Should a telescoping microphone be legal simply because it be can bought for $20 or because everyone has one? If everyone has one, then no one should expect to have privacy from it.
That's not what "expectation of privacy" in the legal sense means.
It does not mean "can you expect your privacy to be secure, even from folks who don't give two shits about your privacy." That's security, not privacy.
"Expectation of privacy" means could a person reasonably expect for their privacy to be respected in that situation. It has nothing to do with how easy it is to disrespect the privacy. If you're talking at a restaurant in a public place with people all around you, no reasonable person would expect their conversation to remain private. However if you are at home, then you do have a reasonable expectation of privacy even though all it takes is a simple drinking glass, literally ancient technology, pressed against your door to allow someone to overhear you.
Your have an expectation of privacy in your mail, even though most of the time the simple "technology" of holding the fucker up to a light is sufficient to read it. Nevertheless, to use that mail against you, they need a warrant to acquire it.
If not, they only a specialist would have them, and special equipment would require special permissions, AKA a warrant.
A police officer needs no special equipment to search me on the street. However they still require special permissions to do so.
The whole "technology" issue is a red herring. Cops don't get to violate my privacy even when it's easy to do without any technology at all. So why does technology change anything?
I wonder if someone from 1920 would consider it invasive to use a radar gun to judge your speed,
Who knows, but it's irrelevant because if you are on a public road, then the velocity of your vehicle is a matter of public knowledge, in the same way as the color of your hair is not a privacy matter when you walk through the town square (sans chapeau).
However looking inside your car to see what is in your trunk is a privacy matter, and the cops can't check it even if they pull you over for speeding (they need probable cause that there's something illegal in your trunk, and speeding isn't such cause).
And cameras that could take pictures of your property were commonplace long before satellite photography, and a photograph of your property taken from outside your property has never been considered more than at worst rude.
Regarding the IR-sensing iPhone, think of this: Today, right now, anyone can walk up to the front of my house, put a glass to the window, and listen in on my conversations. The technology to do this is both ancient and ubiquitous. And yet, police are not allowed to do this without a warrant.
So I don't care how ubiquitous IR cameras become. For the police to look INSIDE my house, even if it doesn't require them to physically invade my house, is an unreasonable search without probable cause.
Whether you believe he's on to something or completely nuts, at least he's thinking about the paradoxes instead of ignoring them.
Uh... no. His notion of what a paradox is is retarded, and saying that people 'ignore' these paradoxes when they never exist in the first place is also retarded. A couple groaners at brief glance.
"We have the same question with the equation E = mc2. Einstein was nice enough to provide us with this simple equation, but not nice enough to tell us why the energy depends on the square of the speed of light."
Yeah, he never explained it, unless you count the derivation of that equation in his paper on SR.
But even worse, he "proves" the classical kinetic energy equation is wrong thusly:
"The equation is developed from the acceleration, as I just showed. The work-energy theorem requires a change in velocity, which is an acceleration. You cannot get work without a force and you cannot get a force without an acceleration. But the current kinetic energy equation has no change in velocity. A particle has kinetic energy with a constant velocity. If the kinetic energy equation is developed from an acceleration, it means the energy depends on the acceleration. The particle should have kinetic energy only while it is being accelerated."
This is retarded, but quadruply retarded for someone who is claiming their amazing math knowledge is disproving physics.
Yes, the kinetic energy equation is "developed from" the acceleration, in the sense that Work/Energy is an integral of Force. Force defines the rate of change of kinetic energy. His statement that if the force is 0 then the energy should be zero is equivalent to saying that if f(x) = 0, then the integral of f from 0 to x should be zero!
Ugh. Yeah, maybe the OP should read that. He seems to be the kind of guy who would love to hear arguments that the Scientific Establishment has been ignoring obvious paradoxes for hundreds of years that make sense if you know absolutely nothing about the math/science in question.
I didn't say anything about limiting us to Europa, you did.
Uh, you said "forget Mars", so it seems pretty clear that whatever unlimited space program you're imagining, it is limited to not-Mars.
In short Mars has received a disproportionate number of missions yet we keep sending rovers and landers to Mars!
Because we still have a ton of things to learn and it's low-hanging fruit. Relatively cheap missions with a relatively high measure of success and an enormous payoff in science. We will be sending rovers to Mars for a long time and still learning stuff. So why stop? Cus you're bored with science on Mars?
Have we found life on Mars yet? Have we found liquid water? Have the rovers found water ice? Sure the Mars Polar Lander found some ice, but the rovers aren't up there are they? Other than the pretty pictures what have we learned other than there are a lot of blueberries on Mars, and some dust-devils? What pray tell?
So because we haven't answered those questions, and because he current rovers aren't at the poles, we should stop sending rovers? Sounds like a good reason to keep going! And we've learned a shit-ton on Mars. But there's a ton more still to learn, too.
