I'm not saying it is. That's what the article and the submitter of this slashdot story are insinuating. Why is making certain exceptions for investigations related to foreign intelligence "giving up my civil liberties"?
Well in your question you directly pitted intelligence gathering versus the right to privacy and asked who should win, so I'm confused. Equally so because "making certain exceptions" to privacy is explicitly giving up civil liberties.
Allowing surveilance of people without a warrant or any kind of oversight so long as it is claimed that the investigation relates to foreign intelligence is without a doubt giving up the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure -- aka "privacy".
No, I'm not saying that, and I don't think the federal government uses that argument either, intentionally or otherwise. Let's take the Jose Padilla example.
To summarize your example: Circumstantial evidence indicates that Jose Padilla is a bad guy. In order to catch bad guys like Jose Padilla instead of letting them go free, we need to remove his rights under the 4th (unreasonable search), 5th (due process), 6th (speedy trial), and the right to habeus corpus.
Sorry, but the federal government and you are both arguing that our rights are getting in the way of them protecting us. I don't see how you can say otherwise.
Okay. Now, I'm not saying YOU are making this argument, but let me remind you that many of the people who are vehemently anti-Bush also now say that the DHS is the worst bureaucracy ever to be created. And these were some of the same people who are making the exact claim you just did above, by calling for the ability for intelligence agencies to share information. I see that as an unwinnable "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
I don't really care about DHS, but those viewpoints aren't opposed at all. Only a politico would hear "we need better communication between law enforcement agencies" and come away with "we need to create a massive new beauracracy". The saying that applies here is "damned if you don't, damned if you do something retarded".
I don't think that's the contention. The contention is that the targets of investigation will become aware of said investigation, and a chance to prevent a major plot will be missed. When they say "we have to be right all of the time, and the terrorists only have to be right once," they're not kidding.
If that's the case, then court procedings can be sealed. This happens often when an investigation is in progress and releasing court documents could damage that investigation. It's not as if this is a new problem that suddenly sprung into existence after 9/11. How do you think wire tap warrants work? The old system works fine.
Now, if someone believes that the "government" wants all of these expanded powers for 1984-style ulterior motives, I can't speak to that. All I can speak to is the assertion that the powers are necessary, and in some cases, it's necessary that they remain secret, else the ability to foil a detailed plot that has been years in the making may collapse before the plot can be foiled.
I hope by '1984-style' you mean 'all of human history-style'.
And it is just an assertion that these are necessary. The facts say that they would not have stopped 9/11, they are not necessary to prevent terrorists from knowing their plans have been found out, they do nothing but reduce oversight from an entity that has proven that a lack of oversight will be abused.
I guess my problem is that I don't see the powers as anywhere near approaching that threshold. I believe the powers need oversight, but they do not need universal civilian oversight. Such oversight ALWAYS means that the target of an investigation will be aware (or will soon be aware) of the investigation.
Well, since what they are asking for is a complete lack of oversight, why are you for these provisions? It is false that oversight ALWAYS
What follows is a series of honest, and not rhetorical, questions:
I'll accept their honesty, but there is certainly some framing going on.
Is it ever ok for US intelligence and/or military capability to use domestic surveillance and/or intelligence-gathering to protect our assets (be they life, property, and so on), or is it always better to err on the side of privacy in domestic concerns, and use the standard US criminal justice system to prosecute crimes after they have already occurred?
This being a good example, as you've framed the question as a dichotomy which seems to me to be a false one. Why are these new surveilance powers necessary for our domestic intelligence gathering to protect our assets? What power do they need that is incompatible with the standards of justice that the U.S.? You are asking me is it okay to give up my civil liberties in order to gain safety, and I ask why is that a necessary choice?
Is there ever a circumstance where preemption could be appropriate, or would universal privacy always trump, say, the lives of thousands of others?
If you have reason to believe that circumstance exists, you should have no problem convincing a judge of the need for a warrant. If you do not have reason to believe that circumstance exists, then you are just using scare tactics to justify a decrease in privacy rights. Once again I'm seeing a false dichotomy, and it's the one the federal government always uses -- we can only protect you if we take away your righs.
Since the "lives of thousands" that every American thinks of is 9/11, let me remind you that we really didn't need any additional surveilance powers to catch them. We had the evidence, the problems were focus (not on terrorism) and communication (security departments operating more like separate kingdoms than part of the same).
Is it possible to have appropriate oversight of such activities, or would you argue that such mechanisms for oversight and investigation already exist (e.g., warrants, etc.)?
Yes, they exist. If you can't get a warrant for what you need, then you probably don't need it. That is what "reasonable searches" means. We must have oversight. Most of the attempts at increasing police powers in the past decade have focused around having less oversight, whether that's Clinton's roving wiretaps or Bush's anti-terrorism memos. If these actions are so necessary, and so right, and so devoted to helping the people, why can they not stand the light of oversight?
[1] Please consider that no matter how much you personally may distrust the machinery of government, I would remind you that you would likely find that in face-to-face discussions with individual military, intelligence, or other government personnel, you'd find a genuine and deep-seated desire to do what is best.
