I have no idea where you get your information, but H1B visa holder are required to pay all federal, state, local taxes including FICA (Social Security) and Medicare.
I hear there ARE some entitlements that they don't get and for which they (or the employer) don't pay. (I think it's state unemployment insurance in some states.)
IMHO if/when such exist, the employer should be required to directly pay them the fee he would otherwise have paid the government, in addition to the mandated minimum wage/salary.
(That's actually fair, too: They can use the extra money to buy, or otherwise do something to try to replace, whatever the entitlement they don't get would have been.)
Ultimately, what is a lobbying group but institutional level major bribes being paid to get something in return?
A lobbying group is an organization for bringing the opinions and interests of their clients to the attention of the legislators. It's a set of specialists who do the constitutionally guaranteed "right to petition the government for redress of grievances" for their clients - professionally as members of an organization of interested parties, or both.
Of course if the legislators are corrupt, lobbyists for small-but-rich interests may resort to bribes. But lobbyists for very large groups don't need to do that. They can offer, instead, more votes from the people whose interests the legislator is supporting - or at least not opposing. These are votes that the members will chose to give voluntarily. (Perhaps after being informed, in turn, that the congresscritter is now working more in line with their interests. Such "being informed" might take the form of the lobbying organization giving them a "good grade" on ratings they publish periodically.)
The two largest organized interest groups, in order, are:
- AARP (over 37 million members)
- NRA (about 5 to 6 million members, whose members' lobbying is done by the non-tax-deductable NRA-ILA organization)
I hear that multiple-shootings (and other acts of terror, insanity, or political action by violent means) in the US have also declined substantially. (Don't have a footnote handy or I wouldn't have hedged the statement, but it squares with my personal experience.)
How many multiple-shootings did you experience in past years, and how many this year?
You want a personal anaecdote? OK:
The building where I worked (at a research institution the lefties thought was responsible for a lot of Vietnam era military technology, including remote sensing equipment used in the detection and assassination of Che Guevara) was bombed in 1968 (one of a series of bombings in the town at the time). The bomb was placed in the doorway I customarily entered through, and went off at about the time I would normally have been entering. Fortunately, I was down (very!) sick that day. Given the bus schedules and the timing of the explosion, if the bomber also used the bus I probably would have been getting off as he got on.
The bomber has never been formally identified, apprehended, and prosecuted - though a particular figure in The Weathermen (NOT Bill Ayres) was believed to be responsible.
I haven't had any bombings, politically inspired or otherwise, happen near me this year. B-)
To say that anything about the New York Times is extreme is to be extreme yourself to the point of inanity. The New York Times is about as mainstream as it gets.
What alternate universe are YOU posting from?
The New York Times has an editorial policy that the time for objective coverage of the gun control debate is over and the job of journalists is to advocate for gun bans.
For an example see this editorial. It was published three days ago on page A1, the first time NYT has published an editorial on their front page since 1920.
The population of the US has been roughly evenly divided on this issue, with the pro-gun side somewhat ahead. (It has also been making substantial gains for a number of years, thanks to:
- First research, then the results of legislation, showing that increased concealed-carry results in lowered crime and victimization.
- Supreme Court decisions recognizing the RKBA as a civil right and "incorporating" the Second Amendment against the states.
- Incidents like this recent one, which have shown that the government can't protect the citizenry from immediate threats.)
That puts the NYT squarely OUTSIDE the mainstream, and getting more so, as measured by US public opinion.
As measured by the political positions of the elements of "The Mainstream Media" it may well be "as mainstream as it gets". But this just confirms the contention that the mainstream media is strongly left-biased.
It is simply ludicrously easy for mentally ill people to get firearms and ammunition. ..
Most killers are not "mentally ill" by an meaningful definition. They are angry, hopeless or otherwise upset. Often, they act out during a transitory phase of one of these emotional states. They are not "ill" and there is nothing about them outside of the norms of human emotional volatility until something pushes them too far.
More importantly: Psychologists trying to predict whether a particular individual will commit violence on others have results worse than chance.
Further, most "mentally ill" (especially depressives and those with other affective disorders) are far less likely to kill or otherwise violently harm others than the average of the general population.
Ban guns for anyone who has seen a shrink for depression and you disarm more than half the female population. Ban guns for anyone a healthcare worker suspects of PTSD and you disarm essentially all stalker victims and anyone who decided to finally get a gun because they were the victim of a crime.