We could learn a lot from Europa because Europa has a small iron core which is heated by tidal friction, and under the the 3km of ice there may in fact be 100-200 kilometers of salt water . Now it is odd, that our space agencies, that claim to be searching for life willfully have ignored Europa other than a few flybys.
Um... I think you need to think a little bit more about the challenges just in the Mars lander project, then think a little bit more about that 3km of ice and 100km of salt water, on a heavenly body that on its surface receives 1/11th as much sunlight as Mars. "Willfully ignore"? Try "are fascinated by, but realize it's not feasible to dig under yet". The flybys are your clue that they are not ignoring Europa. There's interest in landing something on it, but that is a mission that is going to be in the pre-planning stages for a long time.
We keep going back to Mars because it is relatively easy, yet as per John F. Kennedy, we should do the hard things, but we don't do we because Mars is just too easy, and the thumb sucking populace loves the pretty pictures. I say focus somewhere else for the next 10 years. Mars has had its time. We can always go back to Mars when we want right? Because as you say, it is so easy..
Mars is plenty hard enough. "Relatively" easier than exploring the oceans of Europa is hardly easy. Why go back to Mars later when "we" -- meaning not you -- want to go there now? Because you're bored? So what, scientists aren't. I say bring on the MSL and a dozen other follow-on probes. And explore other bodies, too.
I think the terminology used leads to confusion in the layman. "Dark matter" sounds like it's something real, like matter but that's undetectable. In actuality, it's just a placeholder for something unknonwn, like null in a database.
Well it is in part just a placeholder for something unknown, not the name of some specific kind of matter. On the other hand, the reason it's called "dark matter" is because it is neither emitting nor reflecting enough light for us to see it directly. It is literally dark. And since the indirect gravitational evidence for this matter indicates that there is a ridiculously massive amount of it surrounding various galaxies, this is rather surprising. We can see clouds of hydrogen gas between galaxies, for example, so if this other matter was 'ordinary' we should be able to see it, too.
Thus the leading candidate for dark matter is in fact something that is like normal matter but undetectable by any of our long-range direct detection methods, all of which involve electromagnetism. If it is a type of particle that does not interact electromagnetically then, to the extent that "vision" implies photons, dark matter is literally invisible. And it is extremely hard to detect, unless you count the gravitational evidence in the first place.
So "dark matter" in a way really does give the correct impression to the layman. It's just that the layman, not having heard of a kind of matter that has mass but is invisible to telescopes sounds really weird and crazy. That's fine and dandy, until the layman decides that their lack of knowledge and gut instinct is enough to say that the scientists have no idea what they're talking about.
Of course the matter (heh) isn't fully decided yet or anything. The MACHO vs WIMP debate presses on. But as Hubble and other telescopes continue to fail to find enough objects in the galactic halo to account for dark matter, and with the still highly speculative but very exciting WIMP search showing several candidate events, things are definitely leaning in that direction.
Either way, neutrinos are a predicted and then subsequently observed form of the kind of non-baryonic matter we're talking about. So even if it's not WIMPs that make up the dark matter halo, it isn't a ridiculous idea.
Or blew them up in the terminal before departure. What about a car bomb in Times Square? If airlines are immune to bombing, people will bomb elsewhere. Terrorism cannot be fought at this end.
Exactly. Terrorists have clearly given up on the "hijack an airplane and use it as a giant missile" tactic since it won't work anymore, and are settling for trying to kill a plane full of people.
Well gee, if killing people is the main goal, look at all those folks piled up in front of the rigorous security checkpoint... Maybe not as dramatic as knocking a plane out of the sky, but jihadis can't be choosers if you know what I mean.
In that case it didn't work because the man's own body muffled the explosion, and while being held under arrest in front of the Prince is a really lousy time to try to drop trou and crap out the explosives.
But on an airplane, a trip to the bathroom could do the trick...
And if it happens -- WHEN it happens, mark my words -- the airline industry is fucked.
well... can they take off on their own given enough distance? They are only chucked off because the air craft carrier is not long enough for them to achieve the speed they need, they can take off fine from an airstrip, so they are airplanes that don't require catapults... now, put wright brothers "the flyer" on a airstrip with no wind and tell it to take off, it won't happen.
Why does it matter? Since when does the definition of airplane include the mandatory condition that it be able to take off under its own power? You said it yourself -- they are airplanes that don't require catapults. That is not synonymous with "airplane".
If an F-14 had all the capabilities it has in reality once in the air, but required a catapult, would you say it's not an airplane?
Large military cargo airplanes, the kind that transport tanks, require rocket boosters to actually take off when fully loaded. Are they not airplanes? Or only when empty?
Is Spaceship One not a rocket plane because it is launched from the White Knight carrier?
Before complaining, use some common sense, those fighters launched with catapults from aircraft carriers are full aircrafts that don't require that gizmo. The flyer is just a glider.
Uh... Common Sense says that a glider is something that does not fly under its own power. The definition (common sense and otherwise) of "gliding" is "unpowered flight". The Wright Flyer, once airborne, flew under its own power. Ergo it is obviously not a glider.
