouds the issue of size vs. benefit. The kneejerk "Walmat Bad, Local Good" is not relevant because there is so much more involved than just size. A local large supermarket has better prices than a corner store -- do we have an interest in trying to force the large market to raise their prices to keep things fair for the corner store?
Otherwise, why not hire hitmen to bash your opponents' knees,
Such rules exist not for the control of corporate profit and competitiveness, but for everyone as a whole. Try again.
or any number of other dirty tricks?
Well, I think the discussion is currently whether "raising the price of something because the author just died" is a dirty trick or just sleazy. Don't the prices for most works of art go up after the artist dies? The argument that upping the price on Houston's work is sleazy because there isn't an actual increase in the cost to produce the product is misplaced. That's an argument that applies to production of all digital content.
the conflation of natural breeding with GMO is something the industry has brainwashed many people with.
Why yes, we are all shills for the GM producers. Thanks for outing us.
No, I think it is just that the difference between "doing it in a test tube" and "doing it in a test tube" is a difference that makes no difference. Oh, you don't think that cross-breeding can take place in a lab setting, too?
Genetic modification is a process that has been going on really long before Mendel figured out there were genes. It's all modified, whether by crossing within or outside of species.
If you don't think so, I've got a nice tasty tangelo for you to munch on.
You can't make the seeds without use of synthetic chemicals.
The seeds aren't the agricultural product being sold under the organic markings, whether or not they were made with "synthetic chemicals". The seeds grow into plants, and the corn (or wheat, etc) produced by the plant is what is sold as organic.
Not only that, it's continued refinement, of both plants and humans, so that the co-evolved plants approach ideal foods for the co-evolved humans.
That's why I enjoy a really tasty poison ivy salad, and top it off with a helping of rhubarb leaves. My wife's parents enjoy a good helping of Mother-In-Law's Tongue on a regular basis. At least my father in law does. We all co-evolved, so it must be great, right?
Modern commercial crops haven't evolved. They've been managed and crossbred for centuries. Ever since Gregor Mendel started working on peas.
Because when I book a flight I do so, in some part, based on the current seating availability. That's if I have flexibility in deciding when to fly. I'll take a later flight if it is currently emptier, and I've absolutely refused to book a flight where there are no aisle or window seats left. Your system keeps me from knowing any of that until after I've paid for the ticket.
People booking later pay more.
That already happens.
If there are any open seats, sell them 12 hours before the flight. No cancellation policy, prices drop and drop until all the seats are filled.
There is a price point where the airlines will lose money by doing this. Your weight uses fuel, which costs money. In addition, you'll simply create confusion and problems for those who wait until the last minute specifically to get good deals, and then wind up with no seat at all because they were too late. That is, of course, their problem, but it does impact the business of the airline.
With all the time saved from not having to do the "We are now looking for volunteers to not get on the plane" dance,
Which is essentially zero. I've never been on an airplane that was delayed by overbooking. The airline knows well before the departure that they're in an overbooked state and can (and do) ask well in advance of departure for the volunteers. Sometimes they ask for volunteers and then it turns out they aren't overbooked, so they tell the volunteers to get on the plane as normal. Any volunteers that are used are dealt with after the doors close, not causing any delay of the plane. At least that's how United does it. If other airlines do it by delaying departure, they are creating the problem for themselves and they're stupid.
SEC. 2105. 7 U.S.C. 6504 NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR ORGANIC PRODUCTION.
To be sold or labeled as an organically produced agricultural
product under this title, an agricultural product shall --
(1) have been produced and handled without the use of synthetic chemicals, except as otherwise provided in this title;
(2) except as otherwise provided in this title and excluding
livestock, not be produced on land to which any prohibited substances, including synthetic chemicals, have been applied during the 3 years immediately preceding the harvest of the agricultural products; and
(3) be produced and handled in compliance with an organic
plan agreed to by the producer and handler of such product
and the certifying agent.
I see nothing in that definition that prohibits "genetically modified" seed being used. In addition, the CFR seems to be most interested in restriction who can used the official USDA "organic" label, not in what can be referred to as "organic".
BTW, not only is the latter "organic farmer" screwing Monsanto--he is also screwing the consumer, by passing off his genetically modified crops as organic.