I sincerely desire to do good in this world. You can count on that. If you took that statement, and then decided to grant me supreme power over you and the ability to probe into any detail of your life I wanted without oversight, I would recoil in horror from your foolishness. Many people believe they are doing good. Plenty of good cops have arrested innocent people in their pursuit of what is "good". The road to hell and all that -- it isn't just an expression.
More to the point -- when I turn around and say "I sincerely desire to do good in the world, but you can't watch my actions to see that this is the case" you should doubt that it is in fact good intentions that I'm paving the road to hell with.
The less people that can afford the car, the less hybrids that will be out there. Not everyone can afford the $3,000 markup that hybrids carry, and especially when they're told it won't save them the cost of said markup over time.
Which is why everyone that can should buy one, in order to drop the price down.
Isn't this how capitalism is supposed to provide benefit to the people? New product comes along, great but expensive. Demand among the afluent causes increasing production which reduces the price. As the price comes down, more people -- progressively more as we walk the wealth curve to the left -- are able to afford it, creating more demand, creating more supply, further driving down the cost.
Nobody needed an economic reason to spend $5k to buy a good desktop PC in the eighties. Well, nobody who could afford one. I think that's really the take-away: Either you can afford the hybrid car, or you can't. Being a hybrid doesn't really change the financial decision. If you can afford one and are interested, buy it already and don't complain how your gas savings won't pay for the extra money you spent.
Exactly. That's why restrictions on cryptography exports were lifted in the 90s, because the stupid assumption that nobody but Americans could develop strong cryptography was proven false. All the restrictions did was hinder U.S. companies in international markets.
Under the completely unresearched assumption that the U.S. currently has some lead in quantum computing, all restricting it can do is give some lead time before others catch up and then we have the same situation as we had with cryptography.
Though the article doesn't make it clear that export restrictions are going to be the main thrust. If they regulate quantum computers within the U.S... well, I can only imagine the justification (teh terrorists crack your bank account!), but the detrimental-to-U.S.-interests aspect will actually be amplified as the rest of the world uses the useful tool and the U.S. forbids it.
With any luck there will be an unexplainable outbreak of intelligence and sincerity in the government (or the appearance of such caused by commercial lobbyists) and no significant regulations come to pass.
Is that that the full-fledged xbox 360, or the one without a hard drive?
I'm somewhat skeptical that the HDD is going to be such a great feature of the xbox when a good deal of the consoles (if normal market assumptions hold where the lower end sells more, most of them) won't have a hard drive. How many developers are going to make games that depend on a feature that may or may not be there?
But even if that is just for the diskless xbox, that would still make for an interesting competition between xbox and gamecube, the latter having a very nice price advantage in the current console wars from the get-go.
It's a game! My record is fourteen. By the way, it is cheating to not wear pants, which I wish I had known beforehand.
Re:While panspermia is possible...
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Space Lichens
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I always thought the theory was that primitive life (aka bacteria) were carried from Mars or elsewhere to earth. Not that humans were brought here from somewhere else and aren't connected to other life on earth.
Not that Michigan (Detroit, more recently Benton Harbor) hasn't had its fair share of riots over what could be termed "race issues".
The point not being that "U.S. is just as bad!" so much as "any country that has and fails to address significant race issues will find them coming to the surface, often as an explosion of violence". France has deliberately tried to push down any and all race issues (that being what all the head-scarf-banning was about) in the hopes that this would make them go away. *Checks news.google* Nope, haven't gone away.
I do find it interesting that the U.S. has had generally good luck accepting immigrant populations. Don't think that these populations were just readily embraced as soon as they stepped off the boat, either. Dutch, Irish, and other immigrants certainly saw their fair share of problems when they first arrived, but were eventually assimilated and peace reigned. On the other hand, we have miserable luck assimilating populations brought over as captives, with problems resulting in outraged violence continuing even to today in afforementioned melting pot of Michigan. Then again this too was a problem that wasn't addressed until it exploded into nation-wide violence.
Here's hoping France doesn't need a civil war to realize ignoring problems won't make them go away, and using censorship to fight racism is like trying to fight a volcano by capping all of its vents.
PLaying the name-game doesn't really change anything.
Which is why it is important to call something what it is. The way language works is we pick up on things implied by the name regardless of whether that affects the reality. This is why we call someone an "accused murderer" rather than "murderer" before they are convicted (though people will still conclude that accusation is the same as guilt). Similarly it is natural (and has been observed in reality) for the users of a "non-lethal" weapon to believe that the weapon, used as intended, will not kill when that simply isn't true. Updates to training of police officers have started to take this fact into account.
"Less-lethal weapons" is a perfect name for the devices normally called "non-lethal", and I was glad when I started to see news reports using that term. It conveys the absolutely correct idea: These are weapons who are designed to do less-than-lethal harm, but still have the capacity for lethality inherent in any weapon capable of incapacitating someone. The very important inference from this is that one should use caution relative to that risk of death when deciding whether or not to fire the weapon.