Ban guns for anyone who has voluntarily seen a shrink and large numbers of people who SHOULD see a shrink will chose not to do so. (Thus professional psychologists are some of the strongest opponents to laws letting the government use psychological records in gun background checks and RKBA infringement laws.)
(The occasional person who goes on a spree when treated with antidepressants is more than adequately explained by this phenomenon: Psychopathy and depression are separate conditions, so some people happen to be both psychopaths and depressed. Treat the depression and you have a fully functional psychopath.)
There is no way to identify future killers that would not single out many "normal" and "law abiding" people.
There is only one good predictor of future violence: A past history of violence. But that's handled adequately by gun restrictions on people either convicted of crimes or involuntarily committed, as a danger to others, based on a history of being a danger to others, in a court proceeding .
CTD has done horrible price-gouging in past "black gun" and "ammo shortage" scares, so I wouldn't give them the time of day, let alone my business.
It's called "supply and demand".
When there is a sudden spike in demand, and those bidding don't want to order for later delivery, after more are made, because they are hedging the possibility that no more WILL be made, sellers would be stupid to keep the price below market-clearance and run out of stock, when they could both make more money for themselves and route the available stock to those for whom having product NOW is important enough to pay the premium.
If "Cheaper Than Dirt" tracks the market on the downslope, too, giving good service and better-than-the-competition prices (going for the fast nickels rather than the slow dimes), I have no problem whatsoever if they track it up on the occasional peak - and maybe still have some stock available when there's a crunch. The money from the perceived "gouging" can help support their low prices at other times. (Or it can support their lifestyle or other projects: It's their choice.)
If you don't like their prices today, don't buy today. If you don't like their policies, of course, you're always welcome to shop elsewhere. That's the "free" part of a free market.
Funny thing is...it appears that overall, gun violence in the US has been in a downturn over the past number of years. It is just these "spree" killings that has seemed to have popped up lately.
I hear that multiple-shootings (and other acts of terror, insanity, or political action by violent means) in the US have also declined substantially. (Don't have a footnote handy or I wouldn't have hedged the statement, but it squares with my personal experience.)
What has increased is news coverage of them when they occur. This is, of course, what should be expected: As they become more rare, they become more newsworthy.
From up-close-and-personal experience with Objective C and C++ (also Smalltalk), these languages have substantially different semantics regarding class identity (primarily: what version of overridden member functions you get) during construction and destruction. I wouldn't be surprised if Objectivce-C++ had yet another semantics, pulling "features" from both, and I have no clue about LVMM.)
Building a frontend to compile to them, interchangeably, is a recipe for subtle bugs, if the frontend doesn't deal with these issues. Efficiency may go out the window if the frontend tries to impose one language's construction/destruction semantics on another. Doing so also brings up the issue of which semantics the compiler exposes to the programmer - each has its good and bad points, and each enables different - and incompatible - useful programming features.
I'd be interested in what (if anything) Clang has done about this issue. (Unfortunately, I'm busy on other stuff, so I'll have to depend on others to elucidate this.)
I wonder if we'll ever test nukes in space again? I wonder if we'll test them on some celestial body (perhaps the moon, I guess) and just extrapolate from there?
Nuclear explosives have a lot of uses besides war. The radiation makes most of them impractical on or near the surface of the Earth. (That's why using them to cut a Nicaragua Canal, for instance, was rejected.) In space, radiation is not such an issue.
Asteroid mining, asteroid modificatins, interpanetary and intersteller propulsion are all potential uses of such devices, and there are more. It may turn out nukes are the best, or an adequately good, choice, in practice, for one or more of these jobs.
Before you say, "Never!" I submit that we humans don't have a history of doing the Right Thing.
What makes you think testing new designs of nuclear explosive devices will ALWAYS be a "Wrong Thing".
the Obama administration has in the past indicated that it wants to ratify the treaty, although that won't happen with this Senate. I call BS. Obama had the votes to do what he wanted in the Senate early in his term, and he didn't bother to ratify it.
Ratification takes 2/3s of the Senate.
* Did he have about a third of the Republicans onboard?
* Was it important enough to get this ratified NOW that he should spend some of his political favors, rather than waiting for the Senate to move on its own?
The hostility that too many doctors have to analgesics is maddening.
It's not that the doctors are hostile to giving adequate doses of painkillers.
It's that the DEA examines how often and how much they prescribe, and if it is too high (by their far too low scales) they come down on the doctors with penalties that are often career-ending. This puts doctors treating chronic-pain cases, or painful diseases, at substantial risk. So they underprescribe painkillers in order to avoid discovering the current administrative threshold by exceeding it.
