Personally, I suspect that people should start voting against legislators who vote for bills that are longer than 100 pages. Any bill longer than this should be more than one bill. The only reason to make a bill as long as most of the ones that Congress has been voting on lately is to hide stuff.
Speaking from my experience as a permanent non-partisan staffer for a state legislature,
which required that I spend a lot of time with both
state and federal bills, statutes and legislative processes,
some remarks:
Some of the bulk is in the nature of bills.
A bill may state that "Section 201, subsection 1, is amended to read,"
followed by the entire 20 pages of subsection 1 with
the intended modifications indicated.
The bulk of the actual changes may be small —
a sentence removed here, three words added there —
but clarity and accuracy require including the current statute
as well as the changes.
Some of the bulk is a consequence of the size and complexity of current statute.
I'm a BIG fan of simplifying government,
but what is, is.
What starts out as a modest change in policy
becomes enormous in terms of the bill bulk simply because
it may touch many other parts of statute.
That is, repeat the previous point 20 or 80 times.
Many legislators are as unhappy as you are as they watch a bill
grow to enormous size right before their eyes
as staff adds the pieces necessary to
keep the overall body of statute consistent.
Philosophically,
the US Constitution makes Congress the primary power
within the federal government
(the executive branch is charged with "executing" policies set by Congress).
There are limits to how much of the policy setting
Congress can delegate
(probably the most far-reaching Supreme Court decisions ever made
were the ones late in the 19th century when
the Court ruled that Congress could delegate at least some policy details —
rule writing —
to executive agencies).
Sometimes Congress is simply exercising its prerogative to write
a detailed design document instead of a high-level functional spec.
In many cases,
the detailed design is appropriate.
Consider the case where statute allows a factory polluting a river
to be shut down.
Under exactly which conditions can this be done?
What pollutants count?
Which don't?
At what levels?
What procedure must the agency follow to implement the shut down?
Are there exceptions, say, in the interest of national security?
Is there an appeals process?
If so,
what documentation must be submitted and on what schedule?
Absent the detailed Congressional design,
the agency and/or the courts are going to make it all up as they go along.
Splitting a bill into multiple smaller parts is dangerous,
in the sense that some parts may pass and others fail.
The result can be statute that is incomplete or even worse, contradictory.
Futurists in general grossly underestimated the value that people put on mobility.
Even today's cell phones' voice quality sucks compared to
the landline network of the 1960s.
Switched full-duplex 10Base-T often provides greater and more consistent throughput than the 802.11 wireless protocols with higher raw bitrates.
Moreso for 100Base-T.
MP3 audio quality is much worse than CDs,
but you stuff hours of MP3 music into your pocket and walk away with it.
3G networks have, as you suggest, issues.
For a long time, a laptop computer meant sacrificing a lot
in terms of keyboard and display quality.
But as it turns out,
people will give up a lot of quality in exchange for mobility.
Indeed,
"liberal" means something quite different in US and European politics.
On the US left-right scale,
most European "conservative" parties are actually
somewhere to the left of our Democrats.
The role of religion in US politics rises and falls.
Mark Twain expressed concerns about
what he saw as the intrusion of religious fundamentalists
into politics in his day,
and the potential threat of establishing a theist state.
Seems there are others who feel it's more than the 4.2 million gallon claim.
Steven Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University used a computer analysis (particle image velocimetry) yielding a rate of 700,000 barrels (29,000,000 US gal) per day
Or a tanker every other day... ah well. Either way, it's an evironmental disaster with no real solution yet in planning.
During initial testing of the well, it was found that the produced fluid
contains some 3,000 cubic feet of natural gas
(at standard temperature and pressure,
the gas is obviously highly compressed in the reservoir).
Some analysts assert that when the expansion of the gas associated with
the pressure drop as the fluid leaves the pipe is accounted for,
the particle velocities are consistent with 5,000 bbl/day.
The cynic in me wants
to point out that while BP has incentives to underestimate the flow,
outsiders doing independent estimates have incentives to overestimate it.
As you say,
either way,
this is not an estimate that anyone wants to be making.
