It can also make sense to subsidize an industry to help it get off the ground. Solar panel subsidies increased the demand for the things, and presumably this caused the manufacturing capacity to increase, and economies of scale to kick in. We got a strategically important industry going faster than it otherwise would have.
My '50s era vehicle is more reliable than my 2010+ vehicle could ever be.
How do you find a 2010+ vehicle that bad? My experience with modern vehicles is that, if you don't get into accidents, you do routine maintenance for ten years and it's still reliable. My current 2008 Honda Civic failed me once because I got into an accident, and twice with a bad battery. Try doing that with a 1958 vehicle lasting to 1966. It would be a rustbucket and rattletrap.
I'm curious whether you have any source for your figures outside your imagination. Most laws tend to represent my interests, either in doing things I like or in not really affecting me. There are a lot of exceptions, but the government does significantly more than 1% of what I want it to do, and it does considerably more that I think it should than what I think it shouldn't, and I'm well below the 1% (although still in the upper 10%).
Since you use implausible figures with no obvious support, I don't know what the "situation" is that you refer to.
GP does have some legitimate points (although I disagree with his politics). Legislators should act in the public interest, true. How are they supposed to know what is in the public interest? If they talk to nobody, they miss a lot. If they try to talk to everybody, they can't, and get a potentially distorted view.
Now, suppose I talk to a legislator. How do I know what the public interest is? I'm competent to speak about my interests, not about yours. I'm also reasonably competent to tell the legislator some of the ramifications of a proposed bill on some technical issues, and certainly not on farm issues. It appears to me that, to best serve the public interest, I should tell the legislator what I know about, and the legislator should give that the consideration it deserves. Since the legislator can't talk to everyone, I need to realize that the legislator is very likely not to talk to me.
Now, if ten thousand of my close personal friends and I think pretty much alike on an issue, it's reasonable for us to pick out one among us, preferably one with actual people skills, and send that person to talk to the legislator about our interests and what issues we see in our areas of expertise. How reasonable is it, then, for us to decide on a few people and pay them to work full-time to represent our interests? (It may not be practical for us to send individuals when they're available. A trip to Washington, D.C. takes time and money.) If we encounter someone with better people skills and connections who can understand our positions well enough to represent us, how reasonable is it for us to hire this person?
I see no bright line here, no point at which we can confidently agree is the dividing line between good and bad lobbying.
It is reasonable, in my opinion, to object to the role of campaign contributions in lobbying. It is reasonable to object to organizations that are not primarily lobbying groups (like unions and businesses) using their members' or stockholders' money for political purposes they oppose (particularly considering the state of corporate governance these days). I don't see it as reasonable to object to the formation of special interest groups and their hiring of specialists to represent their interests before legislators.
Actually, IE5 was arguably the best browser of its day. IE's problem is not that it took a long time to become good, it's that Microsoft stopped developing it, and when IE had competition from Firefox it took a long time for IE to more or less catch up.
Not with my medical insurance. My heart attack was pretty much a non-event financially, although much of that was due to my employer (I continued getting paid while I recovered).
That also means Libertarians have to run credible campaigns at the state level, in all 50. Otherwise, they aren't a credible national party.
The Federal government should run the nationwide basic income, remove Federal laws against soft drugs (I don't think there are Federal laws against prostitution so much as sex trafficking), and tackle climate change. State governments need to tackle their own drug laws, sex work, right to die, and gun ownership. This isn't going to work across the country, but it doesn't have to.
Smoking laws aren't nanny state laws. Second-hand smoke has real effects on people. In most cases, we regulate the ability to put foul-smelling toxic and carcinogenic substances into the air. This may also apply to smoking marijuana.
Depends on the specific libertarian you're talking to. Some are of the type one of Kim Stanley Robinson's characters disliked: people who want police protection from their slaves. Some believe that private security would suffice. One common attitude is that the government should prevent physical violence and enforce contracts, in which we get your scenario, with a "rich man with lots of money".
You're proposing that we take no direct action about who our elected officials are, and feel smug about it. You aren't advocating for anything, you're advocating we don't vote for realistic candidates because they aren't perfect.