Organic is a designation based on how a crop is grown, and is, in most cases, a way for the farmer to screw the consumer into paying more.
All modern crops are "genetically modified" in some manner, even "organic" (and especially organic, to gain pest resistance without needing pesticides). Nobody grows the same kind of corn that the native americans, or ancient Egyptians, did. The results of Fr. Mendel's work appears in all commercially produced crops.
Those elaborate models you cite make most flights into cattle cars, sardine cans, with overhead storage bulging to the bursting point.
What has made overhead storage bulging is not the practice of overbooking, which is a natural response to the tendency of people to book flights and then not show up, expecting a full refund, so the airlines would have empty seats that make no money.
The cause is the creation of baggage charges for every checked bag. This, naturally, makes the frugal among the fliers buy the biggest bag they can that will meet airline standards (and often those that obviously don't) and try to stuff it into the overhead for free, because it won't fit under the seat in front of them.
These are the people, of course, who would take advantage of the free gate checking of bags but they've managed to pack something valuable into the bag and don't want to let it go baggage class.
I do wish the airlines would enforce their policies on carryon bag sizes and number, which would go a long way towards easing the crunch in overhead space. Stop the people at the gate from carrying on the big bags (or bypassing the pay-to-check system by gate checking them) and force them to check everything more than 2.
I remember this same thing being part of the deal. Despite what others might say. I also remember satellite TV being commercial free.
Satellite TV is not the same thing as cable TV. Cable TV has NEVER been commercial-free and never claimed that it was intended to be. How could it be? It started out as a system to deliver BROADCAST channels and broadcast channels have ads. People living in apartment buildings in big cities had trouble getting the local stations because of multipath and other interference using their own antennas so they got together and put one big antenna on the roof and sent a cable to every apartment from that. (Or the building management did it.) "CATV". Multiple buildings started sharing. Someone realized they could make money doing this, so "cable TV" was born. That was all based on carrying LOCAL TV, which had ads.
It wasn't until later that cable TV expanded from the community antenna systems into carrying satellite-provided programming. Even after adding pay channels delivered to the head end of the cable by satellite, cable TV still carried broadcast TV, and those channels still had ads.
Along the way, local activists realized that they could force the cable TV companies to add local non-broadcast channels to carry civic and local information. Oila, Public Access. Now called PEG, for "public, education, and government". THOSE channels are ad-free, but they are few, and many other channels still carried ads.
Yes, in the early days of satellite programming, most of those channels were subscription services. They got their revenue from the subscribers and not ads. Except, of course, for the satellite super stations which were just retransmissions of the broadcast station they orginated from. WGN, WTBS, to name two. Those have always had ads. You could watch ads for Atlanta grocery stores while watching movies on WTBS. And then someone got the bright idea to create shopping channels, which are 24/7 ads.
If some cable salesman lied to you and said you'd be getting advertising free television, well, he lied, and you believed it. It isn't true, and no legit cable outfit made such a claim.
It's amazing that a patently absurd claim about cable TV being ad-free could be modded "informative". It just didn't happen, and if you consider for even a moment how and why cable TV got started, you'd know that. Those broadcast channels that were the basis for cable TV had and always will have ads.
Yeah, and one of the features they touted when cable TV first came out was that it was completely commercial free. How did that work out for us again?
I don't know where you got that claim from, but I've been involved in cable tv since early on and I've never heard anyone claim that one of its features was "completely commercial free". That's just lunacy.
It started out as community antenna TV systems, and all that did was carry local broadcast stations -- which have always had ads. (That's where the acronym "CATV" came from. Also known as MATV for "master antenna".) Then satellite got involved, with the "superstations" like TBS and WGN. Ted Turner's little podunk WTBS has always run ads. Religious broadcasters jumped on the satellite bandwagon pretty quick, too. Ad supported.
The relative late comers were the pay channels, and they've always run ads for their own programs, even if they didn't carry outside commercials.
No, cable TV has never been about "completely commercial free" at any time in its life. So, I guess it worked out just like the cable companies planned.
Now, if you want some "commercial free", I've got some free Android apps that I promise are "completely commercial free".
You've never taken a class that was graded on the curve, have you? Or had to vie for scholarships or other academic awards that have real-life consequences?
