You're ignoring the rest of the criticism of #3 - where are the currents from the flow of water over the edge of the world? Over-fill your glass. Same diff.
If you've never seen it, the meniscus is quite magical. Too much, yes, it overflows the edge, until there isn't too much and then it stops. With a bulge on the surface of the water.
You know, since it rains a lot, why doesn't the ocean keep rising and overflow the land? Because the excess runs OFF THE EDGE OF THE WORLD. Then it stops. Here, see, like this here glass 'o water, you filgy landlubber. Over the edge, until it stops, and see there, a bulge. This here ocean does the same thing.
No, I didn't ignore "the rest of the criticism". You ignored what would happen after the excess drained away. Where are the currents? Why, matey, ALL OVER THE OCEAN. They aren't all necessarily on the surface, you know? Ain'tcha never been caught in an undertow?
It's only the ignorant who believed that people thought the world was flat until "modern times".
Your gratuitous insult has been noted. It is only the ignorant who didn't notice that I wasn't defending the flat earth, or making the claim that people DID believe it. I dealt specifically with YOUR objection to why they might believe it. In daily life they would see bulges on the tops of filled containers, so it was reasonable that they would assume the ocean did the same thing. I didn't say they HAD to believe the earth was flat, or that there wasn't some other reason to think the earth was a globe, just that YOUR reason was crap.
...and in nature, there are LOTS of sperical objects to serve as models (apples, oranges, grapes, etc), whereas I don't think they had contact lenses... (your #3)
They certainly had the meniscus formed when over-filling a container with water, and it would not be hard to imagine that they would assume the same thing happened on a large scale with the oceans.
Yeah, that's what I get for relying on the summary which talks about "detecting" and not "measuring".
So, there really is nothing significant in this "news", since C14 dating would show the liquor to be YOUNGER than it claims to be anyway. Higher levels of C14 would indicate less decay, younger sample.
Because I know the content that I will receive is not going to be plain text...
Doesn't have to be. All it has to be is some page definition language that says "here's a title", "here's a paragraph" etc.
that can be wrapped and reformatted at will.
If you get the former, you get the latter.
Yes, I know that much of the old content is being page scanned into PDFs as IMAGES of the page. I have found this format to be usable on the Sony in landscape mode (half a book page per page), IF the file decodes at all. Color PDFs from archive.org tend not to; B/W are still huge but usually do.
That doesn't mean that anything since 1980 needs to be provided that way.
Aside from that, resolution and DPI absolutely do matter,...
Didn't say it didn't. I'm talking about "pages" and display size, not resolution.
Finally, I would also be wary of leaving all rendering up to client devices. IMO one of the major benefits of having PDF articles from journals is precisely that those articles look like they came from the journal. They are properly typeset, use sane fonts, and look neat and clean. HTML versions of the same articles look like shit. I don't know what it is about PDFs that just makes them visually more appealing, but they invariably look better than HTML or Word documents on screen.
There is no reason that a publisher could not use a "pageless" formatting language that properly marks text that can be reflowed and, e.g., equations that cannot. In fact, the Sony will try to reflow text in PDFs, so there must be some way of knowing which is which, just few seem to want to mark it that way.
I suspect that the HTML versions of journals is poor because they don't do the proper formatting, but I don't know. I never select the HTML version -- because it typically looks like crap. Or they are HTML-izing based on THEIR browser and the commands it likes, and they are using IE. Or/And they are trying to force certain formatting assuming specific font sizes instead of letting the browser format it, which is the kind of crap the results in "submit" buttons that have the top half of the characters "SUB" and nothing else.
Considering the number of people who simply ignore things like the TITLE and AUTHOR headers for PDF files, it may be a very hard education task, but that doesn't mean it won't work when it is used. (I am getting really tired of US Government produced documents in locked PDF format that have titles like "Microsoft PDF-Writer 352.9 Version 9".)
Higher resolution means being able to see the entire page (or even the entire width of the page).
I've seen this kind of comment before in the MobiRead forums. You are thinking inside the box.
Pages are an artifact of the mechanical process used to print documents. There is no physical significance to a "page" other than it determines how large a physical instance of a document will be. In fact, when I read the summary for this thread, I was thinking "how mobile would a device be that can show a broadsheet (one 'page' in newspapers) all at once?"
Book publishers have known that all along. They are forced to "repage" books when they go from hardbound to paper because the "pages" are smaller. They don't worry about keeping the same page numbers. If there is an index, they have to re-index. It's part of the process.
When you say you want your Kindle or Sony to "show a full page", they already do. The PROBLEM is that the e-documents are coming with pre-defined pages, when they should come with pre-defined logical sections. Paragraphs and chapters are logical divisions. Pages are completely artificial. And as I reread that statement, I realize I'm pushing for TRUE HTML format -- not this modern "here's how your page WILL look", but "here's the information, you define how you want it to look" model.
