I'm not a fan of Cruz, but he was the only one to show any concern that this appointee might use his power for political purposes.
FFS, the "political purposes" Cruz was worried about is MORE disclosures of campaign funding sources. He was especially worried about it because the Tea Party groups that helped him are largely funded by a few sugar daddies that want to stay anonymous.
Cruz held this nomination up in order to maintain the status quo, instead of allowing increased transparency in the public interest.
Total US foreign aid is under 1% of the federal budget, if you remove the military aid that's largely corporate welfare it's quite literally a rounding error in the scope of the federal budget.
Uhh.. a lot of US foreign aid is also corporate welfare. We give them money, they hire American contractors who buy American products.
Some of that infrastructure aid trickles down in the form of local wages, but the vast majority of it gets recycled back into American pockets.
Biomass has zero net CO2 output. The plants that provide the biomass suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, then you burn it to put the same CO2 back into the atmosphere...
There is a non-zero amount of energy required to get fossil and renewable fuels to a point where they can be turned into power. Biomass requires less energy than fossil fuels, but it's also less energy dense, which means you need to harvest more. Ultimately, biomass hasn't become a viable replacement yet.
What issues are those? A hot pursuit is the perfect situation to tag a vehicle with a GPS device and then back off. The social benefit of not chasing someone far outweighs the social cost of the transient tracking.
Seems to me reliability in engine control software _is_ doable. Toyota just didn't do it. Probably some kind of poor management decision that will ultimately be blamed on bad engineering.
What makes you think that any other car company has put more than a modicum of effort into their ECU code?
Pretty much every time a (industrial) black box has been cracked open, the code is found to be riddled with errors and glaring mistakes.
Really, the story is that Obama was unaware of spying for 8 years! How on earth is that possible? 2007 - 2008, he was Chairman of United States Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs, and after that as a president.
If you dig through the news coverage & various Snowden documents, you'll find that the NSA was only briefing the ranking members of the intelligence committee. Despite being chairman of a subcommittee, Obama was a very junior member at the time and they wouldn't have told him dick.
Proven a lie? Obama himself apologized and the targeting guidelines literally had the very words that were being used by conservatives. You would be up in arms if this happened under Bush with an identical scenario focused on things like "progressive".
The problem with a lot of the coverage on the IRS non-scandal was that the Inspector General's report did not investigate all the facts, the Republican chairman of the oversight committee was only selectively releasing information from the incomplete IG report, and then he got very pissy after the ranking Democrat on the committee aired out all the laundry.
Guess what the facts showed? Spoiler: that the IRS was targeting progressive groups as well.
Nothing yet. I ended up emailing a professor of mine from school, and I'm waiting to hear back from her, while at the same time asking her, "Is there a more reasonable way for me to do this?"
Some people told me to go to the local medical school library and download the articles from there. I don't know if it's feasible for me to go to a library of a school I don't go to! And at the moment, I don't really know any students who I could ask.
That should have been the entire article right there.
Almost all specialty libraries I've heard of offer visitor access or special (paid) access to professionals in affiliated fields. It sounds like this Doctor didn't put a lot of effort into trying to find a way around the pay wall.
I just checked the websites of Medical School libraries in my State and neighboring States, they almost all have a way for people unaffiliated with the school to gain onsite access. /Though one requires an annual membership and charges extortionist prices for photocopying articles.
This makes a lot of assumptions about the level of maintenance that people put into their cars. And at the same time, a lot of assumptions about the quality of work that mechanics put into fixing cars.
One thing that bothers me about this story is that the source is the Daily Caller.
A lot of stories slip through the cracks of the major news organizations (Fox News included) and it's only the bloggers and partisans who get attention for the story by beating the drums until everyone else notices.
As a society we don't need to care what happens to some random company.
If JP Morgan collapsed tonight, we (as a society) would certainly care about what happens. Why? Because some "random companies" are so big that their troubles would shake the (inter)national economy.
This is a great strength of the private sector, and this property is what is referenced by the phrase "the market is self-regulating".
The market is not self regulating, unless it is self regulating towards oligopolies, oligopsonies, cartels, and general shittiness. Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation October 23, 2008
But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.
"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken.
I could quote the entire article, hell his entire testimony. There was no room in his ideology for private companies to intentionally abandon risk management and externalize the risk by selling it off. So despite his attempts to mince words, the results of his Ayn Randian ideology ended up being exactly what one would historically expect from not having meaningful regulation.
As long as enough *potentially* trustworthy eyes do the review, does it really matter whose they are? Not everyone can work for one of the USA's alphabet agencies.
