We're talking about a 40-day suspension. If the student had previous 10, 20 and 30 day suspensions for selling drugs to kindergarten students or something, then maybe a 40 day suspension would be more reasonable.
But if a student has never been disciplined before, jumping straight to a 40-day suspension for a first offense that is neither illegal nor dangerous seems a tad unreasonable.
So no, model students don't have more rights than non-model students, but model students probably deserve lighter punishment for the same offense than students who are constant sources of problems and have been disciplined several times before.
How much land does it take to produce one gallon of ethanol?
Getting one net gallon for every four gallons grown doesn't mean anything by itself - you have to know how much land you're using to grow those 4 gallons. If it's 10 square feet, you're doing pretty good. If it's an acre, not so much.
yes, you can expect that to be the case with powerful funders who have the resources and ingenuity to find the right scientists who will produce the right results. but there are also a hell of a lot of scientists out there who, because of their training in scientific values, are likely to feel that a professional code of practice stands in the way, and either get funding from somewhere else, or stand by their results.
Did you even read what you wrote?
You wrote that the people with the most money only hire the scientists that will give them the results they want, and the scientists who only publish the truth don't get that money.
Each text message is a separate purchase. If I'm selling at $1 for one and $10 for 30, and you buy one, then come back in a half hour and buy another, and then come back in a half hour and buy another, a few days later, I'm still charging you $1 for each purchase.
But if you come in and buy 30 at once and then don't come back, I charge you $10.
What if the GPL were changed requiring any distributor to give ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS to the user?
Software available under the old license could still be distributed under the old license.
If someone wanted to distribute software ONLY available under this new license, then they would have to:
- Pay one hundred billion dollars to each user - Not distribute it - Not pay one hundred billion dollars, distribute it anyway, and be liable for copyright infringement for copying and distributing someone else's software without their permission.
Remember, if the GPL doesn't work, then the result is not that anybody can distribute the software, the result is that NO ONE can distribute the software.
OPEC can't alleviate summer gas prices by producing more oil. Having more oil does you no good if you can't refine it into gas, and since refinery capacity is already at its limit, only more refining capacity will push down the price of gas. Producing more oil is useless.
...the problem most OPEC countries have is they are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to developing alternative energy. Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil because it's sitting on a lot of oil. There is nothing anybody else can do to get Saudi Arabia's oil short of invading them or paying for it.
Alternative energy doesn't work like that. Anything Saudi Arabia develops there can be developed better by someone else. And in a lot of things - like ethanol - they're at a huge disadvantage due to lack of arable land.
They're stuck. They can only sell oil so fast - if they try and sell it all now, they'll just plummet the prices. And if they raise prices to cash in now, then they're just making oil become obsolete sooner.
This is not true. OPEC exists to keep oil prices high
Wrong. OPEC's goal is to keep PROFITS high. Getting the highest profits does NOT result from arbitrarily high prices. But, when producers collaborate, the price at which profit is maximized is higher than where it would be if producers competed. THAT's the goal of a cartel - eliminate downward price pressure caused by competition.
But, even the cartel has long and short term pressures on the oil price. In the short term, if the price goes too high, they move past the optimum point, the decreased volume of sales is not offset by the increased margin, and their profits actually go down. And even if they are at the optimal short-term price point for maximizing profits, in the LONG term, if the short-term price is so high that other people start investing in technology that ultimately reduces the demand for oil, then again, OPEC loses out on profits because in 5 or 10 years, everyone's car runs Ethanol or Vegetable Oil and demand for oil plummets. One of the big reasons we don't have more alternative energy now is that comparatively, gas has been cheap, so there wasn't any incentive to develop something else.
OPEC wants high profits - but to get high profits over the long term, they want to keep oil prices reasonable in the short term to discourage investment in alternative energy sources.
Does refinery capacity magically disappear in the summer, and come back in the winter?
It's called supply *AND* demand for a REASON!
My original post ASSUMES refining capacity doesn't change. That's the whole point!
What DOES change is DEMAND - there is a lot more driving done in the summer than in the winter; DEMAND goes up, PRICES go up.
Refining capacity yeilds a particular gas price in the winter. That SAME refining capacity, faced with HIGHER SUMMER DEMAND, yields a HIGHER price in the summer? Get it?
Gas prices are high because a single cartel, OPEC, dictates the price per barrel. This is not a free market.