Personally I believe the cop that shot the woman through the eye with a rubber bullet would have been much less likely to discharge his weapon into a crowd at head level had that weapon been a full-fledged "lethal" weapon. "Non-lethal" lends to thinking of the device more like one would think of a baton, or hand cuffs, when in fact it is much closer to the sidearm a police officer is trained to consider carefully before using.
As opposed to, say, a pillow, which is not designed to harm at all. Non-lethal applies perfectly to pillows. If you think a tazer or pellet gun is closer to a pillow in terms of lethality than a gun, you are mistaken. If you don't think this, then why is "less lethal" not a superior phrase?
Re:But will it be able to defend against...
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Set PHASRs On Stun
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No, that's just a myth that Sony and Nintendo allowed Microsoft to believe. Sony may have lost money on early PS2's, but Nintendo never lost money on the Cube.
However they do make most of their cash off of game licenses, so it still doesn't make any sense to encourage destruction of the consoles.
Actually, this is the kind with AK-47s and ski masks.
Don't worry, give it a hundred years and I'm sure we'll romanticize these pirates too. Kids will be wearing jaunty ski masks and waving around plastic RPGs, while the real pirates are attacking cruise ships with therm-optic camoflauge and lasers.
Actually, can we skip right to romanticizing the camoflauge and laser pirates?
HAWTs have a distinct advantage of exploiting the swept area and the power law index by increasing rotor diameters (blade lengths). VAWTs may evolve into simple designs without much need for regulation - there are some that offer inbuilt speed regulation by design. They can generate at any wind speed that the supporting structure can withstand. However, I am yet to see VAWTs catching up with HAWTs having rated capacities of decade-old standards.
So, should my takeaway be something like: HAWTs are better for large-scale wind farms to provide power to cities, while VAWTs may be better for small scale applications, like an individual wishing to become more indpendent from the grid?
I've myself suggested one design to a defence research official for distributed, arctic-condition, radar/thermal/sonic neutral generation needs at the world's highest battlefield.
I assume you're talking about Kashmir? That's pretty cool. But I don't see how it would be radar neutral...
Where they near each other? I see two possibilities: 1) Bird gets smacked by turbine blade beak-first into sheep's temple, killing it. The solution to this problem would be to sharpen the blades, so instead of striking the bird like a baseball it would cut them in half so the two halves would fall at normal speed to the ground. 2) The sheep, being of a species well known for their craven cowardice and deep cunning (they only act stupid so as not to appear threatening), saw the dead bird, and upon considering the environmental implications, died of a heart attack. The solution to this problem is to give sheep internet access so they can research the problem themselves.
The Altamont Pass is a disaster which was produced by irresponsible economic incentives of the time which put up low quality turbines willy-nilly throughout California. Add to that the fact that many of Altamont Pass's are placed on angle-iron framework towers. These make them ideal nesting grounds--well, if one ignores the 30 m food processor out front. Modern towers take great care in leaving no place for avian habitation.
Just for everyone's convenience, here's a link to a page which shows the old-style tower and the new style and the obvious difference it would make in problems with perching and nesting. There's also the non-obvious scale difference, with the new larger one being much safer due to slower and thus easier to see/avoid blades. It also has per-turbine death rates for birds for various sites, with Altamont being much higher in raptor deaths than the others.
It always gets dragged up, but does anyone really know how many birds those propellers actually kill? I'm willing to bet it's very low; I also suspect way more birds are killed by flying into vehicles on the highway, or into the sides of highrise buildings (I had one kamikaze into my house last week, and that's not even a high rise).
If you google for Altamont Pass, you will find reports of what is apparently the most deadly wind farm for raptors in the U.S., and kills about 800-1300 birds of prey a year. It's the farm's location in this pass, a migration path for other birds which makes it a great home for many raptors such as golden eagles, that makes it high risk. It's the small size, tight placement, and old design of the turbines that turns that risk into actual dead birds.
Your intuition is correct here, in that this is a tiny amount compared to the number of birds that crash into windows of buildings in your average city. On a per-turbine basis, cell phone towers kill more birds.
However, many people have taken the issue seriously (the makers of the Altamont Pass turbines were taken to court to force them to reduce the danger of their farms to birds), people like my father who as a bird watcher and conservationist is most concerned about predator populations due to their important role at the top of the food chain. It turns out that these concerns are being addressed, and newer turbines are much less dangerous to birds, in particular raptors. New designs discourage perching on the supports (electrocution of perching birds being a problem apparently), and larger turbines with commensurately slower blades, have proven to reduce bird fatalities.
This is an issue I care about, loving as I do large animals that eat other animals, and I feel it is being duley considered and addressed. Wind farms do less damage to the environment than any other form of power generation other than solar, and kill fewer birds than the windowed office building that would be built to house the adiminstration for any form of power plant. That's no reason not to pressure the makers of the farms to continue to address bird deaths by improving their turbines, but it's also no reason to discourage the construction of wind farms. People who are against wind farms due to bird deaths have in my experience fallen into two categories: concerned environmentalists who aren't aware of the scope of the problem, and industrialists who just want to have something to put in the "negatives of alternative energy" column to line up with "releases more radiation than Three Mile Island on a normal day of operation" in the "negatives of coal" column so they'll both seem equally bad.