It was an airplane that required assistance to take off. It was an airplane with a significant technological limitation. That does not mean it was not an airplane.
americans think they need to invent everything... I feel sad for them.
Maybe, but that doesn't excuse you trying to undo a legitimate case with this terrible logic. Americans did invent some things, trying to prove that was never the case is equally sad.
No, we can't forget about mars, because we still have a crap-ton of stuff left to learn about it. So much so that just about everything we do there results in us learning something new. Hell, just a day or two ago, I learned that the Spirit rover trying to work its way free from some sand had revealed sulfate deposits. And that was quite literally just scratching the surface.
As others have pointed out, Europa missions are in the works, but are quite a bit harder to do than Mars, especially if you think the interesting stuff lies underneath the ice. Just think about the effort that went into the Mars rovers, then imagine working out how to design a lander that can drill through the ice, maneuver underneath it, and then somehow communicate with an orbiter through the ice. And then once you've designed and built it, it will still take a long time to actually reach Jupiter.
In the meantime we've got the Mars Science Laboratory planned for launch in 2011, and if it's half as successful at its mission as Spirit and Opportunity were at theirs, we're going to learn a ridiculous amount about the red planet.
Exactly. And also, I thought the name was quite clever in that it showed that the actual resource was almost beside the point. It doesn't matter what the valuable thing is, just that it is valuable.
Yeah, the name is less descriptive of the material's properties than it is of its role in the plot. A nice wink between Cameron and the audience.
People say the plot is a cliched retelling of $historicalevent, and then congratulate themselves that they've seen though the cunning allegory, but they are missing the point. Humans have shown themselves willing to kill entire populations of our own kind for any number of resources. It is cliche precisely because it has happened again and again throughout our history.
Well it is a cliched story, but many stories are and that's acceptable if the story is well done, and I thought it was. Okay sure the dialogue was a bit weak but acting made up for a lot of it. Also it added a couple twists to the cliche that I liked. My favorite and the biggest advancement is that it wasn't simply Culture A vs Culture B, with the one person from Culture A who makes a full transition to being part of Culture B fighting for Culture B. Sigourney Weaver and her team were a new addition, people from Culture A who realize that Culture B is worthy of respect, and worthy of protecting from annihilation, without actually adopting Culture B. The movie wasn't anti-technology or anti-Western culture, because Weaver and her science and technology were instrumental in saving the Na'vi, and without her the Na'vi would have been run roughshod over long before the movie happened. The movie is simply anti- people who are willing to slaughter an indigenous people and destroy their holy sites simply because it will improve their quarterly returns. The movie is pro- people from Culture A who are willing to fight those people.
In that sense it is a very optimistic movie. Dances with Wolves didn't include that set of people, in part because it couldn't. There were no Europeans actually fighting for the sake of the natives.
Fair enough. But while "Sgt Evil McBadass" could easily have a non-ridiculous name (can't remember what the actual characters name was, actually), I simply can't think of a name for an imaginary mineral that is a natural room-temperature superconductor that wouldn't sound as ridiculous as unobtainium. Any name they gave it would still essentially mean "made up material whose nature is unimportant because it's just a plot point."
Contrary to what the "internet" likes to tell you, many people question what scientists say because they want to see actual proof to support the claims rather than just additional layers of theories and educated "guesses".
And the people who are legitimately intellectually curious rather than simply delighting in taking jabs at the "scientific orthodoxy" don't universally phrase their questions as "Do you know what you're talking about or are you making shit up that supports your preconceived notions?"
"How do they determine those dates?" is a fine question, one I am curious about as well. "Gee, in the scientific method I'm used to, you have to have a known reference. Do they have one? Have they been following the scientific method?" kinda makes you sound like the kind of person you are implying you aren't. Maybe you're just being defensive, or using modding reverse-psychology. But really, just leave that part out.
No it wasn't. I was looking for the non-technical common-English word "theory". Because the (colloquial sense) theories of most people and I'm certain the OP regarding alien life are not as well-formed as a scientific hypothesis.
Go to Interpol.int and read up a bit. They do more than coordinate agencies. My previous question was rhetorical - they actually do all of those things.
Oh believe me I already have. And the last thing I would do at this point is take your word for the information contained in some document.
They do not arrest. They do not conduct primary investigations. They are information coordinators/managers. As their web site clearly states. They provide access to databases and expert advice, they assist communication between law enforcement agencies. They make information obtained by other organizations investigations available. That's what they do. That's what their website says they do.
You suggest they perform actual law enforcement activity within participating countries, and ergo continue to be full of shit.
You're confusing legal-under-American-law acts and acts-done-as-part-of-their-job acts, which may or may not be the same thing.
No I'm not. I'm saying that they cannot possibly have immunity from the provision of unreasonable search and seizure, because search and seizure is not one of their official capacities. Legal or not, it's not one of their official activities. Ergo the immunity cannot protect them if it is illegal.