This is particularly appalling now that it has been discovered that adequate opioid painkiller dosage in the first weeks following a traumatic injury apparently prevents post traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps the high and rising incidence of this debilitating condition in the past decades was entirely the result of the drug war.
All these "mass shootings" seem to take place in areas that have a lot of firearms related restrictions, where nobody has a gun and nobody is able to shoot back before the body count ramps up.... It also boggles the mind that after a terrorist attack on US soil, that all anyone wants to talk about is gun control.
But one nice thing about that is the anti-gun-control side of the argument is becoming massively more popular, after the attack in (heavily gun-controlled) France as followed by one in (a gun-free zone in heavily gun-controlled) California.
So bring on the arguments. Maybe they're result in more effective application of the Second Amendment and more general carriage of firearms. B-)
IMHO, increasing the density of armed citizens is the only thing likely to be effective against terror attacks on US soil - from either "home-grown" or infiltrated parties. We're long past the point where anything done (or stopped) overseas, or attempts to tighten government-operated security here, would do anything but make it worse (with the possible exception of closing the borders.)
Um, excuse me? America is busy installing and funding dictators and extremists... Even the famous Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was used as an asset to keep the communists out of Iran after the Shah (remember him, right?) got sick and died.
Um, excuse me? Are you seriously claiming that the US installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini?
Last I heard he was the revolutionary who created the movement that overthrew the Shah, and the whole Pahlavi monarchy (who had been re-empowered by a US/UK coup after the democrartically-elected Prime Minister nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's assets). The Shah didn't die until five years later (although he DID die of a cancer where survival times with then-current treatments were about five years, so he might have been starting to show symmptoms when he was overthrown.)
Or are you just claiming that the US used him against the Soviet Union once he had established himself and his movement? Governments tend to use everybody and everything they can to promote their interests, regardless of how they got there. Sometimes you build it, sometimes you mine it. "You have to make the good from the bad, because the bad is all you have to work with."
I recently went through a college-mandated anti-plagiarism training session required of all students.
(As Zontar The Mindless points out, by example, above) A quotation with a citation is not plagiarism.
The critical point is whether you clearly distinguish your own work from that of others. (In academic writing you are also expected to give citations, so interested readers don't have to work so hard to track down the original source of the non-original material. Here, doing so is a friendly gesture, but not customarily expected.)
Note also that Slashdot is a news-related discussion board, not an academic journal. Users bring news and ideas to the attention of others. In the absence of an explicit claim of original work, it is wise to assume any given idea or information presented may not be the original work of the poster.
It's easy to assume otherwise, because so many of us are used to doing and publishing original work, occasionally do so on Slashdot, and habitually give credit, or otherwise distinguish our work from others, when we write.
If you hack systems in china, it is much easier to prosecute. (I would assume)
Other possible motivations:
The malware developers don't want to become infected by their own malware, so they make it avoid some aspect of their configuration. (Language selection is an easy one to pick, if the target set is not in your language group anyhow.)
The malware developers may be trying to confine the malware to particular target sets, and avoiding certain countries, languages, etc. is a first, coarse, sieve.
Those courses sound good, so why aren't they mandatory to get a gun?
Probably because mandatory courses for gunowners are generally promulgated by left-wing politicians, who HATE the NRA and use the courses they demand to push their agendas (often requiring answers that are wrong with respect to the real world, but politically correct, to get a passing grade.)
But there are reasons to NOT require a course. Two of the most important:
- Requiring a passing grade in a government-mandated course to exercise a constitutional right is a convenient way for the government to abrogate that right. Like by giving the course once per year, at a remote location, during business hours, with limited number of seats, that are all filled by people who received advanced notice by the time the test is announced to the general public. (This sort of thing has actually been done on the US east coast.) Think about how "literacy tests" for voting were used to disenfranchise blacks, before they were struck down by the Supreme Court during the Civil Rights movement era. This is the same principle, and the government cannot be allowed to control who has the power to oppose it if it ever goes tyrannical
- Requiring a particular minimum set of courses means most new gun buyers take that set AND STOP. The minimum requirement becomes the nearly-universal level of training. Leaving it open-ended means they take tests until they are comfortable with their own expertise - typically receiving far more training than if some minimum were required.
[the Onion is] where it belongs. Helium-3 is the dumbest, most impractical solution to our energy problems imaginable. Unicorn farts would be a more realistic power source. We don't actual have any helium-3, and even if we did, it is far harder to fuse, with far less energy out, than deuterium, and deuterium fusion still isn't anywhere near breakeven after 60 years of effort.