Because almost all offices will go to Democrats or Republicans, they have to deal with the world as it exists, and that's very, very messy. They have to worry about what will happen when they're in office, and what they can actually accomplish. Promising the obviously unattainable will attract a fairly large number of voters, but will repel more.
Libertarians and other third-party candidates can run in a different world, a world where principles are cleaner and people somewhat different. It may be a better world than we've got in many ways, but it has the disadvantage of not being the one we live in. Their proposals don't have to have any minute chance of working, and they will rarely be called on it. After the election, they can make up reasons why things would be so much better if they'd been elected without any real fear of rebuttal. Accountability is a very slippery process in politics, but third parties have the option of walking away from it entirely, and some do.
Show me a third party that is prepared for the unpleasant realities of politics and governance, and I'll consider voting for them The Libertarians very definitely do not qualify.
What NSA programs are clear violations of the Fourth Amendment? Is there a program that is a clearly unreasonable search of people's papers and effects that they haven't confided to third parties? If something of yours is stored in a way that no action will be taken on it and no human will see it without a warrant and you can't tell what's happening, is that a search in the Fourth Amendment sense? I'm not asking for your interpretation of the law, because the NSA doesn't care about your reputation as a jurist. I'm asking for binding court decisions (I'll be satisfied by Circuit Court or Supreme Court binding precedents) or specific legislation here.
The impression I've gotten is that the NSA will at least assume that any possible ambiguity in any law will be decided in the direction of more NSA power. The Fourth is a sweeping statement that doesn't get very specific.
We have a philosophical difference here, and I'm not so interested in convincing you as having you understand where I'm coming from.
We have differences about the role of a government. You appear to think it should be highly restricted, while I believe that it should benefit its citizens. (Both of our attitudes are compatible with the US Constitution.) I'm a little puzzled here by " If you want to succeed, Government is to make sure there are no roadblocks to you that do not exist for others.", since that's pretty much what I'm arguing. I consider malnutrition and poor education to be roadblocks, which means I very much approve of school lunch and breakfast programs that are open to all regardless of income. (My son ate school lunches, but we paid for them.) My son went to public schools that were generally quite good, and I'd like to see every child have that opportunity.
So, what sort of things do you consider roadblocks?
My contention is that we don't give enough of the right support to the poor. They frequently have bad schools, for example, which won't prepare them to get out of poverty. The hard limit on Medicaid forces many of them to stay in poverty, since there's a very large gap between bettering oneself enough to be no longer eligible for Medicaid and bettering oneself enough to get decent affordable health care. We need an economy where hard work can get someone out of poverty, which means worker protections with some sort of teeth in them, and either a much higher minimum wage or some sort of income supplement. You decide for yourself whether this means more handouts or different ones.
I don't see the need for support to get people who won't (as opposed to can't) work hard to get out of poverty, although I'd like them to have more secure lives.
Let's look at space exploration. The original space exploration rockets in the US were based on IRBMs and ICBMs, but they didn't stay that way. The military still has rockets of various sorts, and the space program still does also, but they're not the same. For a long time now, NASA rockets have been designed for space exploration purposes, not military purposes. Once we had relatively efficient ways to put objects into the orbit of our choice, we found more and more applications. We developed capabilities for scientific purposes, and these capabilities proved to be very useful in everyday life. If we hadn't indulged in space exploration, we wouldn't have had the ready-made ability to put up GPS satellites once we could build them. We've also learned a whole lot scientifically, but it's much harder to trace that into useful results. What you are saying is that past space exploration efforts were good because you can see good results from them, and the current ones are wasteful since you lack imagination.
There's no difference between gravitational waves and lasers as you explain them. Both were theorized and apparatus constructed. The big difference is that lasers were created long enough ago that we've found very large numbers of useful purposes.
There's no difference between gravitational wave detectors and Leyden jars as you describe. Neither was useful for any practical purpose. Both demonstrated properties of matter here on Earth. Scientists working on electricity early on didn't know that they could manipulate and exploit it for anything useful. The big difference is that the Leyden jar era of electricity was a long time ago, and we've had lots of time to develop uses.