If you think about all the espionage that has gone on under the umbrella of diplomatic immunity, you'll see where your error lies.
By full immunity, I meant they have attained some form of immunity in all six categories of diplomatic immunity.
So by "full" immunity, you meant "partial" immunity in some categories.
Yeah, that's not bullshit. It's blatant bullshit.
Huh, I guess they don't maintained databases of criminals, child abusers, ensure secure communications between police agencies, help track down fugitives, assume crisis management of developing situations, or police training.
Yes, they're an information coordinator. They don't actually track down fugitives, they pass information from one nation's police force to another so that they can track down fugitives. They assist communication between police agencies. Yes. That's all they do.
Any actual investigation or arrest performed by a law enforcement agent, even if that agent is assigned as a representative to INTERPOL (i.e. has the privileges mentioned), would not be protected because it would not be official INTERPOL business. INTERPOL does not have that authority.
Do you even know what you're talking about, or do you just parrot what you read in other comments?
Why don't you learn WTF you're talking about, eh? Notice how even their INTERPOL Response Teams (under Operational police support services) only deals with providing information and advice? Not actual law enforcement activity?
As WP and the law itself clearly states, agents of International Organizations are immune from prosecution for official acts only.
That is nothing like "full diplomatic immunity", which is immunity from all prosecution.
INTERPOL's official business in the U.S. is one of information coordinator between the police forces of various nations, NOT anything related to actual investigation or law enforcement. They do not arrest. They do not investigate.
So to answer the salient question raised by the summary: Can INTERPOL agents now violate due process or other Constitutional protections within the United States with impunity, is a big fucking NO because any such action would not be an official act and thus not protected.
Sure, finding habitable planets is cool. But what are they going to do once they've found one? Tick a box? Celebrate humanity?
Perform spectroscopy experiments to see if the planet has more in common with ours than just mass and relative distance from its star?
As part of the long, long process of answering one of the most amazing questions in humanity's existence: Are we alone in the universe? Is life unique to our planet, extremely rare, or as common as the stars themselves?
You might have you own theories one way or the other, but a theory isn't an answer. This is about evidence.
Because the Slashdot editors mangled my entry. There was no link to the ABC News article in what I submitted, but I did have a link to the story on unpaid UN parking tickets.
Ah, so a slashdot editor actually managed to improve a submission by linking to accurate information? I'm honestly shocked.
What really irks me is that this actually is a granting of full diplomatic immunity. If you go through the list of all the possible options for diplomatic immunity (it comes in different kinds), INTERPOL now has them all. So, yeah, I called it full diplomatic immunity.
No, it isn't, as your own links state.
Either you don't understand the difference between "immune to prosecution" and "immune to prosecution for official acts", or you don't understand what INTERPOL's official business is in the U.S. Or you somehow think "immunity for some actions" is the same as "full" immunity.
FULL diplomatic immunity means free from prosecution for any and all acts.
Let me spell it out for you.
If I was the French Ambassador to the U.S., and I was caught in L.A. snorting cocaine from from the ass crack of a dead 12 year old boy who I'd just raped and killed (not necessarily in that order), then the worst that the U.S. or local governments could do to to me would be to kick me out of the country -- unless of course France revoked my immunity, which you can certainly imagine happening in this case, but you get my point.
Now if I were an employee of INTERPOL, I would be prosecutable under U.S. and local law. As in NOT full immunity.
Unless you can explain how rape, murder, and drug use are official actions,
And you know what INTERPOL's official business is in the U.S.? Handing information provided by other nations' police forces over to U.S. police forces. That's it. That doesn't cover a very wide variety of actions, thus doesn't provide immunity for a very wide variety of actions, and thus only someone either completely foolish or deliberately stirring shit would call that "full immunity".
If you weren't wrong, I'd agree with you.
If you were any judge of right and wrong, you wouldn't have written such a shitty summary to begin with.
Maybe cause every time we hear it won't happen, won't pass, and won't hurt people, yet suddenly it magically manages to destroy people, get sneaked through, and does pass.
Maybe what is 'cause every time we hear it won't happen etc etc? What is that a response to?
Anyway, "it" did happen, but "it" isn't anything like what the submitter suggested it was. Are you suggesting that the headline "diplomatic immunity" isn't bullshit because in some hypothetical future it might not be bullshit? I don't know; make your words make sense to me please.
Slashdot Mirror
You just made it illegal for the cops to use their eyes. ... to look inside my house without a warrant.
And yeah, that's true.
If they want to use an IR camera to study my front lawn, more power to them.
Should a telescoping microphone be legal simply because it be can bought for $20 or because everyone has one? If everyone has one, then no one should expect to have privacy from it.
That's not what "expectation of privacy" in the legal sense means.
It does not mean "can you expect your privacy to be secure, even from folks who don't give two shits about your privacy." That's security, not privacy.