Price of a barrel of oil is only one component of the price of a gallon of gas. In the US, the price of gas is much more closely related to the supply of refined gasoline vs. the demand for refined gasoline. Presently, there is about a $1 swing between the price of a gallon of gas in the winter and in the summer. Every year. Does the price of a barrel of oil swing by $20 from the winter to the summer?
No, it doesn't.
Does OPEC reduce oil production by 25% in the summer?
No, they don't.
So what accounts for the swing in gas prices?
Supply and demand. We only have a finite amount of refining capacity. In the summer, demand goes up, but supply does not - there is no more refining capacity available.
The real culprit in the high gas prices are the oil companies and environmentalists. Oil companies don't want to invest their profits in more refining capacity, and environmentalists make it difficult to build new refineries at all.
OPEC, on the other hand, doesn't like high gas prices any more than you do - the higher the gas price, the more attractive alternate energy sources become. And if there's one thing OPEC definitely doesn't want, it's people investing in ways to use less gas.
Look how well deregulation of the energy market worked for California
The California energy market was NEVER deregulated. They just changed the regulations. And when they changed the regulations, companies like Enron figured out how to exploit the new rules in order to get profit for doing nothing.
Basically, when California's energy market was 'deregulated', new rules were put in place that set the cost of power based on congestion - the more demand there was for the power lines over which the power was transmitted, the more money you paid for that power.
So the energy companies just moved power around essentially in circles, creating more artificial demand, and inflating the cost of power.
If the California energy market had been ACTUALLY deregulated, California's utilities wouldn't have been forced by regulation to pay too much for power, and there would have been more than enough power at reasonable prices to go around because the statutory incentive for the power distribution companies to artificially inflate demand wouldn't have existed.
So, in short, it was REGULATIONS that caused the rolling blackouts, NOT a lack of them.
Warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, period.
And where does the Constitution say that?
It doesn't. Why doesn't it? Because in 1789, there was no such thing as electronic communication.
In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that the protections of the fourth amendment applied to electronic searches as well as physical searches. But you must keep in mind than in 1967, electronic searches pretty much meant having people listen to other people's phone calls.
It's now 2007. Electronic searches mean a lot more than just people listening to other people's phone calls. Whether a computer monitoring all phone calls constitutes an illegal search or not is not a given. It is not unreasonable that the courts could say that computerized monitoring of phone calls is not due the same 4th amendment protections as human monitoring. Or they could say that it is. But neither has happened yet.
In the meantime, a law which says you can't use computer systems to monitor masses of phone calls isn't a bad thing - it makes it illegal now, definitively, without waiting for court interpretation of the scope of 1789's 4th amendment in 2007.
But, the 'It could be used for other purposes' argument applies to pretty much anything you let the government do, and you can't blindly deny the government the ability to do use any equipment or procedure just because that same equipment or procedure COULD be used in appropriately. If we did, police officers would not have guns - they could (and do) use those guns when they should not.
Of course, your argument also fails on the basis that you object to the government acquiring the system necessary to engage in this surveillance, when they ALREADY HAVE the system.
The question is, is the increased risk of illegitimate use of the policy/system and the impact on the privacy of American parties worth the benefits of potentially detecting terrorist threats earlier?
Regardless of the answer to that question, I agree that the President does not CURRENTLY have the authority to conduct this surveillance and than any such surveillance conducted to date has been illegal and I hope he gets prosecuted for it later. But setting aside my strong dislike of the current administration, and the current illegality of the method, the question still deserves consideration: How much privacy are we willing to give up for security? I'm personally fine with a computer monitoring my phone calls and then a warrant process for calls that the computer finds 'interesting', so long as the monitoring process itself is governed by congress/warrant.
What this administration has gotten wrong, however, is that it should be discussion first, implementation second, not the other way around. And they've also certainly missed the part where their activity needs some sort of monitoring by the other branches of government.
The 4th amendment only mentions people and things. The 4th amendment does not mention conversations or phone calls.
The NSA using a computer to monitor hundreds of thousands of phone calls involves neither a search of a place nor a seizure of a person or thing.
Mass computerized monitoring of electronic communication is not something the framers of the constitution likely considered in 1787. Clearly the burden on a person of the NSA computer monitoring a phone conversation is not the same as agents of the government entering your home and searching it and perhaps taking with them your things or records.
Now, I'm not saying the government SHOULD be able to listen to all our phone calls, but we shouldn't pretend that entering your home and searching it is the same as a human agent listening to your phone conversations is the same as a computer listening for phone calls about dirty bombs.
Where along that continuum, if anywhere, 4th amendment protections stop is an issue for the courts.