If you're going for a harder-than-deuterium/tritium reaction as your one great hope, Helium 3 is not it.
The logical candidate is p-B (Proton, i.e. light hydrogen, fusing with Boron 11). While it's even a bit harder to light than 2xHe3, and produces about 2/3 the power per reaction. But it's also aneutronic (i.e. 1% of the reactions produce a neutron - in this case about 0.2%). Nearly all of the fusion energy can be extracted as electricity - DC at several voltages in the vicinity of 2 kV - almost trivially, by decelerating and "catching" the reaction product alpha particles. The kicker, though, is that both H1 and B11 are common on Earth, so you don't have to import them from the moon.
That story was published by the Weekly World News. Compared to the WWN, the National Enquirer is serious journalism.
Yeah. We used to refer to it as the "Wiggly World News".
The National Enquirer occasionally threw in a real story for authenticity. (Also: When they did things like add a paragraph to a WhiteHouse memo to gin up a story, they'd sometimes use a different font for their addition. B-) )
Several thousand people every year are shot accidentally and many of them die, and several hundreds of them are children. Take a look at the statistics, these are undeniable facts.
And while you're looking at statistics, look also at the number osf times guns are used to COMMIT crimes, versus the number of times privately owned guns are used to STOP them. These numbers totally dominate the accidental shooting numbers (which are also inflated, because suicide, by-gun or otherwise, is often reported as an accident, especially if there's any doubt, to relieve social pressure on the family and/or avoid life insurance companies refusing to pay outt when it's not cut-and-dried.)
It's hard to get good numbers on use of personal guns to stop crimes - because just showing you're armed is usually enough to get the crook to back off and go find somebody less risky to bother. But in the early '90s Gary Kleck developed a methodology for getting good numbers via a survey, and estimated that the ratio was five defensive uses to one gun crime. (Later work by Kleck and others confirmed this number - and that, if anything, it erred on the low side and the value might be 1:6 or better.)
Similarly, in the late '90s, John Lott and David Mustard were able to show that legalizing and encouraging concealed carry caused a substantial reduction in crime.
Let alone suicide..
Yes, let's leave the suicides alone. It has been shown that restricting access to guns doesn't reduce the suicide rate - it just moves the suicidal to slower, less effective (so more tries are needed), and more painful means, increasing their misery.
Endogenous depression is a separate issue, needing separate treatment and perhaps interventions. Meanwhile, that suicidal people sometimes chose guns as the most practical means is no excuse for disarming the rest of us and making us sitting ducks for crooks, tyrants, and now, apparently, terrorists.
It's almost every day I ["don't" omittied for sarcasm] see headlines like 'heroic, armed local guy prevents mass shooting.'
Yep. Because the stories disappear quickly from the mainstream media, because they don't "fit the template". Look at the Clackamas Mall shooting, for example. After shooting into a store and killing two, the shooter discovered he was being stalked by one armed citizen - and another on a balcony (who may not have been armed at the time but was tracking him from cover like someone who was). So the shooter retreated to the access tunnels and, reaching a dead-end, shot himself. You can find almost nothing on this in the media record now. (Ditto Wikipedia, which doesn't even mention the armed-citizen aspect - or the estimate that about four percent of the mallgoers were carrying concealed.)
That should coincide with the perfection of nuclear fusion reactors and the release of Hurd 1.0.
About right.;-)
Seriously, though: Presuming his estiamate is right on:
2021: Emergency brake and/or reverse gear for ageing discovered.
2022: Several patented drug candidates apply for trial.
2022: Government decides to not allow deployment of anti-aging drugs as a matter of poliicy (figuring they'd bankrupt Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare). They also decide to keep this secret, to avoid the peasants with torches and pitchforks / citizens with tar, feathers, and a rail / successful third party dynasty-change secnarios.
2026: "Tests still ongoing". The boomers are dropping like flies - and some are catching on. Black market in illegal unapproved anti-ageing drugs forms. New (phase of the) drug war.
2027: All the illegal-drug social pathologies ramp up: Low quality and fake drugs flood the market. New legalization movement gains traction in some states, pitting states and fed against each other (see medical marijuhana for example). etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea where you get your information, but H1B visa holder are required to pay all federal, state, local taxes including FICA (Social Security) and Medicare.
I hear there ARE some entitlements that they don't get and for which they (or the employer) don't pay. (I think it's state unemployment insurance in some states.)