I read documents on my LifeDrive. Very small "pages", but the plain-text documents I read fit a full page on every screen. Yes, the page is probably on e tenth or one fifth the content of the printed book's page, but I don't care. I have no reason to care. I turn pages a lot faster than on the paper version, but that's a flick of a button.
I also read (or try to read) scientific journal articles on my Sony PRS. It's horrid. That's because the publisher has copied the page format from the printed journal. I really don't care if the second page of the article appears on page 13452 (as it does in the printed journal) or "2". That info is irrelevant. What's more important is reading the info in the article. The proper format for e-distribution would have the article reformat on the device and IGNORE any "page" nonsense the publisher wants to force on people.
In other words, PDF doesn't require a specific page size to see the entire "page", it's the publishers who force this. Saying "I want a pdf reader that shows the full page" is putting the blame in the wrong place.
The counter point is that letting almost everyone pick this option destroys the environment
No, it doesn't. Driving an SUV doesn't destroy anything. Allowing everyone choice doesn't destroy anything but control-freaks. Allowing everyone the same option is called "equality of opportunity", and we know that not everyone will make the same choice, so your implication that "if we allow it everyone will do it" is nonsense.
and drives up prices of gas for people that don't actually buy large cars.
No, failure to produce drives up the price. It isn't my fault that drilling offshore is NIMBY and ANWR is prohibited.
I suppose you could say your right to a big SUV ends at might right to breathe (cleaner) air.
No, I wouldn't say that, because it isn't true and isn't relevant. I don't think you have the right to breathe absolutely pure air, simply because the existence of other people (along with the animals and volcanoes and forest fires...) makes the air less than pure. That means there is some level of "pollution" that has to be allowed. If you want to demand that my addition to the level is zero, then you better shut off your computer and disconnect your electric service and stop eating anything you personally haven't grown in your backyard, since everything you do causes some level of "pollution."
In other words, you have the right to exist, which implies the right to emit "stuff" into the air, so I have the same rights. Instead of using a fireplace to heat my home, I have an SUV. I think I come out ahead on "carbon credits".
You probably fell for the Clinton trick of issuing an executive order lowering allowable arsenic levels in water to some ridiculously tiny amount, which led to liberals flaming the conservatives when that order was quite appropriately rescinded by the next president. "Oooh, those awful Republicans want to poison the water", which is a patently absurd claim since the previous limits caused no danger to anyone, much less poisoned them. "Anything more than zero is too much" is a wonderful platitude, but it isn't realistic and it isn't possible. (And if you try to meet that level by drinking only distilled filtered water, you are responsible for a lot of carbon footprint for the energy necessary to reach those tiny (but still nonzero) levels of pollutants.)
This all avoids the initial issue, which is regulating businesses because they might not make useful things. People find SUVs useful, so they are being made. Prohibiting SUVs won't create an equal demand for tiny shitbox cars. A healthy economy relies on both producers making desired goods and consumers desiring them. Either side stops, the economy fails.
1. You will be looking for rogue transmitters and APs in the area of your network as a security measure, and be able to identify if someone is attempting to transmit from the parking lot. That is a good indicator that you need to send security out to a car.
I'm a licensed amateur radio operator with an HSMM system in my car. You send security out to my car, parked on a public street, and if they do anything more than smile and wave I'll get the cops on site to hand out assault charges faster than you can say "unlicensed operations must not interfere with and must accept interference from licensed users of the spectrum".
Now, if I was trying to cut into your WIRED network, you could have the cops come arrest ME. See, the difference between wireless and wired isn't that hard to understand, now is it?
Except we end up creating useless products without a point,...
If a company creates a product that people want to buy, evidently those people see a point and don't find it useless. If nobody wants to buy a product, it isn't made for very long, and the company moves on to something else. A growing, healthy economy is a two-sided sheet of paper. On one side there are producers, on the other consumers. Producers need to be free to make what consumers want to buy. If producers don't make things the consumers want to buy, the economy fails.
That's the whole point behind free markets and capitalism. Free markets and capitalism work, unless you are someone who wants to define what is necessary for others. Then they are a danger that must be regulated. Regulating what a company can make doesn't create demand, it only creates failure.
E.g., people want cars that can carry more than two skinny adults and a bag of peanuts. They're called SUVs. They carry more stuff and people more safely than tiny little cars. They go places that tiny little cars cannot. Some people don't want to allow this as a choice, so they create regulations on the market that limit choices.
"Your car must get 30 MPG." I'm ok paying for the gas at 27 MPG, it's none of your business if I want to pay extra for the comfort and safety.