The "leak" is spewing over 210 million gallons a day...
At 42 gallons/barrel, that would be 5 million barrels per day.
TTBOMK, no oil well in history has ever come within an order of magnitude of that sort of flow rate.
BP's estimate is 5,000 bbl/day,
often converted to 210,000 gal/day by the media.
Even the nightmarish estimates some academics are putting out are on the order of 80,000 bbl/day, or 3.4 million gallons/day.
You appear to be off by a factor of anywhere from 60 to 1,000.
Using BP's estimate of the flow is rate,
and your estimate of tanker capacity,
it's about one tanker every 300 days.
It's probably challenging enough to keep half a dozen surface ships/rigs on-site and a bunch of ROVs from bumping or tangling with each other.
Indeed.
According to reports,
the first insertion of the siphon pipe was successful, but the siphon was subsequently knocked loose when
two of the ROVs collided with each other, then with the siphon.
Always within limits. You have the right to do lots of things with your car, but using it as a bludgeon to strike people isn't one of those things.
Apple has rights too. To sell a closed system if they want -- and it's not like they didn't warn you. More importantly, to impose essentially arbitrary restrictions, like any other retailer, on the goods they sell in the App Store. The restrictions don't make you happy; they don't make a bunch of developers happy; but it's going to be a heck of a stretch, legally, to win a court case that asserts that developers' rights take precedent over the retailer's rights.
At the state level, it thins out a bit; 15% overall, with a significantly stronger showing in the state Senates (see the National Conference of State Legislatures website for more detailed details, if you care for 'em).
At least in my state, every bill or amendment that is introduced must be drafted, or at least reviewed, by the non-partisan legislative legal staff. The people on that staff may not have been practicing attorneys, but they have been through law school, and when they join the staff, they receive additional training specific to how language has been interpreted in our state courts.
A bigger problem is unanticipated interactions. The current state statutes run to several thousand pages, chock full of various sorts of linkages (programmers are not the only ones who can do spaghetti code). Every session there are a number of bills introduced whose purpose is to clean up inconsistencies introduced in previous years.
I suspect that plants do not use 100% of available energy reaching the surface of the Earth.
Correct.
Crop plants typically convert 1-2% of the sunlight striking them to biomass.
Under optimal conditions,
some varieties of sugarcane can convert up to 8%.
Its not like we'll be coating the surface of the Earth with solar panels within the next 100 years.
Nor need to.
The usual rough figure for PV solar to provide for current US electricity consumption
is about 10,000 square miles of Southwestern desert --
a square 100 miles on a side.
Of course,
you'd also need enormous changes in the national transmission grid,
and you'd have to find places to store a bunch of the daytime production
for use at night
(lots of pumped hydro storage located around the country might work for that).
I do agree, however, with your concerns about the effect of wide adoption of solar energy on weather patterns.
I suspect that we can do almost anything we want
to a 100-mile square of desert
with little or no change on climate or weather
except in that immediate area.
As much as I enjoy the Hubble pictures,
I always try to keep in mind that for most of them,
there is no place that you could go and see the same image
with your naked eye.
False colors and
extensions into the infrared portions of the spectrum
create images that are both lovely and scientifically valuable;
but it's not what you would see if you were positioned
to look without equipment.
Except for the odd moment here and there, good fighter pilots are looking at/for things in lots of places other than where they want the plane to go. There would seem to be few real-world situations where driving requires such a single-minded focus, with no checking to the sides (or up and down in a plane). Baja racer, perhaps? And then there's always the question of throttle and braking...
In 25 years,
with experience being both the developer who had seating arrangements dictated,
and the manager of a group who had to dictate seating,
I have never heard a developer complain over the long haul
that individual offices on the same short hall
were causing too little collaboration and cooperation
between the people on the team.
OTOH, there were numerous complaints that being jammed all together
created large impediments to ever finding a quiet time without interruptions
to think through a complex problem.
Ask your experienced people which they prefer;
someone who is six months out of school is not qualified to have an opinion.
I spent almost 25 years analyzing and designing telephone and data networks and services.
And never got comfortable talking on the telephone.
Does that count?