I think the point is to give access to the tools that they could use in real life while ensuring that they can still work independently.
Well, in real life, people collaborate on work. So, if you are demanding they do all the work without collaborating, you are already putting artificial limits on the process.
If you are going to put one artificial limit on them, why not two? They don't get to look things up. But that's not fair, is it?
So don't ask questions where they have to look things up. If you have to look up the concepts behind the work you are doing, then you haven't really learned anything, now have you? I'll point out that there is a difference between forgetting the name for some concept (e.g., "Boyle's Law" or "Charles' Law") and what that concept is ("pressure vs. volume of a gas" etc.) If you want to teach the concepts, you'll accept a demonstration of the concept without demanding it be named properly.
Even if you could come up with unique questions, you still have a situation where they could hire someone else to answer the questions for you.
That exists in real life, too. They're called consultants. If you are going to test in "real life" mode, do it. You have to allow consultants.
My suggestions: only let http through and use a white-list for acceptable websites.
You don't get to install anything on my phone, tablet, or latptop. Ain't gonna happen. And if you do, I'll simply use root to get around it. Real life sucks, huh?
It is only a taste of real life, but it should be enough to prepare them.
Real life rarely sets 100 people down in a room and hands them a list of questions to answer. Tests aren't supposed to simulate real life. Write the test to test what you need to test, not test whether they could figure out a way around an artificial limit that isn't going to be there in real life.
The system-on-chip (SoC) solution can accurately distinguish between objects that appear virtually identical using traditional red-green-blue imaging chips.
The sentence immediately preceding that one, claims the product senses outside the visual spectrum ("hyper-spectral") and that it can perform remote spectral analysis, but somehow it uses just a good ol' RGB sensor.
Yes, it says that it can differentiate things that a traditional RGB sensor cannot. That means it's NOT a "good ol' RGB sensor".
Color cameras are just black and white ones with a set of filters over the pixels. Traditional color cameras use red, green and blue filters in a Bayer pattern. You can make a "hyperspectral" camera by using narrower filters of specific wavelengths to detect light at those wavelengths. For example, if you know that corn and someone else differ at a certain wavelength, use a filter at that wavelength.
You can also make a hyperspectral line imager by using a slit instead of a round aperture and putting a grating or prism behind it. That turns the slit image into a two-D "image" where the slit is broken down by color. One dimension is along the line, the second is by color. Move the camera so the slit covers the desired imaging area and record the spectrum at each "pixel" in the resulting image. Google for "CAP" and "Archer".
Part of education today is learning how to use resources like the internet, and sometimes databases specific to the material you are learning.
That's true. Doing research is not an innate thing for most people. Where do you look? What is relevant? When I went to graduate school, one of the first classes we were required to take involved tasks that forced us to go find where in the library certain things were, and where other things were on campus, and how to use what we found there.
So, to "test" that, you assign papers and outside-of-class projects.
When you are giving a test, as in "everyone sitting in one room with a sheet of questions", design the questions so that your ability to do research isn't being tested, but your grasp of the concepts that lie behind the material. Things that don't require you to look anything up, but have you explain what you would need to look up and how it applies to the problem. Tests should never be the only thing considered in a grade.
How? How do you know what sites I'm visiting on my iPad or Android phone? Do you think I'm going to allow you to install tracking software?
The answer to the question being asked is: you can't. If you allow access to "the Internet", you allow access to the Internet and what it includes.
The question you should be asking is "how can I test what I need to test without requiring reference material?", which first requires asking "what do I need to test?" Many people think that making up tests is easy. Good tests aren't easy to make.
You talk about "problem solving". Well, if that's what you want to test for, ask questions that probe that ability without requiring minute detail or arcane trivia. Or provide the arcane trivia in the question (along with a significant amount of distracting information). E.g., if the solution requires a knowledge of the density of water at four different temperatures, provide a short table of density, refractive index, dissociation constants, and a couple of other physical properties at ten temperatures. This will test the ability of the student to determine exactly what property of water is relevant.
Also, grade on the work and not the answer. If someone needs to have memorized some equation to get the correct answer and you didn't provide it, but the equation itself is not part of what you want to test, give credit if he gets close. Does the work show an understanding of the concepts if not the specific equations?