"You live in the city and don't need an SUV." I live in the city and drive into the country to search for people when they get lost. I think that could be called "helpful", don't you?
Yep. Sounds good to me. Pull out of Iraq and let Shiites kill Sunnis and vice versa because they have the wrong religion or because they want to regain power in a dictatorship. We can sit by and watch. Not our problem. Doesn't matter if the dead people are just trying to live their lives and may be children or whatever. Not our problem.
What was that? Darfur? Timor? You want us to what in Darfur?
The Home Office is the office responsible for home affairs - I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the equivalent of the US Department of State,...
You picked the one Department that is least like the Home Office. The Dept. of State deals with issues external to the US. Interior, Homeland Security, Commerce, are the internal departments that are probably most like Home Office.
Here's the quote: "I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development..."
My guess is he doesn't plan to enforce it.
Then he's lying when he says "we will" and not "we want".
I have no idea why the responses to this story sound like the Fox News "'Bama's raisin' ma taxes!" crowd.
Because in order to do what he "will" do, he needs to spend $420 BILLION dollars, and there are only two ways to get that money. Both make everything cost more, even if inflation created by printing money at will isn't technically a tax, the result is the same.
Not a chance in hell. He's talking about 360 BILLION dollars here.
$420 billion. The estimated US GDP for 2008 was $14.23 trillion.
But I'm wondering where he's going to get the money to make this something other than a nice speech.
One or both of two places: either taxing the GDP at a higher rate, removing money from the economy that would be invested by the people who earned it in things that are productive and worth investment, making everything cost more to cover the increased taxation, or printing it, thus making every dollar already in the GDP worth less and driving inflation so everything costs everyone more.
Raising taxes to spend more money to spur the economy is a losing game, since the biggest waste of money is the administration of the programs that tax and spend. Every dollar spent on administration is a loss to the GDP.
People, he's saying 3% of our GDP, not tax revenues. The GDP is the Gross Domestic Product, the total market value of all goods and services that are produced within this country.
The CIA factbook claims the US GDP for 2008 was $14.13 trillion, with tax revenues of $2.5 trillion. Three percent of the GDP is $420 billion. The government has no right to decide how the results of the GDP are invested, but I have no doubt that we'll see another $420 billion porkulus bill spending tax revenues and newly printed money.
Every birthday, holiday and anniversary of my untimely demise, this company will send you insulting messages reminding you of how great I was,...
And in-between it will send you info on how to make your penis larger and how to get that 49.000.000 MBP my executor is protecting from the Kenyan government out of the country. You didn't know I was so rich (in both departments), did you?
Please include the cost of insurance and other legal hoops that have to be bought besides the physical gun and ammunition?
When I was young, I used to stick around work after the late shift and use the computers. This required electricity on the part of the company. They were happy to let me do it because having someone ON SITE during times when normally nobody was meant they could get a break on insurance. Someone was there to deal with fires, etc, instead of depending on automated alarms and such.
I tell that story only because it is reasonable to assume that an armed ship will have lower insurance rates than unarmed ones, because there is less chance that they will be pirated and the insurance have to pay off.
Also the open ocean is NOT your backyard. A more realistic scenario would be firing a few shots at the person approaching your car who you think is a pirate.
Stupid and meaningless automobile analogy.
There is no reason for a small vessel to approach a large merchant ship without clear identification and communications on the high seas. There is NO reason for a small, unidentified, high-speed ARMED vessel to approach a merchant ship on the high seas AT ALL.
On the other hand -- "hey dude, you left your lights on".
If I'm a merchant captain, I say anything within 300 yards of my vessel on the high seas IS in my backyard and you better have a real good excuse for being there, and if you try to board my vessel you are no longer in my backyard, you are undeniably on MY property and will suffer the consequences.
If ships armed themselves, then they waive the "right of innocent passage" and when they are out of international waters, then they might run into problem with the local authorities.
They only waive this right if they act in ways that are "prejudicial to the peace, good order or the security" of the country in whose territorial waters they are sailing. One specific example from one of the articles you linked to is "weapons practice", but not "weapons possession". Even submarines, which are well armed, don't need to give up their weapons in territorial waters, they only need to sail on the surface under colors.
Yes, if a merchant vessel came into US waters with guns blazing, I think there would be concern. If, however, they entered with "guns stowed and locked", there is no danger to the security of the US. In Somali waters, there would be no danger to Somali 'good order', unless Somalia decided that successful piracy was part of their 'good order', and then they'd run afoul of international law. It is a reasonable expectation that merchant vessels should receive protection from piracy while they are in territorial waters from the owner of those waters.
Even so, the pirates operate in international waters, IIRC.