In fact, before I tackle most tasks I check to see if there's a free open-source project that has already solved the hard problems.
And if it hasn't been solved, what do you do? Let me guess: You solve it yourself.
But I have often wondered -- who are these people that pay (in money or time) to develop all this stuff?
The same people who have always funded the majority of software development -- companies that have a specific business need that no existing software solves. Most programmers are employed to create custom software. So are they and will be in the world of open source.
I'm really glad they do, but I hope all the "funding" doesn't all dry up someday.
That will only happen when there is free software that does everything that any business ever needs. Somehow I'm not too worried about it.
I'd have to do all that work myself!!
And if you were not a programmer but an employer, you'd hire a programmer to do it yourself.
The only way free software hurts the ability of programmers to get paid is by reducing their ability to get paid for doing something that someone else has already done. Instead you get paid for doing new things (using plenty of existing tools, if you like), which to me sounds vastly better and more efficient. If getting paid for reinventing the wheel (the same wheel, not a better one) is the only way to get paid, then I'd say programming is no longer a worthwhile profession.
Is this really about protecting private information or stopping computer crime?
It seems to me this would mostly benefit ISPs who don't want people sharing their broadband connections with everyone on their block. Won't someone think of the lost monthly fees?! Not that this would necessarily prevent connection sharing; but a mere firewall won't do much to prevent information stealing either.
I'll admit my main reason for thinking this is cynicism.
Since 61% of all electricity in California is produced using fossil fuel how is this really helping us right now?
What was the percentage ten years ago?
What will the percentage be in another ten years?
The true benefit of hydrogen fuel cells is this: it separates your energy storage method from the production method. When your car is running from a hydrogen cell, that hydrogen can come from anywhere. If you are using electricity to crack water to produce hydrogen, then the electricity to do this can come from anywhere. You can completely change your electricity-producing infrastructure and have zero impact on your transportation infrastructure.
I think it would be better to start with creating more electricity that doesn't come from fossils.
I think it would be better to do both simultaneously. Seriously, is there any reason we can't do both?
If we are using hydrogen cell cars, then any improvements in electricity generation also benefit automobiles. If we continue to use petroleum powered cars, then improvements in electricity generation do not benefit automobiles (well, tangentially, but not significantly). Which is better: 100% fossil fuel powered cars, or some percentage less than 100% of fossil fuel powered cars?
I think you're setting up a false dichotomy. Let's do both, and get the maximal benefit.
One thing I actually appreciated in Revenge were the large staves used by Grevious' guards. They were portrayed as having significant heft and momentum compared with the nearly weightless light sabers. It made those battles more interesting, which was good since many of the filler non-pivotal battles of saber vs saber or saber vs blaster were becoming sterile and boring.
A friend of mine had the robot. It was, in a word, crap. There were two games for it. Gyromite and some other game. They were, in a word, crap.
Here's roughly (from my twenty year old memories) how Gyromite worked: You tried to navigate some guy through a side-scrolling platform maze which featured movable red and blue columns. Raising one color of columns would lower the other, and coordinating this was the basic challenge of the game.
It was essentially a two-player game, and with another human it actually wasn't so bad. One player controls the guy, the other controls the columns. This was fun because the guy could be crushed by the columns, and so the second player would open up the pathways to lure the first player in, then try to crush them while player one tried to get through and avoid being crushed.
What if you didn't have a friend? Well, that's where your artificial buddy Robbie the Robot came in! The robot had a gyroscope (hence Gyromite) that it could move between two plates (buttons). That's it. It might have had one other function, but I don't remember. Moving the gyro was basically it. So the gameplay then was this: Move guy around, hit start or something to pause the game and enter robot command mode, and tell the robot to switch buttons. The robot would then pick up the gyroscope, slowly move it over to the other button, and drop it causing the columns to move and allowing you to continue moving your guy. Why couldn't they have just made it so hitting the right button made the columns move directly? Because then you wouldn't need Robbie, silly!
The game was incredibly annoying to play with the robot. I don't really remember the other game at all, except that it sucked even more than gyromite and didn't have a fun two human option. I don't think they ever made any more games for it, but I could be wrong.
I distinctly remember a Sega ad that openly mocked Robbie the Robot, and it was richly deserved.
If some non-authorized 3rd party releases bad code that causes problems, that would reflect very badly on the make of the console.
Of course, of course! Just like Microsoft's driver quality program (whatever they call it, don't care) is just there to make sure your hardware works well with Windows. Now, in order for us to perform the quality tests needed, you'll have to pay us $X, and sign this agreement saying you won't make any games for other consoles...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying it is. That's what the article and the submitter of this slashdot story are insinuating. Why is making certain exceptions for investigations related to foreign intelligence "giving up my civil liberties"?