Also you didn't really explain how they would have access so I assumed they would be in some sort of school computer lab,
Well, yes, if you only let them use the computers you give them, you can try to limit their access to other things. If you are in a lab, why not just let them use the reference books in the lab?
And such loans are not taxed as "income" or "capital gains" from stock.
Because they aren't. They are loans.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Alternatively, anything that allows the wealthiest to dodge their tax obligations should be looked at as a bug, not a feature.
The "tax obligation" is what the law requires them to pay. Are you claiming that they are violating the law and paying less than required? If so, the IRS would probably like to have copies of your evidence.
If all you are whining about is that they have deductions that they use, just like the rest of us have deductions we can use, then I assume you use none of your deductions and pay more than the law requires.
The founding fathers had a lot to say about the accumulation of wealth and the corrosive effect it has on society.
And yet, they implemented neither income nor wealth taxes, at least at the federal level. Odd how you imply they didn't want the accumulation of wealth and yet they did nothing to stop it. I think they actually knew that wealth was the incentive to success and didn't want to cripple a new country by trying to redistribute the wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
The Feds do legitimately have the right to regulate interstate travel.
This isn't travel.
This would fit very clearly and legitimately within the Interstate Commerce clause.
Yes, in the modern world where everything fits under the ICC, it does, but in a world where words have meaning and actions have consequences it certainly does not. The Feds do NOT have the right to levy a state sales tax, nor do they have the right to prohibit a state from levying one.
I would guess that consumers and retailers would very quickly put a huge amount of pressure on their local representatives to stick to the Federal sales tax guidelines.
I would guess that you'd have 50 state attorneys-general in federal court suing to overturn such a ridiculous power grab on the part of the feds before the consumers could even say "boo".
The members of staff who had loaned the laptops were asked to make sure that these machines were always chained to their desks.
So the fault was with the people who loaned the laptops for not keeping them chained up. It's hard to loan someone something if you've chained it to your desk, but that's the best security if you don't trust the people you loan things to, I guess.
So, in the long run, it is likely to save consumers money.
What a ridiculous assumption.
Your proposal falls so far outside the authority of the federal government under the Constitution that I imagine that Jefferson et.al. are spinning in their graves. The federal government simply does not have the authority to define for the states what their sales tax will be and parcel it out for them.
There are no advantages to either the consumer or the businesses in your plan. The state of California, one of the most bankrupt states in the country, would lose a lot of money under this plan, and the ability to create a more stable revenue system. In most of the other states, consumers would see the cost of everything go up, because they pay less that 7% in sales tax. This is hardly a revenue-neutral system as you pretend.
As for the advantages of mail-order over brick-and-mortar, well, two things. First, mail-order outfits don't use the local services as heavily as the brick and mortars (how many firemen in Tennessee report to a fire at the Amazon.com Washington facility when there is a fire?). Second, the brick-and-mortars have chosen their playground knowing the rules. It's really disengenuous of them (or for people on their behalf) to whine about how unfair the rules are. Nobody worries about the unfairness of the rules that say a mail-order outfit that uses USPS for delivery falls under the rules of the Postmaster for things like mail fraud (a federal offense), but a local brick and mortar doesn't. Why is one unfair advantage good but the other one bad?
That said, the whole thing has been debunked already,
Yeah, the girl was only provided extra food at cost and it wasn't actually stuffed down her throat to make her eat it. That's so much better. I don't think anyone was saying it was stuffed down her throat or she was forced to eat it, so you have won a phyrric victory.
As for "two different notes", you at least admit the existance of a note that let the mother know that her child wasn't being properly provided for at home, in the opinion of the state. You call it "effectively a receipt" as a way of handwaving it away. It's still preposterous that it happened at all. When a parent provides a lunch, they are assuming responsibility for what their child eats. The state should stick their nose out of it.
That is kind of the point of a nationwide identical tax on things, allowing stores to write out price stickers showing exactly what you're paying without having to calculate which part is tax etc.
Thus hiding the amount of tax that a taxpayer is actually giving up to the government.
You realize that the only thing that really keeps people from objecting to the high income tax rates is that the taxation takes place almost invisibly. I.e., you get a line item on your pay stub that you probably never look at. Then in April, you get free money from the government! (If you get a refund.)