"Expectation of privacy" means could a person reasonably expect for their privacy to be respected in that situation. It has nothing to do with how easy it is to disrespect the privacy. If you're talking at a restaurant in a public place with people all around you, no reasonable person would expect their conversation to remain private. However if you are at home, then you do have a reasonable expectation of privacy even though all it takes is a simple drinking glass, literally ancient technology, pressed against your door to allow someone to overhear you.
Your have an expectation of privacy in your mail, even though most of the time the simple "technology" of holding the fucker up to a light is sufficient to read it. Nevertheless, to use that mail against you, they need a warrant to acquire it.
If not, they only a specialist would have them, and special equipment would require special permissions, AKA a warrant.
A police officer needs no special equipment to search me on the street. However they still require special permissions to do so.
The whole "technology" issue is a red herring. Cops don't get to violate my privacy even when it's easy to do without any technology at all. So why does technology change anything?
I wonder if someone from 1920 would consider it invasive to use a radar gun to judge your speed,
Who knows, but it's irrelevant because if you are on a public road, then the velocity of your vehicle is a matter of public knowledge, in the same way as the color of your hair is not a privacy matter when you walk through the town square (sans chapeau).
However looking inside your car to see what is in your trunk is a privacy matter, and the cops can't check it even if they pull you over for speeding (they need probable cause that there's something illegal in your trunk, and speeding isn't such cause).
And cameras that could take pictures of your property were commonplace long before satellite photography, and a photograph of your property taken from outside your property has never been considered more than at worst rude.
Regarding the IR-sensing iPhone, think of this: Today, right now, anyone can walk up to the front of my house, put a glass to the window, and listen in on my conversations. The technology to do this is both ancient and ubiquitous. And yet, police are not allowed to do this without a warrant.
So I don't care how ubiquitous IR cameras become. For the police to look INSIDE my house, even if it doesn't require them to physically invade my house, is an unreasonable search without probable cause.
Whether you believe he's on to something or completely nuts, at least he's thinking about the paradoxes instead of ignoring them.
Uh... no. His notion of what a paradox is is retarded, and saying that people 'ignore' these paradoxes when they never exist in the first place is also retarded. A couple groaners at brief glance.
"We have the same question with the equation E = mc2. Einstein was nice enough to provide us with this simple equation, but not nice enough to tell us why the energy depends on the square of the speed of light."
Yeah, he never explained it, unless you count the derivation of that equation in his paper on SR.
But even worse, he "proves" the classical kinetic energy equation is wrong thusly:
"The equation is developed from the acceleration, as I just showed. The work-energy theorem requires a change in velocity, which is an acceleration. You cannot get work without a force and you cannot get a force without an acceleration. But the current kinetic energy equation has no change in velocity. A particle has kinetic energy with a constant velocity. If the kinetic energy equation is developed from an acceleration, it means the energy depends on the acceleration. The particle should have kinetic energy only while it is being accelerated."
This is retarded, but quadruply retarded for someone who is claiming their amazing math knowledge is disproving physics.
Yes, the kinetic energy equation is "developed from" the acceleration, in the sense that Work/Energy is an integral of Force. Force defines the rate of change of kinetic energy. His statement that if the force is 0 then the energy should be zero is equivalent to saying that if f(x) = 0, then the integral of f from 0 to x should be zero!
Ugh. Yeah, maybe the OP should read that. He seems to be the kind of guy who would love to hear arguments that the Scientific Establishment has been ignoring obvious paradoxes for hundreds of years that make sense if you know absolutely nothing about the math/science in question.
I didn't say anything about limiting us to Europa, you did.
Uh, you said "forget Mars", so it seems pretty clear that whatever unlimited space program you're imagining, it is limited to not-Mars.
In short Mars has received a disproportionate number of missions yet we keep sending rovers and landers to Mars!
Because we still have a ton of things to learn and it's low-hanging fruit. Relatively cheap missions with a relatively high measure of success and an enormous payoff in science. We will be sending rovers to Mars for a long time and still learning stuff. So why stop? Cus you're bored with science on Mars?
Have we found life on Mars yet? Have we found liquid water? Have the rovers found water ice? Sure the Mars Polar Lander found some ice, but the rovers aren't up there are they? Other than the pretty pictures what have we learned other than there are a lot of blueberries on Mars, and some dust-devils? What pray tell?
So because we haven't answered those questions, and because he current rovers aren't at the poles, we should stop sending rovers? Sounds like a good reason to keep going! And we've learned a shit-ton on Mars. But there's a ton more still to learn, too.
We could learn a lot from Europa because Europa has a small iron core which is heated by tidal friction, and under the the 3km of ice there may in fact be 100-200 kilometers of salt water . Now it is odd, that our space agencies, that claim to be searching for life willfully have ignored Europa other than a few flybys.