Well in your question you directly pitted intelligence gathering versus the right to privacy and asked who should win, so I'm confused. Equally so because "making certain exceptions" to privacy is explicitly giving up civil liberties.
Allowing surveilance of people without a warrant or any kind of oversight so long as it is claimed that the investigation relates to foreign intelligence is without a doubt giving up the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure -- aka "privacy".
No, I'm not saying that, and I don't think the federal government uses that argument either, intentionally or otherwise. Let's take the Jose Padilla example.
To summarize your example: Circumstantial evidence indicates that Jose Padilla is a bad guy. In order to catch bad guys like Jose Padilla instead of letting them go free, we need to remove his rights under the 4th (unreasonable search), 5th (due process), 6th (speedy trial), and the right to habeus corpus.
Sorry, but the federal government and you are both arguing that our rights are getting in the way of them protecting us. I don't see how you can say otherwise.
Okay. Now, I'm not saying YOU are making this argument, but let me remind you that many of the people who are vehemently anti-Bush also now say that the DHS is the worst bureaucracy ever to be created. And these were some of the same people who are making the exact claim you just did above, by calling for the ability for intelligence agencies to share information. I see that as an unwinnable "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
I don't really care about DHS, but those viewpoints aren't opposed at all. Only a politico would hear "we need better communication between law enforcement agencies" and come away with "we need to create a massive new beauracracy". The saying that applies here is "damned if you don't, damned if you do something retarded".
I don't think that's the contention. The contention is that the targets of investigation will become aware of said investigation, and a chance to prevent a major plot will be missed. When they say "we have to be right all of the time, and the terrorists only have to be right once," they're not kidding.
If that's the case, then court procedings can be sealed. This happens often when an investigation is in progress and releasing court documents could damage that investigation. It's not as if this is a new problem that suddenly sprung into existence after 9/11. How do you think wire tap warrants work? The old system works fine.
Now, if someone believes that the "government" wants all of these expanded powers for 1984-style ulterior motives, I can't speak to that. All I can speak to is the assertion that the powers are necessary, and in some cases, it's necessary that they remain secret, else the ability to foil a detailed plot that has been years in the making may collapse before the plot can be foiled.
I hope by '1984-style' you mean 'all of human history-style'.
And it is just an assertion that these are necessary. The facts say that they would not have stopped 9/11, they are not necessary to prevent terrorists from knowing their plans have been found out, they do nothing but reduce oversight from an entity that has proven that a lack of oversight will be abused.
I guess my problem is that I don't see the powers as anywhere near approaching that threshold. I believe the powers need oversight, but they do not need universal civilian oversight. Such oversight ALWAYS means that the target of an investigation will be aware (or will soon be aware) of the investigation.
Well, since what they are asking for is a complete lack of oversight, why are you for these provisions? It is false that oversight ALWAYS
What follows is a series of honest, and not rhetorical, questions:
I'll accept their honesty, but there is certainly some framing going on.
Is it ever ok for US intelligence and/or military capability to use domestic surveillance and/or intelligence-gathering to protect our assets (be they life, property, and so on), or is it always better to err on the side of privacy in domestic concerns, and use the standard US criminal justice system to prosecute crimes after they have already occurred?
This being a good example, as you've framed the question as a dichotomy which seems to me to be a false one. Why are these new surveilance powers necessary for our domestic intelligence gathering to protect our assets? What power do they need that is incompatible with the standards of justice that the U.S.? You are asking me is it okay to give up my civil liberties in order to gain safety, and I ask why is that a necessary choice?
Is there ever a circumstance where preemption could be appropriate, or would universal privacy always trump, say, the lives of thousands of others?
If you have reason to believe that circumstance exists, you should have no problem convincing a judge of the need for a warrant. If you do not have reason to believe that circumstance exists, then you are just using scare tactics to justify a decrease in privacy rights. Once again I'm seeing a false dichotomy, and it's the one the federal government always uses -- we can only protect you if we take away your righs.
Since the "lives of thousands" that every American thinks of is 9/11, let me remind you that we really didn't need any additional surveilance powers to catch them. We had the evidence, the problems were focus (not on terrorism) and communication (security departments operating more like separate kingdoms than part of the same).
Is it possible to have appropriate oversight of such activities, or would you argue that such mechanisms for oversight and investigation already exist (e.g., warrants, etc.)?
Yes, they exist. If you can't get a warrant for what you need, then you probably don't need it. That is what "reasonable searches" means. We must have oversight. Most of the attempts at increasing police powers in the past decade have focused around having less oversight, whether that's Clinton's roving wiretaps or Bush's anti-terrorism memos. If these actions are so necessary, and so right, and so devoted to helping the people, why can they not stand the light of oversight?
[1] Please consider that no matter how much you personally may distrust the machinery of government, I would remind you that you would likely find that in face-to-face discussions with individual military, intelligence, or other government personnel, you'd find a genuine and deep-seated desire to do what is best.
