Fake Facebook accounts can backfire, as I've discovered. For my fake Facebook account, I can't remember what fake birth date I used, and somehow my account became locked. Even though I have the password, and access to the email account (under a fake name of course) I used to register, I cannot finish log in. After I log in, Facebook demands that I provide the birth date to "prove" I am really me. Unfortunately, I set the birthday info to "private", so I can't ask the few connections I made on that account what my fake birthday is.
Now that email account gets spam from that damned Facebook account, and there's no way to turn it off. Deleting that Facebook account would work for me, but apparently I can't even have that done. Emails to their customer service have gotten no response. Jsut when Facebook's policy of deleting fake accounts would actually be useful, too....
We do know the sign. Global Warming is definitely a cost. Yes, we'll see some benefits, some gains. But those are minor next to the costs. One of the costs will certainly be wars. The fastest way to fire up a war is not over some high minded principles, or religious dogmas, powerful though they are. It's a lack of the basic necessities. What will people do if they are suddenly faced with starvation, but the neighbors still seem to have enough?
But you're willing to plunge ahead with your own religion. Science is never fully settled. 100% confidence is fantasy. Only morons say that we should make no changes because we don't know enough, by which they mean we don't know everything about an issue. The point is, we will never know everything about an issue. Do we know enough to act with sufficient confidence of being right? Yes! Whether the world would be a better place if it was warmer is not the issue. We can always head that direction later, eyes open, by our own choice only, if we decide that is best. But right now, that's not the case. The really peculiar thing is the conservative, anti-change political parties are willing to go ahead and chance the massive changes that ocean level rise will force upon us, to avoid having to make relatively tiny changes now. I've seen that they maintain self consistency with their principles through a fool's technique of denial. Gloabl Warming isn't real, it's a liberal plot! Then I suppose, should ocean level rise come to pass just as we have foretold may well happen, that amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the incredible losses that they'll trot out that loser excuse that there was nothing we could do about anyway, it was God's will.
I'm certainly not doing nothing now, so I can say "I told you so" decades later. That would be damned cold satisfaction. God help us all if we do heed the voices of denial. And as to it being God's will, maybe it is a test. God is always testing us. After all, we have free will. Are we going to be fools, and suffer God's wrath for it? Have we learned nothing? Thousands of years ago, we were far more ignorant. The Roman Empire was smart and industrious, but made many mistakes through ignorance, some of it deliberate. They actually did have hints that lead was toxic, but they brushed it off. Another serious error in basic policy were the walls. Certainly the walls helped keep the uncivlized barbarians at bay, for a while. But ultimately the walls were only a way of putting off the hard work of dealing with the real problems, not a lasting solution themselves. Rome never got around to starting work on those problems before the walls were breached. Today, some politicians want to erect a wall along the US-Mexico border. That kind of brute problem solving totally ignores the underlying issues. It may be that we'll have to build dikes to keep the ocean back. But if it is better to head off ocean rise, surely we should go that route? We should at the least explore all viable options. Making no changes is certainly one of the options, and definitely the cheapest and easiest up front, but likely not the best choice we could make over the long term.
I heard a thing a while ago about coal-burning plants emitting more hard radiation from their smoke stacks than nuclear plants leak in real-life operation
Perhaps you heard this. But you can't just conclude on that alone that coal is bad. It is possible to scrub the output of the smokestacks. Coal ash is even easier to keep contained.
Despite the sarcastic tone, everyone, even you, realizes nuclear power is dangerous. It might seem that the main question is, are the benefits worth the dangers? On balance, the answer seems to be yes, nuclear is worth doing. But hang on. Costs and benefits should be the big question, but sadly there are some other factors to consider. Given human failings, which is the safer power source? Nuclear power can be generated safely, but will it? Such is the pressure to make a profit that operators will cut corners on safety to save a few dollars. We have careful analysis and fairly good consensus on the measures that must be taken to operate a nuclear power plant with reasonable safety, and then that all gets thrown out the window when a plant is built on the coast, with a wall that is not high enough. They gambled that a tsunami of enough magnitude to top the inadequate wall they built would not happen during the plant's lifetime. They were wrong.
It's even worse than that. The owners deliberately fudged the data on tsunamis. They had enough information to know that they needed a higher wall. Instead, they took a fool's course. They leaned hard on the engineers to approve a lower height for the wall. At a plant further south, the chief engineer bravely fought back and refused to authorize a wall he knew would not be adequate. The owners, being greedy fools, complained bitterly about the additional expense, and threatened to fire the engineer for not "cooperating". This kind of unfair pressure is very common in our capitalist systems. Might as well threaten to fire the universe for not being nice enough. Today, the result is that that other plant came through the tsunami intact. But it didn't matter, because Fukushima, where the engineers bowed to the pressure, failed spectacularly and now the entire nuclear power industry is teetering on the edge.
The owners did not trouble to understand the scope of the gamble they were taking on behalf of everyone, and it was their responsiblity to understand. Then, having upped the risk of a nuclear disaster to unacceptable levels that we the public would never have agreed to had we known, they went further. They skimped on the design and maintenance of various backup systems. Diesel powered emergency generators were located below what the water level would be if a tsunami should top the wall. If a tsunami happened, disaster was guaranteed.
I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take
I'm not impressed. Ultimately, it couldn't take the punishment. Almost isn't good enough, not with something as dangerous as nuclear power.
Another bit of deliberate blindness too often paraded here is ignoring alternative power. When compared to only coal, nuclear looks pretty good. But coal is a low standard to beat. How does nuclear power stack up against solar, wind, and water? Not so well.
Look up a few definitions yourself. Like, "externality". Solar power absolutely is worth paying more for, if it saves more in environmental damage than its costs, relative to coal. I think it does. What is Global Warming eventually going to cost us all? Easily trillions, if we have to relocate coastal infrastructure to higher ground.
Even without that, what is the cost to our health from pollution from coal burning? Priceless. I visited London in 1985. One shocker I got was a day after I arrived, when I blew my nose. The white tissue turned black. I hear that London is much cleaner today.
Solar may cost more up front, but is cheaper over the long haul. Solar will continue to improve.
small personal acts of piracy should be penalized in the region of a few thousand dollars TOTAL
Doesn't go far enough. "personal acts" of copying should be 100% legal, and should be encouraged. Being able to share with friends is a huge public good that these property rights trolls have been trying to persuade the public is unethical, immoral, unAmerican, and Bad for Business. Of course it's bad for business! It's bad for the business of rent seeking. They've got many people more than half persuaded that data should be treated the same as physical property. It's a simple way to think of the matter, and for that reason holds great appeal. But it's wrong. The physical is scarce. Data is not. The term
"intellectual property" should never have gained such acceptance amoung the public.
Jammie Thomas should never have been dragged into court, never been treated as some kind of big time criminal. Her biggest crime seems to be that she dared to fight back. They escalated the charges and penalties to ludicrous levels, trying to make an example of her. It's similar to what happened to Aaron Swartz. All they really accomplished was making idiots of themselves. Revealed a bit of the complex web of "campaign contributions" and other money machine details and corruption that have entirely too much of a hold on our govenrment. Few around here have much respect for the justice system, not when they get such crucial distinctions between property rights and copyrights so very wrong.