In TFA, they mention that they'll be launching from international waters. Which is what makes his question so interesting.
If the launch is outside the borders of any State, why would they need "authorization and continuing supervision" from a State entity?
Imagine if the effort was sufficiently international in nature, how would anyone decide which State has to give "authorization and continuing supervision"?
So will the french demand the return of the Statue of Liberty that they gifted to the americans?
The intellectual father of the Statue (Laboulaye) and the designer (Bartholdi) both felt that the United States better embodied the spirit of liberte, egalite, fraternite than Napoleon's empire.
Which is why the Statue of Liberty was installed in the USA, facing France, as a big middle finger to Napoleon III. (Even though Napoleon was long gone by the time the Statue was finished.)
It's impossible to keep an operation that big under wraps.
They managed it for years now, so I'd say it was entirely possible. And with the security changes resulting from Manning and Snowden, it's not likely we're going to see a leak on this scale again.
The Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction only where Congress allows it. If Congress excepted the FISA court from Supreme Court jurisdiction, that's the end of it.
Roberts's Picks Reshaping Secret Surveillance Court Chief Justice Roberts is personally responsible for picking 10 of the 11 sitting FISA judges. To be clear: the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court nominates all the FISA judges, the President signs off.
I understand what you're saying, but what kind of ass backwards policy would it be to have the Chief Justice of the United States pick judges for a court that he has no jurisdiction over?
You know what's awkward for the deniers? When you talk about the ozone layer.
The same people who said "if we stop using halons and CFCs, we can fix the hole in the ozone layer" are the ones saying "hey, this global warming stuff is a problem"
Unlike the denial industry, the scientists have already been proven correct once.
US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
First time I've seen the government argue that the Court doesn't have jurisdiction. All the other cases that have been quashed were either from claiming the plaintiff had no standing to sue, or that it involved State Secrets.
It's especially ballsy to try and argue that the Supreme Court doesn't have jurisdiction.
A US Supreme Court decision to take the case would be "a drastic and extraordinary remedy that is reserved for really extraordinary causes," argued Donald Verrilli, an administration lawyer, in a statement released late Tuesday.
"drastic and extraordinary remedy" No shit. It certainly seems like we need one of those.
What if they had passed this stupid law in 2005, before micro-usb was invented? We'd be stuck with that horrible mini-usb port that only lasted for a couple thousand insertions by design.
Back when you only had to charge your phone once a week, 2 thousand insertions was greater than the lifespan of the device. Now that people generally charge their smart phones at least 2x per day, 2 thousand insertions is two years, give or take.
Once again, possibility is not the same as probability.
Dude, they found Cesium-137 where none was previously known to exist. AFAIK it doesn't naturally occur and we only get it as a byproduct of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons
Risks shouldn't be ignored, just compared to other risks. If the utility losses for other risks are higher, then we should spend our finite resources on the other risks first.
How much risk utility is embodied in this problem compared to, say dying from accidentally swallowing (and choking on) a bee?
One of my friends got stung, by a bee, on his tongue. He was lucky enough to get medical attention before the swelling choked him to death. Even luckier, he got that medical attention before the doctors would have had to cut a hole in throat.
It's almost like you've never heard the expression "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" Avoiding exposure to radiation is better than cancer and chemo-therapy.
This is the perfect use of government money: projects which are promising (though they may not pan out in the end), which will help many people, and which will not be subsidized by industry because they will not make money in the next three quarters.
I know that "companies can't see past the next quarter" is a popular notion, but it does not apply to all industries.
Big Pharma & medical device companies spend plenty of money on R&D that has no guarantee of paying off.
The Solana salt tanks are about 740 cubic meters so they could probably store around 16TJ of energy. (For physics impaired, 1 joule per second == 1 watt.) That is a lot of power. Since it will mostly be relying on that stored energy at night and not running at full capacity, that stored energy could reasonably last through the night and on through a good portion of the following day.
1. Not all of that energy is usable. Once the salt stops being molten, it stops being *useful.
2. AFAIK there's one solar-thermal plant that managed 24 hours of energy output... Once. It's not really possible.
*You never want the salt to cool enough to stop being molten. It's the equivalent of stopping a cement mixer and letting the cement dry.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a fan of Cruz, but he was the only one to show any concern that this appointee might use his power for political purposes.
FFS, the "political purposes" Cruz was worried about is MORE disclosures of campaign funding sources.
He was especially worried about it because the Tea Party groups that helped him are largely funded by a few sugar daddies that want to stay anonymous.
Cruz held this nomination up in order to maintain the status quo, instead of allowing increased transparency in the public interest.