IMHO if/when such exist, the employer should be required to directly pay them the fee he would otherwise have paid the government, in addition to the mandated minimum wage/salary.
(That's actually fair, too: They can use the extra money to buy, or otherwise do something to try to replace, whatever the entitlement they don't get would have been.)
Ultimately, what is a lobbying group but institutional level major bribes being paid to get something in return?
A lobbying group is an organization for bringing the opinions and interests of their clients to the attention of the legislators. It's a set of specialists who do the constitutionally guaranteed "right to petition the government for redress of grievances" for their clients - professionally as members of an organization of interested parties, or both.
Of course if the legislators are corrupt, lobbyists for small-but-rich interests may resort to bribes. But lobbyists for very large groups don't need to do that. They can offer, instead, more votes from the people whose interests the legislator is supporting - or at least not opposing. These are votes that the members will chose to give voluntarily. (Perhaps after being informed, in turn, that the congresscritter is now working more in line with their interests. Such "being informed" might take the form of the lobbying organization giving them a "good grade" on ratings they publish periodically.)
The two largest organized interest groups, in order, are:
- AARP (over 37 million members)
- NRA (about 5 to 6 million members, whose members' lobbying is done by the non-tax-deductable NRA-ILA organization)
this has a Lovecraftian "unnameable" geometry.
What's unnamable about a "2 1/2 turn Mobius strip"?
I hear that multiple-shootings (and other acts of terror, insanity, or political action by violent means) in the US have also declined substantially. (Don't have a footnote handy or I wouldn't have hedged the statement, but it squares with my personal experience.)
How many multiple-shootings did you experience in past years, and how many this year?
You want a personal anaecdote? OK:
The building where I worked (at a research institution the lefties thought was responsible for a lot of Vietnam era military technology, including remote sensing equipment used in the detection and assassination of Che Guevara) was bombed in 1968 (one of a series of bombings in the town at the time). The bomb was placed in the doorway I customarily entered through, and went off at about the time I would normally have been entering. Fortunately, I was down (very!) sick that day. Given the bus schedules and the timing of the explosion, if the bomber also used the bus I probably would have been getting off as he got on.
The bomber has never been formally identified, apprehended, and prosecuted - though a particular figure in The Weathermen (NOT Bill Ayres) was believed to be responsible.
I haven't had any bombings, politically inspired or otherwise, happen near me this year. B-)
To say that anything about the New York Times is extreme is to be extreme yourself to the point of inanity. The New York Times is about as mainstream as it gets.
What alternate universe are YOU posting from?
The New York Times has an editorial policy that the time for objective coverage of the gun control debate is over and the job of journalists is to advocate for gun bans.
For an example see this editorial. It was published three days ago on page A1, the first time NYT has published an editorial on their front page since 1920.
The population of the US has been roughly evenly divided on this issue, with the pro-gun side somewhat ahead. (It has also been making substantial gains for a number of years, thanks to:
- First research, then the results of legislation, showing that increased concealed-carry results in lowered crime and victimization.
- Supreme Court decisions recognizing the RKBA as a civil right and "incorporating" the Second Amendment against the states.
- Incidents like this recent one, which have shown that the government can't protect the citizenry from immediate threats.)
That puts the NYT squarely OUTSIDE the mainstream, and getting more so, as measured by US public opinion.
As measured by the political positions of the elements of "The Mainstream Media" it may well be "as mainstream as it gets". But this just confirms the contention that the mainstream media is strongly left-biased.
It is simply ludicrously easy for mentally ill people to get firearms and ammunition. . .
Most killers are not "mentally ill" by an meaningful definition. They are angry, hopeless or otherwise upset. Often, they act out during a transitory phase of one of these emotional states. They are not "ill" and there is nothing about them outside of the norms of human emotional volatility until something pushes them too far.
More importantly: Psychologists trying to predict whether a particular individual will commit violence on others have results worse than chance.
Further, most "mentally ill" (especially depressives and those with other affective disorders) are far less likely to kill or otherwise violently harm others than the average of the general population.
Ban guns for anyone who has seen a shrink for depression and you disarm more than half the female population. Ban guns for anyone a healthcare worker suspects of PTSD and you disarm essentially all stalker victims and anyone who decided to finally get a gun because they were the victim of a crime.
Ban guns for anyone who has voluntarily seen a shrink and large numbers of people who SHOULD see a shrink will chose not to do so. (Thus professional psychologists are some of the strongest opponents to laws letting the government use psychological records in gun background checks and RKBA infringement laws.)