Yes, of course, a union. But unions have problems too. I would like to see a bit more support of fellow workers without dragging a union organization into it. You don't have to join a union to stand up to terrible management.
Unions have a poor reputation, thanks to many of their tactics being destructive, even dangerous, but also thanks to vicious smear campaigns waged by management. The controversy over Firestone tires on Ford Explorers is an example. The problem was traced to bad tires from a particular Firestone plant in Decatur, IL. That plant was unionized, and was bitterly contesting with management. There was speculation that union members had deliberately done shoddy work. If that is true, then that means those union workers are murderers. Another possibility is that it was the cheap non-union labor that did the poor work, because they were inexperienced and poorly trained. Either case can also mean that Firestone should test their product better. Shouldn't be possible for a tire with defects to pass inspection. Another possibility was the design of the tire, specifically that it did not have a "belt edge layer". Blaming it on the worker peons is weak. Management must take ultimate responsibility regardless. Management certainly would make workers into scapegoats if possible. With a problem that lead to deaths, and with the lack of responsibility displayed especially by those whose job is to take responsibility, it is to be expected that everyone is desperately trying to blame it on someone or something else. In any case, the plant was closed. Perhaps closing down the entire operation is the only way to deal with a place that has so poisoned relationships that it has become dysfunctional, and unable to correctly diagnose and resolve problems. Not a good outcome for the union or the company.
How can this problem of sociopathic, overpaid CEOs be fixed?
One way is for employees to show more backbone and solidarity. But how exactly? Everyone else could quit on the spot. That's hardly better than everyone shooting themselves. So, everyone threaten to quit unless the CEO retracts the firing? Don't think that would work either. Everyone could refuse to meet with the CEO, and walk out of the meeting, without quitting. Better, but still not good enough. Probably the CEO would fire everyone for that, and it would stick. Maybe the group could perform a citizens' arrest? But on what grounds? Could the group get hold of the board of directors after the meeting and give them an ultimatum: reinstate Abel, fire the CEO, or we all leave in 2 weeks? Also demand that the board reduce CEO compensation to sane levels. Or maybe everyone could ignore the firing, act as if it didn't happen, with the fired person staying in the meeting and carrying on as normal? The CEO might have a hard time making a firing effective if the HR machinery refuses to cooperate. What if they just keep right on paying the victim's salary, and he continues to come to work?
I've worked under sociopaths. One of my biggest regrets about it is that I unintentionally empowered them merely by being too passive. Now I regard it as not just vital for my own health but everyone's, and therefore a civic duty, to never take bull from sociopaths. In order to do that, you must therefore be prepared at all times for being fired. Never count on being so valuable, even if you really are the life of the company, that a fool CEO won't go temporarily insane and fire you anyway, even though he knows it will destroy the company and cost him his job too. More likely is that he was bluffing.
Sugar gets more evil every day. I've heard that sugar causes or is linked to:
tooth decay
weight problems
diabetes
acne
dementia
And, I've heard that sugar is acidic, but how and what that means other than that it's somehow bad I don't know. Acidic foods cause faster aging, maybe? Wish I'd known about the link to acne back in high school.
Anyone who is using public key encryption should make their public key(s) available in public places, no need to send it. Could just have it on a web page. That's not quite enough, because there's the problem of authenticity. How is a visitor to the web page with the public key to know it is genuine? Links can be hijacked, web sites hacked, web pages injected, and so on. One answer is to test the key against a digitally signed document that came from the intended recipient of the secure messages, should the communicator possess such a document. More likely is another kind of answer, which is to ask a 3rd party the
communicator already trusts. One kind of public place that is specialized in public key encryption is a trusted repository of keys for which everyone has the public key. This 3rd party is sometimes called "Trent". This is basically how https works, and the 3rd parties are organizations such as the somewhat notorious Verisign. Thawte, CAcert, and others also serve as Trents. A person wishing to communicate with a stranger asks Trent for that stranger's public key, or asks if a key really does belong to a particular entity, then can use Trent's public key (because everyone already has Trent's public key) to verify that the message purportedly from Trent is genuine. A problem with this is that one Trent could be a single point of failure. What if Trent is compromised? A way to deal with that is the "web of trust". You don't check the public key of a stranger against just one Trent, you check it with many Trents. If a dozen independent entities all say that some public key really is the public key of the stranger you want to communicate with, then you can be fairly sure you have a good key. This is still not unbeatable, especially if the independent parties get lazy and start leaning on each other too much, so that they are no longer truly independent.
Asking others to send their public keys looks a bit ignorant. Instead, check around for their public keys. That is, Bob doesn't ask Alice for her public key, not over an unprotected channel, instead Bob asks Trent (through the protected channel he already has with Trent) if Trent has a public key for Alice. If no, then might ask Alice directly. Ask if they use public key encryption and have public key(s) and if so, where a suitable key can be obtained. However, the main reason to ask Alice about it is not to get her key, because she probably doesn't have one, it's more snarky, to make Alice aware that maybe she ought to use public key encryption, obtain a key, and get the word out that she has one.
I read a lot of conflicting info about the early Earth. Is the end of the Hadean Eon and beginning of the Archean supposed to be when life began? Or is some other event supposed to divide the two eons, like perhaps the emergence of conditions hospitable to life? I've read that it is 3.8 gya or 4.0 gya. Why not say 3.9+/-0.1 gya? Obviously 4 was picked for being a very round number, but settling on a single number however round seems a bad idea. Makes it sound like we're more certain of those dates than we really are.
Much of our knowledge is sketchy and speculative. No one really says whether the first life forms might be considered bacteria, or archaea. The archaean domain is still new to science. Was only in the late 1970s that archaea were recognized as being different enough to qualify as a separate domain and not part of the domain of bacteria. Then there are fun ideas like the RNA world hypothesis. There's the idea that life could have started and died several times before achieving permanence. Panspermia is another notion.
There is always one alternative: don't watch cable TV.
I really don't understand why so many people put up with Big Media's crap. They bitch and complain about the prices and restrictions-- and pay up anyway. I get the feeling if they had to go through humiliating fraternity initiation rituals to get their TV shows, they'd do it. There are so many other entertaining things to do, such as computer games. Could even visit the great outdoors.
Sorting bugs into "security vulnerabilities" and "other" is prioritizing.
Security people talk as if the start point is security vulnerabilities. It's not. From a functional view, there's not much difference between a bug that breaks crucial functionality, and a DoS attack.