This whole thing America has with having to manually add taxes and tips at restaurants is a real head-shaker for many Europeans.
The ready acceptance of higher and higher taxes at what many in America would consider confiscatory rates is a real head-shaker for many Americans. Once they realize that your VAT and many other taxes are hidden from you, it makes sense.
We only give a tip if we've been treated above and beyond the ordinary, since the serving staff at a given restaurant actually collects a paycheck.
This has nothing to do with taxes.
As I've already said in other replies, the note is questionable as to when it was sent home. The article linked to from this story did not specify that the note regarding the school checking lunches was received the same day; it could have been a policy note that was sent home earlier.
The note was specific about the charge "in her case". It's hard to imagine that a note sent home two months ago would tell a mother that her child would not bring a sufficiently healthy lunch and thus be required to pay $1.25 on Jan. 30 of the next year. That makes the argument that is was a "form letter" sent home "earlier" hard to accept.
The receipt for the chicken nuggets only shows that the girl bought chicken nuggets. It does not, however, support the allegations that she was ordered to not eat her own lunch and have instead only the chicken nuggets as many "news" sites want us to believe.
I think the fact that there has been an admission from DHHS that someone did inspect lunches and order them not to be eaten, but won't or cannot identify who specifically did it, is pretty good evidence that someone did tell her not to eat her lunch, and DHHS doesn't have the courage to say who.
Of course, this ignores the overarching question of why state inspectors are required to force children to eat every food group during their lunch. The USDA food pyramid shows only 2-3 servings from both the dairy and fruit groups. One at breakfast, one at dinner, you got all you need. None at lunch are required. The state is forcing requirements outside the USDA suggestions onto children and implying to them that their parents aren't taking good care of them.
If the state wants to regulate what the cafeteria sells, that's one thing. To regulate what a parent provides for their child's lunch is preposterous. What's next, forcing every child to eat their lunch under the direct supervision of a state inspector so the state will know that the child actually ate each mandated item?
and has a link to the entire rule.
To a discussion of the rule, but not the rule itself.
The law doesn't need specifics, the USDA defines the specifics based on the law.
Dude, the law defines what the USDA can do, and unless there is actually a federal law that says "GM doesn't count", it counts.
Well according to the USDA, it's a lot more than that. They won't certify anything genetically modified by any laboratory methods as "organic". Check out my other post.
Do you have a reference to any section of the federal law regarding the use of the USDA organic label that would prohibit the use on anything with GM content? The section I quoted that defines what can be called organic doesn't mention anything about genetic modifications.
That's not curtailing their freedom, that's providing structure so the game can be played at all.
Providing structure is inherently limiting freedom. "You can't do that" said to a game player to keep him "in bounds" is, by definition, limiting his freedom to "do that" or go "out of bounds". You say "potato", I say "starchy tuber".
We as a society have an interest in holding these competitions, and keeping contests as fair and non-destructive as practical.
Do we? Doesn't society benefit when a company reaches a size that it can offer significant price breaks to consumers through economies of scale, even though this is clearly not fair to small competitors? Note that I am specifically not talking about Walmart, where there is a considerable amount of other baggage that clouds the issue of size vs. benefit. The kneejerk "Walmat Bad, Local Good" is not relevant because there is so much more involved than just size. A local large supermarket has better prices than a corner store -- do we have an interest in trying to force the large market to raise their prices to keep things fair for the corner store?
Otherwise, why not hire hitmen to bash your opponents' knees,
Such rules exist not for the control of corporate profit and competitiveness, but for everyone as a whole. Try again.
or any number of other dirty tricks?
Well, I think the discussion is currently whether "raising the price of something because the author just died" is a dirty trick or just sleazy. Don't the prices for most works of art go up after the artist dies? The argument that upping the price on Houston's work is sleazy because there isn't an actual increase in the cost to produce the product is misplaced. That's an argument that applies to production of all digital content.
the conflation of natural breeding with GMO is something the industry has brainwashed many people with.
Why yes, we are all shills for the GM producers. Thanks for outing us.
No, I think it is just that the difference between "doing it in a test tube" and "doing it in a test tube" is a difference that makes no difference. Oh, you don't think that cross-breeding can take place in a lab setting, too?