Because the searches had so little merit that even FISA would not grant warrants.
The problem is that having FISA issue warrants for the kind of surveillance the Bush administration wants IS NOT POSSIBLE.
FISA is set up to approve warrants for searches against specific people. Agent wants to listen to your calls, they do so, then get a warrant to do so.
Neverminding the bassaskwardness of this, this procedure does not work when the search method isn't Agent listens to Targets phone call, but is instead NSA uses computers to monitor HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of phone calls.
How is FISA going to approve tens of thousands of warrants?
Separate from FISA itself, is computerized monitoring of millions of phone calls as intrusive as a human agent listening to a particular person's phone calls? I think we'd all say no. So should we be willing to accept a lower burden on the governement for this sort of automated search?
The 4th amendment was written in a time when 'search' meant agents of the government came into your home or business and actually PHYSICALLY SEARCHED it. Automated search of electronic communication could not possibly have been considered then, and is thus something we need to consider now.
And if you have any responsibility for the election process, you should be fired.
Guaranteeing that the number of votes cast matches the number of votes in the machine DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT THE NUMBER OF VOTES CAST FOR EACH CANDIDATE MATCH THE NUMBER OF VOTES RECORDED!
Putting yellow tape around a machine does not do a damn thing to guarantee that the software running in the machine is legitimate.
That machine could have software in it that worked fine during any testing phase, then on election day took votes for Candidate A and instead recorded them for Candidate B, and you would never know - every single one of your 'checks' would pass, and you'd think nothing was wrong.
You fail. Horribly. And it's people like you, who have no idea what you are doing, that are going to ruin the validity of elections for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
...It wouldn't be +1 Funny.
Remember, Chernobyl was in Soviet Russia.
They don't watch Grey's Anatomy there.
$10 retail on something that costs $5 to produce is pretty standard.
What if my NIC asks his router if I'm allowed to use his network, and his router says "yes"? Is it okay then?
What if you turn the doorknob on someone's front door and it opens - are you allowed to enter the house then?
Once entering the house, are you allowed to help yourself to anything in the fridge? Watch TV? Order pay-per-view movies?
We're talking about a 40-day suspension. If the student had previous 10, 20 and 30 day suspensions for selling drugs to kindergarten students or something, then maybe a 40 day suspension would be more reasonable.
But if a student has never been disciplined before, jumping straight to a 40-day suspension for a first offense that is neither illegal nor dangerous seems a tad unreasonable.
So no, model students don't have more rights than non-model students, but model students probably deserve lighter punishment for the same offense than students who are constant sources of problems and have been disciplined several times before.
How much land does it take to produce one gallon of ethanol?
Getting one net gallon for every four gallons grown doesn't mean anything by itself - you have to know how much land you're using to grow those 4 gallons. If it's 10 square feet, you're doing pretty good. If it's an acre, not so much.
yes, you can expect that to be the case with powerful funders who have the resources and ingenuity to find the right scientists who will produce the right results. but there are also a hell of a lot of scientists out there who, because of their training in scientific values, are likely to feel that a professional code of practice stands in the way, and either get funding from somewhere else, or stand by their results.
Did you even read what you wrote?
You wrote that the people with the most money only hire the scientists that will give them the results they want, and the scientists who only publish the truth don't get that money.
Short answer:
Because we're dumb.
Long answer:
Each text message is a separate purchase. If I'm selling at $1 for one and $10 for 30, and you buy one, then come back in a half hour and buy another, and then come back in a half hour and buy another, a few days later, I'm still charging you $1 for each purchase.
But if you come in and buy 30 at once and then don't come back, I charge you $10.
Nothing sleazy about that.
What if the GPL were changed requiring any distributor to give ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS to the user?
Software available under the old license could still be distributed under the old license.
If someone wanted to distribute software ONLY available under this new license, then they would have to:
- Pay one hundred billion dollars to each user
- Not distribute it
- Not pay one hundred billion dollars, distribute it anyway, and be liable for copyright infringement for copying and distributing someone else's software without their permission.
Remember, if the GPL doesn't work, then the result is not that anybody can distribute the software, the result is that NO ONE can distribute the software.
I can do 1 Gbit/sec with my station wagon, but the latency kinda sucks.
Also, the MTU (MINIMUM transfer unit) is 4 GB.
Well, 780 MB if you only want to use CDs.
OPEC can't alleviate summer gas prices by producing more oil. Having more oil does you no good if you can't refine it into gas, and since refinery capacity is already at its limit, only more refining capacity will push down the price of gas. Producing more oil is useless.