I sincerely desire to do good in this world. You can count on that. If you took that statement, and then decided to grant me supreme power over you and the ability to probe into any detail of your life I wanted without oversight, I would recoil in horror from your foolishness. Many people believe they are doing good. Plenty of good cops have arrested innocent people in their pursuit of what is "good". The road to hell and all that -- it isn't just an expression.
More to the point -- when I turn around and say "I sincerely desire to do good in the world, but you can't watch my actions to see that this is the case" you should doubt that it is in fact good intentions that I'm paving the road to hell with.
The less people that can afford the car, the less hybrids that will be out there. Not everyone can afford the $3,000 markup that hybrids carry, and especially when they're told it won't save them the cost of said markup over time.
Which is why everyone that can should buy one, in order to drop the price down.
Isn't this how capitalism is supposed to provide benefit to the people? New product comes along, great but expensive. Demand among the afluent causes increasing production which reduces the price. As the price comes down, more people -- progressively more as we walk the wealth curve to the left -- are able to afford it, creating more demand, creating more supply, further driving down the cost.
Nobody needed an economic reason to spend $5k to buy a good desktop PC in the eighties. Well, nobody who could afford one. I think that's really the take-away: Either you can afford the hybrid car, or you can't. Being a hybrid doesn't really change the financial decision. If you can afford one and are interested, buy it already and don't complain how your gas savings won't pay for the extra money you spent.
Exactly. That's why restrictions on cryptography exports were lifted in the 90s, because the stupid assumption that nobody but Americans could develop strong cryptography was proven false. All the restrictions did was hinder U.S. companies in international markets.
Under the completely unresearched assumption that the U.S. currently has some lead in quantum computing, all restricting it can do is give some lead time before others catch up and then we have the same situation as we had with cryptography.
Though the article doesn't make it clear that export restrictions are going to be the main thrust. If they regulate quantum computers within the U.S... well, I can only imagine the justification (teh terrorists crack your bank account!), but the detrimental-to-U.S.-interests aspect will actually be amplified as the rest of the world uses the useful tool and the U.S. forbids it.
With any luck there will be an unexplainable outbreak of intelligence and sincerity in the government (or the appearance of such caused by commercial lobbyists) and no significant regulations come to pass.
Is that that the full-fledged xbox 360, or the one without a hard drive?
I'm somewhat skeptical that the HDD is going to be such a great feature of the xbox when a good deal of the consoles (if normal market assumptions hold where the lower end sells more, most of them) won't have a hard drive. How many developers are going to make games that depend on a feature that may or may not be there?
But even if that is just for the diskless xbox, that would still make for an interesting competition between xbox and gamecube, the latter having a very nice price advantage in the current console wars from the get-go.
You can say "invented", you just have to leave in the quotes. ;)
See how many employees laugh at you!
It's a game! My record is fourteen. By the way, it is cheating to not wear pants, which I wish I had known beforehand.
I always thought the theory was that primitive life (aka bacteria) were carried from Mars or elsewhere to earth. Not that humans were brought here from somewhere else and aren't connected to other life on earth.
Not that Michigan (Detroit, more recently Benton Harbor) hasn't had its fair share of riots over what could be termed "race issues".
The point not being that "U.S. is just as bad!" so much as "any country that has and fails to address significant race issues will find them coming to the surface, often as an explosion of violence". France has deliberately tried to push down any and all race issues (that being what all the head-scarf-banning was about) in the hopes that this would make them go away. *Checks news.google* Nope, haven't gone away.
I do find it interesting that the U.S. has had generally good luck accepting immigrant populations. Don't think that these populations were just readily embraced as soon as they stepped off the boat, either. Dutch, Irish, and other immigrants certainly saw their fair share of problems when they first arrived, but were eventually assimilated and peace reigned. On the other hand, we have miserable luck assimilating populations brought over as captives, with problems resulting in outraged violence continuing even to today in afforementioned melting pot of Michigan. Then again this too was a problem that wasn't addressed until it exploded into nation-wide violence.
Here's hoping France doesn't need a civil war to realize ignoring problems won't make them go away, and using censorship to fight racism is like trying to fight a volcano by capping all of its vents.
PLaying the name-game doesn't really change anything.
Which is why it is important to call something what it is. The way language works is we pick up on things implied by the name regardless of whether that affects the reality. This is why we call someone an "accused murderer" rather than "murderer" before they are convicted (though people will still conclude that accusation is the same as guilt). Similarly it is natural (and has been observed in reality) for the users of a "non-lethal" weapon to believe that the weapon, used as intended, will not kill when that simply isn't true. Updates to training of police officers have started to take this fact into account.
"Less-lethal weapons" is a perfect name for the devices normally called "non-lethal", and I was glad when I started to see news reports using that term. It conveys the absolutely correct idea: These are weapons who are designed to do less-than-lethal harm, but still have the capacity for lethality inherent in any weapon capable of incapacitating someone. The very important inference from this is that one should use caution relative to that risk of death when deciding whether or not to fire the weapon.