It's amazing how many security vulnerabilities rely on age old bugs such as buffer overruns and dirty memory that are easily fixed if we're willing to live with slightly slower computers. We can program the OS to blank memory whenever it is allocated and for extra safety, whenever it is freed. We can add bounds checking to library routines such as C's infamous gets(). But all that hurts performance. It's a tradeoff we've been unwilling to make. How many people run SELinux? For most, the time it takes to learn and administer an SELinux system is just not worth the scanty benefits. For instance, SELinux does very little to protect you from NSA snooping. Another approach is the microkernel. Why haven't we pursued microkernels? A microkernel architecture might reap ten times the security benefits we could ever hope to net by constantly patching drivers. Gets rid of a whole class of vulnerabilities involving the escalation of flaws in drivers. What we can do cheaply is punt illegal access problems to the OS and hardware, leaning on virtual memory paging to protect programs from each other and No Execute bits to protect a program's code from itself.
The entire approach of zeroing in on vulnerabilities is fire fighting. And saying that we should choose which fires to fight is not particularly insightful or helpful. Better to build systems that don't catch on fire so easily.
The current system is a bigger clusterf**k than anything you're imagining.
which they turn around and fund their R&D with.
They'd like you to believe that. And it seems that you do. Sure, some do some R&D. But all use a lot of that money for fat bonuses for their execs, and other dubious purposes such as advertising. I have not heard of insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield doing any research at all. Those who do, don't do much basic R&D. Instead they lean on publicly funded institutions of higher education for that. They get a free ride there. What good is the heavy advertising they do for name brand drugs? Why are these ads aimed at patients? Most patients are not medical professionals. Then, what of the money they spend on "intellectual property" to "protect" their precious drugs? Some of the monies that should be spent on our health goes towards lobbyists whose jobs are to persuade or bribe government to shore up monopolies and destroy competition. And the whole thing is aided and abetted by people like you who blindly believe in Big Pharma and friends.
Formerly free society? You talk like our current health care system is some paragon of competitive efficiency. It's not. It's full of fraud and waste. It's dirty pool. Price controls? There's an excellent method of price control: Competition. Too bad there isn't much competition, not that there's scope for it in all areas. But where there could be competition, there isn't. A person who needs emergency medical treatment obviously has no time or opportunity to comparison shop. Such people are the perfect captive consumers who routinely get bilked. It is no coincidence that our care is geared towards emergencies and not prevention. Obamacare has a lot of flaws, not least thanks to Republican attempts to deliberately screw it up. But it's a start. The medical community has only themselves to blame for bringing this upon them. They've had decades to demonstrate the effectiveness of the current system. Instead, they've abused their position of authority, their power, to bleed us all.
pretty much everyone I've ever met sells out when it comes to making an actual personal sacrifice for the sake of doing what's right
Too right! But understand, management is to blame for most of that. They deliberately put people in untenable situations, and sometimes it can be for such stupidly petty crap. If you have any kind of reputation as a star hacker, or an advanced degree or some such, they may demand that you put your personal stamp of approval on some equipment, software, or project that is absolute junk. They don't put it so nakedly of course, they will instead tell you to examine the material, and mention that it would be good that it be approved, perhaps dropping hints of what might happen if you were to reject it. They want it approved, for political reasons, never mind that it doesn't work. They want you to help grease the gravy train they're setting up for friends back home in their congress person's district. And if they're so unprincipled that they'd do that, they sure as heck won't scruple to lean hard on you. Also, they want results, meaning, positive results, not negative results, so they can look good too. If you won't play along but you do like to keep your head down and stay quiet, they may just put the words they want into your mouth!
I don't have much respect for 'play it safe' cowards either.
Work for these guys, and you may eventually face that hard choice that looks like a) play along, and you get to keep your job, or b) take a stand, and kiss your job and your career bye-bye. They want you to sweat over the possibility that you won't just lose your job, but that you will end up with such a black mark on your record that you will never be able to find another job in your field. It can be much worse even than that. How'd you like to be facing a long prison sentence? Thanks to them being backed by the force of the state, that's no idle threat. Or, how about life as a fugitive, seeking asylum from other nations, as Snowden has had to do? You'd like to think you would do the right thing and call those sort of jerks on their threats, but until you've really faced that situation, faced that kind of fear, you can't know what it's like and what you'd really do. And you may not have just yourself to think about. What if you have children who will suffer if you end up unemployed for a long time? Now what do you do? Cowardly, you say? Compared to all that, playing along with some little petty nothing begins to look extremely pragmatic. But that path also has its perils. Play along, and if another groups calls them on their boondoggle, and they aren't able to justify it, they may call on you to do so. What do you do then? Lie, and hope it works? Fess up? But you don't have to face an inquisition to lose big in this. Before things ever reach that point, it is likely way too late. Just the fact that your name is associated with junk is enough to ruin your reputation. No matter what you do, it won't be a good outcome for you.
Once your reputation is "spent", you are of no more value to them, and they will discard you like a used piece of toilet paper. This is what happens to many contractors. I've seen some pretty high turnover in defense contracting.
Persistence didn't help alchemists, builders of perpetual motion machines, proponents of Digital Restrictions Management, or anyone else trying to do the impossible.
That kind of failure is due to a lack of understanding, not necessarily a lack of skills.
You joke, but the military is very quick and free to trot that idea out. "He did it because he is gay" as if being gay makes a person more likely to leak information, I mean, commit treason. Some of Bradley Manning's posts I ran across would seem to show he might indeed be gay. Then it occured to me those posts might be fakes.
The 1989 gun turret explosion on the USS Iowa was a classic. The navy put out this ridiculous hypothesis that Clayton Hartwig, a sailor who died in the disaster, was gay and so sexually frustrated that he was suicidal and deliberately caused the explosion. Under pressure, the navy dropped the gay part but clung on to the idea Hartwig was suicidal and did it on purpose. As the disaster was investigated further, it became even more painfully obvious that the navy was doing a cover up. The real reason was that they were using experimental mixings of explosives that if not rammed slowly could prematurely detonate. Strangest was that the officer the navy picked to lead the investigation was the same guy who made the experimental mix.
And remember, some of the most radical social conservatives advanced this absurd notion that 9/11 happened because America is too tolerant of homosexuality. Just the other day I stopped in at my insurance agent's office and heard Limbaugh on their radio, ranting about the possibility that Trayvon Martin might have been gay and tried to sexually assault Zimmerman. I don't expect any better of those retards, but we should have smarter military leaders than that. No General Boykins! May be hard to do. I suppose a military career is attractive to simpletons who think force is a good answer to most problems.
One thing file system directory trees have shown me is that hierarchy is lousy for categorizing. Convenient for file systems, bad for people. The example I like to use is 2 applications organized into binary and data files. Should the files be put in these directories:/app1/bin,/app1/data,/app2/bin,/app2/data ? Or in these directories:/bin/app1,/bin/app2,/data/app1,/data/app2 ? Or should we use some kind of directory linking, so we can sort of have it both ways? This leads to a question about OOP. If hierarchical organizations are bad for files, maybe they're also bad for classes?
Whatever else tags do, they dispense with hierarchy. A file system that truly did away with the hierarchical directory structure and used tags would be interesting. The problem in the above example would vanish, with the files in question merely being tagged as app1 or app2, and as bin or data. Ask for a directory listing of all files tagged as bin, and get all the files tagged as app1 and bin, and app2 and bin. Strips the ordering out of the problem, leaving categorization, which is still a tough problem.
