AFAIK there is no electrical turbine that will supply an extra 153 MW at the flip of a switch. Electrical energy has to be stored somewhere to let the catapult work.
That's what flywheel/motor-generator systems are for. Crank it up at (relative) leisure, dump it out quick when you need it. Turns a 1.7 second load of 153 MW into a two-minute load of 2 1/6 MW. Much easier to handle. (Also much less copper in the wiring from the reactors to the catapult system.)
While I don't know if the Navy is using a flywheel peaking system on this catapult, it would be a logical move. I have seen reports of such systems being used with actual railgun/coilgun experiments on tank-like platforms.
Supercapacitors might be up to the necessary energy storage these days, too.
Sounds like the light saturated the receiver and this triggered the "tamper" alarm. ("I can't communicate - so I'll assume somebody's trying to bypass me. I'll report an alarm condition for every sensor I can't hear".)
That's $125 million becomes $1.925 Billion... That's 15,400 increase!
If you really meant 15,400 times you're using the British "billion" (= American "trillion") rather than the American "billion" (= British "thousand million"). That's off by three orders.
If you mean 15,400% you're still off by one order.
Or if you're using the European comma where Americans would use a decimal point (i.e. 15.4x) you're on. The actual multiplier is 15.4x.
But that misses other costs - like the 800 million (and maybe more) they spent on trying to deploy their network before throwing in the towel. Add that in and they're only ahead 2.018x - a twofer - for ten years investment.
Even with the Fed driving interest rates down near zero they could have done about as well buying certificates of deposit. So for all the markup on the spectrum they're just escaping with their investment money intact.
It is merely my perception that I have dropped calls and no service periodically. I am so glad to know that these things don't actually happen. It's all in my imagination.
The simplest way to create a perception of something is to create the reality.
If your power supply doesn't have a three-prong plug and some "drain" connection from the ground pin to the power supply output, or the protective ground pin of your wall outlet isn't hooked up, stray capacitance through the power brick will cause your computer to be "floating" at about half the line's AC voltage. This is enough to feel - especially if you run your hand lightly along a metal surface. But it (usually) doesn't have enough current available to electrocute you if you also happen to touch a good ground - or to start a fire or blow a fuse if you ground the case.
Grounding something on it (like the shell of a video cable connector) will typically pull the case down to ground potential and solve the problem. (It may also blow a very sensitive ground-fault detector. And if the connection is a defect rather than stray capacitance you're back to the blown fuse / fire starts / something burns out scenario.)
Ran into the same phenomenon on a Toshiba laptop with a two-prong power brick and a docking station. The 60ish volt float caused the microphone to pick up AC hum, wrecking it for VoIP applications.
First step of the solution was to hook up the dock to the desktop's monitor's VGA cable. Upside: No hum. (Dell monitor had a three-prong power plug and grounded its frame and cables.) Downside: Screen blanked on the laptop because it saw the desktop's monitor and switched the video to it. Second step: Got a couple extra of the nuts that hold a DBnn connector to the chassis and serve as landing for the strain relief screws on the cable. Used 'em for conductive standoffs, so the cable shell was connected but the pins were not. Good ground so no hum, laptop didn't "see" the monitor so video stayed active.
IBM 4341 mainframe in our data-center that would just shut down regularly every Friday night, around the same time... shutdown coincided with the approach of the USS Lexington... Apparently the radar from the ship was strong enough to... trigger a shutdown.
Another IBM radar story (Third hand: CE involved -> my brother -> me.)
Shortly after the "Foreign Attachments" suit required IBM to allow other companies' equipment to be directly connected, there were a number of multivendor projects, of which this was one.
Each component worked fine in the respective labs. But the first integration of the whole system took place at the final site. (Why rent some space, hook it all up, get it running, tear it down, move it, and hook it up again, when you can do it once at the final site?) So they hooked it up and nothing worked right.
Several weeks of hair-tearing and finger-pointing by exasperated CEs from several companies ensued. At one point my brother's buddy had time on his hands and decided to fix the really annoying flickering fluorescent tube. He turned off the lights - and the tube kept flickering. WTF?
He called the other CEs over and demonstrated this. Then they all took a quick look around the environment to see what might be causing it. It was a short look: The wooden building was right next to the antenna for the airport's search radar.
Lined the room with conductive material. Everything started working just fine. Handshakes all around, exit stage left.
About 47 bits to address the cells of one body (if you only have one device with one port each and nothing for other stuff). Another 33 for the current population. That's only about 2/3 of the bits.