Genetic modification is a process that has been going on really long before Mendel figured out there were genes. It's all modified, whether by crossing within or outside of species.
If you don't think so, I've got a nice tasty tangelo for you to munch on.
You can't make the seeds without use of synthetic chemicals.
The seeds aren't the agricultural product being sold under the organic markings, whether or not they were made with "synthetic chemicals". The seeds grow into plants, and the corn (or wheat, etc) produced by the plant is what is sold as organic.
Not only that, it's continued refinement, of both plants and humans, so that the co-evolved plants approach ideal foods for the co-evolved humans.
That's why I enjoy a really tasty poison ivy salad, and top it off with a helping of rhubarb leaves. My wife's parents enjoy a good helping of Mother-In-Law's Tongue on a regular basis. At least my father in law does. We all co-evolved, so it must be great, right?
Modern commercial crops haven't evolved. They've been managed and crossbred for centuries. Ever since Gregor Mendel started working on peas.
Why not:
Because when I book a flight I do so, in some part, based on the current seating availability. That's if I have flexibility in deciding when to fly. I'll take a later flight if it is currently emptier, and I've absolutely refused to book a flight where there are no aisle or window seats left. Your system keeps me from knowing any of that until after I've paid for the ticket.
People booking later pay more.
That already happens.
If there are any open seats, sell them 12 hours before the flight. No cancellation policy, prices drop and drop until all the seats are filled.
There is a price point where the airlines will lose money by doing this. Your weight uses fuel, which costs money. In addition, you'll simply create confusion and problems for those who wait until the last minute specifically to get good deals, and then wind up with no seat at all because they were too late. That is, of course, their problem, but it does impact the business of the airline.
With all the time saved from not having to do the "We are now looking for volunteers to not get on the plane" dance,
Which is essentially zero. I've never been on an airplane that was delayed by overbooking. The airline knows well before the departure that they're in an overbooked state and can (and do) ask well in advance of departure for the volunteers. Sometimes they ask for volunteers and then it turns out they aren't overbooked, so they tell the volunteers to get on the plane as normal. Any volunteers that are used are dealt with after the doors close, not causing any delay of the plane. At least that's how United does it. If other airlines do it by delaying departure, they are creating the problem for themselves and they're stupid.
SEC. 2105. 7 U.S.C. 6504 NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR ORGANIC PRODUCTION.
To be sold or labeled as an organically produced agricultural product under this title, an agricultural product shall --
(1) have been produced and handled without the use of synthetic chemicals, except as otherwise provided in this title;
(2) except as otherwise provided in this title and excluding livestock, not be produced on land to which any prohibited substances, including synthetic chemicals, have been applied during the 3 years immediately preceding the harvest of the agricultural products; and
(3) be produced and handled in compliance with an organic plan agreed to by the producer and handler of such product and the certifying agent.
I see nothing in that definition that prohibits "genetically modified" seed being used. In addition, the CFR seems to be most interested in restriction who can used the official USDA "organic" label, not in what can be referred to as "organic".
BTW, not only is the latter "organic farmer" screwing Monsanto--he is also screwing the consumer, by passing off his genetically modified crops as organic.
Organic is a designation based on how a crop is grown, and is, in most cases, a way for the farmer to screw the consumer into paying more.
All modern crops are "genetically modified" in some manner, even "organic" (and especially organic, to gain pest resistance without needing pesticides). Nobody grows the same kind of corn that the native americans, or ancient Egyptians, did. The results of Fr. Mendel's work appears in all commercially produced crops.
Those elaborate models you cite make most flights into cattle cars, sardine cans, with overhead storage bulging to the bursting point.
What has made overhead storage bulging is not the practice of overbooking, which is a natural response to the tendency of people to book flights and then not show up, expecting a full refund, so the airlines would have empty seats that make no money.
The cause is the creation of baggage charges for every checked bag. This, naturally, makes the frugal among the fliers buy the biggest bag they can that will meet airline standards (and often those that obviously don't) and try to stuff it into the overhead for free, because it won't fit under the seat in front of them.
These are the people, of course, who would take advantage of the free gate checking of bags but they've managed to pack something valuable into the bag and don't want to let it go baggage class.