Um... I think you need to think a little bit more about the challenges just in the Mars lander project, then think a little bit more about that 3km of ice and 100km of salt water, on a heavenly body that on its surface receives 1/11th as much sunlight as Mars. "Willfully ignore"? Try "are fascinated by, but realize it's not feasible to dig under yet". The flybys are your clue that they are not ignoring Europa. There's interest in landing something on it, but that is a mission that is going to be in the pre-planning stages for a long time.
We keep going back to Mars because it is relatively easy, yet as per John F. Kennedy, we should do the hard things, but we don't do we because Mars is just too easy, and the thumb sucking populace loves the pretty pictures. I say focus somewhere else for the next 10 years. Mars has had its time. We can always go back to Mars when we want right? Because as you say, it is so easy..
Mars is plenty hard enough. "Relatively" easier than exploring the oceans of Europa is hardly easy. Why go back to Mars later when "we" -- meaning not you -- want to go there now? Because you're bored? So what, scientists aren't. I say bring on the MSL and a dozen other follow-on probes. And explore other bodies, too.
I think the terminology used leads to confusion in the layman. "Dark matter" sounds like it's something real, like matter but that's undetectable. In actuality, it's just a placeholder for something unknonwn, like null in a database.
Well it is in part just a placeholder for something unknown, not the name of some specific kind of matter. On the other hand, the reason it's called "dark matter" is because it is neither emitting nor reflecting enough light for us to see it directly. It is literally dark. And since the indirect gravitational evidence for this matter indicates that there is a ridiculously massive amount of it surrounding various galaxies, this is rather surprising. We can see clouds of hydrogen gas between galaxies, for example, so if this other matter was 'ordinary' we should be able to see it, too.
Thus the leading candidate for dark matter is in fact something that is like normal matter but undetectable by any of our long-range direct detection methods, all of which involve electromagnetism. If it is a type of particle that does not interact electromagnetically then, to the extent that "vision" implies photons, dark matter is literally invisible. And it is extremely hard to detect, unless you count the gravitational evidence in the first place.
So "dark matter" in a way really does give the correct impression to the layman. It's just that the layman, not having heard of a kind of matter that has mass but is invisible to telescopes sounds really weird and crazy. That's fine and dandy, until the layman decides that their lack of knowledge and gut instinct is enough to say that the scientists have no idea what they're talking about.
Of course the matter (heh) isn't fully decided yet or anything. The MACHO vs WIMP debate presses on. But as Hubble and other telescopes continue to fail to find enough objects in the galactic halo to account for dark matter, and with the still highly speculative but very exciting WIMP search showing several candidate events, things are definitely leaning in that direction.
Either way, neutrinos are a predicted and then subsequently observed form of the kind of non-baryonic matter we're talking about. So even if it's not WIMPs that make up the dark matter halo, it isn't a ridiculous idea.
Or blew them up in the terminal before departure. What about a car bomb in Times Square? If airlines are immune to bombing, people will bomb elsewhere. Terrorism cannot be fought at this end.
Exactly. Terrorists have clearly given up on the "hijack an airplane and use it as a giant missile" tactic since it won't work anymore, and are settling for trying to kill a plane full of people.
Well gee, if killing people is the main goal, look at all those folks piled up in front of the rigorous security checkpoint... Maybe not as dramatic as knocking a plane out of the sky, but jihadis can't be choosers if you know what I mean.
In that case it didn't work because the man's own body muffled the explosion, and while being held under arrest in front of the Prince is a really lousy time to try to drop trou and crap out the explosives.
But on an airplane, a trip to the bathroom could do the trick...
And if it happens -- WHEN it happens, mark my words -- the airline industry is fucked.
well... can they take off on their own given enough distance? They are only chucked off because the air craft carrier is not long enough for them to achieve the speed they need, they can take off fine from an airstrip, so they are airplanes that don't require catapults... now, put wright brothers "the flyer" on a airstrip with no wind and tell it to take off, it won't happen.
Why does it matter? Since when does the definition of airplane include the mandatory condition that it be able to take off under its own power? You said it yourself -- they are airplanes that don't require catapults. That is not synonymous with "airplane".
If an F-14 had all the capabilities it has in reality once in the air, but required a catapult, would you say it's not an airplane?
Large military cargo airplanes, the kind that transport tanks, require rocket boosters to actually take off when fully loaded. Are they not airplanes? Or only when empty?
Is Spaceship One not a rocket plane because it is launched from the White Knight carrier?
Before complaining, use some common sense, those fighters launched with catapults from aircraft carriers are full aircrafts that don't require that gizmo. The flyer is just a glider.
Uh... Common Sense says that a glider is something that does not fly under its own power. The definition (common sense and otherwise) of "gliding" is "unpowered flight". The Wright Flyer, once airborne, flew under its own power. Ergo it is obviously not a glider.
It was an airplane that required assistance to take off. It was an airplane with a significant technological limitation. That does not mean it was not an airplane.
americans think they need to invent everything... I feel sad for them.