Still, IMHO that's starting to get a little tight. You'll probably want more than one bot per cell, one port per bot, and that's not even counting things like the intestinal bacteria (which out-count the body cells by enough to reduce the body cells to a footnone.) More significantly, there are a LOT of things besides people's guts that could use such molecular-machine attention.
So IMHO ipv6's address space is only adequate for macro machines on one planet.
2^128 unique address. I don't think we'll be exhausting them any time soon. That's like each person on earth have access to roughly 10^38 unique address.
Huh?
That's not enough to address the cells of one human body.
(Of course putting your medical nanobots on the internet would be a pretty dumb move. DoS attacks would sink to a new level - about six feet under, while BSoD would become quite literal.)
Interestingly, the Electric Eel has its positive pole near it's head and delivers appropriate pulses to pull off this stunt. Perhaps it doesn't just use its pulses to detect and stun its prey, but actually forces fish to swim toward its head?
(The electric catfish has the poles arranged the other way. Oh, well...)
If they are at the point of putting chips inside the lure, might as well add a mini tazer, and stun the fish to stop fighting...would be more practical!
Actually there IS a fish taser. More of a remote control for fish, actually. It's based on the reactions of fish muscles and/or nerves to pulsed DC currents in the water.
At a low threshold the fish starts to twich, in a way that turns it to face the positive electrode. At a somewhat higher threshold it involuntarily swims toward the electrode. At a third, still-higher level, it stops swimming, turns over, and floats up, stunned. Turn off the power and in a minute or so it comes to and swims away.
So if you put a central positive electrode in a body of water (with a corresponding negative electrode of pretty much any geometry - though a wide one sets up a bigger trap) the field will get progressively stronger near the fish gets to the + electrode. It will be captured at a distance, swim toward the electrode, pass out when it gets close, and float up to be netted. (You can also make them swim up a pipe and into a holding tank, where the field fades out. They're fine but can't escape because when they get near the exit from the pipe the field forces 'em to turn around and swim away from it.)
And unless I'm mistaken this is right up there with dynamite-fishing in the illegal category, and has been since the era of vacuum tubes.
Recall that some wanted to make Washington King of America, but he bared his wooden teeth at them and refused.
Heard an interesting speculation on that.
There used to be a tradition in Europe for when a new kingdom was being created and the crown (and associated hotseat) was being offered to the first king/victim/prototyrant: He'd turn down the crown on the first two offers and only accept it on the third.
So scenario:
- Delegation comes to Washington and offers him the crown.
- Washington, a learned man, does the first refusal.
- Delegation, not familiar with the tradition, slaps him on the back and departs, to spread the story of what a fine fellow he is. B-)
= = = =
Of course this bit of humor is unlikely, given both his well-documented popular-government leanings and his reported statement about not having fought a war just to replace one "Tyrant George" with another. But it WOULD make a good Monty Python skit.
Some countries still have the death sentence for Treason
Heck. THIS country still has the death sentence for Treason.
The only mitigation is that, in reaction to England's excesses, the Constitution DEFINES Treason, limiting it to making war on the US or giving aid and comfort to an enemy (which effectively requires a DECLARED war) and requiring two witnesses to the act.
(That's why Jane Fonda got to dance with Tom Hayden and Ted Turner at her second and third weddings, rather than with Danny Deever in the morning.)
The Tea Party just re-elected the only party that openly expresses more support for millionaires than it does for the middle class.
The Tea Party IS the "regular Joes". They're attempting to oust the established big-spenders from the government, and that includes the Neocons, who had a death grip on the Republican Party machine (and who fought them tooth-and-nail since they came into being during the Ron Paul campaign). Of the "Republicans" that were elected to the House, nearly half are Tea Party candidates, much to the consternation of the power elite.
By "more support for the millionaires than the middle class" are you by any chance referring to the Republicans' opposition to excluding "the rich" from "the extension of the Bush tax cuts" (i.e. raising taxes on anyone with more than a couple hundred grand a year in income)? Let me give you a couple clues:
First: "The Rich" don't pay taxes out of their pockets. They pass them on to their customers - and only get hurt when the rising prices mean less people buy their products - at which point they lay off employees and stop buying both raw materials and luxury goods (so people who sell to them lay off employees or fold). Raising taxes on "The Rich" just means taxing their customers and killing the businesses of their suppliers.
It isn't the poor or the middle class who hire people. It's the rich.