I do wish the airlines would enforce their policies on carryon bag sizes and number, which would go a long way towards easing the crunch in overhead space. Stop the people at the gate from carrying on the big bags (or bypassing the pay-to-check system by gate checking them) and force them to check everything more than 2.
I remember this same thing being part of the deal. Despite what others might say. I also remember satellite TV being commercial free.
Satellite TV is not the same thing as cable TV. Cable TV has NEVER been commercial-free and never claimed that it was intended to be. How could it be? It started out as a system to deliver BROADCAST channels and broadcast channels have ads. People living in apartment buildings in big cities had trouble getting the local stations because of multipath and other interference using their own antennas so they got together and put one big antenna on the roof and sent a cable to every apartment from that. (Or the building management did it.) "CATV". Multiple buildings started sharing. Someone realized they could make money doing this, so "cable TV" was born. That was all based on carrying LOCAL TV, which had ads.
It wasn't until later that cable TV expanded from the community antenna systems into carrying satellite-provided programming. Even after adding pay channels delivered to the head end of the cable by satellite, cable TV still carried broadcast TV, and those channels still had ads.
Along the way, local activists realized that they could force the cable TV companies to add local non-broadcast channels to carry civic and local information. Oila, Public Access. Now called PEG, for "public, education, and government". THOSE channels are ad-free, but they are few, and many other channels still carried ads.
Yes, in the early days of satellite programming, most of those channels were subscription services. They got their revenue from the subscribers and not ads. Except, of course, for the satellite super stations which were just retransmissions of the broadcast station they orginated from. WGN, WTBS, to name two. Those have always had ads. You could watch ads for Atlanta grocery stores while watching movies on WTBS. And then someone got the bright idea to create shopping channels, which are 24/7 ads.
If some cable salesman lied to you and said you'd be getting advertising free television, well, he lied, and you believed it. It isn't true, and no legit cable outfit made such a claim.
It's amazing that a patently absurd claim about cable TV being ad-free could be modded "informative". It just didn't happen, and if you consider for even a moment how and why cable TV got started, you'd know that. Those broadcast channels that were the basis for cable TV had and always will have ads.
Yeah, and one of the features they touted when cable TV first came out was that it was completely commercial free. How did that work out for us again?
I don't know where you got that claim from, but I've been involved in cable tv since early on and I've never heard anyone claim that one of its features was "completely commercial free". That's just lunacy.
It started out as community antenna TV systems, and all that did was carry local broadcast stations -- which have always had ads. (That's where the acronym "CATV" came from. Also known as MATV for "master antenna".) Then satellite got involved, with the "superstations" like TBS and WGN. Ted Turner's little podunk WTBS has always run ads. Religious broadcasters jumped on the satellite bandwagon pretty quick, too. Ad supported.
The relative late comers were the pay channels, and they've always run ads for their own programs, even if they didn't carry outside commercials.
No, cable TV has never been about "completely commercial free" at any time in its life. So, I guess it worked out just like the cable companies planned.
Now, if you want some "commercial free", I've got some free Android apps that I promise are "completely commercial free".
Ultimately, the cheater only hurts themselves.
You've never taken a class that was graded on the curve, have you? Or had to vie for scholarships or other academic awards that have real-life consequences?
I think the point is to give access to the tools that they could use in real life while ensuring that they can still work independently.
Well, in real life, people collaborate on work. So, if you are demanding they do all the work without collaborating, you are already putting artificial limits on the process.
If you are going to put one artificial limit on them, why not two? They don't get to look things up. But that's not fair, is it?
So don't ask questions where they have to look things up. If you have to look up the concepts behind the work you are doing, then you haven't really learned anything, now have you? I'll point out that there is a difference between forgetting the name for some concept (e.g., "Boyle's Law" or "Charles' Law") and what that concept is ("pressure vs. volume of a gas" etc.) If you want to teach the concepts, you'll accept a demonstration of the concept without demanding it be named properly.
Even if you could come up with unique questions, you still have a situation where they could hire someone else to answer the questions for you.
That exists in real life, too. They're called consultants. If you are going to test in "real life" mode, do it. You have to allow consultants.
My suggestions: only let http through and use a white-list for acceptable websites.
You don't get to install anything on my phone, tablet, or latptop. Ain't gonna happen. And if you do, I'll simply use root to get around it. Real life sucks, huh?