How many people read the headline and wondered why a Seattle baseball team was trying to create something to keep Pittsburgh players away?
If the Somalis want change I'd say that it's up to them to provide it.
Roger that. And the first way to promote change in productive directions is to stop them from thinking that "taking a ship's crew hostage for millions of dollars in ransom" will result in a change in anything but their body temperature.
These people aren't pirates because the see any "global inequality", they are pirates because they think they can make millions of dollars easily and face no consequences. It's no different than any criminal activity, white collar or blue.
And even HD is overkill if you ask many older people... they can barely tell the difference.
I AM an old person, you insensitive clod.
I can tell the difference, I just don't care. If I want to see a high-resolution sunset, I'll go outside and watch it live. I don't need to see every nose hair on the news reporter or every pore and pimple on these damn kids who seem to be everywhere on TV these days. And get off my lawn...
If we did find intelligent life, I think it would be a good idea to send a rocket with a screen and dvd player or something, with a big red button on it that plays it.
One of the fascinating free books I've been able to find for my Sony ereader was a short story "Test Rocket", I think it was called. We sent up a rocket with a mouse as a test. It disappeared. Several years later, an copy of the rocket came back, made out of materials "not of this planet" and three times the size of the original, containing what appeared to be a human.
Except he couldn't speak or communicate.
(In case the meaning was lost in summarizing, THEY are much bigger than we are and to them humans are just "laboratory mice".)
No, only if those viewpoints aren't germane to the topic at hand. The origin of life isn't taught in science class because we don't know the origin of life.
The last time I was in high school biology class, we certainly were being taught the origins of life. The "Miller experiment", if I recall the name of the guy correctly, was big news. That's the one where a mix of methane, ammonia, water and electricity were cooked for some length of time and amino acid precursors were detected. We were being taught, explicitly, about "primordial ooze" and random events leading to single cellular organisms that led to multi etc. I haven't gone back to the textbooks to see if they still say this, but from the public discussions it seems clear that nothing much has changed in this area.
That makes the "other viewpoints" relevant in that classroom, IF you believe that "other viewpoints" are supposed to be taught, and not just "viewpoints I believe in". And that is the limited context of my part of this discussion. "Other viewpoints" has to mean "other viewpoints" and if one viewpoint is relevant in a class the same class ought to get the alternates, not some other class taught in alternate decades in the basement boilerroom.
We know the origin of the universe,...
Uhhh, no, we don't know the origin of the universe any better than we know the origin of life, and for the same reason. Science just can't PROVE what happened in the past; it can disprove predictions about the future and suggest what MIGHT have happened in the past, but proof of the past is beyond the scientific method.
One example. The measurement of microwave background radiation supports the theory of the big bang, but it does not prove that the big bang must have happened.
Just because we don't know doesn't mean we should teach the untestable alternative in its place in science class to placate those who believe in the alternative absent evidence.
Unfortunately, too many times these "untestable alternatives" ARE being taught in the classroom and being pushed by scientists ("The God Delusion", e.g.) and triggering the backlash for other "untestable alternatives" to join them. I can understand the backlash, for when science steps into religion it steps back many centuries.
I'm saying that if a school has a class that explores other viewpoints (such as religion class or a philosophy class), then nothing should be off-limits.
That's even worse than what I thought you were saying. The only way "other viewpoints" should be taught is if there is a class specifically for those viewpoints? No, if you require "other viewpoints", they should be in the same place and class as the viewpoints they differ from. Otherwise, you are filing the building permit for the galactic bypass in the basement (reference to Hitchhiker's Guide.)
What I was referring to with "intellectual freedom bills" are the bills being pressed through by a religious minority as a trojan horse to teach intelligent design which is an untestable hypothesis which is not fact and should not be taught in a basic science course.
Unfortunately, the "origin of life" being taught in biology class is an untestable hypothesis and not a fact, as well. Yes, adaptation of species and genetic modification is testable, but the claim "this is how life started" is not, and cannot be. While it is likely that's how life started, there is no way of disproving that hypothesis and that removes it from the scientific method.
By that standard, the community standard of nullifying the bill of rights in a town is okay if everyone in the town agrees with it.
Nonsense. The Bill Of Rights is not a "community standard". You were talking about "community standards", not the Constitution. That's the context in which I replied.
Let the children learn that there are other viewpoints out there. That's what school is supposed to be for.
When they stop trying to embarrass or otherwise annoy me by trying to ram through "academic freedom" bills that force teachers to teach a fairytale as science and act as a wedge to break down the church/state separation, then they'll earn my sympathy and respect.
That sounds very much like you are saying that teaching "other viewpoints" is something you require of the schools, unless those viewpoints are something you don't agree with and then nobody should have the right to require schools to teach them.