Oddly enough, I interpret such a move on Apple's part as a strategic one to insure that ARM has the resources to develop the designs that keep ARM on top in its market, and possibly to expand in new directions. Currently, neither Intel nor AMD have an x86 chip that competes well with ARM in low-power devices, which puts a serious crimp in MS's efforts in that market. You have to believe that at some point, MS will fund either Intel or AMD to develop a real competitor to ARM, seeing that as less expensive than trying to support their main software lines on two different hardware architectures. More ARM design wins don't hurt Apple; they hurt MS.
...you can hold it much closer to you face, making good sight unnecesary.
One of the first things to go is the ability to focus at close-in distances.
Watch your elders hold magazines and newspapers at arms-length,
trying to get the page far enough away that they can focus on it.
I'm not that bad yet,
but it is irritating to get my head behind the equipment
where the SN is stamped,
only to find that I can't read the numbers because they're too close for me to focus.
The only legs Adobe may have to stand on is if they were lead to believe that their platform was to be accepted (written contract or verbal) and then at the 11th hour to be shafted? Well then maybe they have a case.
And a fairly limited case, at that.
Development tools for the iPhone OS probably don't generate large profits.
The costs to add iPhone capabilities to the Flash IDE
were probably rather modest.
Loss of good will from developers who get caught in the middle of this
is hard to quantify.
So even if Adobe prevails,
the court is likely to decide that the damages done to Adobe
are quite modest.
And while IANAL,
it seems unlikely to me that the court would do more than
require Apple to reimburse Adobe;
I certainly don't see the court forcing Apple to retract this restriction on developers.
Care to cite statute or case law to support this very broad statement? There are a number of closed platforms that don't run third-party software: cable and satellite television boxes and luxury automobiles are two easy examples. And there are LOTS of companies out there that would dearly love to be able to write apps for cable set top boxes, or for Cadillac and Lexus automobiles. Note also that Apple hasn't told anyone that they can't write apps for the platform; they said that everyone would have to use the approved development tools to do so. There are something over 100,000 apps already built with those tools, strongly suggesting that the restriction won't limit people.
Granted, it seems like a silly restriction to me. Although one could make a number of arguments for why it is not unreasonable. For example, given the very limited memory management capabilities of the underlying OS, third-party development tools that effectively link in static copies of large libraries could result in apps that create a number of problems for the overall user experience.
What if the market is defined as "Phones with one button and a touch screen interface"?
Assuming Adobe's basis for suing is that Apple is violating the US antitrust laws, then Adobe will be obligated to make a compelling argument that their definition of the market is reasonable.
Recall that when the federal government took MS to court in the 1990s for antitrust violations, there was considerable surprise when the judge ruled that "desktop computer operating systems" was a market.
The Justice Department spent a LOT of time and effort building its case that such a definition was indeed broad enough to be considered a market.
I think Adobe's lawyers are smart enough to tell them that the chances of a judge accepting "Phones with one button and a touch screen interface" are slim to none.
With some risk that the judge would entertain a motion by Apple
that it was a frivolous lawsuit and Adobe should be punished.
I suspect that Adobe will be suing for some sort of breach of contract.
Others have pointed out that Apple has previously allowed apps built with a pre-release version of the Adobe development tool.
Much easier to argue that Apple's allowing those apps led Adobe to believe such apps were acceptable, and that by cutting them off now, Apple has damaged Adobe (a) financially for the costs of finishing "productizing" the tool and (b) in general for the loss of good will from developers.
The Earth is already covered in efficient origami solar panels, its just that regular people call them plants.
Origami, yes, but not efficient. Plants are typically 3-6% efficient in capturing sunlight and converting to biomass. When you consider that the biomass will have to be dried and then converted to electricity by some means (burned to power a steam generator? run through a direct carbon fuel cell?), the efficiency is much worse than even those figures. A 10% efficient PV panel converting 10% of the sunlight directly to electricity is enormously more efficient than plants.
If you look at the federal budget from 1965 on, what we decided to do was provide health care for the elderly and the poor.
And borrowed a whole sh*t-pile of money, so that the interest payments almost doubled as a share of GDP.