Maybe, but that doesn't excuse you trying to undo a legitimate case with this terrible logic. Americans did invent some things, trying to prove that was never the case is equally sad.
No, we can't forget about mars, because we still have a crap-ton of stuff left to learn about it. So much so that just about everything we do there results in us learning something new. Hell, just a day or two ago, I learned that the Spirit rover trying to work its way free from some sand had revealed sulfate deposits. And that was quite literally just scratching the surface.
As others have pointed out, Europa missions are in the works, but are quite a bit harder to do than Mars, especially if you think the interesting stuff lies underneath the ice. Just think about the effort that went into the Mars rovers, then imagine working out how to design a lander that can drill through the ice, maneuver underneath it, and then somehow communicate with an orbiter through the ice. And then once you've designed and built it, it will still take a long time to actually reach Jupiter.
In the meantime we've got the Mars Science Laboratory planned for launch in 2011, and if it's half as successful at its mission as Spirit and Opportunity were at theirs, we're going to learn a ridiculous amount about the red planet.
Exactly. And also, I thought the name was quite clever in that it showed that the actual resource was almost beside the point. It doesn't matter what the valuable thing is, just that it is valuable.
Yeah, the name is less descriptive of the material's properties than it is of its role in the plot. A nice wink between Cameron and the audience.
People say the plot is a cliched retelling of $historicalevent, and then congratulate themselves that they've seen though the cunning allegory, but they are missing the point. Humans have shown themselves willing to kill entire populations of our own kind for any number of resources. It is cliche precisely because it has happened again and again throughout our history.
Well it is a cliched story, but many stories are and that's acceptable if the story is well done, and I thought it was. Okay sure the dialogue was a bit weak but acting made up for a lot of it. Also it added a couple twists to the cliche that I liked. My favorite and the biggest advancement is that it wasn't simply Culture A vs Culture B, with the one person from Culture A who makes a full transition to being part of Culture B fighting for Culture B. Sigourney Weaver and her team were a new addition, people from Culture A who realize that Culture B is worthy of respect, and worthy of protecting from annihilation, without actually adopting Culture B. The movie wasn't anti-technology or anti-Western culture, because Weaver and her science and technology were instrumental in saving the Na'vi, and without her the Na'vi would have been run roughshod over long before the movie happened. The movie is simply anti- people who are willing to slaughter an indigenous people and destroy their holy sites simply because it will improve their quarterly returns. The movie is pro- people from Culture A who are willing to fight those people.
In that sense it is a very optimistic movie. Dances with Wolves didn't include that set of people, in part because it couldn't. There were no Europeans actually fighting for the sake of the natives.
Fair enough. But while "Sgt Evil McBadass" could easily have a non-ridiculous name (can't remember what the actual characters name was, actually), I simply can't think of a name for an imaginary mineral that is a natural room-temperature superconductor that wouldn't sound as ridiculous as unobtainium. Any name they gave it would still essentially mean "made up material whose nature is unimportant because it's just a plot point."
Contrary to what the "internet" likes to tell you, many people question what scientists say because they want to see actual proof to support the claims rather than just additional layers of theories and educated "guesses".
And the people who are legitimately intellectually curious rather than simply delighting in taking jabs at the "scientific orthodoxy" don't universally phrase their questions as "Do you know what you're talking about or are you making shit up that supports your preconceived notions?"
"How do they determine those dates?" is a fine question, one I am curious about as well. "Gee, in the scientific method I'm used to, you have to have a known reference. Do they have one? Have they been following the scientific method?" kinda makes you sound like the kind of person you are implying you aren't. Maybe you're just being defensive, or using modding reverse-psychology. But really, just leave that part out.
Obviously we don't, otherwise the word "hypothesis" would not have been suggested, now would it?
Actually that implies that you do understand my meaning, and thought "hypothesis" was a better word for expressing it.
The inescapable conclusion is that yes, he's doing it on purpose. The whole submission is a finely crafted troll. Gotta hand it to him -- it worked.
Uh. Oh yeah. That's the stuff. Graph that flux, baby. Graph it good.
Of a limited sort... For official acts only, and INTERPOL's official acts are rather limited.
No it wasn't. I was looking for the non-technical common-English word "theory". Because the (colloquial sense) theories of most people and I'm certain the OP regarding alien life are not as well-formed as a scientific hypothesis.
That's why I called it full diplomatic immunity - they didn't have all six categories before.
So you're calling partial immunity in six categories full immunity.
That's a retarded, and dare I say it, deliberately misleading definition.
In any case it's not what everyone who read your summary thought of when you said "full immunity".
Go to Interpol.int and read up a bit. They do more than coordinate agencies. My previous question was rhetorical - they actually do all of those things.
Oh believe me I already have. And the last thing I would do at this point is take your word for the information contained in some document.
They do not arrest. They do not conduct primary investigations. They are information coordinators/managers. As their web site clearly states. They provide access to databases and expert advice, they assist communication between law enforcement agencies. They make information obtained by other organizations investigations available. That's what they do. That's what their website says they do.