I ran into this tagging problem when thinking about an app to sort images. The idea was to compare 2 images, and come up with a percentage value of how similar they were to each other, with 100% being identical, and 0% being totally different. But, on what criteria should images be compared? I saw that it was much too simplistic to boil down a comparison of such intricate data to just one number.
It's pretty clear that, in aggregate, doctors aren't fleecing the system
I disagree. First, doctors are horrible at finance. Few trouble to manage their own money effectively. It's common for a doctor to be pulling down 6 figure pay, and yet be broke because he blows all his money on expensive cars, big houses, and trophy wives. They are even worse with their patients' money, going through that like the proverbial drunken sailor. They'll happily order unnecessary $2000 scans, "just in case", and to cover their asses and to get some use out of the really expensive equipment the practice should not have bought in the first place. They prescribe expensive brand name medication when a generic is available, and oft times is superior. An example is prescribing Crestor, instead of simvastatin or lovastatin. Even a generic may be the wrong approach, if patients have not tried other measures first, such as improving their diets and exercising. I realize there is a great deal of pressure on doctors from both Big Pharma and patients. We're really sold on the idea of magic pills that fix all our medical problems. Doesn't help that Big Pharma works the public over with all these ads. "Ask your doctor about..." But rather than go with the flow, especially since it's more profitable, doctors have a duty to push back.
My own personal experience with this was thanks to an automobile accident. Had my parents with me, and they were both injured. My mother finished her hospitalization in a private place, where she had been sent for rehab. On the day they released her, they shoved a wheelchair at us, and shoved a form under her nose for her to sign. The form said that she promised to pay for the wheelchair herself should her insurance refuse. She didn't need the wheelchair, but at that time we were still just a little too credulous and inexperienced with medical profiteering. I protested that we could get a wheelchair from a friend who no longer needed his, but was ignored. I asked how much their wheelchair cost, and was told not to worry about it because insurance would cover it! I pointed out that the form they were insisting she sign suggested that there was a possibility insurance would not cover it, and so I ought to know what it cost. They replied that they didn't know but it was sure to be reasonable. Uh huh. Turned out that damned wheelchair cost $825, 4 to 6 times what it should have cost. That was hardly the only instance of profiteering.
You should read Bitter Pill (paywalled), and How Dentists Rip Us Off (pdf) if you are truly ignorant of the reckless and cavalier attitude the medical community has towards costs.
You forget the atmosphere. Suppose you give the payload exactly the right amount of velocity that the far side of the ellipse just grazes the atmosphere at a very shallow angle. Even though the ellipse must intersect the launch point, the payload won't. It will skip off the atmosphere like a stone skipping off of water. A tiny bit of acceleration could make the resulting trajectory into a stable orbit.
You could also use the moon's gravity, if you can reach that far. A payload that gets close enough to the moon could get enough of a gravity boost to stay in Earth orbit. That's not nearly as feasible as using the atmosphere, because the moon is much too far away to do that easily.
I was thinking the same thing but on a much smaller scale. Would this work for a new kind of rifle? The bullets could be just solid bits of material, shaped like golf balls, no need for gunpowder. Or perhaps the bullets could be disc shaped.
Cutting the funding is only treating the symptom. The problem is regulatory capture, cronyism, and other forms of corruption. Seems this happens over and over. Surprisingly, I don't think inefficiency is all that bad, contrary to reputation. It's corruption. How did 34 million dollars end up being spent to build a base in Afghanistan that will never be used? Government hands out sweetheart deals for various services, to contractors who just happen to be friends or relatives of government officials. They're supposed to put all this up for bids, but they're pretty good at stacking the deck, with techniques such as burying announcements deep in the local paper so they can say they made a public announcement, and fishing for reasons to disqualify a competitor. It's like winning a baseball game by not telling the other team when and where to go so that they forfeit because they didn't show. And if the team does figure out where to go in time, and shows up, then they get disqualified because their uniforms don't conform to some ISO standard, or their mode of transport doesn't conform to safety regulations, or they don't have required paperwork with them, etc. All the easier to pull this off if the press is also in their pockets.
One of the more recent scams has been the way banks treat small governments. Detroit serves as the perfect excuse why underwriting municipal bonds is risky, and therefore the interest rate should be higher. Then cities put these finance packages up for bid, trying to get the lowest rate of interest that they can, but big banks have colluded to make certain cities don't get competitive offers. Even a government that is run honestly has a hard time beating that. And you think cutting funding will solve problems of that sort?
You think that is flamebait? No one is going to bother donating for some nails to stick you on a cross, not for that feeble "cutesy" criticism. And, The Onion? Not even close. Try this:
XKCD is like the fax machine.
Fax: Let's use these cool new digital communication devices to recreate paper documents, on paper, only with really crappy low resolution pictures of the text. Unlike emails, they'll have legal force because they're printed on paper, like sales slips! A pity that legal force doesn't extend to paper currency, or people could pay off their student loans by faxing $100 bills to the banks.
XKCD: Let's use the comic strip, a holdover from an antiquated medium that's been going stale like decade old peanuts, as a vehicle for modern comedy. We'll draw everything in rows of boxes, just like traditional comic strips, but with stick figures because you have to put some kind of drawing in those boxes, in case some dying newspaper gets desperate enough to try adding something really radical to freshen up their stodgy Sunday comics section, and get Garfield off the first page. Or in case they need some filler should Doonesbury offend the prudes and moralists again and they have to yank it for a month.
Our fellow citizens take an awful lot lying down. I wish they wouldn't. Why are Too Big To Fail banks still in business in one piece, and not broken up? The social conservatives are especially aggravating. Get all worked up over abortion, and even totally fake issues like whether global warming is just a big hoax to get more public funding for climate scientists, and "teach the controversy" over Creationism and Evolution, while failing to see any difference between science and propaganda, and letting these white collar thieves walk.
Education is thought to be crucial for a democracy to function. If these US citizens aren't just plain stupid, they certainly are lacking a good education. To fall for idiotic notions such as the proposal to secure the US-Mexico border with 300,000 guards, after the recent lesson we had in Iraq over the limits of brute, military force... well, we'll never educate everyone well enough to see through such attempts at manipulation, but a few more could be enough to tip the US into taking much better directions.
They used to jab the tip of your finger. That's just about the most sensitive, painful place they could choose to get a blood sample. Fingertips have the greatest concentration of nerves. Being medical professionals, they of all people should know that. So why couldn't they prick some other spot, like the forearm? It really seemed like they were at best indifferent to causing their patients unnecessary pain. At worst, I wondered if some of them were sadists.
Some years ago, a change in this procedure came along. Now, they prick the side of the finger, not the tip. Much, much less painful.
Names. Give us some names. I'd like to know who are these bureaucrats who ask for passwords? Then, I'd like to see them sweat over the possibility they might be censured, might lose their jobs.
Let them experience how thrilling it is to have their dark glasses taken away, feel what it's like not to be faceless anymore. Then, maybe they'd appreciate privacy a little more.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the fake one just used for stupid sites
Of course!