As there appears to be a political limit on federal tax revenue of about 20% of GDP, and health care costs are increasing much faster than the economy as a whole, health care is crowding things out.
And if you think health-care costs are a bad for the federal budget, Medicaid is a slow-motion budget nightmare for the states.
It is in the process of crowding out public higher education; plan on graduating fewer aerospace engineers.
As I see it (speaking as a former state legislative budget analyst), there are two choices if you want a robust space program:
Take the libertarian position on health care: if you can't afford it on your own, you don't get it.
Adopt some version of single-payer health care financing, like every other industrialized country. Some have implemented the equivalent of single-payer through heavy regulation of the health care and insurance industries.
Note that the recently passed health care reform act isn't anywhere close to option (2) in that list.
Definitely a was, since it has been out of production for almost 20 years now. And unlikely to be put back into production: the Russians chose the Angara design over the Energia for their new heavy lifter. Although the engine and its derivatives are still in production and use in other vehicles.
Doubt it. I don't think Microsoft would give up if there was competition to drive out.
The difficulty of driving out the competition probably matters also.
I wonder how many of the non-Windows Itanium systems are running application software
for which there is no drop-in replacement available for Windows?
So MS would have to convince the owners that
not only is Windows a better/cheaper/whatever OS,
but enough so that it's worth replacing application software as well.
Obviously some people like it. They demonstrate that by giving up some of their money in order to obtain it.
Given that this discussion is happening today, I might have phrased that first sentence as "Obviously some people think they are going to like it." Two weeks from now there will be people who gave up some money who love it, and some people who gave up some money and hate it. I expect the dividing line to be based on its iPod-ness: there will be those who say, "Now this is what the iPod was supposed to be," and there will be those who say, "But it's only an iPod with a big screen."
I feel quite safe in saying that not everyone laying out their money today is going to be happy with their purchase.
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Speaking from my experience as a permanent non-partisan staffer for a state legislature, which required that I spend a lot of time with both state and federal bills, statutes and legislative processes, some remarks:
Futurists in general grossly underestimated the value that people put on mobility. Even today's cell phones' voice quality sucks compared to the landline network of the 1960s. Switched full-duplex 10Base-T often provides greater and more consistent throughput than the 802.11 wireless protocols with higher raw bitrates. Moreso for 100Base-T. MP3 audio quality is much worse than CDs, but you stuff hours of MP3 music into your pocket and walk away with it. 3G networks have, as you suggest, issues. For a long time, a laptop computer meant sacrificing a lot in terms of keyboard and display quality.
But as it turns out, people will give up a lot of quality in exchange for mobility.
Indeed, "liberal" means something quite different in US and European politics. On the US left-right scale, most European "conservative" parties are actually somewhere to the left of our Democrats.
The role of religion in US politics rises and falls. Mark Twain expressed concerns about what he saw as the intrusion of religious fundamentalists into politics in his day, and the potential threat of establishing a theist state.
During initial testing of the well, it was found that the produced fluid contains some 3,000 cubic feet of natural gas (at standard temperature and pressure, the gas is obviously highly compressed in the reservoir). Some analysts assert that when the expansion of the gas associated with the pressure drop as the fluid leaves the pipe is accounted for, the particle velocities are consistent with 5,000 bbl/day. The cynic in me wants to point out that while BP has incentives to underestimate the flow, outsiders doing independent estimates have incentives to overestimate it.
As you say, either way, this is not an estimate that anyone wants to be making.
At 42 gallons/barrel, that would be 5 million barrels per day. TTBOMK, no oil well in history has ever come within an order of magnitude of that sort of flow rate. BP's estimate is 5,000 bbl/day, often converted to 210,000 gal/day by the media. Even the nightmarish estimates some academics are putting out are on the order of 80,000 bbl/day, or 3.4 million gallons/day. You appear to be off by a factor of anywhere from 60 to 1,000. Using BP's estimate of the flow is rate, and your estimate of tanker capacity, it's about one tanker every 300 days.
Indeed. According to reports, the first insertion of the siphon pipe was successful, but the siphon was subsequently knocked loose when two of the ROVs collided with each other, then with the siphon.