I didn't say the IPCC was right. I said that their reports are the product of a very large number of smart people all over the world who study the subject very hard, with essentially no possibility that it's a conspiracy. (If it were, someone would create a big splash by blowing the whistle. Scientists are not intellectual conformists.) I also said that it's a good idea to think they might be more or less correct, and plan accordingly. You're the one who wants us to go blindly into disaster if these people do kinda know what they're talking about.
What do you need for a smoking gun? We've got major changes in summer Arctic ice. Is the Northwest Passage smoking enough? Increasing temperatures (and we have far more than a few decades of measurements)? We're not going to get unique weather. We're going to get more of some and less of other weather.
Your evaluation of possible solutions is based in your firm irrational belief that AGW is not happening, the apparently religious belief that carbon markets must be horribly designed, and a case of blindness about exploration of renewable energy possibilities.
Actually, there were reported cold fusion replications. A quote from the Wikipedia article: "Many scientists tried to replicate the experiment with the few details available. Hopes faded due to the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many reported positive replications,"
If there's a difference between power turned off and power turned on, that's very strong evidence that something is happening. Currently, I'm assuming that there is unexplained thrust. I could be wrong.
The claim is actually that energy in produces a force, not energy, and a given force over a given time produces a given change in momentum, without any observed change in reverse somewhere to conform to the Law of Conservation of Momentum. It's more force than a straight photon drive could create, by orders of magnitude. In very limited review of the results, I've seen completely inadequate attempts to find what it could be pushing against. I'm not going to take it too seriously unless and until I see that done in more than one lab. (Cold fusion had some inadequately controlled independent confirmations, IIRC.) One suggestion has been to orbit a satellite with the alleged space drive and see if it has thrust in vacuum with nothing around it.
The theory of this thing is a mess. We've seen different theories proposed, none of which work. This should have been obvious to the theorists, since the claim violates the Law of Conservation of Momentum, and if it does we're going to need new physics at a very fundamental level.
And here is where I find this as a reactionless drive unbelievable. We've found new physics by going to new extremes, although not as extensive as violating basic conservation laws in any way we can detect (I think of virtual particles as the Universe sticking its tongue out at us behind our backs). This thing is bouncing microwaves around in a particular shape of chamber, and that's something we've been doing since WWII
The device is claimed to exert thrust without reaction mass, thereby violating the Law of Conservation of Momentum and invalidating most of physics. It does this without doing anything really odd. The odd things about relativity and quantum mechanics don't show up at normal speeds (with exceptions like the orbit of Mercury, which was previously a mystery).
It isn't a matter of throwing photons off the back end to get acceleration. We know all about photon drives, including how much force one can get out of a given energy input, and the reported thrusts are orders of magnitude greater than a photon drive could do with that energy.
Therefore, either physics is inexplicably wrong or the device is pushing against something in a non-obvious manner or there's a lot of egregious experimental error going on.
No. We already knew about photon drives, and the fact that a flashlight produces thrust. The problem is that photons are a very energy-inefficient way of generating thrust, and the observed results reported a lot more acceleration than is possible for a photon drive of that energy.
Solar sails are another technique, in which the ship uses photons and particles produced outside the ship to accelerate.
The PU-238 power sources NASA uses are designed to survive being in an exploding rocket and falling to Earth. IIRC, it happened once. The problem with them is that they're heavy and expensive (I read something about having only a limited supply of the isotope), and solar panels are a much lighter and cheaper energy source if the spacecraft is staying reasonably close to the Sun.
C++ solves a lot of safety problems with C. Smart pointers can deal with most dynamic memory problems, and using the C++ string and container classes you can avoid most buffer overflow problems.
Slight correction from a guy who sent quite a few dollars to Metrowerks in the 90s:
Codewarrior was originally a C environment, and C++ was added later, in fairly slow steps towards "standard" C++ (which meant ARM (Annotated Reference Manual) conformance until the ISO standard took shape).
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It can also make sense to subsidize an industry to help it get off the ground. Solar panel subsidies increased the demand for the things, and presumably this caused the manufacturing capacity to increase, and economies of scale to kick in. We got a strategically important industry going faster than it otherwise would have.