Fake Facebook accounts can backfire, as I've discovered. For my fake Facebook account, I can't remember what fake birth date I used, and somehow my account became locked. Even though I have the password, and access to the email account (under a fake name of course) I used to register, I cannot finish log in. After I log in, Facebook demands that I provide the birth date to "prove" I am really me. Unfortunately, I set the birthday info to "private", so I can't ask the few connections I made on that account what my fake birthday is.
Now that email account gets spam from that damned Facebook account, and there's no way to turn it off. Deleting that Facebook account would work for me, but apparently I can't even have that done. Emails to their customer service have gotten no response. Jsut when Facebook's policy of deleting fake accounts would actually be useful, too....
Any ideas?
We do know the sign. Global Warming is definitely a cost. Yes, we'll see some benefits, some gains. But those are minor next to the costs. One of the costs will certainly be wars. The fastest way to fire up a war is not over some high minded principles, or religious dogmas, powerful though they are. It's a lack of the basic necessities. What will people do if they are suddenly faced with starvation, but the neighbors still seem to have enough?
But you're willing to plunge ahead with your own religion. Science is never fully settled. 100% confidence is fantasy. Only morons say that we should make no changes because we don't know enough, by which they mean we don't know everything about an issue. The point is, we will never know everything about an issue. Do we know enough to act with sufficient confidence of being right? Yes! Whether the world would be a better place if it was warmer is not the issue. We can always head that direction later, eyes open, by our own choice only, if we decide that is best. But right now, that's not the case. The really peculiar thing is the conservative, anti-change political parties are willing to go ahead and chance the massive changes that ocean level rise will force upon us, to avoid having to make relatively tiny changes now. I've seen that they maintain self consistency with their principles through a fool's technique of denial. Gloabl Warming isn't real, it's a liberal plot! Then I suppose, should ocean level rise come to pass just as we have foretold may well happen, that amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the incredible losses that they'll trot out that loser excuse that there was nothing we could do about anyway, it was God's will.
I'm certainly not doing nothing now, so I can say "I told you so" decades later. That would be damned cold satisfaction. God help us all if we do heed the voices of denial. And as to it being God's will, maybe it is a test. God is always testing us. After all, we have free will. Are we going to be fools, and suffer God's wrath for it? Have we learned nothing? Thousands of years ago, we were far more ignorant. The Roman Empire was smart and industrious, but made many mistakes through ignorance, some of it deliberate. They actually did have hints that lead was toxic, but they brushed it off. Another serious error in basic policy were the walls. Certainly the walls helped keep the uncivlized barbarians at bay, for a while. But ultimately the walls were only a way of putting off the hard work of dealing with the real problems, not a lasting solution themselves. Rome never got around to starting work on those problems before the walls were breached. Today, some politicians want to erect a wall along the US-Mexico border. That kind of brute problem solving totally ignores the underlying issues. It may be that we'll have to build dikes to keep the ocean back. But if it is better to head off ocean rise, surely we should go that route? We should at the least explore all viable options. Making no changes is certainly one of the options, and definitely the cheapest and easiest up front, but likely not the best choice we could make over the long term.
I heard a thing a while ago about coal-burning plants emitting more hard radiation from their smoke stacks than nuclear plants leak in real-life operation
Perhaps you heard this. But you can't just conclude on that alone that coal is bad. It is possible to scrub the output of the smokestacks. Coal ash is even easier to keep contained.
Despite the sarcastic tone, everyone, even you, realizes nuclear power is dangerous. It might seem that the main question is, are the benefits worth the dangers? On balance, the answer seems to be yes, nuclear is worth doing. But hang on. Costs and benefits should be the big question, but sadly there are some other factors to consider. Given human failings, which is the safer power source? Nuclear power can be generated safely, but will it? Such is the pressure to make a profit that operators will cut corners on safety to save a few dollars. We have careful analysis and fairly good consensus on the measures that must be taken to operate a nuclear power plant with reasonable safety, and then that all gets thrown out the window when a plant is built on the coast, with a wall that is not high enough. They gambled that a tsunami of enough magnitude to top the inadequate wall they built would not happen during the plant's lifetime. They were wrong.
It's even worse than that. The owners deliberately fudged the data on tsunamis. They had enough information to know that they needed a higher wall. Instead, they took a fool's course. They leaned hard on the engineers to approve a lower height for the wall. At a plant further south, the chief engineer bravely fought back and refused to authorize a wall he knew would not be adequate. The owners, being greedy fools, complained bitterly about the additional expense, and threatened to fire the engineer for not "cooperating". This kind of unfair pressure is very common in our capitalist systems. Might as well threaten to fire the universe for not being nice enough. Today, the result is that that other plant came through the tsunami intact. But it didn't matter, because Fukushima, where the engineers bowed to the pressure, failed spectacularly and now the entire nuclear power industry is teetering on the edge.
The owners did not trouble to understand the scope of the gamble they were taking on behalf of everyone, and it was their responsiblity to understand. Then, having upped the risk of a nuclear disaster to unacceptable levels that we the public would never have agreed to had we known, they went further. They skimped on the design and maintenance of various backup systems. Diesel powered emergency generators were located below what the water level would be if a tsunami should top the wall. If a tsunami happened, disaster was guaranteed.
I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take
I'm not impressed. Ultimately, it couldn't take the punishment. Almost isn't good enough, not with something as dangerous as nuclear power.
Another bit of deliberate blindness too often paraded here is ignoring alternative power. When compared to only coal, nuclear looks pretty good. But coal is a low standard to beat. How does nuclear power stack up against solar, wind, and water? Not so well.
Look up a few definitions yourself. Like, "externality". Solar power absolutely is worth paying more for, if it saves more in environmental damage than its costs, relative to coal. I think it does. What is Global Warming eventually going to cost us all? Easily trillions, if we have to relocate coastal infrastructure to higher ground.
Even without that, what is the cost to our health from pollution from coal burning? Priceless. I visited London in 1985. One shocker I got was a day after I arrived, when I blew my nose. The white tissue turned black. I hear that London is much cleaner today.
Solar may cost more up front, but is cheaper over the long haul. Solar will continue to improve.
small personal acts of piracy should be penalized in the region of a few thousand dollars TOTAL
Doesn't go far enough. "personal acts" of copying should be 100% legal, and should be encouraged. Being able to share with friends is a huge public good that these property rights trolls have been trying to persuade the public is unethical, immoral, unAmerican, and Bad for Business. Of course it's bad for business! It's bad for the business of rent seeking. They've got many people more than half persuaded that data should be treated the same as physical property. It's a simple way to think of the matter, and for that reason holds great appeal. But it's wrong. The physical is scarce. Data is not. The term "intellectual property" should never have gained such acceptance amoung the public.
Jammie Thomas should never have been dragged into court, never been treated as some kind of big time criminal. Her biggest crime seems to be that she dared to fight back. They escalated the charges and penalties to ludicrous levels, trying to make an example of her. It's similar to what happened to Aaron Swartz. All they really accomplished was making idiots of themselves. Revealed a bit of the complex web of "campaign contributions" and other money machine details and corruption that have entirely too much of a hold on our govenrment. Few around here have much respect for the justice system, not when they get such crucial distinctions between property rights and copyrights so very wrong.