However, your first claim is incorrect. Schools at the elementary and high school level are intended to teach basic concepts to, not make experts out of the children. Even the lower levels of collegiate study are required to work at this level, in this day of information explosion.
If we are to see further in the future, we must climb upon the shoulders of the giants that have come before us. To do that, we must understand what they saw and the direction they were looking. In other words, have a grasp of the basics before we can advance. Some have said "those who do not know history are bound to repeat it". This is true even more so in science and technology, and those who are repeating scientific discoveries are not advancing society in any meaningful way. Their vision goes no further than the giants who preceeded them, at best, and usually considerably less.
Community standards, the basis of most obscenity claims, were never meant to be static and unchanging - they were meant to be influenced by society as a whole.
While it is reasonable to expect they not be static, it is ridiculous to claim they should be influenced by society as a whole. To expect that would be to remove the "community" from the "community standards". It is perfectly reasonable, and perfectly acceptable, for a community to decide they they will not "follow the crowd" and to maintain what they feel are acceptable standards for them and their children.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've never seen it, the meniscus is quite magical. Too much, yes, it overflows the edge, until there isn't too much and then it stops. With a bulge on the surface of the water.
You know, since it rains a lot, why doesn't the ocean keep rising and overflow the land? Because the excess runs OFF THE EDGE OF THE WORLD. Then it stops. Here, see, like this here glass 'o water, you filgy landlubber. Over the edge, until it stops, and see there, a bulge. This here ocean does the same thing.
No, I didn't ignore "the rest of the criticism". You ignored what would happen after the excess drained away. Where are the currents? Why, matey, ALL OVER THE OCEAN. They aren't all necessarily on the surface, you know? Ain'tcha never been caught in an undertow?
It's only the ignorant who believed that people thought the world was flat until "modern times".
Your gratuitous insult has been noted. It is only the ignorant who didn't notice that I wasn't defending the flat earth, or making the claim that people DID believe it. I dealt specifically with YOUR objection to why they might believe it. In daily life they would see bulges on the tops of filled containers, so it was reasonable that they would assume the ocean did the same thing. I didn't say they HAD to believe the earth was flat, or that there wasn't some other reason to think the earth was a globe, just that YOUR reason was crap.
They certainly had the meniscus formed when over-filling a container with water, and it would not be hard to imagine that they would assume the same thing happened on a large scale with the oceans.
So, there really is nothing significant in this "news", since C14 dating would show the liquor to be YOUNGER than it claims to be anyway. Higher levels of C14 would indicate less decay, younger sample.
Doesn't have to be. All it has to be is some page definition language that says "here's a title", "here's a paragraph" etc.
that can be wrapped and reformatted at will.
If you get the former, you get the latter.
Yes, I know that much of the old content is being page scanned into PDFs as IMAGES of the page. I have found this format to be usable on the Sony in landscape mode (half a book page per page), IF the file decodes at all. Color PDFs from archive.org tend not to; B/W are still huge but usually do.
That doesn't mean that anything since 1980 needs to be provided that way.
Aside from that, resolution and DPI absolutely do matter,...
Didn't say it didn't. I'm talking about "pages" and display size, not resolution.
Finally, I would also be wary of leaving all rendering up to client devices. IMO one of the major benefits of having PDF articles from journals is precisely that those articles look like they came from the journal. They are properly typeset, use sane fonts, and look neat and clean. HTML versions of the same articles look like shit. I don't know what it is about PDFs that just makes them visually more appealing, but they invariably look better than HTML or Word documents on screen.
There is no reason that a publisher could not use a "pageless" formatting language that properly marks text that can be reflowed and, e.g., equations that cannot. In fact, the Sony will try to reflow text in PDFs, so there must be some way of knowing which is which, just few seem to want to mark it that way.
I suspect that the HTML versions of journals is poor because they don't do the proper formatting, but I don't know. I never select the HTML version -- because it typically looks like crap. Or they are HTML-izing based on THEIR browser and the commands it likes, and they are using IE. Or/And they are trying to force certain formatting assuming specific font sizes instead of letting the browser format it, which is the kind of crap the results in "submit" buttons that have the top half of the characters "SUB" and nothing else.
Considering the number of people who simply ignore things like the TITLE and AUTHOR headers for PDF files, it may be a very hard education task, but that doesn't mean it won't work when it is used. (I am getting really tired of US Government produced documents in locked PDF format that have titles like "Microsoft PDF-Writer 352.9 Version 9".)
It's like detecting fake paintings because the paint uses modern pigments instead of what the contemporary artists used.
So, try again.
No spirit is worthless if it contains alcohol of the appropriate kind.
I've seen this kind of comment before in the MobiRead forums. You are thinking inside the box.