(The occasional person who goes on a spree when treated with antidepressants is more than adequately explained by this phenomenon: Psychopathy and depression are separate conditions, so some people happen to be both psychopaths and depressed. Treat the depression and you have a fully functional psychopath.)
There is no way to identify future killers that would not single out many "normal" and "law abiding" people.
There is only one good predictor of future violence: A past history of violence. But that's handled adequately by gun restrictions on people either convicted of crimes or involuntarily committed, as a danger to others, based on a history of being a danger to others, in a court proceeding .
CTD has done horrible price-gouging in past "black gun" and "ammo shortage" scares, so I wouldn't give them the time of day, let alone my business.
It's called "supply and demand".
When there is a sudden spike in demand, and those bidding don't want to order for later delivery, after more are made, because they are hedging the possibility that no more WILL be made, sellers would be stupid to keep the price below market-clearance and run out of stock, when they could both make more money for themselves and route the available stock to those for whom having product NOW is important enough to pay the premium.
If "Cheaper Than Dirt" tracks the market on the downslope, too, giving good service and better-than-the-competition prices (going for the fast nickels rather than the slow dimes), I have no problem whatsoever if they track it up on the occasional peak - and maybe still have some stock available when there's a crunch. The money from the perceived "gouging" can help support their low prices at other times. (Or it can support their lifestyle or other projects: It's their choice.)
If you don't like their prices today, don't buy today. If you don't like their policies, of course, you're always welcome to shop elsewhere. That's the "free" part of a free market.
Funny thing is...it appears that overall, gun violence in the US has been in a downturn over the past number of years. It is just these "spree" killings that has seemed to have popped up lately.
I hear that multiple-shootings (and other acts of terror, insanity, or political action by violent means) in the US have also declined substantially. (Don't have a footnote handy or I wouldn't have hedged the statement, but it squares with my personal experience.)
What has increased is news coverage of them when they occur. This is, of course, what should be expected: As they become more rare, they become more newsworthy.
What bias do you claim to see?
I suspect people with different political opinions may see a bias in the opposite direction from the one you perceive.
From up-close-and-personal experience with Objective C and C++ (also Smalltalk), these languages have substantially different semantics regarding class identity (primarily: what version of overridden member functions you get) during construction and destruction. I wouldn't be surprised if Objectivce-C++ had yet another semantics, pulling "features" from both, and I have no clue about LVMM.)
Building a frontend to compile to them, interchangeably, is a recipe for subtle bugs, if the frontend doesn't deal with these issues. Efficiency may go out the window if the frontend tries to impose one language's construction/destruction semantics on another. Doing so also brings up the issue of which semantics the compiler exposes to the programmer - each has its good and bad points, and each enables different - and incompatible - useful programming features.
I'd be interested in what (if anything) Clang has done about this issue. (Unfortunately, I'm busy on other stuff, so I'll have to depend on others to elucidate this.)
I wonder if we'll ever test nukes in space again? I wonder if we'll test them on some celestial body (perhaps the moon, I guess) and just extrapolate from there?
Nuclear explosives have a lot of uses besides war. The radiation makes most of them impractical on or near the surface of the Earth. (That's why using them to cut a Nicaragua Canal, for instance, was rejected.) In space, radiation is not such an issue.
Asteroid mining, asteroid modificatins, interpanetary and intersteller propulsion are all potential uses of such devices, and there are more. It may turn out nukes are the best, or an adequately good, choice, in practice, for one or more of these jobs.
Before you say, "Never!" I submit that we humans don't have a history of doing the Right Thing.
What makes you think testing new designs of nuclear explosive devices will ALWAYS be a "Wrong Thing".
the Obama administration has in the past indicated that it wants to ratify the treaty, although that won't happen with this Senate.
I call BS. Obama had the votes to do what he wanted in the Senate early in his term, and he didn't bother to ratify it.
Ratification takes 2/3s of the Senate.
* Did he have about a third of the Republicans onboard?
* Was it important enough to get this ratified NOW that he should spend some of his political favors, rather than waiting for the Senate to move on its own?
The hostility that too many doctors have to analgesics is maddening.
It's not that the doctors are hostile to giving adequate doses of painkillers.
It's that the DEA examines how often and how much they prescribe, and if it is too high (by their far too low scales) they come down on the doctors with penalties that are often career-ending. This puts doctors treating chronic-pain cases, or painful diseases, at substantial risk. So they underprescribe painkillers in order to avoid discovering the current administrative threshold by exceeding it.