Yes, of course, a union. But unions have problems too. I would like to see a bit more support of fellow workers without dragging a union organization into it. You don't have to join a union to stand up to terrible management.
Unions have a poor reputation, thanks to many of their tactics being destructive, even dangerous, but also thanks to vicious smear campaigns waged by management. The controversy over Firestone tires on Ford Explorers is an example. The problem was traced to bad tires from a particular Firestone plant in Decatur, IL. That plant was unionized, and was bitterly contesting with management. There was speculation that union members had deliberately done shoddy work. If that is true, then that means those union workers are murderers. Another possibility is that it was the cheap non-union labor that did the poor work, because they were inexperienced and poorly trained. Either case can also mean that Firestone should test their product better. Shouldn't be possible for a tire with defects to pass inspection. Another possibility was the design of the tire, specifically that it did not have a "belt edge layer". Blaming it on the worker peons is weak. Management must take ultimate responsibility regardless. Management certainly would make workers into scapegoats if possible. With a problem that lead to deaths, and with the lack of responsibility displayed especially by those whose job is to take responsibility, it is to be expected that everyone is desperately trying to blame it on someone or something else. In any case, the plant was closed. Perhaps closing down the entire operation is the only way to deal with a place that has so poisoned relationships that it has become dysfunctional, and unable to correctly diagnose and resolve problems. Not a good outcome for the union or the company.
How can this problem of sociopathic, overpaid CEOs be fixed?
One way is for employees to show more backbone and solidarity. But how exactly? Everyone else could quit on the spot. That's hardly better than everyone shooting themselves. So, everyone threaten to quit unless the CEO retracts the firing? Don't think that would work either. Everyone could refuse to meet with the CEO, and walk out of the meeting, without quitting. Better, but still not good enough. Probably the CEO would fire everyone for that, and it would stick. Maybe the group could perform a citizens' arrest? But on what grounds? Could the group get hold of the board of directors after the meeting and give them an ultimatum: reinstate Abel, fire the CEO, or we all leave in 2 weeks? Also demand that the board reduce CEO compensation to sane levels. Or maybe everyone could ignore the firing, act as if it didn't happen, with the fired person staying in the meeting and carrying on as normal? The CEO might have a hard time making a firing effective if the HR machinery refuses to cooperate. What if they just keep right on paying the victim's salary, and he continues to come to work?
I've worked under sociopaths. One of my biggest regrets about it is that I unintentionally empowered them merely by being too passive. Now I regard it as not just vital for my own health but everyone's, and therefore a civic duty, to never take bull from sociopaths. In order to do that, you must therefore be prepared at all times for being fired. Never count on being so valuable, even if you really are the life of the company, that a fool CEO won't go temporarily insane and fire you anyway, even though he knows it will destroy the company and cost him his job too. More likely is that he was bluffing.
Sugar gets more evil every day. I've heard that sugar causes or is linked to:
And, I've heard that sugar is acidic, but how and what that means other than that it's somehow bad I don't know. Acidic foods cause faster aging, maybe? Wish I'd known about the link to acne back in high school.
Anyone who is using public key encryption should make their public key(s) available in public places, no need to send it. Could just have it on a web page. That's not quite enough, because there's the problem of authenticity. How is a visitor to the web page with the public key to know it is genuine? Links can be hijacked, web sites hacked, web pages injected, and so on. One answer is to test the key against a digitally signed document that came from the intended recipient of the secure messages, should the communicator possess such a document. More likely is another kind of answer, which is to ask a 3rd party the communicator already trusts. One kind of public place that is specialized in public key encryption is a trusted repository of keys for which everyone has the public key. This 3rd party is sometimes called "Trent". This is basically how https works, and the 3rd parties are organizations such as the somewhat notorious Verisign. Thawte, CAcert, and others also serve as Trents. A person wishing to communicate with a stranger asks Trent for that stranger's public key, or asks if a key really does belong to a particular entity, then can use Trent's public key (because everyone already has Trent's public key) to verify that the message purportedly from Trent is genuine. A problem with this is that one Trent could be a single point of failure. What if Trent is compromised? A way to deal with that is the "web of trust". You don't check the public key of a stranger against just one Trent, you check it with many Trents. If a dozen independent entities all say that some public key really is the public key of the stranger you want to communicate with, then you can be fairly sure you have a good key. This is still not unbeatable, especially if the independent parties get lazy and start leaning on each other too much, so that they are no longer truly independent.
Asking others to send their public keys looks a bit ignorant. Instead, check around for their public keys. That is, Bob doesn't ask Alice for her public key, not over an unprotected channel, instead Bob asks Trent (through the protected channel he already has with Trent) if Trent has a public key for Alice. If no, then might ask Alice directly. Ask if they use public key encryption and have public key(s) and if so, where a suitable key can be obtained. However, the main reason to ask Alice about it is not to get her key, because she probably doesn't have one, it's more snarky, to make Alice aware that maybe she ought to use public key encryption, obtain a key, and get the word out that she has one.
(LUCA = Last Universal Common Ancestor.)
I read a lot of conflicting info about the early Earth. Is the end of the Hadean Eon and beginning of the Archean supposed to be when life began? Or is some other event supposed to divide the two eons, like perhaps the emergence of conditions hospitable to life? I've read that it is 3.8 gya or 4.0 gya. Why not say 3.9+/-0.1 gya? Obviously 4 was picked for being a very round number, but settling on a single number however round seems a bad idea. Makes it sound like we're more certain of those dates than we really are.
Much of our knowledge is sketchy and speculative. No one really says whether the first life forms might be considered bacteria, or archaea. The archaean domain is still new to science. Was only in the late 1970s that archaea were recognized as being different enough to qualify as a separate domain and not part of the domain of bacteria. Then there are fun ideas like the RNA world hypothesis. There's the idea that life could have started and died several times before achieving permanence. Panspermia is another notion.
There is always one alternative: don't watch cable TV.
I really don't understand why so many people put up with Big Media's crap. They bitch and complain about the prices and restrictions-- and pay up anyway. I get the feeling if they had to go through humiliating fraternity initiation rituals to get their TV shows, they'd do it. There are so many other entertaining things to do, such as computer games. Could even visit the great outdoors.
Sorting bugs into "security vulnerabilities" and "other" is prioritizing.
Security people talk as if the start point is security vulnerabilities. It's not. From a functional view, there's not much difference between a bug that breaks crucial functionality, and a DoS attack.