Second: Higher taxes on "The Rich" means the government has a perverse incentive to (hyper)inflate the currency, in order to push "The Middle Class" into the income-in-dollars range that was defined as "Rich". They have to soak the middle class, because it's the only way to get significant money. The poor don't have much to tax, while there are still so few rich that even if the government took ALL their wealth it would be a drop in the bucket (as well as killing the goose that lays the gold eggs.)
They already did this, over and over, with the income tax (which was originally a "temporary emergency war" tax that was supposed to tax only "the rich".)
Of course the inflation robs you of your savings and the value of everything else you have denominated in dollars. And it cuts your wages (which won't rise enough and fast enough to keep you even). And it also sucks value out of any investments you have that AREN'T denominated in dollars, as well - because when you sell styff for more cheaper dollars that you bought with fewer expensive dollars they'll get to tax the difference. But that's fine by them. When the money inflates it's because they printed more - and spent it. The value for the new money was sucked out of the money that was already out there, so they got it, along with all the extra taxes from everything else.
So be VERY VERY SUSPICIOUS of any politician who plays the class warfare card and claims he'll help you by soaking "the rich". Because, no matter how middle-class or poor you are now, you'll find that, as far as they're concerned, you're "The Rich" - or will be shortly, while the super-soaker is still running.
What the conservatives (that didn't get sucked into the beltway machine) are about is trying to help everybody become richer, rather than looting people who are just trying to do better next year than last.
To be fair, a lot of right-wingers want government control of the Internet also. They just differ on what they want controlled.
To be fair, a lot of LEFT-wingers want government control of the Internet also. They just differ on what they want controlled.
Like "hate speech". Or anything politically incorrect. Or opposing one of their programs. Or discussing their voting records - especially in the months just preceding an election. Or political organizing, especially by "right wing loons" and "racists" (or Tea Party members). (For a list, consult the Southern Poverty Law Center.) Or opposing taxes. Or criticizing government agencies or officials. Or talking about guns in a positive way. Or anything discussing when the use of force might be justified. Or recruiting for religious groups, non-left-wing political organizations, and other "hate groups".
"'The Children' must be protected from these discussions. And since we've wired the Internet into the schools we have to keep all that stuff off the Internet."
Which side of the asile is more of a problem? Try look at the party breakdown of the vote counts on the various proposals to censor the Internet.
Ok, but if such an amplification cavity exists and is in use, then why cant we use it?
Presuming it actually worked (I'll believe it when I hold one and it pushes me over) it would be emitting large amounts of microwave radiation (and I'll hold it while dressed in several layers of conductive metal!). Like enough to push against to the tune of thousands of pounds.
Open-air microwave ovens, anybody? As in "fly though a flock of birds and spray half-cooked meat all over the neighborhood".
What puts a bur up my butt is the assertion that Fox News is Libertarian when in fact it is 100% Authoritarian Statist Conservative.
Fox got its audience by filling a news coverage vacuum when the lamestream media were carefully avoiding any right-of-center viewpoints. By giving roughly equal time to both major sides of issues they got a lock on half the viewership.
This held until the nomination race for the 2008 presidential run. Then it became apparent that they were covering the right from the viewpoint of only ONE of the four or so major and several minor factions that are associated with the Republican Party: The Neocon faction.
What was particularly blatant was their handling of Ron Paul, the only Libertarian in the Republican primary race.
(Fox now appears to be trying to fill the Libertarian coverage gap - by leaving the Fox News channel as the Neocon outlet and converting Fox Business Network into a Libertarian channel, with shows by Judge Napolitano and John Stossel just for starters.)
Now, since he was born in Hawaii, this is moot. But it does legally matter that he was born in Hawaii, and not elsewhere.
Except that Hawaii has a long track record of generating official birth documents for people who weren't actually born there.
More significant is that (according to Snopes) both of Hawaii's major newspapers printed a matching birth announcement in the year and month in question.
... including, particularly, the case at hand, in which Sixth Circuit found that the evidence need not be excluded because of the Government's good-faith reliance on a statute that, while the Court did find it unconstitutional, was not so clearly unconstitutional that reasonable law enforcement officers could not believe that it allowed what they used it to do.
So much for the doctrine that an unconstitutional law is null and void from its inception, as is everything done under its sole authority.
Also: You have to run your own spam filter or you get buried and/or your IP line tied up.
(And as someone who's been doing email since it was UUCP and the number of mail-exchanging sites fit on three printed pages, let me tell you that there will be a LOT of spam pouring into even a little bitty mail domain. Once any real mail address gets harvested it will be flooded forever. They'll also guess plausible addresses, generate spam to your domain contact email addresses and derivatives of them,...)