Pages are an artifact of the mechanical process used to print documents. There is no physical significance to a "page" other than it determines how large a physical instance of a document will be. In fact, when I read the summary for this thread, I was thinking "how mobile would a device be that can show a broadsheet (one 'page' in newspapers) all at once?"
Book publishers have known that all along. They are forced to "repage" books when they go from hardbound to paper because the "pages" are smaller. They don't worry about keeping the same page numbers. If there is an index, they have to re-index. It's part of the process.
When you say you want your Kindle or Sony to "show a full page", they already do. The PROBLEM is that the e-documents are coming with pre-defined pages, when they should come with pre-defined logical sections. Paragraphs and chapters are logical divisions. Pages are completely artificial. And as I reread that statement, I realize I'm pushing for TRUE HTML format -- not this modern "here's how your page WILL look", but "here's the information, you define how you want it to look" model.
I read documents on my LifeDrive. Very small "pages", but the plain-text documents I read fit a full page on every screen. Yes, the page is probably on e tenth or one fifth the content of the printed book's page, but I don't care. I have no reason to care. I turn pages a lot faster than on the paper version, but that's a flick of a button.
I also read (or try to read) scientific journal articles on my Sony PRS. It's horrid. That's because the publisher has copied the page format from the printed journal. I really don't care if the second page of the article appears on page 13452 (as it does in the printed journal) or "2". That info is irrelevant. What's more important is reading the info in the article. The proper format for e-distribution would have the article reformat on the device and IGNORE any "page" nonsense the publisher wants to force on people.
In other words, PDF doesn't require a specific page size to see the entire "page", it's the publishers who force this. Saying "I want a pdf reader that shows the full page" is putting the blame in the wrong place.
No, it doesn't. Driving an SUV doesn't destroy anything. Allowing everyone choice doesn't destroy anything but control-freaks. Allowing everyone the same option is called "equality of opportunity", and we know that not everyone will make the same choice, so your implication that "if we allow it everyone will do it" is nonsense.
and drives up prices of gas for people that don't actually buy large cars.
No, failure to produce drives up the price. It isn't my fault that drilling offshore is NIMBY and ANWR is prohibited.
I suppose you could say your right to a big SUV ends at might right to breathe (cleaner) air.
No, I wouldn't say that, because it isn't true and isn't relevant. I don't think you have the right to breathe absolutely pure air, simply because the existence of other people (along with the animals and volcanoes and forest fires...) makes the air less than pure. That means there is some level of "pollution" that has to be allowed. If you want to demand that my addition to the level is zero, then you better shut off your computer and disconnect your electric service and stop eating anything you personally haven't grown in your backyard, since everything you do causes some level of "pollution."
In other words, you have the right to exist, which implies the right to emit "stuff" into the air, so I have the same rights. Instead of using a fireplace to heat my home, I have an SUV. I think I come out ahead on "carbon credits".
You probably fell for the Clinton trick of issuing an executive order lowering allowable arsenic levels in water to some ridiculously tiny amount, which led to liberals flaming the conservatives when that order was quite appropriately rescinded by the next president. "Oooh, those awful Republicans want to poison the water", which is a patently absurd claim since the previous limits caused no danger to anyone, much less poisoned them. "Anything more than zero is too much" is a wonderful platitude, but it isn't realistic and it isn't possible. (And if you try to meet that level by drinking only distilled filtered water, you are responsible for a lot of carbon footprint for the energy necessary to reach those tiny (but still nonzero) levels of pollutants.)
This all avoids the initial issue, which is regulating businesses because they might not make useful things. People find SUVs useful, so they are being made. Prohibiting SUVs won't create an equal demand for tiny shitbox cars. A healthy economy relies on both producers making desired goods and consumers desiring them. Either side stops, the economy fails.
I'm a licensed amateur radio operator with an HSMM system in my car. You send security out to my car, parked on a public street, and if they do anything more than smile and wave I'll get the cops on site to hand out assault charges faster than you can say "unlicensed operations must not interfere with and must accept interference from licensed users of the spectrum".
Now, if I was trying to cut into your WIRED network, you could have the cops come arrest ME. See, the difference between wireless and wired isn't that hard to understand, now is it?
If a company creates a product that people want to buy, evidently those people see a point and don't find it useless. If nobody wants to buy a product, it isn't made for very long, and the company moves on to something else. A growing, healthy economy is a two-sided sheet of paper. On one side there are producers, on the other consumers. Producers need to be free to make what consumers want to buy. If producers don't make things the consumers want to buy, the economy fails.
That's the whole point behind free markets and capitalism. Free markets and capitalism work, unless you are someone who wants to define what is necessary for others. Then they are a danger that must be regulated. Regulating what a company can make doesn't create demand, it only creates failure.