It's amazing how many security vulnerabilities rely on age old bugs such as buffer overruns and dirty memory that are easily fixed if we're willing to live with slightly slower computers. We can program the OS to blank memory whenever it is allocated and for extra safety, whenever it is freed. We can add bounds checking to library routines such as C's infamous gets(). But all that hurts performance. It's a tradeoff we've been unwilling to make. How many people run SELinux? For most, the time it takes to learn and administer an SELinux system is just not worth the scanty benefits. For instance, SELinux does very little to protect you from NSA snooping. Another approach is the microkernel. Why haven't we pursued microkernels? A microkernel architecture might reap ten times the security benefits we could ever hope to net by constantly patching drivers. Gets rid of a whole class of vulnerabilities involving the escalation of flaws in drivers. What we can do cheaply is punt illegal access problems to the OS and hardware, leaning on virtual memory paging to protect programs from each other and No Execute bits to protect a program's code from itself.
The entire approach of zeroing in on vulnerabilities is fire fighting. And saying that we should choose which fires to fight is not particularly insightful or helpful. Better to build systems that don't catch on fire so easily.
The current system is a bigger clusterf**k than anything you're imagining.
which they turn around and fund their R&D with.
They'd like you to believe that. And it seems that you do. Sure, some do some R&D. But all use a lot of that money for fat bonuses for their execs, and other dubious purposes such as advertising. I have not heard of insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield doing any research at all. Those who do, don't do much basic R&D. Instead they lean on publicly funded institutions of higher education for that. They get a free ride there. What good is the heavy advertising they do for name brand drugs? Why are these ads aimed at patients? Most patients are not medical professionals. Then, what of the money they spend on "intellectual property" to "protect" their precious drugs? Some of the monies that should be spent on our health goes towards lobbyists whose jobs are to persuade or bribe government to shore up monopolies and destroy competition. And the whole thing is aided and abetted by people like you who blindly believe in Big Pharma and friends.
Formerly free society? You talk like our current health care system is some paragon of competitive efficiency. It's not. It's full of fraud and waste. It's dirty pool. Price controls? There's an excellent method of price control: Competition. Too bad there isn't much competition, not that there's scope for it in all areas. But where there could be competition, there isn't. A person who needs emergency medical treatment obviously has no time or opportunity to comparison shop. Such people are the perfect captive consumers who routinely get bilked. It is no coincidence that our care is geared towards emergencies and not prevention. Obamacare has a lot of flaws, not least thanks to Republican attempts to deliberately screw it up. But it's a start. The medical community has only themselves to blame for bringing this upon them. They've had decades to demonstrate the effectiveness of the current system. Instead, they've abused their position of authority, their power, to bleed us all.
pretty much everyone I've ever met sells out when it comes to making an actual personal sacrifice for the sake of doing what's right
Too right! But understand, management is to blame for most of that. They deliberately put people in untenable situations, and sometimes it can be for such stupidly petty crap. If you have any kind of reputation as a star hacker, or an advanced degree or some such, they may demand that you put your personal stamp of approval on some equipment, software, or project that is absolute junk. They don't put it so nakedly of course, they will instead tell you to examine the material, and mention that it would be good that it be approved, perhaps dropping hints of what might happen if you were to reject it. They want it approved, for political reasons, never mind that it doesn't work. They want you to help grease the gravy train they're setting up for friends back home in their congress person's district. And if they're so unprincipled that they'd do that, they sure as heck won't scruple to lean hard on you. Also, they want results, meaning, positive results, not negative results, so they can look good too. If you won't play along but you do like to keep your head down and stay quiet, they may just put the words they want into your mouth!
I don't have much respect for 'play it safe' cowards either.
Work for these guys, and you may eventually face that hard choice that looks like a) play along, and you get to keep your job, or b) take a stand, and kiss your job and your career bye-bye. They want you to sweat over the possibility that you won't just lose your job, but that you will end up with such a black mark on your record that you will never be able to find another job in your field. It can be much worse even than that. How'd you like to be facing a long prison sentence? Thanks to them being backed by the force of the state, that's no idle threat. Or, how about life as a fugitive, seeking asylum from other nations, as Snowden has had to do? You'd like to think you would do the right thing and call those sort of jerks on their threats, but until you've really faced that situation, faced that kind of fear, you can't know what it's like and what you'd really do. And you may not have just yourself to think about. What if you have children who will suffer if you end up unemployed for a long time? Now what do you do? Cowardly, you say? Compared to all that, playing along with some little petty nothing begins to look extremely pragmatic. But that path also has its perils. Play along, and if another groups calls them on their boondoggle, and they aren't able to justify it, they may call on you to do so. What do you do then? Lie, and hope it works? Fess up? But you don't have to face an inquisition to lose big in this. Before things ever reach that point, it is likely way too late. Just the fact that your name is associated with junk is enough to ruin your reputation. No matter what you do, it won't be a good outcome for you.
Once your reputation is "spent", you are of no more value to them, and they will discard you like a used piece of toilet paper. This is what happens to many contractors. I've seen some pretty high turnover in defense contracting.
Persistence didn't help alchemists, builders of perpetual motion machines, proponents of Digital Restrictions Management, or anyone else trying to do the impossible.
That kind of failure is due to a lack of understanding, not necessarily a lack of skills.
You joke, but the military is very quick and free to trot that idea out. "He did it because he is gay" as if being gay makes a person more likely to leak information, I mean, commit treason. Some of Bradley Manning's posts I ran across would seem to show he might indeed be gay. Then it occured to me those posts might be fakes.
The 1989 gun turret explosion on the USS Iowa was a classic. The navy put out this ridiculous hypothesis that Clayton Hartwig, a sailor who died in the disaster, was gay and so sexually frustrated that he was suicidal and deliberately caused the explosion. Under pressure, the navy dropped the gay part but clung on to the idea Hartwig was suicidal and did it on purpose. As the disaster was investigated further, it became even more painfully obvious that the navy was doing a cover up. The real reason was that they were using experimental mixings of explosives that if not rammed slowly could prematurely detonate. Strangest was that the officer the navy picked to lead the investigation was the same guy who made the experimental mix.
And remember, some of the most radical social conservatives advanced this absurd notion that 9/11 happened because America is too tolerant of homosexuality. Just the other day I stopped in at my insurance agent's office and heard Limbaugh on their radio, ranting about the possibility that Trayvon Martin might have been gay and tried to sexually assault Zimmerman. I don't expect any better of those retards, but we should have smarter military leaders than that. No General Boykins! May be hard to do. I suppose a military career is attractive to simpletons who think force is a good answer to most problems.
One thing file system directory trees have shown me is that hierarchy is lousy for categorizing. Convenient for file systems, bad for people. The example I like to use is 2 applications organized into binary and data files. Should the files be put in these directories: /app1/bin, /app1/data, /app2/bin, /app2/data ? Or in these directories: /bin/app1, /bin/app2, /data/app1, /data/app2 ? Or should we use some kind of directory linking, so we can sort of have it both ways? This leads to a question about OOP. If hierarchical organizations are bad for files, maybe they're also bad for classes?
Whatever else tags do, they dispense with hierarchy. A file system that truly did away with the hierarchical directory structure and used tags would be interesting. The problem in the above example would vanish, with the files in question merely being tagged as app1 or app2, and as bin or data. Ask for a directory listing of all files tagged as bin, and get all the files tagged as app1 and bin, and app2 and bin. Strips the ordering out of the problem, leaving categorization, which is still a tough problem.