It is only a taste of real life, but it should be enough to prepare them.
Real life rarely sets 100 people down in a room and hands them a list of questions to answer. Tests aren't supposed to simulate real life. Write the test to test what you need to test, not test whether they could figure out a way around an artificial limit that isn't going to be there in real life.
From TFA:
The system-on-chip (SoC) solution can accurately distinguish between objects that appear virtually identical using traditional red-green-blue imaging chips.
The sentence immediately preceding that one, claims the product senses outside the visual spectrum ("hyper-spectral") and that it can perform remote spectral analysis, but somehow it uses just a good ol' RGB sensor.
Yes, it says that it can differentiate things that a traditional RGB sensor cannot. That means it's NOT a "good ol' RGB sensor".
Color cameras are just black and white ones with a set of filters over the pixels. Traditional color cameras use red, green and blue filters in a Bayer pattern. You can make a "hyperspectral" camera by using narrower filters of specific wavelengths to detect light at those wavelengths. For example, if you know that corn and someone else differ at a certain wavelength, use a filter at that wavelength.
You can also make a hyperspectral line imager by using a slit instead of a round aperture and putting a grating or prism behind it. That turns the slit image into a two-D "image" where the slit is broken down by color. One dimension is along the line, the second is by color. Move the camera so the slit covers the desired imaging area and record the spectrum at each "pixel" in the resulting image. Google for "CAP" and "Archer".
Part of education today is learning how to use resources like the internet, and sometimes databases specific to the material you are learning.
That's true. Doing research is not an innate thing for most people. Where do you look? What is relevant? When I went to graduate school, one of the first classes we were required to take involved tasks that forced us to go find where in the library certain things were, and where other things were on campus, and how to use what we found there.
So, to "test" that, you assign papers and outside-of-class projects.
When you are giving a test, as in "everyone sitting in one room with a sheet of questions", design the questions so that your ability to do research isn't being tested, but your grasp of the concepts that lie behind the material. Things that don't require you to look anything up, but have you explain what you would need to look up and how it applies to the problem. Tests should never be the only thing considered in a grade.
Then monitor the internet traffic ...
How? How do you know what sites I'm visiting on my iPad or Android phone? Do you think I'm going to allow you to install tracking software?
The answer to the question being asked is: you can't. If you allow access to "the Internet", you allow access to the Internet and what it includes.
The question you should be asking is "how can I test what I need to test without requiring reference material?", which first requires asking "what do I need to test?" Many people think that making up tests is easy. Good tests aren't easy to make.
You talk about "problem solving". Well, if that's what you want to test for, ask questions that probe that ability without requiring minute detail or arcane trivia. Or provide the arcane trivia in the question (along with a significant amount of distracting information). E.g., if the solution requires a knowledge of the density of water at four different temperatures, provide a short table of density, refractive index, dissociation constants, and a couple of other physical properties at ten temperatures. This will test the ability of the student to determine exactly what property of water is relevant.
Also, grade on the work and not the answer. If someone needs to have memorized some equation to get the correct answer and you didn't provide it, but the equation itself is not part of what you want to test, give credit if he gets close. Does the work show an understanding of the concepts if not the specific equations?
Also you didn't really explain how they would have access so I assumed they would be in some sort of school computer lab,
Well, yes, if you only let them use the computers you give them, you can try to limit their access to other things. If you are in a lab, why not just let them use the reference books in the lab?
And such loans are not taxed as "income" or "capital gains" from stock.
Because they aren't. They are loans.
Alternatively, anything that allows the wealthiest to dodge their tax obligations should be looked at as a bug, not a feature.
The "tax obligation" is what the law requires them to pay. Are you claiming that they are violating the law and paying less than required? If so, the IRS would probably like to have copies of your evidence.
If all you are whining about is that they have deductions that they use, just like the rest of us have deductions we can use, then I assume you use none of your deductions and pay more than the law requires.
The founding fathers had a lot to say about the accumulation of wealth and the corrosive effect it has on society.
And yet, they implemented neither income nor wealth taxes, at least at the federal level. Odd how you imply they didn't want the accumulation of wealth and yet they did nothing to stop it. I think they actually knew that wealth was the incentive to success and didn't want to cripple a new country by trying to redistribute the wealth.