You have to use an MTA that doesn't have any holes that will let the malware users reach through it to install a root kit, p0wn your homebrew mail server, and turn it into part of a command-and-control infrastructure for a botnet.
You also have to configure it so it doesn't turn into a spam mail reflector and get your domain blacklisted.
That's three for starters. Handing off mail administration to the ISP, where they have enough email users to afford a full-time staff to handle these problems in bulk and keep up with the arms race, is very popular among small sites - even those with old-hand email administrators as the operators.
The basic precedent was set when the Federal Government, during the Great Depression, tried to "fix" the market in farm products by imposing bureaucratically determined production limits on farmers - and busted a farmer for growing "excessive" corn to feed to his own pigs. The farmer tried to defend with a claim that feeding his own corn to his own pigs wasn't interstate commerce. But the Court found against him, ruling that, had he not grown the corn he would have had to buy feed (such as corn) for his pigs, which would have affected the price of corn being traded in interstate commerce.
Make that wheat and chickens. Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942)
Oh right, this was reported on the internet, so it is relevant here.
This is about challenging the bigger of the two constitutional-interpretation blank checks that Congress uses to regulate anything they care to regulate. If it sticks it could put a big stick in Congress' spokes and knock down a WHOLE LOT of federal law - including a slew of current laws (and possible future attempts at passing laws) that restrict what nerds can do.
This is a BIG DEAL. For nerds as well as for the rest of the country.
As a common law nation, our constitutional law depends both on the constitution itself and the rulings of the Supreme court.
And indeed the role of the Supreme Court as final arbiter of Constitutionality was not expressly in the Constitution itself - but self-interpreted by the Court's observation that, if it so ruled (by procedures at least partly based in common law), the Constitution specifies that there is nobody who can override the ruling.
Nevertheless, where the Constitution and Common Law are in conflict, the Constitution (as an explicit legislation postdating and overriding the common law of the time) wins. This is because the Framers were well versed in the common law, and could be expected to take it into account and explicitly state any way they wanted the laws of the US to diverge from common law.
That also implies that the Constitution froze the Common Law for the US at the point of its ratification. The framers' intent to include any given bit of the Common Law at that point can be inferred from their lack of action to change it. That can NOT be assumed for any changes to Common Law thereafter.
Which is all immaterial...
Centuries of common law have extended the original scope of the document by quite a bit.
No. Centuries of constitutional interpretation by courts have "found" implied civil rights and government powers in the constitution that weren't necessarily obvious in the plain text. Unfortunately, a few of these findings may have been faulty. And some of the arguably faulty findings served as the basic precedents for explosions of fallout.
Two of those were finding essentially blank checks of government power in the "Necessary and Proper" and "Commerce" clauses - allowing Congress to circumvent virtually all the express limits on its power elsewhere in the Constitution.
The "Commerce clause" is the one we're dealing with here. The basic precedent was set when the Federal Government, during the Great Depression, tried to "fix" the market in farm products by imposing bureaucratically determined production limits on farmers - and busted a farmer for growing "excessive" corn to feed to his own pigs. The farmer tried to defend with a claim that feeding his own corn to his own pigs wasn't interstate commerce. But the Court found against him, ruling that, had he not grown the corn he would have had to buy feed (such as corn) for his pigs, which would have affected the price of corn being traded in interstate commerce.
Needless to say such a broad interpretation of what constitutes "interstate commerce" makes it apply to just about anything. And it's been the basis for a massive increase in Federal control - including the Drug War and the federal gun laws.
Which is why any case where a court finds a limit to the powers the Federal Government claims under the Commerce Clause is Big News.
Umm actually, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways disagrees with you, as it was built for military purposes and thus is well within the constitutional bounds of government.
Also: The power to create a national road system adequate to exchange snail-mail among the cities and the hinterlands in an efficient and timely fashion was explicitly given to congress by Article 1 Section 8. ("... To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;") That includes parcels and doesn't require reserving the use of such roads to the US Mail. So if Congress decides to do it in a way efficient for passenger and freight travel it's within their power.
(Eisenhower's Interstate system was designed, not just to handle freight, but to double as airfields and hangers. The sizing of the overpasses, lanes, and clearance around them lets the military reroute traffic onto one side, knock down the traffic signs, and turn the other into a runway for fighters and bombers, with the planes and their support infrastructure hangared under the overpasses. Then blowing up a few airfields WW II style is futile, because the whole country is an airfield.)
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK there is no electrical turbine that will supply an extra 153 MW at the flip of a switch. Electrical energy has to be stored somewhere to let the catapult work.