This is particularly appalling now that it has been discovered that adequate opioid painkiller dosage in the first weeks following a traumatic injury apparently prevents post traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps the high and rising incidence of this debilitating condition in the past decades was entirely the result of the drug war.
Linux Being Used for This? Then WTF is it on /. for?
Increased government restrictions on network use and encryption technology comes immediately to mind. B-b
All these "mass shootings" seem to take place in areas that have a lot of firearms related restrictions, where nobody has a gun and nobody is able to shoot back before the body count ramps up. ... It also boggles the mind that after a terrorist attack on US soil, that all anyone wants to talk about is gun control.
But one nice thing about that is the anti-gun-control side of the argument is becoming massively more popular, after the attack in (heavily gun-controlled) France as followed by one in (a gun-free zone in heavily gun-controlled) California.
So bring on the arguments. Maybe they're result in more effective application of the Second Amendment and more general carriage of firearms. B-)
IMHO, increasing the density of armed citizens is the only thing likely to be effective against terror attacks on US soil - from either "home-grown" or infiltrated parties. We're long past the point where anything done (or stopped) overseas, or attempts to tighten government-operated security here, would do anything but make it worse (with the possible exception of closing the borders.)
Um, excuse me? America is busy installing and funding dictators and extremists... Even the famous Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was used as an asset to keep the communists out of Iran after the Shah (remember him, right?) got sick and died.
Um, excuse me? Are you seriously claiming that the US installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini?
Last I heard he was the revolutionary who created the movement that overthrew the Shah, and the whole Pahlavi monarchy (who had been re-empowered by a US/UK coup after the democrartically-elected Prime Minister nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's assets). The Shah didn't die until five years later (although he DID die of a cancer where survival times with then-current treatments were about five years, so he might have been starting to show symmptoms when he was overthrown.)
Or are you just claiming that the US used him against the Soviet Union once he had established himself and his movement? Governments tend to use everybody and everything they can to promote their interests, regardless of how they got there. Sometimes you build it, sometimes you mine it. "You have to make the good from the bad, because the bad is all you have to work with."
I recently went through a college-mandated anti-plagiarism training session required of all students.
(As Zontar The Mindless points out, by example, above) A quotation with a citation is not plagiarism.
The critical point is whether you clearly distinguish your own work from that of others. (In academic writing you are also expected to give citations, so interested readers don't have to work so hard to track down the original source of the non-original material. Here, doing so is a friendly gesture, but not customarily expected.)
Note also that Slashdot is a news-related discussion board, not an academic journal. Users bring news and ideas to the attention of others. In the absence of an explicit claim of original work, it is wise to assume any given idea or information presented may not be the original work of the poster.
It's easy to assume otherwise, because so many of us are used to doing and publishing original work, occasionally do so on Slashdot, and habitually give credit, or otherwise distinguish our work from others, when we write.
If you hack systems in china, it is much easier to prosecute. (I would assume)
Other possible motivations:
The malware developers don't want to become infected by their own malware, so they make it avoid some aspect of their configuration. (Language selection is an easy one to pick, if the target set is not in your language group anyhow.)
The malware developers may be trying to confine the malware to particular target sets, and avoiding certain countries, languages, etc. is a first, coarse, sieve.
Those courses sound good, so why aren't they mandatory to get a gun?
Probably because mandatory courses for gunowners are generally promulgated by left-wing politicians, who HATE the NRA and use the courses they demand to push their agendas (often requiring answers that are wrong with respect to the real world, but politically correct, to get a passing grade.)
But there are reasons to NOT require a course. Two of the most important:
- Requiring a passing grade in a government-mandated course to exercise a constitutional right is a convenient way for the government to abrogate that right. Like by giving the course once per year, at a remote location, during business hours, with limited number of seats, that are all filled by people who received advanced notice by the time the test is announced to the general public. (This sort of thing has actually been done on the US east coast.) Think about how "literacy tests" for voting were used to disenfranchise blacks, before they were struck down by the Supreme Court during the Civil Rights movement era. This is the same principle, and the government cannot be allowed to control who has the power to oppose it if it ever goes tyrannical
- Requiring a particular minimum set of courses means most new gun buyers take that set AND STOP. The minimum requirement becomes the nearly-universal level of training. Leaving it open-ended means they take tests until they are comfortable with their own expertise - typically receiving far more training than if some minimum were required.