E.g., people want cars that can carry more than two skinny adults and a bag of peanuts. They're called SUVs. They carry more stuff and people more safely than tiny little cars. They go places that tiny little cars cannot. Some people don't want to allow this as a choice, so they create regulations on the market that limit choices.
"Your car must get 30 MPG." I'm ok paying for the gas at 27 MPG, it's none of your business if I want to pay extra for the comfort and safety.
"You live in the city and don't need an SUV." I live in the city and drive into the country to search for people when they get lost. I think that could be called "helpful", don't you?
What was that? Darfur? Timor? You want us to what in Darfur?
You picked the one Department that is least like the Home Office. The Dept. of State deals with issues external to the US. Interior, Homeland Security, Commerce, are the internal departments that are probably most like Home Office.
My guess is he doesn't plan to enforce it.
Then he's lying when he says "we will" and not "we want".
I have no idea why the responses to this story sound like the Fox News "'Bama's raisin' ma taxes!" crowd.
Because in order to do what he "will" do, he needs to spend $420 BILLION dollars, and there are only two ways to get that money. Both make everything cost more, even if inflation created by printing money at will isn't technically a tax, the result is the same.
$420 billion. The estimated US GDP for 2008 was $14.23 trillion.
But I'm wondering where he's going to get the money to make this something other than a nice speech.
One or both of two places: either taxing the GDP at a higher rate, removing money from the economy that would be invested by the people who earned it in things that are productive and worth investment, making everything cost more to cover the increased taxation, or printing it, thus making every dollar already in the GDP worth less and driving inflation so everything costs everyone more.
Raising taxes to spend more money to spur the economy is a losing game, since the biggest waste of money is the administration of the programs that tax and spend. Every dollar spent on administration is a loss to the GDP.
The CIA factbook claims the US GDP for 2008 was $14.13 trillion, with tax revenues of $2.5 trillion. Three percent of the GDP is $420 billion. The government has no right to decide how the results of the GDP are invested, but I have no doubt that we'll see another $420 billion porkulus bill spending tax revenues and newly printed money.
And in-between it will send you info on how to make your penis larger and how to get that 49.000.000 MBP my executor is protecting from the Kenyan government out of the country. You didn't know I was so rich (in both departments), did you?
And why are they treating the parasite instead of killing it?
When I was young, I used to stick around work after the late shift and use the computers. This required electricity on the part of the company. They were happy to let me do it because having someone ON SITE during times when normally nobody was meant they could get a break on insurance. Someone was there to deal with fires, etc, instead of depending on automated alarms and such.
I tell that story only because it is reasonable to assume that an armed ship will have lower insurance rates than unarmed ones, because there is less chance that they will be pirated and the insurance have to pay off.
Also the open ocean is NOT your backyard. A more realistic scenario would be firing a few shots at the person approaching your car who you think is a pirate.
Stupid and meaningless automobile analogy.
There is no reason for a small vessel to approach a large merchant ship without clear identification and communications on the high seas. There is NO reason for a small, unidentified, high-speed ARMED vessel to approach a merchant ship on the high seas AT ALL.
On the other hand -- "hey dude, you left your lights on".
If I'm a merchant captain, I say anything within 300 yards of my vessel on the high seas IS in my backyard and you better have a real good excuse for being there, and if you try to board my vessel you are no longer in my backyard, you are undeniably on MY property and will suffer the consequences.
They only waive this right if they act in ways that are "prejudicial to the peace, good order or the security" of the country in whose territorial waters they are sailing. One specific example from one of the articles you linked to is "weapons practice", but not "weapons possession". Even submarines, which are well armed, don't need to give up their weapons in territorial waters, they only need to sail on the surface under colors.
Yes, if a merchant vessel came into US waters with guns blazing, I think there would be concern. If, however, they entered with "guns stowed and locked", there is no danger to the security of the US. In Somali waters, there would be no danger to Somali 'good order', unless Somalia decided that successful piracy was part of their 'good order', and then they'd run afoul of international law. It is a reasonable expectation that merchant vessels should receive protection from piracy while they are in territorial waters from the owner of those waters.
Even so, the pirates operate in international waters, IIRC.
How many people read the headline and wondered why a Seattle baseball team was trying to create something to keep Pittsburgh players away?
Roger that. And the first way to promote change in productive directions is to stop them from thinking that "taking a ship's crew hostage for millions of dollars in ransom" will result in a change in anything but their body temperature.
These people aren't pirates because the see any "global inequality", they are pirates because they think they can make millions of dollars easily and face no consequences. It's no different than any criminal activity, white collar or blue.
I AM an old person, you insensitive clod.