That's what flywheel/motor-generator systems are for. Crank it up at (relative) leisure, dump it out quick when you need it. Turns a 1.7 second load of 153 MW into a two-minute load of 2 1/6 MW. Much easier to handle. (Also much less copper in the wiring from the reactors to the catapult system.)
While I don't know if the Navy is using a flywheel peaking system on this catapult, it would be a logical move. I have seen reports of such systems being used with actual railgun/coilgun experiments on tank-like platforms.
Supercapacitors might be up to the necessary energy storage these days, too.
Sounds like the light saturated the receiver and this triggered the "tamper" alarm. ("I can't communicate - so I'll assume somebody's trying to bypass me. I'll report an alarm condition for every sensor I can't hear".)
That's $125 million becomes $1.925 Billion... That's 15,400 increase!
If you really meant 15,400 times you're using the British "billion" (= American "trillion") rather than the American "billion" (= British "thousand million"). That's off by three orders.
If you mean 15,400% you're still off by one order.
Or if you're using the European comma where Americans would use a decimal point (i.e. 15.4x) you're on. The actual multiplier is 15.4x.
But that misses other costs - like the 800 million (and maybe more) they spent on trying to deploy their network before throwing in the towel. Add that in and they're only ahead 2.018x - a twofer - for ten years investment.
Even with the Fed driving interest rates down near zero they could have done about as well buying certificates of deposit. So for all the markup on the spectrum they're just escaping with their investment money intact.
It is merely my perception that I have dropped calls and no service periodically. I am so glad to know that these things don't actually happen. It's all in my imagination.
The simplest way to create a perception of something is to create the reality.
I have the nice leather-bound hardcover edition, and it randomly slams shut when I'm trying to read it.
Don't slam the book! Something Bad might happen.
If your power supply doesn't have a three-prong plug and some "drain" connection from the ground pin to the power supply output, or the protective ground pin of your wall outlet isn't hooked up, stray capacitance through the power brick will cause your computer to be "floating" at about half the line's AC voltage. This is enough to feel - especially if you run your hand lightly along a metal surface. But it (usually) doesn't have enough current available to electrocute you if you also happen to touch a good ground - or to start a fire or blow a fuse if you ground the case.
Grounding something on it (like the shell of a video cable connector) will typically pull the case down to ground potential and solve the problem. (It may also blow a very sensitive ground-fault detector. And if the connection is a defect rather than stray capacitance you're back to the blown fuse / fire starts / something burns out scenario.)
Ran into the same phenomenon on a Toshiba laptop with a two-prong power brick and a docking station. The 60ish volt float caused the microphone to pick up AC hum, wrecking it for VoIP applications.
First step of the solution was to hook up the dock to the desktop's monitor's VGA cable. Upside: No hum. (Dell monitor had a three-prong power plug and grounded its frame and cables.) Downside: Screen blanked on the laptop because it saw the desktop's monitor and switched the video to it. Second step: Got a couple extra of the nuts that hold a DBnn connector to the chassis and serve as landing for the strain relief screws on the cable. Used 'em for conductive standoffs, so the cable shell was connected but the pins were not. Good ground so no hum, laptop didn't "see" the monitor so video stayed active.
IBM 4341 mainframe in our data-center that would just shut down regularly every Friday night, around the same time ... shutdown coincided with the approach of the USS Lexington ... Apparently the radar from the ship was strong enough to ... trigger a shutdown.
Another IBM radar story (Third hand: CE involved -> my brother -> me.)
Shortly after the "Foreign Attachments" suit required IBM to allow other companies' equipment to be directly connected, there were a number of multivendor projects, of which this was one.
Each component worked fine in the respective labs. But the first integration of the whole system took place at the final site. (Why rent some space, hook it all up, get it running, tear it down, move it, and hook it up again, when you can do it once at the final site?) So they hooked it up and nothing worked right.
Several weeks of hair-tearing and finger-pointing by exasperated CEs from several companies ensued. At one point my brother's buddy had time on his hands and decided to fix the really annoying flickering fluorescent tube. He turned off the lights - and the tube kept flickering. WTF?
He called the other CEs over and demonstrated this. Then they all took a quick look around the environment to see what might be causing it. It was a short look: The wooden building was right next to the antenna for the airport's search radar.
Lined the room with conductive material. Everything started working just fine. Handshakes all around, exit stage left.
Oops. Need to check my math BEFORE posting. B-(
About 47 bits to address the cells of one body (if you only have one device with one port each and nothing for other stuff). Another 33 for the current population. That's only about 2/3 of the bits.