Total US foreign aid is under 1% of the federal budget, if you remove the military aid that's largely corporate welfare it's quite literally a rounding error in the scope of the federal budget.
Uhh.. a lot of US foreign aid is also corporate welfare.
We give them money, they hire American contractors who buy American products.
Some of that infrastructure aid trickles down in the form of local wages,
but the vast majority of it gets recycled back into American pockets.
Biomass has zero net CO2 output. The plants that provide the biomass suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, then you burn it to put the same CO2 back into the atmosphere...
There is a non-zero amount of energy required to get fossil and renewable fuels to a point where they can be turned into power.
Biomass requires less energy than fossil fuels, but it's also less energy dense, which means you need to harvest more.
Ultimately, biomass hasn't become a viable replacement yet.
What issues are those?
A hot pursuit is the perfect situation to tag a vehicle with a GPS device and then back off.
The social benefit of not chasing someone far outweighs the social cost of the transient tracking.
Seems to me reliability in engine control software _is_ doable. Toyota just didn't do it.
Probably some kind of poor management decision that will ultimately be blamed on bad engineering.
What makes you think that any other car company has put more than a modicum of effort into their ECU code?
Pretty much every time a (industrial) black box has been cracked open,
the code is found to be riddled with errors and glaring mistakes.
Really, the story is that Obama was unaware of spying for 8 years! How on earth is that possible? 2007 - 2008, he was Chairman of United States Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs, and after that as a president.
If you dig through the news coverage & various Snowden documents, you'll find that the NSA was only briefing the ranking members of the intelligence committee.
Despite being chairman of a subcommittee, Obama was a very junior member at the time and they wouldn't have told him dick.
Proven a lie? Obama himself apologized and the targeting guidelines literally had the very words that were being used by conservatives. You would be up in arms if this happened under Bush with an identical scenario focused on things like "progressive".
Fox Still Ignoring That IRS Targeted Progressives
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/21/fox-still-ignoring-that-irs-targeted-progressiv/195511
The problem with a lot of the coverage on the IRS non-scandal was that the Inspector General's report did not investigate all the facts, the Republican chairman of the oversight committee was only selectively releasing information from the incomplete IG report, and then he got very pissy after the ranking Democrat on the committee aired out all the laundry.
Guess what the facts showed?
Spoiler: that the IRS was targeting progressive groups as well.
Nothing yet. I ended up emailing a professor of mine from school, and I'm waiting to hear back from her, while at the same time asking her, "Is there a more reasonable way for me to do this?"
Some people told me to go to the local medical school library and download the articles from there. I don't know if it's feasible for me to go to a library of a school I don't go to! And at the moment, I don't really know any students who I could ask.
That should have been the entire article right there.
Almost all specialty libraries I've heard of offer visitor access or special (paid) access to professionals in affiliated fields.
It sounds like this Doctor didn't put a lot of effort into trying to find a way around the pay wall.
I just checked the websites of Medical School libraries in my State and neighboring States,
they almost all have a way for people unaffiliated with the school to gain onsite access.
/Though one requires an annual membership and charges extortionist prices for photocopying articles.
They can do 160km/h safely, bumper to bumper.
This makes a lot of assumptions about the level of maintenance that people put into their cars.
And at the same time, a lot of assumptions about the quality of work that mechanics put into fixing cars.
This should provide some enlightenment: http://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop
If you don't understand what you're seeing, there's usually an explanation in the comments.
if {collision}
then {arbitrary braking profile}
else {real data}
One thing that bothers me about this story is that the source is the Daily Caller.
A lot of stories slip through the cracks of the major news organizations (Fox News included)
and it's only the bloggers and partisans who get attention for the story by beating the drums until everyone else notices.
As a society we don't need to care what happens to some random company.
If JP Morgan collapsed tonight, we (as a society) would certainly care about what happens.
Why? Because some "random companies" are so big that their troubles would shake the (inter)national economy.
This is a great strength of the private sector, and this property is what is referenced by the phrase "the market is self-regulating".
The market is not self regulating, unless it is self regulating towards oligopolies, oligopsonies, cartels, and general shittiness.
Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation
October 23, 2008
But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.
"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken.
I could quote the entire article, hell his entire testimony.
There was no room in his ideology for private companies to intentionally abandon risk management and externalize the risk by selling it off.
So despite his attempts to mince words, the results of his Ayn Randian ideology ended up being exactly what one would historically expect from not having meaningful regulation.
and who do you trust to double check his work?
As long as enough *potentially* trustworthy eyes do the review, does it really matter whose they are?
Not everyone can work for one of the USA's alphabet agencies.
and has put in effort to determine which cryptosystems should still be considered safe.