Personally I believe the cop that shot the woman through the eye with a rubber bullet would have been much less likely to discharge his weapon into a crowd at head level had that weapon been a full-fledged "lethal" weapon. "Non-lethal" lends to thinking of the device more like one would think of a baton, or hand cuffs, when in fact it is much closer to the sidearm a police officer is trained to consider carefully before using.
As opposed to, say, a pillow, which is not designed to harm at all. Non-lethal applies perfectly to pillows. If you think a tazer or pellet gun is closer to a pillow in terms of lethality than a gun, you are mistaken. If you don't think this, then why is "less lethal" not a superior phrase?
BLING - Bitch, Lasers Is Nothin to Gangstas
Can you play in the PVP areas if you don't have both? Or do you need to have both in order to have the art resources?
No, that's just a myth that Sony and Nintendo allowed Microsoft to believe. Sony may have lost money on early PS2's, but Nintendo never lost money on the Cube.
However they do make most of their cash off of game licenses, so it still doesn't make any sense to encourage destruction of the consoles.
If they're naked, what are they stripping?
Paint, mostly. Have you never heard of Erotic Contractors, LTD?
Actually, this is the kind with AK-47s and ski masks.
Don't worry, give it a hundred years and I'm sure we'll romanticize these pirates too. Kids will be wearing jaunty ski masks and waving around plastic RPGs, while the real pirates are attacking cruise ships with therm-optic camoflauge and lasers.
Actually, can we skip right to romanticizing the camoflauge and laser pirates?
HAWTs have a distinct advantage of exploiting the swept area and the power law index by increasing rotor diameters (blade lengths). VAWTs may evolve into simple designs without much need for regulation - there are some that offer inbuilt speed regulation by design. They can generate at any wind speed that the supporting structure can withstand. However, I am yet to see VAWTs catching up with HAWTs having rated capacities of decade-old standards.
So, should my takeaway be something like: HAWTs are better for large-scale wind farms to provide power to cities, while VAWTs may be better for small scale applications, like an individual wishing to become more indpendent from the grid?
I've myself suggested one design to a defence research official for distributed, arctic-condition, radar/thermal/sonic neutral generation needs at the world's highest battlefield.
I assume you're talking about Kashmir? That's pretty cool. But I don't see how it would be radar neutral...
There, under the turbines, I saw a total of:
1 dead bird
1 dead sheep
Where they near each other? I see two possibilities:
1) Bird gets smacked by turbine blade beak-first into sheep's temple, killing it. The solution to this problem would be to sharpen the blades, so instead of striking the bird like a baseball it would cut them in half so the two halves would fall at normal speed to the ground.
2) The sheep, being of a species well known for their craven cowardice and deep cunning (they only act stupid so as not to appear threatening), saw the dead bird, and upon considering the environmental implications, died of a heart attack. The solution to this problem is to give sheep internet access so they can research the problem themselves.
The Altamont Pass is a disaster which was produced by irresponsible economic incentives of the time which put up low quality turbines willy-nilly throughout California. Add to that the fact that many of Altamont Pass's are placed on angle-iron framework towers. These make them ideal nesting grounds--well, if one ignores the 30 m food processor out front. Modern towers take great care in leaving no place for avian habitation.
Just for everyone's convenience, here's a link to a page which shows the old-style tower and the new style and the obvious difference it would make in problems with perching and nesting. There's also the non-obvious scale difference, with the new larger one being much safer due to slower and thus easier to see/avoid blades. It also has per-turbine death rates for birds for various sites, with Altamont being much higher in raptor deaths than the others.
It always gets dragged up, but does anyone really know how many birds those propellers actually kill? I'm willing to bet it's very low; I also suspect way more birds are killed by flying into vehicles on the highway, or into the sides of highrise buildings (I had one kamikaze into my house last week, and that's not even a high rise).
If you google for Altamont Pass, you will find reports of what is apparently the most deadly wind farm for raptors in the U.S., and kills about 800-1300 birds of prey a year. It's the farm's location in this pass, a migration path for other birds which makes it a great home for many raptors such as golden eagles, that makes it high risk. It's the small size, tight placement, and old design of the turbines that turns that risk into actual dead birds.
Your intuition is correct here, in that this is a tiny amount compared to the number of birds that crash into windows of buildings in your average city. On a per-turbine basis, cell phone towers kill more birds.
However, many people have taken the issue seriously (the makers of the Altamont Pass turbines were taken to court to force them to reduce the danger of their farms to birds), people like my father who as a bird watcher and conservationist is most concerned about predator populations due to their important role at the top of the food chain. It turns out that these concerns are being addressed, and newer turbines are much less dangerous to birds, in particular raptors. New designs discourage perching on the supports (electrocution of perching birds being a problem apparently), and larger turbines with commensurately slower blades, have proven to reduce bird fatalities.
This is an issue I care about, loving as I do large animals that eat other animals, and I feel it is being duley considered and addressed. Wind farms do less damage to the environment than any other form of power generation other than solar, and kill fewer birds than the windowed office building that would be built to house the adiminstration for any form of power plant. That's no reason not to pressure the makers of the farms to continue to address bird deaths by improving their turbines, but it's also no reason to discourage the construction of wind farms. People who are against wind farms due to bird deaths have in my experience fallen into two categories: concerned environmentalists who aren't aware of the scope of the problem, and industrialists who just want to have something to put in the "negatives of alternative energy" column to line up with "releases more radiation than Three Mile Island on a normal day of operation" in the "negatives of coal" column so they'll both seem equally bad.