Still, IMHO that's starting to get a little tight. You'll probably want more than one bot per cell, one port per bot, and that's not even counting things like the intestinal bacteria (which out-count the body cells by enough to reduce the body cells to a footnone.) More significantly, there are a LOT of things besides people's guts that could use such molecular-machine attention.
So IMHO ipv6's address space is only adequate for macro machines on one planet.
2^128 unique address. I don't think we'll be exhausting them any time soon. That's like each person on earth have access to roughly 10^38 unique address.
Huh?
That's not enough to address the cells of one human body.
(Of course putting your medical nanobots on the internet would be a pretty dumb move. DoS attacks would sink to a new level - about six feet under, while BSoD would become quite literal.)
Typoed the link:
Much info here.
Interestingly, the Electric Eel has its positive pole near it's head and delivers appropriate pulses to pull off this stunt. Perhaps it doesn't just use its pulses to detect and stun its prey, but actually forces fish to swim toward its head?
(The electric catfish has the poles arranged the other way. Oh, well...)
If they are at the point of putting chips inside the lure, might as well add a mini tazer, and stun the fish to stop fighting...would be more practical!
Actually there IS a fish taser. More of a remote control for fish, actually. It's based on the reactions of fish muscles and/or nerves to pulsed DC currents in the water.
At a low threshold the fish starts to twich, in a way that turns it to face the positive electrode. At a somewhat higher threshold it involuntarily swims toward the electrode. At a third, still-higher level, it stops swimming, turns over, and floats up, stunned. Turn off the power and in a minute or so it comes to and swims away.
So if you put a central positive electrode in a body of water (with a corresponding negative electrode of pretty much any geometry - though a wide one sets up a bigger trap) the field will get progressively stronger near the fish gets to the + electrode. It will be captured at a distance, swim toward the electrode, pass out when it gets close, and float up to be netted. (You can also make them swim up a pipe and into a holding tank, where the field fades out. They're fine but can't escape because when they get near the exit from the pipe the field forces 'em to turn around and swim away from it.)
And unless I'm mistaken this is right up there with dynamite-fishing in the illegal category, and has been since the era of vacuum tubes.
Recall that some wanted to make Washington King of America, but he bared his wooden teeth at them and refused.
Heard an interesting speculation on that.
There used to be a tradition in Europe for when a new kingdom was being created and the crown (and associated hotseat) was being offered to the first king/victim/prototyrant: He'd turn down the crown on the first two offers and only accept it on the third.
So scenario:
- Delegation comes to Washington and offers him the crown.
- Washington, a learned man, does the first refusal.
- Delegation, not familiar with the tradition, slaps him on the back and departs, to spread the story of what a fine fellow he is. B-)
= = = =
Of course this bit of humor is unlikely, given both his well-documented popular-government leanings and his reported statement about not having fought a war just to replace one "Tyrant George" with another. But it WOULD make a good Monty Python skit.
Some countries still have the death sentence for Treason
Heck. THIS country still has the death sentence for Treason.
The only mitigation is that, in reaction to England's excesses, the Constitution DEFINES Treason, limiting it to making war on the US or giving aid and comfort to an enemy (which effectively requires a DECLARED war) and requiring two witnesses to the act.
(That's why Jane Fonda got to dance with Tom Hayden and Ted Turner at her second and third weddings, rather than with Danny Deever in the morning.)
The Tea Party just re-elected the only party that openly expresses more support for millionaires than it does for the middle class.
The Tea Party IS the "regular Joes". They're attempting to oust the established big-spenders from the government, and that includes the Neocons, who had a death grip on the Republican Party machine (and who fought them tooth-and-nail since they came into being during the Ron Paul campaign). Of the "Republicans" that were elected to the House, nearly half are Tea Party candidates, much to the consternation of the power elite.
By "more support for the millionaires than the middle class" are you by any chance referring to the Republicans' opposition to excluding "the rich" from "the extension of the Bush tax cuts" (i.e. raising taxes on anyone with more than a couple hundred grand a year in income)? Let me give you a couple clues:
First: "The Rich" don't pay taxes out of their pockets. They pass them on to their customers - and only get hurt when the rising prices mean less people buy their products - at which point they lay off employees and stop buying both raw materials and luxury goods (so people who sell to them lay off employees or fold). Raising taxes on "The Rich" just means taxing their customers and killing the businesses of their suppliers.
It isn't the poor or the middle class who hire people. It's the rich.