Have someone(s) double check his work.
We should be doing that anyway, even for someone who is 100% trusted.
In TFA, they mention that they'll be launching from international waters.
Which is what makes his question so interesting.
If the launch is outside the borders of any State, why would they need "authorization and continuing supervision" from a State entity?
Imagine if the effort was sufficiently international in nature, how would anyone decide which State has to give "authorization and continuing supervision"?
So will the french demand the return of the Statue of Liberty that they gifted to the americans?
The intellectual father of the Statue (Laboulaye) and the designer (Bartholdi) both felt that the United States better embodied the spirit of liberte, egalite, fraternite than Napoleon's empire.
Which is why the Statue of Liberty was installed in the USA, facing France, as a big middle finger to Napoleon III.
(Even though Napoleon was long gone by the time the Statue was finished.)
It's impossible to keep an operation that big under wraps.
They managed it for years now, so I'd say it was entirely possible.
And with the security changes resulting from Manning and Snowden, it's not likely we're going to see a leak on this scale again.
You don't pay much attention to the Courts. "Standing" is something that gets argued all the time, and it is solely about jurisdiction.
Standing is about who has the right to sue.
Jurisdiction is about where you have the right to sue.
Everything else you said is correct, though I hope your prediction of his lawsuit's path is not correct.
The Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction only where Congress allows it. If Congress excepted the FISA court from Supreme Court jurisdiction, that's the end of it.
Roberts's Picks Reshaping Secret Surveillance Court
Chief Justice Roberts is personally responsible for picking 10 of the 11 sitting FISA judges.
To be clear: the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court nominates all the FISA judges, the President signs off.
I understand what you're saying, but what kind of ass backwards policy would it be
to have the Chief Justice of the United States pick judges for a court that he has no jurisdiction over?
You know what's awkward for the deniers?
When you talk about the ozone layer.
The same people who said "if we stop using halons and CFCs, we can fix the hole in the ozone layer"
are the ones saying "hey, this global warming stuff is a problem"
Unlike the denial industry, the scientists have already been proven correct once.
US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
First time I've seen the government argue that the Court doesn't have jurisdiction.
All the other cases that have been quashed were either from claiming the plaintiff had no standing to sue, or that it involved State Secrets.
It's especially ballsy to try and argue that the Supreme Court doesn't have jurisdiction.
A US Supreme Court decision to take the case would be "a drastic and extraordinary remedy that is reserved for really extraordinary causes," argued Donald Verrilli, an administration lawyer, in a statement released late Tuesday.
"drastic and extraordinary remedy"
No shit. It certainly seems like we need one of those.
What if they had passed this stupid law in 2005, before micro-usb was invented? We'd be stuck with that horrible mini-usb port that only lasted for a couple thousand insertions by design.
Back when you only had to charge your phone once a week, 2 thousand insertions was greater than the lifespan of the device.
Now that people generally charge their smart phones at least 2x per day, 2 thousand insertions is two years, give or take.
Once again, possibility is not the same as probability.
Dude, they found Cesium-137 where none was previously known to exist.
AFAIK it doesn't naturally occur and we only get it as a byproduct of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons
Risks shouldn't be ignored, just compared to other risks. If the utility losses for other risks are higher, then we should spend our finite resources on the other risks first.
How much risk utility is embodied in this problem compared to, say dying from accidentally swallowing (and choking on) a bee?
One of my friends got stung, by a bee, on his tongue.
He was lucky enough to get medical attention before the swelling choked him to death.
Even luckier, he got that medical attention before the doctors would have had to cut a hole in throat.
It's almost like you've never heard the expression "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"
Avoiding exposure to radiation is better than cancer and chemo-therapy.
This is the perfect use of government money: projects which are promising (though they may not pan out in the end), which will help many people, and which will not be subsidized by industry because they will not make money in the next three quarters.
I know that "companies can't see past the next quarter" is a popular notion, but it does not apply to all industries.
Big Pharma & medical device companies spend plenty of money on R&D that has no guarantee of paying off.
The Solana salt tanks are about 740 cubic meters so they could probably store around 16TJ of energy. (For physics impaired, 1 joule per second == 1 watt.) That is a lot of power. Since it will mostly be relying on that stored energy at night and not running at full capacity, that stored energy could reasonably last through the night and on through a good portion of the following day.
1. Not all of that energy is usable. Once the salt stops being molten, it stops being *useful.
2. AFAIK there's one solar-thermal plant that managed 24 hours of energy output... Once.
It's not really possible.
*You never want the salt to cool enough to stop being molten. It's the equivalent of stopping a cement mixer and letting the cement dry.