Google puts links to your site on THEIR website.
Spammers put emails in YOUR email box.
Further, when you publish something on the web, it is public by default.
...the problem most OPEC countries have is they are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to developing alternative energy. Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil because it's sitting on a lot of oil. There is nothing anybody else can do to get Saudi Arabia's oil short of invading them or paying for it.
Alternative energy doesn't work like that. Anything Saudi Arabia develops there can be developed better by someone else. And in a lot of things - like ethanol - they're at a huge disadvantage due to lack of arable land.
They're stuck. They can only sell oil so fast - if they try and sell it all now, they'll just plummet the prices. And if they raise prices to cash in now, then they're just making oil become obsolete sooner.
This is not true. OPEC exists to keep oil prices high
Wrong. OPEC's goal is to keep PROFITS high. Getting the highest profits does NOT result from arbitrarily high prices. But, when producers collaborate, the price at which profit is maximized is higher than where it would be if producers competed. THAT's the goal of a cartel - eliminate downward price pressure caused by competition.
But, even the cartel has long and short term pressures on the oil price. In the short term, if the price goes too high, they move past the optimum point, the decreased volume of sales is not offset by the increased margin, and their profits actually go down. And even if they are at the optimal short-term price point for maximizing profits, in the LONG term, if the short-term price is so high that other people start investing in technology that ultimately reduces the demand for oil, then again, OPEC loses out on profits because in 5 or 10 years, everyone's car runs Ethanol or Vegetable Oil and demand for oil plummets. One of the big reasons we don't have more alternative energy now is that comparatively, gas has been cheap, so there wasn't any incentive to develop something else.
OPEC wants high profits - but to get high profits over the long term, they want to keep oil prices reasonable in the short term to discourage investment in alternative energy sources.
Does refinery capacity magically disappear in the summer, and come back in the winter?
It's called supply *AND* demand for a REASON!
My original post ASSUMES refining capacity doesn't change. That's the whole point!
What DOES change is DEMAND - there is a lot more driving done in the summer than in the winter; DEMAND goes up, PRICES go up.
Refining capacity yeilds a particular gas price in the winter. That SAME refining capacity, faced with HIGHER SUMMER DEMAND, yields a HIGHER price in the summer? Get it?
Gas prices are high because a single cartel, OPEC, dictates the price per barrel. This is not a free market.
Price of a barrel of oil is only one component of the price of a gallon of gas. In the US, the price of gas is much more closely related to the supply of refined gasoline vs. the demand for refined gasoline. Presently, there is about a $1 swing between the price of a gallon of gas in the winter and in the summer. Every year. Does the price of a barrel of oil swing by $20 from the winter to the summer?
No, it doesn't.
Does OPEC reduce oil production by 25% in the summer?
No, they don't.
So what accounts for the swing in gas prices?
Supply and demand. We only have a finite amount of refining capacity. In the summer, demand goes up, but supply does not - there is no more refining capacity available.
The real culprit in the high gas prices are the oil companies and environmentalists. Oil companies don't want to invest their profits in more refining capacity, and environmentalists make it difficult to build new refineries at all.
OPEC, on the other hand, doesn't like high gas prices any more than you do - the higher the gas price, the more attractive alternate energy sources become. And if there's one thing OPEC definitely doesn't want, it's people investing in ways to use less gas.
Look how well deregulation of the energy market worked for California
The California energy market was NEVER deregulated. They just changed the regulations. And when they changed the regulations, companies like Enron figured out how to exploit the new rules in order to get profit for doing nothing.
Basically, when California's energy market was 'deregulated', new rules were put in place that set the cost of power based on congestion - the more demand there was for the power lines over which the power was transmitted, the more money you paid for that power.
So the energy companies just moved power around essentially in circles, creating more artificial demand, and inflating the cost of power.
If the California energy market had been ACTUALLY deregulated, California's utilities wouldn't have been forced by regulation to pay too much for power, and there would have been more than enough power at reasonable prices to go around because the statutory incentive for the power distribution companies to artificially inflate demand wouldn't have existed.
So, in short, it was REGULATIONS that caused the rolling blackouts, NOT a lack of them.
The Cylons and Humans end up being the same. You already have a whole bunch of character crossovers, cross-breeding....
Warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, period.
And where does the Constitution say that?
It doesn't. Why doesn't it? Because in 1789, there was no such thing as electronic communication.