Second: Higher taxes on "The Rich" means the government has a perverse incentive to (hyper)inflate the currency, in order to push "The Middle Class" into the income-in-dollars range that was defined as "Rich". They have to soak the middle class, because it's the only way to get significant money. The poor don't have much to tax, while there are still so few rich that even if the government took ALL their wealth it would be a drop in the bucket (as well as killing the goose that lays the gold eggs.)
They already did this, over and over, with the income tax (which was originally a "temporary emergency war" tax that was supposed to tax only "the rich".)
Of course the inflation robs you of your savings and the value of everything else you have denominated in dollars. And it cuts your wages (which won't rise enough and fast enough to keep you even). And it also sucks value out of any investments you have that AREN'T denominated in dollars, as well - because when you sell styff for more cheaper dollars that you bought with fewer expensive dollars they'll get to tax the difference. But that's fine by them. When the money inflates it's because they printed more - and spent it. The value for the new money was sucked out of the money that was already out there, so they got it, along with all the extra taxes from everything else.
So be VERY VERY SUSPICIOUS of any politician who plays the class warfare card and claims he'll help you by soaking "the rich". Because, no matter how middle-class or poor you are now, you'll find that, as far as they're concerned, you're "The Rich" - or will be shortly, while the super-soaker is still running.
What the conservatives (that didn't get sucked into the beltway machine) are about is trying to help everybody become richer, rather than looting people who are just trying to do better next year than last.
To be fair, a lot of right-wingers want government control of the Internet also. They just differ on what they want controlled.
To be fair, a lot of LEFT-wingers want government control of the Internet also. They just differ on what they want controlled.
Like "hate speech". Or anything politically incorrect. Or opposing one of their programs. Or discussing their voting records - especially in the months just preceding an election. Or political organizing, especially by "right wing loons" and "racists" (or Tea Party members). (For a list, consult the Southern Poverty Law Center.) Or opposing taxes. Or criticizing government agencies or officials. Or talking about guns in a positive way. Or anything discussing when the use of force might be justified. Or recruiting for religious groups, non-left-wing political organizations, and other "hate groups".
"'The Children' must be protected from these discussions. And since we've wired the Internet into the schools we have to keep all that stuff off the Internet."
Which side of the asile is more of a problem? Try look at the party breakdown of the vote counts on the various proposals to censor the Internet.
Ok, but if such an amplification cavity exists and is in use, then why cant we use it?
Presuming it actually worked (I'll believe it when I hold one and it pushes me over) it would be emitting large amounts of microwave radiation (and I'll hold it while dressed in several layers of conductive metal!). Like enough to push against to the tune of thousands of pounds.
Open-air microwave ovens, anybody? As in "fly though a flock of birds and spray half-cooked meat all over the neighborhood".
What puts a bur up my butt is the assertion that Fox News is Libertarian when in fact it is 100% Authoritarian Statist Conservative.
Fox got its audience by filling a news coverage vacuum when the lamestream media were carefully avoiding any right-of-center viewpoints. By giving roughly equal time to both major sides of issues they got a lock on half the viewership.
This held until the nomination race for the 2008 presidential run. Then it became apparent that they were covering the right from the viewpoint of only ONE of the four or so major and several minor factions that are associated with the Republican Party: The Neocon faction.
What was particularly blatant was their handling of Ron Paul, the only Libertarian in the Republican primary race.
(Fox now appears to be trying to fill the Libertarian coverage gap - by leaving the Fox News channel as the Neocon outlet and converting Fox Business Network into a Libertarian channel, with shows by Judge Napolitano and John Stossel just for starters.)
Now, since he was born in Hawaii, this is moot. But it does legally matter that he was born in Hawaii, and not elsewhere.
Except that Hawaii has a long track record of generating official birth documents for people who weren't actually born there.
More significant is that (according to Snopes) both of Hawaii's major newspapers printed a matching birth announcement in the year and month in question.
My little Roku box that sits next to my TV and plays Netflix is built on Linux apparently.
So have they released the source to their firmware?
... including, particularly, the case at hand, in which Sixth Circuit found that the evidence need not be excluded because of the Government's good-faith reliance on a statute that, while the Court did find it unconstitutional, was not so clearly unconstitutional that reasonable law enforcement officers could not believe that it allowed what they used it to do.
So much for the doctrine that an unconstitutional law is null and void from its inception, as is everything done under its sole authority.
Also: You have to run your own spam filter or you get buried and/or your IP line tied up.
(And as someone who's been doing email since it was UUCP and the number of mail-exchanging sites fit on three printed pages, let me tell you that there will be a LOT of spam pouring into even a little bitty mail domain. Once any real mail address gets harvested it will be flooded forever. They'll also guess plausible addresses, generate spam to your domain contact email addresses and derivatives of them, ...)