I ran into this tagging problem when thinking about an app to sort images. The idea was to compare 2 images, and come up with a percentage value of how similar they were to each other, with 100% being identical, and 0% being totally different. But, on what criteria should images be compared? I saw that it was much too simplistic to boil down a comparison of such intricate data to just one number.
It's pretty clear that, in aggregate, doctors aren't fleecing the system
I disagree. First, doctors are horrible at finance. Few trouble to manage their own money effectively. It's common for a doctor to be pulling down 6 figure pay, and yet be broke because he blows all his money on expensive cars, big houses, and trophy wives. They are even worse with their patients' money, going through that like the proverbial drunken sailor. They'll happily order unnecessary $2000 scans, "just in case", and to cover their asses and to get some use out of the really expensive equipment the practice should not have bought in the first place. They prescribe expensive brand name medication when a generic is available, and oft times is superior. An example is prescribing Crestor, instead of simvastatin or lovastatin. Even a generic may be the wrong approach, if patients have not tried other measures first, such as improving their diets and exercising. I realize there is a great deal of pressure on doctors from both Big Pharma and patients. We're really sold on the idea of magic pills that fix all our medical problems. Doesn't help that Big Pharma works the public over with all these ads. "Ask your doctor about ..." But rather than go with the flow, especially since it's more profitable, doctors have a duty to push back.
My own personal experience with this was thanks to an automobile accident. Had my parents with me, and they were both injured. My mother finished her hospitalization in a private place, where she had been sent for rehab. On the day they released her, they shoved a wheelchair at us, and shoved a form under her nose for her to sign. The form said that she promised to pay for the wheelchair herself should her insurance refuse. She didn't need the wheelchair, but at that time we were still just a little too credulous and inexperienced with medical profiteering. I protested that we could get a wheelchair from a friend who no longer needed his, but was ignored. I asked how much their wheelchair cost, and was told not to worry about it because insurance would cover it! I pointed out that the form they were insisting she sign suggested that there was a possibility insurance would not cover it, and so I ought to know what it cost. They replied that they didn't know but it was sure to be reasonable. Uh huh. Turned out that damned wheelchair cost $825, 4 to 6 times what it should have cost. That was hardly the only instance of profiteering.
You should read Bitter Pill (paywalled), and How Dentists Rip Us Off (pdf) if you are truly ignorant of the reckless and cavalier attitude the medical community has towards costs.
You forget the atmosphere. Suppose you give the payload exactly the right amount of velocity that the far side of the ellipse just grazes the atmosphere at a very shallow angle. Even though the ellipse must intersect the launch point, the payload won't. It will skip off the atmosphere like a stone skipping off of water. A tiny bit of acceleration could make the resulting trajectory into a stable orbit.
You could also use the moon's gravity, if you can reach that far. A payload that gets close enough to the moon could get enough of a gravity boost to stay in Earth orbit. That's not nearly as feasible as using the atmosphere, because the moon is much too far away to do that easily.
I was thinking the same thing but on a much smaller scale. Would this work for a new kind of rifle? The bullets could be just solid bits of material, shaped like golf balls, no need for gunpowder. Or perhaps the bullets could be disc shaped.
Cutting the funding is only treating the symptom. The problem is regulatory capture, cronyism, and other forms of corruption. Seems this happens over and over. Surprisingly, I don't think inefficiency is all that bad, contrary to reputation. It's corruption. How did 34 million dollars end up being spent to build a base in Afghanistan that will never be used? Government hands out sweetheart deals for various services, to contractors who just happen to be friends or relatives of government officials. They're supposed to put all this up for bids, but they're pretty good at stacking the deck, with techniques such as burying announcements deep in the local paper so they can say they made a public announcement, and fishing for reasons to disqualify a competitor. It's like winning a baseball game by not telling the other team when and where to go so that they forfeit because they didn't show. And if the team does figure out where to go in time, and shows up, then they get disqualified because their uniforms don't conform to some ISO standard, or their mode of transport doesn't conform to safety regulations, or they don't have required paperwork with them, etc. All the easier to pull this off if the press is also in their pockets.
One of the more recent scams has been the way banks treat small governments. Detroit serves as the perfect excuse why underwriting municipal bonds is risky, and therefore the interest rate should be higher. Then cities put these finance packages up for bid, trying to get the lowest rate of interest that they can, but big banks have colluded to make certain cities don't get competitive offers. Even a government that is run honestly has a hard time beating that. And you think cutting funding will solve problems of that sort?
You think that is flamebait? No one is going to bother donating for some nails to stick you on a cross, not for that feeble "cutesy" criticism. And, The Onion? Not even close. Try this:
XKCD is like the fax machine.
Fax: Let's use these cool new digital communication devices to recreate paper documents, on paper, only with really crappy low resolution pictures of the text. Unlike emails, they'll have legal force because they're printed on paper, like sales slips! A pity that legal force doesn't extend to paper currency, or people could pay off their student loans by faxing $100 bills to the banks.
XKCD: Let's use the comic strip, a holdover from an antiquated medium that's been going stale like decade old peanuts, as a vehicle for modern comedy. We'll draw everything in rows of boxes, just like traditional comic strips, but with stick figures because you have to put some kind of drawing in those boxes, in case some dying newspaper gets desperate enough to try adding something really radical to freshen up their stodgy Sunday comics section, and get Garfield off the first page. Or in case they need some filler should Doonesbury offend the prudes and moralists again and they have to yank it for a month.
Our fellow citizens take an awful lot lying down. I wish they wouldn't. Why are Too Big To Fail banks still in business in one piece, and not broken up? The social conservatives are especially aggravating. Get all worked up over abortion, and even totally fake issues like whether global warming is just a big hoax to get more public funding for climate scientists, and "teach the controversy" over Creationism and Evolution, while failing to see any difference between science and propaganda, and letting these white collar thieves walk.
Education is thought to be crucial for a democracy to function. If these US citizens aren't just plain stupid, they certainly are lacking a good education. To fall for idiotic notions such as the proposal to secure the US-Mexico border with 300,000 guards, after the recent lesson we had in Iraq over the limits of brute, military force... well, we'll never educate everyone well enough to see through such attempts at manipulation, but a few more could be enough to tip the US into taking much better directions.
They used to jab the tip of your finger. That's just about the most sensitive, painful place they could choose to get a blood sample. Fingertips have the greatest concentration of nerves. Being medical professionals, they of all people should know that. So why couldn't they prick some other spot, like the forearm? It really seemed like they were at best indifferent to causing their patients unnecessary pain. At worst, I wondered if some of them were sadists.
Some years ago, a change in this procedure came along. Now, they prick the side of the finger, not the tip. Much, much less painful.
Names. Give us some names. I'd like to know who are these bureaucrats who ask for passwords? Then, I'd like to see them sweat over the possibility they might be censured, might lose their jobs.
Let them experience how thrilling it is to have their dark glasses taken away, feel what it's like not to be faceless anymore. Then, maybe they'd appreciate privacy a little more.