Always within limits. You have the right to do lots of things with your car, but using it as a bludgeon to strike people isn't one of those things.
Apple has rights too. To sell a closed system if they want -- and it's not like they didn't warn you. More importantly, to impose essentially arbitrary restrictions, like any other retailer, on the goods they sell in the App Store. The restrictions don't make you happy; they don't make a bunch of developers happy; but it's going to be a heck of a stretch, legally, to win a court case that asserts that developers' rights take precedent over the retailer's rights.
At least in my state, every bill or amendment that is introduced must be drafted, or at least reviewed, by the non-partisan legislative legal staff. The people on that staff may not have been practicing attorneys, but they have been through law school, and when they join the staff, they receive additional training specific to how language has been interpreted in our state courts.
A bigger problem is unanticipated interactions. The current state statutes run to several thousand pages, chock full of various sorts of linkages (programmers are not the only ones who can do spaghetti code). Every session there are a number of bills introduced whose purpose is to clean up inconsistencies introduced in previous years.
When you go read the material at the NIF web site, there seem to be a lot of problems that haven't got past the "conceptual design" stage:
In some ways, it seems like ignition is one of the more minor problems they have to solve.
Correct. Crop plants typically convert 1-2% of the sunlight striking them to biomass. Under optimal conditions, some varieties of sugarcane can convert up to 8%.
Nor need to. The usual rough figure for PV solar to provide for current US electricity consumption is about 10,000 square miles of Southwestern desert -- a square 100 miles on a side. Of course, you'd also need enormous changes in the national transmission grid, and you'd have to find places to store a bunch of the daytime production for use at night (lots of pumped hydro storage located around the country might work for that).
I suspect that we can do almost anything we want to a 100-mile square of desert with little or no change on climate or weather except in that immediate area.
As much as I enjoy the Hubble pictures, I always try to keep in mind that for most of them, there is no place that you could go and see the same image with your naked eye. False colors and extensions into the infrared portions of the spectrum create images that are both lovely and scientifically valuable; but it's not what you would see if you were positioned to look without equipment.
Except for the odd moment here and there, good fighter pilots are looking at/for things in lots of places other than where they want the plane to go. There would seem to be few real-world situations where driving requires such a single-minded focus, with no checking to the sides (or up and down in a plane). Baja racer, perhaps? And then there's always the question of throttle and braking...
In 25 years, with experience being both the developer who had seating arrangements dictated, and the manager of a group who had to dictate seating, I have never heard a developer complain over the long haul that individual offices on the same short hall were causing too little collaboration and cooperation between the people on the team. OTOH, there were numerous complaints that being jammed all together created large impediments to ever finding a quiet time without interruptions to think through a complex problem.
Ask your experienced people which they prefer; someone who is six months out of school is not qualified to have an opinion.
I spent almost 25 years analyzing and designing telephone and data networks and services. And never got comfortable talking on the telephone. Does that count?
Oddly enough, I interpret such a move on Apple's part as a strategic one to insure that ARM has the resources to develop the designs that keep ARM on top in its market, and possibly to expand in new directions. Currently, neither Intel nor AMD have an x86 chip that competes well with ARM in low-power devices, which puts a serious crimp in MS's efforts in that market. You have to believe that at some point, MS will fund either Intel or AMD to develop a real competitor to ARM, seeing that as less expensive than trying to support their main software lines on two different hardware architectures. More ARM design wins don't hurt Apple; they hurt MS.
One of the first things to go is the ability to focus at close-in distances. Watch your elders hold magazines and newspapers at arms-length, trying to get the page far enough away that they can focus on it. I'm not that bad yet, but it is irritating to get my head behind the equipment where the SN is stamped, only to find that I can't read the numbers because they're too close for me to focus.
And a fairly limited case, at that. Development tools for the iPhone OS probably don't generate large profits. The costs to add iPhone capabilities to the Flash IDE were probably rather modest. Loss of good will from developers who get caught in the middle of this is hard to quantify. So even if Adobe prevails, the court is likely to decide that the damages done to Adobe are quite modest. And while IANAL, it seems unlikely to me that the court would do more than require Apple to reimburse Adobe; I certainly don't see the court forcing Apple to retract this restriction on developers.