How do you find a 2010+ vehicle that bad? My experience with modern vehicles is that, if you don't get into accidents, you do routine maintenance for ten years and it's still reliable. My current 2008 Honda Civic failed me once because I got into an accident, and twice with a bad battery. Try doing that with a 1958 vehicle lasting to 1966. It would be a rustbucket and rattletrap.
I'm curious whether you have any source for your figures outside your imagination. Most laws tend to represent my interests, either in doing things I like or in not really affecting me. There are a lot of exceptions, but the government does significantly more than 1% of what I want it to do, and it does considerably more that I think it should than what I think it shouldn't, and I'm well below the 1% (although still in the upper 10%).
Since you use implausible figures with no obvious support, I don't know what the "situation" is that you refer to.
GP does have some legitimate points (although I disagree with his politics). Legislators should act in the public interest, true. How are they supposed to know what is in the public interest? If they talk to nobody, they miss a lot. If they try to talk to everybody, they can't, and get a potentially distorted view.
Now, suppose I talk to a legislator. How do I know what the public interest is? I'm competent to speak about my interests, not about yours. I'm also reasonably competent to tell the legislator some of the ramifications of a proposed bill on some technical issues, and certainly not on farm issues. It appears to me that, to best serve the public interest, I should tell the legislator what I know about, and the legislator should give that the consideration it deserves. Since the legislator can't talk to everyone, I need to realize that the legislator is very likely not to talk to me.
Now, if ten thousand of my close personal friends and I think pretty much alike on an issue, it's reasonable for us to pick out one among us, preferably one with actual people skills, and send that person to talk to the legislator about our interests and what issues we see in our areas of expertise. How reasonable is it, then, for us to decide on a few people and pay them to work full-time to represent our interests? (It may not be practical for us to send individuals when they're available. A trip to Washington, D.C. takes time and money.) If we encounter someone with better people skills and connections who can understand our positions well enough to represent us, how reasonable is it for us to hire this person?
I see no bright line here, no point at which we can confidently agree is the dividing line between good and bad lobbying.
It is reasonable, in my opinion, to object to the role of campaign contributions in lobbying. It is reasonable to object to organizations that are not primarily lobbying groups (like unions and businesses) using their members' or stockholders' money for political purposes they oppose (particularly considering the state of corporate governance these days). I don't see it as reasonable to object to the formation of special interest groups and their hiring of specialists to represent their interests before legislators.
Actually, IE5 was arguably the best browser of its day. IE's problem is not that it took a long time to become good, it's that Microsoft stopped developing it, and when IE had competition from Firefox it took a long time for IE to more or less catch up.
If you can't tell the difference between scientists and conmen, there's really no point in continuing any discussion.
Cloud operations are typically done by (or at least under the supervision of) competent people. This is not necessarily the case in non-cloud servers.
AWS doesn't want to drive people away, so they have incentive not to screw up too badly. Again, this is not necessarily the case for private servers.
Neither solution is perfect. Both are usually workable.
Not with my medical insurance. My heart attack was pretty much a non-event financially, although much of that was due to my employer (I continued getting paid while I recovered).
That also means Libertarians have to run credible campaigns at the state level, in all 50. Otherwise, they aren't a credible national party.
The Federal government should run the nationwide basic income, remove Federal laws against soft drugs (I don't think there are Federal laws against prostitution so much as sex trafficking), and tackle climate change. State governments need to tackle their own drug laws, sex work, right to die, and gun ownership. This isn't going to work across the country, but it doesn't have to.
Smoking laws aren't nanny state laws. Second-hand smoke has real effects on people. In most cases, we regulate the ability to put foul-smelling toxic and carcinogenic substances into the air. This may also apply to smoking marijuana.
Depends on the specific libertarian you're talking to. Some are of the type one of Kim Stanley Robinson's characters disliked: people who want police protection from their slaves. Some believe that private security would suffice. One common attitude is that the government should prevent physical violence and enforce contracts, in which we get your scenario, with a "rich man with lots of money".
You're proposing that we take no direct action about who our elected officials are, and feel smug about it. You aren't advocating for anything, you're advocating we don't vote for realistic candidates because they aren't perfect.