In fact, before I tackle most tasks I check to see if there's a free open-source project that has already solved the hard problems.
And if it hasn't been solved, what do you do? Let me guess: You solve it yourself.
But I have often wondered -- who are these people that pay (in money or time) to develop all this stuff?
The same people who have always funded the majority of software development -- companies that have a specific business need that no existing software solves. Most programmers are employed to create custom software. So are they and will be in the world of open source.
I'm really glad they do, but I hope all the "funding" doesn't all dry up someday.
That will only happen when there is free software that does everything that any business ever needs. Somehow I'm not too worried about it.
I'd have to do all that work myself!!
And if you were not a programmer but an employer, you'd hire a programmer to do it yourself.
The only way free software hurts the ability of programmers to get paid is by reducing their ability to get paid for doing something that someone else has already done. Instead you get paid for doing new things (using plenty of existing tools, if you like), which to me sounds vastly better and more efficient. If getting paid for reinventing the wheel (the same wheel, not a better one) is the only way to get paid, then I'd say programming is no longer a worthwhile profession.
Like I said, I'm not too worried.
Is this really about protecting private information or stopping computer crime?
It seems to me this would mostly benefit ISPs who don't want people sharing their broadband connections with everyone on their block. Won't someone think of the lost monthly fees?! Not that this would necessarily prevent connection sharing; but a mere firewall won't do much to prevent information stealing either.
I'll admit my main reason for thinking this is cynicism.
The women are safe.
I'm sure they'll both be relieved to hear that.
Since 61% of all electricity in California is produced using fossil fuel how is this really helping us right now?
What was the percentage ten years ago?
What will the percentage be in another ten years?
The true benefit of hydrogen fuel cells is this: it separates your energy storage method from the production method. When your car is running from a hydrogen cell, that hydrogen can come from anywhere. If you are using electricity to crack water to produce hydrogen, then the electricity to do this can come from anywhere. You can completely change your electricity-producing infrastructure and have zero impact on your transportation infrastructure.
I think it would be better to start with creating more electricity that doesn't come from fossils.
I think it would be better to do both simultaneously. Seriously, is there any reason we can't do both?
If we are using hydrogen cell cars, then any improvements in electricity generation also benefit automobiles. If we continue to use petroleum powered cars, then improvements in electricity generation do not benefit automobiles (well, tangentially, but not significantly). Which is better: 100% fossil fuel powered cars, or some percentage less than 100% of fossil fuel powered cars?
I think you're setting up a false dichotomy. Let's do both, and get the maximal benefit.
One thing I actually appreciated in Revenge were the large staves used by Grevious' guards. They were portrayed as having significant heft and momentum compared with the nearly weightless light sabers. It made those battles more interesting, which was good since many of the filler non-pivotal battles of saber vs saber or saber vs blaster were becoming sterile and boring.
A friend of mine had the robot. It was, in a word, crap. There were two games for it. Gyromite and some other game. They were, in a word, crap.
Here's roughly (from my twenty year old memories) how Gyromite worked: You tried to navigate some guy through a side-scrolling platform maze which featured movable red and blue columns. Raising one color of columns would lower the other, and coordinating this was the basic challenge of the game.
It was essentially a two-player game, and with another human it actually wasn't so bad. One player controls the guy, the other controls the columns. This was fun because the guy could be crushed by the columns, and so the second player would open up the pathways to lure the first player in, then try to crush them while player one tried to get through and avoid being crushed.
What if you didn't have a friend? Well, that's where your artificial buddy Robbie the Robot came in! The robot had a gyroscope (hence Gyromite) that it could move between two plates (buttons). That's it. It might have had one other function, but I don't remember. Moving the gyro was basically it. So the gameplay then was this: Move guy around, hit start or something to pause the game and enter robot command mode, and tell the robot to switch buttons. The robot would then pick up the gyroscope, slowly move it over to the other button, and drop it causing the columns to move and allowing you to continue moving your guy. Why couldn't they have just made it so hitting the right button made the columns move directly? Because then you wouldn't need Robbie, silly!
The game was incredibly annoying to play with the robot. I don't really remember the other game at all, except that it sucked even more than gyromite and didn't have a fun two human option. I don't think they ever made any more games for it, but I could be wrong.
I distinctly remember a Sega ad that openly mocked Robbie the Robot, and it was richly deserved.
If some non-authorized 3rd party releases bad code that causes problems, that would reflect very badly on the make of the console.
Of course, of course! Just like Microsoft's driver quality program (whatever they call it, don't care) is just there to make sure your hardware works well with Windows. Now, in order for us to perform the quality tests needed, you'll have to pay us $X, and sign this agreement saying you won't make any games for other consoles...