Care to cite statute or case law to support this very broad statement? There are a number of closed platforms that don't run third-party software: cable and satellite television boxes and luxury automobiles are two easy examples. And there are LOTS of companies out there that would dearly love to be able to write apps for cable set top boxes, or for Cadillac and Lexus automobiles. Note also that Apple hasn't told anyone that they can't write apps for the platform; they said that everyone would have to use the approved development tools to do so. There are something over 100,000 apps already built with those tools, strongly suggesting that the restriction won't limit people.
Granted, it seems like a silly restriction to me. Although one could make a number of arguments for why it is not unreasonable. For example, given the very limited memory management capabilities of the underlying OS, third-party development tools that effectively link in static copies of large libraries could result in apps that create a number of problems for the overall user experience.
Assuming Adobe's basis for suing is that Apple is violating the US antitrust laws, then Adobe will be obligated to make a compelling argument that their definition of the market is reasonable. Recall that when the federal government took MS to court in the 1990s for antitrust violations, there was considerable surprise when the judge ruled that "desktop computer operating systems" was a market. The Justice Department spent a LOT of time and effort building its case that such a definition was indeed broad enough to be considered a market. I think Adobe's lawyers are smart enough to tell them that the chances of a judge accepting "Phones with one button and a touch screen interface" are slim to none. With some risk that the judge would entertain a motion by Apple that it was a frivolous lawsuit and Adobe should be punished.
I suspect that Adobe will be suing for some sort of breach of contract. Others have pointed out that Apple has previously allowed apps built with a pre-release version of the Adobe development tool. Much easier to argue that Apple's allowing those apps led Adobe to believe such apps were acceptable, and that by cutting them off now, Apple has damaged Adobe (a) financially for the costs of finishing "productizing" the tool and (b) in general for the loss of good will from developers.
Given that they both do business in the EU, yes. Of course, any decisions by the EU court system are only binding in the EU.
Origami, yes, but not efficient. Plants are typically 3-6% efficient in capturing sunlight and converting to biomass. When you consider that the biomass will have to be dried and then converted to electricity by some means (burned to power a steam generator? run through a direct carbon fuel cell?), the efficiency is much worse than even those figures. A 10% efficient PV panel converting 10% of the sunlight directly to electricity is enormously more efficient than plants.
If you look at the federal budget from 1965 on, what we decided to do was provide health care for the elderly and the poor. And borrowed a whole sh*t-pile of money, so that the interest payments almost doubled as a share of GDP. As there appears to be a political limit on federal tax revenue of about 20% of GDP, and health care costs are increasing much faster than the economy as a whole, health care is crowding things out.
And if you think health-care costs are a bad for the federal budget, Medicaid is a slow-motion budget nightmare for the states. It is in the process of crowding out public higher education; plan on graduating fewer aerospace engineers.
As I see it (speaking as a former state legislative budget analyst), there are two choices if you want a robust space program:
Note that the recently passed health care reform act isn't anywhere close to option (2) in that list.
Definitely a was, since it has been out of production for almost 20 years now. And unlikely to be put back into production: the Russians chose the Angara design over the Energia for their new heavy lifter. Although the engine and its derivatives are still in production and use in other vehicles.
The difficulty of driving out the competition probably matters also. I wonder how many of the non-Windows Itanium systems are running application software for which there is no drop-in replacement available for Windows? So MS would have to convince the owners that not only is Windows a better/cheaper/whatever OS, but enough so that it's worth replacing application software as well.
Given that this discussion is happening today, I might have phrased that first sentence as "Obviously some people think they are going to like it." Two weeks from now there will be people who gave up some money who love it, and some people who gave up some money and hate it. I expect the dividing line to be based on its iPod-ness: there will be those who say, "Now this is what the iPod was supposed to be," and there will be those who say, "But it's only an iPod with a big screen."
I feel quite safe in saying that not everyone laying out their money today is going to be happy with their purchase.