Because almost all offices will go to Democrats or Republicans, they have to deal with the world as it exists, and that's very, very messy. They have to worry about what will happen when they're in office, and what they can actually accomplish. Promising the obviously unattainable will attract a fairly large number of voters, but will repel more.
Libertarians and other third-party candidates can run in a different world, a world where principles are cleaner and people somewhat different. It may be a better world than we've got in many ways, but it has the disadvantage of not being the one we live in. Their proposals don't have to have any minute chance of working, and they will rarely be called on it. After the election, they can make up reasons why things would be so much better if they'd been elected without any real fear of rebuttal. Accountability is a very slippery process in politics, but third parties have the option of walking away from it entirely, and some do.
Show me a third party that is prepared for the unpleasant realities of politics and governance, and I'll consider voting for them The Libertarians very definitely do not qualify.
What NSA programs are clear violations of the Fourth Amendment? Is there a program that is a clearly unreasonable search of people's papers and effects that they haven't confided to third parties? If something of yours is stored in a way that no action will be taken on it and no human will see it without a warrant and you can't tell what's happening, is that a search in the Fourth Amendment sense? I'm not asking for your interpretation of the law, because the NSA doesn't care about your reputation as a jurist. I'm asking for binding court decisions (I'll be satisfied by Circuit Court or Supreme Court binding precedents) or specific legislation here.
The impression I've gotten is that the NSA will at least assume that any possible ambiguity in any law will be decided in the direction of more NSA power. The Fourth is a sweeping statement that doesn't get very specific.
We have a philosophical difference here, and I'm not so interested in convincing you as having you understand where I'm coming from.
We have differences about the role of a government. You appear to think it should be highly restricted, while I believe that it should benefit its citizens. (Both of our attitudes are compatible with the US Constitution.) I'm a little puzzled here by " If you want to succeed, Government is to make sure there are no roadblocks to you that do not exist for others.", since that's pretty much what I'm arguing. I consider malnutrition and poor education to be roadblocks, which means I very much approve of school lunch and breakfast programs that are open to all regardless of income. (My son ate school lunches, but we paid for them.) My son went to public schools that were generally quite good, and I'd like to see every child have that opportunity.
So, what sort of things do you consider roadblocks?
My contention is that we don't give enough of the right support to the poor. They frequently have bad schools, for example, which won't prepare them to get out of poverty. The hard limit on Medicaid forces many of them to stay in poverty, since there's a very large gap between bettering oneself enough to be no longer eligible for Medicaid and bettering oneself enough to get decent affordable health care. We need an economy where hard work can get someone out of poverty, which means worker protections with some sort of teeth in them, and either a much higher minimum wage or some sort of income supplement. You decide for yourself whether this means more handouts or different ones.
I don't see the need for support to get people who won't (as opposed to can't) work hard to get out of poverty, although I'd like them to have more secure lives.
Let's look at space exploration. The original space exploration rockets in the US were based on IRBMs and ICBMs, but they didn't stay that way. The military still has rockets of various sorts, and the space program still does also, but they're not the same. For a long time now, NASA rockets have been designed for space exploration purposes, not military purposes. Once we had relatively efficient ways to put objects into the orbit of our choice, we found more and more applications. We developed capabilities for scientific purposes, and these capabilities proved to be very useful in everyday life. If we hadn't indulged in space exploration, we wouldn't have had the ready-made ability to put up GPS satellites once we could build them. We've also learned a whole lot scientifically, but it's much harder to trace that into useful results. What you are saying is that past space exploration efforts were good because you can see good results from them, and the current ones are wasteful since you lack imagination.
There's no difference between gravitational waves and lasers as you explain them. Both were theorized and apparatus constructed. The big difference is that lasers were created long enough ago that we've found very large numbers of useful purposes.
There's no difference between gravitational wave detectors and Leyden jars as you describe. Neither was useful for any practical purpose. Both demonstrated properties of matter here on Earth. Scientists working on electricity early on didn't know that they could manipulate and exploit it for anything useful. The big difference is that the Leyden jar era of electricity was a long time ago, and we've had lots of time to develop uses.