You suggest they perform actual law enforcement activity within participating countries, and ergo continue to be full of shit.
You're confusing legal-under-American-law acts and acts-done-as-part-of-their-job acts, which may or may not be the same thing.
No I'm not. I'm saying that they cannot possibly have immunity from the provision of unreasonable search and seizure, because search and seizure is not one of their official capacities. Legal or not, it's not one of their official activities. Ergo the immunity cannot protect them if it is illegal.
If you think about all the espionage that has gone on under the umbrella of diplomatic immunity, you'll see where your error lies.
Yes, under actual, FULL diplomatic immunity.
By full immunity, I meant they have attained some form of immunity in all six categories of diplomatic immunity.
So by "full" immunity, you meant "partial" immunity in some categories.
Yeah, that's not bullshit. It's blatant bullshit.
Huh, I guess they don't maintained databases of criminals, child abusers, ensure secure communications between police agencies, help track down fugitives, assume crisis management of developing situations, or police training.
Yes, they're an information coordinator. They don't actually track down fugitives, they pass information from one nation's police force to another so that they can track down fugitives. They assist communication between police agencies. Yes. That's all they do.
Any actual investigation or arrest performed by a law enforcement agent, even if that agent is assigned as a representative to INTERPOL (i.e. has the privileges mentioned), would not be protected because it would not be official INTERPOL business. INTERPOL does not have that authority.
Do you even know what you're talking about, or do you just parrot what you read in other comments?
Why don't you learn WTF you're talking about, eh? Notice how even their INTERPOL Response Teams (under Operational police support services) only deals with providing information and advice? Not actual law enforcement activity?
Get a clue.
As WP and the law itself clearly states, agents of International Organizations are immune from prosecution for official acts only.
That is nothing like "full diplomatic immunity", which is immunity from all prosecution.
INTERPOL's official business in the U.S. is one of information coordinator between the police forces of various nations, NOT anything related to actual investigation or law enforcement. They do not arrest. They do not investigate.
So to answer the salient question raised by the summary: Can INTERPOL agents now violate due process or other Constitutional protections within the United States with impunity, is a big fucking NO because any such action would not be an official act and thus not protected.
Sure, finding habitable planets is cool. But what are they going to do once they've found one? Tick a box? Celebrate humanity?
Perform spectroscopy experiments to see if the planet has more in common with ours than just mass and relative distance from its star?
As part of the long, long process of answering one of the most amazing questions in humanity's existence: Are we alone in the universe? Is life unique to our planet, extremely rare, or as common as the stars themselves?
You might have you own theories one way or the other, but a theory isn't an answer. This is about evidence.
Because the Slashdot editors mangled my entry. There was no link to the ABC News article in what I submitted, but I did have a link to the story on unpaid UN parking tickets.
Ah, so a slashdot editor actually managed to improve a submission by linking to accurate information? I'm honestly shocked.
What really irks me is that this actually is a granting of full diplomatic immunity. If you go through the list of all the possible options for diplomatic immunity (it comes in different kinds), INTERPOL now has them all. So, yeah, I called it full diplomatic immunity.
No, it isn't, as your own links state.
Either you don't understand the difference between "immune to prosecution" and "immune to prosecution for official acts", or you don't understand what INTERPOL's official business is in the U.S. Or you somehow think "immunity for some actions" is the same as "full" immunity.
FULL diplomatic immunity means free from prosecution for any and all acts.
Let me spell it out for you.
If I was the French Ambassador to the U.S., and I was caught in L.A. snorting cocaine from from the ass crack of a dead 12 year old boy who I'd just raped and killed (not necessarily in that order), then the worst that the U.S. or local governments could do to to me would be to kick me out of the country -- unless of course France revoked my immunity, which you can certainly imagine happening in this case, but you get my point.
Now if I were an employee of INTERPOL, I would be prosecutable under U.S. and local law. As in NOT full immunity.
Unless you can explain how rape, murder, and drug use are official actions,
And you know what INTERPOL's official business is in the U.S.? Handing information provided by other nations' police forces over to U.S. police forces. That's it. That doesn't cover a very wide variety of actions, thus doesn't provide immunity for a very wide variety of actions, and thus only someone either completely foolish or deliberately stirring shit would call that "full immunity".
If you weren't wrong, I'd agree with you.
If you were any judge of right and wrong, you wouldn't have written such a shitty summary to begin with.
Maybe cause every time we hear it won't happen, won't pass, and won't hurt people, yet suddenly it magically manages to destroy people, get sneaked through, and does pass.
Maybe what is 'cause every time we hear it won't happen etc etc? What is that a response to?
Anyway, "it" did happen, but "it" isn't anything like what the submitter suggested it was. Are you suggesting that the headline "diplomatic immunity" isn't bullshit because in some hypothetical future it might not be bullshit? I don't know; make your words make sense to me please.