[the Onion is] where it belongs. Helium-3 is the dumbest, most impractical solution to our energy problems imaginable. Unicorn farts would be a more realistic power source. We don't actual have any helium-3, and even if we did, it is far harder to fuse, with far less energy out, than deuterium, and deuterium fusion still isn't anywhere near breakeven after 60 years of effort.
If you're going for a harder-than-deuterium/tritium reaction as your one great hope, Helium 3 is not it.
The logical candidate is p-B (Proton, i.e. light hydrogen, fusing with Boron 11). While it's even a bit harder to light than 2xHe3, and produces about 2/3 the power per reaction. But it's also aneutronic (i.e. 1% of the reactions produce a neutron - in this case about 0.2%). Nearly all of the fusion energy can be extracted as electricity - DC at several voltages in the vicinity of 2 kV - almost trivially, by decelerating and "catching" the reaction product alpha particles. The kicker, though, is that both H1 and B11 are common on Earth, so you don't have to import them from the moon.
That story was published by the Weekly World News. Compared to the WWN, the National Enquirer is serious journalism.
Yeah. We used to refer to it as the "Wiggly World News".
The National Enquirer occasionally threw in a real story for authenticity. (Also: When they did things like add a paragraph to a WhiteHouse memo to gin up a story, they'd sometimes use a different font for their addition. B-) )
Several thousand people every year are shot accidentally and many of them die, and several hundreds of them are children. Take a look at the statistics, these are undeniable facts.
And while you're looking at statistics, look also at the number osf times guns are used to COMMIT crimes, versus the number of times privately owned guns are used to STOP them. These numbers totally dominate the accidental shooting numbers (which are also inflated, because suicide, by-gun or otherwise, is often reported as an accident, especially if there's any doubt, to relieve social pressure on the family and/or avoid life insurance companies refusing to pay outt when it's not cut-and-dried.)
It's hard to get good numbers on use of personal guns to stop crimes - because just showing you're armed is usually enough to get the crook to back off and go find somebody less risky to bother. But in the early '90s Gary Kleck developed a methodology for getting good numbers via a survey, and estimated that the ratio was five defensive uses to one gun crime. (Later work by Kleck and others confirmed this number - and that, if anything, it erred on the low side and the value might be 1:6 or better.)
Similarly, in the late '90s, John Lott and David Mustard were able to show that legalizing and encouraging concealed carry caused a substantial reduction in crime.
Let alone suicide..
Yes, let's leave the suicides alone. It has been shown that restricting access to guns doesn't reduce the suicide rate - it just moves the suicidal to slower, less effective (so more tries are needed), and more painful means, increasing their misery.
Endogenous depression is a separate issue, needing separate treatment and perhaps interventions. Meanwhile, that suicidal people sometimes chose guns as the most practical means is no excuse for disarming the rest of us and making us sitting ducks for crooks, tyrants, and now, apparently, terrorists.
It's almost every day I ["don't" omittied for sarcasm] see headlines like 'heroic, armed local guy prevents mass shooting.'
Yep. Because the stories disappear quickly from the mainstream media, because they don't "fit the template". Look at the Clackamas Mall shooting, for example. After shooting into a store and killing two, the shooter discovered he was being stalked by one armed citizen - and another on a balcony (who may not have been armed at the time but was tracking him from cover like someone who was). So the shooter retreated to the access tunnels and, reaching a dead-end, shot himself. You can find almost nothing on this in the media record now. (Ditto Wikipedia, which doesn't even mention the armed-citizen aspect - or the estimate that about four percent of the mallgoers were carrying concealed.)
That should coincide with the perfection of nuclear fusion reactors and the release of Hurd 1.0.
About right. ;-)
Seriously, though: Presuming his estiamate is right on:
2021: Emergency brake and/or reverse gear for ageing discovered.
2022: Several patented drug candidates apply for trial.
2022: Government decides to not allow deployment of anti-aging drugs as a matter of poliicy (figuring they'd bankrupt Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare). They also decide to keep this secret, to avoid the peasants with torches and pitchforks / citizens with tar, feathers, and a rail / successful third party dynasty-change secnarios.
2026: "Tests still ongoing". The boomers are dropping like flies - and some are catching on. Black market in illegal unapproved anti-ageing drugs forms. New (phase of the) drug war.
2027: All the illegal-drug social pathologies ramp up: Low quality and fake drugs flood the market. New legalization movement gains traction in some states, pitting states and fed against each other (see medical marijuhana for example).
etc.
I wonder if any of this is bugs hacks added to the radio firmware for the security agencies (and/or other malware purveyors)? B-)