In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that the protections of the fourth amendment applied to electronic searches as well as physical searches. But you must keep in mind than in 1967, electronic searches pretty much meant having people listen to other people's phone calls.
It's now 2007. Electronic searches mean a lot more than just people listening to other people's phone calls. Whether a computer monitoring all phone calls constitutes an illegal search or not is not a given. It is not unreasonable that the courts could say that computerized monitoring of phone calls is not due the same 4th amendment protections as human monitoring. Or they could say that it is. But neither has happened yet.
In the meantime, a law which says you can't use computer systems to monitor masses of phone calls isn't a bad thing - it makes it illegal now, definitively, without waiting for court interpretation of the scope of 1789's 4th amendment in 2007.
I make no such assumptions.
But, the 'It could be used for other purposes' argument applies to pretty much anything you let the government do, and you can't blindly deny the government the ability to do use any equipment or procedure just because that same equipment or procedure COULD be used in appropriately. If we did, police officers would not have guns - they could (and do) use those guns when they should not.
Of course, your argument also fails on the basis that you object to the government acquiring the system necessary to engage in this surveillance, when they ALREADY HAVE the system.
The question is, is the increased risk of illegitimate use of the policy/system and the impact on the privacy of American parties worth the benefits of potentially detecting terrorist threats earlier?
Regardless of the answer to that question, I agree that the President does not CURRENTLY have the authority to conduct this surveillance and than any such surveillance conducted to date has been illegal and I hope he gets prosecuted for it later. But setting aside my strong dislike of the current administration, and the current illegality of the method, the question still deserves consideration: How much privacy are we willing to give up for security? I'm personally fine with a computer monitoring my phone calls and then a warrant process for calls that the computer finds 'interesting', so long as the monitoring process itself is governed by congress/warrant.
What this administration has gotten wrong, however, is that it should be discussion first, implementation second, not the other way around. And they've also certainly missed the part where their activity needs some sort of monitoring by the other branches of government.
The 4th amendment only mentions people and things. The 4th amendment does not mention conversations or phone calls.
The NSA using a computer to monitor hundreds of thousands of phone calls involves neither a search of a place nor a seizure of a person or thing.
Mass computerized monitoring of electronic communication is not something the framers of the constitution likely considered in 1787. Clearly the burden on a person of the NSA computer monitoring a phone conversation is not the same as agents of the government entering your home and searching it and perhaps taking with them your things or records.
Now, I'm not saying the government SHOULD be able to listen to all our phone calls, but we shouldn't pretend that entering your home and searching it is the same as a human agent listening to your phone conversations is the same as a computer listening for phone calls about dirty bombs.
Where along that continuum, if anywhere, 4th amendment protections stop is an issue for the courts.
Because the searches had so little merit that even FISA would not grant warrants.
The problem is that having FISA issue warrants for the kind of surveillance the Bush administration wants IS NOT POSSIBLE.
FISA is set up to approve warrants for searches against specific people. Agent wants to listen to your calls, they do so, then get a warrant to do so.
Neverminding the bassaskwardness of this, this procedure does not work when the search method isn't Agent listens to Targets phone call, but is instead NSA uses computers to monitor HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of phone calls.
How is FISA going to approve tens of thousands of warrants?
Separate from FISA itself, is computerized monitoring of millions of phone calls as intrusive as a human agent listening to a particular person's phone calls? I think we'd all say no. So should we be willing to accept a lower burden on the governement for this sort of automated search?
The 4th amendment was written in a time when 'search' meant agents of the government came into your home or business and actually PHYSICALLY SEARCHED it. Automated search of electronic communication could not possibly have been considered then, and is thus something we need to consider now.
The only thing worse than ending a series is dragging it on past its natural conclusion.
Tell the story. When the story is over, it's over. Trying to tack on extra seasons is just going to make it suck.
And if you have any responsibility for the election process, you should be fired.
Guaranteeing that the number of votes cast matches the number of votes in the machine DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT THE NUMBER OF VOTES CAST FOR EACH CANDIDATE MATCH THE NUMBER OF VOTES RECORDED!
Putting yellow tape around a machine does not do a damn thing to guarantee that the software running in the machine is legitimate.
That machine could have software in it that worked fine during any testing phase, then on election day took votes for Candidate A and instead recorded them for Candidate B, and you would never know - every single one of your 'checks' would pass, and you'd think nothing was wrong.
You fail. Horribly. And it's people like you, who have no idea what you are doing, that are going to ruin the validity of elections for the rest of us.