You have to use an MTA that doesn't have any holes that will let the malware users reach through it to install a root kit, p0wn your homebrew mail server, and turn it into part of a command-and-control infrastructure for a botnet.
You also have to configure it so it doesn't turn into a spam mail reflector and get your domain blacklisted.
That's three for starters. Handing off mail administration to the ISP, where they have enough email users to afford a full-time staff to handle these problems in bulk and keep up with the arms race, is very popular among small sites - even those with old-hand email administrators as the operators.
The basic precedent was set when the Federal Government, during the Great Depression, tried to "fix" the market in farm products by imposing bureaucratically determined production limits on farmers - and busted a farmer for growing "excessive" corn to feed to his own pigs. The farmer tried to defend with a claim that feeding his own corn to his own pigs wasn't interstate commerce. But the Court found against him, ruling that, had he not grown the corn he would have had to buy feed (such as corn) for his pigs, which would have affected the price of corn being traded in interstate commerce.
Make that wheat and chickens. Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942)
Oh right, this was reported on the internet, so it is relevant here.
This is about challenging the bigger of the two constitutional-interpretation blank checks that Congress uses to regulate anything they care to regulate. If it sticks it could put a big stick in Congress' spokes and knock down a WHOLE LOT of federal law - including a slew of current laws (and possible future attempts at passing laws) that restrict what nerds can do.
This is a BIG DEAL. For nerds as well as for the rest of the country.
As a common law nation, our constitutional law depends both on the constitution itself and the rulings of the Supreme court.
And indeed the role of the Supreme Court as final arbiter of Constitutionality was not expressly in the Constitution itself - but self-interpreted by the Court's observation that, if it so ruled (by procedures at least partly based in common law), the Constitution specifies that there is nobody who can override the ruling.
Nevertheless, where the Constitution and Common Law are in conflict, the Constitution (as an explicit legislation postdating and overriding the common law of the time) wins. This is because the Framers were well versed in the common law, and could be expected to take it into account and explicitly state any way they wanted the laws of the US to diverge from common law.
That also implies that the Constitution froze the Common Law for the US at the point of its ratification. The framers' intent to include any given bit of the Common Law at that point can be inferred from their lack of action to change it. That can NOT be assumed for any changes to Common Law thereafter.
Which is all immaterial...
Centuries of common law have extended the original scope of the document by quite a bit.
No. Centuries of constitutional interpretation by courts have "found" implied civil rights and government powers in the constitution that weren't necessarily obvious in the plain text. Unfortunately, a few of these findings may have been faulty. And some of the arguably faulty findings served as the basic precedents for explosions of fallout.
Two of those were finding essentially blank checks of government power in the "Necessary and Proper" and "Commerce" clauses - allowing Congress to circumvent virtually all the express limits on its power elsewhere in the Constitution.
The "Commerce clause" is the one we're dealing with here. The basic precedent was set when the Federal Government, during the Great Depression, tried to "fix" the market in farm products by imposing bureaucratically determined production limits on farmers - and busted a farmer for growing "excessive" corn to feed to his own pigs. The farmer tried to defend with a claim that feeding his own corn to his own pigs wasn't interstate commerce. But the Court found against him, ruling that, had he not grown the corn he would have had to buy feed (such as corn) for his pigs, which would have affected the price of corn being traded in interstate commerce.
Needless to say such a broad interpretation of what constitutes "interstate commerce" makes it apply to just about anything. And it's been the basis for a massive increase in Federal control - including the Drug War and the federal gun laws.
Which is why any case where a court finds a limit to the powers the Federal Government claims under the Commerce Clause is Big News.
Umm actually, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways disagrees with you, as it was built for military purposes and thus is well within the constitutional bounds of government.
Also: The power to create a national road system adequate to exchange snail-mail among the cities and the hinterlands in an efficient and timely fashion was explicitly given to congress by Article 1 Section 8. ("... To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;") That includes parcels and doesn't require reserving the use of such roads to the US Mail. So if Congress decides to do it in a way efficient for passenger and freight travel it's within their power.
(Eisenhower's Interstate system was designed, not just to handle freight, but to double as airfields and hangers. The sizing of the overpasses, lanes, and clearance around them lets the military reroute traffic onto one side, knock down the traffic signs, and turn the other into a runway for fighters and bombers, with the planes and their support infrastructure hangared under the overpasses. Then blowing up a few airfields WW II style is futile, because the whole country is an airfield.)