I can tell the difference, I just don't care. If I want to see a high-resolution sunset, I'll go outside and watch it live. I don't need to see every nose hair on the news reporter or every pore and pimple on these damn kids who seem to be everywhere on TV these days. And get off my lawn...
One of the fascinating free books I've been able to find for my Sony ereader was a short story "Test Rocket", I think it was called. We sent up a rocket with a mouse as a test. It disappeared. Several years later, an copy of the rocket came back, made out of materials "not of this planet" and three times the size of the original, containing what appeared to be a human.
Except he couldn't speak or communicate.
(In case the meaning was lost in summarizing, THEY are much bigger than we are and to them humans are just "laboratory mice".)
The last time I was in high school biology class, we certainly were being taught the origins of life. The "Miller experiment", if I recall the name of the guy correctly, was big news. That's the one where a mix of methane, ammonia, water and electricity were cooked for some length of time and amino acid precursors were detected. We were being taught, explicitly, about "primordial ooze" and random events leading to single cellular organisms that led to multi etc. I haven't gone back to the textbooks to see if they still say this, but from the public discussions it seems clear that nothing much has changed in this area.
That makes the "other viewpoints" relevant in that classroom, IF you believe that "other viewpoints" are supposed to be taught, and not just "viewpoints I believe in". And that is the limited context of my part of this discussion. "Other viewpoints" has to mean "other viewpoints" and if one viewpoint is relevant in a class the same class ought to get the alternates, not some other class taught in alternate decades in the basement boilerroom.
We know the origin of the universe,...
Uhhh, no, we don't know the origin of the universe any better than we know the origin of life, and for the same reason. Science just can't PROVE what happened in the past; it can disprove predictions about the future and suggest what MIGHT have happened in the past, but proof of the past is beyond the scientific method.
One example. The measurement of microwave background radiation supports the theory of the big bang, but it does not prove that the big bang must have happened.
Just because we don't know doesn't mean we should teach the untestable alternative in its place in science class to placate those who believe in the alternative absent evidence.
Unfortunately, too many times these "untestable alternatives" ARE being taught in the classroom and being pushed by scientists ("The God Delusion", e.g.) and triggering the backlash for other "untestable alternatives" to join them. I can understand the backlash, for when science steps into religion it steps back many centuries.
That's even worse than what I thought you were saying. The only way "other viewpoints" should be taught is if there is a class specifically for those viewpoints? No, if you require "other viewpoints", they should be in the same place and class as the viewpoints they differ from. Otherwise, you are filing the building permit for the galactic bypass in the basement (reference to Hitchhiker's Guide.)
What I was referring to with "intellectual freedom bills" are the bills being pressed through by a religious minority as a trojan horse to teach intelligent design which is an untestable hypothesis which is not fact and should not be taught in a basic science course.
Unfortunately, the "origin of life" being taught in biology class is an untestable hypothesis and not a fact, as well. Yes, adaptation of species and genetic modification is testable, but the claim "this is how life started" is not, and cannot be. While it is likely that's how life started, there is no way of disproving that hypothesis and that removes it from the scientific method.
By that standard, the community standard of nullifying the bill of rights in a town is okay if everyone in the town agrees with it.
Nonsense. The Bill Of Rights is not a "community standard". You were talking about "community standards", not the Constitution. That's the context in which I replied.
When they stop trying to embarrass or otherwise annoy me by trying to ram through "academic freedom" bills that force teachers to teach a fairytale as science and act as a wedge to break down the church/state separation, then they'll earn my sympathy and respect.
That sounds very much like you are saying that teaching "other viewpoints" is something you require of the schools, unless those viewpoints are something you don't agree with and then nobody should have the right to require schools to teach them.
However, your first claim is incorrect. Schools at the elementary and high school level are intended to teach basic concepts to, not make experts out of the children. Even the lower levels of collegiate study are required to work at this level, in this day of information explosion.
If we are to see further in the future, we must climb upon the shoulders of the giants that have come before us. To do that, we must understand what they saw and the direction they were looking. In other words, have a grasp of the basics before we can advance. Some have said "those who do not know history are bound to repeat it". This is true even more so in science and technology, and those who are repeating scientific discoveries are not advancing society in any meaningful way. Their vision goes no further than the giants who preceeded them, at best, and usually considerably less.
Community standards, the basis of most obscenity claims, were never meant to be static and unchanging - they were meant to be influenced by society as a whole.
While it is reasonable to expect they not be static, it is ridiculous to claim they should be influenced by society as a whole. To expect that would be to remove the "community" from the "community standards". It is perfectly reasonable, and perfectly acceptable, for a community to decide they they will not "follow the crowd" and to maintain what they feel are acceptable standards for them and their children.