I didn't say the IPCC was right. I said that their reports are the product of a very large number of smart people all over the world who study the subject very hard, with essentially no possibility that it's a conspiracy. (If it were, someone would create a big splash by blowing the whistle. Scientists are not intellectual conformists.) I also said that it's a good idea to think they might be more or less correct, and plan accordingly. You're the one who wants us to go blindly into disaster if these people do kinda know what they're talking about.
What do you need for a smoking gun? We've got major changes in summer Arctic ice. Is the Northwest Passage smoking enough? Increasing temperatures (and we have far more than a few decades of measurements)? We're not going to get unique weather. We're going to get more of some and less of other weather.
Your evaluation of possible solutions is based in your firm irrational belief that AGW is not happening, the apparently religious belief that carbon markets must be horribly designed, and a case of blindness about exploration of renewable energy possibilities.
Actually, there were reported cold fusion replications. A quote from the Wikipedia article: "Many scientists tried to replicate the experiment with the few details available. Hopes faded due to the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many reported positive replications,"
If there's a difference between power turned off and power turned on, that's very strong evidence that something is happening. Currently, I'm assuming that there is unexplained thrust. I could be wrong.
The claim is actually that energy in produces a force, not energy, and a given force over a given time produces a given change in momentum, without any observed change in reverse somewhere to conform to the Law of Conservation of Momentum. It's more force than a straight photon drive could create, by orders of magnitude. In very limited review of the results, I've seen completely inadequate attempts to find what it could be pushing against. I'm not going to take it too seriously unless and until I see that done in more than one lab. (Cold fusion had some inadequately controlled independent confirmations, IIRC.) One suggestion has been to orbit a satellite with the alleged space drive and see if it has thrust in vacuum with nothing around it.
The theory of this thing is a mess. We've seen different theories proposed, none of which work. This should have been obvious to the theorists, since the claim violates the Law of Conservation of Momentum, and if it does we're going to need new physics at a very fundamental level.
And here is where I find this as a reactionless drive unbelievable. We've found new physics by going to new extremes, although not as extensive as violating basic conservation laws in any way we can detect (I think of virtual particles as the Universe sticking its tongue out at us behind our backs). This thing is bouncing microwaves around in a particular shape of chamber, and that's something we've been doing since WWII
The device is claimed to exert thrust without reaction mass, thereby violating the Law of Conservation of Momentum and invalidating most of physics. It does this without doing anything really odd. The odd things about relativity and quantum mechanics don't show up at normal speeds (with exceptions like the orbit of Mercury, which was previously a mystery).
It isn't a matter of throwing photons off the back end to get acceleration. We know all about photon drives, including how much force one can get out of a given energy input, and the reported thrusts are orders of magnitude greater than a photon drive could do with that energy.
Therefore, either physics is inexplicably wrong or the device is pushing against something in a non-obvious manner or there's a lot of egregious experimental error going on.
No. We already knew about photon drives, and the fact that a flashlight produces thrust. The problem is that photons are a very energy-inefficient way of generating thrust, and the observed results reported a lot more acceleration than is possible for a photon drive of that energy.
Solar sails are another technique, in which the ship uses photons and particles produced outside the ship to accelerate.
The PU-238 power sources NASA uses are designed to survive being in an exploding rocket and falling to Earth. IIRC, it happened once. The problem with them is that they're heavy and expensive (I read something about having only a limited supply of the isotope), and solar panels are a much lighter and cheaper energy source if the spacecraft is staying reasonably close to the Sun.
And I still don't have a hoverboard. Not fair!
I never used while/wend or for/next in C either. They're not C language constructs.
C++ solves a lot of safety problems with C. Smart pointers can deal with most dynamic memory problems, and using the C++ string and container classes you can avoid most buffer overflow problems.
C++ will not compile K&R C. It's fairly compatible with C90, the first C standard, in that it's easy to change a C program to compile in C++.
Slight correction from a guy who sent quite a few dollars to Metrowerks in the 90s:
Codewarrior was originally a C environment, and C++ was added later, in fairly slow steps towards "standard" C++ (which meant ARM (Annotated Reference Manual) conformance until the ISO standard took shape).